Our primary moral responsibility is to discover what is true All other values stem from this simple core. The love of life, survival, wisdom, value creation, meaning. But most important of all, truth and wisdom are the keys to our future.

Truth leads to the love of life, which is the only rational choice. It leads to happiness, growth, empathy and compassion for both self and others.

Once you fully embrace empathy, you will be incapable of either hate or evil.

... How to love life ...

The love of life is in full accordance with wisdom. That is, if you take action now which is aligned to a love of life, and then reflect back on that action at any time in the future, you would realize that it was the wisest decision you could have made.

Similarly, if you could reach back in time and speak to yourself at any point when you were younger, and if you had compassion in your heart, you would surely say to yourself - love life with a passion. And when you were older, you'd find no reason to doubt the wisdom of those words.

• Some say we should align our thoughts
  with all the suffering in the world.
• Some, to all the great things man has done.
• The religious, to the words of old books.

But we usually just default to receive as many distractions as the moment of now can provide.

For me, the great philosophical questions provide the best place to start for the answers.

The love of life is dependent on our beliefs. For we all live within a trance made up from our beliefs. And so we need to understand how our beliefs arise, how they become sick, and how to make them well again.

It is easy to tell if our minds are infected with viral beliefs - we become sad, disappointed or angry very easily. When our minds are aligned with truth, we struggle from becoming intoxicated by the bliss of simply being in love with life.

Viral or toxic beliefs seem to mask that bliss. Or perhaps fracture it into a collection of broken emotions. When you see the world, or yourself as being broken, then that is what you will feel.

There is a core of bliss inside all of us. We might turn our back on it; try to censor it; or disguise it with false beliefs, converting love to suffering. But it is always there inside - driving us to act. It is the reason we care about anything at all.

Beliefs are highly contagious. The healthy ones as well as the bad. And just as our bodies can be infected with disease, so our minds can become infected with toxic beliefs. Such as exposure to negative stories about mankind.

They are like exposure to chemical toxins on the body; few people have the immunity to survive them for long. Especially if infected while young. So it's essential to have a strategy for dealing with toxic social, political or religious teachings. Or any other potentially dangerous propaganda..

Whatever beliefs you hold that trigger hate or fear, cannot at the same time be based on truth. Not once you begin to understand the nature of matter and consciousness.

Suffering is always based on a lack of wisdom.

Some foundational ammunition to protect yourself from feeling either disappointed or angry at oneself or mankind can be found in aspects of naturalism, humanism and even libertarianism. Though even these are merely the effects and not the primary cause.

I suspect it's important to nurture an underlying core - an unshakable faith in mankind. A love for self, life and mankind so deep, that all other beliefs become derivative to it. And if concepts are not aligned to your core truth, then you don't empower them to become dominant beliefs.

There are two habits of mind that are likely to lead to the discovery of your inner bliss.

• A perception tuned more to what is good than bad.
• The cultivation of an attitude of gratitude.

The first builds a mental landscape of love. What you think about most tends to grow. The second protects that landscape from satiation (growing stale).

There really is no such thing as evil, it is always caused by a lack of wisdom; by belief infections, or by incompatible personal aesthetics. There is no such thing as forgiveness, since there is never anything to forgive. There is just the practical negotiation of a shared social reality.

We already love life, it's just that we sometimes fail to remember it. Or we suffer from beliefs that hide it from our view. Love and bliss have just been censored from our minds. To be glimpsed at, only when everything is life is 'just right' rather than 'just is'.

Einstein once said the primary question is this - Is the universe a friendly place? But isn't friendliness an affect rather than a cause? An alternate question might be - Does the universe love life? I think the answer is yes, which is why we are all here.

But even if we're unsure, it's surely wisest to assume that it does. Our challenge is simply to align our beliefs to that faith.

If you already know these things, then you have probably already discovered the bliss that ascends from the ashes of an ego humbled by the gift of authentic gratitude. The discovery of grace.

For those who achieve a deep and sincere love for self and mankind, a door within you will be opened. A door allowing you to experience a deep and visceral bliss. An existential bliss beyond words to describe.

Once discovered, and no matter how fine your prior life had been, you would sacrifice it all for just a few moments of such bliss.

And life becomes precious beyond words.

Some call this place enlightenment.