Under the usual conditions of modern society, on schools and universities is incumbent the intellectual formation of citizens, on churches and activist groups their moral education, on counseling clinics and psychotherapy the integration of their personality. These three aspects may be separated in the academic curriculum and in the division of social labor, but not in the real existence of the individual. Every concrete problem of life poses cognitive, moral, and psychological difficulties at a time, requiring an integral and simultaneous response in all those three areas. Each human decision requires an integration of the knowledge acquired, of the values at stake, and of the psychological integration necessary to coordinate one thing with the other. In the academic world, which is an imitative scenery constructed for the sake of learning, these three elements may remain separate, precisely because decisions there do not have the definitive and irrevocable character of the acts of real life.
My first general goal in life was to gain wisdom, to become an accomplished personality, a wakeful consciousness, and a source of strength, courage, and hope for the people around me. I studied philosophy and religion in search of living models of inner knowledge (and never of external stereotypes) that could guide me on the way to self-improvement. I found a lot of them: human excellence is not as rare as one might think. But I also encountered forces that opposed the attainment of my goals, forces which were extraordinarily resilient.
It is, in the first place, a multi-year online program in philosophical studies (the only one that can help you practice philosophy instead of just repeating what other people, however illustrious, have said about it). Philosophy, however, by its own nature, is not a specialized kind of knowledge about a determinate class of objects: it is rather an integral activity of human intelligence which turns to all fields of knowledge and experience in search of their unity, foundation, and ultimate significance to human consciousness.