Jay Shetty

You do not think your way to a clear life

You live your way to a clear life.

The path doesn't become clear by just looking.

The path becomes clear by putting one foot in front of the other, and then it appears.

Here's the science.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work on flow states we've referenced before, found that people most commonly experience their deepest sense of purpose and meaning not in moments of reflection, but in moments of engaged activity.

Not when they're thinking about what they want to do, but when they're doing it.

This maps directly onto what neuroscience now knows about how the brain generates meaning.

Meaning is not a conclusion the brain reaches after sufficient contemplation.

It is a byproduct of engagement, of doing, creating, building, moving.

The brain makes meaning retrospectively, from the raw material of lived experience.

You cannot think yourself into a meaningful life.

You have to live yourself into one.

The ancient Sanskrit concept of karma is entirely misunderstood in Western culture.

We think of karma as cosmic justice.

What goes around comes around.

And there's truth to that.

But in its original philosophical context, karma simply means action.

Karma is the act itself, and the Bhagavad Gita is perhaps the world's most sophisticated treatise on action, specifically on the relationship between action, identity, and liberation.

Krishna's central teaching to Arjun in the Gita is not figure out your purpose and then act.