Without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there's nothing freeing about that

Unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us

The best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives

Carer about a thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone

Over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia

Earnest quest to move beyond simplistic ideology, left or right, and not repeat mistakes of the past

All cultures have created stories to help us grapple with, and ultimately map, the chaos into which we are thrown at birth; this chaos is everything that is unknown to us, and any unexplored territory that we must traverse, be it in the world outside or the psyche within

No matter how different our genes or life experiences may be, or how differently our plastic brains are wired by our experience, we all have to deal with the unknown, and we all attempt to move from chaos to order

People would sacrifice everything for an 'identity'

Be most wary of ideology, no matter who is peddling it or to what end

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to 'make the world a better place' before they've taken care of their own chaos within

Ideologies are substitutes for the knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence

Life is suffering. That's sad. But alas, it's not particularly special. We are born human. We are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard. Doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only make it harder

Adults in their lives had become so naively overprotective that they deluded themselves into thinking that not talking about suffering would in some way magically protect their children from it

The hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risk. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage

Alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure

Morality is relative, at best a personal 'value judgment.' Relative means that there is no absolute right or wrong in anything; instead, morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, 'relative to' or 'related to' a particular framework, such as one's ethnicity, one's upbringing, or the culture or historical moment one is born into. It's nothing but an accident of birth

Show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come from different backgrounds

One of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be 'judgmental.' Since we don't know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live

'Non-judgmental.' Listen. Be tolerant, empathic, and not voice critical, moralistic judgments. Feel comfortable in being totally honest, and not diminishing their problems. Encouraged self-reflection, and allowed them to explore warded off feelings, wishes, even shameful anti-social urges. Discover their own unconscious conscience and their own harsh self-criticism of their 'lapses,' unconscious guilt which they had often hidden from themselves, but whicch often formed the basis of their low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. We are both more immoral and more moral than we are aware of. 'Non-judgmentalism' an ideal attitude when you want to better unnderstand yoourself. Civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place

'Practical wisdom' guided previous generations. Millennials have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect

Morals: right and wrong, good and evil

Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was defined as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness

Virtues always aim for balance and avoid the extremes of the vices

Nicomachean ethics by Aristotle

Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date

Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other

Telling people you're virtuous isn't a virtue, it's self-promotion. Virtue signaling is not virtue. Virtue signaling is, quite possible, our commonest vice

Intolerance of other's views is not simply wrong, it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous

Many people cannot tolerate the chaos which is inherent in life. They cannot live without a moral ccompass, without an ideal at which to aim in their lives

Blind certainty offered by ideologies claim to have an answer for everything

Ideologue always knowns what's wrong about others, and what to do about it. The only people willing to give advice in a relativistic society are those with the least to offer

All human being are so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fanasty

We are rule generators. We are moral animals

You must take responsibility for your own life

If one wants to live a full life, one first sets one's own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilites

These rules are demanding. They require you to undertake an incremental process that over time will stretch you to a new limit. That requires venturing into the unknown. Stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current self requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above you, superior to you—and that you can't always be sure you will reach

If you don't reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning

In the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged

Our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage instead of a place of objects. The constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things

Order is where the people around you act according to well understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It's the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine

Chaos is where—or when— something unexpected happens

As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it's presented imaginatively as feminine

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.

For the Taoist, meaning is to be found on the border between the even-entwined pair. To walk the border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that's much better than happiness

Shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other's expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system simplifies everyone. Shared beliefs simplify the world because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world

They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting

Actions speak louder than words, and an act of betrayal disrupts the fragile and carefully negotiated peace of an intimate relationship. In the aftermath of disloyalty, people are seized by terrible emotions: disgust, contempt, guilt, anxiety, rage and dread

Both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal, by necessity, something valued. We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing

We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being

So: no value, no meaning

Heidegger tried to distinguish between reality, as conceived objectively, and the totality of human experience. Being is what each of us experiences, subjectively, personally and individually, as well as what we each experience jointly with others. It includes emotions, drives, dreams, visions and revelations, as well as our private thoughts and perceptions. Being is also brought into existence by action, so its nature is to an indeterminate degree a consequence of our decisions and choices—something shaped by our hypothetically free will. Being is (1) not something easily and directly reducible to the material and objective and (2) something that most definitely requires its own term

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all

We can no longer afford conflict

Dreams shed light on the dim places where reasoon itself has yet too voyage

I must and do draw more from what I do know than from what I do not

The centre is occupied by the individual. The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted

It is possible to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? Through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world

Being is far more complicated than one person can know

We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We're pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That's order. Order can become excessive, and that's not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path. Each of the twelve rules of this book therefore provide a guide to being there. 'There' is the dividing line between order and chaos. That's where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough, transforminng enough, repairing enoough, and cooperating enough. IT's there we find the meaning that justifies life and its inevitable suffering. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, resentment, then envy, and then the desire for vengeance and destruction. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we wouldn't have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own insufficiency and ignorance. Perhaps we could come to avoid those pathways to Hell—and we have seen in the terrible twentieth century just how real Hell can be

That the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life

If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

The wiliest, strongest, healthiest and most fortunate birds occupy prime territory, and defend it. Because of this, they are more likely to attract high-quality mates, and to hatch chicks who survive and thrive. Protection from wind, rain and predators, as well as easy access to superior food, makes for a much less stressed existence. Territory matters, and there is little difference between territorial rights and social status. It is often a matter of life and death

Establish dominance, while risking the least amount of possible damage

If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate's brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position. Its original brain just isn't sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth

Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ration of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ration of the former to the latter

A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion

When a defeated lobster regains its courage and dares to fight again it is more likely to lose again than you would predict, statistically, from a tally of its previous fights. Its victorious opponent, on the other hand, is more likely to win. It's winner-take-all

The Matthew Principle: 'To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.'

The top lobster parades his dominance around his territory, rousting subordinate lobsters from their shelters at night, just to remind them who's their daddy

The female lobsters identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him

Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy

This is very much what happens with stock-market picking, where the value of any particular enterprise is determined through the competition of all

Sheer physical power is an unstable basis on which to found lasting dominance

Males who were successful in the longer term had to buttress their physical prowess with more sophisticated attributes

Males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the troupe's females and their infants. The political ploy of baby-kissing is literally millions of years old

The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster and male

Lobsters have been around for more than 350 million years

Dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society

Evolution is conservative. When something evolves, it must build upon what nature has already produced. New features may be added, and old features may undergo some alteration, but most things remain the same

Evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection

What exactly is the 'nature' in 'natural selection'? What exactly is 'the environment' to which animals adapt?

'It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.' - Mark Twain

The environment—the nature that selects—itself transforms. The famous yin and yang symbols of the Taoists capture this beautifully. Being, for the Taoists—reality itself—is composed of two opposing principles, often translated as feminine and masculine, yin and yang are more accurately understood as chaos and order

The black serpent, chaos, has a white dot in its head. The white serpent, order, has a black dot on its head. This is because chaos and order are interchangeable, as well as eternally juxtaposed. There is nothing so certain that it cannot vary. There is nothing so mutable that it cannot be fixed

Nature 'selects.' The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is 'fitness' that is 'selected.' Fitness is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The 'fit' in 'fitness' is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand

Evolution is a never-ending series of linear improvements

As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. The theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit one that is deadly. 'In my kingdom,' as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, 'you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.'

It is a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically

If Mother Nature wasn't so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates

Nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it. The order within the chaos and order of Being is all the more 'natural' the longer it has lasted. This is because 'nature' is 'what selects,' and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected—and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters is permanence. The dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It's permanent. It's real

We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight

If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can't easily put up the kind of fight that life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies

Serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape. Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency. Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society—on a scale of one to ten, for the sake of argument. If you're a number one, the highest level of status, you're an overwhelming success. If you're male, you have preferential access to the best places to live and the highest-quality food. People compete to do you favours. You have limitless opportunity for romantic and sexual contact

If you are a low-status ten, by contrast, male or female, you have nowhere to live. Your food is terrible, when you're not going hungry. You're in poor physical and mental condition. You're of minimal romantic interest to anyone, unless they are as desperate as you. You are more likely to fall ill, age rapidly, and die young, with few, if any, to mourn you. Even money itself may prove of little use. You won't know how to use it, because it is difficult to use money properly, particularly if you are unfamiliar with it. Money will make you liable to the dangerous temptations of drugs and alcohol, which are much more rewarding if you have been deprived of pleasure for a long period. Money will also make you a target for predators and psychopaths, who thrive on exploiting those who exist on the lower rungs of society. The bottom of the dominance hierarchy is a terrible, dangerous place to be

The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability

That physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources. This response is really what everyone calls stress. It's a reflection of the genuine constraints of unfortunate circumstances. When operating at the bottom, the ancient brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an uncontrollable chain of negative events, which will have to be handled alone, as useful friends are rare indeed, on society's fringes. You will therefore continually sacrifice what you could otherwise physically store for the future, using it up on heightened readiness and the possibility of immediate panicked action in the present. When you don't know what to do, you must be prepared to do anything and everything, in case it becomes necessary

Too much of that and everything falls apart. The ancient counter will even shit down your immune system, expending the energy and resources required for future health now, during the crises of the present. It will render you impulsive, so that you will jump, for example, at any short-term mating opportunities, or any possibilities of pleasure, no matter how sub-par, disgraceful or illegal

If you have a high status, the counter's cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can be safely discounted. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster. The serotonin flows plentifully. This renders you confident and calm, standing tall and straight, and much less on constant alert. Because your position is secure, the future is likely to be good for you. It's worthwhile to think in the long term and plan for a better tomorrow. You don't need to grasp impulsively at whatever crumbs come your way, because you can realistically expect good things to remain available. You can delay gratification, without forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen

Sometimes the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity

Waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity

The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms

Eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars, as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip)

A positive feedback loop requires an input detector, an amplifier, and some form of output

Trouble starts when the input detector detects that output, and runs it through the system again, amplifying and emitting it again. A few rounds of intensification and things get dangerously out of control

There are many systems of interaction between brain, body, and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. Depression spirals and amplifies

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge

The formerly lowly persons have matured and moved to new and more successful places in their lives. But they don't fully notice. Their now-counterproductive physiological adaptations to earlier reality remain, and they are more stressed and uncertain than is necessary

Sometimes people are bullied because they can't fight back. This can happen to people who are weaker, physically, than their opponents

But just as often, people are bullied because they won't fight back. This happens not infrequently to people who are by temperament compassionate and self-sacrificing—particularly if they are also high in negative mention, and make a lot of gratifying noises of suffering when someone sadistic confronts them (children who cry more easily, for example, are more frequently bullied)

If you say no, easily in the cycle of oppression, you mean what you say (which means you state your refusal in no uncertain terms and stand behind it), then the scope for oppression on the part of the oppressor will remain properly bounded and limited

People who refuse to muster appropriately self-protective territorial responses are laid open to exploitation as much as those who genuinely can't stand up for their own rights because of a more essential inability or a true imbalance in power

People are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the treat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of individuals who are genuinely malevolent.

Those who aim to harm have become specialized to prey on people who think precisely such things

No one likes to be pushed around, but people often put up with it for too long

Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power. Such people produce powerful undercurrents of resentment around them which, if expressed, would limit their expression of pathological power

When the awakening occurs their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. They can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become. There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character

Maybe you are a loser. If you are, you don't have to continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you're even just a collection of bad habits. It's not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin

Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can work to get you ahead. Those who start to have will probably get more

Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression

People size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently

You're not only a body. You're a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being

You respond to a challenge. You see the gold the dragon hoards. You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality. It means withstanding the ensuing unncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and more productive order

Attend carefully to your posture. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward.Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dore to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence

People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able. Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating. Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing so will not only genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you—it will also make those good things feel better when they do happen

Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement.

Allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair. You will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, and pursue your rightful destiny.

Then you may be able too accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy

Stand up straight, with your shoulders back

Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Dialysis involves passing all the patients blood out of his or her body, through a machine, and back in

People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That’s not good. Even from your pets perspective, nuts not good. Your pet (probably) loves you, and would be happier if you took your medication

Because we are so scientific now it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist

Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lined, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person

Pain matters, more than matter matters

That which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, externally and without limits

Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too. Order, by contrast, is explored territory

The most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations

Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved

Nature is what selects

Reality itself is whatever we contend with then we are striving to survive and reproduce. A lot of that is other beings, their opinions of us, and their communities

The way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by the border between the twin serpents. The way of the path of proper being

We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not the world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos

The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionary grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural. It’s the right place to be, in every sense

Music is telling you. It’s harmonious layered patterns of predictability and unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your Being

Living things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make them vulnerable

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. That is where meaning is to be found

The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality

And even if we had defeated all the snakes that beset us from without, reptilian and human alike, we would still not have been safe. Not are we now. We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls

The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being

It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them

How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger?

Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all

People, unsettled by their vulnerability, eternally fear to tell the truth, to mediate between chaos and order, and to manifest their destiny

God's a judgmental father. His standards are high. He's hard to please

Those who see into the future can also eternally see trouble coming, and must then prepare for all contingencies and possibilities. To do that, you will have to eternally sacrifice the present for the future. You must put aside pleasure for security. In short: you will have to work. And it's going to be difficult. I hope you're fond of thorns and thistles, because you're going to grow a lot of them

Only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you will all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic

Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate

If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don't, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures. If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world, Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might strive to set the world straight

It seems that people often don't really believe that they deserve the best care, personally speaking. They are excruciatingly aware of their own faults and inadequacies, real and exaggerated, and ashamed and doubtful of their own value

'Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbour as yourself.' - Carl Jung

If I am someone's friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong

Encourage people to credit themselves and those around them for acting productively and with care, as well as for the genuine concern and thoughtfulness they manifest towards others. People are so tortured by the limitations and constraint of Being that I am amazed they ever act properly or look beyond themselves at all

You deserve some respect. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being

To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not 'what you want.' It is also not 'what would make you happy.'

'Happy' is by no means synonymous with 'good.'

You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so

You need to consider the future and think, 'What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?' You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world

You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don't end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others' taking inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play. You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to beccome and to stay a good person. It would be good to make the world a better place

Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being

'He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.' - Friedrich Nietzsche

You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell

You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsbile for helping

Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you

In a small town, everyone knows who you are. You drag your years behind you. You can't escape who you have been. Everything wasn't online then, and thank God for that, but it was stored equally indelibly in everyone's spoken and unspoken expectations and memory

In the chaos there are new possibilities

People will often accept or even amplify their own suffering, as well as that of others, if they can brandish it as evidence of the world's injustice

How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won't instead bring them—or you—further down?

In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens? The entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed

Down is a lot easier than up

You're associating with people who are bad for you not because it's better for anyone, but because it's easier

You've all decided to sacrifice the future to the present

Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble

If you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past. In this manner, you strip him or her of all power

It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty

Failure is easy to understand

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It's easier not to shoulder a burden. It's easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures

'That's a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!' - Homer Simpson

How do I know that I am not myself merely pretending to be responsible, while pointlessly 'helping' you, so that I don't have to do something truly difficult—and genuinely possible?

Success: that's the mystery. Virtue: that's what's inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits

Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their degeneration

It was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve

Maybe instead of continuing our relationship I should just go off somewhere, get my act together, and lead by example

If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn't recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself? Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly, and honestly. Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It's a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It's appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve

If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not

Michelangelo's great perfecct marble David cries out to its observer: 'You could be more than you are.' Whenn you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future

You remind them that they ceased caring not because of life's horrors, which are undeniable, but because they do not want to life the world up on to their shoulders, where it belongs

A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity

Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

No matter how good you are at something, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent

We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be

If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours, perhaps you should stop listening

If you hadn't decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn't be doing it

If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse

The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don't succeed at one, you can try another. You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses and situation. If cchanging games does not work, you can invent a new one

Growing might be the most important form of winning

Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don't have and undervaluing what you do

Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself

Should is your responsbility, and you should live up to it

Dare to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express what would really justify your life

Resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up. Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse

When you have something to say, silence is a lie

Be cautious when you're comparing yourself to others. You're a singular being, once you're an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems

You must decide how much of your time to spend on this, and how much on that. You must decide what to let go, and what to pursue

Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching, or investigating, or looking for, or having. We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming

We succeed when we score a goal or hit a target. We fail, or sin, when we do not. We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate

We are always and simultaneously at point 'a' (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point 'b' (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways of things could be set right, and improved, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all

We can change the world so that the intolerable state of the present can be rectified in the future. The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort

Who are you?

You can't fix something if you don't know it's broken—and you're broken

The future is like the past. But there's a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future—it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount—the amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement

Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived

Called upon properly, the internal critic will suggest something to set in order, which you could set in order, which you would set in order—voluntarily, without resentment, even with pleasure. Is there one thing that exists in disarray in your life or your situation that you could, and would, set straight?

'Excuse me, I'm trying to reduce some of the unnecessary suffering around here. I could use some help. I'm wondering if there is anything that you would be willing to do? I'd be very grateful for your service'

A little careful kindness goes a long way

Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?

Aim small. You don't want to shoulder too much to begin with, given your limited talents, tendency to deceive, burden of resentment, and ability to shrink responsibly

By the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. 'What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?'

With each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that's magic. That's compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you're aiming for something higher. Now you're wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you're learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That's worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see

You aim at what you value

Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go

The world, as perceived, is maya—appearance or illusion

People are blinded by their desires

Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want

Getting what we currently want can make us blind to higher callings

Perhaps what you really need is right in front of your eyes, but you cannot see it because of what you are currently aiming for

Life sucks, and then you die

Life doesn't have the problem. You do

If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself. Perhaps your value structure needs some serious retooling. Perhaps what you want is blinding you to what else could be. Perhaps you are holding on to your desires, in the present, so tightly that you cannot see anything else—even what you truly need

'Maybe I'm not unhappy because I don't have my boss's job. Maybe I'm unhappy because I can't stop wanting that job.'

You must change what you are after more profoundly

Want whatever it is that would make your life better and start working on it right now

Let go

What would your life look like, if it were better?

You will start to slowly see what is 'better,' once you have truly decided to want it

If you genuinely want your life to improve

Making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful

We only see what we aim at

'I want whatever might be better than just my life being better.' And then we enter a more elevated and more complete reality

We must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies

Our values, our morality—they are indicators of our sophistication

The philosophy study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such study can render us more sophisticated in our choices

Religion concerns itself not with right and wrong but with good and evil themselves—with the archetypes of right and wrong

Religion is about proper behavior

You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored

There must be vision, beyond discipline; beyond dogma. A tool still needs a purpose

You're simply not an atheist in your actions, and it is your actions that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs

You can only find out what you actually believe by watching how you act

It takes careful observation, and education and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs. Everything you value is a product of unimgainably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural and biological

What you want is conditioned by the immense, abysmal, profound past. Every neural circuit through which you peer at the world has been shaped by the ethical aims of millions of years of human ancestors and all of the life that was lived for the billions of years before that

You don't understand anything

You didn't even know that you were blind

The Bible is the foundational document of Western civilization

Old Testament God doesn't much care what modern people think

He was a Force of Nature

New Testament God wants nothing for us but the best. He is all-loving and all-forgiving. He's the God of Love

Something that seems incomprehensible to someone unseeing might be perfectly evident to someone who had opened his eyes

Imagine that you come to notice, and contemplate, and reconsider your unhappiness. You determine to accept responsibility for it, and dare to posit that it might be something at least partly under your control. You crack open one eye, for a moment, and look. You ask for something better. You sacrifice your pettiness, repent of your envy, and open your heart. Instead of cursing the darkness, you let in a little light. You decide to aim for a better life

You don't stop there. You realize that it's a mistake to aim for a better life, if it comes at the cost of worsening someone else's. So, you get creative. You decide to play a more difficult game. You decide that you want a better life, in a manner that will also make the life of your family better. Or the life of your family, and your friends. Or the life of your family, and your friends, and the strangers who surround them. You start to wish even your enemies well

And the direction of your sight changes. You see past the limitations that hemmed you in. New possibilities for your life emerge, and you work toward their realization. Your life indeed improves

It means better today, in a manner that makes everything better tomorrow, and next week, and next year, and a decade from now, and a hundred years from now. And a thousand years from now. And forever

'Better' means to aim at the improvement of Being. Thinking all of this—realizing all of this—you take a risk. You decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness. It is a decision, that declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and arrogance. It is not at all the will to believe things that you know perfectly well to be false. Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including your life. You realize that you have, literally, nothing better to do

You might start by not thinking, by refusing to subjugate your faith to your current rationality and its narrowness of view. This doesn't mean 'make yourself stupid.' It means the opposite. It means instead that you must quit maneuvering and calculating and conniving and scheming and enforcing and demanding and avoiding and ignoring and punishing. It means you must place your old strategies aside. It means, instead, that you must pay attention, as you may never have paid attention before

Pay attention. Focus your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix

'What is it that is bothering me?' 'Is that something I could fix?' 'Would I actually be willing to fix it?'

Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it

People can learn, even if they are very unskilled at the beginning. Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer.

What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and one other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave. Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge

'What could I do, that I would do, to make life a little better?' You are not dictating to yourself what 'better' must be. You are not being a totalitarian, or a utopian, even to yourself

Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better

This is the attempt of the Spirit of Mankind to transform the understanding of ethics from the initial, necessary Thou Shalt Not of the child and the Ten Commandments into the fully articulated, positive vision of the true individual. This is the expression not merely of admirable self-control and self-mastery but of the fundamental desire to set the world right. This is not the cessation of sin, but sin's opposite, good itself. Ther Semon of the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you—but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justidy Being and illuminate the world. Do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must bee sacrificed soo that you can pursue the highest good

Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you

Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention. You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world. You are negotiating, instead of playing the martyr or the tyrant. You not longer have to be envious, because you no longer know that someone else truly has it better. You no longer have to be frustrated, because you have learned to aim low, and to be patient. You are discovering who you are, and what you want, and what you are willing to do. You are finding that the solutions to your particular problems have to be tailored to you, personally and precisely. You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself

Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good

Your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully...

Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little; a lot' completely—and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being itself

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Thoughtful parents would not have let someone they truly cared for become the object of a crowd's contempt

The desire of his parents to let their child act without correction on every impulse perversely produced precisely the opposite effect: they deprived him instead of every opportunity to engage in independent action

'A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.' - Sigmund Freud

It is the things that occur every single day that truly make up our lives, and time spend the same way over and again adds up at an alarming rate

No matter how good your intentions, or how sweet and tolerant your temperament, you will not maintain good relations with someone you fight with. Resentment will inevitably build

It's also not for the best that all human corruption is uncritically laid at society's feet. That conclusion merely displaces the problem, back in time. It explains nothing, and solves no problems

Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous

Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril

Today's parents as terrified by their children, not least because they have been deemed the proximal agents of this hypothetical social tyranny, and simultaneously denied credit for their role as benevolent and necessary agents of discipline, order and conventionality

Children are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined and properly encouraged

Children must be shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive

Kids are utterly desperate for attention from both peers and adults because such attention, which renders them effective and sophisticated communal players, is vitally necessary

Children are damaged when their 'mercifully' inattentive parents fail to make them sharp and observant and awake and leave them, instead, in an unconscious and undifferentiated state. Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance

A child will have many friends, but only two parents—if that—and parents are more, not less, than friends

Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach children how to behave so that other people will be able to interact meaningfully and productively with them

It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child

Proper discipline requires effort. It is difficult to pay careful attention to children. It is difficult to figure out what is wrong and what is right and why. It is difficult to formulate just and compassionate strategies of discipline, and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child's care

Strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement

Violence is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned

Correction is better sooner than later. Correction also helps the child learn that hitting others is a sub-optimal social strategy. Without that correction, no child is going to undergo the effortful process of organizing and regulating their impulses, so that those impulses can coexist, without conflict, within the psyche of the child, and in the broader social world. It is no simple matter to organize the mind

A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old

'Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.'

When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them

There is just no talking to parents about their children—until they are ready to listen

Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying

Anger-crying is often an act of dominance, and should be dealt with as such

You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First, figure out what you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in and deliver a reward

That use of reward was very difficult: the observer had to attend patiently until the target spontaneously manifested the desired behaviour, and then reinforce

We feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope

Satisfaction tells us that what we did was good, while hope indicates that something pleasurable is on the way. Pain hurts us, so we won't repeat actions that produced personal damage or social isolation

Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful people and bad places so we don't have to feel pain

The fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost

The judgmental and uncaring broader social world will mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered by an awake parent. You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world—and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused with love

Every child must listen to and obey adults because he or she is dependent on the care that one or more imperfect grown-ups is willing to bestow

The child could act in a manner that simultaneously ensures optimal adult attention, in a manner that benefits his or her present state of being and future development. That's a very high standard, but it's in the best interests of the child, so there is every reason to aspire to it

Every child should also be taught to comply gracefully with the expectations of civil society

Parents must reward those attitudes and actions that will bring their child success in the world outside the family, and use threat and punishment when necessary to eliminate behaviours that will lead to misery and failure

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends

Much more of our sanity than we commonly realize is a consequence of our fortunate immersion in a social community. We must be continually reminded to think and act properly. When we drift, people that care for and love us nudge us in small ways and large back on track

If a society does not adequately reward productive, pro-social behavior, insists upon distributing resources in a markedly arbitrary and unfair manner, and allows for theft and exploitation, it will remain conflict-free for long. If its hierarchies are based only on power, instead of the competence necessary to get important and difficult things done, it will be prone to collapse, as well

Poorly socialized children have terrible lives. Thus, it is better to socialize them optimally

Two general principles of discipline. The first: limit the rules. The second: use the least force necessary to enforce those rules

Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defense. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don't end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don't hate you and might, therefore, deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you're lucky to have them. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you're invited for the fun. Act so that other people are happy you're around, so that people will want you around. A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere

Time out can be an extremely effective form of punishment, particularly if the misbehaving child is welcome as soon as he controls his temper. An angry child should sit by himself until he calms down. Then he should be allowed to return to normal life. 'Come be with us as soon as you can behave properly.'

Disciplinary principle 1: limit the rules. Principle 2: use minimum necessary force. Principle 3: parents should come in pairs. Principle 4: parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry, and deceitful. Principle 5: parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world—merciful proxies, caring proxies—but proxies, nonetheless.

A parent who is seriously aware of his or her limited tolerance and capacity for misbehaviour when provoked can therefore seriously plan a proper disciplinary strategy and never let things degenerate to the point where genuine hatred emerges

Being a proxy supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunities, self-regard, and security. It's more important even than fostering individual identity

You realize the difference between good and evil

You take responsibility for their discipline. You take responsibility for the mistakes you will inevitably make while disciplining. You can apologize, when you're wrong, and learn to do better

If their actions make you dislike them, think what an effect they will have on other people, who care much less about them than you

Better to let your little monsters know what is desirable and what is not, so they become sophisticated denizens of the world outside the family

A child who pays attention, instead of drifting, and can play, and does not whine, and is comical, but not annoying, and is trustworthy—that child will have friends wherever he goes

Clear rules make for secure children and calm, rational parents. Clear principles of discipline and punishment balance mercy and justice so that social development and psychological maturity can be optimally promoted. Clear rules and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society, establish, maintain and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos and the terrors of the underworld, where everything is uncertain, anxiety-provoking, hopeless and depressing. There are no greater gifts that a committed and courageous parent can bestow

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

'The human race isn't worth fighting for, only worth killing. Give the Earth back to the animals. They deserve it infinitely more than we do. Nothing means anything anymore.' - One of the members of the Columbine duo

Why must innocent people suffer so terribly? What kind of bloody, horrible planet is this, anyway?

Life is in truth very hard. Everyone is destined for pain and slated for destrucction. Sometimes suffering is clearly the result of a personal fault such as willful blindness, poor decision-making or malevolence. Whenn it appears to be self-inflicted, it may even seem just. People get what they deserve, you might content. Sometimes, if those who are suffering changed their behaviour, then their lives would unfold less tragically. Human control is limited. Susceptibility to despair, disease, aging and death is universal. We do not appear too be the architects of our own fragility.

'According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it. They do not have to live, yet they have lived and they do live, just as I myself had lived, even though I had known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil.' - Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy could identify only four means of escaping from such thoughts. One was retreating into childlike ignorance of the problem. Another was pursuing mindless pleasure. The third was 'continuing to drag out a life that is evil and meaningless, knowing beforehand that nothing can come of it.' 'The people in this category know that death is better thann life, but they do not have the strength to act rationally and quickly put an end to the delusion by killing themselves...' Only the fourth and final mode of escape involved 'strength and energy. It consists of destroying life, once one has realized that life is evil and meaningless.' 'Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner. Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living and that it is better not to exist, they act and put an end to this stupid joke; and they use any means of doing it: a rope around the neck, water, a knife in the heart, a train.'

'Distress, whether psychic, physical, or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism (that is, the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations.' - Nietzsche

People who experience evil may certainly desire to perpetuate it, to pay it forward. But it is also possible to learn good by experiencing evil.

Abuse disappears across generations. People constrain its spread. That's a testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart

If it's her fault, she might be able to do something about it. If it's God's fault, however—if reality itself is flawed, hell-bent on ensuring her misery—then she is doomed. She couldn't change the structure of reality itself. But maybe she could change her own life

The great writer, the profound, spirited defender of truth, did not allow his mind to turn towards vengeance and destruction. He opened his eyes, instead

How had he missed the mark, in the past? How many times had he acted against his own conscience, engaging in actions that he knew to be wrong? How many times had he betrayed himself, and lied? Was there any way that the sins of his past could be rectified, atoned for?

Can I stop making such mistakes, now? Can I repair the damage done by my past failures, now? He learned to watch and to listen. He found people he admired; who were honest, despite everything. He took himself apart, piece by piece, let what was unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrected himself

Solzhenitsyn's writing utterly and finally demolished the intellectual credibility of communism, as ideology or society. He took an axe to the trunk of the tree whose bitter fruits had nourished him so poorly—and whose planting he had witnessed and supported

One man's decision to change his life, instead of cursing fate, shook the whole pathological system of communist tyranny to its core

Success breeds pride and arrogance

This is life. We build structures to live in. We build families, and states, and countries. We abstract the principles upon which those structures are founded and formulate systems of belief. At first we inhabit those structures and beliefs like Adam and Eve in Paradise. But success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention. We take what we have for granted. We turn a blind eye. We fail to notice that things are changing, or that corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart.

Failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that's sin. The wages of sin is death. The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God's goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That's insanely responsible.

If you are suffering—well, that's the norm. People are limited and life is tragic. If your suffering is unbearable, however, and you are starting to become corrupted, here's something to think about

Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down? Have you made peace with your brother? Are you treating your spouse and your children with dignity and respect? Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being? Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities? Have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members? Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better?

Have you cleaned up your life?

Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste your time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is. Inopportune questioning can confuse, without enlightening, as well as deflecting you from action. You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why. Your entire Being can tell you something that you can neither explain or articulate. Every person is too complex to know themselves completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend

Stop acting in that particular, despicable manner. Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honor

You can use your own standards of judgment. You can rely on yourself for guidance. You don't have to adhere to some external, arbitrary code of behavior (although you should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don't have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).

Don't reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? Let your own soul guide you. When you are at work you will begin to say what you really think. You will start to tell your wife, or your husband, or your children, or your parents, what you really want and need. When you know that you have left something undone, you will act to correct the omission. Your head will start to clear up, as you stop filling it with lies. Your experience will improve, as you stop distorting it with inauthentic actions. You will then begin to discover new, more subtle things that you are doing wrong. Stop doing those, too. After some months and years of diligent effort, your life will become simpler and less complicated. Your judgment will improve. You will untangle your past. You will become stronger and less bitter. You will move more confidently into the future. You will stop making your life unnecessarily difficult. You will then be left with the inevitable bare tragedies of life, but they will no longer be compounded with bitterness and decceit

Your now less-corrupted soul is now able to bear those remaining, necessary, minimal, inescapable tragedies

Perhaps your uncorrupted soul will then see its existence as a genuine good, as something to celebrate, even in the face of your own vulnerability. Perhaps you will become an even-more-powerful force for peace and whatever is good

Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

The fact of life's tragedy and the suffering that is part of it has been used to justify the pursuit of immediate selfish gratification for a very long time

The pleasure of expediency may be fleeting, but it's pleasure, nonetheless, and that's something to stack up against the terror and pain of existence

We know how to behave. We know who's who, and why. We've learned that through experience. Our knowledge has been shaped by our interaction with others. We've established predictable routines and patterns of behavior—but we don't really understand them, or know where thye originated. They've evolved over great expanses of time. No one was formulating them explicitly, even though we've been telling each other how to act forever. One day, however, not so long ago, we woke up. We were already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing

Something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present. The necessity for work is one of the curses placed by God upon Adam and his descendants in consequence of Original Sin

The future: that's where you go to die. Your demise might be staved off through work through the sacrifice of the now to gain benefit later

There is little difference between sacrifice and work. They are also both uniquely human

Such sacrifice—work—is delay of gratification. The discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and, with it, causality. We began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. Behaving properly now, in the present—regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others—could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist. We began to inhibit, control and organize our immediate impulses, so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves

Organizing society: the discovery of the causal relationship between our efforts today and the quality of tomorrow motivated the social contract—the organization that enables today's work to be stored, reliably

Understanding is often acted out before it can be articulated

There is a long conceptual journey between merely feating hungrily and learning to set aside some extra meat, smoked by the fire, for the end of the day, or for someone who isn't present. It takes a long time to learn to keep anything later for yourself, or to share it with someone else (and those are very much the same thing as, in the former case, you are sharing with your future self). It is much easier and far more likely to selfishly and immediately wolf down everything in sight

The future is a judgmental father

The logic of work—sacrifice nnow, to gain later

What must be sacrificed? Small sacrifices may be sufficient to solve small, singular problems. Larger, more comprehensive sacrifices might solve an array of large and complex problems. That's harder, but it might be better

Sacrifices are necessary, to improve the future, and larger sacrifices can be better

Sacrifice will improve the future

What is implied by the idea that sacrifice will improve the future, in the most extreme and final of cases? Where does that basic principle find its limits? 'What would be the largest, most effective—most pleasing—of all possible sacrifices?' 'How good might the best possible future be, if the most effective sacrifice could be made?'

Not all sacrifices are of equal quality. It often appears that sacrifices of apparently high quality are not rewarded with a better future

The realization that pleasure could be usefully forestalled dawned on us with great difficulty. It runs absolutely contrary to our ancient, fundamental animal instincts, which demand immediate satisfaction (particularly under conditions of deprivation, which are both inevitable and commonplace). And, to complicate the matter, such delay only becomes useful when civilization has stabilized itself enough to guarantee the existence of the delayed reward, in the future. If everything you save will be destroyed or, worse, stolen, there is no point in saving

First, there is excess food. That's accidental, at first—but, eventually, the utility of 'for later' starts to be appreciated. Some provisional notion of sacrifice develops at the same time: 'If I leave some, even if I want it now, I won't have to be hungry later.' That provisional notion develops, to the next level ('If I leave some for later, I won't have to go hungry, and neither will those I care for') and then to the next ('I can't possibly eat all of this mammoth, but I can't store the rest for too long, either. Maybe I should feed some to the other people. Maybe they'll remember, and feed me some of their mammoth, when they have some and I have none. Then I'll get some mammoth now, and some mammoth later. That's a good deal. And maybe those I'm sharing with will come to trust me, more generally. Maybe then we could trade forever'). In such a manner, 'mammoth' becomes 'future mammoth,' and 'future mammoth' becomes 'personal reputation.' That's the emergence of the social contract

To share does not mean to give away something you value, and get nothing back. That is instead only what every child who refuses to share fears it means. To share means, properly, to initiate the process of trade. A child who can't share—who can't trade—can't have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade. Benjamin Franklin suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new neighbour to do him or her a favour. He that has once done a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. Asking someone for something (not too extreme, obviously) was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction. Such asking on the part of the newcomer provided the neighbour with an opportunity to show him- or herself as a good person, at first encounter. The latter could now ask the former for a favour, in return, because of the debt incurred, increasing their mutual familiarity and trust. Both parties could overcome their natural hesitancy and mutual fear of the stranger

It is better to have something than nothing. It's better yet to share generously the something you have. It's even better than that, however, to become widely known for generous sharing. That's something that lasts. That's something that's reliable

The productive, truthful sharer is the prototype for the good citizen, and the good man. The simple notion that 'leftovers are a good idea' the highest moral principles might emerge

'It's as if there is a powerful Figure in the Sky, who sees all, and is judging you. Giving up something you value seems to make Him happy—and you want to make Him happy, because all Hell breaks loose if you don't. So, practise sacrificing, and sharing, until you become expert at it, and things will go well for you.'

Actioonn came first (as it had to, as the animals we once were could act but could not think). Implicit, unrecognized value came first (as the actions that preceded thought embodied value, but did not make that value explicit)

The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future

What's the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice. Things get better, as the successful practise their sacrifices

What is the greatest possible sacrifice? For the greatest possible goood?

He demands not only sacrifice, but the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best

Sometimes things do not go well

Sometimes, when things are not going well, it's not the world that's the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. The world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values. If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, it's time to examine your values. It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It's time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are

The animal will not sacrifice the part to preserve the whole

Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity. Something valuable, sacrificed, pleases the Lord. What is most valuable and best sacrificed?—or, what is at least emblematic of that? A most valued possession. What's above even that? Something intensely personal and painful to give up. That's symbolized, perhaps, in God's insistence on circumcision as part of Abraham's sacrificial routine, where the part is offered, symbolically, to redeem the whole. What's beyond that? What pertains more closely to the whole person, rather than the part? What constitutes the ultimate sacrifice—for the gain of the ultimate prize? It's a close race between child and self. The sacrifice of the mother, offering her child to the world

It's an act of supreme courage, when undertaken voluntarily

The man who gives his all for the sake of the better—who offers up his life for the advancement of Being—who allows God's will to become manifest fully within the confines of a single, mortal life. That is the model for the honourable man

Pain and suffering define the world. Of that, there can be no doubt. Sacrifice can hold pain and suffering in abeyance, to a greater or lesser degree—and greater sacrifices can do that more effectively than lesser. Everyone holds this knowledge in their soul. Thus, the person who wishes to alleviate suffering—who wishes to rectify the flaws in Being; who wants to bring about the best of all possible futures; who wants to create Heaven on Earth—will make the greatest of sacrifices, of self and child, of everything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the Good. He will forego expediency. He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning. And he will in that manner bring salvation to the ever-desperate world

Divine sign: his internal spirit, voice or daemon

One of the factors distinguishing him from other men was his absolute willingness to listen to its warnings—to stop speaking and cease acting when it objected. The Gods themselves had deemed him wise above other men, not least for this reason held to be a reliable judge of such things. Because of his ever-reliable internal voice objected to fleeing (or even to defending himself) Socrates radically altered his view of the significance of his trial. He began to consider that it might be a blessing, rather than a curse. The spirit to whom he had always listened might be offering him a way out of life, in a manner 'easiest but also the least irksome to one's friends,' with 'sound body and a spirit capable of showing kindliness' and absent the 'throes of illness' and vexations of extreme old age. Socrates' decisiono to accept his fate allowed him to put away mortal terror in the face of death itself, prior to and during the trial, after the sentence was handed dpwn, and even later, during his execution. He saw that his life had been so rich and full that he could let it go, gracefully. He was given the opportunity to put his affairs in order. He saw that he could escape the terrible slow degeneration of the advancing years. He came to undertand that all that was happening to him as a gift from the gos. He was not therefore required to defend himself against his accusers—at least not with the aim oof pronouncing his innocence, and escaping his fate

Socrates rejected expediency, and the necessity for manipulation that accompanied it. He chose instead, under the direst of conditions, to maintain his pursuit of the meaningful and the true. We remember his decision and take comfort from it. If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the ultimate threat; if you abide, truthfully and courageously, but the highest of ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any short-sighted concentration on your own safety; if you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death

The tragedy of self-conscious Being produces suffering, inevitable suffering. That suffering in turn motivates the desire for selfish, immediate gratification—for expediency. But sacrifice—and work—serves far more effectively than short-term impulsive pleasure at keeping suffering at bay. Tragedy (conceived of as the arbitrary harshness of society and nature, set against the vulnerability of the individual) is not the only source of suffering. Man's inhumanity to man is something even worse. It is not only privation and mortal limitation that must be addressed by work—by the willingness to offer, and to give up. It is the problem of evil as well

We work because we have awakened to the truth of our own vulnerability, our subjugation to disease and death, and wish to protect ourselves for as long as possible. Once we can see the future, we must prepare for it, or live in denial and terror. We therefore sacrifice the pleasures of today for the sake of a better tomorrow

Once you become consciously aware that you, yourself, are vulnerable, you understand the nature of human vulnerability

Once you truly understand such feelings in yourself, and how they're produced, you understand how to produce them in others

Evil enters the world with self-consciousness

Human beings are strong enough to tolerate the implicit tragedies of Being without faltering

Human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake

The central problem of life is what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering and evil—the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering

'No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.' - Carl Jung

There was no possibility for movement upward without a corresponding move down

It's interesting, when I'm in my human form, knowing I'm going to die. Everything has a touch of triviality to it

Soldiers who develop post-traumatic stress disorder frequently develop it not because of something they way, but because of something they did

Satan embodies the refusal of sacrifice; he is arrogance, incarnate; spite, deceit, and cruel, conscious malevolence. He is pure hatred of Man, God and Being. He will not humble himself, even when he knows full well that he should. He knows exactly what he is doing, obsessed with the desire for destruction, and does it deliberately, thoughtfully and completely

There are more important things than food. Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving

Christ aims at the description of a mode of Being that would finally and forever solve the problem of hunger. If we all chose instead of expedience to dine on the Word of God? That would require each and every person to live, and produce, and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the privation of hunger a thing of the past. And that's how the problem of hunger in the privations of the desert is most truly and finally addressed

Live as the archetypal Saviour lives, and you and those around you will hunger no more. The beneficence of the world manifests itself to those who live properly

'Do not put the Lord your God to the test'

Such expansion of status also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkness to reveal itself

Power also means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission, and crush enemies

Attention, pure and untrammeled: detached, alert, watchful attention, waiting to act when the time was right and the place had been established

'He who contrives, defeats his purpose; and he who is grasping, loses. The sage does not contrive to win, and therefore is not defeated; he is not grasping, so does not lose.' Tao te Ching

To obtain the greatest possible prize—the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the resurrection of Paradise—the individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike, no matter how powerfully and convincingly and realistically those are offered, and dispense, as well with the temptations of evil. Evil amplifies the catastrophe of life, increasing dramatically the motivation for expediency already there because of the essential tragedy of Being. Sacrifice of the more prosaic sort can keep that tragedy at bay, more or less successfully, but it takes a special kind of sacrifice to defeat evil

Why do we remain unconvinced that there is no better plan than lifting our eyes skyward, aiming at the Good, and sacrificing everything to that ambition? Have we merely failed to understand, or have we fallen, wilfully or otherwise, off the path?

The European mind found itself motivated to develop the cognitive technologies of science—to investigate the material world—after implicitly concluding that Christianity, with its laser-like emphasis on spiritual salvation, had failed to sufficiently address the problem of suffering in the here-and-now

It was the alchemists who first seriously began to examine the transformations of matter, hoping to discover the secrets of health, wealth and longevity. These great dreamers intuited and then imagined that the material world, damned by the Church, held secrets the revelation of which could free humanity from its earthly pain and limitations. It was that vision, driven by doubt, that provided the tremendous collective and individual motivational power necessary for the development of science, with its extreme demands on individual thinkers for concentration and delay of gratification

It's not precisely that CO2 levels are irrelevant. It's that they're irrelevant when you're working yourself to death, starving, scraping a bare living from the stony, unyielding, thorn-and-thistle-infested ground

Freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently

If a father disciplines his son properly, he obviously interferes with his freedom, particularly in the here-and-now. He puts limits on the voluntary expression of his son's Being, forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of the world. Such a father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down a single pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if the father does not take such action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland. That is not a morally acceptable alternative

A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive sturcture—is necessary for the development of a free mind

The dogma is dead, at least to the modern Western mind

Nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas

Nietzche posited that individual human beings would have to invent their own values in the aftermath of God's death

We cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls

We rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself to action, and neither can you. 'I will stop procrastinating,' I say, but I don't. 'I will eat properly,' I say, but I don't. 'I will end my drunken misbehavior,' I say, but I don't. I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect. I have a nature, and so do you, and so do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves. What is it, that we most truly are? What is it that we ccould most truly become, knowing who we most truly are? We must get to the very bottom of things before such questions can be truly answered

'Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)' - Descartes

'That which is aware and thinks.'

A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of others, or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can let our ideas die in our stead. Then the essential part, the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by comparison, with error. Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself

An idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. An idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in a world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants something It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what is has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When it manifests itself within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that person its avatar: to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion can be so strong that the person will die, rather than allowing the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision, given that it is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person with the idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue

It is the most fundamental convictions that must die—must be sacrificed—when the relationship with God has been disrupted

The future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this our, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it

'If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour.'

Much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor

There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do

Some actions are wronng

There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human Being

These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, that is wrong

'Take the sins of the world onto oneself.' Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori. If there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening

Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don't be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of tour own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it's not the world that's at fault. Maybe it's you. You've failed to make the mark. You've missed the target. You've fallen short of the glory of God. You've sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don't lie. Don't lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people

The alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering

Whatever was at the top of an individual's moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person's ultimate value, that person's god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it's a personality—or, more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities

Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It's short-term gain. It's narrow, and selfish. It liest to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It's immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better

If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. This stacking up is a place in space and time whose existence we can detect with our ability to experience more than is simply revealed here and now by our senses, which are obviously limited to their information-gathering and representational capacity. Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and forever. that's why we can detect it

If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix or reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, 'What should I do today?' in a manner that means 'How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?'

You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed 'make the world better' at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It's not bliss. It's not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It's payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence

Expedience—that's hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That's covering the blood you just spilled with a carpet. That's avoiding responsibility. It's cowardly, and shallow, and wrong. It's wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It's wrong because expedience merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better

There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon, you, of its own accord. You can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself, but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment

What is expedient works only for the moment. It's immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being

Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony

Meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly

Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good

Meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that

Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient

Rule 8: Tell the truth or, at least, don't lie

What should you do, when you don't know what to do? Tell the truth

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you

He talked to me, nonetheless, because I listened and responded honestly, even though I was not encouraging in my responses

Taking the easy way out or telling the truth. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing

You can use words to manipulate the world into delivering what you want. This is what it means to 'act politically.'

Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist

Current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good, unquestioningly, far into the future. Reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices. What you are currently aiming at might not be worth attaining, just as what you are currently doing might be an error

All I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute

A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie

A sin of commission occurs when you do something you know to be wrong. A sin of omission occurs when you let something bad happen when you could do something to stop it

Her obedience and self-obliteration eliminate all the meaning from her life. She has become nothing but a slave, a tool for others to exploit. She does not get what she wants, or needs, because doing so would mean speaking her mind

Hiding from others also means suppressing and hiding the potentialities of the unrealized self

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward

When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information

Researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed in a new situation. These genes code for new proteins. These proteins are the building blocks for new structures in the brain

You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on. And, if not ... you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete

If you say no when it needs to be said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. If you say yes when no needs to be said, you transform yourself into someone who can only say yes, even when it is very clearly time to say no

If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things

A vision of the future, the desirable future, is necessary. Such a vision links action taken now with important, long-term, foundational values. It lends actions in the present significance and importance. It provides a frame limiting uncertainty and anxiety

It's not vision. It is instead willful blindness. It's the worst sort of lie. It's subtle. It avails itself of easy rationalizations. Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known

It's refusal to admit to error while pursuing the plan. Every game has rules. Some of the most important rules are implicit. You accept them merely by deciding to play the game. The first of these rules is that the game is important. If it wasn't important, you wouldn't be playing it. Playing a game defines it as important. The second is that moves undertaken during the game are valid if they help you win. If you make am move and it isn't helping you win, then, by definition, it's a bad move. You need to try something different. You remember the old joke: insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results

If you're lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn't work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small changes, and see if they help. Sometimes, however. the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed. That's a revolution, with all the chaos and terror of a revolution. It's not the something to be engaged in lightly, but it's sometimes necessary. Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice—and if you have rejected the truth for a long time, then you've run up a dangerously large sacrificial debt

The prideful, rational mind, comfortable with its certainty, enamored of its own brilliance, is easily tempted to ignore error, and to sweep dirt under the rug. This mode of Being as 'inauthentic.' An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice

'Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.' That is the voice of authenticity

When the individual lies, he knows it. He may blind himself to the consequences of his actions. He may fail to analyze and articulate his past, so that he does not understand. He may even forget that he lied and so be unconscious of that fact. He may even forget that he lied and so be unconscious of that fact. But he was conscious, in the present, during the commission of each error, and the omission of each responsibility. At that moment, he knew what he was up to. And the sins of the inauthentic individual compound and corrupt the state

Why not complain? Why not take a stand? If you do, other people, equally afraid to speak up, may come to your defense. And if not—maybe it's time for a revolution. Maybe you should find a job somewhere else. where your soul is less in danger from corruption

For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism. 'Repression' contributed in a nontrivial manner to the development of mental illness. Lies bred sickness. Problems were caused by untruth. Lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other

The difficulties intrinsic to life itself are sufficient to weaken and overwhelm each of us, pushing us beyond our limits, breaking us at our weakest point. Not even the best-lived life provides an absolute defense against vulnerability. The family that fights in the ruins of their earthquake-devastated dwelling place is much less likely to rebuild than the family made strong by mutual trust and devotion. Any natural weakness or existential challenge, no matter how minor, can be magnified into a serious crisis with enough deceit in the individual, family or cculture

The honest human spirit may continually fail inn its attempts to bring about Paradise on Earth. It may manage, however, to reduce the suffering attendant on existence to bearable levels. The tragedy oof Being is the consequence of our limitations and the vulnerability defining human experience. It may even be the price we pay for Being itself—since existence must be limited, to be at all

With love, encouragement, and character intact, a human being can be resilient beyond imagining

The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify, minimize, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalize, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuries of pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature of moral endeavour, regarded it as positively demonic

It is because rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute

Reason is something alive. It lives in all of us. It's older than any of us. It's best understood as a personality, not a faculty. It has its aims, and its temptations, and its weaknesses. It flies higher and sees farther than any other spirit. But reason falls in love with itself, and worse. It falls in love with its own productions. It elevates them, and worships them as absolutes

It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. All important facts have been discovered. Nothing important remains unknown. Denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being. What is going to save you? 'You must rely on faith in what you already know.' But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith inthe possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being

That denial is the meaning of rebellion against 'the most High.' That is what totalitarian means: Everything that needs to be discovered thas been discovered. Everything will unfold precisely as planned. All problems will vanish, forever, once the perfect system is accepted

Stubborn refusal to change in the face of error not only meant ejection from heaven, and subsequent degeneration into an ever-deepening hell, but the rejection of redemption itself. Even if he was willing to seek reconciliation, and God willing to grant it, he would only rebel again, because he will not change

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n

Those who have lied enough, in word and action, live there, in hell—now

These are the people who are immediately angered if you direct your gaze toward them, although sometimes they will instead turn away in shame

It is deceit that makes people miserable beyond what they can bear. It is deceit that fills human souls with resentment and vengefulness. It is deceit that produces the terrible suffering of mankind

What happens if, instead, we decide to stop lying? We must make decisions, here and now, even though the best means and the best goals can never be discerned with certainty. An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. We have to think, and plan, and limit, and posit, in order to live at all. How then to envision the future, and establish our direction, without falling prey to the temptation of totalitarian certainty

Some reliance on tradition can help us establish our aims. It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to. It is reasonable to become educated and work and find love and have a family. That is how culture maintains itself. But it is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance—and worse, by your own unrevealed corruption. You must make friends, therefore, with what you don't know, instead of what you know. You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act. You must remove the beam, in your own eye. before you concern yourself with the mote in your brother's. And in this way, you strengthen your own spirit, so it can tolerate the burden of existence, and you rejuvenate the state

Social organizations ossify with time, and tend towards willful blindness

The encounter with malevolence and evil is of sufficient terror to damage even the vision of a god. The attentive son can restore the vision of his father. Culture is always in a near-dead state, even though it was established by the spirit of great people in the past. But the present is not the past. The wisdom of the past thus deteriorates, or becomes outdated, in proportion to the genuine difference between the conditions of the present and the past. That is a mere consequence of the passage of time, and the change that passage inevitably brings. But it is also the case that culture and its wisdom is additionally vulnerable to corruption—to voluntary, willful blindness and Mephistophelean intrigue. The inevitable functional decline of the institutions granted to us by our ancestors is sped along by our misbehavior—our missing of the mark—in the present

It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible—even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness, and half-blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us. It is the act of seeing that informs the individual and updates the state. Nietzsche said that a man's worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate. You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. You should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity. Tie a rope to a boulder. Pick up the great stone, heave it in front of you, and pull yourself towards it. Watch and observe while you move forward. Articulate your experience as clearly and carefully to yourself and others as you possibly can. In this manner, you will learn to proceed more effectively and efficiently towards your goal. And, while you are doing this, do not lie. Especially to yourself

If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It's an embodied sensation, not a thought

If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move toward your goal. You will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. 'What if my current ambition is in error?' All people serve their ambition. In that manner, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve

If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth. If, instead, you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress. If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself, as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will reorient yourself, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly and radically

Working at cross-purposes to your own wishes, you will find yourself unmotivated, and failing. You will struggle to concentrate and discipline yourself, but it will not work. Your soul will reject the tyranny of your will. Why are you complying? You may not want to disappoint your parents (although if you fail you will do exactly that). You may lack the courage for the conflict necessary to free yourself. You may not want to sacrifice your childish belief in parental omniscience, wishing devoutly to continue believing that there is someone who knows you better than you know yourself, and who also knows all about the world. You want to be shielded in this manner from the stark existential aloneness of individual Being and its attendant responsibility. This is all very common and understandable. But you suffer because you are truly not meant to be an engineer

One day you have had enough. You droop out. You disappoint your parents. You learn to live with that. You consult only yourself, even though that means you must rely on your own decisions. You accept the burden of your own mistakes. You become your own person. By rejecting your father's vision, you develop your own. And then, as your parents age, you've become adult enough to be there for them, when they come to need you. They win, too. But both victories had to be purchased at the cost of the conflict engendered by your truth. 'Think not that I have come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.'

As you continue to live in accordance with the truth, as it reveals itself to you, you will have to accept and deal with the conflicts that mode of Being will generate. If you do so, you will continue to mature and become more responsible, in small ways (don't underestimate their importance) and in large. You will ever more closely approach your newer more wisely formulated goals, and become even wiser in their formulation, when you discover and rectify your inevitable errors. Your conception of what is important will become more and more appropriate, as you incorporate the wisdom of your experience. You will quit wildly oscillating and walk ever more directly towards the good—a good you could never have comprehended if you had insisted despite all evidence that you were right, absolutely right, at the beginning

If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good. If existence is not good, by contrast, you're lost. Nothing will save you—certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions

This is the 'act of faith' whose necessity was insisted upon by Kierkegaard. You cannot know ahead of time. Even a good example is insufficient for proof, given the differences between individuals. The success of a good example can always be attributed to luck. Thus, you have to risk your particular, individual life to find out. It is this risk that the ancients described as the sacrifice of personal will to the will of God. It is not an act of submission. It is an act of courage. It is faith that the wind will blow your ship to a new and better port. It is the faith that Being can be corrected by becoming. It is the spirit of exploration itself

Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be 'live in truth.' 'Act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself (and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you). While doing so, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will, while you act our and articulate the truth.' This is both pragmatic ambition and the most courageous of faiths

Life is suffering. The equivalence of life and limitation is the primary and unavoidable fact of existence. The vulnerability of our Being renders us susceptible to the pains of social judgment and contempt and the inevitable breakdown of our bodies. But even all those ways of suffering, terrible as they are, are not sufficient to corrupt the world, to transform it into Hell

'In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort too large-scale falsehoods.' - Hitler

For the big lie, you first need the little lie. The little lie is, metaphorically speaking, the bait used by the Father of Lies to hook his victims. The human capacity for imagination makes us capable of dreaming up and creating alternative worlds. This is the ultimate source of our creativity. With that singular capacity, however, comes the counterpart, the opposite side of the coin: we can deceive ourselves and others into believing and acting as if things are other than we know they are

And why not lie? Why not twist and distort things to obtain a small gain, or to smooth things over, or to keep the peace, or to avoid hurt feelings? Reality has its terrible aspect: do we really need to confront its snake-headed face in every moment of our waling consciousness, and at every turn in our lives? Why not turn away, at least, when looking is simply too painful?

Things fall apart. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work today. We can open our eyes and modify what we have where necessary and leep the machinery running smoothly. Or we can pretend that everything is alright, faily to make the necessary repairs, and then curse fate when nothing goes our way

Things fall apart: this is one of the great discoveries of humanity. And we speed the natural deterioration of great things through blindness, inaction and deceit. Without attention, culture degenerates and dies, and evil prevails

What you see of alie when you act it out (and most lies are acted out, rather than told) is very little of what it actually is. A lie is connected to everything else. It produces the same effect on the world that a single drop of swage produces in even the largest crystal magnum oof champagne. It is something best considered live and growing

When the lies get big enough, the whole world spoils. If you look close enough, the biggest lie is composed of smaller lies, and those are composed of still smaller lies—and the smallest of lies is where the big lie starts. It is not the mere misstatement oof fact. It is instead an act that has the aspect of the most serious conspiracy ever to possess the race of man

Lies corrupt the world. Worse, that is their intent

The arrogance and sense of superiority that inevitably accompanies the product of successful lies

Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself. Things fall apart. Life degenerates. Everything becomes frustration and disappointment. Hope consistently betrays. The deceitful individual desperately gestures at sacrifice, like Cain, but fails to please God. Then the drama enters its final act

Tortured by constant failure, the individual becomes bitter

To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner, rather than an enemy. Truth makes the past truly past, and makes the best use of the future's possibilities. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It's the light in the darkness

See the truth. Tell the truth

Truth will not come in the guise of opinions shared by others, as the truth is neither a collection of slogans nor an ideology. It will instead be personal. Your truth is something only you can tell, based as it is on the unique circumstances of your life. Apprehend your personal truth. Communicate it carefully, in an articulate manner, to yourself and others. This will ensure your security and your life more abundantly now, while you inhabit the structure of your current beliefs. This will ensure the benevolence of the future, diverging as it might from the certainties of the past

The truth springs forth ever anew from the most profound wellsprings of Being. It will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. It will help you avoid the terrible desire to seek vengeance for that tragedy—part of the terrible sin of Being, wich everything must bear gracefully, just so it can exist

If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak or rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise

Tell the truth. Or, at least, don't lie

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't

Advice is what you get when the person you're talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence

Genuine conversationn is exploration, articulationo and strategizing

Mostly listening. Listening is paying attention. It's amazing what people will tell you if you listen. Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what's wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes that helps you fix something wrong with yourself

Alcohol can cause ambiguity. Alcohol temporarily lifts the terrible burden of self-consciousness from people. Drunk people know about the future, but they don't care about it. That's exciting. Drunk people can party like there's no tomorrow

If you have come apart at the seams you can restructure your life on Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Rogerian or behavioural principles

Imagine a movie where nothing but terrible things happen. In the end, everything works out. A sufficiently happy ending can change the meaning of all the previous events. They can all be viewed as worthwhile, given that ending. Now imagine another movie. A lot of things are happening. They're all exciting and interesting. But there are a lot of them. The story ends, abruptly, unresolved, or something facile and cliched occurs

The present can change the past, and the future can change the present

If you're not the leading man in your own drama, you're a bit player in someone else's

Memory is a tool. Memory is the past's guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That's the purpose of memory. It's not 'to remember the past.' It's to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over

'Pale criminal'—the person who at one moment dares to break the sacred law and at the next shrinks from paying the price

Sometimes you have to change the way you understand everything to properly understand a single something

People need to think. Otherwise they wander blindly into pits. When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn't do. Then they can not do them. Then they don't have to suffer the consequences. That's the purpose of thinking. But we can't do it alone/ We simulate the world, and plan our actions in it. Only human beings do this. That's how brilliant we are. We make little avatars of ourselves. We place those avatars in fictional worlds. Then we watch what happens. If our avatar thrives, then we act like he does, in the real world. Then we thrive (we hope). If our avatar fails, we don't go there, if we have any sense. We let him die in the fictional world, so that we don't have to really die in the present

People think they think, but it's not true. It's mostly self-criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It's difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world. Viewpoint One is an avatar in a simulated world. It has its own representations of past, present and future, and its own ideas about how to act. Thinking is the process by which these internal avatars imagine and articulate their worlds to one another

True thinking is complex and demanding. It requires you to be an articulate speaker and careful, judicious listener, at the same time. It involves conflict. Conflict involves negotiation and compromise. So, you have to learn to give and take and to modify your premises and adjust your thoughts—even your perceptions of the world. Sometimes it results in the defeat and elimination of one or more internal avatar. They don't like to be defeated or eliminated, either. They're hard to build. They're valuable. They're alive. They like to stay alive. They'll fight to stay alive. You better listen to them. If you don't they'll go underground annd turn into devils and torture you. Thinking is emotionally painful, as well as physiologically demanding; more so than anything else—except not thinking. You have to be very articulate and sophisticated to have all of this occur inside your own head

A listening person is your collaborator and your opponent

A listening person tests your talking (and your thinking) without having to say anything. A listening person is a representative of common humanity. He stands for the crowd. Now the crowd is by no means always right, but it's commonly right. It's typically right. Controversial opinions are sometimes correct. The individual is morally obliged to stand up and tell the truth of his or her own experience. Something new and radical is still almost always wrong. You need good, even great, reasons to ignore or defy general, public opinion

If you're going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons. You better have thought them thought. You might otherwise be in for a very hard landing. You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to

A listening person can reflect the crowd. Without talking. He can do that merely by letting the talking person listen to himself

Freud did not face his patients. He did not want their spontaneous meditations to be altered by his emotional expressions. He was properly concerned that his own opinions—and, worse, his own unresolved problems—would find themselves uncontrollably reflected in his responses and reaction, conscious and unconscious alike

Want the best for them

I do my best to want the best, period

You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up

Put myself in the proper frame of mind. I aim properly. I want things to be better. Mind orients itself, given this goal

A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.)

'The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.' - Carl Rogers

'Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker's satisfaction.'

Summarize what people have said to me, and ask them if I have understood properly

Genuinely come to understand what the person is saying. 'Sounds simple, doesn't it? If you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. If you really understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.'

A better memory. It is now less weighty. It has been distilled; reduced to the gist. We have extracted the moral of the story. It becomes a description of the cause and the result of what happened, formulated such that repetition of the tragedy and pain becomes less likely in the future. 'This is what happened. This is why. This is what I have to do to avoid such things from now on.' That's the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is 'accurately recorded,' to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future

If you are called upon to summarize someone's position, so that the speaking person agrees with that summary, you may have to state the argument even more clearly and succinctly than the speaker has even yet managed. If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (1) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, and (2) hone your positions against them and strengthen your arguments further against challenge

Talking (and thinking) is often more about forgetting than about remembering

Much that is not necessary must be put into words

If you listen without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking

You can in fact tell whether or not you are actually listening in this manner. If the conversation is boring, you probably aren't

Not all talking is thinking. Nor does all listening foster transformation

Conversation where one participant is speaking merely to establish or confirm his place in the dominance hierarchy

The purpose of the conversation is to make the case that not thinking is the correct track. The person who is speaking in this manner believes that winning the argument makes him right, and that doing so necessarily validates the assumption-structure of the dominance hierarchy he most identifies with

Each participant attempting to justify fixed, a priori positions instead of trying to learn something or to adopt a different frame

People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. The input of the community is required for the integrity of the individual psyche. It takes a village to organize a mind

Mich of what we consider healthy mental function is the result of our ability to use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity

Before a problem can be solved it must be formulated precisely

Too-early problem-solving may also merely indicate a desire to escape from the effort of the problem-formulating conversation

A good lecturer is not only delivering facts (which is perhaps the least important part of a lecture), but also telling stories about those facts, pitching them precisely to the level of the audience's comprehension, gauging that by the interest they are showing. The story he or she is telling conveys to the members of the audience not only what the facts are, but why they are relevant—why it is important to know certain things about which they are currently ignorant. Tell those audience members how such knowledge could change their behaviour, or influence the way they interpret the world, so that they will now be able to avoid some obstacles and progress moore rapidly to some better goals

A good lecturer is thus talking with and not at or even to his or her listeners

A good lecturer speaks directly to and watches the response of a single, identifiable people

You don't present. You talk

There is also no 'audience.' There are individuals, who need to be included in the conversationo

Do not be boring (it is also very bad form to actually put someone down, when you are only pretending to put them down)

You already know what you know and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough

If you just knew enough, you could be healthier and more honest. You would suffer less. You could recognize, resist and even triumph over malevolence and evil. You would neither betray a friend, nor deal falsely and deceitfully in business, politics or love. However, your current knowledge has neither made you perfect nor kept you safe. So, it is insufficient, by definition—radically, fatally insufficient

It is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions. Youo must believe that if they shared their conclusions with you, you could bypass at least some of the pain of personally learning the same things. You must meditate, too, instead of strategizing towards victory. If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness. But if you are meditating as you converse, then you listen to the other person, and say the new and original things that can rise from deep within of their own accord

It's as if yu are listening to yourself during such a conversation, just as you are listening to the other person. You are describing how you are responding to the new information imparted by the speaker. You are reporting what that informationn has doone to you—what new things it made appear within you, how it has changed your presuppositions, how it has made you think of new questions. You tell the speaker these things, directky. You both change, as you let your old presuppositions die—as you shed your skins and merge renewed

A conversation such as this is one where it is the desire for truth itself that is truly listening and speaking. You're where you should be, with one foot in order, and the other tentatively extended into chaos and the unknown. You're immersed in the Tao, following the great Way of Life. You're stable enough to be secure, but flexible enough to transform. Allowing new information to inform you—to permeate your stability, to repair and improve its structure, and expand its domain

Listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom

Socrates always sought the truth. Wisest living man, because he knew that what he knew was nothing

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech

The world reveals itself to us as something to utilize and something to navigate through—not as something that merely is

We turn from our minds, so to speak—too slow, too ponderous—to our bodies. Our bodies react much faster than our minds

When things collapse around us our perception disappears, and we act. Ancient reflective responses protect us in those dire moments when not only thought but perception itself fails

Maybe the physical intimacy they undoubtedly shared should have been matched, as it often is not, by a corresponding psychological intimacy

There is little, in a marriage, that is so little that it is not worth fighting about. That oath is there to make you take the damn situation seriously

Maybe the fault is with you, and you should grow up, get yourself together and keep quiet

Living things die, after all, without attention. No one finds a match so perfect that the need for continued attention and work vanishes. In truth, what you need—what you deserve, after all—is someone exactly as imperfect as you

Every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self=betrayed woman for the rest of her life

To ensure such an outcome is nothing: don't notice, don't react, don't attend, don't discuss, don't consider, don't work for peace, don't take responsibility. Don't confront the chaos and turn it into order

Not thinking about something you don't want to know about doesn't make it go away

Why refuse to investigate, when knowledge of reality enables mastery of reality

Do you truly think it is a good idea to retreat, to abandon the possibility of arming yourself against the rising sea of troubles, and to thereby diminish yourself in your own eyes?

Isn't it better to prepare, to sharpen your sword, to peer into the darkness, and then to beard the lion in its den?

If you wait instead until what you are refusing to investigate comes a-knocking at your door, things will certainly not go so well for you

To specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover—and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don't get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically. But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future

She must separate the particular details of her specific catastrophe from the intolerable general condition of Being, in a world where everything has fallen apart. Everything—that's far too much. It was specific things that fell apart, not everything; identifiable beliefs failed; particular actioonons were false and inauthentic. What were they? How can they be fixed, now? How can she be better, in the future? She will never return to dry land if she refuses or is unable to figure it all out. She can put the world back together by some precision of thought, some precision of speech, some reliance on her word, some reliance on the Word

When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it—often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus. If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague

The psyche (the soul) and the world are both organized, at the highest levels of human existence, with language, through communication. Things are not as they appear when the outcome has been neither intended nor desired. Being has not been sorted into its proper categories, when it is not behaving. When something goes wrong, even perception itself must be questioned, along with evaluation, thought and action

In that collapse into the terrible mess of uncomprehended Being lurks the possibility of new and benevolent order. Clarity of thought—courageous clarity of thought—is necessary to call it forth

The problem itself must be admitted to, as close to the time of its emergence as possible

Perhaps, you are just whiny and immature?

Our creative, communicative exploration continually generates and regenerates the world. We are shaped and informed by what we voluntarily encounter, and we shape what we inhabit, as well, in that encounter

Precision specifies. When something terrible happens, it is precision that separates the unique terrible thing that has actually happened from all the other, equally terrible things that might have happened—but did not

Precision may leave the tragedy intact, but it chases away the ghouls and the demons

Even what is terrible in actuality often pales in significance compared to what is terrible in imagination

If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganized and chaotic. Then it will grow bigger and swallow all order, all sense, and all predictability. Ignored reality transforms itself (reverts back) into the great Goddess of Chaos, the great reptilian Monster of the Unknown—the great predatory beast against which mankind has struggled since the dawn of time

Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering

Be careful with what you tell yourself and others about what you have done, what you are doing, and where you are going. Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs. The past can be redeemed, when reduced by precise language to its essence. The present can flow by without robbing the future if its realities are spoken out clearly

Don't hide baby monsters under the carpet. They will flourish. They will grow large in the dark. Then, when you least expect it, they will jump out and devour you. You will descend into an indeterminate, confusing hell, instead of ascending into the heaven of virtue and clarity. Courageous and truthful words will render your reality simple, pristine, well-defined and habitable

You make them specific and useful, and reduce their complexity

You leave things vague, then you'll never know what is one thing and what is another. Everything will bleed into everything else. This makes the world too complex to be managed

You have to consciously define the topic of a conversation, particularly when it is difficult

You have to think: what is wrong, exactly? What do I want, exactly?

You must determine where you have been in your life, so that you can know where you are now

You must determine where youo are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with

Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Not your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life

Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly

Be precise in your speech

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Triumph over danger

It's competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be

They drive and walk and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop

When untrammeled—and encouraged—we prefer to live on the edge. We can still be both confident in our experience and confronting the chaos that helps us develop. We feel invigorated and excited when we work to optimize our future performance while playing in the present

There is a dark side to everything

If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation

Culture is an oppressive structure. It's always been that way

What we inherit from the past is willfully blind, and out of date

It crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential

Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter

To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous

Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy. It is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning. We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as we consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued

People compete to rise to the top, and they care where they are in dominance hierarchies

The fact that we can never know everything does make all our observations and utterances dependent on taking some things into account and leaving other things out

All outcome inequalities must be eliminated (inequality being th heart of all evil)

Group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual

Assuming that others think as they do, they expect—instead of ensuring—reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don't speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful

You must also know clearly what you want out of the situation, and be prepared to clearly articulate your desire. It's a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing. You might think, 'if they loved me, they would know what to do.' That's the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence

The Oedipal mother says to her child, 'I only live for you.'

The deal is this: 'Above all, never leave me. In return, I will do everything for you. As you age without maturing, you will become worthless and bitter, but you will never have to take any responsibility, and everything you do that's wrong will always be someone else's fault.'

'If it was too good at home, you'd never leave.'

Lunchbucket couldn't accept his name, or settle into his job. He adopted an attitude of condescending irritation when addressed, and reacted to the work in the same manner. He was not fun to be around, and he couldn't take a joke. That's fatal, on a work crew

Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don't whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don't suck up and don't snitch. Don't be a slave to stupid rules. Don't, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don't be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. Are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable? If not, go away. We don't need to feel sorry for you. We don't want to put up with your narcissism, and we don't want to do your work

A man should look after a woman and children—although that is not all he should do. But a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child. This means that he must not be dependent. Awake and conscious women want an awake and conscious partner

Men toughen up by pushing themselves, and by pushing each other

If they're healthy, women don't want boys. They want men. They want someone to contend with; someone to grapple with. If they're tough, they want someone tougher. If they're smart, they want someone smarter. They desire someone who brings to the table something they can't already provide

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

People are social because they like the members of their own group. People are antisocial because they don't like the members of other groups

Problems arise when two or more factors are important, but none can be maximized without diminishing the others

They favooour their own group, because favouring it helps it thrive—and climbing something that is failing is not a useful strategy

What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations

No limitation, no story. No story, no Being

It is not the clay the potter throws, which gives the pot its usefulness, but the space within the shape, from which the pot is made

Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence—and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is only possible for something limited

Perhaps you might start by noticing this: when you love someone, it's not despite their limitations. It's because of their limitations. You shouldn't stop trying to make life better, or let suffering just be

Set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or other crisis and how it should be managed every day. Do not talk or think about it otherwise. If you do not limit its effect. you will become exhausted, and everything will spiral into the ground. Conserve your strength. You're in a war, not a battle, and a war is composed of many battles

Wish upon a star, and then act properly, in accordance with that aim. Once you are aligned with the heavens, you can concentrate on the day. Be careful. Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It is possible that you can manage, if you are careful. People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost

If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day, you may be fortunate enough to be confronted with small opportunities

Maybe you can steal ten or twenty minutes to do some little ridiculous thing that distracts you or reminds you that you can laugh at the absurdity of existence

Maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you will get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Ask, and it shall be given to you; Seek, and ye shall find; Knock, and it shall be open unto you: For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened

Perhaps you could ask what you might have to do right now to increase your resolve, buttress your character, and find the strength to go on. Perhaps you could instead ask to see the truth

What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about? However small, however distant ... we had each made some error. Here's how I was wrong...

You want to be right or you want to have peace

You don't get peace by being right

But your heart must be open to the terrible truth. Youo must be receptive to that which you do not want to hear. When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought

What shall I do tomorrow? The most good possible in the shortest period of time

What shall I do next year? Try to ensure that the good I do then will be exceeded only by the good I do the year after that

What shall I do with my life? Aim for Paradise, and concentrate on today

Orient yourself properly. Then—and only then—concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Ai, continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future, in that manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both

What shall I do with my wife? Treat her as if she is the Holy Mother of God, so that she may give birth to the world-redeeming hero. What shall I do with my daughter? Stand behind her, listen to her, guard her, train her mind, and let her know it's OK if she wants to be a mother. What shall I do with my parents? Act such that your actions justify the suffering they endured. What shall I do with my son? Encourage him to be a true Son of God

To act too justify the suffering of your parents is to remember all the sacrifices that all the others who lived before you have made for you in the course of the terrible past, to be grateful for all the progress that has been thereby made, and then to act in accordance with that remembrance and gratitude. People sacrificed immensely to bring about what we have now. In many cases, they literally died for it—and we should act with some respect for that fact

What shall I do with the stranger? Invite him into my house, and treat him like a brother, so that he may become one

What shall I do with a fallen soul? Offer a genuine and cautious hand. but do not join it in the mire

What shall I do with the world? Conduct myself as if Being is more valuable than Non-Being. Act so that you are not made bitter and corrupt by the tragedy of existence. Confront the uncertainty of the world voluntarily, and with faith and courage

How shall I educate my people? Share with them those things Ii regard as truly important. That is to aim for wisdom, to distill that wisdom into words, and to speak forth those words as if they matter, with true concern and care

What shall I do with a torn nation? Stitch it back together with careful words of truth

What shall I do for God my Father? Sacrifice everything I hold dear to yet greater perfection

What shall I do with a lying man? Let him speak so that he may reveal himself

How shall I deal with the enlightened one? Replace him with the true seeker of enlightenment. There is no enlightened one. There is only the one who is seeking further enlightenment. Proper Being is a process, not a state; a journey, not a destination. It's the continual transformation of what you know, through encounter with what you don't know, rather than the desperate clinging to the certainty that is eternally insufficient in any case. Always place your becoming above your current being. That means it is necessary to recognize and accept your insufficiency, so that it can be continually rectified. That's painful, certainly—but it's a good deal

What shall I do when I despise what I have? Remember those who have nothing and strive to be grateful. Take stock of what is right in front of you

Knowledge frequently results from knowing others, but the man who is awakened, has seen the uncarved block. Others might be mastered by force, but to master one's self requires the Tao. He who has many material things, may be described as rich, but he who knows he has enough, and is at one with the Tao, might have enough of material things and have self-being as well

What shall I do when greed consumes me? Remember that it is truly better to give than to receive

To give is to do what you can to make things better. The good in people will respond to that, and support it, and imitate it, and multiply it, and return it, and foster it, so that everything improves and moves forward

What shall Ii do when I ruin my rivers? Seek for the living water and let it cleanse the Earth

The more people sort themselves out, the more responsibility they will take for the world around them and the more problems they will solve. It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city

What shall I do when my enemy succeeds? Aim a little higher and be grateful for the lesson. 'Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.' Learn, from the success of your enemies; listen to their critique, so that you can glean from their opposition whatever fragments of wisdom you might incorporate, to your betterment; adopt as your ambition the creation of a world in which those who work against you see the light and wake up and succeed, so that the better at which you are aiming can en compass them, too

What shall I do when I'm tired and impatient? Gratefully accept an outstretched helping hand. Accept and be thankful for the support of others. Exhaustion and impatience are inevitable. There is too much to be done and too little time in which to do it. But we don't have to strive alone, and there is nothing but good in distributing the responsibilities, cooperating in the efforts, and sharing credit for the productive and meaningful work thereby undertaken

A life lived thoroughly justifies its own limitations

It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. Aim to be the person at your father's funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. Noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity

What shall II do in the next dire moment? Focus my attention on the next right move. The flood is coming. The flood is always coming

What shall I say to a faithless brother? The King of the Damned is a poor judge of Being. It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world is to fix yourself

There's plenty to do, right where you are. Your specific personal faults detrimentally affect the world. Your conscious, voluntary sins make things worse than they have to be. Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace

Failure to make the proper sacrifices, failure to reveal yourself, failure to live and tell the truth—all that weaken you

Life is hard enough when it is going well

To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell

The King of the Damned is a poor judge of Being

What shall I do to strengthen my spirit? Do not tell lies, or do what you despise

What shall I do to ennoble my body? Use it only in the service of my soul

What shall I do with the most difficult of questions? Consider them the gateway to the path of life

What shall I do with the poor man's plight? Strive through right example to lift his broken heart

What shall I do when the great crowd beckons? Stand tall and utter my broken truths

Strengthen and encourage those who are committed to your care instead of protecting them to the point of weekness

Wish the best for others