I think I would recommend reading about some of those philosophies you consider "dead wrong" and how they came to be. Once you start to understand how they wer

I think I would recommend reading about some of those philosophies you consider "dead wrong" and how they came to be. Once you start to understand how they were formed in the first place, I think you would be less ready to deride them. In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that". But what you'll find is that that one notion you may have figured out on your own is itself a nuance of a larger system of understandings. That you'll find a lot more work has been done than you realized to understand and prove each of those notions to the best of our collective knowledge. Then you'll understand why grabbing a single notion and anchoring to it like the author is doing is so fundamentally flawed that it's not a positive exercise. To use the "rich man's spiritual" reference again: the "rich man" of the poem is basing his salvation on the idea that he has to have enough of whatever new thing he decides is between him and heaven/salvation/happiness before he can ever attain it. The "rich man" put that barrier there, himself. He created the frame for his experience and bound himself to it by creating it in the first place. In the poem, the central character is making the declaration that he needs more to defend his existing material accumulations, so it's not exactly a 1:1. But that kind of self-imposed framework based on nothing grounded can be self-limiting. It can make it hard to understand real fundamentals.