You live in America, a land of opportunity. It is a land where you are asked to stand on yourself and where a level playing field is the ideal and often the law — a social experiment in fairness.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, you alone bear the responsibility for living a life of your own design. In other words, you are given the right of participation and it is up to you to take charge of it.
So you set out to live as you see fit and to find how you can best be useful. However, the pressure to imitate and conform is intimidating. Competition drives you to replace truth and courage with an oversized ego.
Yet the price of mimicry, conformity and timidity is disillusionment, passivity and an absence of spontaneity and joy. And the price of an oversized ego is narcissism, opportunism and irresponsibility — a shallow expression of autonomy and life.
The solution is to shape an intelligently informed and principled open mind and to think freely and see clearly without illusion and delusion driving your thoughts and actions. Indeed, the promise in the discipline of Autonomy and Life is to have you gain your cognitive independence from an oversized ego and an excessive dependence on mimicry, conformity and timidity.
This discipline is an opportunity to be the artist of your life and to map the authentic route to a life of your own design. The challenge is to map out a journey that calls on you to stand on yourself and on your capacity for truth and courage.
The point is to succeed with being in charge of the right you are given to participate in this great civilization and to compete on a level playing field or said differently, to succeed with the journey that is your autonomy and life.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and the leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes. Visit autonomyandlife.com for more information.