FOREWORD fn1 Some argue—mistakenly—that Freud (often mentioned in these pages) contributed to our current longing for a culture, schools and institutions that are “non-judgmental.” It is true that he recommended that when psychoanalysts listen to their patients in therapy, they be tolerant, empathic, and not voice critical, moralistic judgments. But this was for the express purposes of helping patients feel comfortable in being totally honest, and not diminish their problems. This encouraged self-reflection, and allowed them to explore warded off feelings, wishes, even shameful anti-social urges. It also—and this was the masterstroke—allowed them to discover their own unconscious conscience (and its judgments), and their own harsh self-criticism of their “lapses,” and their own unconscious guilt which they had often hidden from themselves, but which often formed the basis of their low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. If anything, Freud showed that we are both more immoral and more moral than we are aware of. This kind of “non-judgmentalism,”in therapy , is a powerful and liberating technique or tactic—an ideal attitude when you want to better understand yourself. But Freud never argued (as do some who want all culture to become one huge group therapy session) that one can live one’sentire life withoutever making judgments, or without morality. In fact, his point inCivilization and its Discontents is that civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.
OVERTURE fn1 The yin/yang symbol is the second part of the more comprehensive five-parttajitu , a diagram representing both the original absolute unity and its division into the multiplicity of the observed world. This is discussed in more detail in Rule 2, below, as well as elsewhere in the book.
fn2 I use the term Being (with a capital “B”) in part because of my exposure to the ideas of the 20th -century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger tried to distinguish between reality, as conceived objectively, and the totality of human experience (which is his “Being”). Being (with a capital “B”) is what each of us experiences, subjectively, personally and individually, as well as what we each experience jointly with others. As such, it includes emotions, drives, dreams, visions and revelations, as well as our private thoughts and perceptions. Being is also, finally, something that is 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. Construed in this manner, Being is (1) not something easily and directly reducible to the material and objective and (2) something that most definitely requires its own term, as Heidegger labored for decades to indicate.
RULE 2: TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING fn1 It is of great interest, in this regard, that the five-parttaijitu (referred to inChapter 1 and the source of the simpler yin/yang symbol) expresses the origin of the cosmos as, first, originating in the undifferentiated absolute, then dividing into yin and yang (chaos/order, feminine/masculine), and then into the five agents (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) and then, simply put, “the ten thousand things.” The Star of David (chaos/order, feminine/masculine) gives rise in the same way to the four basic elements: fire, air, water and earth (out of which everything else is built). A similar hexagram is used by the Hindus. The downward triangle symbolizes Shakti, the feminine; the upward triangle, Shiva, the masculine. The two components are known asom andhrim in Sanskrit. Remarkable examples of conceptual parallelism.
fn2 Or, in another interpretation, He split the original androgynous individual into two parts, male and female. According to this line of thinking, Christ, the “second Adam,” is also the original Man, before the sexual subdivision. The symbolic meaning of this should be clear to those who have followed the argument thus far.
RULE 5: DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM fn1 I draw here and will many times again in the course of this book on my clinical experience (as I have, already, on my personal history). I have tried to keep the moral of the stories intact, while disguising the details for the sake of the privacy of those involved. I hope I got the balance right.
RULE 7: PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPEDIENT) fn1 And this is all true, note, whether there is—or is not—actually such a powerful figure, “in the sky” :)
fn2 In keeping with this observation is the fact that the word Set is an etymological precursor to the word Satan. See Murdock, D.M. (2009).Christ in Egypt: the Horus-Jesus connection . Seattle, WA: Stellar House, p. 75.
fn3 For anyone who thinks this is somehow unrealistic, given the concrete material reality and genuine suffering that is associated with privation, I would once again recommend Solzhenitsyn’sGulag Archipelago , which contains a series of exceptionally profound discussions about proper ethical behavior and its exaggerated rather than diminished importance in situations of extreme want and suffering.
RULE 9: ASSUME THAT THE PERSON YOU ARE LISTENING TO MIGHT KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T fn1 Here, again, I have disguised many of the details of this case, to maintain the privacy of those involved, while attempting to maintain the central meaning of the events.
fn2 The strategy of speaking to individuals is not only vital to the delivery of any message, it’s a useful antidote to fear of public speaking. No one wants to be stared at by hundreds of unfriendly, judgmental eyes. However, almost everybody can talk to just one attentive person. So, if you have to deliver a speech (another terrible phrase) then do that. Talk to the individuals in the audience—and don’t hide: not behind the podium, not with downcast eyes, not by speaking too quietly or mumbling, not by apologizing for your lack of brilliance or preparedness, not behind ideas that are not yours, and not behind clichés.
RULE 10: BE PRECISE IN YOUR SPEECH fn1 This is why, for example, it has taken us far longer than we originally assumed to make robots that could function autonomously in the world. The problem of perception is far more difficult than our immediate effortless access to our own perceptions predisposes us to infer. In fact, the problem of perception is so difficult that it stalled the early progress of artificial intelligence almost fatally (from the perspective of that time), as we discovered that disembodied abstract reason could not solve even simple real-world problems. Pioneers such as Rodney Brooks proposed in the late 1980s and early ’90s that bodies in action were necessary preconditions to the parsing of the world into manageable things, and the AI revolution regained its confidence and momentum.
RULE 11: DO NOT BOTHER CHILDREN WHEN THEY ARE SKATEBOARDING