I, now, sort of understand what "principles" are.
Most people when they think of principles will resort to moralistic stuff that were just handed to them by the society, which is on avg actually good for the world probably. That's not exactly what I mean - these are not aspirational principles but more like, what are your actual rules of operation in life?
It's such a hard question to answer, bordering on philosophical, so easy to turn into a should/must torture cycle. That's not ideal.
The thing is this, once you see through your mind - meaning, you understand how the mind can make up any story, be convinced of anything, it's a non-dependable center to live from.. you're like, holy shit, what do I do now? The mind is like the propagandist - it needs to be fed, given a direction, and it'll create all the words, thoughts, imagery, reasoning, etc that's needed to get there. So everything the mind spews out, is ALWAYS half-true. There's no absolute mental truth, there can't ever be.
You can depend on the mind to make decisions ONLY if you're following someone else's principles. Society's, common sense, whatever. Which is, again, great. If it works for you, go on. If you love Truth (or anything that's close to it), you're pretty screwed here though..
First instinct that appears here is to follow one's intuition or instinct or feelings or whatever.. Which, you quickly realize, are very feeble and abstratct in some cases, not always dependable - they're sometimes like children; will tell you A in the morning and B at night, get upset at you for not doing C tomorrow, etc. Not dependable, at all, in most cases.
Then you realize - both the head & the body best serve as data points. NOT as the decisionmakers themselves. Whatever "YOU" are, need to not blindly identify with & follow those centers, but be INFORMED by them. This sounds simple, but requires a lot of practice and you'll never be doing it perfectly, which is ok.
So what you realize is, you still probably need something to follow, some criteria or standard to hold yourself to, something more stable and not feeble, etc.
The head doesn't work as the Master - you see through all of its stories and how it's never leading, always following. And you realize the head's power - which is, if you give it a task or a goal, it WILL deliver. Brilliant at it! It's certainly worth developing, and intentionally deploying as needed.
The body didn't work as the Master - primarily because how you exist in a society and are aware of time & space, and have memory, etc. You're a human, not an animal. Cool. But the body IS the most "you" thing, even more than the head (if you can see through it), and you don't want to be cut off from it & all of its wonders.. So you become embodied, actually fully step into it and nourish it, etc.
But again - who will be the Master now?! Because, you'll either live a life of complete randomness, no plans, nothing (I guess some people do this..) - or you'll need to find a north star and then let the rest flow (which is the more sane & still healthy option, it seems).. So you end up at Principles.
If you could have a handful of pointers/rules/operation guides in your life, each one sentence or so, that you could actually remember and could get you to great places as long as you stick to them in your life.. then you'd follow them, right?
I mean, if an angel descended from above, and gave you a list of principles perfectly crafted for you personally by the Gods or whatever, and told you that if you were to follow these, your life would be unimaginably better in a few months or years.. You would give it a try, I guess. Who wouldn't?
It's certainly better than "It's smart and well-advised to do X" or "I kinda feel like doing Y" - those are pretty dull, most of the time. You can hear from mostly-rational people how lifechanging it was to follow their feelings for a decision, or your emotional rollercoaster of a friend makes a logical decision once in a while & is shocked.. But in general most people aren't living on the fringes like that. So, what helps the best & most is coming up with a handful of principles to guide your life & live in alignment with those.
I'll write more about this later, it's still brewing for me. Let's end with this beautiful parable..