"Let's assume I want to consciously direct myself, my life. Let's assume I want to clarify what actually drives me — and work with it. Let's assume I want to cultivate, enrich and expand my capabilities to the fullest and exercise them to build a world that matches my highest vision. Where would I start?"
Systematic Integrated Living proposes a specific architecture of human experience — not as revealed truth, but as a working model. It's a model, a proposed architecture of how human reality actually emerges. The claim is simple: if I can learn to work at the level of will and thought, I can systematically change the emotions I tend to live in, the actions I tend to take, and the reality I keep finding myself in.
The Hierarchy
After twenty-five-or-so years of focusing on human consciousness, trying differing approaches has led me to the following thesis: there's a hierarchy that governs human experience, and the higher upstream one intervenes, the more direct, systemic and powerful the results.
Will → Thought → Emotion → Action → Results
There is great density of substance in this progression.
- Will — authentic purpose, genuine intention. Not willpower in the gritting-your-teeth sense. Will as in: what I actually want at the deepest level. What my being is oriented toward. The direction my consciousness naturally moves in when nothing is blocking it.
- Thought — the internal simulation engine. Patterns of activation across networks of neurones — memories re-firing, language circuits assembling sentences, visual areas replaying or inventing scenes. The layer that continuously models reality, predicts what will happen next, and suggests what I 'should' do about it.
- Emotion — what happens when sensations and tones are interpreted and aimed. The same hot face and fast heartbeat can become anger, anxiety, shame, or excitement depending on the thought accompanying it.
- Action — starting from the most basic and direct one, the spoken word, and leading all the way to the gold medal at the Olympics, climbing mount Everest, or going to the convenience store for milk.
- Results — the visible facts of a life.
When will is clear and I align with it, thoughts that serve arise naturally. Emotions support rather than sabotage. Actions flow rather than require force. Results accumulate rather than scatter, and over time life starts to feel less like a pile of episodes and more like a single, integrated movement.
The Want / Need Distinction
This is not a moral distinction. I'm not saying wants are bad and needs are good. I'm pointing to something structural about how desire operates in human consciousness — and therefore how will can either fragment or integrate a life.
Wants span a wide spectrum: from hardwired survival drives, through socially and culturally shaped desires, to compulsive patterns that have learned to hijack the system's reward circuits. They all show up, from the inside, as some version of 'I want.' But they are not all equal in terms of what they do to a life.
The point is not to demonise any of them. The point is to recognise that 'what I want' can be anything from a clean signal of genuine requirement to a decades-old habit loop firing on autopilot. Until I see that full range, will has no chance to choose which layer to serve.
Needs are developmental. They emerge from within — from what my being actually requires to grow, to stabilise, to become more fully itself at this stage of life. Less rush, more seriousness. Less fantasy, more groundedness.
Integration means learning to trace a desire back through its layers, separate the conditioned from the authentic, and orient the whole system around a clearer direction.
The Spheres
Most teaching on consciousness quietly assumes a single context: me, alone with my mind. Meditation, journaling, reflection — these matter enormously. But what stabilises easily in solitude does not automatically hold when I'm in a heated conversation with my partner, under pressure at work, or navigating a complex social situation. This is why people plateau.
SIL maps development across expanding spheres of complexity:
- Core — my relationship with myself: thoughts, emotions, body, inner experience.
- First — intimate relationships: partners, family, close friends.
- Second — professional and organisational systems: work, projects, teams.
- Third — cultural and social systems: community, politics, society.
Each sphere has its own challenges, its own feedback loops, its own ways of triggering unconscious patterns. The same will that can generate clarity in solitude has to learn to route itself through relationship, through work, through cultural participation.
Will → Thought → Emotion → Action → Results is not a private diagram. It's the pipeline through which I shape not only my inner life but the systems I touch.
Measurement
How do I know if this is working?
Subjective experience matters — it's the actual substance of my life. But it has a vulnerability: self-deception. The mind is remarkably skilled at convincing itself it's making progress when it's avoiding the real work — and just as skilled at convincing itself it's failing when it's actually avoiding the equally demanding work of staying with uncertainty long enough for real transformation to complete.
SIL incorporates objective measurement as a complement to subjective experience. When consciousness changes, it does so in time and in a body: my nervous system responds differently to stress, my sleep patterns shift, my relationships change tone, my creative output evolves — and these shifts often show up in data before they fully register in familiar feelings.
When both point in the same direction — when I feel more integrated and my measurable indicators confirm it — I have earned the right to relax into that movement and let it deepen. When they diverge, it's an invitation to inquire rather than to choose a side.