Faith + Reason = Truth

8 paths to personal fulfillment, based on my own extensive study and practice:

1) Look within yourself. You will find what motivates you, what brings you joy or sadness, and eventually, what you believe. This is your soul, or essence, or spirit.

2) Look outside of yourself. You will find that you are not everything; instead, you are a part of something, and everything else is a part of that same thing.

3) Expose yourself to as much as possible. Experiences, physical locations, acquaintances, subject matters, everything you can think of: directly experience as much variety as you can.

4) Drill as deeply into 1 specific thing as possible. Again, an academic subject, a culture, a physical place, a talent, anything you choose: learn and experience that subject as deeply and completely as you are able.

5) Be as generous and giving as you can. Cultivate an awareness of needs, and when you come across people or circumstances that you can help, help them in the way that you can.

6) Be self-centered. Know what you require, and take the necessary actions to attain it. This may be food or shelter, or love from another, or freedom to contemplate and search, and the necessary actions to attain them will be activities such as work, social interaction, alone time, and the awareness that you cannot help everyone and everything or do everything that other people think you should do.

7) Think. Read, watch, and listen to everything you can that is deemed by yourself as worthy of your learning capacity and effort. Sense it, concentrate on it, process it, and make new concepts and ideas within your mind from it.

8) Do. Apply what you learn in the ways that you are able. Build something, or calculate something, or write something, or present something, or otherwise share the things that you have created within your mind with your learning and thinking. This can be a long and drawn out effort with a final finished "product", or an ever-evolving/changing/improving work in progress that will never really be "done" in the sense that work on it will cease. But there must be a physical going forth to apply what you know, even if that is as seemingly effortless as discussing the concept with other people face to face or as a blog post.

In a nutshell, no single philosophy or path can be so narrowly interpreted or followed to provide what you seek. You may hear generalizations such as "Eastern traditions look inward, while the West looks outward," or "become an expert in something to make yourself more valuable" or "get a well-rounded education so that you will be familiar with whatever life throws at you." The answer is, of course, all of the above, for all of the old sayings and wisdom have roots in timeless truths. Too challenging to be all things, to do all things, to know all things? Certainly! But the end result of having successfully "done" it all is not the objective here; fulfillment is. And the most fulfilling activities are those which stimulate, those which result in knowing oneself more fully, those which help others, those which keep one occupied, those which sharpen the body and the mind, and those which lead us closer to answering the eternal "why am I here?" So what are you waiting for? And one more thing:  the order of Paths 1-8 above are of no importance, as the more you pursue any one of them, the further along you will be in the rest of them