What is the Best Way to Enjoy Life and be Successful at It?

My sense of the wisdom of how to live a good life is both tentative and absolute:

1. Retract attachment to all people and things. You don’t want to be persuaded by mere opinions, as this will lead to confusion and bad feelings.
2. Think about the good life. What is most worth doing? Can you do it? Is it difficult? How much work will it take?
3. Develop a secure home base. Find an income that is reliable, even if it is very small. This may require convincing relatives that you are worth it, committing to a job, completing your education, or taking charity. Use your home base to create a reliable platform for success.
4. Now, indulge your feelings about the good life without feeling regret. What are small things you can do to improve your life? What are you doing slightly wrong? What are dangers you can avoid? What would be most helpful? Can things just continue as they are? Are you being unrealistic? What can change? Have you found your center?
5. Create more or less structure where necessary. Remain optimistic. Change will occur.

What you have to watch out for is that some people have achieved all these steps in high school. But relative success is still possible.

PRACTICAL SPACE: WHAT IS MISSING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE AVERAGE IMMORTAL QUEST

Practical Space: One of the most difficult things for someone on the beginning of the immortal path is to put the mind and the life in a ‘practical space’ --- the sort of space where one could take practical advice from others, and see the relative merits of small, discrete choices. The first step might be having a safeguard against occasional irrational decisions like gambling or eating poisonous mushrooms. This will grant greater rationality to the life, making it possible to make firm decisions without erasing the progress one has made in life. One of the more difficult contracts for the beginner is the contract to arrange personal security indefinitely. Indeed, the prospect of death looms as a fundamental sort of ‘gambling’ --- indeed, it is the most fundamental sort of gambling. Therefore, the second step, and many steps beyond the second, involve doing those things which are best for one’s health and sanity. However, the final point of practicality for the beginner is what I have already mentioned: having an openness to free, practical advice, and knowing --- being ‘canny’ --- to the relative advantage one has in terms of health. Only through recognizing that one has made progress (however subtle and slight) can one hope to overcome discouragement and therefore maintain an attitude of health.

----excerpt from The Dimensional Immortality Toolkit, published recently as of 2015. (c) 2014, 2015... Nathan Coppedge