The Menu for Life: The Four Basic Principles to Reach a Full Life

By Guillermo Benavides Gonzalez

In the book The Menu for Life you will discover how to live a better life so that you reach full happiness.

If you are looking to achieve a full life you must take into account 4 fundamental principles: Love, Education, Work and Service to others.

In the first chapter you will learn how the human being is the most complex and perfect creature of creation, and allows us to discover the divine part of our existence.

In the second chapter you can know in depth an analysis and foundation about the 4 principles of love, education, work and service to others.

In the third chapter you can find 7 universal character examples where you can check the connection between the 4 principles to verify the validity of their relationship.

This Menu for life, is applicable to transform the life of a person, a community and humanity, can be applied from the most daily events of a person to create a government program to transform a society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543971552

Book preview

Introduction

The idea of writing this book came to me because of a difficult moment in my life which led me inevitably to a time of deep personal reflection. In May 1996 when my wife Maria Cristina passed away; after coming back from the funeral, her parents, my brothers-in-law, my brothers and I returned home thoughtful, grieving and deeply troubled. That afternoon I asked my father-in-law, breaking the silence,

-Don Luis, why do we come into this world? and his reply was

-We come to learn.

My father-in-law had spent much of his life devoted to the ideas and concepts of Theosophy. He was a member of the Theosophical Society where he would attend every Sunday to share, analyze and discuss readings on topics of human evolution from the Theosophical canon. He was a good man and taught us many things; he shared his readings with us and to spend time with him was an immensely rewarding and enjoyable experience.

Despite this, I was not entirely satisfied with the response Don Luis had given to my question. During the following months I fell into a long and deep period of reflection during which I thought about the meaning of the events that occur during our lives and about the importance of our individual actions. During this time, I was in a wilderness of mourning and sorrow over the loss of my wife. Alone, I had to face the upbringing and education of my son Esteban. I was deeply aware of my responsibilities towards him; to give him all the love, the care and the education that, with Maria Cristina, we had wanted, and we had planned for him. We had planned to have more children but as our time together was brought to an end, those dreams were lost.

I could not neglect my fatherly duties to my son, he needed a lot of love as does any child of that age, and I knew I had to further strengthen that love to somehow make up for the loss of his mother. Esteban was only a year and nine months old at the time of her passing; I knew I had to spend all my time with him and to give him all my love, affection and knowledge in order to give him the best start in life I could. Helped by my whole family, mine and Maria Cristina's parents, my brothers and my brothers- in-law, we have worked hard to surround Esteban with as much love and affection as we could. He is growing up this way and we have done our best to make him feel no less than anyone else due to the absence of his mother. We have worked to create an environment of love, strength and dignity as a tribute to Maria Cristina who was a great woman.

Shortly after I signed Esteban up for kindergarten in order to begin his personal and social education, I continued to work and for about a year I divided my time between my beautiful son and the need to provide for him. I kept thinking about my life and the things I was doing finally, I came to the realization that everything revolved around love, the love that I had for Esteban. Maria Cristina was no longer with us and at that time I could see and feel how important it is to give love unconditionally and to receive love in the same way. I have come to believe that love is the source of energy that gives us strength to keep fighting, to keep growing and to keep living.

The education of Esteban was my greatest concern. I had to give him the foundations of his life, the teachings, values and examples for him to grow and to eventually take his place in society.

I had to look for a good school and I knew this was more than a simple question of academic reputation; my son needed an establishment where the tenderness and human quality of its teachers would complement its educational value.

Likewise, I continued working with a major company which helped me and supported me during this period in my life. I was very fortunate I always had a job with a company that gave me the confidence to carry on. During this time of my life I learned to be thankful for what I had, and I realized that we all need gainful employment and that we spend much of our working lives engaged in this way.

Thinking and analyzing all that I had faced in this period of my life, I began to find the answers I had sought after with regards to the nature of our existence and meaning of life in our journey through this world. I found three key elements in the existence of everyone: love, education and work.

Later I began to imagine and conceive the idea of putting my thoughts, on the subjects of love, education and work, to paper. So, I started writing the first manuscript in mid-2004; I wrote, spontaneously at first, what I thought about these matters and how they related to my daily life and the lives of others. Having completed a first draft, I sought the advice of a Psychologist friend of mine; she helped me to refine my ideas and recommended some books to assist the shaping and polishing of the document I had created.

Afterwards, when I had finished my writings about love, education and employment, I incorporated a new, and equally important, element into my thesis, "service to others". This was because I came to understand that all the love and education we receive, and the work we do in our lives must have a projection, an effect or an impact on the lives of our neighbors. Given that I am, by profession, a System Engineer, I have a very practical and logical approach to life. For that reason, I brought the four elements, and their interrelationships, together under the title: The Menu for life because that is the way a System Engineer works, integrating variable elements for compositing or creating a chain of relationships.

By writing this book I intended to prove that the four elements: love, education, work and service to others are present at all times and at all places in the existence of man and his relationships with others and with nature: these elements make up The Menu for Life.

Love, I maintain, should be the starting point of any endeavor, idea, plan or project developed by man. If a person takes love as a starting point, as a foundation, then the divine will be expressed through that person; the person who comes from the superior planes full of virtues, with the necessary strength to achieve good deeds will evolve both individually and collectively with the world

Once a person has the inspiration and motivation given by love, a process of education and learning should be undertaken to acquire implicit knowledge from the universe, and the ability to use this knowledge in two ways: for the creation of goods and services needed to live in the best possible way; and to go deeper into this knowledge to understand its spiritual and divine nature.

Human beings express love and education in the physical world through work, letting them become a reality which will enable us to enjoy life and get the necessary material goods to live. Much of human existence is spent in this way; our lives go by working for others and ourselves.

We human beings cannot live alone. Almost always live in contact and in relation to others, as active members of society to which we belong and where we are somewhat interdependent of each other to a greater or lesser degree. For this reason, man cannot live alone, for this reason there is a need to integrate love, education and work. Life only makes sense when we see it in relation to our neighbors, maintaining an attitude of fellowship and service to them. We will always be related and linked to our neighbors through a common need and desire for love, to maintain loving relationships, harmony, integration and coexistence. A single man cannot interpret and use all the existing natural knowledge, and this is why integrated, and harmonious work is required for humanity as a collective for the development of knowledge enabling us to make progress in the physical and spiritual domains.

This book was conceived and written that you, dear reader, may have in your hands a key, and a guide, to this knowledge and it is my hope that it will help you to develop an understanding of the four elements of The Menu for life. I believe, and know, that if you implement the ideas contained in these pages in your daily life you will achieve a deeply gratifying, full and happy existence.

The human being is the most complex and awe-inspiring creature in the known universe

Of all living organisms, the human being is the most complex and extraordinary. The life of a human being is a constant process of evolution and improvement; as such it can be considered one of the most perfect systems in all creation. Human existence occurs on many interconnected levels or planes; the development and evolution of which integrates physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects.

Maintaining a connection with each other, these planes can produce effects on the natural world and on the relationships that exist within it. As a human being evolves, he or she progresses, or learns to progress, to a greater or lesser extent in each of these planes and to maintain balance and harmony. To achieve this balance a person must act in the most impeccable manner, demonstrating his ability in the events and activities to which he directs himself

Perhaps it is this complexity of life and the stages of which it is comprised that result in the perceived difficulty of discovering the true meaning to life and clouds our judgment and understanding of our mission in the world.

We are more than a physical body

A common idea about the human condition is that a person is composed of a physical body and a non-physical body, a soul. While this is a valid concept, the human being is actually a much more complex system consisting of several energy bodies associated and identified with the emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects.

While some philosophers and theorists give greater importance to the physical body and others to the soul; to achieve a true and complete spiritual evolution, a human being needs to be aware of his or her true nature influenced and marked by these bodies which he or she needs to develop harmoniously in order to achieve the best possible evolutionary state. A person needs to develop a perfect level of coordination and harmony between all these planes of being and this can be said to be one of the most important goals in life.

In other words, a human being needs to develop not only the physical and emotional bodies: there is a necessity to evolve in all the afore mentioned elements of existence because they are all of equal importance. Each has a clearly established role in the evolutionary journey along which a human must travel. Thus, the integration of all planes of being is what determines a human being's evolutionary pathway, and this is what distinguishes us from the animal world.

To facilitate the understanding of these bodies, in the pages that follow, we will, describe them in a concise and clear way. The purpose of describing these bodies is to demonstrate that the principles on which The Menu for life analysis is founded on are intrinsic elements of human nature.

The seven bodies of human evolution

As previously mentioned, man is a highly developed, complex being consisting of several bodies or planes of being. To explain each of these bodies we will delve into the field of Theosophy; literally meaning divine wisdom. The term Theosophy refers to a school of thought that integrates philosophy, religion and science; it draws from the teachings of the great religions of the world and as such it can be seen as a synthesis of all religions. It postulates that a person may come to knowledge and truth by seeking universal brotherhood through development of the spiritual-self, through exploration and through the study of his or her own nature¹

Theosophy provides detailed knowledge from physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual perspectives. Theosophy also provides a holistic approach from which a methodological perspective emphasizes that an object of study, in this case the human being, should be studied as an organized whole rather than a sum of its parts. Theosophy therefore allows analysis of perfect and complex composition of man or woman as a highly developed being, which can be understood in an integrated way. One of the central themes of Theosophy is the study of people who have devoted themselves to analyzing both the visible and the invisible: the physical, the spiritual and divine worlds. For these people, having dedicated themselves to these matters, have come to know universal truths about humans.

Theosophy has existed for centuries; in its early years it was an exclusive knowledge only known by the Mystery Schools' initiates. Ammonius Saccas was one of its first exponents and was the founder of the Eclectic Theosophical School in Alexandria in the third century. Later thinkers such as Plato, Plotinus, and Paracelsus promulgated the fundamental principles of theosophy and in more recent years the Russian writer Madame H. P. Blavatsky came to light with her book The Secret Doctrine, a masterpiece of Theosophy, published in 1888, which can be consulted by the reader to have a deeper understanding of Theosophy.

Theosophy makes a masterful combination of Eastern wisdom with the logic and scientific thought of the West, firmly placing them in a philosophical context involving, among others, theories of evolution, reincarnation, the laws of Karma or cause and effect across the different planes in which humans exists. Furthermore, Blavatsky demonstrates a commonality between all religions in terms of knowledge and the relation between the Godhead, man and the universe, seeking divine wisdom in each.

In relation to science, Theosophy opens and explores new ground by establishing knowledge and laws applied to nature, the universe and man. Theosophy also analyzes the principles of existence and it asserts that life exists universally across the seven energy bodies, that there are laws governing the universe and that there is a continuous evolutionary process linking all.

The Theosophy principles

Theosophy is a philosophically interesting thought process well worth knowing and analyzing. The principles and basic assumptions on which it is based were outlined and defined in a 1947 conference of the Theosophical Society Congress², under the guidance of its president, Mr. Jinarajadasa. The principles and foundations of Theosophy are:

•All things, living or otherwise, exist in unity. The many disparate elements in the world are, in fact, part of a unified whole.

•The whole of existence is determined and governed by unchanging laws. These laws apply to nature, the universe and to man. Theosophy describes the evolution of the system of laws to which we belong.

•Everything in nature has an evolutionary process. Human evolution is governed by super-human hierarchies which are personified by many world religions in the form of a Divine Trinity.

•Divine existence is the source from which energy, life and consciousness arise.

•The spirit represents the unorganized aspects of life; matter represents organized life. The spirit is free; matter is conditional.

•Every human life has an individual evolutionary pattern governed by the following fundamental laws:

The law of rhythm: life and death follow each other in a cycle which is repeated countless times. For instance, the night follows the day, and wakefulness follows sleep in a cycle which repeats itself daily.

The law of action or Karma: this relates each event to those preceding and following it, this is also known as the law of cause and effect. Regarding the existence of man, an individual inherits positive or negative influences from past lives, thoughts and actions.

•An individual has the power to free himself from all limitations of human existence and to be aware of the existence of the Self with God through his own experience. That is to say that by his efforts, and helped by more evolved brothers, people can make progress towards transcendental levels of awareness through their progression along the evolutionary journey.

•True knowledge of divinity is the result of the application of natural laws governing all existence.

•The human mind allows interaction between spirit and matter.

•The Divine Life animates all beings; it is a form of universal brotherhood.

•The human consciousness meets its evolutionary process through successive generations. Every spiritual being evolves in a cycle comprising