The Still Point of First Principles
This meditation guides you to find your 'First Principle,' the foundational truth at the core of a challenge or belief. By peeling back layers of assumption and external noise, you will connect with an unshakeable inner certainty. Use this practice to build clarity and conviction before taking action.
The Weight of Knowing
Let's begin in the place we so often find ourselves. Buried. Buried under the weight of knowing. What you *know* you should do. What they told you was true. The endless stream of advice, the chorus of expectations, the ghost of past attempts. All of it layered upon you, dense and heavy as earth. This is the noise of the secondhand world. A world built from conclusions that are not your own. A structure of assumptions you inherited, accepted, and eventually mistook for the foundation of your own life. And so you stand here, at a crossroads or a cliff's edge, holding a map drawn by a hundred different hands. And you wonder why you feel lost. You wonder why the next step feels so heavy. It is because you are carrying everything but yourself. Take a breath. Feel the weight of it all. The pressure in your chest, the tension in your shoulders. Don't fight it. Just acknowledge the sheer mass of accumulated certainty that doesn't belong to you. We are here to set it down. We are here to find the one, simple truth that does.
The Great Unraveling
Bring to mind a challenge you are facing. A decision that feels tangled. A belief that has begun to feel hollow. See it in your mind’s eye, not as a single problem, but as a tightly wound ball of thread. A knot of conclusions. Now, we begin the great unraveling. We will ask a simple question, again and again. The question is, *“What is true beneath this?”* Look at the surface of the problem. Perhaps the surface is fear. *I am afraid to fail.* And so we ask: What is true beneath this? Perhaps beneath the fear is a belief: *If I fail, I will lose respect.* We ask again, with gentle persistence: What is true beneath that? *If I lose their respect, I will be alone.* And again. What is true *beneath that*? Follow this thread. Each answer is just a doorway to a deeper room. Move past the borrowed furniture, the voices of parents, teachers, and society that echo in these rooms. This is not an interrogation. It is an excavation of the soul. Ancient thinkers, from Aristotle to Descartes, had a name for this process. They called it a search for First Principles. The first basis from which a thing is known. The foundational truth that cannot be deduced from anything else. It is the axiom, the self-evident starting point. René Descartes, in his search, decided to doubt everything he possibly could, until he was left with a single, unshakable truth. *I think, therefore I am.* Your search is not for a universal principle, but a personal one. It is for the bedrock of *this* situation, for you, right now. So keep asking. *I must do this to be successful.* What is true beneath this? *I owe them my loyalty.* What is true beneath this? *This is just the way things are.* What is true beneath *that*? Peel back the layers of justification, of obligation, of tradition. Let them fall away. Be willing to stand in the uncomfortable silence when an answer doesn't immediately appear. Stay with the question. What is true, absolutely true, when everything else has been stripped away?