12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Jordan B. Peterson
Description
What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.
What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant, and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure, and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith, and human nature while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its listeners.
Key words: Happiness, Resilience, Meaning
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My Notes
Introduction
Devote conversations to the pleasure of saying what you really think, and hearing others do the same, in an inhibited give and take. Here the rule is ‘speak the truth’.
I was always fond of mid-western, Prairie types who come from a farm (where they have learned all about nature), or from a very small town, and who have worked with their hands to make things, spent long periods outside in the harsh elements, and are often self-educated and go to university against the odds. I found them quite unlike their sophisticated but somewhat denatured urban counterparts, for whom higher education was pre-ordained, and for that reason sometimes taken for granted, or thought of as not as an end in itself, but simply a life stage in the service of career advancement. These westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly, and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasing spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers.
Alongside our wish to be free, we search for structure.
The decent thing to do – once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s ‘moral values’ are – is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come from different (diverse) backgrounds.
Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ‘ways of behaving that are most conducive to a happy life’.
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 then only then can one sensible aim to take on bigger responsibilities.
Order and chaos are the yang and yin on the famous Taoist Symbol. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine way.
I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realise that shared belief systems made people understand one another – and that the systems weren’t just about belief.
It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect and what they desire.
Each of the 12 rules of this book – and their accompanying essays – provide a guide to being ‘there’ the dividing line between order and chaos.
I hope these 12 rules will help people understand what they already know: 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.
Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Because territory matters, and because best locales are always in short supply, territory seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn produces another problem: how to win or lose without disagreeing parties incurring too great cost.
No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted.
We (the sovereign we, the we that has been around since the beginning of life) have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We are struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.
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. If your number one, the highest level of status. You have the best place to live and highest quality food. People compete to do you favours. You have limitless opportunity for romantic and sexual contact. You are a successful lobster, and females line up and vie for your attention. If you are low status, you have nowhere to live. Your food is terrible. Even money itself may prove of little use, because you don’t know how to use it.
The ancient part of your brain specialised for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you a judged by your peers for your worth, the counter restricts serotonin. That makes you more psychologically and physically reactive to any circumstance or event. High status, on the other hand, and the counters cold-pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe. That you are well buttressed with social support. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster.
Sometimes however, 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 an orchestra. Every system must play its role at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines.
Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you ran away.
There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start to feel 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. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.
If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterises 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 low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin.
If you slump, shoulders forward, you look defeated and small. The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you different.
Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of being. Your nervous system response in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond for a challenge, instead of bracing for catastrophe.
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.
Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had right to them – at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully. Through neural pathways desperate for its calming influence. People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
We eventually, inhibit order surrounded by chaos. Chaos is unexplored, order is explored. To straddle the fundamental duality is to be balanced. To walk the line between the yin and yang; 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 fundamental reality for chaos and order is true for everything alive, not only for us. Living things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make the vulnerable.
You need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existing is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. 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 the reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbour a snake.
We have seen the enemy after all, and he is us. The snake inhibits each of our souls.
There is simply no way to wall off some isolated portion of their greater surrounding reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it.
It is far better to render beings in your care competent that to protect them.
And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening – everything dangerous (and therefore, everything challenging and interesting), that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge or danger?
Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe or strong?
Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgement for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. But it was naked and hid. What does this mean? It means that people, unsettled by their vulnerability, eternally fear to tell the truth, to mediate between chaos and order, and to manifest their destiny.
Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself? Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam?
No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reasons to hold you in contempt, so see you as pathetic – and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings. Clearly, a dog is more deserving.
Unlike us, predators have no comprehension of their fundamental weaknesses, their fundamental vulnerability, their own subjugation to pain and death. But we know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. That is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness. We are aware of our own defencelessness, finitude and morality. We can feel pain, self-disgust, and shame, and horror, and we know it. We know what makes us suffer. We know how dread and pain can be inflicted on us – and that means we know exactly how to inflict it on others. We know how we are naked, and how that can be exploited – and that means we know how others are naked and how they can be exploited.
We can and do, make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is wilfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, the proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time talking of ourselves, or others.
If we 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.
Some people shoulder burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill. It seems that people don’t believe 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. They believe that other people shouldn’t suffer, and they will work to help them alleviate it. They extend the same courtesy even to the animals they are acquainted with – but not so easily to themselves.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Loving your neighbour as yourself.
Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business.
In my clinical practice I 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 toward others.
We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as you are to yourself. 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 of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued.
To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you.
Ask: What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly?
What should I be doing, what 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 change your course. You need to know who you are, so that you can 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 your world.
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be uncontrollable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. ‘He whose life has a why can bear almost any how’.
You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.
Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you
You drag your years behind you like a running dog with tin cans tied to his tail. 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.
You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new better ruts, with people aiming at better things.
What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or worse, perhaps unwilling) to move or to change their friendships and improve circumstances of their lives? Was it a consequence of their own limitations? Illness or traumas from the past? People differ in intelligence, which is in part the ability to learn and transform.
Why did they continually choose people who, and places that, were no good for them?
Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own self-worth – or, perhaps when they refuse responsibility for their lives – they chose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe they deserve any better – so they don’t go looking for it. Or perhaps they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this ‘repetition compulsion’. He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past – sometimes, perhaps, to formulate these horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps because no alternatives beckon. People create their world with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. Its part inability. It’s partly unwillingness to learn. Refusal to learn. ‘Motivated’ refusal to learn?
People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone. People will often accept of amplify their own suffering, as well as that of others, if they can brandish as evidence of the world’s injustice.
Imagine someone not doing well. He needs help. He might even want it. But it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper. The distinction is difficult even for the person who is wanting and needing and possibly exploiting. The person who tries and fails, and is forgiven, and then tries again and fails, and is forgiven, is also too often the person who wants everyone to believe in the authenticity of all that trying.
How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them – or you – further down?
Maybe you’re saving someone because you’re strong, generous, well put together person who wants to do the right thing. Buts it’s also possible – and perhaps, more likely – that you want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of compassion and good will.
You are associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier. You know it. You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future for the present. You don’t talk about it. You all know what’s going on.
Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty.
Maybe your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose upward while you waited and sank. Maybe your misery is your own attempt to prove the world injustice, instead of the evidence of your own sin, your own missing of the mark, your conscious refusal to strive and live.
Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve. Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better.
Maybe instead of continuing our friendship I should just go off somewhere, get my act together, and lead by example.
If you surround yourself with people, who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your destructiveness. They will encourage you and tell you when you’re not doing your best. People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette. They will become jealous when you succeed. They will withdraw their support or punish you for it. Maybe they are testing your resolve to see if it’s real. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light. When you dare aspire upward, you are saying the present is no good and the future looks promising. It is at this time, that you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable.
Have some courage. Use your judgement and protect yourself from the critical.
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
Our hierarchies of accomplishment and now dizzyingly vertical.
Inside of us dwells a critical internal voice and spirit that knows all. It predisposed to make a noisy case. It condemns our mediocre efforts. It can be very difficult to quell.
We are not equal in ability of outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything.
If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself).
If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better that the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it.
If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse. Every game comes with chance of success or failure. If there was no better or worse, nothing would be worth doing. There would be no value and no meaning. Today you are either a ‘success’ or ‘failure’. There is no middle ground. Such a generalisation is naive.
You might find the game you play is so unique to you that comparison to others is simply inappropriate. Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do have. Here comes gratitude.
When we are young, we have not yet formed our own standards. We therefore compare ourselves to others. When we head off into the brave world, we have to create our own set of standards and values. Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger – and then you must get to know yourself. Not what other people want. Dare to be dangerous and express what would really justify your life. You must decide what to let go, and what to pursue.
Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching. We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. This is the hunter gatherer instinct. We cannot navigate without something to aim at, and while we are in this world, we must always navigate.
We are at point A (which is less desirable than it could be), moving toward point B (which we deem better, in accordance with our values). We encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We must pick one thing above all else to focus.
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.
If you aim, could you use your judgement and ask yourself what a better tomorrow might look like? With each day, the comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. The compound effect.
What you aim at determines what you see.
You must shepherd your limited resources carefully. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go. A word of warning – sometimes what you want is blinding you to what else could be. Try to want whatever will make a life a little better, and I will start to work on it now. Our minds will then start to present us with new information, to aid us in the pursuit. Then we can act and improve. We must become conscious of our desires and articulate them.
You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. It takes observation, education, reflection and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs.
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.
If you do all this, you will be less concerned with the actions of other people, because you will have plenty to do yourself. To journey happily may be better than to arrive successfully.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Rule 5: Do not let your children to anything that makes you dislike them
A man that has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life that feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.
Kids are utterly desperate for attention from bother peers and adults because such attention, which renders them effective and sophisticated communal players, is vitally necessary. This is the catalyst for further development.
Children realise (sometimes through violence) that if they can hurt or overpower you, then they get exactly what they want, when they want, whenever you are around. They do this to find out what is acceptable.
Emotions, positive and negative, come in two usefully differentiated variants. Satisfaction tells us what we did was good, while hope (technically, incentive reward) indicates that something pleasurable is on the way.
Children would not have such a lengthy period of natural development, prior to maturity, if their behaviour did not have to be shaped. They would just leap out of the womb ready to trade stocks.
People have great capacity for evil, as well as good – and because they remain wilfully blind to the fact.
It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable.
Don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Why must innocent people suffer so terribly? What kind of bloody, horrible planet is this, anyway? Life is in truth very hard. Sometimes suffering is clearly the result of a personal fault such as wilful blindness, poor decision making or malevolence.
You can ask. Can I stop making such mistakes, now? Can I repair the damage done by my past failure, now? Watch and listen to yourself. Take yourself apart, piece by piece, let what is unnecessary and harmful die, and resurrect yourself.
This is life. We build structures to live in. We then formulate systems of belief in those structures. At first, we inhibit those structures in paradise. But success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention. We fail to notice when things are changing. And things then fall apart. Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today.
Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.
(Know yourself. Then manage yourself, before you can manage others).
Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).
Life is suffering. 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. Why not take everything you can get, whenever the opportunity arises? Or is there an alternative, more powerful and compelling?
We’re still chimps in a troupe, or wolves in a pack. 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 routines and patterns of behaviour – but we don’t really understand them. One day we woke up and started to notice what we were doing. We started to use our bodies as devices to represent their own actions. We started dramatising. We realised we can only gain through proper sacrifice.
The delay of gratification – (engage in sacrifice) ‘that something better might be attained in the future, by giving up something of value in the present.’ Sacrifice now, to gain later. There is little difference between sacrifice and work. They are also both uniquely human. Sometimes animals act as if they were working. But they’re just following nature. Beavers build damns. They don’t think ‘I’d rather be on a beach in Hawaii’ while they’re doing it.
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.
Sacrifice will improve the future.
In terms of food ‘if I leave some, even if I want it now, I won’t have to be hungry later’.
The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. The successful sacrifice.
If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, it is time to examine your values. It’s time to let go. It might even be a time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are. Something valuable given up, ensures future prosperity. Be so that you can live a life full and rich, so that you can let go gracefully, however that might happen. If you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from fear of death.
I think, therefore, I am.
Aim for something. 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 it has now.
If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present, you can change the structure of reality in your favour. Ask: How can I use my time to make things better? Strive for humility. Place ‘make the world better’ at the top of your values, you will experience ever-deepening meaning. To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither not know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. Meaning signifies, you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos. Meaning is the dance of single purpose.
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 possible want takes any precedence over that.
Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. (Expedient - convenient and practical although possibly improper or immoral).
Rule 8: Tell the truth – or at least, don’t lie.
Taking the easy way out or telling the truth – those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
Sometimes we can manipulate the world. It’s what everyone does when they want something and decide to falsify themselves to please and flatter.
Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-define outcome is allowed to exist.
A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.
Vitality requires original contribution. Also hiding from others is also a means of suppressing and hiding potentialities of the unrealised self. And that’s the problem.
If you cannot reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward. If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. An inauthentic person does not speak with his own voice and believes the world is at fault.
You must have 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 human transformation. You must make friends with what you don’t know, instead of what you know.
It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and learn from it, even if it seems horrible. A man’s worth is determined by how much truth he can tolerate. As you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will re-orient yourself, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly and radically.
If your life is not what it could be, start telling the truth.
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
Psychotherapy is genuine conversation. Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategising. In a conversation you’re listening and talking – but most importantly listening. Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen. When you listen sometimes people will tell you what’s wrong them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it.
Memory is not a description of the objective past. ‘Memory’ is a tool. Memory is the pasts 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.
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 two people disagree.
A listening person can reflect the crowd. He can do that without talking. He can do that by merely letting the talking person listen to himself. Freud called this ‘free association’. This way you avoid transferring your personal biases into the internal landscape of the patient.
You can be pretty smart if you just shut up.
The key to a therapeutic process is; two people telling each other the truth – and both listen.
Routinely summarise what people have said to you and ask them if I have understood it properly. The first advantage of this, is I can genuinely understand what the person is saying. The second advantage of summarising, is that it aids the person to understand and digest what he has said. After we have summarised back and forth, the memory now becomes different, in many ways – a better memory. It is now less weighty, more distilled, reduced to the gist. We have extracted the moral of the story.
Talking and thinking is often more about forgetting and remembering. To discuss an event, particularly something emotional, like a death or serious illness, is to slowly choose what to leave behind.
Not all talking is thinking. Nor all listening fosters transformation. There is the instance where one person is speaking merely to establish or confirm his place in the hierarchy. This is when someone tells a story, then someone tells a better story. This is jockeying for position, pure and simple.
People organise their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds.
Much of what we consider to be 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.
A good lecturer should be talking with, and not at his listeners. You don’t present, you talk. There is also no audience, there are individuals who need to be included. A well-practiced public speaker will address a single, identifiable person, and watches the nod, shake his head, and responds appropriately to those gestures or expressions. After that switch to another audience member. In this manner, he infers and reacts to the attitude of the entire group.
So, 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. Have one foot in the order, and one foot tentatively in the chaos. That way you’re living the Great Way of Life.
Assume that the person you are speaking with might know something you don’t.
Rule 10: Be precise in your speech
Our evolved perceptual systems transform the interconnected, complex multi-level world that we inhibit down into ‘useful things.’ (or nemeses, things that get in the way). This is the necessary practical reduction of the world. What we inhibit then is this ‘enough’. That is a simplification of the world.
It is for this reason that we must be precise in our aim. Absent that, we drown in the complexity of the world.
If we are not precise, we have a tendency to create a ‘fog’ to hide what we do not want to see. Then chaos emerges bit by bit behind the fog. We do, nothing, don’t notice, don’t attend, don’t discuss, and don’t take responsibility. We refuse to specify the problem. Because to specify the problem is to admit a problem exists.
Clarity of thought – courageous clarity of thought – is necessary to call it forth.
Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering. Don’t hide baby monsters under the carpet. They will flourish. They will grow large in the dark.
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. Organise those words into the correct sentences. You must speak precisely to pull the world from chaos. You must be precise in your speech to do that.
Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so that you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. That is how you discover the meaning of life. Confront the chaos of being. Take aim. Specify your destinations. Tell those around you who you are. Be precise in your speech.
Rule 11: Do not bother children while they are skateboarding
Skateboarding down stair rails – they weren’t trying to be safe; they were trying to be competent – and its competence that makes people as safe as they can be.
If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences – and infer motivation.
We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued.
Everything is interpretation. Beware of single cause interpretations – and beware the people who purvey them.
Too much protection devastates the developing soul.
Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
People are social, and people are antisocial. 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.
Being requires becoming, as well as a mere static existence – and to become is to become something more, or at least something different.
The parts of your brain that generate anxiety are more interested in the fact that there is a plan than in the details of the plan.
Put things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good, better.
Conclusion
If it is you that is wrong, then you must change. You must figure out how to do that. Then you have to actually do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice to take make new perceptions and make them habitual. It’s much easier to turn your attention away. When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open up a line of communication with your conscience. What does this all mean? Orientate yourself properly. Concentrate on the day. Set your sights on the good, the beautiful, the true, and then focus on each moment. Then be grateful for each moment and step forward. Then offer a helping hand to someone, so you can help his or her best part step forward.
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.
“To fix the world, fix yourself.”
