12 Commandments

For Extraordinary People To Master Ordinary Life

HANZI FREINACHT

METAMODERNA

Copyright © 2023 Metamoderna

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-91-527-4862-6

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue: Revealing the Real Title of This Book

Introduction: Get Up, Grow Up?

First Commandment: Live in a Mess, Moderately

Second Commandment: Fuck Like a Beast

Third Commandment: Live Sincerely, Ironically

Fourth Commandment: Turn Workout Into Prayer

Fifth Commandment: Quit

Sixth Commandment: Do the Walk of Shame

Seventh Commandment: Sacrifice Immortality

Eighth Commandment: Heal with Justice

Ninth Commandment: Burn Your Maps

Tenth Commandment: Do What You Hate

Eleventh Commandment: Kill Your Guru, Find Your Others

Twelfth Commandment: Play for Forgiveness

Prologue: Revealing the Real Title of This Book

“I am not like most self-help books”.

—Most self-help books

There is something inherently ridiculous about the self-help genre in and of itself. The idea is that an author, presumably wiser than ourselves (at least in some regards), writes down insightful advice and practically applicable knowledge, which we read and apply—and, as a result, our lives improve.

The writer is ridiculous for thinking that they can actually tell other people how to live. In a world where context is everything, and where experience always weighs heavier than whatever we read in books, advice and insights transmit poorly from one person’s life to another’s, particularly in written form. Few authors like to speak of their work as self-help, and to the extent that it is done, it is often described as the opposite of “all the other self-help literature out there”. There is a shame attached to the genre itself, a kind of stigma. So self-help authors hide their efforts to provide self-help, swearing that “I am not like most other self-help books”.

The reader is equally ridiculous for thinking that they can substantially change their life by reading another book by another know-it-all. Many of us like to tell others about books we’re reading, but self-help literature is something we rarely brag about. Better still, those of us who don’t read them love bragging about that. And yet, it is unbelievably popular. From money, to sex, to relationships, to career, to work-out, to diet, to managing our own minds and emotions, we enjoy a bit of good advice from time to time—even if we generally don’t follow it, even if we tend to forget about it, and even if our lives rarely do change after reading.[1]

And yet more laughable still is the philosopher, or academic psychologist, or—worst of all—social theorist or sociologist, who tries to write a self-help book. Not only is every scholarly decorum and taboo broken, but there is an arrogant quality to the endeavor itself that can hardly be married to the humble truth-seeking of a researcher or theorist. For sure, philosophers have argued about practical knowledge and “the examined life” for ages. And the stoics have taught ways of thinking and relating in everyday life. But these are ancient wisdom teachers. For a sociologist of today—an analyst of social phenomena and societies—to write about how you and I can live our lives better is nothing short of ludicrous.

I belong to this last category: the ludicrous.

I, Hanzi, a sociologist and philosopher, hereby write a self-help book with no apology or excuse. I have a vision of life, an intimate and subtle practice, and I intend to share it. Yes, may scholars cringe and casual observers laugh: I shall carry their contempt as a cross. Those naive souls who dare defy the scorn and laughter of others are the true rebels of our time, as the novelist David Foster Wallace once claimed. How I long to join their ranks!

Indeed, is not all writing meant to help its reader? If even with mere entertainment, texts are written to help someone, to do something, to bring new events into being. And beyond offering one heck of a time spent reading, do not all writers wish to convey at least something useful? Take a serious and respectable thing, say a physics textbook. Is its purpose not to help the reader to help themselves to understand physics? Or a theory of racial injustice—is it not meant to help other scholars, policymakers, activists, and ultimately the disadvantaged groups themselves? If we allow ourselves such things, why not share our own crazy wisdom? Writing to help is a vain calling, no doubt, but perhaps not entirely in vain.[2]

Challenging the Canadian

What, then, is this vision of a life well lived that I adhere to? This book is titled 12 Commandments[3]. This is a wink to the widely read book, 12 Rules for Life, and its sequel, 12 More Rules for Life, both by the Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. I seek to offer a serious alternative to following his 12 (or 24) rules. In the early part of this book, I get back to Peterson’s work several times, but then this focus fades into the background; I do, after all, have an entirely different life philosophy.

There are both overlaps and disagreements between my own and Peterson’s perspective. To be sure, there are good rules to follow on Peterson’s lists, like being truthful (then you never need to remember what you said to whom, for one thing). And to be clear, I’m not against people following Peterson’s rules; I have even recommended his books to friends, for instance an unemployed good man in a midlife crisis. I have also observed inspired young men fruitfully following his recipe to find meaning and take on responsibilities. And not all of them seem to pick up sexist attitudes or the like (which is what Peterson has come to represent in the eyes of many, due to his sometimes controversial exclamations).[4]

But are Peterson’s the best possible set of rules—for everyone, or even most people? Peterson is a clinical psychologist and, in many ways, a political conservative. Follow his rules, and you will be working from an individualist perspective and you will arguably show up in the world more as a moderate conservative. A fairly sober one, hopefully.[5] My commandments might not literally be “much better” in every instance (it all depends on context, naturally), but my contention is that they’re much better at least for some people.[6] I suppose the very fact of writing a book implies that the writer somehow feels that their thoughts are better in some regard. To quote Joan Didion, that razorblade of American literature:

“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”[7]

I agree. Didion sees past the charade of the humble author. To be fair, however, authors also do try to grant leeway for differences of opinions among readers, or for differences between the writer and the reader. Peterson, for his part, labors to strike the right balance between the conservative and creative/radical impulses towards life and politics (especially in his second book of additional rules). But when it comes down to it, his own proclivities are clearly of the conservative bent. I too work hard to find syntheses and pathways beyond the Left and the Right, and my earlier work has mainly critiqued what I perceive to be the loopholes of the mainstream and academic Left. But my personal style is, all said and done, more of the radical  kind. I eat roots for breakfast.

Likewise, Peterson goes through great pains to balance between secular and religious worldviews, between the individual and their social surroundings, between responsible adulthood and childlike rapture—and so do I. But, again, even at the other side of those balancing acts, our inclinations tend to be opposite ones. I end up more on the secular side, all said and done.

Thus, there are both profound resemblances and great differences between us. If you compare my earlier writings and Peterson’s, we say strikingly similar things, and we repeatedly draw almost the opposite conclusions. I am still not sure if I should be proud or embarrassed about that, or both. In summary, you could say that I’m a complex blend of friend and foe to Peterson’s intellectual and spiritual project. It’s not unlike how I relate to other thinkers that I feel warrant a calibrated mixture of appreciation and disagreement (or condemnation), like Karl Marx.[8]

Peterson’s books have quickly become a cornerstone of our time. I can hardly run into any old friend of a friend without hearing about them. Why, then, have his books and online lectures become such a smashing world-wide phenomenon? Some of it can certainly be explained by the person and intensity of the author himself. But his content has also struck a chord. What is this chord? That is a sociological question, a question of understanding society and the time we live in.

Laidback Responsibility (in a Digital Revolution)

The first note Peterson has touched is making responsibility sexy again. In today’s society, our attention spans are hijacked by dopamine-driven manipulations through the web and social media. It appears as though we no longer win the respect of others through effort, contribution, merit, and taking responsibility—but rather by being the best at stacking cents, criticizing society, and scoring cheap points at one another for faults and perceived injustices. Just cleaning your room and doing your job properly seems to have fallen out of fashion. Packaged correctly, such a message of renewed personal responsibility feels like just the medicine we need.

I agree that we have, individually and collectively, slipped away from personal responsibility. Here’s an example: My wife recently worked as a junior high science teacher at a school in Sweden. Its motto was (true story): Everyone has the right to succeed. She didn’t think much about it, understanding that the school's leadership simply meant to be inclusive of underprivileged pupils, until she met the kids and parents and saw the results: It was more than a motto, it was a literal policy.

People, especially the young but also many parents and even teachers, did indeed view it as the school’s responsibility to make sure that the kids learned math. The kids were busy using smartphones, snapchatting away during class hours. Parents blamed the school for their children’s out-of-control behavior and threatened to take their kids elsewhere. Kids bullied a substitute teacher to the point of nervous breakdown, and the other teachers blamed the guy for having taught the kids too poorly and thus bringing it on himself. Homework had been done away with. Academic results were dismal (as long-term trends of national statistics also confirm). People literally thought they had “the right” to succeed, regardless of their own efforts. There was, simply put, a widespread abdication from responsibility. Need I point out the absurdity of this motto? If the definition of succeeding is performing an action to the desired result, how can other people be charged with upholding one’s “right” to it?

So when Peterson finds evocative ways of suggesting that taking responsibility might not be such a bad idea after all, people are starved for it. Our institutions have failed to bring this point home, and as a result, folks are feeling afloat, helpless, disempowered, and infantilized. Even adults, even parents, have begun thinking that there is some other abstract grown-up “out there” who is ultimately responsible.

One major crook behind this slide away from personal responsibility is a hyper-consumer society gone haywire under the mobile and digital revolution and its distinct form of capitalism.

Philosopher Shoshana Zuboff has called it surveillance capitalism in a recent book.[9] People are nudged 24/7 to consume by means of increasingly clever digital manipulations invented by experts of marketing and attention-grabbing who use our personal data against the better angels of our nature. This creates a sea of distractions that pacify us, make us less active, less engaged in learning, resulting in less self-efficacy and self-respect. Attention spans are hijacked and emotional growth stunted because we always distract ourselves whenever unpleasant feelings arise. Children are becoming digital addicts before they learn how to talk.

The society we have created does not scaffold and support us to become responsible and active citizens, but a “consumtariat”[10]—a wide social class of idle onlookers, always watching other people, and vying to be watched by others. Or, we are drawn into pseudo-participation, a stand-in for true engagement in life with a smorgasbord of online trends and conspiracy theories for us to indulge in. Society is destabilized, polarized, and loses grip of its sensemaking, of its systems for trust, credibility, and truth. Our institutions are subject to significant decay: education, healthcare, police, politics, administration, welfare—all of them have become measurably shakier over a period of time. We don’t know what to believe and which authorities to trust. Whole parallel stories about the world break loose and float apart in cyberspace.

Lego, the Danish toy company, recently surveyed 3000 kids aged 8-12 in the US, UK, and China. The number one dream job of US and UK kids—almost a third of them—is to become a YouTuber (or similar). Astronaut made it to fifth place, at 11%. (But in China, the order is reversed; astronaut is still number one, YouTuber fifth.)[11] In the minds of young Westerners, the race to conquer outer space has been replaced by the race for attention in cyberspace. As my friend Tristan Harris, founder of Center for Humane Technology[12], has said about the social media industry: It’s a race to the bottom of the brainstem. And it all serves to fund the vanity space travel of a few people who never gave up on astronaut.

How does this social media hype affect inequality? Well, do the math: Those who have the preconditions to skillfully navigate the endless waves of information and knowledge that digital society has to offer have more opportunities than ever—whereas those with poor information filtering skills most easily have their attention grabbed, ending up more vulnerable than before. And that follows a kind of information-society based class structure.

Well-prepared families learn to self-regulate the use of addictive media, also making sure that the flows of information are more useful (investing in stock markets or crypto currencies rather than online gambling and so on), which all in all makes them more empowered than before the advent of the internet. The distance in grades between the kids of high and low educated parents is increasing, despite the best efforts of educational policymakers and idealistic teachers to curb the trend. The numerically smaller social classes of the well-educated and tech-savvy who can adapt to this environment gather all the resources and the attention on the web. They grab the long-distance Zoom-meeting jobs in Silicon Valley and at NGOs and multinational firms. Meanwhile, vast numbers of people are left in a void and a crisis where life slowly loses its meaning and opportunities become rarer and rarer, except for opportunities of distraction and entertainment. This larger group is the growing consumtariat. The cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke calls this “the meaning-crisis”[13]: our global culture has difficulty providing real meaning to people’s lives. In this new wonderland, the ideal person becomes, in the minds of many, the comedian: the person who scores cheap points and criticizes others and society, while still being an entertainer. Ah, YouTuber dreams!

At the same time, we are in the midst of a mounting global mental health crisis, affecting the young generations particularly. This adds another grim layer to the “meaning-crisis”. A large survey spanning across 20 countries recently revealed that in the age group 18-24, 44% of the population are in the “clinical/at risk” category in terms of mental health—as compared to 6% for those 65 and older. Between these extremes, there is a steady downwards staircase: the younger the cohort, the more compromised their mental health.[14] It’s the opposite of a stairway to heaven.

Increasing inequality on digital steroids (lower socio-economic class kids spend more hours by the screen, doing less productive things, which also means that e.g. black and Hispanic kids in the US are more digitally addicted than white ones[15]), combined with massively deteriorating mental health. That’s a recipe for societal instability, in a time where new shocks to society (with everything from climate change to technological disruptions) are getting increasingly common, and we need every piece of mental and emotional resilience we can muster.

How do we navigate this situation? A key idea in Peterson’s work is that you can change your life by changing the stories you live by, by seeing which drama is playing out inside of you. It’s thus a good idea to know some profound patterns of how such dramas have universally played out in mythologies, religions, literature, and our own psychologies. The point of much of his work is that you can become the author of that drama. And indeed, I agree, you should pick up the quill of your will and write your own story, beginning by correcting faults and loopholes, starting out with the little things, such as cleaning your room. There’s a sense of surprising dignity and self-esteem that can flow from a more “conservative, strict, and formal” way of relating to life and one’s own identity, such as when people used to call us academics “Doctor Freinacht, may I ask…” and I would have worn a tweed jacket and replied very articulately with horned-rimmed glasses and the truthful gaze to match. It’s satisfying. It brings meaning, somehow: you feel responsible and adult. This is something that we may have lost sight of in our casual and informal culture.

By all means, let us break out of this nasty cycle of abdicated responsibility before it is too late. Let us become masters of our own time, attention, information, and (to the extent possible) our life trajectories. Let us get to a point where many more of us feel that we truly are at the steering wheel of society (because, in the end, we are), starting with our own lives. Think about it: whole generations of people, brought up to be less empowered and capable, at the very point in history when global society is becoming hyper complex and full of disruptions. Millions of people convinced they have “the right to succeed”—who were implicitly, sometimes even literally, told this—and who measure success in terms of YouTube views and/or crypto-spiked quick riches. Good idea? I don’t think it is. We need some slow carbs here, some sturdy fiber, some good old responsibility.

Let’s add another layer to this. As these millions of people are increasingly frustrated, but at the same time too distracted to quite notice it, and the pressures of climate change and other crises emerge (like tech disruptions of simpler jobs), where will we end up as a society? Ecofascism looks like an increasingly likely outcome: an authoritarian state, drawing on the mounting controls of the corona days and economies pressured by war, that starts taking responsibility for us. The paternalistic and authoritarian “China model” shines with increasing lure, even for intellectuals. For instance, as you might have seen in the news, President Xi Jinping set a three hour weekly limit for how long Chinese youths can play video games. This is the state coming in with responsibility from above. To be clear, I think that should be avoided.

This chaos stemming from today’s digital revolution does have historical parallels. When “we” (a part of humanity) entered into the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, things went rather awry around the industries and coal mines of Liverpool and Manchester. Since people had no prior experience with the new life conditions brought by industrialization, they were completely unprepared for the harmful effects of an unregulated industrial market economy. The government was just as unprepared, resulting in pipe-smoking child laborers dying from nutritional deficiencies at the tender age of ten after having spent most of their childhoods in the coal mines. Despite the massive increase in wealth and productivity, the industrial areas of England actually saw a significant drop in average life expectancy during the first decades of the Industrial Revolution. Among the burgeoning working class, a new array of social problems arose. When the Industrial Revolution eventually spread to other parts of the world, governments and social critics had learned from the English example and managed to safeguard their populations from some of the most horrific outcomes. Still, the shock of transition from farmers to industrial workers is still felt to this day. Generations later, many working class families struggle with substance abuse, domestic violence, and limited access to higher education. These problems have reproduced themselves over a century and more.

Now we’re seeing the fallout of entering the Digital Revolution, with no prior experience of the territory. This time, however, it’s not limited to a single region or country.[16] This time it’s happening all at once, to billions of people, at a global scale, at breakneck speed. If we don’t get it right by acting now, we’ll never know what hit us. If we don’t start taking responsibility today, we’ll be stuck with the fallout of digital poisoning for generations to come. Although many of the unintended consequences of industrialization were gradually dealt with, and things started to improve and eventually greatly surpassed the standard of living of the agrarian way of life, it took some major implosions along the way to get there: communism, fascism, and two world wars.[17]

So, sure, we do need to take responsibility. But there are different pathways to get there, some better adapted to the world we live in, focusing more on changing a society that, perhaps, isn’t entirely sane to begin with. And being responsible often means being relaxed. So let’s look for the sweet spot: a laid back stance that still touches the world and either makes it better, or at least doesn’t make it that much worse.

The world does not at this point in history necessarily need an army of moderate conservatives focused on their own individual paths (where Peterson arguably leads us). Even if we all manage to do that, we still have climate change and the “unlimited growth on a limited planet” looming large. Society will still be likely to crash, and pretty soon, too. We may need some folks like that; people who’ve lost control of their lives and perhaps even ended up in prison may do well to get some of that structure and self-discipline going—but it’s obviously not for everyone. So this book is a counter-story of self-help: not by a psychologist, but by a sociologist (who sees social relationships, contexts, society, and interactions as primary), and of a more liberal or even radical bent. Perhaps a bit more laidback, too.

Ethical Commitments

This book is written in a no holds barred spirit, being playful and pushing the limits whenever possible. There is, however, one part of this we cannot be entirely laidback about: ethics. The twelve commandments I issue have to make sense at a “systems level” for them to be ethical. This harkens back to a version of the philosopher Kant’s old “categorical imperative”: act in a manner that could be made a general rule for everyone. Simply put: What if everybody did it? So if we imagine a case in which everyone follows these commandments, would the world be a better or worse place? There are principles that people can follow to, say, become better at sales and marketing, or seduction, or power politics, but which only work if most people do not follow them. They don’t actually make the world a better place.

The ultimate test for the commandments is that they should work at an individual level (improving your life even if others do not abide by the same principles) and at a collective level, if “everyone” follows them (improving society). Finding ways to “get rich” (materially speaking) doesn’t really make the grade here, for example, because you can only be rich if others are poorer than you (otherwise there won’t be anyone to do the things you want to pay them for). Billionaires don’t mow each other's golf courses. And besides, the world cannot ecologically sustain too many rich people, as things stand. So not everyone can “get rich” (at least until/if those fanciful visions of “fully automated luxury communism” come true, within the ecological boundaries, too). The commandments have to fit together “as a system”; they have to make sense together, as a seamless whole. By formulating and following principles that are ethical in this sense, we can find that they connect us to the world around us. Making money or becoming successful is okay, of course, and it can be a healthy expression of ambition. But the best principles should focus on deeper things that can apply more universally.

We live in a time in which engaged and playful participation in the great adventure of life is sorely needed. Peterson’s effort is to help us to grow up, even to man up, and show up with personal integrity. But this focus on the individual arguably also subtly disconnects us from the greater whole, from the rich fabric of a world in crisis. My effort is to help us become the playful children that we always-already are; to nurture that inner child—and to connect this quality of curiosity to the great adventures and very real challenges of our time. Let’s find the best possible basis for rewriting not only our own personal stories, but the stories and realities of the world we live in together.

And that collective heroic journey begins from quite ordinary places: our everyday lives and the stories, relationships, and emotions that play out within that realm.

The Real Title of This Book

This book could equally have been titled Sublime Mediocrity. This is the core principle of all the twelve commandments I issue. The aim, then, is not excellence or to be outstanding—but mediocrity. The word “mediocre” literally means to be average, ordinary, unexceptional. That is what I am, and thus, it is what I shall teach.

Let me thus get the confessions and declarations of content out of the way:

I, Hanzi Freinacht, am truly mediocre. I did normally well in education; I am normally charming and charismatic (and sometimes boring and off-putting); I have a modestly successful writing career, with a modest number of followers and supporters; I have made less money than most people my age (in comparable countries); I manage my relations somewhat well but often make mistakes; I sometimes kill vibes and ruin parties; I periodically have trouble sleeping; I have a normal but flawed family life (but a good family and two Zen master cats); I am only moderately brave; I am somewhat but not very helpful; my IQ score falls within the normal range; I read slowly; I do my research but am sometimes sloppy about it; I fail at cooking from time to time—over-salting, over-heating, mixing the wrong flavors; I am often clumsy and disorganized; I spend a not insignificant share of my daily life looking for my phone and my keys; I lose at chess against my twelve year old nephew. I am not exceptionally happy nor highly functional. I have regrets. I have frail health and am tired most of the time.

There’s room for improvement, no doubt. And there are some stubborn traits that cannot easily be improved upon (but never say never!). For instance, I’m not even writing in my first language, and my grammar and semantic mistakes only wax poetic in the same way that German heavy metal bands get away with their lousy lyrics: using the English language in ways that native speakers simply wouldn’t have thunk of.

But you know what? I like it, most of the time. And, what’s more: I like myself. Not in a particularly narcissistic way (sure, those things can creep up on me too, mediocre as I am), but more in a relaxed, everyday manner. I look in the mirror, and I feel, “you know what, you’re okay, you old rascal”.

And in that sense of okayness, there is more. Sometimes, in my quite unexceptional life, with more than a few admittedly pathetic intermezzos, exceptional opportunities nevertheless do present themselves—and I tend to be adventurous enough to at least not miss all of them. And sometimes those opportunities turn out to connect to a sense of direction, to the values in my life, and—what do you know—I even get to grant some little pearls to others, to use my creativity and talents to do something worthwhile (like writing books). In such moments, I have sometimes had the pleasure and honor to receive praise and even a bit of exaggerated exaltation.[18]

And after just a little of that praise (it would be an overstatement to call it “fame”), as well as some drama and criticism around my work and person, it started to feel… well, entirely ordinary. Receiving a sincere fan mail or impressed review does less for my day than the weather, or a good night’s sleep, or managing to keep my workout schedule. Sure, it does something for me. But if these things haven’t happened in your life, take it from me: You’re not really missing out.

I don’t mean to belittle our longing for appreciation; I’m just saying that like with other such things (money, food, shelter, sex, power, number of friends) you only really need some recognition, not that much. After that, it’s better to concentrate on other things. But as many behavioral scientists have pointed out, our search for status turns out to be more unquenchable than any of those other drives. I guess our search for meaning is the only real contender. I hold that we’re wiser to try to tame our hunger for status once we feel okay about ourselves (either way, it’s very often a matter of filling inner holes through therapy and healing rather than getting yet higher status) and cultivate the search for meaning instead. After all, status means people respect you and like you. Now if you stop for two seconds to think about it, it’s apparent that not everyone can like and respect you—so increasing your status becomes a fool’s errand after a certain point.

Whatever adventures and hero’s journeys we undertake, life has a way of bringing us back, like Groundhog Day, to a seemingly ordinary life (and sometimes to sub-ordinary drudgery). Even the extraordinary becomes ordinary. Even the mind-blowing becomes disenchanted and dull as dishwater. Even the exalted or illustrious among us sooner or later turn out to be all too human—mediocre.

Here’s a thought: Why don’t we embrace mediocrity, this seemingly inescapable “ground of being”? Our culture and the social media-induced narcissism of our age have taught us to disdain mediocrity. We insult by calling each other mediocre. We fear that we should be subsumed by the masses of the unexceptional. We look for signs of our exceptionality, for signs of our subtle chosenness (a lingering mysticism that whispers: “yes, you are special after all, meant for greatness”). But what if all of this is a grave mistake—one that is impeding us from truly playing with God or [insert appropriate placeholder for what is of ultimate significance] and the cosmos?

No, I’d go further yet. Why don’t we master mediocrity? Why don’t we love it and shine it like a pair of dirty fine shoes?

This is a book that aims to do just that: to become a master of mediocrity; a consummate average Joe or Jane. You will not become a perfect moviestar or world-class activist with a few flaws here and some beauty spots there to show our “human side” (that in truth just underscore our humility and thus increase our perfection even more)—but a truly so-so person, a ho-hum creature.

After all, if we’re all aiming at becoming exceptional, it will always be crowded at the top, and we will always have to play different stupid games just to gain and maintain our relative positions. Most of us are going to be mediocre in most ways anyhow—that is a fact of life; indeed, it is true by definition. And all of us are going to be mediocre in at least some ways.

Think about it. Do you want to live in a world where true satisfaction and sense of meaning belong only to the exceptional? I, for one, do not. What a miserable world that would be. There are win-win games, and win-lose games. Win-win games create a richer fabric of life. And there’s plenty of mediocrity to go around for everyone; so making mediocrity great is a win-win game. Why play a stupid game when we can play a smarter one for mutual benefit?

Ladies and gents, esteemed non-binaries and plural beings—I give you sublime mediocrity. This is a mediocrity brought to its highest form; a mediocrity mastered, honed, and diligently perfected. History has shown us again and again the disappointments and the fatal flaws of the exceptional: the lies, obfuscations, and incongruities that haunt the excessively admired. It is long overdue that we should turn the struggle of life to become our best possible selves into something else: the play of the mediocre. It won’t shine as much; but let me tell you, it can be sublime.

By what authority can I speak to this issue? How can I possibly be the guide on such a universal quest?

Well, don’t ask me. I’m mediocre, remember? I spill food, mess up my computer files, waste my time, and get into online mud wrestling matches of little value or dignity. (And, again, I like it, most of the time.) That’s all I can say. Follow my commandments, comrade, and you shall one day wake up to an entirely ordinary existence, finding that you too have achieved mediocrity.

Are you going to call me a fraud—claiming that I’m not actually mediocre? By all the saints, I swear it: I am. Ask anyone in my closest vicinity, and they will (eagerly) attest to it.

As William Martin writes in The Parent's Tao Te Ching:

Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is the way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.

He has a point, doesn’t he? My suggestion is simply that we parent ourselves, throughout our lives, in a corresponding manner: with an openness to the extraordinary and its visits seemingly from other dimensions, but with a steady return to the hidden beauties of the ordinary. Il y a des fleurs partout pour qui veut bien les voir, said the painter, Henri Matisse: There are flowers everywhere, for those who deign to see them.

This is a book dedicated to those flowers of everywhere, always ready to be revealed, and to the beholders that deign to see them. And to those participants-of-the-world who reveal them and help them to grow and flourish.

Inappropriate Honesty

I suppose I have already been inappropriately honest (which is more often socially penalized than rewarded). But let me, as a last note, extend that a bit farther still.

I believe that this book will be a bigger “hit” than my former ones (but I might be wrong; correct me by not getting this book or recommending it to others). This is because I’m writing in a much simpler genre, self-help, with wider potential audiences. It is also because I’m writing a book that I don’t truly believe matters much. Writing self-help is the surest path to joining the  unnecessariat; there are, as we speak, over 70 000 titles available on Amazon labeled under this genre. And you just got hold of the best one.[19]

It is often easier to excel in arenas for which you hold a slight but healthy contempt, since you can barge in and act from a position of truly not giving a damn. That sense of relaxation grants confidence, which translates into ease and uninhibition, which in turn translates into working from a place of abundance. The French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg made his most (at the time) popular songs with contempt for their crudeness (and then hated himself and his audience for it, being a rather sophisticated fellow, a friend of Salvador Dalí and so forth; I think I’ll skip that part[20]). I’m doing something similar here.

Because, let’s be entirely honest, for the most part self-help literature doesn’t matter much. It doesn’t change the course of history or save a million lives. And social theorists like myself really want to think about the large issues of society and its fascinating transformations. Flooding the world with more self-help books will not reverse the social and cultural decay of our time. At best, they can improve lives, but they cannot change society. They never have, and they never will.

So why am I doing this?

To sell books. But not this one. I have written more relevant and important books before, and I’m working on other more important work that targets the bigger picture within which our lives are lived. If you enjoy this one, feel free to take a look. I don’t want to sell the other books to get rich (then I would have pursued other vocations than becoming a social theorist), but because I believe in the relevance and importance of the ideas explored there.

Readers! I stand ready for your responses, your engagement, for all spans of human emotion, for the world’s wealth of thoughts and perspectives other than my own, alien to me. Your love is judgment. Let me marinate in your reactions, hot and cold, happy and angry. I await your replies. Indeed, I challenge you to reply. I command it.

Of course, I believe in the 12 commandments, or I wouldn't have written about them. But the good news is, I’m not going to chase you to “change your life” and go at it like a drill sergeant, giving you loads of homework. I’ve tried to craft the book so that all you need to do is read it and have fun. Like most self-help books, really. So just kick back, open a beer or [insert desired beverage], and enjoy the ride.

And then, a very ordinary life awaits you.

Introduction: Get Up, Grow Up?

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

If you’ve read some of my other work, you will know that I’m not only interested in sociology, history, and political philosophy; I also have a keen interest in psychology, particularly depth psychology and adult development. Simply stated, I believe that there can be profound inner shifts in our experience of life and how we relate to existence, and I think that at least some of that can be studied as stages of how we develop psychologically as adult human beings. Longer story.

Such profound shifts of perspective and personal development can feel awesome, magical. But then they always fade and become the new normal and hitherto unexpected problems show up. There it is: the iron law of mediocrity.

In my circles and networks (where many are interested in adult development psychology) it is common to be on a quest to spark such adult development in others; it is a matter of “transformations” of the mind and self into higher and more universal and existentially mature forms of being in the world. There is undeniably an underlying hysteria to this striving. People who develop into the later stages of adult development tend to have a different perspective on life than most in their surroundings and society at large. So it gets a bit lonely; these folks tend to want others to develop new, deeper, and wider perspectives too—so that life will feel less alienating and lonely for themselves. It is an understandable impulse, one that I admittedly share to some degree, but often a misguided and vain one.

The US guru and spiritual philosopher (or “pundit”) Ken Wilber has recently quite niftily summarized five ways in which humans can develop, the “five ups”:

1. Growing up (reaching higher stages of adult development, i.e. changing our personalities and outlooks on life towards more mature ways of being),

2. Waking up (reaching deeper spiritual insight and meditative states of consciousness),

3. Showing up (getting your shit together and finding your way to work in the world, a lot of what Peterson’s work also aims to do),

4. Cleaning up (dealing with your issues and traumas so you don’t project your own stuff onto others, also a concern of Peterson’s), and

5. Opening up (getting over your inhibitions and letting yourself fall in love with life itself, often by connecting to lust and sexuality).

It’s worth noting that these five can both support and contradict each other. For instance, an extended period of childhood and adolescence, into one’s late twenties, can lead to a greater “growing up” and “waking up”, as you have longer time to experiment with different ideas, experiences, and ways of life, but at the same time this can lead to an impaired capacity to “show up” as an efficient and responsible adult member of society, thereby living up to the potential that you now have within. Interestingly—and sadly—it tends to be harder to meaningfully “show up” when you have “grown up” and “woken up” more: you tend to lack motivation. The people who are still driven by fairly basic needs and self-serving rewards (house, car, sex, recognition, pleasure) find plenty of motivation to get up in the morning and go to work, even go the extra mile. For those who feel that simply reproducing society is ethically untenable, “showing up” as a shop clerk at 7 a.m. simply becomes harder. Or even as a movie star, for that matter. It just doesn’t have the same appeal anymore, much like legos seem less appealing to 18-year-olds than to 9-year-olds. In turn, “showing up” and getting your routines in place can actually make it harder to “clean up” (getting over your traumas, blindspots, ethical lapses, and self-deceit) because you become more rigid and invested in your way of life and perspective. With all of that inner cleaning left to do, you can have a harder time “opening up” and being truly alive, and so on.

The psychology of adult development is a fascinating and rich field. Certainly, if we do all of these five “ups' ' successfully, balancing them out well, we are likely to become in some sense better people, for ourselves and for others. There are some elements of these things that show up here and there in my twelve commandments, but these are not the focus. They’re not unimportant, but they’re not what this book is about.

This book does not seek to support your transformation, growth, or maturity. It does not strive to support “development” into “higher stages”. Sure, those things do indeed exist—and you can read about it in my other works, where I discuss contributing to a society that supports inner growth—but they are not the issue here.

The issue of the hour is staying sane and reasonably happy in genuinely confusing and simultaneously undeniably tremendous times. So it’s more about navigating this space of five dimensions (the “five ups”) successfully, which doesn’t always lead upwards and onwards.

As a member of what could be called “the creative class” (and the “Triple-H population” of allied Hackers, Hipsters, and Hippies[21]) and its transnational networks, I have become witness to a significant social and psychological fallout within these groups. Exceptionally talented, creative, and idealistic people fall apart left and right—despite all the work they have done on themselves, with extensive therapies, meditations, studies, travels, careers, and rich life experiences. They still get into heaps of relational complications and drama. They suffer from anxiety and burnout. They begin subscribing to crazy religious, spiritual, intellectual, and political doctrines—ruining their lives and families as a result. Some commit suicide. Some become invested in their own philosophical or spiritual or media-driven greatness and begin to compete with others for fame and fortune. They look for their chance to change the world, to make a dent in the universe. A lot of them stagnate and become pale shadows and excuses for where they thought they were headed in their lives. The iron law of mediocrity reasserts itself—but in a manner that is decidedly not sublime.

I used to be so deeply impressed by many of these people and their varied talents. I still am. I used to think that with such people, life would be different. They truly are kinder, more creative, more open-minded, with softer and more universal values and more self-sacrifice in them, than the people I met when I grew up, and who still know me today, from my “ordinary” life.

And yet, comparing the groups—the ordinary and the extraordinary—the social fallout of the latter is rampant in comparison. Crazy and unbelievable stories and behaviors abound, and they always sneak up unexpectedly. How can such an intelligent and kind person be so dysfunctional, after so much effort to transform and develop? A big part of it is, I think, that they come to expect too much. They fail—or we fail—to be mediocre.

Being Exceptional Is Common

Here’s a related nugget: Being exceptional is common. It’s not as rare as we like to imagine it to be. Consider that there are so many areas of life with particular skills to have. Let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, that there are a thousand different skills you can be good at. And let us assume that people’s talents are different enough for these to be roughly equally distributed across people (of course, some people have multiple talents, but there really are many different skills and capacities out there, so let’s go with that assumption here). Then, for someone to be “the best of 10000 people” at something, which is being quite excellent, would occur in about 10% of the population. In high-talent networks, the concentration would be higher still. As for being the best of 1000 people, it would be ridiculously common—not everyone, but still Tom, Dick, and Harry. Excellence does grow on trees, if you know where to look for it. Everybody has a hidden talent they don’t know about until tequila is poured.

But excellence is always followed by a fundamental question: “So what?” So what if you’re the best mandolin player south of the Sahara? What does that change? Does that mean you are chosen, or special, or have a VIP-card that warrants your existence? No, it just means you’re good at playing the mandolin.

We don’t need to pretend that our exceptional sides are not there. The point is not to let others deny your gifts and potentials. I’d be the last to argue for a “humility” that denies the very real existence of hierarchies of skill, capacities, and competence. The striving for humility has a pretty dark side if you consider the word in its active form, as a verb: to humiliate someone. A society full of humble people can easily become, strangely enough, a society full of humiliators and the humiliated. People who humiliate others very often do so in the name of “teaching them a bit of humility”. The bully always says: “Why are you so cocky?”

Don’t be the bully, the humble humiliator. We can allow ourselves to honor exceptional capabilities where appropriate. But then we always get back to that fundamental “yeah, and so what?”. The point is to not make such a big deal out of it, because, in the end, even the extraordinary are indeed mostly ordinary. In the larger scheme of things, we are still all equal, extraordinary or not. Our lives and feelings matter just as much, even without exceptional talents.

Sublime mediocrity has plenty of space for our rather frequent exceptional sides. No need to flatten ourselves out and pretend we’re not special. We are. Most readers already are, at least in some ways. Don’t worry, you are too, perhaps in ways you haven’t even thought of (and if not, that’s okay, too). It’s just that we still always have to deal with the quite ordinary sides of existence, or else they tend to get in the way of us putting our exceptional talents to use. Or cracks in our ordinary lives let others hold us back from making use of our potential. The issue is to manage our ordinary lives so that those unusual talents can blossom and be fruitful for ourselves and others.

This path of sublime mediocrity prioritizes healing over growth. Any striving to “grow” must always include inner healing. Roughly speaking, for every one “unit of growth”, we need two “units of healing”, if we are to be healthy and balanced people. The world doesn’t need more highly developed people on the verge of mental breakdown. The world needs reasonably balanced  human beings who’ve healed their trauma and who function well in their daily lives. And healing usually takes place within the gray background of our lives: the vast realm of the seemingly ordinary and its underlying oceans of emotions.

I have thus come to the realization that the most important self-help books of today are not the ones that teach the ordinary to become extraordinary—but those that teach the extraordinary to become ordinary. That is what I have set out to do in this book. Remember: everybody wants to be extraordinary. That’s common. The rare soul is the one who can bear mediocrity, and thrive, and shine right through it. It’s an honest shine. It’s the glow of truth. It’s the opposite of Elon Musk and Kanye West, the opposite of the Bezos moon rides I’m apparently paying for by writing and publishing this book. It’s going back to planet earth, to your real life, and making it matter.

Here I would depart from Peterson’s fairly rigid set of rules. The aim I propose is not to create stability in our lives by setting a firm foundation of rules, but to find ways to ride the waves of these troubled seas, to skillfully surf the madness of our times. That requires, I have come to believe, a fundamentally playful stance, one that must be nurtured and maintained. Sometimes we will be thrown off and cast into crisis. Then we need a set of principles that lead us back to playful curiosity—back into a mediocre life where even the mundane can feed our sense of the sublime, until we find a new chance to play so we can offer our pearls to the world. Or not—again, staying in mediocrity is no sin.

The Scale of Subjective States

And in our everyday lives, it really is okay to want to feel alright. Unlike most observers of our day and age, I am a firm believer in happiness. Most philosophers and self-help folks will argue that the pursuit of happiness is mistaken. They will score cheap points against society’s purportedly hysterical, commercialized, and immature praise of happiness and its unacceptance of suffering as an intrinsic part of a meaningful life. They have some points here and there, but by and large, they are wrong.

Writing this, I am happy. I’m feeling pretty great. I’m having fun. If I wasn’t, the work wouldn’t get done. Playful sentences would not be flowing from my fingertips; the keyboard wouldn’t feel like an electric piano. It is easier to do productive things, and to respond productively to other people, when you’re feeling happy and playful. Besides, being happy makes you healthier: it boosts healthy habits, bolsters the immune system, combats stress, reduces pain, may protect your heart and lengthen your life-span. It tends to improve your relationships, too. Look it up if you don’t believe me; it’s just a websearch away.

Seriously, it’s pretty appalling that people (most experts included) get this wrong, given that all the research points with blinking neon signs in one direction: Happiness is good for you. (But why be happy when you can be interesting, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once said, right?)[22]

We’re not talking about valuing happy people over miserable ones. We’re just talking about setting reasonable goals for the sublimely mediocre life. And happiness, understood correctly and realistically, isn’t such a bad goal.

Of course, if you focus on “wanting to become happy”, that tends to decrease your happiness, as research has also shown.[23] One mechanism seems to be that you simply become stressed out by the pursuit of happiness, like you don’t have enough time for life itself. Another one is that you tend to begin to compare your almost-always-mediocre state of affairs to an imagined happier one, and that makes you just a bit more miserable.

But again, the very fact that people make this argument (that happiness is a bad goal because it makes you unhappy), reveals an underlying assumption that happiness is a good thing. If happiness is not a goal, why then would it be a bad thing that people become unhappier? In such a case, we can just strive for happiness, even if it makes us unhappy, because happiness is unimportant—right?

So the trick is to recognize that happiness is important, and then focus on what good things we can achieve with our lives—personally, professionally, or politically—seeing that taking care of ourselves can also serve those goals. Such goals tend to revolve around doing something good for others. Paradoxically, it’s not the pursuit of happiness that is good, it’s happiness itself that marks a full life. And when life is really full—and fulfilling—we tend to feel richer on time as well. Our experience of time slows down when happy periods of life hit home, which might explain why happiness makes us more effective, too.

Besides, on the flipside, people who do very stupid things, like school shootings or sexual violence, or just slightly stupid things, like cutting in line, are generally not very happy. So how we feel drives how we behave, and happiness makes it easier to be ethical. Speaking for myself, most bad stuff I have done has been either while being quite unhappy, or at least acting from an unhappy part within myself.

Feeling good about life doesn’t mean you have to appear upbeat. Nor am I arguing for the suppression or denial of painful or difficult emotions (as we shall discuss in detail in some of the following chapters). It’s just that being at ease and at peace with oneself and with existence is being happy. Happiness, as I understand it here, is when dark inner clouds are not covering the experience of life, not numbing us to and distorting the beauty of the world; happiness is when things can come alive to us in a crisp and rich manner. It’s about being tuned in to existence, to life. As such, happiness is not really a thing in and of itself; it is rather the inner clarity that allows for other things to be fully experienced and playfully participated in: the moon, the stars, the fresh flowers of spring, the breath of cool air, the corny but funny joke, the bananarama cocktail, our lover’s gaze, the purpose we work for. We’re looking for that which feels entirely ordinary, only sprinkled with the subtle presence of the tremendous (despite our ordinary lives, it’s a pretty tremendous universe, after all, with its rich history and mysterious cosmic expanses and all of that).[24]

And to achieve sublime mediocrity we need some of that happiness and freshness in our lives. We need to be at least somewhat tuned in to life, because falling in love is about a sense of connection. How can we feel connected if we’re not truly attentive to the beauties, mysteries, and tragedies of existence?

So a lot of this book is about supporting the “inner states” of our moment-to-moment experience: how we’re doing on the inside, how reality itself emerges through our lived participation in it. There’s nothing fancy about it, really. It’s not about realizing the total Power of Now and never suffering again; it’s just about being reasonably good at being reasonably happy. The research on happiness is unanimous: What determines the level of human happiness more than anything else is the quality of interpersonal relationships. Naturally, then, going deep and healing relationships is a major theme of this book. It is approached from many different angles, twelve to be precise.

Let’s set a bit of expectation management for the rest of this book, then. What kind of “happiness” do I have in mind, and what are our chances of achieving it? Start by taking a look at this “scale of subjective states” that I have proposed in earlier work:

Lower states:

1. Hell

2. Horrific (phenomenological reality breaks down)

3. Tortured

4. Tormented

Medium states:

5. Very uneasy

6. Uneasy, uncomfortable

7. Somewhat uneasy, “okay”, full of small faults

8. Satisfied, well

9. Good, lively

10. Joyous, full of light, invigorated

High states:

11. Vast, grand, open

12. Blissful, saintly

13. Enlightened, spiritual unity

Let’s go through a couple of notes about this scale before we go on.

At any given moment, it feels like something to be you. This is what I mean with “inner states”; you are always in some kind of “inner state”. These states aren’t exactly the same as feelings or emotions. We can have all sorts of sensations and emotions, but we still have some kind of overall “how we’re doing” at any given moment: that’s the “subjective state” (or “inner state”, because it’s how you experience the world from the inside of your own awareness). So you can have delicious anger, for instance, being angry while being in a high state. Likewise, sorrow can feel like a great release (i.e., it can emerge during a high state). Or you can have meaningless pleasure, pleasure while in a low state, like when gorging on cake at a party but feeling empty inside. Subjective states are not the same as emotions; they’re the canvas upon which emotions, sensations, and thoughts play out. Again, it’s how tuned in, whole, and connected we are, from moment to moment.

Subjective states go up and down. In times of crisis, we usually have at least some moments when things aren’t that bad. And even during the best of times, we tend to sometimes be somewhat uneasy and uncomfortable. So we’re always on some kind of scale of higher, medium, or lower subjective states. Life is a rollercoaster for all of us, but with varying degrees of sharp turns, soaring heights, and steep falls.

The point of this scale is to get at something a bit more tangible than simply asking “how you’re doing on a scale of 1 to 10”. That old method doesn’t really work if we want to check how we’re really doing (and thus, our currently used international happiness statistics are rather unreliable). With the “scale of subjective states”, we get something we can compare and track more easily and reliably—even if this proposed model is of course still somewhat crude.

The scale of subjective states helps us describe how “tuned in” we are to life itself, moment to moment. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about surface-level cheeriness, but about happiness at the deepest level. How is existence showing up for you?

This model has already begun to be used clinically. A senior clinical psychologist in Massachusetts, Erik Muten, has started to employ the scale of subjective states to gauge where his clients are at—and to support them in improving upon their inner states. From what I hear, it has thus far been highly successful as a part of his clinical toolkit, in his work with corporate leadership as well, and it is spreading to other therapists.

We don’t really have to, in this context, make a big deal out of the “high states” and “low states”. Maybe it isn’t exactly true that people can be “enlightened”, for instance. We can just note that at the heights of what can be experienced by humans, things tend to reach into the “spiritual” in some wide sense of the term: very strong orgasms, moments of extreme clarity and peace, psychedelic highs (whether chemically induced or not), etc. And, on the lower end, there are some really frightening and awful depths of madness and unimaginable suffering.

But let us now focus on where most of us really live our lives: in the range of medium states (states 5-10). And by far the most common subjective state for most people is “7”: Somewhat uneasy, “okay”, full of small faults. So the “7” on the scale is something we all recognize: We’re doing okay, sort of, but with this lingering feeling of slight unease, or some little discomfort here and there. Sometimes we’re at a “6”, (uneasy, uncomfortable) sometimes even a “5”, dealing with real anxieties. Some people generally have higher states, and some have to live out their lives at lower ones, coloring all of their life experience in darker shades. Most of us spend more than 99% of the time in the range of these medium states (as mentioned, 5-10).

But again, most of us are at a “7” most of the time. To be honest, that’s where we tend to more or less spend our lives. In this state, we’re okay, with a lot of things to enjoy, but we’re not quite “happy”. During unhappier and tougher periods of our lives, we tend to gravitate somewhat lower than “7”, of course.

As compared to ordinary state “7” existence, state “8” is just one state up, and there’s nothing spectacular about it. It is quite ordinary. We’ve all been there from time to time (or, by far the most of us have). There are yet higher states, sure, but here at “8”, life is still, well, genuinely okay. Not “okay, sort of”. The lingering microdosed misery is gone.

“Happiness”, as I conceive of it, only quite begins at state “8”—when we truly feel a sense of ease, okayness, normality. Somehow, here, we feel at home in the world and that underlying low-level suffering isn’t present. Life just happens; there are subtle moods within everyday experience which we can feel into more or less vividly: a shower, a first coffee, the little things, a nice song playing at the cozy café. Again, this serves to underscore why “the pursuit of happiness” in and of itself tends to be counterproductive; happiness is not “a thing”, it’s a container for the technicolor richness of life. Happiness is a property of the canvas of direct experience upon which life is painted.

Now, what I claim is two things: Firstly, there is something rather sad about the fact that we live out so much of our lives in state “7” and below. Is it unreasonable of us to ask of life that it should be more good than bad, that feeling genuinely okay should be our default? I don’t think it is. Do you?

Secondly, and more importantly, I believe that state “8”, that fundamental sense of okayness, is the more “natural” one—it is where we would be if troubles, worries, and old wounds did not block our doors of perception.

I don’t think, as so many observers have argued, that humans are made for “always being a little dissatisfied”, so as to always seek improvement and strive forward. It is well known that we are more productive in all manner of ways when we’re happier. Happy researchers publish more papers, for one thing, but it goes for career success generally, and yes, there is a causal link between being happy and being more productive.[25] Depressed (or slightly depressed, or anxious) people simply have a harder time getting into the flow—although they do get better at spotting risks and errors, which can be useful at times. That old trope of “natural dissatisfaction to make us strive” just doesn’t hold up very well when put under closer scrutiny in the real world.

Whenever “nothing is in the way”, whenever “nothing is the matter”, we naturally gravitate towards state “8”. The problem is just that, most of the time, at least something is in the way, if only a little. When you were a small kid, chances are you returned to a state “8” quite regularly, at which point you spontaneously started to play. You just felt self-evidently okay much of the time. It was normal to be “tuned in”. There are people who’ve had very bad childhoods, to be sure, but most readers likely know what I mean here. The experience of life had a certain self-evident freshness to it. Children, of course, also go lower than “7” much more easily. Very small children don’t seem to frequent it at all. One may conceive of state “7” as a strange and slightly broken state we adults keep ourselves in so as to avoid falling down to states “6” and below—but by doing so, we stop returning to state “8” as the natural setpoint.

The “natural equilibrium” is not state “7”, but state “8”. And this book, in its attempt to serve a sublime mediocrity, seeks to strengthen our capacity to get to state “8” and to return to it more often, so that we can live more of our lives with this as a baseline. This, I feel, is not an easy task—by no means—but still a realistic and reasonable one.

If you can go beyond that, and experience states “9” or “10”, or yet more soaring heights of being-in-the-world, good on you. I’ve known a few people who seem to manage to do this under exceedingly good circumstances, for periods of time. But, again, only a few, only under the very best circumstances, and only after lots of struggle, and only for limited periods of time. For most people, extended periods of high states usually involve either falling in love or joining a cult—the latter of which usually has a very happy first phase, and then sharply turns for the worse; as for falling in love, well that’s a story with many possible endings. Outlier examples, like the French Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard, “the happiest person in the world” (a title Ricard himself claims is an exaggeration), are reportedly in higher states much more of the time, more or less permanently. But these are rare exceptions that prove the rule; they’ve spent tens of thousands of hours actively trying to rewire their brains for higher states with advanced meditation techniques (and, to be frank, many serious long-term meditators still don’t succeed in this quest).[26]

Perhaps it is in the cards for the future of humanity and other life on our planet to bask in the higher states much more often—but that’s not the aim of this book. I feel that a reasonable and realistic expectation upon life, one that we should try to hold ourselves to, is to experience state “8” more frequently than not.

And being in state “8”, you’re at least a lot less likely to make others miserable. You’re less likely to get into complicated dramas and exacerbate family issues and contribute to all sorts of anti-social behaviors. You’re more likely to be nice (in the good sense of the word), simply because life feels a bit more fresh, free, and alive to you. You get to live a bit less “on mute”, a bit more “tuned in”. Being unhappy, at lower states, is far from the only reason we have for making others miserable, but it’s certainly among the top ones. If we’re tuned in to life, we’re tuned in to others and how we affect them, and we’re not too emotionally exhausted to care.

Please note that I’m not saying that being in states “7” or below is not okay, and that we should always compare ourselves to an imagined situation of state “8” and above. We human beings are incredibly good at making ourselves miserable by always comparing the reality of this moment to what we imagine “should have been the case”. The reality of this moment is what we’ve got and that’s that. Subjective states are fickle; they change a lot, and it’s unavoidable that we have periods of lower states. I don’t wish to contribute to neurotic self-blame or dissatisfaction with this model. I just want to give us a sense of direction. It’s okay that we feel not entirely okay most of the time—and it’s okay for us to work on feeling more okay.

Am I then arguing for the ideal of The Smooth Operator—that it’s good to be as even as possible in terms of our inner states? Always state “8” on a steady course? If so, the stoics would perhaps agree: maintain a healthy stability and sense of humor. But the existentialists would likely disagree: life entails absurd suffering and we need to deal with its ups and downs, owning them fully. I actually align more with the latter, the existentialists. I have always found stoic philosophy rather shallow (fit for Romans, maybe, but not for us). Life is going to be a rollercoaster ride either way, and from the deepest valleys we can return with the greatest treasures. I am not arguing against the valleys and peaks of life. I am just saying that, in between those inevitable highs and lows, do you really want yourself and others to stay in slight anxiety and stress, or would you prefer that the default periods are of stable mental health and feeling alive? Here, I think the answer should be simple.

Let us here and now make sure I am not overselling this. I am acutely aware that self-help books don’t necessarily help people; they can just as easily give us bad ideas and values that cause all sorts of problems down the line (like The Secret, which tells people they can change what happens to them by thinking positively, including the events “out there in the world”, so don’t think of a comet hitting planet Earth; it’ll be your fault if it does!). And I much prefer disinterested readers, or aborted readings, over disappointed or misled readers. Nor do I argue for an expectation that life can and should be without anxieties; anxiety will be there, but there can be more or less of it, more or less skillfully responded to.

The ideas of social theorists can easily misfire or be misused. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that. The same is true when we try to write self-help. It’s not rocket science, but still, in a way it is. The pioneering German rocket scientist Baron Werner von Braun just wanted to build his rockets and go to space. The Nazis really liked the idea and funded him royally. His V-2 model was a rocket science revolution; these rockets reached 300 kilometers, at 5600 kilometers per hour, up to heights of 100 kilometers (grazing space for the first time)—and they rained down on London and Antwerp, 3000 of them, killing 9000 people (plus another 3000 or so people who died in the slave camps where they were made). The British authorities were so panicked they lied about it, blaming exploding gas pipes (which made people joke about “flying gas pipes”). After the war, von Braun lived in America and worked for the US government. One comedian, Mort Sahl[27], summarized his fate thus: “I aim for the stars. But sometimes I hit London.”

So we’ll aim slightly below the stars, and hopefully spare a few blocks in London from annihilation. No flying gas pipes here. To be clear: I am not promising that reading this book will get you to state “8” and let you stay there. I am simply sharing some thoughts and perspectives that I have strong reasons to believe increase the likelihood of that occurring, on average, and over the long run. I am not promising happiness—and certainly not success, fame, and fortune. I am not even promising sanity (even if that is an end dear to my heart). I simply offer the same thing that happened after all those other self-help books you might have read: mediocrity. But at least I hope to make mediocrity just a little more sublime—and a little more connected to improving the world.

There is, of course, no time-back guarantee for readers. So, no promises made—none broken.

And Beyond, Beyond, Beyond

The original working title of this book was 12 Much Better Rules for Life (and Beyond). The twelve commandments I issue also relate to what lies beyond our lifespan: our unavoidable death and our legacy.

Although I have argued in some of my other works that we should, as a society, try to deal with our fear of death, and that reducing it can bring benefits to how well we function together, I have found no reason to believe that the fear of death can ultimately be overcome. We will always, quite naturally, have at least some fear of ceasing to exist, extending to our children and so forth. We fear harm to our bodies and to our life projects. We fear pain and suffering, and that’s okay. New Age folks like to throw a bravado about how deep spiritual insight and “non-dual awareness” can surmount the fear of death, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Sure, there is the rare case of self-immolation among protesting monks who stoically endure the flames and die—but these are also driven by the desperate situations against which they react. They’re unlikely to view the matter lightly.

So the thing is: we’re going to die. Some cancer is going to metastasize in our body, or we’ll get a heart attack, or a stroke, or we’ll get smashed by a car, or trip and fall on a staircase, or drown in the bathtub, or choke on the dessert. Or some colorful combination of these. And the same goes for everyone we love and care about, blessed be they. Even if some scientific progress is made to dramatically lengthen our lifespans we’re still going to die, sooner or later. And the same goes for “humanity”, however we define that category. 99.9% of all species that have existed on Earth have gone extinct (not least through six periods of mass extinction). A million years is a normal species lifespan and humanity may have existed for about 200 000. It is rather unlikely we will last the full million. Ancient civilizations have survived for 336 years on average, of course with a lot of variance (classical Greece, for instance, lasted 265 years). Death and collapse are the rule, not the exception. If we look at the longer stretches of time, with astronomical, geological, or even historical scales, death is perfectly normal. Not just the death of “me”, but the death of my entire world. It arises, it passes, as Buddhist teachers like to remind us.

Besides, we’re always-already dying. My former 4-year-old self is already entirely obliterated. He was quite the guy, I can tell you, puffed cheeks and all. But he’s gone. So is the historical pre-internet era into which he was born.

Again, it’s okay for us not to be entirely comfortable with that fact. To mourn it.

Facing that inconvenient truth, we’re all tempted to create some kind of immortality project: some contribution to humanity, some legacy, some children and heirs, some ever-lasting fame due to exceptional talent, some truth we serve that will stand the test of time, maybe even a literal heaven or paradise for the religious. Or, better yet, our own personal Wiki page. These projects seem to escape the clutches of death, and let us cast at least some sense of immortality onto an indefinite horizon of the future.

Yet, even these things will die. Complete annihilation awaits. Even for the best mandolin player south of the Sahara. And her Wiki page.

This isn’t news. So why am I saying this?

It’s not a fascination with the morbid. It’s because I want to make it clear that this book does not serve your immortality project. It is not about ascension and greatness. It is just about living life, and then dying, disappearing forever, being forgotten.

If you’re entirely honest with yourself, this is a surprisingly hard pill to swallow. Something in you (or at least in most of us, myself included) resists: “No! Maybe I’m meant for more, maybe there’s a destiny for me after all! Maybe I wasn’t born in vain! Maybe there’s a reason that the entirety of the universe happens to be ‘filmed’ precisely through my eyes!”.

We all want fame and glory, or something along those lines. It’s just socially impossible to quite admit it to one another. We all think we’re a bit chosen. The Chosen One™.

But, of course, it’s a delusion of the mind. And even if you end up being Michael Jackson, the larger-than-life status heaped upon you by admirers is still a delusion. All of this is just a long-winded way of saying: death is real.

So the twelve commandments relate to life and death. We’re not trying to cheat death or wriggle our way out of it. The aim of the mediocre life is to truly live our lives, and then to truly die.

I have come to believe that a life well lived reduces our existential (if not biological) fear of death, even if it never quite extinguishes it. The better we live, the less we need immortality projects. And I think that the immortality projects tend to stress us out more than they reassure us; they nudge us towards an unnecessary level of self-importance.

To be clear, the goal is not to become the next Aristotle. What does he get out of us obsessing about him two and a half millennia later? He’s not actually immortal (pretty dead, yes), it’s just that his name gets thrown around by a lot of people, in reality with very little connection to whoever he really was and whatever he may have thought he was doing. The wide array of symbols we know as “Aristotle”, of course, aren’t actually Aristotle, as in the sentient being who once walked around the streets of Athens. By far the majority of all people have been or will be forgotten within three generations—did they all live in vain? Or were their lives just as meaningful as the few whose names happen to be remembered?

Or to be clearer yet: Our lives do not belong to our immortality projects—not to philosophy, not to the history of art or rock’n’roll, not to science, not to a business empire, not to the fatherland, not to Allah, not to Enlightenment, not to the struggle for revolution, not to future generations, not to saving the biosphere. We can partake in these arenas, if that’s our jazz, but we can also not. We simply don’t owe the universe an excuse for our existence. Whatever super-important immortality project you go with (“I live for GOD!”), most people have lived out their lives perfectly fine without it, which kind of puts the absurdity of it all on display.

At the deeper level, immortality projects revolve around ourselves and our wish to transcend death. They can serve different important ends beyond ourselves, too, no doubt. And yes, there are more important and greater things than our own tiny little lives and the stories we tell ourselves about them. But when we invest in the immortality projects, we are subtly making those greater concerns about us. This is self-defeating.

I guess you could divide this insight up into three levels of development.

●    First, we live for happiness and pleasure, avoiding suffering.

●   Then, responsibilities and purposes “call us forth”, we are chosen by them, as it were, and this creates a source of meaning and direction, sometimes giving us the grit to even endure greater suffering than we thought we could. Purpose and responsibility can bring out the best in us and offer a deeper source of life satisfaction and contentment.

●   But—and this is the third step—when we get to know and examine those purposes that have called us forth, they tend to look suspiciously a lot like ourselves; they tend to be “created in our own image”. They are alien forces that have taken us over (as our bodies are controlled by the ideas we believe in and work for), yes, but they still consist of our all-too-human drives, wants, and needs. And, so we notice, “it was me all along”.

Here’s the paradox, then: We need to live well, not to be able to cheat death, but to die well, serving larger purposes from the homestead of an ordinary, mediocre life. And because death is always ongoing, we need to start dying well today.

We are unnecessary parts of the universe, with no God-given purpose or destiny. My suggestion is that we best transcend everyday life—and its inherent limitations—by embracing the ordinary and playing until we die. The gems are hidden in the cracks of the mundane and the common. A life well lived has an inherent value beyond any legacy that lies beyond it.

Live and let die, I heard someone say.

Onwards, into oblivion!

First Commandment: Live in a Mess, Moderately

“I looove a mess!”

—Marie Kondo, house tidying guru

The first commandment I issue is a cautious reversal of Jordan Peterson’s “clean your room” or “get your house in order” (or more precisely, put it in perfect order before you criticize the world).

We should allow ourselves to live in a mess. The main message here is simply: Relax. You can clean your home if you want, but it’s okay if you’re messy. Cleanliness is not a measure of your worth or virtue. You don’t owe a neat home to anybody. Nor do you need a life in perfect order to valuably partake in society and work for its improvement.

I’d be in trouble if I tried to make the case that it’s better to live in an utter mess. The science on the matter is pretty clear: A tidy home environment correlates with mental health, efficiency, happiness, and even a harmonious family. Doing house chores can even improve the brain’s health. It’s not a very strong factor (there’s no shortage of miserable families with well decorated, tidy homes), but it is there.

Sure, if our homes look like Dresden after the Royal Air Force was done with it, we have a problem. We shouldn’t be breathing in too much dust, and there’s the clinically observed clutter-depression-anxiety cycle you can get stuck in if things get out of hand. If you live with children or other animals for whom you’re responsible, keeping things reasonably clean and tidy is a natural part of taking care of them, too.

And yet, there is a strong case to be made for moderate messiness. What did Einstein’s desk look like? Messy. And yet he was more productive than most of us, and in many ways a model citizen with deeply humanistic engagements. What about another great physicist, Richard Feynman? Same story. Or look at the office of Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist? Quite cluttered. You’d have to swim through books and papers, by the look of the photographs. Search these images online and see for yourself.

On a personal level, some of the very best people I’ve worked with and learned from have lived in veritable labyrinths of clutter, and yet they have always been energetic and creative. There have even been happy kids running around in their messy homes. Intelligent people tend to be messier, research has shown. And a messy environment has also been shown to correlate, causally, with creativity.

Likewise, I have seen highly organized people who say they want to change the world, but end up spending their days polishing the bathroom walls with a toothbrush and going after family members and cohabitors with ever new house chore demands. Or people who spend much of their lives chastising themselves for never quite keeping their homes up to the standard they’d like. Or people who love order and reporting in their organizations, who end up chasing away the creatives and suffocating the core of the work that is being done.

How would you interpret this? Aren’t cleanlier and more organized people “better”, more in control of their lives and environments?

Here’s my interpretation: People deeply invested in truly fun and meaningful projects often simply have better things to do than keeping their homes in perfect order. They accept a certain level of messiness as a part of life, and move on to things that truly matter. There is an acceptance that life and the little things around us can never quite come under their control, and then they focus on what’s really important to them. They don’t build their self-image on their house, or their desk.

Orderliness is a powerful tool, but it is no magic wand. It can easily get out of hand, like the brooms set to work by the wizard’s apprentice. And getting your house in order can easily become an excuse for never going on that adventure and truly offer your gifts to the world.

Hitler and Einstein Walk into an Office

Guess who had a really neat and fancy office? Adolf Hitler. Again, search for images online, it’s quite impressive. Sumptuous, even. He made one room very beautiful before he tried to change the world, didn’t he? Then compare it to Einstein’s desk at Princeton—it’s a quick image search away, the one taken on the day he passed away, April 18th 1955, by Ralph Morse. You may have seen it before, iconic as it is: it’s messy.

I don’t mean this as a guilt by association; having a superbly beautiful office space does not make you more like Hitler, of course. Nor does a cluttered desk turn you into Einstein. But it helps us see that there is certainly no direct relationship between keeping a neat order and being a good person who has their shit together.

The connection between orderliness and authoritarianism does, however, go a bit deeper. When German women were sent to the Polish countryside to take over the homes of subjugated Poles during the Second World War, they started cleaning up the place. They took their superior cleanliness and ability to make things neat and tidy as proof of their racial superiority, and thus as a justification of the German invasion and their own mistreatment of the locals. Indeed, Hitler even began to describe invading Poland as a “housecleaning”.

These are anecdotal examples—but what does the research say?

A 2010 study revealed that you could get people to morally judge others more harshly (on things like smoking or pornography) simply by giving them a “cleanliness priming” (disinfecting hands and telling them all the equipment in the office was brand new). When people feel clean, they also feel more morally entitled to judge others.

Another experiment in the same study showed that cleanliness-primed people (who got to read a snippet about their own imagined cleanliness: My hair feels clean and light. My breath is fresh. My clothes are pristine and like new. My fingernails are freshly clipped and groomed and my shoes are spotless. I feel so clean.) would rate themselves as more morally superior as compared to others.[28]

A fairly well-cited study with the title “Dirty Liberals!: Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes”, from 2011, showed a similar pattern—but making people more self-reportedly conservative and judgmental on issues of sexual purity.[29]

Not to mention my favorite one: You can spray the paper sheets of the moral-judgment survey with Lysol, and most people will actually judge others more harshly when filling in the survey simply because it smells cleaner.[30]

Given that these cases don’t actually change any moral qualities of the people involved, just prime them with a sense of cleanliness, we are here witnessing the increase of what might be called self-righteousness, also called sanctimoniousness, sententiousness and holier-than-thouness. Virtually all people have a natural tendency to view themselves as morally superior to the average bear... including self-ratings of modesty, of course.[31] But this is a matter of degree, and the more morally superior you feel, the less cooperative you tend to be and the more entitlement you tend to have for immoral behaviors.[32] And being self-righteous is not linked to better self-esteem.[33]

These are examples from experimental psychology. But within the humanities and social sciences, there is a long tradition of linking concepts of obsessive cleanliness and purity ideals to racism, ethnic cleansing and authoritarian rule.[34] When groups are targeted, they are almost always viewed as “impure” and “dirty”, and the attacks against them are spoken of in terms of hygiene (dehumanizing the “vermin” and so on). That doesn’t make hygiene and house cleaning bad in and of itself, but given that ideals of cleanliness can trigger judgment and intolerance, there is undeniably a dirty side to cleanliness.

If we venture into murkier waters of scientific validity, psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm have long linked excessive cleanliness to sadistic and “necrophilic” character types, particularly in his 1973 grand work, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. It is argued that these character types prefer the dead and inanimate to the complexities and difficulties of life and the living. Here, a liking to the clean, frigid, and shiny can be understood as a will to suppress the organic and the messiness inherent to anything alive. This was later exemplified in the book and movie, American Psycho; in the movie, a naked and buff Christian Bale ends up running around his perfectly clean apartment chasing people with a bloodstained chainsaw. The link between cleanliness and “necrophilia” is a bit far-fetched, if you ask me, but still worth considering in this context: Can excessive cleanliness be a marker of something else, something less savory? If deep and astute, albeit not entirely scientific, observers of the human mind have made that connection, let’s at least take it as a warning sign.

The issue of “cleanliness norms” also links up with environmentally unsustainable consumerism. My sociologist colleague, Tulia Jack, has shown that there is a link between media and commercial idealizations of a clean home (and clothing) and unrealistic ideals of cleanliness, leading to excessive and unsustainable use of chemical products and energy use.[35] Knowing her personally, I can attest that she does not come off as unhygienic despite her research interests; she’s actually rather stylish and has a background in fashion.

So, yes, we all have reasons to clean up and get our house in order from time to time. But the issue is: Are we doing it for the right reasons and with the right level of intensity?

Another anecdotal example might shed a bit of light on this: On YouTube there are many videos of Jordan Peterson winning arguments against people—and armies of commentators flock to rub their hands. In one video, rather emblematically titled Jordan Peterson Calls Out The “Pseudo-moralistic Stances” Of Activists[36], posted on February 27th 2019, a woman in an Australian TV-studio audience somewhat aggressively argues that the personal responsibility that Peterson defends is inadequate in dealing with collective issues like climate change and inequality. Peterson responds, rather skillfully, to the (often gloating) enthusiasm of the YouTube commentators. The video has millions of views and tens of thousands of comments. Here I’d like to focus on this army of commentators—presumably inspired by Peterson’s advice. One recurring theme is attacking the woman for being visibly overweight. Commentators feel that she does not have “her house in order” due to her alleged weight issue, and thus should have no right to speak before she has taken care of her own life.

I know that the YouTube comment section isn't exactly known for being the pinnacle of human virtue and civility. But still, doesn’t it make you wonder? These commentators are the people who are deeply inspired by the “get your house in order” rule of life. And there they are, scores and scores of them, going after random people for their weight, linking it to a perceived moral hypocrisy on a topic where one’s waistline is obviously irrelevant.

To make my claims entirely clear: These people seem to have become less, not more, competent in making a contribution to the world by following the “clean your house” rule. They seem to have become more snarky and hypocritical, and less constructive team players in the games of life, much like the previously cited research predicted. Folks seem to have been housecleaning their way into a misplaced superiority complex.

Is this where an exaggerated obsession with cleanliness and control of one’s direct environment leads us—being judgmental and focusing on superficial traits? Judging from thousands of YouTube commentators, and as underscored by the research, this does indeed appear to be the case. Granted that the number one dream profession of Generation Z is to be a YouTuber, the example may be more significant than it initially appears: YouTube is where people’s dreams play out, how they engage with the world, and hence studying behaviors there can be instructive. So I’m not making this up; this blame-game of over-generalized cleanliness is where Peterson’s self-help program seems to have led many of his readers and social media followers. Someone’s been spraying Lysol on their screens.

Being judgmental means:[37]

1. Making a lot of negative moral evaluations of others.

2. Having a moral rating system that is skewed in your own favor.

3. Jumping to negative moral conclusions about others; being inclined to believe the worst.

4. Moving very quickly from judgments of the form, "This action is morally wrong," to ones of the form, "This person is morally corrupt." (Hello, YouTube commentators.)

5. Acting as if you can know that what so-and-so did was wrong even though you know much less about the context of so-and-so's action than so-and-so.

And there’s a price to be paid for being judgmental. Not only do you reinforce an intolerant society and become less apt at correctly understanding the (usually not so bad) intentions and perspectives of others. Once you get caught in “judgmental cleanliness”, you are likely to spend your life signed up to the mission impossible of reaching that perfect cleanliness. The more you reach for perfection, the farther away the goal, and the more dirt you will perceive. Ask yourself if that’s what you want, as a person and member of society. By the same logic, whenever you fail to present cleanliness, people will discredit you for it—no matter if you happen to be right. Is that desirable? I don’t think it is.

And ultimately, if you nurture an unacceptance of disorder, you will feel dirty yourself, and blame others for it. And when you blame others, you are more likely to be tough on yourself, sooner or later—which leads to worse, not better, mental health and self-esteem.

So let Einstein’s desk be messy, and still listen to him. Don’t be fooled by Hitler’s tidy office. Relax your standards and let yourself live in a moderate mess. Sure, it’s mediocre—but it’s a better priority of your time (the average American already spends about an hour a day cleaning up, women more than men). A perfect world is not one where everyone has a spotless kitchen; what an unimaginative vision that would be.

If you do, after all, need to get more tidy and organized, there is great advice to be found in the energetic Japanese tidying[38] guru Marie Kondo’s method, which includes throwing away all the stuff you don’t really need or that doesn’t “spark joy”, and then making sure that each possession has a designated “home station” within your home. There is a time and effort “tax” we pay for having each additional possession, as well as a “tax” we pay in wasted time for managing our clutter, so having fewer things, and having specified exactly where to put each of them back, is usually a win.

For organizing our lives, Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind offers some research-based suggestions on things like taking control of how your time is spent and leaving more space for daydreaming (it’s good for creativity and mental health). Time hygiene is important in today’s world of digital distractions. Imagine a world where everyone has a tidy room but wastes their days getting kicks on YouTube by watching public intellectuals making comebacks against TV-studio audiences. Does that sound like a house in order, in the bigger scheme of things?

Marie Kondo’s art of tidying, plus time-management—these are things that work, not as rules, norms, and ideals, but simply as tools and methods. Like any tool, you can use these ideas when appropriate.

If your time-management is off (too many online distractions, etc.) this can also mean less time to care for your home. And a very big part of time-management tends to be about busting yourself when your thought patterns are irrational (“I’ll have more time later” and so on). Better take control of your time with tools to organize it. For instance, a time-management hack is organizing work into pomodoros (work for 25 minutes, take a break for five and stretch your legs, repeat four times, then take a 15 minute break). It has been proven to be highly effective and lets you work for longer stretches of time without getting bored or tired. I’ve been experimenting with some of these methods myself and sometimes even found them enjoyable. People are resistant to trying pomodoro (“tomato” in Italian, it’s named after a tomato-shaped egg-clock they used), because it sounds too trivial and a bit counter-intuitive. But for most people it does indeed work well, at least for office work, programming, writing, etc.

What I take issue with is having orderliness as a life rule and a measure of the moral weight of your participation in society. That is not a healthy rule and it should be contested. Never let ideas about this rule of tidiness keep you from doing your thing. Don’t judge others on their perceived tidiness, unless it’s directly relevant to the issue at hand.

Deep House in Order

Of course, there is more to the idea of getting one’s house in order than tidying up and feng-shuing the hell out of your living room, or even your schedule. It also has a deeper meaning (especially in Jordan Peterson’s chapter on the matter); it’s about setting our personal story straight, admitting our weaknesses and mistakes and owning up to them, cleaning up our inner turmoil, and “showing up” for life in one fairly solid piece.

These things are undeniably important. But when exactly will you be “done” with that inner cleaning? How long will the world and your dreams and contributions have to wait?

Given that we will never be perfect, it makes more sense to use our journeys to contribute to the world to learn and grow along the way. You will never be “ready” for all the surprises life holds. You only become ready by taking the leap and doing your thing. Again, accept mediocrity, thrive in it, and still have the insolence to take part and speak your truth. Even if you’re overweight or have a messy desk. It doesn’t really matter if you have dust bunnies under your bed or haven’t yet worked through all the identity issues of high school. Your voice and contribution still matter.

But there is some truth to the “house in order” argument. The real issue is that, if we carry resentments and personal issues around, we’re likely to project these onto whatever grand projects we care about. If our lives are too messy and unstable, we’re unlikely to be happy and productive, and that spills over into how we engage with the world. Maybe we blame patriarchy but it’s actually the neglect of our own father we’re mad at. Maybe we’re blaming the educational system but would be better off focusing on our own learning habits.

If you’d like to reformulate the deeper meaning of that life rule in less metaphorical terms, it might be: “Remain aware that the problems you see in society are, perhaps more often than not, not actually about big issues out there in the world, but about yourself and issues you may be experiencing in your own personal life. Please exhaust the possibility that the latter is the case before you go on any big crusades to change the world. After all, not only will you likely cause harm if you try to change everyone else just because of your own issues, but it’s also much easier to change one person—yourself—than to change the entire world, so you’ll have much better chances of getting the results you want. Changing yourself is difficult enough, but to change the world is all but impossible. Maybe your moral outrage is just a means for you to unconsciously switch a possible but difficult mission (take responsibility for yourself) for an impossible one where you can always divert responsibility (change world history!). In such cases, you’d do yourself and everyone else a huge favor by focusing on working on the real issue: yourself.”

This stance—the crusader stance—can get us into the wrong “game of life”. Instead of focusing on how to improve our lives and contribute to others, we start over-focusing on busting each other with blame games and political correctness, while abdicating from our own responsibilities. This can undercut our sense of agency and self-efficacy.

I agree that we’re better off if we’re happy and peaceful and not driven by frustrations and resentments, and that this requires inner work. Our wounds serve us (and our struggles and endeavors) best when healed, not while still open and festering. This inner healing is also an important focus of this book. We just don’t get there by being so hard on ourselves about house chores.

However, the opposite argument can also be made—and it’s equally important. Just like you can take a personal issue and project it onto a societal one, so can you take a societal issue and project it onto a personal one. Simple example: Did you know that about 98-99% of venture capital goes to men, 1-2% to women? If you want to change that, how much room cleaning and self-therapy do you think you have to do? Aren’t women already spending too much time with house chores, which contributes to the unequal distribution of venture capital in the first place? Do you really want to tell women to go do the dishes before complaining about this?

How about the abolition of slavery in the 19th century? Was that achieved by people with their houses in perfect order? Would you tell enslaved people to stop blaming society and get their shit together first? Or if you seek to change the fact that some 70 billion land animals are tormented and killed under industrial farming every year (animals just as alive and precious as any Zen master cat), how clean does your living room have to be? (Or how much will following a rule about petting cats down the street help? Also one of Peterson’s). I for one don’t see it. Movements consisting of very incomplete and rough-on-the-edges people have accomplished astonishing things, again and again, from extending the vote to new groups of citizens, to saving the whales, to bringing down the barons of sexual abuse in the 2017 #metoo days.

Social and collective issues are their own thing, and they cannot be reduced to personal issues. Let me substantiate that claim. In Émile Durkheim’s (“father of sociology”) classical 1897 study, Suicide, he showed that sociological factors, more than personal ones, explained the likelihood of suicide occurring. Working before formal statistics had been developed[39], Durkheim still managed to draw some conclusions by studying the records of the preceding period: your risk of committing suicide was greater if you were a man, especially an unmarried one with no children (whereas women had greater risk if married), if you were older, if you were Protestant (rather than Catholic or Jewish), if you were a soldier or civil servant, if you lived an urban rather than a rural life. Periods of economic depression increased the risk, but wars and political upheaval actually reduced it, likely because people got caught up in exciting and meaningful struggles. So, in the end, if you were a Catholic young woman with children in the countryside, your risk was close to zero; if you were an old Protestant male civil servant in the big city during an economic depression, your risk was much, much greater. There was a difference of magnitudes. And not only that, the same patterns were reproduced from year to year with frightening precision. We think we’re acting, choosing to live or die, but, in a sense, society seems to act for us, following its ingrained habits every year, even across seasons (summertime increases suicide, not because people can’t take the heat, but because there are more social dynamics playing out). That is the power of the thing we call “society”.

So: the most intimate and personal of all choices, to be or not to be (what the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus called “the one truly serious question of philosophy”: why not kill yourself?[40]), was explained, Durkheim showed, more by society than by many or even most personal events. Society is its own thing. Thus we are unwise to disregard its power over our lives.[41]

“Your house” is a part of society and planet Earth, for sure. And we need a good homestead to work and play from. But, ultimately speaking, your house is society and the Earth. So let’s put that in order, and do a bit of house chores and personal clean-up in between. Okay, the Earth runs on chaos, so you cannot “put it in order”. But at least you can try to contribute to it being a wee bit more harmonious, and that’s all anyone could reasonably ask of you.

Indeed, I believe there is a higher synthesis between the two perspectives: “clean your house” on the one extreme and “nothing you do in your own little individual bubble will matter before the communist revolution (or insert other reckoning with whichever societal injustice or structural failure you feel is most fundamental, such as transnational legislation to curb climate change)” on the other—and it’s this one: Work to create a society that increases everyone’s chances and capacity to “clean their own room” and thereby to be of lesser burden and greater help to others. Peterson is right to put emphasis on the importance of working with ourselves, but seems to miss the point that society itself will shape our chances to do so. Hence, the best struggle is not to clean one’s room, but to work for a society that equips everyone with the capacity to clean their rooms (or to do other productive things).[42]

“Cleaning our rooms” and creating a better society are interconnected. So why not live for both sides of the coin, while accepting the necessary imperfection of both sides?

Besides—if inner growth and getting your own life in order are so important, and if you best become motivated and learn along the way by partaking in a struggle for a better society—which kind of societal project do you think reaps the most learning of how to get your own shit together?

Allow me a guess: If you work for a “listening society”, one that helps people to grow into their best selves, you’re also likely to learn a lot in terms of your own inner journey. That sets your house in deep order.

◆◆◆

Tidiness can be good and worth an effort from time to time, and it’s part of keeping yourself in a good and relaxed state. But for now, just know that it’s okay to be messy. You’re okay. It’s okay to like yourself regardless of clutter and an “imperfect life”, whatever that means.

Our personal level of tidiness tends to depend, in large part, upon our personalities. Look at “conscientiousness” (it’s one aspect of the “five factor model”, a very big thing in the psychology of personality; it includes stuff like being organized and tidy). Folks with “high conscientiousness” like it tidy, folks with “low conscientiousness” can even get a kick from seeing some disorder. One type shouldn’t be setting life rules for the other. Both are okay.

Much more important than tidiness are self-compassion, tolerance, and the acceptance of ourselves and others. And if we’re kind to ourselves, accepting our own flaws and inescapable mediocrity, we can focus on more interesting and significant things than ourselves and our dust bunnies (or worse: the dust bunnies—real or imagined—of others).

The search for perfect order is an existential dead-end. Tidiness has its place, but there is no tidiness deity to judge or reward us. It’s a tool, not a rule or an end in and of itself.

To put it succinctly: Maintaining perfect order is a fool’s errand. Order comes and goes, and our job is to do whatever level of house chores we prefer (and is fair to all members of the household), work on ourselves continuously, and then accept that life is still going to be a mess. And so are you, in all of your sublime mediocrity. The issue is to make life, and yourself, into a beautiful mess.

Second Commandment: Fuck Like a Beast

“Ongoing passion and growth in intimacy requires us to let go of our ideas of what we ‘should’ be doing and instead trust the wisdom inherent in our unguarded heart and uninhibited body.”

—David Deida, Intimate Communion

Phew, sorry for that boring last chapter. Just had to get it out of the way so you don’t run off to scrub the kitchen floor. Now let us delve more deeply into the Wisdom of the West. The second commandment I issue reads: Fuck like a beast.

Why don’t we get at the heart of it right away: We tend to live pretty inhibited lives. Me too; I’ll get back to that part towards the end of this chapter. This commandment is here to break you free from the shackles of inhibition and to release a stronger and fiercer passion in your life.

Inhibition: The Cosmic Coma

Think about it: what are all the pop, rock, and hip-hop songs about? Are they about good meals and cooking advice? Are they about the beauty of nature? About our experiences in the labor market? No, with the exception of ad jingles (which can indeed be about dishwashers) that we’d never dream of paying to listen to, they all bring up fantasies of the free flow of emotions, bodies, and relationships: falling deeply in in love, being passionately heartbroken, acting out carnal desires, dancing like there’s no tomorrow, giving someone a raging comeback, standing up for ourselves, dominating the party, daring to go for it, having the audacity to brag about our wealth and success (that was hip-hop, mostly), or even resoundingly defeating our enemies on the battlefield (oh, and that was heavy metal).

The fantasies that popular music lyrics bring to different energizing tunes and rhythms—the most prevalent and hyper-recited recorded poetry of our time—are about breaking our inhibitions. Why do we so enjoy filling our days with these soundtracks? For certain, poetry and music work best when they elicit exciting and emotionally charged themes, so in a sense it seems obvious our songs cannot be about dishwashers and tax evasion. But why is this so, really, if we allow ourselves for a moment to question the seemingly obvious order of things? Of all possible themes, the same ones keep coming back.

The simplest explanation is probably the strongest one: We live inhibited lives. We rarely feel fully alive. We’re in state “7” on the scale of subjective states (as discussed in the introduction)—and sometimes below that. And our musical flights of fancy grant us brief reprieve from this condition. The flows of music and lyrics serve to momentarily unlock our constricted inner flows of emotion, or at least they echo the longing inside of us to do so.

Sigmund Freud famously wrote in his 1930 book, Civilization and Its Discontents, that we seem to be paying a significant price for being a part of society, of civilization. To function socially together with others at scale, we need to refrain from acting upon every desire and impulse, and thus we suppress them. But our emotional drives don’t just go away with suppression: we still want to sleep with every hot stranger we walk past, slap our boss, skip work, or rob the candy store. And so these emotional forces and drives still exert pressure on us; they stick in our minds and bodies as neuroses and tensions, linger in our dreams, crop up as Freudian slips when we least expect them.

Freud thought there’s really no way out. Ours is a world of tragic paradoxes that were never meant to be resolved; it just is what it is. At least, in Freud’s perspective, we can work through some of our neuroses in therapy, and we can try to be aware of these inner pressure cookers and manage them so they don’t explode into world wars. And so, we’re more or less stuck with inhibited lives, condemned to walk through life in a cosmic coma.

In the decades that followed, eccentric and perhaps naive psychological thinkers like Wilhelm Reich argued that sexuality could be lived out fully, if only we shifted the norms of society to something less repressive and put in the personal work of letting loose our inner drives. Repression and suppression were thought of as unnatural and unnecessary. His was a call for the full expression of the human being in all her grime and glory. Following Reich’s ideas, students of the body in psychotherapy, like Alexander Lowen, kept developing the notion that there are emotionally caused constrictions and tensions in the body itself, “armorings”. These armorings can be tended to and released with sensitive care and touch, given enough permission to be felt. Not only had the mind been oppressed by society, but the body itself was oppressed, particularly in its erotic and aggressive expressions. We have shielded ourselves from our vulnerabilities, and thus, inadvertently, from the full experience of life itself.

People went ahead and tried these things out, with varied levels of success. New, more somatic (bodily) forms of therapy emerged, like Rosen therapy (a theme we return to later in the book). Intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse, with his critical psychoanalysis, placed eros and its emancipation at the center of challenging capitalist society.

In some instances, this longing to emancipate eros led to shocking extremes. French intellectuals, including Michel Foucault,[43] went all in and argued for the removal of age of consent laws, signing a petition in 1977 (basically, so that adults could have sex with kids). In 1979, two open letters were published in French newspapers defending individuals arrested under charges of statutory rape (also signed by many of the same big names) arguing for the right of “12- and 13-year-olds to have relations with whomever they choose”. Uhm, yup, the 12-year-olds “choosing” to have sex with old pedophiles. This is what our legendary intellectual heroes of the Left argued. It’s so French.

And, in a similar vein, experimental communities have, up to our day, been cropping up to play around with similar ideas of free erotic and emotional expression (“what happens if everyone just has sex with everyone at will!”). In cases like the Indian guru Osho’s community, that set up the town of Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon in 1981, you could see the results: At first, people do indeed feel liberated and intensively alive, but after a while the social fabric breaks down, and a lot of people are hurt.

Whoa, people have really tried hard to break the chains of inhibition. Gotta give it to them.

But what is a sane and effective way to do so? To be clear, the line of argument I’m following here is not a utopian fest of sexual liberation. Neither am I an uncritical supporter of the tantric sex movements that seek to undo the “conditioning of society”. It’s not like there is one pure kernel of healthy desires, and then a prison constructed by a repressive society afraid of our authentic drives. Or, well, it’s “true but partial”.

Rather, since we are social beings through and through, beings that emerge in a perpetual dance with the societies we’re part of, our drives and desires are shaped by both biology and culture. We become “persons” and “personalities” through our interactions with one another. But you have to get that relation between our drives and relationships into a harmonious resonance, so that we don’t feel trapped and suffocated.

The constraints of culture have emerged over history because our impulses and drives get us into genuinely tricky territory like issues of consent, family formation, upholding mutual trust, social hierarchies, or not mixing different roles inappropriately (sleeping with your students is often a bad idea, etc.). And whenever we interact with one another, we cannot just take any role that freely expresses every emotion; we always need to adjust to that which is emotionally and socially acceptable to others. We cannot all act like rock stars and empresses at will, because we’d be getting in each other’s way too much, and thus encounter resistance and social sanctions, even down to complete isolation or the use of force to restrain us: At the end of the day, we do bind and gag people at the psychiatric ward. So we restrain ourselves; we become polite, discrete, civil, and “civilized”. We go out of our way to not act weird to such an extent that it becomes second nature; the alternative simply becomes unthinkable. We are thus shaped and molded into social beings by one another, and to be social is, in part, to be inhibited.

From this perspective, even today’s frequent calls to “authenticity” can be shown to ring hollow. Let’s say we authentically express our negative emotions to others. Well, it might feel good for a moment, but how does that make them feel? And if they are then allowed the same authenticity, and give us back how they now authentically feel about us, how would that make us feel? With a little too much “authenticity” it’s easy to see how a collegial workplace could be turned into a shouting match of mounting rage and hurt. Or even a family can turn sour if “authenticity” is applied with no sense of context. Again, the inhibitions seem to be there for good reasons. We cannot simply remove all of them at once.

The Beast Behind Bars

If we’re honest with ourselves, how inhibited are we, truly? It’s not just that we don’t act on every sexual impulse. It’s in our whole being; the way we show up, how we speak, how we move and dance, how we think, joke, and play. It’s in every interaction. And we all know those moments, or some parts of our lives, in which we are much less inhibited, where we flow freely and truly express ourselves from a position of abundance. “Like electricity” as Billy Elliot (the dancing boy in the movie with the same title) said about his ballet practice. Sometimes it’s in a professional role that we master well. Sometimes it’s in the company of a certain friend. For some, it’s on stage performing. On rare occasions it’s within the realm of erotic and/or romantic connection, when we can truly “fuck like a beast”, or some more tantrically refined version thereof. But most other people, in most settings, only know our inhibited selves. They see pale reflections of who we really are. This is true, often, even of our families.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, all things considered. What happens when we’re not checked, balanced, and put into place by our social surroundings? We do have examples of this in dictators, gurus, and larger-than-life superstars who are surrounded by people who confirm their every whim and bias. Usually, they grow egos the size of blue whales. The human soul always hungers for more, and it will take on whatever self-aggrandizing delusions it can get away with. Our minds and emotions tend to take the lazy (often self-flattering) route unless met by resistance. Truth and knowledge fly out the window, and excessive and socially harmful behaviors abound, often to the point of an impending collapse into misery. I wouldn’t wish that fate for my worst inlaw. So maybe we’re lucky these “prisons”, that come with living with others, are there. Some boundaries are usually good for us and give us some scaffolding; they may even help us build some character.

Still though, it’s difficult to get away from the sense that there is a certain tragedy to it all. Should we always live with so many inhibitions? Should we always be making ourselves smaller than we truly are, emotionally and spiritually speaking? Should we all be content with only ever living out a thin sliver of who we really are as emotional beings, always pretending in the name of social peace and stability? Do we not reasonably owe it to ourselves and one another to at least try to open this up, at least a bit; to not be the emotional prison guards of one another—and of ourselves?

I have come to believe that there are indeed ways to live less inhibited lives together with other people, without going down the crazy paths of sexual slugfests, shouting matches, and social decay. We can even do without primal scream therapy. But it does involve admitting the enormous degree to which we are, in the widest sense of the term, erotic beings. Yes, we are social beings in the sense that everything we do somehow relates to the world around us, including other people. But we are also erotic beings in that we are always driven, to a very significant extent, by some kind of lust or passion or curiosity.

Sexuality is ever-present in our lives and experience. Every moment we feel our bodies (or body-minds, as the body and the mind cannot be clearly delineated) and their urges. From hunger and thirst to playfulness, to coziness and warmth, to sexual desire, to curiosity, to frustration and dissatisfaction, to longing and aching, we cannot escape the extent to which we long for pleasure and satisfaction; that simple sense of being alive, of tasting the flavors of life. Nor can we escape the fear of being constrained, cut off from the very same sweet flavors that life has to offer. To be alive is to want. This fundamental longing flows through us, in subtle currents throughout our experienced bodies, like fierce rivers. The will to touch a desired body is felt in our fingertips as a powerful tingling sensation of aliveness, sometimes an aching. Our participation in life is not a disinterested one; our actions always have directionality towards a preference for something, even if it’s just the smile and prolonged gaze from an attractive stranger, or the touch of a loved one.

Through our difficult lives, we have had to accumulate inhibitions. We have inadvertently stopped these rivers of life from truly flowing, and pressures have built up: as little knots in our chests, hearts, and bellies, as tensions in the throat and the diaphragm, as mute old patches in the back and neck, even in our legs and around our genitals (or in them, if you’re a woman). All of this is present as a certain disconnectedness from life,  an inability to feel and fully participate. Not even our thoughts flow quite freely; inhibitions pin them down and force them to crawl within concrete channels, safe and rigid, rather than run through networks of organic, interconnected streams, rushing towards open horizons.

All of this brings us back to the very basis of the spiritual experience that undergirds everyday life and its deep oceans of emotions: what I call cosmoeroticism. It is about centering the sexual and erotic core of life itself, unlocking it piece by piece, until one remembers the childlike capacity to be in love with life.

What conquest or victory could be more important than reclaiming our love of being alive? Indeed, is not being in love with life the only sane way to live? Does not a muted and disconnected existence, full of inhibitions, do injustice to the tremendous beauty of the universe? Do not our brief blinks of a lifetime, having evolved through billions of years since the beginning of the universe, warrant more than a life lived within the prison walls of inhibition?

Cosmoeroticism: It’s the Hunger, Stupid

Our sexuality encompasses a much larger landscape than merely our sexual actions or encounters (or lack thereof; that’s also a thing in the lives of many). As sensing bodies, we respond to other bodies with strong (and innumerable not so strong) emotions and drives, and this permeates almost all aspects of everyday experience. Our fantasies, dreams, or stray thoughts and impulses, today richly stimulated by evocative images of all sorts of media, wander far, far beyond our actual sexual practices and encounters. Potentiality is always greater than actuality, fantasy always wider than action. How could we not be affected by how these flows play out, as the Gulf Stream under the surface of the Atlantic? How could we not be limited by the ways in which these are overstimulated, inhibited, or frustrated—and often a combination of these?

Cosmoeroticism[44] is the principle that places our erotic drive (again, in the widest sense of the term: all lust for life and hunger for satisfaction) where it in all honesty belongs: at the core of our being. It is called cosmoeroticism because it is about seeing humanity as an erotic being, permeated with “sexual energies”, in her relation not only with the bodies she desires, but in relation to all of reality (hence “cosmo-”). When we can feel that aliveness flowing through us, we also “open up” (as we mentioned in the introduction when discussing subjective states) to a connectedness with reality; we feel like a welcome part of it all.

More specifically, from this perspective, the erotic drive is placed at the center of our spiritual experience of reality, i.e., our wordless relationship to reality itself. As long as we are trapped by our inhibitions, small and great ones, we never quite feel alive and connected, no matter how much we meditate or how hard we work. That’s why it’s called “cosmo”-eroticism; it’s about centering our attention on our lust-driven relatedness to reality, our love affair with the cosmos.

Here’s some food for thought on the centrality of the erotic: I’ve recently been reading The Mind Illuminated (2017). It’s a great practical step-by-step guide to meditation, by one of the foremost Buddhist practitioners of the West: Culadasa (a.k.a. John Yates, PhD). He’s  committed his life to religion, neuroscience, and contemplative practice, and it shows—he has produced a compelling, detailed, and readable volume. This is a person who can describe compassion and transcendence from his own experience like few others, and who makes the case for enlightenment being a real thing that can happen in your life. The book has sold massively; the guy is a spiritual legend and role model for many people working hard to rewire their brains for compassion and selflessness.

Now, if you do a web search for “Culadasa” and “sex scandal”, you’ll notice that he’s also been cheating on his wife with sex workers for years (and, if I’m getting this story right, paying for the whole party with the money of his congregation and then lying about it). How did he respond to the allegations? He claimed it’s a conspiracy against him by his wife and students. You can, of course, find many stories like these, and worse ones too; Culadasa is just an example.[45]

And you don’t have to look to Buddhist or spiritual leaders for these examples. US President Biden, arguably a fairly accomplished politician, has a long and sturdy record of touching women (and little girls) very inappropriately. You can watch video compilations of this behavior online, if you can stomach it. Nor, by the way, do the heights of critical theory and intellectual sensitivity to power relations seem to protect a person from being manipulated by the hunger of the inner beast; Michel Foucault, the philosopher who has, more than any other, influenced contemporary work on unjust power relations in society, has recently been accused of raping numerous little boys, paying poor nine-year-olds for the ordeal, during his long stay in Morocco.[46] This casts a long, dark shadow over Foucault’s heritage as the heroic theorist of the wretched and the oppressed. Not to mention his backing of the protest against age of consent laws in France in the late 1970s.[47]

Staying with the example of Culadasa, then. Let us leave aside the wider discussion of how adultery and sex work can be viewed in different ways. Obviously, even with a liberal stance on these things, something feels off here. So, what’s wrong, Culadasa? What is showing through the cracks? Not pious enough, the mind not sufficiently illuminated? Spent too few tens of thousands of hours meditating on compassion and transcending one’s desires? Not read enough ancient texts on spiritual wisdom and attainment?[48]

Here’s my simple take: This man (or let’s say any other person in this position, so I neither hinge my argument on the details of this particular case, nor single out Culadasa personally) was acting out some underlying erotic dissatisfaction with his life. And all the pious studies and contemplative practices in the world couldn’t balance that out. If he wasn’t driven by some deep sense of erotic dissatisfaction, why would he pay sex workers to sleep with him, and how else would he be motivated to take such great risks and act so inconsistently with his own values and public persona? In a deep sense of the term “erotic”, he appears to have built his life on an insufficiently strong erotic grounding. He worked hard on himself with all of that spiritual practice, but failed to “fuck like a beast”, and thus had to make up for it with a swell of sex workers.[49] And as with all of us, this compounded through his life and took a great toll on him and on others. Whatever currents of sexual energy were flowing the wrong way in this guy’s inner experience, they must have been pretty strong, and they must have been creating considerable inner pressures of frustration and dissatisfaction.

Interestingly, the folks who have worked the most with their “inner shadows” (with therapy and workshops, etc.) tend to make progress, yes, but their remaining issues tend to be yet more pronounced and wicked. Presumably, the mechanism behind this is that they become convinced, having dealt with so much of their own bullshit, that they are now pure as snow. They forget about their own inescapable mediocrity. This harkens back, of course, to the first of my commandments, by which you know and accept that you are, all said and done, still a mess. And you’re still a creature of simple desires. Ya basic. Forget it at your own peril.

For most of us, living with that dissatisfaction just means we feel a bit of muted inhibition and lack of aliveness, perhaps having a bit of resentment lingering here and there. For Biden, it shows up in those moments of “casual friendly touch” that just don’t work out the way he figured: a hunger of the body sneaks in and ruins the occasion. Neither of these two, Culadasa and Biden, lack self-discipline: one could reach the top of Buddhist wisdom glory, the other the top of world politics. So it’s not actually about self-restraint or self-regulation. (And for what it’s worth, neither Culadasa, Biden, nor Foucault are known to have had untidy homes or offices.)

What’s more—interestingly enough, Culadasa’s erotic thirst did not seem to be quenched even by the numerous sex workers whose services he procured—nor, again, by studying and practicing the wisdom traditions. So even when he did try to “fuck like a beast”, it didn’t really help. And yet, there are so many “ordinary people” without legendary spiritual status who manage to stay reasonably happily married and do not need to rely on sex workers, affairs, or even sticky paws. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Erotic energy isn’t extinguished. You’re never “done fucking” for life; only old age and deteriorating health can shift it to a low burner. So the point isn’t really to “satisfy” the sex drive once and for all, but to make it flow in a way conducive to the fullness of experience, to do the ninja version of Freud’s “sublimation”; that is, to find ways to release and direct this flow in manners that make us happy, alive, and in a wide sense productive. We cannot suppress it without also suppressing other parts of ourselves and our emotions; there’s that mute button again that Alexander Lowen and others have warned us about. And like in Zoom meetings, you never notice you’re on mute. It just sneaks up on you, and then you notice you’ve been cut off from the world around you, speaking to a prison wall. Hence, we need to work not for desire’s “full satisfaction” but for its “wholesome flow through us”, and then our actual sexual actions can flow as an expression of that inner flow. More on that soon.

Anyway, I’m not saying that Culadasa is a fraud; his teaching of compassion and transcendence are probably authentic enough, and probably work, building on millenia of human experience with meditation. He just didn’t follow this Hanzi commandment, “fuck like a beast”, in its deeper meaning: setting our lust of life free and letting it find healthy expressions. The principle of cosmoeroticism states that, even with great care to foster compassion for others and transcendence of one’s own ego, one will lack proper grounding for it all, unless one also, and preferably first, takes seriously the fact that we are creatures of lust, of drive, of will. It is a question of failing to account for our inescapable longing for sensual connection in all of its forms. That’s the honest “ground zero” we all have to start from: the erotic core of our animal being, the hungry belly of the beast.

So, if we focus on sex and sexuality first and foremost, and make our whole lives about having lots of unrestrained sexual pleasure, and master such pleasure and all the secrets of the sensual, we’ll be able to stay in integrity? Not so fast; there are plenty of examples of people who have done just that and still ended up as glorified predators, victims, or a combination of these. Alexa Vartman and The New Tantra community come to mind. No need to go into it, but some pretty nasty stuff seems to have gone down over there (people being used, abused, and broken in a cult of “sex positivity”). Arguably, these hyper-sexualized folks harmed more people more profoundly than any straying old Buddhist. And Foucault, too, was a notorious libertine. So it’s not as simple as “be more sexually permissive and you’ll be fine”.

What, then, am I getting at? I’ll get a bit more practical in a bit, but for now, just consider how this rule of life centers the erotic as the core and grounding of spiritual practice and inner development. Here’s a simple model:

What this model illustrates is two things. Firstly, I am claiming something about “transcendence”—i.e. getting at the real depths of simply “being” and having those strong spiritual experiences and inner realizations that can come with hard contemplative work and rare peak experiences, what we have called the “highest subjective states” in the introduction chapter. Transcendence must ultimately, if it is to be healthy and grounded, be based upon a firm basis of “compassion”. What good are refined spiritual experiences and those disidentifications with the ego, if they do not lead to compassionate caring for others, if they are not based upon love? What is “pure emptiness” without an embodied caring for the suffering of others, without a burning heart?

I’m not just making this up; consider the fact that the great Zen master D.T. Suzuki, so revered by Western progressives and intellectuals, and with an impeccable record in terms of sex scandals (none!), also had a dark side worthy of Darth Vader. During the Second World War, back in Japan, he offered some very Zen accounts of justification for the Japanese war of aggression and the heinous war crimes of Japanese fascism, as revealed in detail in Brian Victoria’s 1997 book, Zen at War. Oh, and he also hung out with and inspired some Nazis. Here, transcendent states of egolessness were thought of as bringing people into a realm beyond good and evil; there was believed to be a unity between the Japanese bushido warrior code and spiritual attainment. What you have here, in my mind, is a disconnection between transcendence—the highest reaches of what we can experience as human beings—and compassion. Transcendence without compassion may seem impressive, but it is actually a pretty severe form of evil. It’s a lot like Darth Vader, really: powerful and intense inner experience and insight, but ungrounded, unregulated by the will to do good. Unsurprisingly, that’s a recipe for misery and abuse. I figure Yoda would agree.

What about that compassion, then? In turn, what ground does it rest upon? How can compassion be authentic? That’s the second point I try to make with this model. We are finally getting to the crux of the argument: transcendence without compassion is always hollow and sick, and so is compassion without the erotic. I mean, really, please think this through: How well can you understand the needs of others if you are not intimately familiar with your own needs? If you’re deeply frustrated with life and never quite enjoy its richness, how truly can your compassion flow from love? How real can you be about wishing for the happiness of all sentient beings if you’re just not that happy yourself, and those sentient beings out there are causing you more suffering and frustration than warmth and satisfaction? On a subtle level, you’ll be pissed off at life itself, because you’re not getting what you really need and deserve as much as any other sentient creature. This is the beast part of our nature that we simply cannot opt out of.

Spartacus was wrong to furiously shout “I am not an animal!” again and again at his Roman captors. Never pretend that you are not an animal. Swear: I am an animal, fully an animal and nothing but an animal.

That’s the real meaning of setting our house in order: You don’t have to read Freud, but you need to get the libido working in your favor. From there, genuine compassion can flow, and in turn from there, transcendence can flow. If you reverse it and practice transcendence and compassion but never get what you truly need (or want, at a deeper level), you will be getting into the tricky territory of what Robert Augustus Masters[50] has called “spiritual bypassing”, i.e. just looking at those clogged up emotions and soothing them, maybe tricking yourself in the process that you’re not angry or horny at all, when in fact you are. Spiritual bypassing is about never truly releasing and transforming those difficult, raw emotions. And ungrounded compassion always reveals itself as unsustainable and disingenuous, sooner or later.

Again, you can never opt out of hunger, of longing, of aching. So a life well lived starts there: with the hunger. They like to say “It’s the economy, stupid!” as the economy often explains matters of society to a surprising degree. But what drives the economy itself, if not human desire, always defining the demand side of the equation? So we could equally say: “It’s the hunger, stupid!”

It is by managing and transforming this ever-present flow of desire that we can also transform the economy and society, and set a good grounding for reaching into compassion and transcendence. If you think about it, when you wish someone else well, you tend to wish for them to be happy and fulfilled for their own sake, to be free of muteness and dissatisfaction. It’s okay to wish, and to work for, the same for oneself.

What the Beast Needs

When was the last time you (spontaneously) roared and howled like a wolf during sex? When was the last time you had an orgasm pulsating from your genitals, through the warmth of the belly, into the heart, filling it with tender, loving joy, and further out into every cell of your body, even, as it were, filling the very open space around you with a sense of intense celebration?

When was the last time you were completely honest with a partner about what you want in bed? Yes, that stuff (yeah, you know what I’m talking about you dirty little thing). Or, even better, when was the last time you were completely honest with yourself about what you want?

I am not claiming that we should hold ourselves and our sex lives, or God forbid, our partners, to such stellar standards.[51] But these cosmic peaks of sexual experience—or simply the fact that some people do sometimes experience these, even if we personally do not—can serve as reminders of just how limited we tend to have become as sensual beings, how trapped our inner beasts truly are. Many of us have been conditioned to inhibit ourselves sexually, often from an early age. From sneaking out an orgasm silently as a teen so your parents wouldn’t notice you masturbating, to deliberately keeping the noise down so you won’t disturb your neighbors or roommates, to not showing the extent of your excitement out of insecurity that your partner will think you’re weird or “of lower status” (why else would you be that excited about them?), we’ve been trapping that poor animal inside more than we should, because to truly meet its needs has often been socially, or otherwise practically, impossible.

It’s the strangest thing, but even pleasure, however intense, often doesn’t work—have you noticed? Something in us mutes it, closes down to it, makes it “empty”. Pleasure often doesn’t “hit the spot”; it doesn’t feed and rejuvenate our souls. Maybe we feel we don’t deserve it, because we were supposed to be doing something more productive, or maybe we pushed the same “pleasure button” too eagerly and repeatedly, or maybe we won’t allow ourselves the rapture because something within us is afraid of giving in, of opening up and possibly being hurt and disappointed. Even among great pleasures and luxuries, even in “the pleasure palace”, the inner beast can go hungry. And indeed, hungry are the damned. We need to become good at actually feeding that inner beast, at actually giving it pleasure that does its job: to create inner gratefulness, fulfillment, and joy.

The same goes, naturally, for negative and socially difficult emotions. Our inhibitions of rage and aggression also keep us in check and hinder a sense of aliveness. When was the last time you allowed yourself to truly express your anger towards someone who wronged you? I don’t mean telling someone in a mature, well-reasoned manner that you’re not pleased with their behavior, but truly telling someone what you feel here and now without holding back from showing your anger, without feeling ashamed of it?

As we have seen, not all of life can be a playground for such peaks and valleys of raw emotion. If we act in manners that disturb others, they will respond with sanctions, often overpowering us into submission and new inhibitions.

But we can make it a core part of our life’s journey to treat this inner beast with kindness. At one point, our parents saw to our every need. Once grown up, we have taken that role upon ourselves: to give the beast what it needs, and hopefully to even expand upon its freedom and fullness of expression. If we fail to do this, the hungry beast will sneak around at the back of our minds and puppeteer our actions, even our thoughts—no matter how many hours we meditate on it.

To grow up is, in a sense, to take full parental responsibility for this beastly little beauty.

There are certain capacities that we may have lost along the way since infanthood and early childhood, and certain specifically adult capacities that we can cultivate throughout our adulthood. Growing up, we lose some and gain some. The childhood capacities have to do with freely expressing our emotions and being very attuned to the experience of each moment, with little or no self-consciousness and embarrassment. The adult capacities have to do with refined skills of social, emotional, and sexual mastery. Through their intelligence and sexual maturity, adults of course have faculties that children do not. To a large extent, it is this adult that needs to grow the skills and refinement that also allow for the child to return into our lives.

This erotic basis of our “inner beast” is strangely enough both at once a child and an adult. It is a child in that it consists of raw, real emotions and drives. The beast is childlike in its complete lack of reasonableness; it wants a lot of things, even conflicting things, largely irrespective of what the needs and wants of others may be, or of the long term interests of our future self. For sure, our inner child also has deeply rooted moral emotions of fairness and compassion, even guilt and conscience, but this does not mitigate the inherently unreasonable scope of its dreams and desires.

But the beast is also an adult in that it has specifically sexual drives and needs. These can only be fulfilled when and if we learn to relate, seduce, and to be sexually competent. This requires at least some “successes” in life, i.e. that our deliberate actions produce desired results. To the extent that such successes fail to materialize, we are left in a tragic situation where we are ever haunted by drives and desires we never asked for having, but which perpetually remain unfulfilled. As discussed in the introduction to this book, such successes cannot be “rights”, since they must to a large extent depend on our own actions and choices; however, we can have “rights” to the best possible conditions for creating the necessary successes in our lives.

This predicament of required “success in life” (success in having our deep desires met, not conventional socio-economic success) is not entirely unlike what happened to Tantalus after Zeus was done with him: his punishment was an eternity spent with delicious grapes always just out of reach, with water that sank away the moment he bent down to drink—an ever insatiable hunger, and unquenchable thirst, marred by frustrations  that can only lead to failure. It’s a “tantalizing” situation in the worst sense of the word. Makes you think twice before you steal the nectar of ambrosia from the gods. But that is what failing in life feels like, when the adult does not have the empowerment and capacities to look after the needs of the beast.

And still, given that the nectar of ambrosia was stolen from the gods, we still have it available for us humans. It is not only for the gods. Indeed, some of the failures to satisfy our inner beasts are of little fault of our own: If we fail to impress and make bonds with others due to unjust discrimination and under-privilege, to disability and disease, or lacking wit and talent, or just a striking physical resemblance to Gollum, the Tantalus trap can close around us without there being so much for us to do.

But in most circumstances, most people  do have options of two distinct but interrelated kinds: the adult path and the inner child path. The first is to master our life situations in ways that ensure more successes, so that we can actually get more of what our hearts desire: love, recognition, comfort, excitement, safety, connection, fulfillment, satisfaction. This is the adult part of the story. Here, we have the cultivation of self-knowledge (to know what we truly want and to tell the difference between real deep needs and compensational wants to fill that inner void), the capacity to assert those needs, and the cultivation of relationships that are earnest and mutually productive.

On that last point, in terms of specifically erotic relationships, there are at least four dimensions that can be highlighted:

Presence. The capacity to be fully present and attentive to the subtleties of our lover and the vibrant now of love-making (a lot of what the tantric sexual development focuses on, the spiritual aspects of love-making).

Technique. The technical side of love-making, learning variety and mastery of sexual skills to play with, and communicating openly about what works for whom and what doesn’t. The art of sex, I guess.

Dominance/submission. The capacity to enter into roles of playful and safe spaces of dominance and submission, to take assertive control (often on the masculine side) and to let oneself go completely and trust the powers and goodwill of the other person (often the feminine side). This part tends to clash in some respects with our striving in society for gender equality and it thus remains contentious and difficult to handle, not least within the context of feminist critique and scholarship.[52] Also, sexual predators and abusers give it a bad reputation. Again, play on dominance builds on trust and ultimately on care, and without such foundations, it becomes pretty evil and dysfunctional.

Emotional connection. The capacity to connect emotionally through shared sexual, romantic, and/or erotic experiences, expressing vulnerability, care, admiration, needs, excitement, lust. Usually a bit harder for us guys.

Again, all of this is on the adult side of things, on the side of honing our capacities. This is not a sexual or erotic self-help book and I will be brief about the issue. I simply wish to underscore that these are competencies which would be wise to invest in as we grow as adults: learning to “fuck like a beast” in order to establish and maintain satisfying relations. This requires patience and self-love; nobody’s perfect in the realm of vulnerable and sensitive human connection. But investing in it will truly pay off, leading to happier relationships, less lingering dissatisfaction, and even a boost in our seductive capacities, since sexual competence (in this wide, holistic sense) brings with it a greater ease when interacting with prospective partners.

Where to start when cultivating these capacities? It depends. A simple beginning for men can be to practice withholding orgasms when masturbating, and feeling into the sexual energy throughout the body, so as to extend how long one can stay in love-making and how freely and strongly “sexual energies” can flow through us, even beyond the genitals. Likewise, practicing the subtle art of “being able to ask for and calmly take negative feedback” is a pathway to male sexual mastery—showing the woman that one is sensitive, playful, and secure enough to be able to hear what she wishes or does not. If trust is insufficient, it is very common that the woman will not be comfortable sharing her truth. A simple practice for women to begin can be to stretch one’s comfort zone about revealing the fantasies of one’s “secret garden” to partners, and see how much of it can be accepted and even incorporated into mutually playful exploration. And, in parallel to men practicing being resilient listeners, women may practice being honest (but respectful, of course) in their feedback. The spiritual sex-guru David Deida, who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter, has a lot to offer in regard to this field of adult competence—if you can put up with his sometimes cringe-worthy style of writing.

Most of the commandments of this book feed into a wider process of adult competence, not only of erotic competence, but the overall ability to take responsibility for ourselves and our drives, so I needn’t go farther at this point. We should simply note that to do our life’s work, to master sublime mediocrity, we must grow the adult capacities of taking care of our own innermost needs, and not get stuck at the superficial needs that are only there to compensate for our hurting, starved inner beast. The beast needs to be unleashed, at least sometimes, and this requires some competence on our end. By grounding our lives in a firm connection to our deepest wants and needs, we set the basis for a genuine smile shining from our guts and hearts, up through our eyes as a warm, peaceful glow. And from that inner source of feeling alive and in love with life, compassion can flow, if practiced properly; and when compassion is there, why not turn to the skies and begin to appreciate the transcendent nature of existence itself, always-already present as something inherently tremendous? Just remember that to treat this universe and our fellow beings with genuine and sustainable kindness, we need to smile from the inside out, and this requires certain, specifically adult, competencies—taking responsibility for our inner child.

I would even argue that something yet more serious is at stake here: the birth of evil. Considering the fairly widespread phenomenon of “normal family guys” who live double lives and brag to one another about how they harm and abuse young women and underage girls they groom online and recruit as prostitutes, it is difficult not to wonder about the source of this profound malice lingering beneath the surface of everyday life. One big part of it may very well be that “the beast” has been locked up and frustrated for much too long; that a profound resentment has begun to fester in the hearts of these men. They have begun to hate that which they desire, the feminine. Or even worse: they may wish to harm innocence itself, as their own inner child has been harmed and is now throwing a vengeful tantrum, albeit it in a calculated and manipulative manner that adult faculties bring. The cruelty revealed in such abuses indicates that these people (mostly men) seem to long for positions of tyranny and supreme power. That perverse longing likely mirrors a fundamental sense of powerlessness within: powerlessness in the face of one’s own incapacity to participate fully in life, a bitter disconnection from the cosmoerotic. Hence, evil may stem from a wish to take revenge on life itself, to become the oppressor who exploits and destroys innocence, and thereby forgetting for a moment that one has been oppressed oneself.

These monsters likely weren’t born that way; many of them must have been created through the processes of everyday life and the psychological fallout of lives not-well-lived, of relationships bent and distorted out of shape and proportion. If people were more attentive to and skilled at channeling these drives and inner flows into something life-affirming that grants happiness and connection rather than powerless dissatisfaction, perhaps not as many would devolve into such cruelty. At least it’s a thought worth entertaining. These are extreme cases, but perhaps they highlight key dynamics behind some of the “evil that men do” even in less obvious cases. Can “fucking like a beast” help to prevent the birth of evil in our midst?

Phew, that’s a dark and heavy issue to consider. I bring it up chiefly to underscore that we are dealing with forces so strong that they can destroy people from the inside out; they can rot our souls and unleash evil among us. For most of us, we may not turn into monsters; but to be reliably good, to be genuinely compassionate, we must establish a cosmoerotic relationship to existence. If we fail to fall in love with life, we live our lives on mute—and if that happens, we may begin to hate life itself and wish for its destruction. To be good we need to feel good, as our actions are driven by emotions. Moral agency, beautiful action; these can spring from righteous anger, sure. But it’s harder to imagine how they would spring from resentment, bitterness, self-loathing, disgust, envy, vengefulness. More likely, they spring from feelings of warmth, joy, and gratitude, wouldn’t you think? So we need to set ourselves up for that.

Let’s take a breath and clear our system of these dark thoughts for now and move on. Back to the main track.

The Child Returns

Now to the interesting part. This is truly the core of this second rule for life: the child-like side of the beast; the inner child’s path. The relationship between the inner child and the beast is that, ironically, we don’t unleash our inner lust for life by “living out the beast” so much as by tending to our inner child, that is, to our wounds and vulnerabilities. This may be counterintuitive to many: How can our most carnal and frustrated longings truly be about our most tender hopes and hurts? Children have little to do—or in any case should have little to do—with the eroticism of adulthood and the beast’s needs that linger in everyday life. Yet, it is only in our capacity as innocent children that we can truly let go, truly love, truly live. Hence, this chapter about “fucking like a beast” leads us inwards, to our inner child, the one that has been forced to inhibit his or her enthusiasm and openness.

I have to admit that I have stalled writing this part for some weeks, as I have found it so difficult to grasp in text, and yet I find it so central and important. Somehow, it is too large and self-evident for me to know where to start, or how to bring it into words.

Eventually, I decided that the best way to convey what I’d like to say is to share some of my own experiences as a point of departure. Here, I cannot hide behind theories and abstractions; I have to speak from the heart, as far as my courage and words can carry me. This is not entirely straightforward, as it involves not only my own vulnerabilities, but my close relationships (in the past, however) and the privacy of other people which I need to respect. So bear with me as I try to strike the right balance, to find the right words. I know that personal experience cannot easily be generalized to the lives of others (a paradox of the self-help genre itself), and that our own life-stories, in many regards, weigh less than what can be shown in empirical research. But I ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt, and see how my words sit with your own experience of life, if they ring hollow or true. Sometimes, that’s the best we can do as authors.

Here goes.

One quiet afternoon, I realized, looking at myself in the mirror, that the child had returned. How did I recognize it? There was no tired lingering sadness in my eyes, and both sides of my face were breaking up in a wide, even smile. Specifically, the left side of my face was smiling along with the rest; something I realized hadn’t happened for many years.[53] I was feeling a certain fullness in my heart, and the “stone” of numb emptiness that had been there throughout life’s ups and downs had lifted. Suddenly, that fullness spread across my face, to my smile, up through the warm glow of my eyes. A well of warm joy had sprung open from deep within, with its source physically felt in my heart, now flowing like a fountain, reflecting back to me in the mirror. My inside experience was validated by an externally visible change in my body, in my very face, an unmistakable sense of peace glowing from my own eyes.

I hurried to look at photographs of myself, from years back, until recently. Consistently, only the right side of my face was smiling, the left subtly slumping. I had believed that I simply had an oblique smile. There was no lack of good moments: of successes, of praise, of adventures, of leisure, of beautiful nature, of romantic outings, of community with family and friends. And, throughout it all, a stunted smile. I had thought that was the nature of my face, a physical trait. Here and now, the mirror was telling me otherwise: the truth was that, through so many journeys and fine moments, I hadn’t had one genuine smile for years and years. For how long, I couldn’t remember.

I had actually suspected this to be the case; one night about a year earlier I had woken up with some anxiety at night, and looked deep into the mirror as I went through the emotions behind the anxiety. I saw great sadness. I saw anger. And then a somewhat cruel smile—yes, also even at both sides—appeared. It was the smile of a moviestar coupled with an intense, razor sharp gaze. No, actually, it wasn’t “somewhat cruel”. It was princely, perfect, demonic; of supreme self-confidence. It almost spoke: If life is absurd and tough, and doesn’t treat me well, I will still outsmart y’all and win in the end. It was Satan’s rebellion against God and all the angels, knocking on my conscious awareness at 3 a.m. Strangely, even at that late hour, I looked more handsome than I’d ever seen, given the sheer strength of my princely presence. But it wasn’t peaceful. It was the vengeful substitute for happiness. But through its self-evident confidence, one I subtly recognized as my own, it was as if that place within me said to me: ”Don’t worry, punk, I’ve gotcha covered.” And, yes, the heart sparked into aliveness, with a fire within stemming from a distant place beyond all good and evil. The cold and mute place in my chest was, for a moment, tingling with a strange kind of elation.

As I went back to bed, I tucked this experience away as an important hint to understanding my own inner workings. I figured that the dark prince who had visited me at night was probably not what I wanted as my source of inner confidence, nor as my only refuge for a true smile. But I didn’t see that evensided smile again for over a year. I thought that smile was only possible if laced with anger.

Now it was there again, but without any hint of cruelty; there was peace and joy shining from my face. The same even smile but without its deal with the devil.

What life situation had brought this on? Had I experienced some great success? Some revindication of old slights? No, in fact, I was in the aftermath of a great personal crisis of love. A person, to whom I was romantically attached and connected, and who I loved very dearly, had fallen in love with somebody else. I had experienced great pain. I had to struggle days, weeks, months, with complications, indecisiveness, confusion, bitterness and other debilitatingly difficult emotions.

And there it is, the central principle of how “the child returns”: It is only when I was capable of feeling the deep pain of my old wounds, now forced open by a difficult situation, that something could be budged within me, that the old wounds could heal and the cosmoerotic flows could burst through and replenish my system. There, when the pain had been truly felt, I also regained my capacity to feel childlike joy, romantic love, and a sense of being truly alive. Gone was every cruel and vengeful hint in the smile: the angry, sly eyes of the embittered, locked-up inner beast—handsome as he is, the devil. The eyes looking back at me were eminently joyful, peaceful, grateful, and kind. They were kind to me, to my inner child. A loving, relaxed gaze met me in the mirror, a gaze that could afford to love me, because it flowed from an abundant source of simple happiness.

To be sure, it was when this crisis of love was subsiding, in moments when I thought it was going to be alright (which did turn out to be true, after some ifs and buts), that the well of loving joy sprang open. I don’t feel that joy all the time: but the subtle, almost unnoticeable, “stone of numbness” in my heart is gone. It melted away. There has been an inner nuclear explosion, one that melts stone formed in ages past. The child has returned, and with it, the beast. And, for what it’s worth, some pretty profound sexual experiences also materialized in my life and brought a sense of general satisfaction.

The point here is that the unpleasant (“negative”) emotions are sensations at a certain level of subtlety, just like the pleasant ones. When, throughout my life, I had unconsciously inhibited my capacity to feel these negative emotions, the price I unwittingly paid was an equal incapacity to feel correspondingly positive emotions. I became stunted. I became inhibited. I became mute and mutilated. But my lust for life didn’t go away: it regrouped deep within; it even became sly and vengeful so as to find new ways to push through and get its way.

I have thus come to believe that the strongest path to liberation of our cosmoerotic potentials, is, yes “fucking like a beast” with all of the adult capacities it may require, but primarily and most importantly, to to feel and fully contain our most painful wounds. That’s where our inhibitions lie, and at that subtle level is where the inner beast truly lives. And that’s where reasonable (not perfect) satisfaction with life comes from. I return to this topic, the practical aspects of it, as the book unfolds.

As a last few words on this matter, then, what compass do we have for knowing when we’re approaching this inner liberation of the beast? Here’s the best I’ve got (until we get into later chapters): feel into your heart, feel into your belly. If there is a “subtle smile” in your belly, you’re getting there. If there is a “spark of joy”, indeed, one that is indistinguishable from love, in your heart, you’re getting there. Tune in to that spark and follow it. It’s a rollercoaster, because it tends to lead you on to braver and more dangerous paths, with more pain involved. But there is something to those “true emotions”—the truth, justice, and beauty of the beast. I suggest we make it our business to let this inner spark guide us, through pleasure, towards satisfaction, through pain and suffering, and eventually towards a peace of mind that meets the world with a genuinely felt: “Why thank you!”

If those two inner signs are unavailable—if there is muteness—then practice noticing even the slightest hints of aliveness. You’re not dead, you’re on mute. Someone stopped by and turned down the master volume button.

The child just wants to be safe and play from a place of innocent exploration. And the beast just wants to fuck. If it gets locked up, it will always sneak around and try to get back at the world from its places in the shadows. The adult wanted to protect the child, but ended up locking it up and throwing away the key. But the key is always-already in your pocket. We can begin to feel at home in the universe again, expelling old demons that haunt us at night. The gaze of our lover’s eyes can become a quiet, cosmic homestead. And so can the gaze in the mirror.

Hence, my comrade, the Wisdom of the West, the wisdom that connects Freud’s libido to the spiritual potentials of Compassion and Transcendence is just that: Fuck like a beast. The Wisdom of the East, and of the contemplative traditions at large, can hardly be overrated; the soaring heights and depths of spiritual experience explored through them, in so many different ways, truly constitute one of the hallmarks of human achievement. I wish to take nothing away from that acknowledgement. My argument is only that serious spiritual practice, to be approached responsibly, must be tempered by Freud and rock’n’roll.

This chapter has a theme song. It’s Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) by W.A.S.P.

Third Commandment: Live Sincerely, Ironically

“I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.”

—Arthur C. Clarke[54]

Now we approach one of the most strange and complex commandments. It is a commandment that requires great creativity to obey. In my experience, very few people understand it and know how to follow it. It comprises a subtle art unto itself.

It states that you must live by sincere irony.

Sincere irony is the principle that you need to be as ironic as possible in order to be truly sincere and authentic (and vice versa). The two only look like opposites—in reality, they are two sides of the same coin. Not only that: the deeper your irony goes, the greater sincerity you can muster and the more authentic life you can create. At least, this is increasingly the case in today’s cultural landscape.

People either fail at the sincerity part—getting stuck in the existential poverty of irony, sarcasm, and skepticism—or they fail at the irony part, thereby lacking the skepticism to commit to something that has been thoroughly questioned and scrutinized. In today’s world, many are sick and tired of irony and understandably want no more of it. They complain about how there is no real piety and fullness where there is irony and distancing, that you cannot have real authentic connection if you are being ironic. But nothing could be more wrong.

If you delve deeper into what you sincerely believe, what you are most real about, you always hit a point where your drive to find what is true and real behooves you to question everything, to be skeptical, to keep an ironic distance. But irony and skepticism feed no human spirits—maybe our egos at times, as we can take swipes and reveal the faults of others, but not our spirit. So if you’re entirely honest about it, you always need something to believe in, something to cherish, to worship. And irony or skepticism, for their part, must also be subjected to the same scrutiny as everything else: they must be applied to themselves. If you are skeptical about your own skepticism, doesn’t that make you a believer?

There is almost mathematical precision to this: being ironic towards life is an untenable position, but so is being sincere. Rather, there appears to be a higher synthesis, hidden in plain sight. Sincere irony.

How, then, does one coordinate the principle of irony with the principle of irony, saving both our quivering hearts and our commitment to truth? We shall peel off the layers of this question one by one, until we will see how we can reap all manner of benefits by obeying this commandment—including, as we shall see, saving God from Nietzschean murder.

Irony Brings Trust

By way of a first example, let us look at the issue of trust—something normally closely associated with being sincere. As an author of this book, how do I build trust with the reader? It’s a valid question. Trust is hard to come by these days. It’s pretty easy to lose, too.

So why does irony bring trust? Before we get there, let’s look deeper into trust itself. Mutual trust generally consists of four dimensions:

competence (or credibility, that you know the other person is capable of doing what you need them to do),

goodwill (that you have reason to believe in the benevolent intentions of the other),

reliability (that what is agreed upon or claimed will be lived up to, most of the time), and

alignment (that our interests align and don’t contradict one another).

If all of these four are in place, a solid foundation of mutual trust can form, from which beneficial and creative collaborations can flourish.[55] When people build trust in e.g. work relationships, they tend to forget about the last one.

An often overlooked secret to building trust is to reveal to others what you really want, and to ask the same of them. People will often gladly tell you. Find people that want, not necessarily the exact same, but similar things that can be truly aligned with your goals. Then you know that they will genuinely wish for your success (in a deep and wide sense of the term), and they know that you genuinely wish for theirs. We move together, as people like to say, “at the speed of trust”.

Strange as it may sound, my main method for this trust-building with the reader is irony. Slightly crazy people like myself, who say unusual things, invoke a natural level of suspicion in readers and listeners. It comes with the territory. But by adopting an ironic stance, I am conveying to you that I’m not taking myself too seriously (for instance, I am challenging one of the most read self-help books in the world, but still admit to my own mediocrity). In my presentation of my self there is room for critique, for questioning, for jokes, for open ends.

That is the magic of irony, if done correctly and with the right kind of twinkle in the eye. If I went on like a frenzied agitator while speaking about twelve rules for living a good life, you’d be right to suspect me of tunnel vision, fanaticism, or hubris. The fact that I’m approaching the whole thing like more of a joke shows you that, in the greater scheme of things, at least I know when I am saying something rather outrageous, and I understand that, at the end of the day, the joke is on me. At least I know that while I do act as a comedian at times (this most Satanic of professions), I am also the butt of the joke. It shows you that I have at least some ability to take an outside perspective on how my message is perceived and taken in. Irony is, strangely enough, a token of my sanity. My writer’s voice becomes competent, reliable, and well-intentioned to those readers who catch the underlying irony because the very fact of writing this way shows that I must be a person who is careful and self-reflective and doesn’t get stuck in one tunnel of the mind. As it were, the use of irony grounds the dangerous electric wire of authenticity and hope, so that a stronger current can run through it.

The mastery over irony allows, at least in our cultural context of so many peddlers of messages and ideas, for sincerity to blossom. One has to display one’s own weaknesses and limitations for people to know that what they’re getting is, after all, the real thing. I’m saving you the trouble of joking at my expense and revealing my weaknesses and intentions, because they’re already revealed and analyzed asunder for your enjoyment (but do feel free to add your own critiques and jokes!). And this requires a certain stance, a stance of ironic sincerity, or sincere irony, whichever formulation you prefer. The two qualities contain one another; they are conjoined in cosmic dance, a yin-and-yang; a Shiva-Shakti act of revolutionary lovemaking.

It’s a riskier and, I would argue, gutsier stance than being either ironic or directly sincere. It’s a carefully crafted both-and. It’s the jiu-jitsu path to sincere relatedness. If we’re ironic about our life projects, then we can also allow ourselves a few grandiose dreams, a bit of French revolution in the air, even a bit of religious fervor, of piety and faith. And that’s something modern human beings have been lacking. Who would have thought that faith and piety would return through irony and its God of cruel jokes?

Did It Whose Way?

One can even argue that there’s a three-step process of personal growth and cultural expression: first, authenticity/sincerity; second, irony/nihilism; and third, sincere irony. The third comes in many flavors that capture slightly different dimensions: informed naivety, magical realism, playful struggle, pragmatic romanticism, even conservative radicalism. I’ll break those down later

First let me illustrate by way of Frank Sinatra’s song, My Way. You remember the song, don’t you? Sing it silently to yourself with the help of these lyrics. Or, better yet, play the song or look up all five verses online.

And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I'll say it clear
I'll state my case, of which I'm certain
I've lived a life that's full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way

[...]

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows
I took the blows
And did it my way

When we read this we hear a clarion call to authenticity, to being true to ourselves. We hear Sinatra, singing in 1969, at the fairly ripe age of 53, a modern anthem of American (and Western) individualism, reflecting a long and rich life experience. Even a bit of wisdom, albeit the Wisdom of the West. Like you, I’ve also struggled to cut loose from societal expectations and inhibitions, and I too long to reflect back at my life, feeling, in truth, that I did it my way. I remember a good friend who would listen to the song alone in the car during a period in her life where she was mourning the time lost on the wrong professional path. Eventually, she did break free, went back to school, reeducated herself to be a medical doctor, and attained a fulfilling career, somewhat late in life. And, in the end, I think she stopped listening to this old song, because she could truly say: she did it her way. Here, you have a hymn to authenticity, to a sincere life: For what is a man, what has he got? / If not himself, then he has naught / To say the things he truly feels / And not the words of one who kneels. Seriously, my eyes tear up when I hear that. These words speak.

Beautiful. Now consider these little factoids. Who actually wrote this song? It was not Frank Sinatra. It was Paul Anka, another singer (“Oooh pleeaase, staaay by me, Diiiaa-naaa!”). And how old was he when he wrote this old man’s reflection on a life well lived? 26. And what kind of life is Paul Anka known for having lived? One of Beverly Hills decadence with Swedish (etc.) Hollywood housewives who openly admitted to being gold diggers. Hardly a pinnacle of wisdom and authentic self-expression. Most likely, in a stroke of marketing genius, Anka placed the song in the reverberating vocal chords of the person from which it would be best received. The melody of the song was bought from an obscure Frenchman by Paul Anka for one dollar[56], and Sinatra showed up to their meeting with a number of mafioso types. Sinatra then went on to use the same song for the next 25 years or so, always doing a new comeback with a new farewell tour. Sinatra’s daughter later revealed that he came to hate his signature song: “He didn't like it. That song stuck and he couldn't get it off his shoe. He always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent.”[57]

You’d have to look far for an ounce of artistic authenticity behind this song. Every penny was squeezed systematically out of this piece of poetry. That’s the song’s real bottom line. The anthem of modern Western authenticity is a sleazy marketing ploy. “Once you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything”, is a line from The Sound of Music. Well—once you know your marketing, you can sell most anything. There’s another, darker, snippet of the Wisdom of the West.

And now we’re getting into the second stage: irony, or even nihilism. A righteous rebellion stirs in the ironic mind: “Not me, I won’t be the sucker, credulous of every ploy, trend, and social norm.” There’s one born every minute, they say, but not this one. I’ll question, I will tear down the facades, I will joke back, I will study the minutiae of social control, I will fight power structures, I will “deconstruct” your messages and marketing, and I will see the ideology and self-interest behind your purported virtues and values. In the end, the joke won’t be on me, it will be on whomever thought they could lure me, fool me, and rule me.

Armed with an ironic stance towards society and its surfaces, revealing the emptiness behind the words, the techniques used to manipulate us, and the crude workings of power, this type of mind becomes like a Houdini, breaking out of the prisons that others have created with their subtle-strings-attached offerings. And so a form of grim nihilism creeps in. Frank Sinatra is not singing about being authentic: he’s really singing about consumer capitalism, about using the longings of people with suppressed dreams to make a buck and, while you’re at it, get a Beverly Hills house and the gold digger wife that comes with it. The call for authenticity is, in itself, another feature of the marketing ploy.

But, then again, if we’re always dispelling the enacted enchantments of everyone else, where does this leave us? It leaves us in a place where there is nothing left to believe in, to commit to, to live for, except the resistance and irony itself. And that’s a pretty high price to pay.

Enter a new sincerity; an ironic sincerity. This is the third stage in this model. What if you do realize exactly how Sinatra’s song was conjured by a sly mind that wanted to play on your vulnerable strings—and still you choose to believe it? What if there is a place beyond pure irony, an irony taken so far that it turns on itself? A skepticism that is skeptical of itself?[58] Then the irony inverts, and, like a well springing open, something else can flow from it: hope, idealism, sincerity, connection; yes, even childlike trust, religious faith, spiritual piety. This faith is made of other stuff than blind or naive belief; it grows from the ruins of an ironic revolt against the lies and obfuscations of the world. Its hymn is a subtle one, a vague whisper: After deconstruction, reconstruction must flow.

So once you’ve learned to question the world and to pick it apart you begin, with sincere irony, to reconstruct it playfully. You begin learning the art of mastering the many placebo effects, for the benefit of our own happiness and sanity, and for the benefit of others. Here’s a sweet pill to swallow by the American novelist, David Foster Wallace:

“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern[59] insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”

This is sincere irony expressed better than I could have caught it. It’s from his A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, published in 1998. A voice ahead of its time. By making ourselves intentionally gullible, for just a moment, we get all the real (even biochemically observable) advantages of a stronger placebo effect. One such placebo effect is happiness, optimism, a sense of direction, a sense of agency and even free will, a higher “subjective state” in everyday life.

We meet Morpheus trying to peddle us a red pill (the grim truth), and sure, what the hell, we’ll take it. But! Then we swiftly snatch the blue one (happy illusion) out of his other hand and gobble it down, too, before he can stop us. If Neo would have done that, he would have beaten the Matrix much more easily, and he would have had more fun along the way, too. Too bad nobody told him about the third option, the ironically sincere one.

How does being sincerely ironic empower us, then? Think about it. If you internalize the ironic ridicule of others before they have a chance of applying it to you, you can more easily shrug it off; you can work from a place of near invulnerability, and thus dare to be truly vulnerable; and thus bravely constructive, finding and suggesting new pathways for yourself and society. Mastery over irony, turned-on-itself, allows for new sincerity. And extreme sincerity becomes the sharpest weapon of irony, because it’s so damn outrageous. This does not shield you from constructive criticism; rather it opens you up to it, because you always already expect to be incomplete, to be open-ended, to be improved upon. A few examples from this book: me admitting that I don’t believe in self-help books (as an end in itself), but still writing one in order to sell the other books, which I do believe in; me admitting that I’m awfully mediocre; admitting that I got up at 3 am to look myself in the mirror and greet my own evil smile lurking behind my all-too-human anxiety. I open myself up in a manner that both builds trust and disarms the skeptic with self-distance and irony… and will get me a few new haters, too.

In the face of every “how dare you!” that inevitably comes my way, irony shields me. I am not shielded in the sense that “I tense up and lock it outside”. Again, it is more like the grounding of an electric wire that carries the flow of my dearest truths (to be improved upon by you, the reader). Yes, I will be laughed at and looked down upon, accused of “cringe”, eyes will be rolled and all of that. But the very acknowledgement of that fact releases a creative spark, a freedom of expression that runs deeper than any bill of rights could guarantee.

And so I can say, with all the force of conviction, that sincere irony, in the hands of sublimely mediocre and ridiculously ordinary people, will change the face of the world. Because that’s where the wild things are. The sincerely ironic can reconstruct the world by virtue of their untamed imagination, which comes with the trust they build and the devotion they foster. The child returns; the beast is unleashed.

Where, then, does this leave us with Frank Sinatra’s song? Look at it this way: The fact that the conception of the song and its powerful lyrics involved a clever marketing stunt does not need to take anything away from its beauty. If it is true that all that ever reaches us is not the inherent “essence” of the thing we experience, but rather a surface that stimulates something in us, a surface that touches our senses and moves something inside of us—then does it not follow that the quality of the song belongs to the personal experience of the listener, rather than to the motives of its creators?

It has been found that larger pills make for greater placebo effects—because people believe in them more. So the authentic effect goes up with more fake properties to fool our senses, to make us fill in the blanks; this is true even down to the biochemical level. Placebo effects also increase when people are uncritical, more suggestible. Belief is a real force in our lives. The key is to find a way to put the mind in a state of deep belief and healthy skepticism simultaneously. Can that be done? Yes, if you believe it. If you let yourself be benevolently fooled, there are real heights to climb, real heavens to visit.

Again, you can see that we’re taking the blue pill, after we’ve taken the red one. The witch's brew must contain both in equal and proportionally increasing measure. Stir, and it’s a purple cocktail, an elixir from the crossroads of fact and fiction. It is by enriching our own capacity to experience the magic of reality that we can reclaim the qualities of hope, of progress, of faith, even after our ironic distancing from them. And so we can begin to find the nuggets of beauty in the cultural ruins that irony and nihilism leave behind: My Way may not be the result of the trembling heart of Frank Sinatra looking back upon his life, but it is the result of the sense of freedom and individual dignity offered by the American culture of that period, for all of its faults and vices. It hits home for many of us because it still expresses this collective experience, without which the song could never have been imagined in the first place. And so, we can enjoy it with good conscience, taking the power back of our own construction of meaning in the world; intentionally making ourselves credulous, gullible for just a moment. We can use it to, among other things, create a sense of freedom in ourselves.

So after “deconstructing” and picking apart the many tricks played upon us, we can now “reconstruct” new tricks for the sake of magic and direction in our lives, and in the world around us. We can become our own wizards of Oz (and of one another), and begin to deliberately run the machinery of our own illusions, re-enchanting reality. Dorothy Gale found a little unassuming man behind the machinery that ran the smokescreens of the “great wizard of Oz”, and shouted accusingly “You’re a bad man!”, angry for having been fooled. To which he replied: “I’m not a bad man, just a bad wizard”. In the end, the wizard turned out to be (sublimely) mediocre, like the rest of us.

Everything is magic, except the magician.

But we can take up the mantle of all dispelled conjurors, and together cocreate a more enchanted reality to live in. Dorothy could have stayed behind the curtains and learned a thing or two about running the machine herself. Would that prospect not lead us towards a more compelling open horizon than pure irony? We have worlds to construct, and new sources of magic to discover. That is ultimately the reason I feel this stance, sincere irony, can salvage our souls and let us struggle playfully together towards beautifully impossible but tremendously important goals. At the end of irony, at its omega point, where skepticism is turned on itself, lies the spark of creativity that belongs only to the faithful.

Jesus: Lost and Found

At one point or another, I suppose it is inevitable that we should ruin this dinner party by talking about religion.

As William James, this American “father of psychology”, wrote in his 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Religion, whatever it is, is man’s total reaction upon life”. It’s how we relate to the whole. Also known as: “the question of life, the universe, and everything”. Or, simply: What is of ultimate significance? What is, when all is said and done, truly important?

Let’s keep this broad view of religion in mind. What, then, can a sincerely ironic stance do for our religious relationship to reality, ourselves, life, the universe, and everything? Where does it leave that “faith” we just spoke of?

Here you can see a similar but distinct progression to the one outlined above: from sincere belief, through nihilism and skepticism, towards sincere irony. If sincerity would mean something like “believe in Jesus as the son of God, and as your personal savior who made miracles happen” where God is the ultimate source of all true, good, and beautiful in the world and the everpresent creator of it all, the nihilistic stance is simply to not believe in any of that: it’s bullshit.

And, of course, it is bullshit. Jesus couldn’t heal the sick, turn water into wine, or walk on water, nor was he born by a virgin, nor was he the son of God, nor was he resurrected. Mohammed couldn’t move a mountain, and Buddha didn’t fly around and cast fireballs (yep, that’s a thing in those scriptures); he didn’t even teleport across the Ganges. And even if God was in the world making miracles happen, why on earth would the focus be on wine and fireworks, or getting the teenage Virgin Mary pregnant without consent? It’s preposterous not only at the level of empirical claims; it’s preposterous at an existential and spiritual level, just too dumb to do any notion of God or [other placeholder of ultimate significance] any justice.

Yeah, yeah, of course we don’t believe in that stuff. But there are mysteries, things beyond our comprehension, things like… special and difficult-to-understand capabilities of rare, accomplished, spiritual masters, right? Things like Rupert Sheldrake’s biology of morphic fields, new frontiers of science that rediscover spiritual perennial truths beyond the rational mind. Or at least the possibility thereof. There are synchronicities and serendipities too unlikely to have occurred naturally. There are energies. Frequencies.

No, it’s all bullshit. There aren’t any miracles. Not even just a little, not even in a profound transrational sense, not even in the distant East. So stop it. No, Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of telepathic dogs isn’t correct. There aren’t any morphic fields and dogs aren’t telepathic. Certainly, with Joseph Campbell, that great interpreter of myths, we can look at “walking on water” as a metaphor for “mastering our unconscious” and so on; but believing in the miracle itself very demonstrably does harm. I won’t bore you with the work of the “new atheists” who labor to show this, but they do have a point.

It can feel a bit brutal, but it’s time to take the red pill. We live in a world entirely devoid of all magic and all miracles. That is to say, we live in a world where things are caused by other things in replicable, if complex, manners. That’s the same as understanding that there are no nooks and crannies left of magic or miracles, not even in farthest reaches of the mind, the universe, the far East, life, and everything. In this sense all “metaphysical” claims of all the religions are entirely false; and there is really no need for a shred of mercy or sentimentality about it.

Well yes, I see what you’re saying Hanzi, but…

No, seriously, stop it. You’re not doing yourself or anyone else any favors. There is no “but”, no “both and” here, no “higher synthesis”, no hidden pattern in profound symbols that reveals an esoteric truth that unlocks your chosenness, no meditative insight that saves the metaphysical claims of any of the religions… No multiperspectivalism that puts you into contact with the indigenous spirit worlds. No healing practice that sends energies through the deepest layers of consciousness across continents.

That’s what killing God feels like: it’s a brutal dead-end. It’s not supposed to feel good or right. It is what it is: the death of ideas that are false. And then we go after all the saints and sages (they’re mediocre), every miracle, every siddhi, every magic residual in the known universe. Kill, kill, kill. Die, die, die.

And together with the magic, we also kill off all crazy guru abuses, many of the cults (but cults can and do still show up in political and self-development guises), and our tendency to disregard and disrespect science. We also kill off New Age abuse of desperate people, the cruel commercialization of the human soul where sad people pay for expensive crystals. Oh yeah, and then we kill the notion of “the soul” because that’s also magical thinking. Santa, too.

And now, if the red pill has been properly gobbled down, and only now, do we take the blue pill. It’s the ultimate marshmallow test of humanity. Real magic is felt, not believed. Or let me restate that a bit more precisely: Magic is an experiential, not an objective, category. Magic is never in the thing itself, it’s always in the context, in the relationship. Magic lives in the larger weave of relationships within which “the thing” arises as a part of our experience. It’s about the sense of connection to wholeness, to oneness, that is accessed through our way of experiencing that particular thing. So, sure, a new agey crystal or gem can be magical and in some sense have magic powers (disregarding the not-so-magical underbelly of that mining industry…). But it’s not the crystal itself: it’s what it awakens in us and how it helps us see the beauty of the world.

We can reconstruct God, yes, but only after we’re done properly killing them. Now, we are free to reconstruct religion, to delve head-first into the faith of the faithless (following the words of the philosopher Simon Critchley).

So the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, can indeed be a better one than an absurd “42”.[60] Once you’ve vaccinated spirituality with relentless skepticism and ironic distance and the most ruthless nihilism imaginable, you can begin to reclaim the spiritual realm. If you want to be crude about it, you could say that spiritual experience exists within and beyond the traditional religions, but that it becomes a good and constructive force in our day and age only on the other side of atheism. By first mastering atheism, for all of its unimaginative and judgmental simple-mindedness, we can unleash the power of spirituality in our lives and beyond. Religion and its rapture are recaptured from the monster of modern life.

Enter sincere irony: the teachings of ironic prophets. The religions that can grow and prosper in this realm aren’t exactly religions as we normally think of them.[61] They excavate and revive not the metaphysical and miraculous claims of the contemplative traditions of religions, but their existential truths. And yes, the religions are true, they were right, as all of them point to insights that are correct and profound but of which modern mainstream consciousness remains oblivious. And what a strange oblivion—that we discovered the greatest truths centuries ago but then forgot them!

Take Jesus, for example. It is true that we lost him as the literal son of a heavenly father and cosmic creator in our merciless purge of all magic from the world. We lost him, of course, in the sense that we no longer believe in what are, if you’re entirely sober about it, childish bullshit fairy tales. But now we can find him again, in a more mature and adult relationship. He’s not our savior or daddy figure. But he’s not entirely wrong, either: non-judgment and forgiveness really are higher truths if you look at it, there are very good reasons to try to find universal love for all and to live by it; and, yes, we really are sinners in that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as inherently good, but rather become good by seeing how we are flawed and limited in our moral and cognitive capacities. And yes, there really is a kingdom of God within us, waiting to be discovered at the highest heights of our inner subjective states—states that also reach into the depth and core of our being. And yes, people who came before us really did go through torture for us to be here—not just Jesus, but all the martyrs and heroes of humanist values who gave us freedom, dignity, and equality—so a little damned gratitude wouldn’t be such a bad idea. As far as I can see, Jesus has more insightful things to say than almost anyone I can think of. Hallelujah.

Likewise, with the Buddha, we can see that you literally can advance through the stages of meditative absorption if you diligently practice meditation—the so-called jhanas—and that this even shows on a brain scanner. And yes, these stages of increasing absorption are roughly yet correctly described, and they can be taught and learned. And yes, our desires are always functions of our own minds and end up being frustrated one way or another, and we do well to transform their nature towards becoming less self-centered. And yes, we really do experience a loss of the discrete “sense of self” if we reach the deeper meditative and “higher” inner states. And all experience, pleasurable or painful, even the sense of having a separate soul, melts away in a radical emptiness and sense of ultimate freedom if we study it closely and attentively enough. Once we identify with the deeper layers of the mind, and with the consciousness of which we are a part, we can easily see that doing harm to others, to anyone, is in a sense doing harm to ourselves. So even the law of Karma has something going for it: What goes around comes around. It’s true even on a practical level. On average and over time, we tend to benefit from kind actions, when they are performed with discernment (so: actions that are just, as we shall return to in coming chapters). The more we focus on others, the easier we usually have maintaining a good subjective state ourselves, and genuinely kind actions tend to reward us with nice surprises later down the road, if seldom in the ways we expected. So the focus on compassion is simply, well, correct. Even if counter-examples show up in the short run (we try to be kind and feel cheated, etc.), Karma is certainly worth believing in, sincerely, ironically.

If the Buddhist truths get too boring for us, we can plunge deeper still—into their Hindu and Vedantic roots, and burn in the sun that comes if you fixate your mind in its entirety upon what is ultimate, what is “absolute” rather than relative (all the facts of the world being relative). That stuff gets you going, it’s religion on fire. It sets everything, everywhere, all at once aflame, including the grimmest and most tragic sides of existence which you now see as part of the greatness and seriousness of ultimate reality. The Bhagavad Gita’s most famous passage says it all: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.”

Speaking of feeling one great unification under God: With Islam we can experience a sense of wholeness or oneness that has been shown empirically to support happiness and wellbeing (whereas the bleak belief structures of Buddhism, “everything is suffering”, actually tend to make you less happy unless paired with extensive contemplative practice). By focusing on one principle, one God, one path, we can feel more at home in the universe. Research has even shown that Muslims have the highest score of sense of “oneness” (which in turn correlates with life satisfaction) and atheists have the lowest.[62] Oneness is a genuinely psychologically helpful fiction, like the belief in free will. People feel better and are healthier if they believe in free will, even if it factually speaking doesn’t exist.[63] You get a sense of direction and control, and that affects how your mind self-organizes and avoids dumb excuses. Praise Allah for those placebo effects!

With indigenous religions and rituals, we can begin to reconnect to our bodies, to our communities, to nature, to the complexities of the world around us. We can come into contact with spirit worlds, not as a source of magic in the literal sense, but as a source of relationality and connection, not to mention a sense of enchantment. How inventive we must be, and how attentive to respecting the wisdom of the oldest cultures on the planet, to tap into this ancient homestead of the human psyche! Animist worldviews, for all the differences between them, were in some way or form how humans lived and expressed themselves for tens of thousands of years. They make up our mental homestead. It does seem plausible to think that what humans adapted to for so long also makes sense at a psychological level, more so than our modern lives. Arguably, the more we connect to this source, the greater role indigenous wisdom can play in creating new forms of sustainable life and community around the world. This is a genuinely exciting prospect that more and more people have been exploring the last few years.

I would even include, among the things we can playfully reconstruct, the zeal of the revolutionary, of the communist, the anarchist: the belief in the possibility of overturning the injustices of society, of imagining new worlds for humans to live in. This is the fire of the French Revolution and its sense that this moment can birth new worlds through an uncompromising commitment to justice. Many of the people who were part of anarchist Catalonia in the 1930s later remembered it as the happiest and most beautiful days of their lives. What a source of energy and agency such “revolutionary happiness” can bring![64] “The irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” as philosophers Hardt and Negri once wrote about, can be channeled, if it is only approached responsibly; that is to say, playfully and ironically. And, of course, one must understand that there is no such thing as what Leon Trotsky called “the permanent revolution”; revolution occurs in moments of seismic change, in social and psychological earthquakes; it is analogous to falling in love, as discussed by the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni. You can’t always be falling in love; it’s a transformation that occurs a few times in one’s life, if one is lucky (no matter what people say in pop songs and speeches to spouses). Between such “moments of movement”, there is institution, habit—longer stretches of mediocrity. But still, these moments—of the dramatic, the tremendous, the musical—are real enough, and they can be sparked. They really do happen in people’s lives; a sense of complete, shared ecstasy taking over one’s entire being, and they really can change society. And they can at least partly be rekindled here and there in our lives.

Beyond the political passions that stir the soul, even the occult can be invited (or show up uninvited in the basement, as it usually does): dark rituals, satanic cabals, sex magic, the “left hand path”, and so on. Sure, the Order of the Golden Dawn never quite delivered on its mysteries and magic spells, nor did any of the many esoteric groups that sprang up around the last turn of the century. But reinvented magical rituals that draw upon the inner beast and its carnal desires, or upon unfiltered dreams and raw emotions, can certainly release strong forces within our lives, at least during short, revolutionary moments. For what it’s worth, such forces inspired rock bands by the dozen, too. The variety of practices called “chaos magick” involve making ourselves entirely suggestible, entirely open to new beliefs, so as to actively reshape our own minds—in effect hypnotizing ourselves. Chaos Magick and other occult paths can help us hack our minds, dramatically and profoundly: they include the “fuck like a beast” insight to a degree that Christianity and classical (theravadan) Buddhism do not. Or, less drastically, there is the ongoing popularization of BDSM and so-called “sex positive” events. Tantric sex is part of such explorations, as is tantra in the deeper and original sense (spirituality beginning from embodied experience) and the careful use of sacred and mysterious symbols. Pagan revivals of Odin/Wotan and summer solstice rituals can also play a part here, but make sure not to link these to those crazy far-right ideas. It’s just too good to be properly pagan for a while not to try it.

[If you’re reading this in a setting where it’s not entirely inappropriate, you may now roar like there’s no tomorrow and a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie is about to begin.]

And, of course, there’s the whole reinvention of psychedelic culture and practice, making it more therapeutic, science-based, and responsible (a promising area—I’m also connected to the Psychedelic Society in the UK and I do respect their work—but it is one in which I’d like to see more caution and healthy conservatism; addiction and psychiatric harm from psychedelia are real things, as are abuses within this field). However, I’ll leave that last discussion to others.

Simply stated: There are a lot of blue pills to take, and they can bring us closer to truth, rather than farther away from it. This includes “transrational” truth: existential truths that lie beyond our analytical minds, but somehow ring true from a place within and beyond us.

Oh, and let’s just be honest—how we long for the ecstatic, for some real magic in our lives, for what life was supposed to be. As the mystical traditions taught, and the religions hinted at in their mythologies, truth brings us closer to magic, while illusion has it that the world is plain and mundane. In that sense, all the religions were right, and today’s prevailing atheist-rationalist-materialist-reductionist-scientist worldview is plainly false. It’s a magical world; so wake up and play.

Praise the Shallow

I realize that I am smorgasbording here: a little of this religion, a little of that one, then ketchup.

I imagine a question has risen for some of the more seriously religious readers. They might think that Hanzi takes a too sloppy and superficial view of religion, one that does not allow for serious commitment and depth that pertains to following one particular path. Should, then, religion and spirituality always remain piecemeal, only a collage of different trends that happen to pop up on the internet? What about going deep into and following a tradition, a contemplative path set by centuries of hard-earned human experience by the practitioners before us? Will deeper truths really reveal themselves to us if we treat these human accomplishments without respect? There’s Kierkegaard’s old “either or”: make up your damned mind and take a leap of faith to live for something, and commit to that path! Or, with another saying that recurs these days from serious spiritual practitioners and followers of a path: “You have to eat the whole fish.” That is to say, to reap the full benefits of a spiritual path, of a contemplative religion or form of mysticism, you have to work according to the internal logic of that path and stay on it, like any good training program. Otherwise, it’s like you’re hopping back and forth from golf to basketball to chess—and neither path will open up and reveal its secrets to you, and none of them will yield to mastery. And it’s mastery that transforms you.

Okay, fair point. Well, the problem is—and I’ve seen this again and again—is that the whole fish eats you. You think you’re going on a deep spiritual path, with your critical mind intact, but before you know it, you’re posting childish gobbledigook about miracles on Facebook to prove that your religion is the true one after all. You have lost touch with all shared reality, and as such you’ve lost all relevance to the world we live in. Why does this happen? Because you invest your life's entire project in the narrative of one religion, to the extent that you so badly want all of its premises to be true, to be The Truth. In the end, at some deep level, you sell out the truth for some emotional and spiritual candybars (for some perceived short-term inner rewards).

In that act of selling out, there’s a threshold we can pass with a great price to pay: a kind of sanity we’ll lose and likely never recover. You thought you were an intrepid explorer of the kingdom within, but what you’ve become is actually no different from a Flat Earther. And then you start trying to convert everyone else to your beliefs, while bankrupting your own philosophy by tying it to your blatantly incorrect assumptions about reality.

I’m not saying we can’t go deep into one tradition, or that it should always be avoided. All I am saying is that taking the red pill first, and then trying out several blue pills, is the safer and more productive way of being religious. From a position of sincere irony, you can go deeper and deeper into the paths that open to you. You make certain that you don’t get sucked into one tunnel-visioned perspective, consuming you like a raw, rattling fish.

Many of these topics of “reinventing religion” have been explored by other works, like my friend Nick Jankel’s Spiritual Atheist, or why not Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has labored extensively to meet the meaning-crisis with a reinvention of religion for our time, sketching the deep structures of a reconstructed religiosity. Suffice to say here that sincere irony allows for the multi-pronged open exploration of faith, for the reenchantment of a world left in spiritual shambles after the death of God. As such, we can meditate, pray, dream, play, and practice our “spiritual style”[65] with no sense of shame or embarrassment, with no apologies made to all the dumb atheists out there.

We can even try to speak our own truths about the great cosmic joke, and become ironic prophets of our own—and of one another. As such, the field of religion, of all of the religions and their perennial wisdoms (which are related but distinct), even of revolutions and the occult all open up to us. We can begin to practice piety in a space that is safer and compatible not only with modern science, but also with critical thinking, and with the sincere irony that increasingly marks our digital age.

But remember. All the religious and spiritual experiences of the world will not efface broken dishwashers and people cutting in line at the bus stop. Religion and zeal can be reinvented and rediscovered with sincere irony, as can wisdom, faith, rapture, ritual, mystery, and contemplation, but they only ever return us, after some wild roller coaster rides through passion, over transcendence, and into inner peace, to sublime mediocrity. It is this sublime mediocrity, this inescapable “ground of being”, that we’re perfecting.

So, once you’ve truly killed God, you can take the blue pill and begin to use those sought-after both-ands of science and spirituality and the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Here, you can combine ruthless reason with the perfectly unreasonable longings of the (scientifically speaking, non-existent) soul. Before the proper death of God, magic will always sneak in, not as a wonderful reenchantment of the cosmos, but as an endless source of deceit and disappointment. Even the saint, even the prophet, is mediocre. In the end, even Jesus doesn’t look a lot like Jesus (simple thought experiment: what would you think of a guy who, in a fit of self-righteous rage, turned over the table of some poor tourist trinket vendors at a cathedral?). And that’s why we need to lose him—and then find him, again and again. And that’s the real miracle of religion: You can kill God, you can even crucify Him and mock Him with a crown of thorns while you’re at it, and He still shows up three days later, happy to go.

What does not conclusively kill you only makes you more annoying, as they say. If God is always on His way to the guillotine, if He’s always beheaded and overturned by a new revolution of the critical mind, of new perspectives and life experiences, what you get is The Headless God. An open-ended God. A God of exploration. Now that is the God that’s left even after the crudest murders of the sacred have been committed, after the altar has been properly pissed off, and that’s a God truly worth worshiping. If being whacked by the critical mind, if being crucified and denied, killed and mocked still doesn’t kill you and you are reborn once more, still wearing the crown of thorns, well then at least my hat’s off and I’m on my knees before you, ready to give you everything. With this view of the divine, “the sacred” is revealed through a relentless series of iconoclasms.

This sincerely ironic reconstruction of faith goes beyond the tired cliché of “spiritual but not religious” (which is, for many reasons we needn’t belabor, a dead-end). It helps us reinvent not only spirituality (the experience and expression of the higher inner states), but religion itself (the meaning-making fabric of our relatedness to reality in its entirety). Religion is thus redefined; it escapes its confines as the category we have become accustomed to (one that was largely constructed in the 19th century) and combines with art, science, and critical thinking; it becomes tailored to the Internet age and to every unique person and to every context.

Not every moment and aspect of life can realistically be “spiritual”... But we all have some kind of “religion” at all times. On our worst of days, life won’t feel spiritual and serene; it will serve us another shit sandwich—but our religion, our faith, will be all that we have. Hence, rather than trying to be “spiritual but not religious”, we should admit that we’ve been “religious but not (always) spiritual” all along. If that makes sense.

Sincere irony can rescue God. And then God saves our fallen souls at the auspicious crossroads of fact and fiction. Isn’t that sublimely mediocre?

The Sound of Both Ands Clapping

As a last note on this chapter, I’d like to mine the gold strains of some other both-ands that are closely related to sincere irony.

A famous Zen koan asks “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”. The Zen koans were designed to radically shatter our conceptual minds and lead us into the realm of pure paradox and thus to the strokes of wordless insight that thrive there. Perhaps at a somewhat less profound level, there are paradoxical both-ands that capture different aspects of the “oscillation”[66] between irony and sincerity. Some of these have been proposed by the Dutch art scholars, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker: pragmatic romanticism, informed naivety, and magical realism.

Now, we have to choose our both-ands carefully. Not all both-ands are born equal. The point is that the two seemingly opposite elements must conflict in a manner that sparks a desirable field of possibilities. So, you cannot walk around both-anding just anything and think that you have achieved a greater synthesis or wisdom. Both rob the bank and give to the poor? Well, it’s good enough for a fairy tale about Robin Hood, but probably not a good idea in reality.[67] Both being nationalist and socialist? Well, that spells National Socialism.

As mentioned, the philosopher Kierkegaard titled his most famous work “either or”: you have to make up your mind sometimes, take a leap of faith, take a stand, to truly live in authenticity. But the point here is that both-and contains either-or; but either-or does not contain both-and.

If you’ll allow me a bit of tangled reasoning:

●        It’s not either “both-and” or “either-or”;

●        it’s both “both-and” and “either-or”.

●        It’s both-and with discernment.

All of this to say that there are productive and destructive paradoxes; you cannot combine any contradiction arbitrarily . To do both-ands well, you have to define the two opposing elements non-arbitrarily, in manners that make sense on a deeper level that clarifies and enriches both sides. And you do this by first differentiating between the two, separating them out fully, and only then do you experiment with combining them. You differentiate, and then you reintegrate where possible and desirable.

Let’s get started with Vermeulen’s and von der Akker’s both-ands.

Pragmatic romanticism is the principle of both taking up an unapologetically romantic stance towards life, like those passionate painters, poets, and philosophers of Romanticism in the 19th century, and to do so as pragmatically as humanly possible. Yes, life should be enchanted, and yes, you have to follow that unique inner spark and express your individuality, because only that can truly bring harmony between what is within and what is around us. Yes, mountaineering and “recapturing the rapture” of nature lead to a sense of the dramatic! The tremendous! The cosmic images of the Hubble space telescope speak to us, and then they can speak through us, as we channel our inspiration into the world. The romantic moment of spiritual bliss, creative insight, or even falling in love makes the entirety of the world and its suffering somehow “worth it”. And yet—none of that will by itself resolve, for instance, the climate crisis. And the climate crisis will sweep much of the potential for such beauty off the face of the Earth. Thus, it is by stretching the soul between these two poles, by holding on to them both at once, that one can create movements that work from the spirit of the romantic and towards real solutions. Pragmatism is directionless without love and rapture, but the moments of rapture cannot sustain themselves. A climate movement, for instance, can only be truly successful if it deliberately uses the love for and mystery of nature to fuel human engagement with science, policy, and the dirtiest of all: politics. (The same could be said, by the way, of marriage.) So if the world has been divided between pragmatists and romantic souls, it appears that a most fruitful paradox to meditate upon becomes pragmatic romanticism. The two may perhaps never be happily married, but in the both-and that attempts to grasp them in one embrace, there is creativity and hope to be found.

Informed naivety is the both-and of knowing that what you believe in is indeed naive, seeing how it is “impossible”, but still working from that vision because it will move things in the right direction. So maybe it is naive to think that climate change can be curbed, or that political polarization can be mitigated and people can begin to understand one another better, or that we can create free and fair solarpunk autonomous zones of postcapitalism and distributed governance. But the very fact that people insist on working naively on those issues means that potentials emerge that otherwise wouldn’t. The world is run and reproduced by realists, but it is transformed, bit by bit, by dreamers. The sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin once noted that, in times prior to democracy, the end of the divine right of kings was unimaginable, and that today, the end of capitalism is equally so. Yet, democracy did emerge, once the conditions were ripe for it. It is by being students of such conditions of transformation and change that we can adopt and live by an informed naivety. Such naivety keeps some of our childlike qualities, like innocence and directness of experience, but attempts to marry them to the discerning and protective mind of the educated adult. It keeps the door open to alternatives, to other worlds, and it feeds our (non-existent) souls with hope and inspiration.

Magical realism you might have heard of already: It’s a big thing in literature, with authors like Haruki Murakami (author of e.g. Kafka on the Shore, 2005) combining a bit of social realism, and renderings of everyday life and history with magical interruptions that break through common reality, in a sense commenting upon it and helping us reach deeper beneath its surfaces. And so boring bus rides and visits to libraries are combined with talking cats and forces of fate that drive the story: “Your problem is that your shadow is a bit—how should I put it? Faint.” comments the black tomcat. It speaks to something many of us can recognize, a lacking sense of fullness when we’re not following our inner path, but it couldn’t have been as succinctly described without the invocation of magic into the narrative. This is actually a path taken by some of the most forward-thinking performance magicians of our day and age: My friend, Ferdinando Buscema, loves to reveal some of the “magic” behind his tricks, and, in that same move, he ironically makes the tricks seem yet more magical. As such, he combines his background as a mechanical engineer with the art of magic. Ferdinando was inspired by TechGnosis, a deep view of cyberculture from 1998; indeed, he was inspired to such a degree that he committed the entire book to his active memory, word for word, including the position of each word on each page, in effect carrying the book with him at all times (if you like the book you’re currently reading, you know what to do). There is magic in technology, and technology in magic. So magical realism does not only use magic to re-enchant the world of crude physics and reason; it uses crude mechanics to enhance our connection to the magical. In the mathematician Warren Weaver’s 1949 article “Science and Complexity”, he guides us through the development of science, through mechanical physics (things that are sure to occur), to statistical chemistry (things that are likely to occur), to complexity in life and society: that which seems unlikely, impossible even, but occurs nonetheless. The magical, the emergent, sparks from building step by step on the crudest and simplest rules.

Each of the above (pragmatic romanticism, informed naivety, and magical realism) somehow relate to the difficult interplay between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. We need to practice stretching our minds between two polarities: from profound enchantment and intuition, wholeness, and radical openness on one hand (right hemisphere), to understanding complexity and the crudest scientific and logical discernment on the other (left hemisphere). It’s interesting to notice how great resistance there is to this simple insight. The world of humans consists almost entirely of people of one type or the other—those that seek to save science, realism, and reason from magic, idealism, and woo woo, or those that seek to save the spiritual realm from cynicism, scientism, and reductionism. In the greater scheme of things, it’s okay that different people take different positions on one side or another of this polarity, even different cultures do, as it’s part of a greater oscillation that runs through humanity at large. But for sublime mediocrity to be best served in our own lives, the richest position by far is an uncompromising, but calibrated, both-and.

Keep Clapping, You Double Extremist

Apart from the above three both-ands, you can extend the list.

Here are some suggestions of my own, presented at a higher pace: the crossroads of fact and fiction, struggle-reborn-as-play, conservative radicalism, game change, and, of course, sublime mediocrity.

The “crossroads of fact and fiction” is the place where dabs of fiction are used to speak more truly and clearly about facts and reality.

Struggle-reborn-as-play is when we deepen the sense of our struggles for a kinder and more just world to the point where the love of and gratefulness towards the world becomes apparent as the very underlying source of these same struggles, so that they suddenly appear less like a war and more like a playful experiment. We become “happy revolutionaries”, committed to and flowing from what social theorist Jason Ananda Storm has called “revolutionary happiness”.

Conservative radicalism is when you commit fully to transforming society, but take a careful and gradual stance towards how radical transformation can realistically come about.[68]

Game change (as described in detail in my other work) is when you accept that life is a game with winners and losers, but still think it’s an unjust game, and resolve to change that game for the better in regards to all of its players.

And beyond that, there are more dangerous but still potentially fruitful concepts that we should only approach with the greatest caution, because they can easily misfire and bring “the worst of both worlds”: sneaky kindness, hierarchical equality, religious nihilism, or idealistic machiavellianism. Without us venturing into these in this text, you can explore them at your own peril. My other books certainly try to venture into these treacherous waters, and only time will tell if I overstretched.

Wrathful compassion is another spicy one. I got it from a friend, Anasuya Sengupta, who is, in my estimation, an exceedingly accomplished social justice activist. She’s the kind of person that many feminists and (anti-)postcolonialists aspire to be: always enmeshed in the down-to-earth duty to balance out the injustices of the web and of information, always taking up new projects to help people in need in real communities around the world, and always very well-informed and thoughtful in her theoretical underpinnings and methods of collaboration. Never complaining or bitter, even in the face of harsh difficulties, always constructive, active, and brave. If you ask her about the source of this admirable and rare level of engagement, she speaks of that quality of “wrathful compassion”.[69] I’m not sure I’d recommend it for everyone: it requires the wrath to be truly felt and embodied, connected to a source of compassion that flows from a genuine sense of injustice and the suffering of others. In theory, any abusive leader, or destructive rebel, could claim that their mistreatment of others is really just an expression of a “wrathful compassion” than others could even comprehend. It could easily be used as a justification for why certain basic ethics don’t apply to us. But it is, as far as I can tell, a very powerful both-and, if done correctly: the unstoppable energy and agency of wrath, channeled towards universal purposes motivated by compassion. Well, at least I truly admire Anasuya, who swears by this principle.

Yet another, somewhat less dangerous, one is empirical pessimism combined with theoretical optimism: Yes, it is true that civilizational collapse is likely to occur sooner or later, and yes, we’re all mediocre and likely to fail to change the ways of the world, and yes, things always go horribly awry sooner or later (pessimism, then, in the empirical sense: empirical means the real-world data you encounter). But it is still true that whenever we find out something that brings us closer to truth, justice, and beauty, such qualities nevertheless manifest (so, in theory, the greater good is always there as a potential, and still worth striving for: “theoretical optimism”). The two sides actually fit together: admitting that death, collapse, the ubiquity of mistakes, crash boom bang, are the rule, not the exception, takes nothing away from the sense that all things connect in the end, in a larger view, and are worth resolving with truth seeking. So in the short run, the conservatives and cynics are always right: “It’ll never work, guys. Get a job. And a damn haircut.” But in the long run, at least some of the most radical among us always turn out to be right: democracy did emerge, as did human rights and gender equality before the law, and the social welfare state. The universe has literally evolved from dust to Shakespeare, why then should it stop now? It’s a tragic and eternally broken world, sure, but because there is such a thing as truth, the very same brokenness always holds the promise of something unimaginably wonderful emerging. The tragedy of the universe also holds within it the capacity for the good and the just, towards which the truth leads us. It’s pretty close to Gandhi’s old dictum: “Truth is God”.

◆◆◆

All of these are fruitful, if not innocent and harmless, paradoxes for us to contemplate, to play with, and to experiment with. What is the sound of both ands clapping?[70] What potentials are we keeping ourselves from by thinking that one extreme always excludes its apparent opposite? This commandment holds that the balanced mind is not necessarily one of golden means, of averages and compromises, but that a stronger balance can be achieved by becoming not just an extremist, but a double extremist. The farther you go in one extreme, the more potential is opened up at the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum, resulting in a wider embrace of life and reality.

Life is always-already an experiment, and thus it is actually irresponsible for us not to take seriously its vast possibilities and potentials. We have every right to try to transform society, and ourselves, even if it is admittedly always a dangerous business. Because the status quo is also dangerous, also insane. With this commandment, to live by sincere irony, I invite you to take a stance of enlightened madness, of double extremism, and to help turn our struggles into play.

Fourth Commandment: Turn Workout Into Prayer

“Remember that bodily exercise, when it is well ordered, as I have said, is also prayer by means of which you can please God our Lord.”

—Saint Ignatius

From one thing to another, let’s get a bit more practical. Or should I say: let’s get romantically pragmatic. First I should do a bit of “expectation management”: this chapter admittedly offers a somewhat less sanguine and spirited read than the last few ones. It’s more matter-of-fact, more down-to-earth. But it’s a necessary building block for creating the resilience, fortitude, and strength you will need in order to successfully apply the commandments of the subsequent chapters. Sure, you can just read the next few commandments for fun, but they will deal with getting over that universal source of human weakness and cowardice—indeed, of all banal forms of evil: awkwardness, both social awkwardness and the awkwardness of dealing with difficult emotions in general. To sustain such emotions requires some preparation in terms of the body and the mind.

Yes, a very large part of the evil that men do comes down to them being unable to tolerate just how awkward it would get if they spoke up. As long as awkwardness runs your life, as long as you cannot push through it or dissolve it, your body and mind will fold whenever any kind of social or emotional pressure is applied to you. Inhibition. Buttons for others to push, to control you. If your body and mind are too exhausted, or weak, or untrained to contain negative emotions, you will be easy to steer and to get to work against your own values and even your self-interest. If we wish to achieve good lives, we must also achieve the inner states that can withstand social pressure.

View this chapter as the groundlaying for the three following ones. In this chapter, we prepare the body and the mind for sustaining and containing difficult emotions: in the three following ones, we face those emotions head-on, taking control of our lives.

The Five Steps of Workout

So, let's recap and catch how this fourth commandment enters the picture.

Sure, you can live in a mess, fuck like a beast, and even adopt a profoundly sincerely-ironic stance towards existence, and that can help to get out of some of the neuroses of our day and age. But will it really achieve what we set out to do—establish that higher subjective inner state in our lives, a baseline of “8” from the “scale of subjective states”  presented in the introduction? It is easy to imagine a person that does these things but still has that slight anxiety in everyday life, always falling back to state “7” or below. The commandments issued thus far are hopefully helpful, but ultimately insufficient, because they do not directly target the very frame within which all of our lives play out; that is, our bodies.

But this still misses something unavoidable: taking care of ourselves, working our body-minds. I speak here of the “body-mind” because, after all, the body and the mind cannot be clearly delineated: doing a workout can affect our state of mind, and feeling at ease and safe (matters of the mind) of course affects our bodies.

I wish to first and foremost remind you that I am not suggesting the following as a long to-do list to add to your existing one. Rather, view it as a perspective, as a way of looking at and organizing the things you can do to work on feeling better in life in general.

What I have in mind is the work one could describe, holistically speaking, as exercise. We all know that exercise is good for us, and that we can exercise both the body and the mind, and that the two affect one another. If our goal is to optimize whichever subjective states are prevalent in our everyday experience, the question would be how to correctly prioritize the different forms of workout.

As Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th century founder of the Jesuit order (that educational elite troop of the Catholic Church who played a key role in reforming and modernizing it), reminds us in the opening quote of this chapter: Exercise can be a prayer, if it is well ordered. So let's get our bodywork in good order and never again miss a chance to please God our Lord. The rule of life here isn’t “do all of these following things slavishly!”; it’s just what it says: to prioritize them correctly, and that will turn your workout into a prayer, a practice of your whole body-mind, connected to higher subjective states, tuned in to life itself.

I have come to believe that there are some things that are more basic and fundamental to increasing our baseline of subjective state, and that some practices build upon others to be truly effective. Although I cannot back it up with empirical research, my own experimentations with exercise of the body-mind have led me to certain conclusions about a sequence of the different forms of exercise. If there is no available research on the topic, at least I can offer the reasoning behind it as we go along and hopefully researchers can find ways of testing these or similar claims. I have thus divided the field of bodywork (again, in the holistic sense that includes the mind) into five subsequently unfolding categories:

First, focus on breath,

second, move on to core and posture,

third, work on cardio,

then get some weightlifting and strength,

and only after that, move on to the glory of meditation.

Four caveats before we get into the weeds:

The sequence isn’t absolute; sometimes you need to move a bit back and forth, and there are some individual differences that can be due to health conditions, genetics, or other personal proclivities. Just try my reasoning out here as a starting point, and then you can see how well it appears to guide your own experience, and then tweak accordingly.

Second, remember that I’m not trying to optimize for getting buffed, “peak performance”, the sport psychology of winning contests, or anything of the sort. Nor do I claim that this sequence necessarily produces the greatest advancement in meditative states etc. This sequence is the correct one, I claim and believe, to optimize your baseline subjective state in everyday life. Again, let me underscore how important that is: Years spent hovering around a higher subjective state are not only happier and more alive, but are also filled with more energy, motivation, and enthusiasm. So improving your baseline subjective state is a reasonable focus to have, for yourself, and for how you affect others.

Third, please note that I’m leaving all issues aside about curing disease, medical care, and nutrition/diet as well as basic habits like sleep and rest. These are indeed important things that affect our subjective state, but they are not the focus here. I would say, they are matters best left to the wide array of medical doctors, dieticians, etc.

And, finally, know that this chapter is indeed useful in and of itself, but since emotional issues and inner wounds and inhibitions keep us from accessing higher inner states, we still need to work more therapeutically and directly with emotions and the stories we tell ourselves. If this chapter is more about “oiling the machinery” of the body-mind, early chapters like “Fuck Like a Beast” and later ones, like “Heal with Justice”, are about repairing it and steering its flows in a desirable direction. But if the machinery isn’t oiled, it won’t run smoothly. So we need to be lubed up, too.

Four Body-Minds

Let’s try to understand this “body-mind” thing a bit more clearly. What I mean to say is that we need to exercise in a manner that makes our embodied experience of life more spacious, more harmonious. Life has ups and downs, it gives and takes, events come and go: but every moment is somehow experienced through many different sensations. The body is always there, feeling all that happens. All that happens somehow happens in and through the body, the brain and nervous system included. Change the body (and mind) and you change the nature of all that happens to you.I want to lift our gaze from a cruder, more superficial focus of exercise, to one that takes into account all the categories of experience. Here, I feel we can benefit from understanding the idea of the four body-minds.

My editor[71] pointed out that this thing that I am about to explain about the four body-minds is more difficult to grasp than other things in this book. So, just to introduce what follows as succinctly as possible, I want to suggest that there are four different layers of the experience we have of being alive:

Gross layer: the obvious things you experience, like an icecream you’re eating or your feet touching the ground..

Subtle layer: the subtler sensations that you may have to make an effort to take note of, such as a soft tingling in your fingertips, and this includes your feelings.

Causal layer: the background frame within which other experiences arise, including your deepest emotions and basic stance towards life.

Non-dual layer: your awareness; the very fact that you experience anything at all, and that it all arises effortlessly—all the good and the bad and the ugly contained within it.

Examining these layers, we are delving into what the body and the mind feel like, how they are experienced. We can of course only ever access our own personal experience, and people seem to have different ways of experiencing and talking about these things, so I cannot know if my way of describing it matches yours—or how well it does. Let me try, though. Here we go.

So we will try to exercise more holistically. A useful starting point to seeing how all the different forms of exercise fit together is the distinction between these four different “layers” of the body-mind. If you’re the “California type” of person, or if you have a background in Eastern traditions, you might have heard of them before: again, the gross, the subtle, the causal, and the non-dual. These concepts originate, unsurprisingly, from the philosophy and contemplative practice of the Vedanta[72] and Vajrayana[73] traditions. In books from recent years that approach this topic, there is one titled Integral Life Practice, by my good friend, the late Terry Patten—and a few others.[74]

These four layers are sometimes called different bodies: the gross body, the subtle body, the causal body, and the non-dual body. This is a bit of a misnomer that I feel leads to some misunderstandings. They’re not really different bodies, and perhaps you could divide the whole field of experience differently than into these four. At the very least, we should call them four “body-minds”.

But I have found that the best way to think of the four body-minds is as different layers of subjective experience; that is to say, they are different parts of what you experience in every moment, different parts of the inner landscape. Another fancier way of saying this is that they are different layers of phenomenology. The word phenomenology roughly means “one’s own personal experience as such”. So in every moment we have some kind of experience, which includes all of the objects that arise as part of that whole, and these “objects of experience” both include a chair we might be sitting in, a view we’re looking at, a smell we’re sensing, our tummy rumbling, a tension in the neck, and feelings and thoughts flowing through us. It is the whole of this experienced world, the “phenomena in and of themselves”. It is, in a sense, the basis of reality as we know it.

And within this inner horizon, this larger field of all-that-arises, we do, after all, experience our own bodies. The body is in itself a vast landscape that effortlessly arises in our experience moment-to-moment. Not only that; there is, from the perspective of direct experience, no clear difference between “the body” (with my arms and legs and whatnot) and all other things, like whatever is present in my field of vision. It all arises effortlessly, from the coldness of my feet, to my sense of breath, to the light that shines into my eyes and the images I see in that light, to even thoughts, feelings, and memories that flash by. All of these aspects just flow like a seamless whole, with no clear distinction of what is within or outside of me. Western philosophers, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, have also noted that our experience of the world is, in this sense, always “embodied”; or, to put it differently, we project the sense of our body onto everything we experience. A famous example here is a blind person with a cane: you’ll feel the patch of ground before you and develop a sense of your surroundings by poking the cane at it, and that will give you a sense of the world around you. The cane has suddenly become a part of your embodied self.

So the conclusion should be clear: if our body is somehow always-already the framework through which the world-as-a-whole is experienced, we can thus affect the entirety of reality as it appears to us, the nature of reality itself, by affecting our concrete, living bodies. That’s the deeper meaning behind Loyola’s claim that “exercise is also prayer”. In a sense, this is trivial and obvious: The same walk in a breathtaking landscape can be heaven or hell, depending on whether we’re a healthy and happy person enjoying the view, or if we’re in the midst of a cold turkey heroin withdrawal while climbing the same slope. The state of the body-mind affects the entirety of experienced reality, simply because reality, spiritual experiences included, can only ever be felt in and through the body-mind. Even otherworldly and out-of-body experiences are, in a deep sense, actually embodied ones. They are processes that reflect the qualities or properties of precisely that body, that organism, in precisely that moment. No mind seems to live without a body (remember, we killed off all spirits and angels in the last chapter?) and thus no mind can reflect and relate to the world through anything but the body.

But the point is that “the body” is a very wide and inclusive thing, if we look at it soberly. It is “the body” in this widened sense that must be the subject of our “bodywork”; i.e. the body-mind. Now, how do we then begin to categorize and speak of what we sense in our body-minds? Sure, we could divide it into things like sensing our hands, feet, and necks, but that wouldn’t very easily relate to this seamless entirety we seem to experience in every moment, to our body-mind as a whole, which includes all that arises in our awareness. Here, one useful way to think of it is in terms of different layers within awareness; and these layers are, again, the gross, the subtle, the causal, and the non-dual. Let’s take a brief look at each of these four before we delve deeper into exercise itself.

The gross body-mind layer of experience makes up all of the fairly obvious and direct things we notice in everyday life. You feel your hands, the tongue in your mouth, tensions in your belly, you touch, see, hear, and smell objects around you. If you hit your leg against the corner of a table, you feel pain. It’s there, it’s obvious, and noticing what’s going on does not require any special attention. When we’re distracted and not paying special attention, this “gross” layer of experience dominates what we notice.

But lo, there is always something else going on within our field of experience, beyond chairs and tummy aches. If you stay with your attention on the very point where you feel the obvious pain of having smashed your leg into the corner of a table, you will notice that the pain seems to consist of something. It is not “one thing”; rather, it is made up of many little tinglings and vibrations within your experience. If you try to find the exact center of the pain, even down to the size of a pinhead, you notice after a while, there isn’t one! Nor can you find the exact outer edge or limit of the pain. Interesting, isn’t it, that such a concrete “thing” as the pain of hitting a table seems to dissolve if you examine it closely enough? Those subtle tinglings of experience, in turn, are what the subtle layer constitutes.

What else is going on within the subtle layer of your body-mind? All of the gross and obvious experiences are made up of smaller and subtler “units of experience”. If you examine how your feet feel in your shoes, the same will hold true: There are smaller, subtler experiences that somehow together make up the gross and obvious ones. But most importantly: all the time, there are flows of experiences in the body that are only subtle, and not obvious to us unless we stop and studiously notice them. There is ever-present a whole world of bodily sensations that never add up to simple pleasure or pain or gross sensations. These sensations, very importantly, include our emotions. Viewed in this framework, what is actually joy, anger, anxiety, excitement? Each of them exists only because there is some kind of bodily sensation going on, however difficult it may be to describe and put into words. Joy feels like some kind of light spring around our hearts. Anger is like a subtle fire that flows through us and charges us with potential for violent movements of the body. Anxiety is some kind of shakiness and tension that lingers in our bellies and upper backs. Excitement feels like some surge of direction, that we’re focusing our body-minds on one thing and being drawn to it. Shame feels like the body is contracting and there’s a burning sensation around the face and cheeks, the muscles around the mouth and eyes subtly tensing up. And so on. (Note, of course, that we all have different experiences of emotions, so my descriptions are just examples based on myself.)

There is always, however, some kind of movement or flow going on within the body. Something is happening, some process unfolding; that’s, after all, what it means to be alive.[75] This is the subtle layer. And much of the subtle layer just lies there in the background of our awareness, steering and shaping our actions and how we experience the world, but it isn’t noticed most of the time. It’s there weaving the strings of our actions, because emotions are what motivates us in every moment. We’re still within the body (where else would we be?), but at a subtler layer of its experience of itself and the world.

Notice how the subtle layer of experience is somehow more fundamental than the gross one. Firstly, the gross experiences are in fact made up of subtler ones; secondly, the subtle layer is where emotions exist, controlling the gross body. You cannot feel an emotion in the manner you feel the chair you’re sitting on. But it is still there, just as much. And if you consider the argument we brought up in the introduction: you could be at a spa getting a massage and having cake (gross body pleasure) but if you’re anxious and miserable at the same time, you still won’t be happy (in a “high state”). And people who have chronic pain can often still report having periods of inner peace and happiness; so while the gross body is aching, the subtle layer with its oceans of emotion can still have pleasurable flows. In other words, one’s subjective state is more dependent on the subtle layer than on the gross one. Here’s the thing: the gross layer always exists within the larger, hidden subtle layer. It is only “the surface” of our lived experience. The subtle layer is a larger world, one that encapsulates and holds all of what goes on in the gross layer.

What, then, is the subtle layer part of? This is where the “causal” layer comes in. I’m not really sure why it’s called “causal”, but I’ll just stick with the convention, so bear with me.

The causal layer of experience is the “background radiation” of lived experience; if you will, the shape and nature of the “inner space itself”—within which all of those subtle flows play out. If you tap into it in deep meditative experience, it feels like a profoundly spacious emptiness. Interestingly, it is often experienced not only or primarily within our body and its limbs, but as something that surrounds us and fills up the space. I mentioned earlier that strong sexual and romantic experiences can feel like they pulsate into the space around us; that’s because they can touch upon this layer of experience. And the shape or nature of this causal layer has to do with such things as our basic sense of “trust in reality”, or our fundamental “sense of safety”[76]. So that sense of vastness, openness, and pure freedom that we can touch upon in the higher subjective states are, in a sense, movements within this causal layer. Likewise, profound existential terror and any sense of unsafety that undergird our experience of life itself, are also native to this layer of experience. If there are distortions or rifts in this layer of experience, this affects us in every moment and in profound manners that define our fundamental relationship to existence.

So—if our experiences of gross things rest upon a sea of subtler sensations and flows, these in turn rest upon a seabed of basic relatedness to reality: safety and freedom, or terror and angst; often a complex landscape of combinations of these, of colorful corals and dark abysses. Healing of the causal layer can thus do more for our subjective state than even transformations of the subtle: in theory, we can have a fundamental sense of safety even while experiencing difficult emotions. However, as we noted earlier around “cosmoeroticism”, it is probably unwise to focus only on the causal layer (by meditation, etc.). If we don’t get the subtle flows of raw emotions to work in our favor, distortions of these are likely to thwart our attempts to heal and become compassionate and insightful people.

Notably, there is good reason to believe that our basic attachment patterns to others also reside within this causal layer of experience. How we truly feel about our closest relationships is something that stays in the background of our awareness most of the time: we don’t tend to walk around on clouds with love for our moms and families, as with a person we have a crush on. But once something happens to them (“a phone call from the hospital”) we react from the core of our being, and our depths are pulled to the surface. The causal layer lies there quietly in the background, but it is ultimately stronger than any movements of the subtle body: no intoxicating infatuation can match the silent love of our closest people and our most cherished values. Consequently, being messed up at this deep level comes with a great suffering that is not apparent at the surface layer of feelings and behaviors. That’s where a bit of depth psychology can come in handy: We love our closest ones at the level of existence itself, and so our relationships to them can only be existential, at the same level as our relationship to reality itself. So being mad at your mom means being mad at the world, at existence itself: a common profile in Nazis and the like, who tend to harbor a deep, unconscious rage against the feminine.

And beyond the causal layer—I’m getting out of my depth here—there is the non-dual layer, the layer of pure experience itself, the field within which “all arises”. Traditionally, it has been associated with being in deep sleep: There’s apparently some part of us that is awake and experiencing even then, as a loud noise can still wake us up. Experience of this layer feels beyond time and space (which has led many Buddhists and others who meditate to the point of experiencing the non-dual layer directly to conclude that consciousness lies beyond time and space). No need to venture there now, but of course, for serious spiritual practitioners, this layer is viewed as the most fundamental one. It’s the layer of awareness that not only encompasses “all that we experience” (like the causal layer, which includes both sensations from within the body, and our perception of the world around us, in one seamless whole); it even encompasses the effortless act of experiencing itself, i.e. of pure awareness, or “suchness”, or “I-am-ness”. Within the non-dual layer of awareness, there is no distinction between the experiencer (the “witness”) and what is experienced. The non-dual layer is just the frame within which all that we experience arises. That’s why it’s called “non-dual”; there’s no separation of what’s inside of us and the world. If you stop and consider it, it’s an obvious fact that all that has ever happened in your life has happened within you; whether it’s a tree you’re looking at or a bellyache you feel, it arises within awareness. Folks like Eckhart Tolle (the New Age guru) and others who experience strong “power of now” states have likely had some shift within this layer, so that it becomes less of a background thing and more apparent in everyday life. Whatever the neurological shifts that correspond to such experiences may be, we can leave aside here. But remember, even such direct experience of the non-dual layer must ultimately be a quality of our nervous systems, of our bodies, and thus this is also part of how we embody reality. That is to say, even how we experience pure awareness depends to some extent upon what we do to make our bodies and minds thrive and function well.

Working to become more directly aware of the non-dual layer of experience can sometimes lead to tremendous and spiritual experiences and shifts of perspective. By tapping into these deeper layers of awareness—the subtle, the causal, and the non-dual—and making ourselves open and suggestible for a moment, we can find ways to sincerely-ironically “reconstruct God” in our time. And that’s not so bad.

I guess you could say that, when moving through these layers of experience, we move from the most particular (if you hit your foot, it’s only you who feel it, and it pertains to you personally: gross body), towards the universal: the emotions we share and resonate around at the subtle layer, to our basic attachments and commitments to others and to reality itself at the causal layer, to the pure canvas of experience itself, which presumably is much alike across species and sentient beings.

Admittedly, thinking about and relating to these four “bodies” leaves plenty of room for “add woo and stir” maneuvers. Be careful not to make such mistakes; remember that we are only speaking of four ever-present layers of lived experience (and not magic ghost bodies floating around or anything like that). We all have lived experience (you’re not a robot reading this, are you? Please don’t be.) In every moment, we feel our gross experience, we feel subtler sensations beyond that, and beyond that we inhabit a basic sense of reality (causal layer), which arises effortlessly within experience itself (non-dual layer). That’s all. If you have another or better way of describing this, feel free to exchange this model for another one.

Breath Is Baseline

Let’s begin at the crossroads of the subtle and gross layers of the mody-mind: the most overlooked form of exercise is breath. Not everyone can do sports and go to the gym in the way they’d like. I know I can’t always. But almost everybody can practice how they breathe and use their breath to change and improve their subjective state.

A great source of inspiration here is James Nestor’s book, Breath. It has deservedly  become a massive hit. In his book, Nestor guides us through the world of “pulmonauts”. A Reddit forum of this crowd states that “A Pulmonaut is someone who uses the lost science of nasal breathing to boost their immune system, increase lung capacity, blood circulation, reduce anxiety, and much more.” Basically, Nestor travels around the world and studies all sorts of breathing practices and research, and comes to a few conclusions, suggesting scores of techniques to explore along the way. He tells us that historical records show that modern people have incrementally gotten narrower breathing canals and jaws, leading us away from nose breathing and away from slower, subtler, and deeper breathing. We have collectively, through our lifestyles and by eating softer foods that don’t develop our jaws sufficiently, become constricted and suboptimal breathers, and this impacts all sorts of things in terms of health and wellbeing negatively. We have become, Nestor claims, “the worst breathers in the animal kingdom”. But, in turn, it is possible to practice breathing and to expand these capacities. “Pulmonauts” of different kinds show impressive physiological changes over time.

Our breath is there 24/7. We only stop breathing when we die. So of course, how we breathe is going to affect us. The way we breathe is linked to how we feel, which in turn sends signals back to our bodies, affecting stress levels, along with many other processes of the body. So if bad breathing habits take hold, as they very often do in our day and age, this impacts our subjective state. And before good breathing habits are in place, we are also likely to (in terms of subjective state) get less desirable results from other exercises. We’ll be panting through the mouth when we shouldn’t, breathing too much, with suboptimal rhythms. We’ll have tensions and constrictions around our bellies and diaphragms that make the breath shallow.

There are a few rather counterintuitive claims made in Nestor’s book, backed up with all sorts of research. One is that we shouldn’t obsess about getting “more air” and “enough oxygen”; rather, we should strive towards a healthy breathing that optimizes for wellbeing and a strong physiology. His conclusion is simple. Physiologically speaking, we should practice breathing:

Through the nose (as this is the primary evolutionary instrument of breath—the mouth only has an auxiliary role here—so the air enters our system in a more filtered, moisturized manner, at an optimal temperature),

With longer exhalations (so that CO2 levels, not oxygen levels, increase in our body, which generates a more effective metabolism),

Slowly (about 5.5 second inhale, about 5.5 second exhale, which is about 5-6 breaths per minute),

Less and more subtly (not, then, the usual advice of breathing “taking very deep breaths”, but so subtly that you can hardly hear it; almost everybody is overbreathing without realizing it).

In other words, breathe in the manner that you would if you were already very relaxed. That sends a signal to the body and optimizes for a state of relaxation, which in turn is good for everything from tension in the body, chronic stress, to the immune system (as higher stress levels, even underlying low-level stress, is linked to an impaired immune system).

There are chapters on each of these instructions and the arguments for them in Nestor’s book. He tries a crazy experiment where he and his Swedish friend breathe only through the mouth for ten days (plugging their noses with silicone), and then only through the nose for as long. They feel awful and have horrid test results after ten days of mouth breathing, and they feel just fine breathing only through the nose, sleep well again, and their bio measures quickly return to normal. “This was just an experiment. This proves nothing. But what it did do was bolster 50 years of science that has been out there and hundreds and hundreds of studies,” Nestor said in an interview with CBC. Still, it makes you think, right? What if you and I are breathing suboptimally and this is part of the explanation for why we keep returning to state “7” on the scale of subjective states (the slight unease of everyday life)? It would make sense. And given that our breath is there all the time, it wouldn’t be so strange if this affects our health in manners that other kinds of exercise don’t. Given that all of the other forms of exercise do involve breathing, getting this part right seems like a good basis.

So the idea is basically to start practicing breathing slowly, through the nose, at about 5.5+5.5 seconds (with long exhalations to match the inhalations), subtly and quietly. Just a few minutes a day, or longer if possible, and try to get into the habit. The longer-than-natural exhales are crucial: during the exhale, you’re activating the “parasympathetic nervous system”, which basically means that you’re calming down. On the inhales, you’re activating the sympathetic nervous system, which means you’re winding yourself up for some stress and action. During moments of mounting anxiety, you can thus do 4 seconds inhale plus 6 seconds exhale. It’s been proven to calm you down again.

If you do nothing else in terms of exercise, this is still a basis that is good for the lungs and the whole body-mind system, affecting our subjective state substantially. Research has shown that just doing this for a few minutes will increase your heart rate variability (and, another counterintuitive thing, a higher heart rate variability is a good thing; it means your heart is more subtly attuned to what’s going on in your body, not that it’s fibrillating out of control).[77] And heart rate variability has been called by health psychologist Kelly McGonigal at Stanford “the fuel of our willpower”; in other words, at higher heart rate variability, you have more freedom to choose your own actions.[78] You have higher motivation because you’re in a higher subjective state.

Breath is right at the interface of the subtle and gross bodies (or “layers” of experience). The word “spirit” even means “breath”, etymologically speaking. Same with “psyche”. Similar connections exist in other languages too, from Germanic to Slavic ones. Prana in Hindu culture is the same story—and even chi in Chinese culture and Taoist practice is directly associated with breath. So the breath is at the crossroads of body and mind. We both feel our breath and can control it like our gross bodies, and focusing on it leads us to notice the subtler parts of experience, to let our minds concentrate on those inconspicuous but unstoppable flows we sense within our field of awareness. That’s of course why breath has such a central place in meditation.

But Nestor doesn’t stop there. He goes on other, more daring adventures in what he calls “breathing +”, i.e. doing more far-out exercises and seeing what happens. One such practice is the introductory breathing technique of Wim Hoff, a.k.a. “Iceman” (this Dutchman set a bunch of world records for tolerating cold baths, etc.). Now, without going to extremes, just googling his content on YouTube and trying out the practice can, in my experience and that of many others, radically shift one’s inner state. I have found that nothing else (not physical workout, nor meditation) can bring up my subjective state to an “8” with such consistency. It doesn’t always work, and sometimes health issues set limits for the practice, but it does work a solid majority of the time.

It’s best to listen to Wim Hoff’s instructions online if you can, but just to review them here briefly, it's about lying down, inhaling sharply, deeply, and quickly and letting two thirds of the air out about 30-40 times (or until you start feeling a bit of dizziness and tingling in your arms and legs); then letting all the air out, holding your breath for as long as you can, and taking a deep breath in, filling your lungs, holding the air for a somewhat shorter time and moving it around for a bit inside your body, and then releasing. That’s one round, it takes a few minutes. Do 3-4 rounds with no break in between, preferably in the morning, and (an addition on my part) lie down for a while and feel your body being held by the ground beneath you. For reasons that elude me (but Nestor takes a few stabs at explaining it in his book) I have experienced that this simple technique very often transports me to a solid state “8”, a fundamental sense of okayness, and lets me stay there for a good while. It’s usually a good use of half an hour.

Ultimately, I don’t claim to have expertise or to make any grand recommendations when it comes to the breath. The main argument here is that breath is fundamental to all body-mind exercise, that it is practicable, that it appears to be overlooked and has not acquired its rightful position as the basis of other exercise. That’s my point here: if the goal is to attain and maintain a higher subjective state, the road to awe begins with an inhalation.

Posture/Core and the Four Ss

To “stand up straight with your shoulders back” is one of Jordan Peterson’s rules of life; indeed, his Rule number 1. That’s a good suggestion, I suppose. But the question is how one does that. Nobody actively chooses to tense up their neck and shoulders and slouch: these are habits that creep up on us as a result of sitting down too much, leaning over things we’re watching or reading, and of course, as unconscious reactions to social interactions and the underlying hierarchies of everyday life. And, naturally, the physical properties of our unique bodies also affect posture. To change this pattern, you need to know how and what to practice.

Posture, like breath, has been shown to affect one’s emotions and level of attentiveness and intellectual performance (and hence, presumably, our subjective state).[79] Simply changing posture and body position can instantly change emotions and mood, as the body “sends signals” to the mind that interprets which emotions are appropriate for the situation. There is a serotonin release activated when the posture is more upright. Posture even affects perception—how you see the things around you—and hence how reality as a whole arises within our awareness. So just standing up straight can bring about a somewhat lighter existence. The gross body affects the subtle body, just as the subtle body affects the gross body. You need to work both of these directions of cause-and-effect to establish a virtuous cycle.

With the caveat that I’ll here focus on people who don’t have disabilities that prevent them from standing up, I'd thus like to discuss how to resculpt the body for a strong core and good posture. This is something I’ve had to work with myself, and something I need to return to continuously. There’s a certain order to this topic as well. For some strange reason, I was never quite taught this order but had to piece it together from disparate bits of information. We can break free from a bad cycle of posture and lower inner state by changing how our body quite concretely carries itself. Again, the focus here isn’t “stand up straight, bucko!”, but simply this: When you do your workout, know to prioritize the following as a foundation.

The basic principle of posture workout is one of a long snake or an extended “S” that stretches from the neck to below the pelvis, or rather four letters S stacked on top of one another, so that you get eight points of focus, each of which require their own appropriate exercises. You can look all of these exercises up on YouTube or similar. There is plenty of great material. My emphasis here is that it becomes easier to track and steer the posture development if you get the “big picture”. Here goes:

The throat front muscles: strengthen them.

The back of your neck: stretch it out.

The upper back, between the shoulder blades: strengthen it.

The chest and front of shoulders: stretch them out.

The abs and core: strengthen, but with exercises that do not contract the hip flexors, so not with crunches primarily.

The lower back: stretch it out (also: look up fixing “anterior pelvic tilt”).

The glutes and back of upper legs: strengthen.

The hip flexors and front of thighs: stretch out.

Every other point of focus is “strengthen” and is matched by a corresponding “stretch” on the opposite side. Hence, you get the “S” shape of what to strengthen and stretch, respectively. Together, each of the eight points of focus form an interconnected system: contracted hip flexors pull on the lower back, which then does more of the job than it should, which weakens the abs, which then leaves the upper back carrying the weight, which then pulls on the neck, which then does the job of lifting the head and thus atrophies the throat muscles. Working this long S-shape is thus the direct counteraction of poor posture.

Sure enough, you need to stretch the muscles you’re strengthening and vice versa, but the primary focus, from a posture-fixing perspective, is this long S. If you don’t know this map, you may end up, for instance, working the lower back and hip flexors, resulting in them contracting further, which will work against a balanced posture. Quite simply, you’re supposed to be working in the opposite direction of a collapsed posture, thus freeing up muscles to carry your weight more optimally. This strengthens your posture, and you can stand up straight.

However. This map of “gross body” posture workout still needs to be paired with a corresponding focus on the “subtle body”. Here, three simple steps are important to practice in everyday life, like when sitting, taking a walk or running.

Firstly: focus on the point on your upper back, the top of your spine, just below your neck. In this spot, just where the neck meets the spine, feel a current that seems to flow through your shoulders and arms. The shoulders are relaxed and lowered and the arms feel slightly energized. It feels like there is a little “command center” in the neck that comes online and takes charge of your upper body. If you are having posture issues, this may feel awkward at first, but practice makes you feel stronger and stronger.

Secondly: feel how the neck is straightened as if by a light upwards pull at the top of your head, as if a string were attached to the very top of the skull. Another way of doing this is to imagine your head gracefully carrying a crown.[80]

Thirdly: do a “light core activation”, i.e. subtly activate the belly, the abs, as a stabilizing force at the core of your body.

Just practicing these three “subtle body” steps (neck activation, neck straightening and light core activation) affects the posture of the body and opens up a freer breath. Just keep practicing with little reminders. Bit by bit, you reshape the body, not only “from the outside” but from the inside out. Your mind is working your body and your body is working your mind.[81]

Again, we’re resculpting the body from both directions of causation. The better you’ve done the “gross bodywork”, the easier the “subtle body work” becomes, and vice versa. The subtle body is the home of our inner flows of sensations in the body, so you can for instance increase your capacity to feel erotic pleasure simply by repeatedly stretching the hip flexors and inner thighs, releasing little tensions there that block out our flows of currents of subtle sensations in the region (what some might call erotic “energies”). Here, we are oiling the machinery to serve the full expression of the body-mind and its flows of sensations and emotions. Hence, a well-calibrated bodily workout can help us “fuck like a beast” and to satisfy that intrinsic lust for life.

And, again, all of this tends to affect your subjective baseline state over time. But don’t be hard on yourself (or others) about posture, as that also defeats the purpose. Your posture is not a measure of virtue or character, or integrity, or anything else. You don’t need to have a good posture to have the right to speak your mind. It’s just that: a system of ingrained habits and properties of the body that can be reshaped over time.

As you have no doubt thought while reading this part, breath plus posture work and stretching—that sounds a lot like doing yoga. Of course, doing yoga can indeed have these intended effects. But all too often, all the complicated asanas and ideals of the yoga community do more to cloud the picture than to simply bring breath and posture and core strength into focus. Yoga also comes with its whole flavor of aesthetics and ways of behaving at expensive yoga parlors which can or cannot be your thing. In its Western guise, it's the most bourgeois of all things imaginable—more so than golf and whiskey. For many of us, it’s better to simply go after these two elemental forms of exercise directly and deliberately, or to practice yoga specifically with these two things in mind, so that you can steer the practice in a desirable manner. As you may have heard, yoga was historically developed as a preparation for meditation practice. That’s what I’m arguing for here as well, except that I view them as the basis of all further exercise. That said, once you have a foundation of breath and posture, doing yoga can be a good idea for continuing to work on these two.

Even if you’re not a runner, gym rat, or meditator, simply doing these two things well—breathwork and posture—will affect your inner state all day, every day. They form a strong foundation for a life well lived. Unlike other forms of exercise, you can do breathwork even when you wake up with eerie dreams, so it even affects our state during sleep and throughout the night. In fact, you can lift weights and meditate all you want, but if you still breathe poorly and have posture issues, these practices are less likely to reliably bring about higher subjective states.

There is no shortage of people going after weight-lifting, cardio, or meditation with great vigor. A lot of the time, these things just don’t produce the results we’ve hoped for. My claim is that breathwork and posture form a sound basis for these results. Feel free to test my claim.

Also, it’s a pretty relaxed view of exercise overall. You don’t need to invest a lot of time and money into expensive classes and time-consuming exercise regimes, and you don’t need to be super fit either. You can start doing it right away from your own home, at your own schedule, even with poor health or from a wheelchair, more or less. In terms of creating a happy and stable foundation for your life, you can go pretty far with these simple tools, breath and posture, because they’re so basic.

Excursion: Your Social Status

It’s easier to stand up straight, shoulders down and relaxed, body language open, in situations where we feel at ease, or even dominant or superior. When we’re nervous, inhibited, subjugated (in manners subtle or apparent) or otherwise feeling inferior, our bodies tense up, our breath shortens, our voices become less resonant, our claims sound more like questions, and our body language becomes stale. And that stuff accumulates: “the body keeps score” as they like to say; social hierarchies stick in the body, even affecting things like stress levels and thus the immune system and thus energy levels, our sense of motivation and our resilience in the face of adversity.

In turn, people spontaneously size one another up via bodily cues of self-worth and confidence and treat them accordingly. It’s closely linked to issues of social status, and high social status basically means that people apply a positive filter of interpretation when they hear you speak and see you act, whereas low status is the opposite: your actions get interpreted negatively (and generally as less important). The very same actions and gestures acquire dramatically different meanings: When taking up space in the room, the person perceived as high status comes off as confident, the low status person as arrogant and insensitive. The transgressive joke is edgy when made by a high status person, but tasteless if made by a low-status person. On it goes, and so we all unconsciously punish the already punished and reward the already rewarded, further molding their body-minds into positions that appear to us as cemented. And then we wonder why the worlds of mice and men seem so unfair.

Interestingly, the lower status you ascribe to someone, the more unidimensionally you tend to view them: a smart person becomes “only a nerd”, a pretty person “only a bimbo” or only a sexualized object, a loyal person “only a side-kick”, a member of a disdained ethnic minority only an exotified, shallow cliché, and so forth. High status people are viewed more as the protagonists of the story of life, as the main characters of the world, as whole human beings with multiple dimensions. They can be perceived as a thinker with their own opinions, a skilled professional, and an emotional or sexual being with a rich life story—all at once. When we perceive someone as having high status, we somehow find the patience for viewing them with nuance, for actually getting to know them. The same can not be said of the people we look down upon.

It’s ain’t exactly fair, but it is what it is.

Now, there’s a nice paradox to all of this: On the one hand, nothing is perceived as more static and inherent to a person than their social status and level of attractiveness (which is why it’s so hard to change someone’s mind once they’ve pegged someone else; all they see is now interpreted through the filter of how they have rated the other person). It appears to the perceiver as “just a hard fact”.

On the other hand, few things are actually as fluid and context-dependent as social status and attractiveness—not seldom being shaped by biases that have to do with class, race, gender, and the like, all of which rely upon fairly superficial displays of group belonging or status. So changed conditions in mood, situation, and body language or style can have massive effects in one direction or the other of how person A interprets the status of person B. It’s hard not to laugh at us here: We’ll walk past a world-leading violin player on the street without a blink, just to cough up a ridiculous amount to listen to them the day after in the main concert hall (true story, that one).

You might argue that this is not exactly a paradox—just a difference between appearances and the reality of the matter. Fair enough. But it remains true that our social reality, and the roles and rankings we inhabit within that universe, is the strongest force in our lives, one that determines matters of life and death, happiness and misery with all the tenacity of a concrete wall—but that this same concrete wall is actually made of fluid and can change shape with the stroke of the lightest brush. That’s paradoxical, if you ask me.

Given that the status we perceive someone to have appears so real, and that it affects how we are treated and how we feel so much, it’s easy to get caught in obsessing about it. Sociologists like Erving Goffman have shown that pretty much everyone engages in at least some “impression maintenance” and “presentation of the everyday self”. At the very least, we all hide our unhygienic sides in all public settings—if we need to pick our nose for a bit, we’re discreet about it; we’re all hygienic hypocrites. Each of us always deliberately constructs images for others to see, or at least in part deliberately, and our status largely depends upon how others perceive and interpret those images, on whether or not they “buy into” our presentation: Is this actually a competent person, or an incompetent one just pretending to avoid being embarrassed, judged, and rejected? and so on.

One of the most scathing ironies of status-perception is that we even ascribe moral meaning to it. We habitually tend to think high-status people are morally superior to others. It’s even the case that moral evaluation of an act and processing how pretty a face is activates the same parts of the brain.[82] And if you stop and think about it, it’s easy to understand why. First of all, there is the unfortunate little habit that we all have as humans to suck up to the powerful, for our own benefit. A dominant, or attractive, or powerful, or popular person just seems a little more… relevant. If we’re trying to win someone powerful over to our side, it makes more sense to interpret them in a positive light already at an unconscious level, no? And another mechanism which is perhaps as important is that we naturally feel that we can trust whatever kindness is shown from the powerful: Wait a minute, this person could have treated me worse and gotten away with it, but they didn’t! Compare that to whenever we meet the kindness of a person we perceive to be less powerful than ourselves: Ah, they’re nice now, but who knows what they would have done to me if they had more power—best make sure they remain in a subordinate position to stay safe! If we stop and think about it, our unfair interpretations of one another make sense in a perverse kind of way. Rather sad, somehow, isn’t it?

However, once we realize just how transient, context-bound, and socially constructed social status truly is, the whole matter reappears to us as a kind of cosmic joke, where fools become kings and vice versa by the spell of new settings and little details. As such, it makes sense to “see through” the games of social status—but still to put in the effort to affect how others perceive us. Might as well work a bit on our posture and aim at a relaxed, self-controlled body language, and practice a bit of assertiveness in social interactions if needed. Otherwise, people will interpret us negatively, even in terms of our moral virtues and intentions. And that’s a bummer, especially since our moral convictions will seem much less genuine and persuasive to others. So we can take social status into account, even for ethical causes—we just don’t need to take it as seriously, now that we know it’s all one big joke at the expense of the human spirit.

This stance—to see through the sheer idiocy of social status games, but still engage in trying to create good impressions of ourselves when appropriate—mirrors the “game change” concept I briefly mentioned in the previous chapter: so we cannot deny that there are games of dominance, social status, and attractiveness, but we can work to change those games to make them more fair, relaxed, and transparent. With sincere irony, we can become useful idiots, but of the good sort. We’re playing the game, like any other idiot out there, but we’re playing for the betterment of the game itself.

And that’s where social justice comes in.. A very important insight here is that people fundamentally tend to wish for status because it increases the likelihood that one is treated with greater kindness and respect. If there would be much more kindness and respect to go around in society in the first place, we’d likely also become less obsessed with status games, because we would not have a million experiences of belittlements and indifference towards our feelings. And thus, we would compete less rapaciously, and thus… be able to treat one another with a little more kindness and respect. We can thus advance society, indeed, advance the nature of civilization itself, by finding self-reinforcing spirals that carry us out of status competition and towards kindness. Status competition never goes away, but it can always be refined; it can always become less cruel, always become more fair. If we can figure out how to make it happen, kindness really is the cure.

Besides, the better you get at taking this sincerely ironic stance, the less you care about social status to begin with. The farther a person progresses in their own personal development, the less “authoritarian” they tend to get; that is to say, the more they will have tamed the primitive impulse to size everyone up and relate to them hierarchically and with little appreciation for nuance, uniqueness, and context. As we develop into more complex modes of sensing and being, we naturally begin to circumvent the eternal question of whether a person is “above or below us”. We can always learn from everyone, and everyone has some advantages over us, non-human animals and small children included—it really is about context. As we mature in our personalities, we begin to see “sublime mediocrity” everywhere: seeing the sublime in our seemingly mediocre fellow creatures, and spotting the quite ordinary in the seemingly exceptional ones. Flowers everywhere, for those who deign to see them. There’s a deep equality to that.

Hopefully, following sincere irony combined with soberly knowing which buttons to push to appear impressive or cool, we can begin to obsess less about the whole status charade. But, again, that doesn’t make status hierarchies go away. For instance, it is well established in behavioral science that “ambiguous status hierarchies” tend to trigger feelings of anxiety. It has been shown with psychology experiments that if people take part in a competitive game and the game is rigged so that they’ll get wildly varying results, they start getting anxious pretty quickly—and thus get much more envious and competitive towards the other players.[83] In other words, if you appear impressive in some regards and less worthy of respect in others, people likely won’t be able to help themselves but to feel uneasy and they will thus want to test you by trying to put you down a notch, so as to lessen their own anxiety. It’s not nice, but it’s the games we have to live by as social animals. The status games will be there, but we can relate more or less productively to those games, see through them more or less, and go for more win-win ways to play them. We can evolve towards better games, thus also changing the players who play them.

So we can still allow ourselves to feel good by being recognized and respected, which of course feeds right back into breath and body language, and vice versa. The point here is that we can actually increase our social status by simple things like breath and posture, and this changes not only how others perceive and treat us, but also how we can recognize the inherent silliness and absurdity of social hierarchies altogether. And right there’s the sound of both-ands clapping.

Anyway—standing up straight and breathing well is a part of those games, like it or not. Much more could be said about tweaking all those dumb and simple status-game dials, of course, but it falls outside the scope of this book.

Our stubborn habit to focus on social status has to do not with the better angels of our nature, but with our “monkey minds” that always, all said and done, stay with us. Because body language and posture are so strongly shaped by these primitive social processes, we cannot simply tell ourselves to “stand up straight!” all day, every day. It just goes deeper than that. The habits we have developed over time shape our muscles and the tightness of all of our interconnected systems of tendons and tissues to such an extent that our bodies will naturally reproduce a certain posture. So Peterson’s rule “to stand up straight” can, without further instructions, actually add harm to injury: We begin to be neurotic about our posture, and blame ourselves for not standing up straight, busting ourselves every time we pass a mirror or the reflection of a storefront window. And that self-blame and sense of defeat can likely add to bad posture in the first place.[84]

Cardio and Strength

The third dimension I’d like to bring up is cardio: running, jogging, biking, swimming, playing ball sports, whatever your thing is and your joints can handle.

Cardio training is truly, truly amazing. Researchers have continued scoring goals and home runs on its wholesome effects on our lives. I won’t reference any here, as there are just so many great, detailed, and credible sources out there that I hardly feel I need to back this up. What you get from doing just a moderate amount of cardio is: wellbeing, motivation, resilience in face of disease and health issues, emotional stability, better sleep, greater creativity, a “younger” brain, stronger bones, a more “sound” appetite, better willpower, improved working memory and learning, improved concentration, improved intelligence (as in IQ score), better cardio-vascular conditions and cholesterol levels, increased lung capacity, and management of conditions like depression and ADHD. Given its “decreasing marginal utility”[85], the first few minutes you put in are worth their time in gold.

If it’s that powerful, why on earth am I putting it only in third place in this priority list of exercise? Well, think about it: breath and posture will be there even throughout your cardio training. They are there 24/7, as we said. If you’re good at those two, this will affect the quality of your cardio training: You don’t want to run around the block breathing incorrectly and giving little shocks to an already unstable body core that deteriorates further, even while improving your cardio. Poor running posture may cause injuries.[86] Breathing through the nose while running (if you can) may also be beneficial and provides a first line of defense against diseases and pollutants you’ll be breathing in when taking a run in an urban environment. You have to do cardio “from the right place” to be able to sustainably reap its rewards in terms of subjective state. That said, cardio workout can and will affect your subjective state.

To put it simply: cardio is super powerful, also for the brain’s health and development, but you can have pretty good subjective states even without much cardio training; it’s more difficult to have high states if both breath and posture are off. Breath and posture set a basis for good cardio workout.

Staying only briefly on the topic, I’d like to say a few things about cardio training:

●      Most any kind will do as long as you get your heart rate up.

●     You need to do it for 20-30 minutes at a time (or longer, but if you go at it too hard, some of the short-term effects on e.g. the immune system and energy levels will be negative rather than positive).

●       You should do it about three times a week.

●    Getting your cardio workout at high intensity (running, etc.) and medium intensity (taking brisk walks, active gardening, etc.) are like two different bank accounts that need to be filled: ideally, about 75 minutes of higher intensity per week (e.g. running thrice for 25 minutes), and 150 minutes of lower intensity per week.

●   Remember that cardio has both long term effects (better overall condition of the body and brain, down to the biochemical level) and short term effects (boosted mood, concentration, and immune system for the day), and that a very large portion of the benefit actually comes from repeatedly exposing oneself to the short term effects. Again, higher subjective state over time accumulates as benefits in your life.

●   Given that neuroplasticity and creativity are increased right after the cardio workout for about an hour’s time, you can make special use of that time window to rewire your brain. There’s a surge of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) protein, which creates new connections and regenerates your brain and nervous system. You can use that time slot for extra important creative work, or, if you have the opportunity, to meditate (as discussed below), thus rewiring the brain for greater calm and baseline happiness—for being immersed in the experience of life and appreciating it as it is.

All said and done, cardio is so great for one’s health and wellbeing that we’re all wise to invest in it. When you get into a good cardio-training period, you’ll also be able to perform better at weightlifting, doing more and longer sets, with maintained energy levels.

As for weightlifting and strength,  it appears to have a lot of complementary benefits with cardio: it has been shown to improve episodic memory (how well you remember what happened to you; working memory (similar description) is boosted by cardio), it can flush us with nice endorphins, and it of course builds functional strength and physique. The point here is that, oftentimes, a one-dimensional focus on weightlifting can lead to some bulking up, but still leave us with limited functional strength (if core and cardio aren’t there), as well as with poor breathing habits and low subjective states. Weightlifting is often closely connected with projects to build a good body image and self-esteem, physical attractiveness, etc., but ultimately, nothing is better for both self-esteem and attractiveness than a high subjective state with the relaxed body language, posture, voice, and the behavioral cues that follow. So putting weightlifting into its proper place—after breath, posture/core, and cardio—is often a better strategy for being happy with one’s body and achieving the deeper results of going to the gym.

Perhaps I should further add a note on weightlifting from a “subjective state-management” perspective (how to manage and optimize your subjective state). If your aim is not a superficial one, but the increase of your subjective well-being, it’s a good idea to “feel into what the body needs”, doing the movements and exercises that target whatever tensions that happen to be present in the body, releasing these. Likewise, it is advantageous to focus more on stretching than is habitual in a conventional weightlifting regime.

We can transform the practice into a form of prayer, turning the gym into our priory, a sacred ground. Again, I’m not saying this is how you become the next bikini fitness model; it’s just how you use weightlifting in service of managing and improving your subjective state. Usually, when we hit the gym, we can notice some places in our body that are tense and would need to loosen up: we can target those places and work through them, really breathing and feeling through the tensions.

Still, of course, the secret here is just the good old relentless “get your ass to the gym”. Or else block off an hour or so to just do exercises wherever you do them. Learn some from YouTubers or books, or even a personal fitness trainer if you can afford it, so the time you’re putting in is more worthwhile, and eat and rest well for good results.

Or let me specify that last bit. My own little revolution in this area came only after reading James Clear’s bestseller Atomic Habits, which focuses on building good little habits in everyday life. In fact, I just skipped going to the gym altogether and only stayed with one rule: work out every single day. Every. Single. Day. No exceptions. And put a cross on the wall calendar for each day.

Like that, I cannot shift around the dates over the week and end up not doing it at all. But I can do as little as I want, depending on time, shape, health, energy, whatever. Most days, the workout is minimal. But when working out every day I began to improve quickly. I realized that my best friend was not whatever I put into the workout, but the habit in and of itself—even the “streak”. Sure, sometimes the streak is broken after all, but then I just quickly get to it again. The good part about it is how simple and binary the matter becomes. I just have to ask myself: Have I worked out? If running is not an option today, just do a tabata (“7 min workout” app), if tabata is too tough for the day, just do pushups or posture work. The point is, you do it every day, you go for what your body and mind can do, and what your body and mind need. I almost don’t notice the time spent or the effort. It’s just like brushing your teeth. Workout became easy because there’s no real decisions involved. Even if I’d end up doing just a few minutes per day, that’s not too little over a year (and the first minute you put in has the highest value, right?). And the difference over ten years? Big one. Still, though, in the end, I exercise more than before, because once I get started doing something it’s easier to keep at it for a while longer. But the key to the castle—at least for me—was simply to remove all other rules than the simplest one: do it every day.

One more thought on gym rat life: Bring your righteous rage to the workout—give the gym the punishment it so sorely deserves. Somebody has to do it. And one more: Imagine you’re shaping your body-mind while you work out, that it is taking on its stronger and more vital shape during the workout and that you are actively commanding it to do so. That's a workout living on a prayer.

Importantly, as we will look into some fairly painful emotional deep dives for healing the system from within in the coming chapters, simply building resilience in the face of feeling strained and getting through tensions here and there in the body (by properly activating and stretching the muscle groups) can set up a great foundation as we move forward. The iron never lies, as they say: either you can lift a weight or you can’t. That’s a sound basis for prayer, then, because you always deal with the truth about the current state of your body. And sincere prayers, likewise, must be about seeking the truth, not about wishful thinking. Basically, staying with the subtle body during workout, and listening to it, will tend to inform a “gross body workout” pretty well.

In summary, I have seen so many people get crazy about yoga (or “subtle body practices” like qigong and tai chi), and do it nine hours a day, or become crossfit enthusiasts, or build pounds and pounds of muscle, or become long distance runners, and still manage to have poor lives and poor overall subjective states, and even fairly dysfunctional and inefficient bodies. It doesn’t make sense to just do lots of yoga and never get your cardio up, for instance, panting every time you take the stairs. So prioritize these four steps correctly, combine them, and I claim that it will help you have a good life expressed through a balanced body-mind. First breath, then posture, then cardio, and then strength.

It won’t make you buff, nor impressive in the eyes of a casual observer. But from the very core of your being, step by step, you will turn yourself into an unstoppable force of sublime mediocrity.

Meditation: The Crown Jewel Put into Place

Finally, we get to step five, meditation. It is arguably the most powerful family of practices to rewire our systems for a higher baseline of subjective state. Forms of meditation can directly help us to become more aware of the subtle, causal, and non-dual layers of the body-mind.

Nevertheless, despite a glorious record of benefits found in research on meditation, most people never quite get into it, don’t want to, try it a little and figure it’s not for them, or just don’t get much out of it regardless of honest efforts. Some  even meditate eagerly for years, and then turn away in disappointment and feel it was ultimately a waste of time.

Ah, and what are those benefits? Well, meditation isn’t one thing, it’s a whole continent of different practices, so, like other workout methods, it will have different benefits for different people trying different things for different reasons. Ultimately, remember that the brain is a physical organ, and that any practice to affect its patterns is an equally physical occurrence, so it is still a kind of workout, albeit of incredibly subtle movements, movements within the brain and at the biochemical level which are somehow reflected in our conscious awareness. As such, meditation can change brain structures depending on which meditation you do. It can:

●    increase your decision-making capacity (i.e., on a deep level, creating more freedom in your life),

●        help you regulate emotions and heal trauma,

●        increase capacity for concentration,

●     foster feelings of compassion, gratitude, love, and joy,

●    make you more resilient to pain (you still feel the pain, but you suffer less),

●        improve sleep, and

●        help you break out of cycles of rumination.

If you manage to get meditation practice right, so that it “hits home” and creates a spiral of reward and incremental improvement, you can change your character traits for the better—as argued by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson in their state-of-the-art overview of meditation research, Altered Traits. From small and fleeting improvements, to substantial momentary ones, to changed setpoints for the experience of everyday life, there appears to be no limit to how high the spiral of improved subjective states can go. The rare few world record Tibetan meditators found, studied by science, and described in Goleman and Richardson’s book seemingly walk around more or less in perpetual states of peace and bliss. That’s the combination of talent/genes and literally tens of thousands of hours of dedicated practice—but it hints at what is possible to achieve within this domain of human endeavor. If it’s the gateway to the highest human peace and happiness ever recorded, shouldn’t we at least be paying attention?

You can approach meditation from the “sutric” or the “tantric” direction. Sutric traditions (like Theravada Buddhism) focus directly on the causal and non-dual layers; they’re more “top-down” in that you discipline your mind to meditate directly on nothingness. Tantric traditions work more “bottom-up”, through the gross and subtle layers, through the flows of sexuality and other drives. I believe both directions are valuable, but as I warned about earlier, the sutric focus can miss out on the cosmoerotic foundations of how we experience and love reality. On the other hand, a tantric focus can get hijacked by our desires, corrupting the workings of spiritual attainment. In both cases, we still need to work with our emotional healing to keep the meditation healthy and beneficial—and this emotional healing is what we’ll be exploring in several of the coming chapters.

Working more directly with our states of consciousness can be broadened beyond “meditation” as we normally think of it. In science journalist James Kingsland’s marvelous 2019 book, Am I Dreaming? The New Science of Consciousness and how Altered States Reboot the Brain, he discusses lucid dreaming, hypnosis and trance, gaming and virtual reality, psychedelic explorations and therapies, as well as some varieties of meditation, each of which can rewire how the mind continuously models and constructs the reality we experience. The point is that our brains can be put into states where “anything is possible” and thereby become open to being reshaped—and meditation is one of the pathways to this. As discussed in the last chapter, there are a lot of “blue pills” that actually shift how reality shows up to us. And given that shifts in our basic sense of reality, in our “causal body”, affect our “subjective states” the most profoundly, it just doesn’t make sense to remain oblivious to this realm of workout. At least not if our aim is a genuinely happy life, glowing from the inside and out.

Meditation, in a wide sense of the term, is basically a kind of workout we’d be dumb to leave out entirely. The point I’m trying to drive home here, however, is similar to the ancient development of yoga practice: remember, yoga was invented to prepare the body-mind for meditation. I’m just adding cardio and strength to that list. And, indeed, I would also argue that meditation practice can bring the other points together: it’s a great opportunity to practice breath, to stabilize posture, and thereby to build a basis for cardio and strength. Practicing some forms of meditation can in turn spill over into more mindful workouts and thus improve results.

Because meditation is a family of very subtle practices (indeed, beyond subtle, even, relating to the “causal” and “non-dual” to use these terms), it is very easy to get derailed and lose focus. We’ll daydream, or fall asleep, or just get stuck in a rut where the practice isn’t fruitful. Even if it’s not what meditation is really about, daydreaming (activating the “default network” of the brain, with a technical term) often serves important functions, and it’s instrumental to creativity and self-knowledge. I have found, however, that at least attempting to meditate tends to make the daydreaming that nonetheless occurs considerably more clear-sighted and expansive. The quality of the flow of daydreaming goes up. So even trying and failing at meditation can be useful and lead to new ideas and insights.

Nevertheless, succeeding at meditation, at quieting the mind, reaching states of absorption, is even better. And we’re much more likely to be successful at it if the right preparations are in place. Think about it:

Meditation often starts from the breath, so having good breathing habits will affect every second of your meditation practice.

Meditation often relies on a stable posture for remaining alert and attentive while at the same time being entirely relaxed, so the better core/posture you have, the better chances of getting into deeper states of absorption.

Meditation is about changing patterns of the brain; hence having exercised recently to get a BDNF boost creates optimal brain plasticity so that the brain is more likely to change as the result of meditating. Also, being in good cardio shape generally makes it easier to maintain concentration, focus and energy throughout, without getting tired or bored.

Meditation in many forms, like mindfulness and vipassana, includes looking at your own bodily sensations, working your way from the gross ones, to the subtle ones and beyond. The subtler the sensations that arise, and the more pleasurable they are, the easier time you’ll have getting into fruitful meditation. If your body is full of tensions and gross or numb patches of bodily sensations, you won’t be able to attend to the flows of the subtle body and beyond anywhere near as easily. So working up the endorphins throughout the system and getting the muscles properly activated will set you up for much subtler sensations, which creates a better starting range for meditation to take off.

Now, this isn’t what they’ll teach you at most meditation retreats. There, you’ll generally find people who tell you that (their preferred form of) meditation is the path, and there are no excuses for not doing this or that exact exercise. There will generally be some more or less concealed “magical thinking” around meditation and its effects (“you get the energy of these masters if you practice the tradition established in their lineage”, etc.). On my first ten day retreat, a vipassana one, I repeatedly asked the teacher about my foot not getting enough blood flow as I felt a burning sensation in it. It was all mental resistance, he insisted with kind eyes and a calm voice, and assured me that no harm would come from the practice. I took his word for it (after some ifs and buts) and suffocated my poor foot to the point of not feeling half of it for about a year afterwards. That was fairly dumb of me. But then again, I hadn’t read this book.

That little story is hardly an isolated event. The crux of the matter is that meditation can only ever start from the body, and without the right bodily preparations, you’ll more often than not waste your time, and potentially even be doing harmful things to yourself. Meditation can be incredibly powerful and useful for becoming a more happy and loving person, but many people would be better off simply practicing their breath, getting their posture in shape, and going for a jog, than working long hours on the cushion. So remember the Third Commandment about sincere irony, and be entirely ruthless towards all claims of meditation magic. And then reconstruct that magic in your life, from the bottom up, working from the gross layers of the experience, towards the subtler and deeper ones. Start from the beast and the hurt inner child, from real psychological pressures and the longings of the body, and then move on towards the depths of compassion and transcendence .

All things said and done, I can’t think of a better form of practice than at least some kind of meditation for fostering mental habits of compassion and reaching for a sense of the transcendent; for catapulting us into higher inner states, for becoming “tuned in” to life and the undeniable glory of the universe.

Maybe meditation isn’t for everyone. I’ve even come across people who practiced pretty much all the well-known techniques seriously for twelve years, becoming teachers themselves, and then figured that meditation is not for them, writing a bitter Facebook post about the ordeal.

But it is certainly an underused potential for most of us, and for our society at large. At least some kind of strengthening of our introspective capacities is valuable for pretty much everyone, and contemplative practices offer us frameworks for looking inwards. I think we can increase the chances of meditation being fruitful by viewing it as the fifth level of body-mind workout (breath, posture, cardio, strength… and meditation). It’s just “not for everyone” in the same sense that natural science or sports aren’t for everyone. It’s still a thing, and it has great potential—one that we as a society are largely blind to. For that blindness, in turn, we probably pay a large price in terms of suffering.

You can learn to meditate elsewhere than in this book. This commandment is only here to give some context to meditation as part of a holistic bodywork, to put this crown jewel into its proper place. It just never quite works when authors try to teach meditation in a few short paragraphs of their books; it requires an entire book, such as Culadasa’s detailed guide I mentioned earlier.[87]

There’s still one particular meditation practice I’d like to share. Having tried many different meditative and contemplative practices, this one stands out. And it is, to my knowledge, fairly unknown. It is an open-eyes so-called “awareness meditation” that I learned by taking the online “Finder’s Course” a few years ago. The instructions are simple. Here’s how you do it.

Sit down comfortably, and pick up a beautiful object, and watch it closely, attending to its every minute detail. I use a hand painted, colorful martini glass, decorated with little shiny beads.

That’s it.

This practice can take about an hour to get into and may need two or more hours to do quite properly. And now look for these eight qualities within yourself as you immerse yourself in closely studying the object:

●        Perfection

●        Delight

●        Wonder/awe

●        Euphoric happiness

●        Equanimity/imperturbability

●        Safety

●        Innocence

●        Immediacy

I don’t know who came up with this practice, but whoever it was must be a spiritual genius. It’s a complete meditation based on the trigger of the quality of beauty in the world.

The more closely I study these eight qualities, the more I am struck by their elegance and the profound truth that unfolds as I practice this meditation. I have found that they even form a sequence, which wasn’t explained to me but became apparent through the practice itself

Only when caught up in the perfection of the minute details of the object, even of its little flaws, can one begin to feel a “mmmm”, a delight emerging.

And in that delight, if it is deepened, one is eventually struck by a sense of wonder and awe.

And once wonder and awe have manifested in one’s soul, a fountain is opened up, an irrepressible flow of euphoric happiness. This is the watershed moment for this meditation, where it really takes off.[88]

And that euphoric happiness makes your soul rich and abundant, so now you begin to get a sense of equanimity or imperturbability; you feel in that moment like there is nothing that can really get to you, because you already have a source of unbelievable joy right here and now that easily matches pains or losses.

From that space of equanimity, you begin to feel safe. Safe at a fundamental, existential level. A basic and self-evident feeling of not being guarded takes hold, of having your back free, your mind carefree.

From that safety, in turn, a childlike, pure quality of innocence emerges.

And once you are there, childlike and innocent as a part of all that arises, you just relate to what is there, the now, the immediate. The “power of now” asserts itself. You feel free and fully present.

If you wish, you can do rounds of the eight steps—restarting at “perfection” once you have reached “immediacy”. Don’t overthink it, just keep a list of the words to remind yourself, glance at them sometimes, and then go back to looking closely at the beautiful, shiny little thing you are observing. I can guarantee you’ll find it’s so rich in detail you can’t believe your eyes—if you look closely and attentively enough.

I understand that meditative practice is a highly personal thing, and that different people respond differently in various periods of their lives. I’m not saying this particular practice applies to everyone. Maybe not to you, dear reader. It also requires ample time and a mind already fairly at ease. It’s just that I feel it is so powerful that I wanted to share my experience of it, for the joy of sharing if nothing else. It works to create a fundamental ease and safety and appreciation of life, a recapturing of the rapture.[89] And maybe you can tweak the exercise to your own needs, turning it into a whole different thing: A friend of mine, for instance, used children’s toys for the exercise, beloved action figures from his childhood which helped him reconnect with his inner, partly neglected, child. The possibilities are endless.

My suggestion is: if you have worked on the first four steps (breath, posture, cardio, strength), begin exploring what meditative practices may work for you, and perhaps try this “beauty meditation” as well.

If we are to rescue God, to reconstruct God, with a new sincerity, we should let that sincerity be anchored in a real experience of the divine. My contention is that, if we oil the machinery of our body-minds well enough, the chances of encountering God in a flower or a simple piece of jewelry increase (not, then, Jesus in a toast). Our chances increase of finding those sources within, from which a radical love, a revolutionary happiness, can flow. And when that sincere love of existence does flow, it doesn’t just encompass “the body”, but the non-dual ground of awareness itself; it fathoms all of existence in a loving embrace, simultaneously opening the world to us and us to the world.

Bodily exercise, when organized in accordance with a higher principle, turns into prayer to please God our Lord.

Fifth Commandment: Quit

“Giving up smoking is easy… I've done it hundreds of times.”

—Mark Twain

We have all been taught to “never give up”. Quitting is for losers. We should never let setbacks discourage us. And sure, perseverance can be a virtue. The thing is that it’s just not always a virtue. From time to time, it would be preferable if you just gave up and did something else.

I have to be honest here. Hanzi is a quitter. In fact, it’s actually a habit of mine to quit things when they don’t provide the results I want. And I believe that everyone is better off for it. Consequently, if this book does nothing for you, or just rubs you the wrong way, I suggest you simply quit reading it.

Quitting is for winners. It’s only for losers when it’s the easy thing to do and comes from inertia. But to quit means breaking the inertia and building new momentum in your life. So fork hard, as they say.

Last chapter was about changing your inner state, your own body-mind. Quitting is about changing your environment. Now, if we have set up happiness as a goal, to be in higher subjective states, we cannot turn a blind eye to the social contexts within which our lives play out. Situationalist psychology has proven to have greater explanatory power than almost any other branch of the study of human behavior. Simple example: Who helps a stranger in need? Is it the goodhearted, the empathetic? That explains some of the variance in behavioral responses to such a situation, but the most powerful factor is simply whether the person (the test subject) is in a hurry or not. The situation we are in dictates how we act. This not only offers us insights into understanding other people (that putting ourselves “in their shoes”, in their situation, is usually one of the very best ways of understanding why people act as they do, because we often resemble one another in more ways than we think), but it also underscores that the situations we are in dictate much of how we feel—unsurprisingly enough.

So (almost) nobody can be happy, even with all the self-knowledge and inner state management in the world, in a very detrimental social situation. I know I can’t.[90] And when you quit a detrimental social situation, it’s like something is unlocked. You suddenly have all the time and energy that you invested into that situation available for other things. That’s interesting to think of, isn’t it? What would be happening in your life instead, if you got out of a certain situation? You could put time and energy into new use and begin investing in new relationships. There is a release, a kind of rebirth, even if finding one’s feet can take some time and effort.

Looking back at my own life, at least three or four of the biggest and best decisions of my life have been to simply quit. I have quit a romantic relationship and life partnership, a university education, a career path, and a life project. Lots of small and less dramatic quits add to the path and story of my life. I almost shiver at the thought of how my life would have been if I hadn’t quit even one of the major ones. Some of these decisions involved a lot of suffering, for myself and even for others, and yet that was primarily because I wasn’t wise enough to quit in due time. In some cases I have been good enough at quitting, at knowing when to call it a day, in others, I have not. To be honest, most of the times when I have been a complete asshole and hurt myself and other people the most, it really comes down to my inability to quit in time.

Chances are, some select times in life, we need to quit. Just quit.

And at any point in our lives, there’s at least something to quit, even if it’s just social media, a lousy book we’re reading (wink wink) or a certain subtask we’ve fallen into at our job. Quitting has costs, yes, but at most times in our lives there is bound to be something we’d be better off without, even if there’s a price to be paid. Maybe we just haven’t thought of our possibility to “just quit” in that particular setting. To attain wisdom, remove things every day, as Lao Tze said.

Hence, we must become good at quitting, so that we know when to do it, how to do it well, and why we’re doing it. If you can’t say no to life, or the things in it, or to other people, you can’t say yes to life, either. Whenever people turn difficult life situations around for the better, it almost inevitably involves a lot of quitting. That may indeed be a centerpiece of their personal empowerment.

Quitting is at the core of what it means to “set boundaries”. We have all been hearing, for the last few decades, about the need for setting healthy boundaries for ourselves and sticking to them. But what does “boundary setting” really mean, and what does it mean to maintain a strong and healthy boundary, say, a preference that we should not be yelled at by a romantic partner? It ultimately means that we have the capacity to quit, and we use that capacity when we deem appropriate. No capacity to quit, no boundary. Boundaries can change over time, as you gain new insights and preferences. But they will always rely on your power to quit. Lose that power, and you also lose the capacity to set boundaries in your life. Which is to say: You lose the power to create the life you want.

Boundaries are about what you want, what you will tolerate in your life—or not. But, of course, you can have boundaries that are solid, clean, and reasonable (“nobody will ever hit me again”), or you can have destructive and unreasonable ones (“I won’t tolerate people who don’t give me free stuff”). The better you are at knowing when it makes sense to quit, the better boundaries you’ll be making, and the more beautiful life you will be sculpting for yourself.

You know who didn’t quit, by the way?

[Brief rhetorical pause for cliffhanger effect.]

The Nazis. In fact, they considered it a mark of virtue to never, ever pull back. They kept pushing forward on all fronts, perhaps the front against Great Britain being the only exception. This relentlessness proved to be a disastrous strategy. Luckily. So don’t be a Nazi. When bullshit amasses in your life, be [insert an appropriate gender denomination] and quit it.

Why Are We Doing This At All?

Let us return for a moment to that question posed by the existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus, the “first question of philosophy”: Why don’t we just kill ourselves?

Why don’t we just quit life itself?

This is an interesting question at an armchair philosophy level, but even more so at the concrete, emotional level. When we, in our darkest moments, contemplate suicide (a serious matter we shouldn’t take lightly and that I do not wish to inadvertently encourage anyone to pursue), what is there to stop us? Why do we keep keeping on? Why are we doing this thing called “life” at all?

Brutal as Camus’ question may seem, it often leads to rather heartwarming kinds of answers. It’s usually not that we’ll miss out on eating more popcorn, or even that we’d like to see more beautiful sunsets. More often, we won’t kill ourselves because that would let down our kids, or at least our mother, or someone else who would be hurt by it. That’s interesting, isn’t it? When push comes to shove, it appears that we’re sticking around for one another, for a sense of responsibility. Responsibility: the ability and duty to respond to the happiness and suffering of the other.[91]

At the core of our existence, at the life-and-death level (at what I have called the “causal layer of phenomenological experience”), we are social beings, relational beings. Upon closer examination, even profound happiness and the avoidance of suffering—which I hold we are wise to wish for ourselves and one another and I believe are viable goals for society at large—seem to be sub-categories of this deeper thing called relationality.

In turn, when this relationality is brought into resonance, as the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has argued, we are happy. Suffering is alleviated through grief and healing, which also seem to constitute a kind of resonance—we cry as a way of accepting reality, bringing our thoughts and emotions into resonance with the realities we face. When what moves inside of you is met and matched by what moves around you, or when your inner flows are brought into the patterns of something greater than yourself that you can feel like a part of, you have “high states” and you are “happy”. That is to say, again, you are happy when your inner experience and your surrounding reality are in tune with one another. There it is again: “tuned in to reality”.

Interestingly, you can relate in a resonant manner even when being alone. Some of the happiest and most connected days of my life have been spent alone in a house in the Alps, engaged with philosophy and writing. Here I am often alone, but rarely lonely, because I am in an intense and meaningful relationship through my work, through the creative freedom of thinking and creating something I feel is meaningful and hopefully even valuable.

When shit hits the fan, life is about relationships; to one another, to ourselves, and to existence itself. Indeed, even truth is about relationships: what’s the relationship between time, distance, and speed? It’s an equation, yes, but it describes a relationship between the three.

But just as happiness and the care for suffering rest upon relationships, so does every relationship rest upon happiness and suffering. There’s little point in maintaining relationships that cause suffering and impede happiness, unless they can realistically be transformed into something better. We don’t want our partner to stick around while becoming more miserable for it (at least not if we’re in our right minds and not in the grip of the fear of abandonment or the like). To relate to someone is at least partly to care about them, and hence about their happiness and suffering. So if we want higher states, for ourselves and others, we must always come back to the nature and reality of our relationships—and the other way around: if we want good relationships, we must always care about the inner states of the parties involved, and thus stay or quit accordingly to what serves the people involved. We need to not be everybody’s everything.

The Scale of Conflict Resolution

Of course, you don’t quit frivolously. You need to exhaust other options first if there is a conflict that arises. Let us begin with looking at four modes of relating when a relationship gets difficult, which are related in a kind of hierarchy, a “scale of conflict resolution”:

1. Resolving the conflict for mutual benefit, through a higher synthesis or “both and” that in fact refines the perceived interests of the parties involved and gets more at the core of what they truly want, just in a way they hadn’t necessarily thought of—often redefining the roles and the nature of the relationship itself.

2. Resolving the conflict by compromise, so that both lose something, but still maintain the benefit of the relationship itself.

3. Confronting and struggling with the other, winning the fight, and thus reshaping the nature of the relationship according to our interests and sense of what is fair and just.

4. And then, as grand finale, you guessed it: Quitting, leaving the relationship, going on strike.

In a perfect world, we could always take the first option: finding a shared higher ground and a renewed relationship. This usually involves some of the paradoxical thinking we visited in the chapter on “sincere irony”. You need to somehow figure out a way not to compromise (and give the parties not just some of what they want) but to get at the core of what both parties want or need, and then stretch out the solution to cover both extremes (the “double extremism” we were talking about) in a manner that unexpectedly fits the whole relationship together into a new, larger whole. This tends to require both a sense of responsibility for that wholeness (a “holistic” view), the capacity to get out of our own limited perspectives, and a great wealth of mutual trust to build upon (as we discussed at the beginning of the sincere irony life rule).

And the greater social skills, level of trust, sense of wholeness, and capacity for skillful both-and thinking, the greater the likelihood for such transformative “higher ground” solutions presenting themselves. Being in higher subjective states in which reality appears more “as a whole” also helps a lot. The first step towards making such holistic solutions is often to insist, in one’s own emotional response to the matter, that in the larger scheme of things, there is no conflict; only a new greater whole waiting to be discovered and brought into being.[92] Rather  than asking ourselves “Why is this happening to me? How could they treat me like this?” we find a way to stay calm and instead ask “What is this challenge trying to teach me? What can I learn from this?”. This is a big part of what they mean when they say that crisis and conflict can be transformative; it can trigger desirable transformations of our social realities and the ways we relate to one another. In couples’ therapy, there is the school of “imago therapy”, which helps to redefine each nasty pattern of triggering negative emotions into an opportunity for inner healing and transformation. Being with other people, depending on them, can force us to do the uncomfortable but invaluable work of going through such potentially painful, but possibly wondrous, transformations. If I believe (with ironic sincerity) in any kind of miracle, this is it.[93]

Alas, however, we don’t live in a perfect world. Transformation is far from always within reach, even in the long term. The conflict can be too deeply rooted, too complex to untangle, or there can be insufficient levels of mutual trust available, or the people involved can have too little basic trust in the goodness of reality, or have too great difficulties taking the perspectives of others, and so on. Transformative solutions are rare, just as the wizards who conjure them. So we’re much more often left with the necessity to compromise, where both parties get some of what they want, but still pay a price. We’ve moved from the heavenly realm of win-win games, to the very earthly realm of partial win-lose games. Still, the relationship as a whole and the mutual benefit can be saved, if at a price for both parties. Neither side gets to move to its preferred extreme, and no higher ground is found. There is only a tug-of-war that establishes a power balance between the parties: but still, a new balance.

And if the equation simply doesn’t seem to allow an acceptable trade of “you gain some, you give some” on both sides, you’re stuck with an open conflict or confrontation, and you have to fight it out so that one side wins and the other side loses. These struggles can range from verbal arguments and social sanctions, to threatening livelihoods and resources, to outright violence and war. Each of these endeavors are costly and risky in and of themselves. So a price is paid even by the winner (usually), and a yet higher price by the losing side. There are righteous wars, for sure, where the losing side may actually benefit from being defeated (the Germans were better off without the Nazis ruling them, arguably; psychiatric patients may sometimes benefit from being subdued by the staff of the hospital, preventing self-harm, etc.), but most conflicts are more nihilistic by nature. The cat kills the mouse, and frankly, there wasn’t much in it for the mouse.

A comment on “fighting it out” before we go on. Conflicts are a normal part of a healthy life—sometimes even keys to a positive transformation.  The principle to apply in our own everyday lives and relationships is: Don’t minimize conflict, minimize resentment. We shouldn’t stir conflicts or keep them alive for no good reason, but remember that the crooks and exploiters of the world always seek to change the subject, to silence, to bury, to hypocritically forgive and forget when it is oneself that has wronged and thus appear magnanimous. And all of those things lead to ever new injustice, new resentment. Better be a fighter than a damned coward, after all—but that’s a bridge we will burn when we get to it (the Eighth Commandment). Don’t let anybody treat you in a manner that will make you resentful. Resentment is the enemy, not conflict, and only rarely actual people (in which case, the enmity is almost always due to their resentment in the first place).

But if you’re in a position where you feel that even “fighting it out” cannot help, or you don’t have enough power to have a fair chance of winning the confrontation, or you’ve already taken all confrontations necessary, you’re left only with leaving, quitting, ending your side of the bargain, killing off the relationship, even escaping if necessary. Of course, fighting or surrendering is the only option when you genuinely cannot quit: the denizens of eastern Europe couldn’t “quit” the Golden Horde once their cities were attacked or besieged in the 13th century. But whoever had the opportunity to escape, we can safely guess, probably ran for their life.

Quitting is a kind of last resort, often the weapon of the less powerful party, like workers who organize strikes (or mass resignation, as strike is still part of a negotiation) in the face of what they feel is unfair exploitation by capital owners. But “quitting” being at the bottom of this hierarchy, ultimately also means that it is the most fundamental building block of relationality: the capacity to “just say no”. The mouse wishes to “just say no” to the prospect of the cat eating them, but their only means of doing so is  to escape, to run like hell and hide where the cat can’t reach them. That means, of course, that only a very limited kind of relationship is at all possible between cats and mice. Since one side has almost all the power, there is no mutuality from which to build further relationships.

After all, and again, if we cannot say “no” to life, or to the things in it, we aren’t actually free to say yes to the things in life, either. We won’t know where we start and someone/something else begins, because we simply don’t have the capacity to set that boundary. Thus we’ll have difficulty forming a clear idea of our wants and needs. If we’re pushed into that position, there’s no “bottom line” that can be formed within us, and others can exploit us freely, because we cannot tell our own wishes apart from theirs.

If we cannot ultimately quit a relationship, or end a certain part of it, we’re in a much weaker position to partake in any of the three other categories of conflict resolution: finding a higher common ground, compromising, or fighting it out. The relationship itself cannot be mutual, and it cannot, in a sense, be true. Of course, if we’re soundly defeated in confrontations, we might not be able to quit, either.

No wonder cults or any abusive, exploitative, or totalitarian forms of leadership do everything they can to make it difficult to quit. It’s hard to “just quit” North Korea, a labor camp, or a criminal gang, or even Scientology, once you’ve gotten to be a full-time worker/resident at their headquarters in the middle of the desert outside of Los Angeles. And if you cannot easily quit, or at least go on strike, you’ll be ill-equipped to stand up for yourself in a confrontation; and failing that, there’s no real common ground from which to find compromise, let alone find positive transformations of the relationship. The whole idea of being a slave is that you can’t quit.

So the power and capacity to quit, even the skill and willingness to quit, provide a foundation for cultivating genuine relationships. In many ways, then, the fundamental social empowerment is the power to quit. It thus makes a lot of sense to become really good at quitting. When divorce became a socially viable option, the number of killings between spouses went down.

Still, we should only use this force sparingly and with great discernment. Quitting is as destructive as it is liberating: not only does quitting mean that you leave behind the relationship and whatever was mutually invested in it; every time you threaten to quit a job or a marriage, it shakes that relationship to its foundations, subjecting it to decay. It nukes the relationship and leaves its mutual trust in smoldering ruins. Nevertheless, without this capacity we are fundamentally powerless. Sometimes, threatening with the nukes and setting a firm boundary can in turn lead to winning a confrontation, to striking a compromise, or even triggering a positive transformation of the relationship itself, redefining the roles entirely. But that only happens rarely; so we are wise to use the threat of “I quit” sparingly. Imagine a spouse that threatens to quit a marriage every Tuesday and Thursday; after a short while, there won’t be much of a marriage left to quit. The threat of quitting is enough to make the marriage deteriorate.

How about not ever threatening to quit at all, then? It’s wrong to threaten, no? Ultimatums are childish, right? Well, that’s what the person who doesn’t want you to quit will say. But if used sparingly and with an eye to sound boundary setting, issuing a proper warning that you might quit can make sense. If you’re quitting a North Korean labor camp, it might be best not to warn them first. Just run if there’s a gap in the fence. If you’re quitting a marriage, best to give a few clear warnings—even if others may call it a threat. There’s no real difference between a warning and a threat, except that we may consider it a warning if it’s used with care and respect for all parties involved.

The capacity of quitting, of saying no, is the essence of freedom. The slave is defined by their incapacity to say no; the oppressor has cut off all viable routes of escape. In that manner, unless we are literally trapped or enslaved, we can also increase our sense of freedom in everyday life, by always remembering that we have the capacity to quit, to say no. Think of what the power to say no means: When our jobs get tough, we can always know that we’re choosing to be there, that we could quit and take the brunt of the consequences. When a romantic relationship becomes dysfunctional, we can work through the issues and go through the fights, while knowing that nobody is forcing us to stay, and that can make us not feel as helpless. When peer groups disrespect us, we can know that we could quit the group and find others who respect us more. When a friendship is tedious and one-sided, we can more easily manage it if we remember that we’re in it voluntarily. Strange as it may seem, knowing that you have the nukes, that you can “just say no”, makes you less neurotic, less nervous, and that increases the chances of improving upon and transforming relationships. Individualism and freedom, values so cherished in our society, ultimately come down to letting people say no to one another.

Our capacity to quit is always imperfect. We are all dependent on others, and people can use the negative social emotions of fear, guilt, and shame to hold us in place (as we shall return to in detail in the two next chapters), to paralyze us. At the deepest level, all monsters say “don’t leave me!”; that’s why they lock you up in dungeons; from the slave owner, to the abusive romantic partner, to the cult, to the totalitarian dictatorship, to the suffocating family member, to the dragon with a maiden trapped in their treasure chamber, to Joseph Fritzl. They might want to shift the game from “stay or leave” into one of confrontations which they can win again and again due to some advantage they happen to have. And it is fundamentally this sense of powerlessness-of-the-seemingly-powerful, the “don’t leave me!”, that destroys freedom from both sides: you can become the monster by undercutting someone else’s capacity to quit, or you can put yourself in an incredibly victimized situation by becoming so desperate and afraid of being abandoned that you say “Don’t leave me, I’ll do anything!”—in effect enslaving yourself even when there is no literal oppressor. You then inadvertently produce a monster for yourself, and that role can even be filled by a kind person who wishes you well. Then you’ll have no room for conflict and compromise, and you’ll be absolutely miserable despite the fact that others are being kind to you. Yikes. That’s the opposite of freedom.

I don’t mean to be judgmental about this: Powerlessness is a real thing. If we fear homelessness if we quit, if we fear not being able to feed our families, if a repressive police state will go after our family, or if we’re just too insecure, connecting to our power to quit can be almost impossible. The point is, that we should identify it as being of primary importance, and then cultivate this capacity. This is done not least by investing in multiple pathways in life and multiple sources of strength and support. But most of all, we need to practice quitting throughout our lives, which implies sometimes quitting as an active and conscious choice, including the quitting of small things. This capacity to quit creates the preconditions for a solid foundation of deep personal freedom, as well as mutually authentic relationships flourishing in our lives.

To point out the obvious, perhaps: Quitting needs to happen in our lives, and it is the basis of freedom and authentic mutuality (again, if your spouse stays just because it would be too hard to leave, that’s not really a spouse, it's a damned prisoner)—but it tends to be the least desirable of the above-mentioned alternatives of conflict resolution. So first, we should look for transformative solutions that creatively redefine the nature of the relationships we’re in; then we should seek compromise; then we should fight it out and make sure we win if we can; and then we should warn the other party we’re quitting… and only then we should quit. However, if you know beforehand that quitting will be best for you, then go directly to that.

I’m being repetitive here, but if you overuse the quit button, you’ll soon have nothing worthwhile left in your life; if you underuse it, there’ll be nothing of yourself left in your life as you’ll be completely gobbled up by all the things you should have quit long ago, but didn’t.

When to Quit

Now, then, comes the million dollar question: which relationships should we cultivate and which ones should we end?[94]

There is, unsurprisingly, no easy answer to this question: when to quit, what to quit? When a relationship is conflictual, oppressive, or doesn’t serve us and others, we should work to change the nature of that relationship. But there are, undoubtedly, some cases that mandate quitting.

It’s usually not a good idea to quit your closest family, especially not your kids. I sometimes hear sad stories of moms leaving their little kids to become yoga teachers in India and the like, or fathers and husbands who break up not just with their wife, but with their little kids, too. That’s tragic, and very unfortunate for all parties involved. In adulthood, estrangement from family is common. A US study found that as much as 17% of adults[95] are estranged from a direct family member, most often the father, and another one found that 12% are even estranged from their non-adult children[96].

Doesn’t all of this mean that people are already quitting too much? Families are incredibly valuable, and if people are quitting even those, shouldn’t we practice loyalty rather than quitting? Well, not so fast: why would people feel the urgent need to engage in such exaggerated forms of quitting in the first place? Likely, a large part of such seemingly destructive behaviors result from a long history of failing to quit in due time, failing to say no, to set, communicate, and hold boundaries, and to redefine social relations before they have become absolutely untenable. A person who leaves their kids to pursue their supposedly blissful yoga life in India must be pretty desperate, don’t you think? They have probably missed quite a few smaller opportunities to quit and say no, and in the end, exhausted and helpless, they started eagerly longing for a whole new life, consequences schmonsequences. There is good reason to believe, in other words, that they haven’t been quitting too much, but much too little. And that leads to unsustainable life conditions, which make people implode and then overreact.

Quitting enough is key. Quitting in time is key. But, then again, committing to things, people included, is integral to the meaning of life. So how do independence and freedom balance against commitment, loyalty, and responsibility?

Let’s start from the farther end of what we most definitely should quit as soon as we possibly can: anything that looks, smells, feels, and especially functions like a cult. A cult will have a first layer of “love bombing” to draw you in, some great and grand narrative about saving the world (or similar), and then cut you off from other parts of life more and more, while controlling you and raising the pressure to conform. It will twist dramatically between warm inclusion and wonderful community, with grim social repercussions for whatever “trouble in paradise” that arises. All cults rely on the inability to quit, so they will all try to claim that there is a great emergency going on, a state of martial or sacred law, where normal freedoms cannot be upheld. Sometimes, of course, there are such situations: in the midst of a major hurricane, or a war, or pandemic, we must accept certain compromises. But cults thrive on narratives where the emergency is artificially invented or prolonged. And once you buy that narrative, their demands seem reasonable enough, and before long, all your capacities to quit have been ground down, all of your escape routes eliminated. The world would have been a much better place if people would have been able to just quit ISIS, Scientology, and all the hundreds of cults that have cropped up over the last few decades. But quitting a cult is hard.

For those of us who are not drawn into a cult, it’s not a big deal that cultists should quit cults. But I have found that, once cults (and similar things) actually do show up and spread their tentacles, the majority of people, by far, are unwilling to make the sacrifices and efforts needed to quit and take an uncompromising stand against them. The cult dynamics always come disguised as something else, as something nice. Quitting and taking a stand is only obvious in theory, seldom in practice.

When you’re in a cult environment, life suddenly sparkles again. Magic has returned to the world. You access a sense of meaning, sometimes one so profound that you literally couldn’t have imagined it before joining. It’s above and beyond anything that can be found in romantic love, or even in family life and children. But where does this sense of meaning truly emanate from?

Exposure to authoritarian messages has been shown to worsen one’s mood, but also grant a heightened sense of meaning in life.[97] In a spiritual sense, authoritarianism is sexy. And cults build on such authoritarian messages, however disguised or repackaged they may be. (Closely connected to this, a recent study suggested that hating some collective group, but not a specific person, can be a source of meaning in life, as we gain a clearer sense of us-and-them[98]... So before you join the choir of all those who “prefer meaning to happiness”, be careful what you wish for.) We all want that great meaning in life, and that can be a hard thing to part from. If I don’t have that cosmic battle for the soul of the universe, then what’s the point, right?

Giving up such a sense of meaning and standing up to social pressure are hard things to do. Even thoughtful, kind, and balanced people become cultists or enablers of cult dynamics. Most commonly, they relativize the misconduct and ethical breaches of cult members, opting for “nuanced understanding”, or “multiple perspectives”, over common decency. Ever wonder why so many Catholic priests, presumably men of wisdom who committed their lives to ethics and serving the good, turn a blind eye to child molestation within the church? (A recent report estimates over 200,000 molested kids since the 1950s, just in France: it’s industrial.) My take: they were good at committing and joining, but they were never trained in saying no and quitting. I’m not calling the Roman Catholic Church a cult, just saying it should train people to say no and stand up against what isn’t right, not just to bow their heads and pray. Having “character” or “integrity”, those magically imbued traits, involves the capacity to quit as much as the grit to commit. Quitting is tricky, and that’s why we must become masters of it, so that we can return safely to sublime mediocrity, whenever we have strayed from its path.

But the even trickier part is that cult-like social dynamics can show up in so many unexpected places: in companies, in work places (especially work places that mimic what the sociologist Erving Goffman called “total institutions”, like prisons or ships at sea, i.e places you literally cannot quit), in political movements, in gangs, on internet forums, in subcultures, around self-help gurus and self-development circles, even in marriages and close personal relationships—and I’m sure in places I couldn’t even think of. So half-baked cults need to be quitted, too. When tunnel-vision, groupthink, surveillance, reporting on one another, and control take hold; when attempts are made to cut off all routes of escape; when you can’t tell the difference between your own will and theirs; when narratives are weaved of enemies everywhere—then the cult dynamic is in place, even if it’s not a full-fledged cult.

This is a book dedicated to idealists of the transnational creative class—the exceptional people who could do well to become a wee bit more ordinary. In such social contexts, cult dynamics are more likely to crop up than in the mainstream. Cults keep springing up like mushrooms after rain. From what I can see, cult awareness is by no means an irrelevant perspective. People’s cult awareness tends to be frighteningly undeveloped. And, again, the cult is the best and clearest example of something that we definitely should quit.

If you ever find these cult dynamics in your relationships, you know what to do, even if it’s hard, even if there is a price to pay: Quit! Leave. Goodbye, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu. And if you can muster the energy and courage, take a public stand against it. Whatever “good sides” there may be to your staying in Scientology, or any abusive relationship, they’re not worth it. You’re doing harm to yourself and to others by feeding the cult dynamics with the days of your life.

Cult dynamics are the very essence of authoritarianism. They are antithetical to anything resembling a sublimely mediocre life; in fact, they promise greatness, meaning, and transcendence (which is not mediocre), but at the expense of everyone’s happiness, freedom, and ultimately their ethical conduct (which is not sublime). And the essence of cults is: never quit, never surrender (sure, you surrender yourself to the collective, but then you cannot surrender that very commitment, and the collective must never surrender against the outsiders).

Beyond that obvious (but often very difficult) need to quit cult-like settings, there are many more things to quit. The next step on the scale are life situations which do not serve us (and others) in a deeper sense. I mentioned earlier a friend quitting her career and taking the long, arduous detour to become a medical doctor, from scratch. It took years, obviously. It was complicated and financially risky. But she became happier for it, and she grew more than an inch in the process. She was genuinely proud of herself, and still is to this day, being very good at her job. She quit, and decades of her life were saved from drudgery and misery.

But how do we tell the difference between us just being childish and unaccepting of life’s intrinsic difficulties, or us being in the midst of some depressive thoughts and the casual despair of life, and a reasonable and sound reason to quit?

For jobs, we should at least be able to believe that they do some good for others, and that they don’t make us worse people. For marriages and similar relationships, we should be able to genuinely say that they make both parties happier than they otherwise would have been, at least over a longer stretch of time. For friends’ groups, we should feel respected and appreciated, and feel that we can charge our batteries with them. In all cases, we should follow our conscience and sense of justice. And how do we do that?

In an upcoming chapter, Heal with Justice—arguably the most important one in this book—we’ll get deeper into that. For now, we’ll note that we should do, as the house tidying guru Marie Kondo says about material possessions: keep that which sparks joy when we listen to our hearts. (Unless it’s a cult. Then quit.)

Quitting sounds irresponsible. And it can be, if done unreasonably. But it is also irresponsible of us to fail to quit, to prolong the misery, and to stifle the potential for new delights that could unfold in our lives and beyond. Indeed, staying in unhappy marriages has been shown to be detrimental to well-being as compared to divorce[99] and a 2014 British poll revealed that 82% of young people between the ages of 14 and 22 actually prefer divorced parents over them staying unhappily married.[100] If something is bad, and stays bad over time, it’s time to quit. For everyone’s sake. Even if it can feel like a betrayal, to stay in what is not good for us is actually a greater betrayal at the deeper level, because it betrays the very purpose of the relationship: mutual thriving and doing good for the world. Any relationship that doesn’t serve such purposes must ultimately be viewed as pathological: a parasite upon the people it connects.

To  be abandoned, to face rejection, to be quit, is one of the great tragedies of life. It should not be taken lightly. Much of cult dynamics and destructive relationships feed off of this fear of rejection and abandonment. If all means to quitting are cut off, the unconscious cult-leader reasons, then I’ll be safe.

Becoming good at quitting includes showing an understanding of the grief that can follow for all parties involved. We should quit, but of course as respectfully as we possibly can towards those that don’t wish us to leave. We may have guilt for leaving, or resentment for staying and having our boundaries crossed. Both should be minimized. If you have to choose, though, always choose guilt over resentment.

The bottom line is that, sometimes, being responsible does not mean commitment, but paying the price of cutting ties and starting anew. That’s commitment to the betterment and health of all parties involved. Again, if we have no practice in quitting even small things, we’ll bring about bigger collateral damage when we quit bigger things. If we’re skilled quitters, we can cut ties when necessary in a kinder and more productive manner, and in time, we can reduce that suffering.

Such dramatic things as ending a marriage, breaking off with adult siblings, or changing career paths should of course be made with great care. There are, however, other things we may need to be good at quitting on a day-to-day basis, or at least regularly in our lives. At any given point, there is likely to be at least something to quit: a boundary to set and make perfectly clear. The secret here is to divide relationships up into their smaller, constituent parts. Maybe you don’t need to “quit your inlaws”, but you may wish to quit certain meetings and shared rituals, or certain responsibilities that have been heaped on you. If you do it sooner rather than later, and communicate well around it, everyone will be better off for it in the long run. Maybe you can keep that friends’ group, but skip beer on every Thursday and Friday, if it doesn’t serve your life the way it once did. Maybe you need to quit certain topics of discussion. Maybe you need to quit a certain role at your job, but not the job itself. Maybe you need to set a boundary around a certain kind of behavior that others are subjecting you to; then you just quit that bad part of the relationship, and you keep and strengthen the rest of it.

Remember: you almost always have the power to quit (and if you don’t, you’re stuck in a dynamic that you should definitely quit, whatever the price). Again, this is a reassuring and empowering thing to always have in mind; it helps to build authentic relationships. Your boss, inlaws, family, and friends don’t want to find out a decade later that you’ve been quietly suffering and been bored to death by them. By knowing that your time and attention are yours and that you offer them to people just as other people offer theirs to you, you can begin to feel that you are in a position to choose others, and that is delightful to them as well. It feels great to be genuinely chosen; deep down, conversely, it feels like crap to have others in our lives simply because they couldn’t bring themselves to leave.

Quitting can feel wrong—and still be the right thing to do. This occurs when you’re in a genuine dilemma, which it is all but inevitable that you will run into sooner or later in life. In Hollywood movies, there’s always “one right path”, the “listen to your heart” path. In reality, as in those awful French movies, you can have genuinely conflicting emotions and values, which force you to make a sacrifice. There’s no “God of right answers” who’s doing the script, no certified letter from the universe. Whatever hero’s journey we may feel we’re on, it’s ultimately in our own head. And there are indeed situations where there isn’t one perfect answer. Hey, that young mathematician, Kurt Gödel, showed a century ago that even mathematical systems necessarily contain unprovable claims. Incompleteness—indeed, paradox—is an intrinsic feature of reality itself.

Sometimes, your dilemmas are real and you need to work through them at a price. So size up the price, buckle up, and pay up. Quit. Of course, then you need to be respectful not only of the emotions of loss of other people involved, but also, and more crucially perhaps, of your own sense of loss.

The more you untangle emotions and gain clarity, the easier this becomes. If you’re lucky, a transformative solution comes into view: an elegant, creative, and bold stroke that somehow redefines the situation and circumvents the problem.

There are kitties you just don’t know how to comb, times when your emotions are so tangled up and contradictory that the “listen to your heart” thing will give you a new answer every five minutes. That’s incredibly painful and confusing. In such situations, go through the alternatives, and choose the “less wrong” answer, once you’ve reached as deeply as you can into yourself. The world is tragic because things don’t always fit together. If you have to choose between your spouse and your new fancy, abandoning one of them is going to feel awful. And still, in time, it will prove to be the right thing to do, for yourself and for others. Hence: quit when it’s the less wrong thing to do.

So quit—and grieve. Give grief it’s due. Give it time. Don’t be too proud to admit it: even if a relationship was harmful, there will be things you miss. Work through that sense of loss; find ways to cry. Admit that you may still be worrying about the people you had to quit, that it pains you that they suffer. Feel those emotions too.

Check in regularly with yourself. Are you stuck in a destructive, cult-like relationship that has deliberately cut off your means of escape? Are any relationships not genuinely serving yourself and others over time, building on false premises or unacceptable attitudes or behaviors? Are there activities and settings that define only a part of a relationship that you’d in all honesty rather be without?

Quit when it is the brave and loving thing to do; not when it is the cowardly and disloyal thing to do. It’s not about abandoning bullied buddies, or rejecting people who aren’t pretty or popular enough. It’s not about crudely calculating “from whom do I gain or lose energy?”. It’s not about avoiding the difficult work of negotiating in marriage. It’s about protecting yourself, standing up for yourself, and serving other people by building on what’s honest and mutual, given your own needs and boundaries. Take the steps necessary to quit in a manner that is as respectful and kind as possible. View it as a skill to master. View it as the sacred source of honest commitment: because a “yes” to life, or any part of it, is only truly a yes, when the firm “no” is present as a possibility.

The Adult Quits, The Child Commits

When it comes to children under our care, we should never quit our parenthood, of course. But if some part of it is unbearable (say, ice hockey), we can try to find a way to quit that part and create something preferable for all parties. Maybe there is another solution (say, someone who enjoys being a hockey parent can take them there for a corresponding favor in return). Transformational solutions and compromises can only come about if there is a basis of mutuality, and mutuality builds on voluntary relationships. As such, we should make even the relationships with our children as voluntary as possible, so that we can love them from a free and joyful part of ourselves. Whereas the abandonment of children and parental responsibility truly are harmful—indeed, reprehensible—we can arguably show up more as good caretakers if we are also good parents to our own, inner child.

By the way, one of the real values of having money and resources of all kinds is to retain the power to quit. If you can secure money, food , and shelter without any one particular source, there will be nobody who can threaten you to stay in any relationship. But for the same reason, it only makes sense to secure a living honestly—otherwise people get more hooks and leverages on you than you can count. Sure, joining the drug cartel can make you rich, but is it easy to quit the mafia? Everyone wants to have enough money saved to be able to quit their job if needed, but that may not work if your boss has so much dirt and strings on you. If you keep your livelihood clean, you can make clean cuts. Ethics, in this sense, is hygiene.

As we discussed earlier, there is the adult path (securing the resources and mastering the skills) and the child’s path (knowing what your unreasonable heart desires), and we need to travel both paths, sacrificing neither, nor pushing others to sacrifice any of the two. The only exception is when the inner child wants two or more incompatible things; here, the adult must step in and make the painful choice for us (the “less wrong” principle). The adult must grow the capacity to resolve conflicts, including the inner conflicts of the child’s desires.

In fact, quitting is at the crux of these two paths: the adult must have the capacity and power to quit (again, commanding sufficient resources and skills to be able to do so), and the inner child must be listened to and protected, so that it is not harmed and oppressed by the social situations we find ourselves in. But once the child is safe, it can commit. And it commits by loving, by trusting, by letting itself go. It’s not unlike that double serpent symbol of medicine, the so-called Caduceus—the staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology and consequently by the mysterious figure Hermes Trismegistus in Greco-Egyptian mythology.

The Caduceus, from Wikipedia, open source.

As you can see, the Caduceus staff has two serpents slithering past each other in a helix pattern up to the top, where a pair of wings unfolds. We may view one serpent as the adult path, growing the strength and capacity to reshape relationships, resolve conflicts, and ultimately to quit (which includes having enough resources to make such choices) The other is the child, whose energy and power can extend farther because it is held by the capacity and responsibility of the adult, trusting and committing more deeply and fully. Together they climb upwards through the twists and turns of life, towards wider embraces and greater heights (farther to the left, then the right, with each level of ascension), until the spirit flies, represented by wings at the top.

In other words, the better the adult self is at quitting, the more the authentic child can roam freely and commit more deeply, to greater and more universal things. When the inner child commits, the heart commits, and there is real connection, tuning in to life, resonance. That makes music beautiful and life worth living. You can go deeper into the labyrinth if you know how to get out again.

This is another version of what I previously called “the sound of both-ands clapping”: two opposites are conjoined: a greater capacity to quit fosters deeper commitment. Commitment without the inner child, without the heart’s longing for joy, is a forced commitment, and it cannot be genuine. When we commit while disconnecting from our own inner spark, our sense of responsibility becomes hollow. In the name of responsibility, one part of ourselves is oppressing another. We’re being bad parents, tyrannical parents, to our own inner child.

As the choice of the Caduceus symbol implies, the capacity to quit is “medicine” for the soul, because it protects the child from that which would harm it, and holds in place a basis (the staff itself) for the child’s further expression, renewal, and development. And so, quitting is instrumental to refining the depth and scope of our life’s larger purposes and key relationships: the clearer these purposes become to us, the easier it then becomes to assess when and what relationships we should quit, aligning more and more of our personalities and habits, across wider and wider fields of endeavor, to one and the same purpose, to a larger pattern that connects our values and desires to each other. You could call it “integrity”, because it means that our values, desires, and emotions become integrated with one another.

Your Life as a Work of Art

If we are to take seriously Thomas Mann’s old idea, to turn one’s life into a work of art, we must use the power of “no”, the power to quit, to chisel away at the marble from which our life is created. Creation always implies destruction. When we say yes to one vocational path, we also say no to other alternatives that could have been. A beautiful sculpture is only revealed by what is removed. Shards of marble and dust cover the floor beneath every new great work. The no is the chisel with which we can sculpt our lives, taking it from rough, formless states, towards a higher life purpose, towards relative utopia, towards sublime mediocrity.

The powers of creation in the universe are ultimately always greater than the powers of destruction (why else would we be here in such a rich world, despite all the terrible things that have happened?). But quitting is about accepting that necessary ingredient of any creation: destruction. And then it is about trusting that creation will always be the greater force, that if you quit something bad, something better will emerge in its place.

What then is the deeper principle by which one should remove things from one’s life, until it becomes true, just, and beautiful?

It’s the principle of alignment, of coordination, of proportion, of fit.

Most of this book discusses how to work on ourselves to better fit our lives. This commandment is here to provide a counter-balancing force: to make our lives fit us, whatever shape or state we’re in as a person. Happiness, or resonance-in-relationality, or being tuned in to life, is fundamentally a function of how “the problem of fit” is managed from both sides: how we fit into our life situations, and how well they fit us. We are happy when the world around us, our circumstances, chime in harmony with our inner experience, with who we are. So let’s work for the purpose of getting you and your life to fit together.

To create a good society, one that improves upon itself and repairs itself as its cracks grow unbearable, we must work to make ourselves fit with our social environments, and vice versa. And that requires the capacity to quit, even a healthy form of aggression towards that which truly doesn’t fit. It’s Darwinian evolution, really. In a good sense: life changing form, flowing, taking new shapes.

From transforming, to compromising, to fighting it out, to quitting, this is what we must do to turn our lives into pieces of art. To return to Camus’ eternal question of suicide (or why not Beck’s question from the song Loser: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”): One reason not to kill ourselves is that it would be excessive; we don’t need to quit everything all at once; we need to quit just the right thing, at the right time, and then reinvest ourselves in that which is more true to us. We chisel with precision and remove only what must be removed. The rest we can keep; new truth and beauty are revealed in the space we thus free up for ourselves and others. We don’t kill ourselves, because we do fit in with the world around us. Life offers us incredible gifts and surprises, and our own lifework becomes a gift onto life itself. We must quit some things so that other things can be born; the right things, the things that fit together with other things.

Quitting is a last resort. But it is inescapable as a part of a life well lived in service of what is true, just, and beautiful.

Thus spoke the ironic prophet: “I command you to quit.”

Sixth Commandment: Do the Walk of Shame

“No Guilt.

No Shame.

No Excuses.

Or:
Know Guilt.

Know Shame.

Know Excuses.

The choice is yours.”

—Quote found online and used here without an inkling of guilt or shame

Let us, by all means, slip into something more uncomfortable. This chapter will make you blush. But have no fear; blushing is the path to liberation, because every bit of undealt-with and un-recognized shame you walk around with holds you back immensely and offers buttons for others to push and control you.

I will go through how I believe that we can deal with, integrate, and heal two negative “social emotions” stuck in our body-mind systems: shame and guilt. I have discussed these as sociological forces in earlier work; now we shall see how they can play out within each of us.

What we have discussed thus far—accepting the mess of life, fucking like a beast, living playfully by sincere irony, prioritizing workout of the body-mind correctly, knowing when to quit—it all relies upon how our emotional flows, our very motivational forces, play out inside of us. If the emotions are off, if they tangle up and our emotional flows don’t harmonize with one another, all else falters. You can’t “fuck like a beast” if your emotions won’t let you, nor can you know what you authentically wish for or not, so you can’t know when to quit, either. And the “new sincerity” I’ve been advocating is just an empty shell if it isn’t rooted in what you actually feel. You can’t have a sublimely mediocre life as long as negative emotions nag you in the background, wearing you down moment by moment. So, even as we “oil our machinery” with the right workout of the body-mind, we cannot escape dealing with the emotions themselves. The emotions are always there, and they guide our every step, whether we recognize it or not.

Let me warn you: this rule of life, and the two that follow, get pretty harsh. The three chapters Six, Seven, and Eight, are closely interconnected, leading up to one of the main points of this book. Be kind to yourself and take it as a way of jogging your mind and emotions—then you can evaluate in your own time and see if you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing.

Method to the Madness

Dealing with tough emotions is hard but straightforward: you simply make the lift, like a weight at the gym. The complicated part is generally to get the emotion to surface honestly and clearly. From there on, it’s a matter of inner grit and strength; either you can make the lift or you cannot. In cases where you can’t, you need to practice in smaller quantities so as not to get overwhelmed. Here it is:

●    Think through all the occasions you can think of at which you have felt the particular emotion to a significant degree (in this chapter it will be shame and guilt we dig up), and stay with each thought for a good while, even if it is uncomfortable. This is where a well-oiled body-mind system can be of help: if we’re used to going through discomfort at the gym or the like, and if we’re generally more at ease and relaxed in our bodies and minds, we might find the strain of the practice easier. When you stay for a while with thoughts of past events and own actions, the associated emotion will very likely be felt.

●    Now, make space (you might be lying down, resting, while doing this) for that emotion to be truly felt. Feel it flowing through you, noticing its texture and detail as it crops up in your system. Keep feeling it. Describe how it shows up as sensations, and the overwhelm tends to decrease, for instance: “There is a tightness in the chest”. Accept it, don’t fight it. It exists. It’s there. It’s okay. Keep at it until at least some of the emotion subsides and you can think about the event with less emotional charge. Move on to the next event; the more shame, for instance, you have felt, the easier it will now be to come up with another memory with more of the same emotion attached to it (shame, guilt, etc.).

Uhm, why torture ourselves this way?

The answer is pretty obvious if you think about it. If you were indeed capable of bringing the emotion up just by thinking about it, it must have still been there within yourself, one way or another. And if it was there, do you figure it was continuing to affect you? You betcha. Not only that, it was there like a landmine to be triggered, or even a string to be pulled by others to manipulate you. (Ever wonder why cult leaders love doing therapy with their followers? They get all the juicy sensitive stuff served for free, and from there, manipulation is easy.) But, just after a while of properly feeling through the unpleasant emotion, its level of intensity tends to decrease. The past event has lost some of its negative charge. It now controls us somewhat less. The emotions want to be seen, heard, recognized, played out to their respective conclusion.

I don’t know about you, but I for one don’t want to go through life subtly controlled by guilt, shame, and fear. Paradoxically, every moment we lie down and feel through an old piece of difficult emotion is a refreshing breath of foul air—if you can accept the emotion and not fight or repress it.

Secondly, and also importantly, it isn’t actually torture. You control the situation. You are in a relaxed position, recollecting events and letting emotions flow through you, and for the most part, it isn’t even very uncomfortable. You know you can stop when you want. No need to be too tough on yourself—you have a lifetime of opportunities to diffuse the negative emotions. You even begin to feel curious about it all: What shame do I carry around? What pockets of emotional charge do I have in my system, connected to which events in the past, to which ongoing or recurring issues? Strangely, once you begin to practice this, it becomes more of an adventure, of an exploration. And since you can face the emotions of each issue in a safe and calm space, one by one, until they subside and there is a bit of peace, you actually feel like you’re on a long, successful campaign of little victories. Each little victory grants a certain reward, a sense of conclusion, of accomplishment. Not to mention the pride and self-respect that arises having faced the emotion and gotten to know oneself better.

Seriously, it sounds like torture. But once you get into it, it’s actually fun. I kid you not.

It’s a lot like lifting weights at the gym: If you think about the most shameful thing in your life, it may very well be overwhelming when you relish in grim details. Your mind may not be able to “contain” the emotion: it might just be too huge. So start smaller, and lift one rock at a time. In time, rock by rock, you will have moved a mountain. Patience grows from having fun with the task. And the fun comes from genuinely wondering: What would life be like without my invisible chains, the chains of shame, of guilt, of fear? What forces are pulling my strings—and what happens if I tug right back at them?

There are exceptions as to when to do this. Major ongoing traumas should perhaps not be casually revisited. A very painful breakup, recent infidelity, or bereavement are so intense that you can’t be playful and observant about them, and so refocusing them continuously might only make things worse. Major issues you are already painfully ruminating on should not be part of this practice. Rather, such things need some distance and some shift of focus, so that you can revisit them later, ideally with therapeutic help. You shouldn’t do this at moments when you are already emotionally overwhelmed. It should be a playful practice you do “as a hobby”, for instance if you have a good twenty minutes before you fall asleep in bed, or on a long train ride.

You could say, it’s fine to do this practice while in “subjective states” 7, 8, or above, but not in 6 or below. The higher your subjective state, the more inner space and energy you have to do the practice successfully.[101] Hence, a good body-mind workout to improve your subjective state is instrumental to preparing the system for this practice. And yet, this practice is precisely one of the things that has the most potential to increase your long-term or baseline subjective state, because you are clearing up the emotional forces within, the ones that were never concluded and thus still affect you. That frees up the emotional flows, clears the inner clouds, and refocuses attention and motivation on what there is to be enjoyed and participated in in your life.

The Inventory of Shame

Okay, so let’s start. The by far easiest emotion to begin from, I have found, is shame (and this includes stuff like embarrassment, humiliation, even awkwardness). Lie or sit down calmly, and bring to mind something you feel shame about. Need to jog your memory? Here’s a list of things that are very common to have felt shameful around (roll up your sleeves, it’s going to get brutal here):

Negative or unflattering ways in which others have viewed you: as a low status clown, as a boring nerd, as a dumb and unsophisticated brute, as an overly bland and uninspiring person, as an awkward weirdo and misfit, as a loser who doesn’t have their stuff together, as just a side-kick of no particular importance, as junior and immature or just “small”, as an overly intense “too much” person, as a pretentious try-hard. Usually, it’s not that people have said these things directly to you, but you could tell from their reactions, from what they implied, from their facial expressions, and you could see how you yourself involuntarily made such impressions. The other people thought that their contemptful view of you was “secret”, but that somehow just adds to how degrading it all was, as if you were stupid enough not to see the social situation, as if it were all happening “above your head”... which it mostly didn’t.

Negative identities or self-images: closely connected to the above, but this is when you have been doubting whether or not any of the above is true, and started to believe it yourself, feeling like a dumb loser, a weird misfit, a boring nerd, or whatnot.

Times when the social situation has broken down: those times that something just got impossibly awkward for some strange reason, and people were disgusted by you or viewed you as terribly socially incompetent, or when people made jokes or corrections at your expense and “everyone” thought they were better than you.

Failures and mistakes: we all have them—from a disastrous public speaking occasion, to the failure to finish a project, to failing at our work or studies, to romantic failings, to losing lots of money on the stock market or gambling, to failed workout programs, to failures in parenting, to being bad at sports, to an SAT score below average (notice how we only ever hear about high SAT scores?)

Rejections: job market rejections, romantic rejections, rejections by folks we’d like to be friends with. It’s particularly shameful that our past actions reveal that we wanted to be a say, doctor or actor, but couldn’t and that’s why we’re now a teacher.

Imposter syndrome: “sure, I did a Ph.D. but I was never really a real scientist, I just cobbled together some crap and made it look good enough to pass, I’ll be found out anytime soon, just waiting for it to happen, I’m such a fraud…”

Our bodies and looks: too fat, too thin, an unflattering combination of the two, pig-eyed, big nosed, hair that curls in all the wrong ways, too thin hair, bad posture, insecure body language, too small breasts, too little curves, stocky legs, bottle-neck shoulders, unsymmetric, pale, spots on our faces and other places, underdeveloped chin, crooked or yellow teeth, clothes that won’t fit the right way; ah, there are so many ways to feel ugly, you name it!

Bad shit we’ve done: stupid projects we’ve undertaken, very poor financial investments, really bad advice we’ve given someone, those times when we were drunk dregs at parties, when we came on to a stranger in the most pathetic or creepy way, when our irresponsible actions lead to trouble but nobody found out.

Bad habits and addictions: from chemical addictions, to porn addiction, to gaming addictions, to binge-watching series, to excessive masturbation, to always postponing house chores or paying bills, to never finishing homework or other procrastination.

Weird sexuality: desires and fantasies we could hardly speak of, very bad performance in bed, sexual inabilities like losing erection or getting too tense, never losing our virginity or doing it only much later than expected, having too little sexual experience, being gay or having other non-normative sexuality or desires, having slept will all the wrong people in all the wrong places in all the wrong ways that weren’t even satisfying.

Perfectly normal but socially impossible sexual desires: ones that are not mutual or at least seem like they aren’t, attraction towards and fantasies about colleagues, married neighbors, friends, friends of our spouse…

Being part of any less respected group: never quite fitting in because you’re from an ethnic minority family, being viewed as a cliché rather than a full person because you’re Roma, or Black, or anything else, or simply being a woman in a male-dominated area.

Functionality: limp, wheelchair, deaf, chronic illness, difficult-to-explain conditions, neuroatypical needs and wants, and so on.

Not being feminine or masculine enough: speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

Physical health issues: from having sicknesses that are difficult to explain to things that affect the way our bodies show up to the senses.

Mental health issues: if you have a schizophrenia diagnosis or long term depression, this can be pretty hard to explain; it’s not exactly something you feel you can brag about.

Being poorer than others: not being able to join peer group activities for economic reasons, having grown up with cheaper, fewer, and less prestigious possessions, not being able to support oneself, being of lower socio-economic class.

Being less intelligent: as compared to our peer group of reference, having bad grades in school and not understanding the subject matters, never being listened to or asked for advice, always being taught, not being able to join in the more sophisticated endeavors and conversations, noticing that others seem to think they’re smarter than us.

Being less successful: having no career, or a less impressive career, or no established life and home as expected in our age group and socio-economic class.

Being clumsy and unathletic: moving one’s body awkwardly is shameful enough, to run around and trip things over in gym class for everyone to see is even more so.

Some days when we failed miserably at a number of simple things: a special case of “failures”; we’ve all had them, speaks for itself.

Any other “stigma”: basically, anything that marks you as different or weird or to be thought of as inferior.

Shame about shame itself: yup, it’s a nasty feedback loop: the deeper the shame, the harder to admit it, because you’re ashamed of feeling ashamed—not least because it is shameful to "care what others think".

Exaggerated infatuations with boy bands.

No doubt, not all of the above apply to you personally. But, to be honest, much of it probably does. Within many of these categories, you have stored away some shame, which now lives inside of you. And the list is by no means exhaustive. Shame, shame, shame. Embarrassment, humiliation. Every time these feelings show up, they lock us down, inhibit us, and stop us from acting.

It’s the walk of shame, folks. Life, that is. We cannot walk through life without feeling ashamed of ourselves, and sometimes even of others. This sixth commandment states: Do that walk of shame. Properly. Fully. Like a boss. Like the queen of England. Or like Freddy Mercury himself.

The principle behind shame—its social function, if you will—is that it reacts to a negative evaluation of ourselves, as mirrored by others, and then the shame paralyzes us, so that we don’t make matters worse, so we don’t drag ourselves into further contempt. Contempt and shame are thus two sides of the same coin: we are ashamed of that which would elicit contempt in ourselves or others. It’s not about being a member of a group or society; it’s about being a respected and appreciated member. And shame is there to help us regulate ourselves so that we don’t draw further contempt to us, so that we are not disdained. In a sense, it is when we internalize contempt and disdain of others, and target ourselves. Each time we do so, however, we pay a price, and shame locks down other emotions, other motivational drives, and we hold ourselves back.

But the especially twisted part of this is that our shame itself, if it is recognized as such, can serve as proof of our inferiority. Shame itself is shameful. If others look down upon us for our awkwardness, stupidity, and big nose, and we are visibly ashamed, and they notice, we’re proving them right! And so the shame increases, our social standing takes yet another hit. For that reason, we stuff it away, we hide it, deny it. As such, it is rarely felt and worked through to its conclusion. Thus we end up with lots of shame stuck in our system. I’ve been surprised to notice that even seemingly “shameless” people, once you get to know them deeply, were only shameless as a coping mechanism to even deeper layers of shame.

Now, the good part is that if you feel through the shame, and let it run its course, it actually loses its grip. You still learned the lesson: “Okay, so if I walk up drunk to women in bars and say ‘hey ladies, I’m a lonely man with a nice hotel room’ things will get awfully embarrassing very soon.” But, after feeling through the shame, you can now think about what a ridiculous and awkward person you were on that fateful night without feeling shameful about it. In fact, you learn more from the occasion, because you now have had the opportunity to think it through coolly. The shame will no longer linger in your emotional system and control you, and you still learn from it.

Virtues like bravery and humility stem not from some magical source of “will”, but from the integration of negative emotions like shame. If you work through your shame, you don’t need to feel a corresponding contempt towards others, either. That’s humility, in the deeper sense. Real humility, not the kind thrown around when people keep telling each other to be humble. Moreover, if you’re not inhibited and held back by shame (and the fear of shame), you can take on tasks that you otherwise wouldn’t dare for fear of the judgment and contempt of others. That’s bravery. Need I point out that this is a process of freeing yourself, of emancipation? You can act in more ways than you otherwise could have.

Some people have more shame, some less. Some are more prone to feeling shame, some have more things to feel ashamed of, and some have been more shamed by others. But we all have it. There’s no shame in having shame. I have it, you have it. An interesting aspect of this is that the more shame you have, the more you can work through, and the integrated form of shame is virtue. In other words, if you have a huge truckload of shame in your system, that’s not all bad: if you work through it, you’ll be braver and more free than almost anyone else. The folks who were always “normal” and “popular” and “successful” and “pretty” have never had to work through and integrate as much shame, and as such they haven’t become as strong and free. Integrated shame simply translates into a stronger spirit, one that holds less contempt for others and still is free to act in the face of social rules and expectations. That’s pretty awesome. I once wrote that “only broken hearts can save the world”. The same is true here: only weirdos can save humanity, because they have had to work through that all-too-human emotion of shame.

You Are the Opposite of Everything You Want to Be, and Others Can See It Very Clearly

There is one great adversary in the work to integrate shame. People inspired by Carl Jung's psychology like to talk about “the shadow”; it’s the part of yourself that you deny and project onto others. For instance, a greedy person will deny their own greed and see other greedy people all around them; an untrustworthy person will perceive other untrustworthy people at every corner, and so forth. The idea is that one can shine a light upon and integrate the shadow, making it lose some of its power over us. There are pros and cons to this idea. Generally, I find it fruitful to look for one’s own shadow only if one can do so without self-blame (so, getting out of those bad thought patterns). And I find it highly unfruitful to try to bust the shadows of other people: it almost always becomes a projection screen for what we happen to dislike about them, for our very own reasons.

In the realm of shame, I’d like to add a similar but distinct and what I feel is a more precise concept: the anti-self. Like with the shadow, only apply this to yourself, not to other people. It’s for your own benefit—but whenever you try to tell someone else about theirs, you may very well just be attacking them, perhaps in ways that are harmful to them. So don’t take “advice” or criticism from others in this realm, and refrain in turn to giving it. This is about self-knowledge, not about smartassing.

Anyway. The anti-self is that nasty, negative self-image that you have and hope so dearly isn’t the truth about you, but that you sometimes suspect is the truth when other people seemingly disrespect you. Maybe it’s “a pale, ugly, fat, plain, boring and cranky narrow-minded person”. I remember an old friend who was kind and idealistic for the most part, but who had an “anti-self” of that kind, and she could cold-heartedly and openly laugh at people on the bus who she felt seemed to fit that description, all to make herself entirely sure that she wasn’t it. When confronted with her behavior, and how much it collided with her other behaviors and values, she muttered something along the lines of “they had it coming”. But the anti-self takes many forms. Maybe the anti-self is a complete buffoon who nobody has any reason to take seriously. Maybe it’s a nerd who couldn’t get laid if he was the last man on Earth. Maybe it’s a weirdo who can never truly be one of the gang.

When you add up your shameful memories, and work through more and more of them, the contours of your anti-self become known. For many of us it’s obvious: all the times in our lives when people have met us and rated us as clearly below them, what is it they thought they saw? Well, we noticed it, too. We know all too well what they were thinking, the meaning of that smug look, that false smile, that half-second when their face betrayed disgust. But in some cases, we need to work a bit harder to figure out what it is. We have that unflattering image of ourselves within us, and we’ve been wrestling it and trying to disprove it all of our lives. And we hate it. And we cannot help but to hate the people who would make us into that anti-self, or who would steer social situations in a direction in which it actually is true. Another close friend worries that he might not be as smart as other people. Once a work colleague implied as much by promising to “compensate” for his contribution. Guess if my friend mentioned it to me almost every time we met for over a decade (I believe he was unaware of having mentioned it again and again). Someone had hit his soft spot, his anti-self.

In other words, by getting to know our anti-selves and working through shame we are learning to accept our own mediocrity, letting go of feeling ashamed about it. And that, interestingly enough, lets us live in sublime mediocrity. We learn not to compare ourselves to whom we think we “should have been”; we own up to who we really are.

The big liberation is when we, part by part, make friends with our anti-self. We stop trying to deny it, because the shame of it is no longer debilitating. We’ve seen it clearly and become used to it. There’s no more contempt towards this part of ourselves, towards ourselves viewed from those unflattering angles. It’s okay. You’re okay. The anti-self and the self have become friends. And so, the anti-self loses its power. If we make friends with the anti-self—i.e., the core of all of our interconnected sources of shame—we no longer need to “prove ourselves”. Shame debilitates us, paralyzes us, and it also corrupts our motivations (“I’ll show ‘em, who’s ashamed now!”). To the extent that we’re no longer subject to shame, we can act more freely, and more morally, in the world.

Or may I suggest you think about it this way: If there are, in total, several hundreds or even thousands of people who have encountered you and who have formed an impression and opinion of you throughout your life course, there is bound to be great variety among those impressions. Some have found you weak and dumb, others strong and smart, some ugly, others sexy—or whatever qualities people may have seen in you. Some found you creepy, tense, inauthentic, awkward, others kindhearted and relaxed. Some of these things, more than others, were fair judgments, in that they more accurately assessed the probability of you behaving in certain ways or performing at a certain level.

You also actually acted very differently and performed quite variously in all those different contexts and times in your life, which of course also means people saw and responded to very different sides of you.

Now, of those thousands of impressions—which ones do you figure are the “true” ones? For my own part, at least, I have ideas about how to answer that question, but, of course, I can’t be sure. So we all end up wondering from time to time what the “true story” about us is—from dark doubts to daydreams of greatness, sometimes both at once.

The idea here is to “own” the entirety of different ways in which people have seen you. From the worst (whether based on misunderstandings, unfair judgements on their parts, or correctly spotted mistakes and faults on your own part), to the medium (they just thought you were normal and bland), to the best (you somehow rocked their socks off). You “are” that whole spectrum. Or we could place the quotation marks differently: “You” are that whole spectrum.

Sociologists who studied how our sense of a unique “self” emerges have always found that human beings only fully become a “person” with a certain self-image by interacting with others and getting certain things mirrored back to them: “Oh, they’re calling me ‘Mary’, I must be ‘Mary’”; “oh, they react with warmth when I flutter my eyelashes, I must have pretty eyes” and so on.

Let’s follow this sociological trail to trace our self-images. If you want to meet your true self, you do so by seeing, understanding, and fully accepting the entire field of how people have seen you, warts and all. Because, well, that’s the truth of the matter. That’s the mirror, the “looking glass self” as Charles Horton Cooley termed it in 1902. Own that, and you have not only reached a higher grade of self-acceptance and self-love, you have also expanded your sense of self to a richer and more multifaceted view. That way, you don’t need to hate that anti-self so badly, or run away from it, or fight it. It’s a part of who you are, in all of your sublime mediocrity, but still it somehow doesn’t define you—because no one image of you exhausts the entirety and richness of your being, of your way of showing up in the world.

Consider the following: Let’s say you’re ashamed of being financially poor and socially dorky. Even if you manage to become the next Elon Musk (rich, and, to many people, admirable), you’ll still be carrying around that same anti-self within, and always be nervous that someone might activate it or reveal it. One’s whole life can easily become one large escape mission from that one negative self-image, that anti-self always lurking behind whatever new appearances we manage to create. If you were dissatisfied with your body and pushed forward to become a bikini fitness model, you’ll still feel that your past self is wrought with shame and embarrassment, ready to surface again (from an old photo, from a slide after a pregnancy, from an old friend who refuses to really see and acknowledge the new you). Your positive sense of self will be ever frail and brittle. You may even be hiding your anti-self from your spouse or close friends, putting in place a subtle barrier to real intimacy and emotional authenticity between yourself and them: “She wouldn’t love me if she knew…”.

And perhaps she wouldn’t. But my point is that the anti-self loses its power over you, also to a large extent its power over how others see you, if you fully own up to it and are no longer ashamed of it. So it’s better to become friends with the anti-self, and still, from a more relaxed and self-loving position, work to change in the ways that you want.

Another both-and. Both see the brutal caricatures that have been drawn of you (in all their grime, meanness, and partial truths) and be extremely kind and accepting towards them. I suppose all of this is yet another way of saying: Embrace your sublime mediocrity.

There’s another, simpler, little add-on to this insight. Try thinking about your life as performance over time. Some days you will have been setting personal records—and many more days will very likely have been so-so, or just dismally bad. Which one is the “real you”? Is it that record day, where you ran ten miles, got some work done, and still managed to call mom and be nice? Or is it that day you were recovering from a cold, hardly moved, got in a fight on the internet, ate poorly, and still managed to miss two important calls? Is when you were in the best possible shape “the real you” because that revealed your potential, or is the worst possible shape you’ve been the real you, because it reveals your low point, your bottomline? The only reasonable answer is—you’re the jumping graph itself, with all of its ups and downs. Accept the reality of that graph, love that person described by that graph, and you have found a way to love the real you. If life is a rollercoaster, and you are this life, what does that make you?

The Inventory of Guilt: Underdog Reversal

To act more morally in the world, we need to follow our conscience. Naturally. The problem is, however, that our conscience itself tends to be pretty corrupted by all sorts of stored up negative emotions pulling the strings at the back of our minds. And then, we are turning from shame to guilt.

Like with shame, the received wisdom of our day and age is that we should feel less guilt. We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. We should cut ourselves some slack; we should stop those neurotic voices of inner critics, not walk around feeling like bad parents or whatnot all of our lives, of little benefit to anyone. Right? Well, I’m suggesting that you try the opposite: to feel more guilt. Or let me specify that a bit further: I’m suggesting that you should make an inventory of your stored-up feelings of guilt, become as aware of these as possible, and then feel through them properly, so that the neurotic feelings of guilt and self-blame loosen their grip on you and your life.

If the social principle of shame is to regulate that which would undermine our standing among others, guilt is that which regulates our right to be a member of society in the first place. As such, it is even more serious. A good daughter who once committed theft of a cellphone when she was six won’t be able to tell her parents, wracked with guilt, feeling that her mom wouldn’t want her as a daughter if she knew. That’s very probably not the case, but it’s what the little girl feels like. She cries about it for eight years, having severe anxiety during evenings, blaming being tired (true story). This is how powerful our responses to guilt can be. Guilt regulates the basic participation in a social world. Ultimately, that’s why prisons, or banishments, or even death sentences remove someone from a social world: they are guilty! They don’t deserve to be part of “us”. And we have all done things that break the fundamental social rules and contracts of how to treat others, of how to comport ourselves. When we did that, we most likely felt guilt. And then repressed the emotion and denied it all before we could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Once we have worked through shame stuck in our systems, we can turn to guilt. And it’s much harder. Why? Because if shame was hidden, guess what guilt is going to be? It’s dug down to the bedrock, all holes filled back in, then a field of tulips was planted on top, and then we built a mall on that, and then let a thousand cars park on the spot. So to make an inventory of guilt, we need to become brutal excavators.

We’re not talking the cute kind of guilt, the one we like to brag about: “I sometimes feel guilty for taking the airplane” or “I feel guilty when I think of the poverty of the world”, or even “I feel guilty when I see friends in need but am too busy to step in myself, not knowing how to help”.

Nor am I exactly talking about the kind of guilt that sneaks up on parents whenever they feel their kids play video games too much, or even the guilt for procrastinating and failing to go to the gym.

We’re talking real guilt, where you, with very good reason, are guilty as charged for being a lousy piece of shit. When you abused[102], betrayed, let down, bullied, humiliated, hid in the crowd while enjoying another’s misery, and so on. Don’t think “I threw away a perfectly good pair of shoes”; think more like “I beat the living crap out of them, laughed evilly, and grabbed them by their hair, and then, after banging their head against the wall for a bit, flushed their face in the toilet. It felt damn good.” That stuff. Even if you perhaps don’t have a story like that one (but many people do, so some readers will, too), you did something royally rotten at some point in your life. The stuff that’s so buried and denied and relativized and excused and explained away that it almost never happened. Actually it didn’t happen at all. Which stuff? Who, me? Couldn’t be.

If anything, we’re the victims here, right? Maybe not Hanzi, who is just a stranger typing letters in a book, but you the reader are definitely the good guy. And the underdog. Always been, right? You’re the last person who needs to think through what they’re guilty of! Besides, you’re more self-reflective than other people so if there was anything, you’d surely know about it and have dealt with it already? Just think of all the hard inner work that you’ve done—much more than most people. If there’s anyone who doesn’t need to think through their guilt, it’s gotta be you.

Now, you might think that you aren’t a lousy piece of shit. That’s probably true, for the most part. Of course, when we’re depressed, we can feel that we’re pretty much only a lousy piece of shit, and that others like us only because they don’t know our real selves: “To truly know me is to hate me.” While depressed, we feel that we hardly deserve to live. This is reported again and again by therapists and research. When we’re not having bouts of depression, however, we all gravitate instead towards embellishing views of ourselves and particularly of our own moral fiber. We think we’re the good guys (the research is unanimous: virtually everybody thinks they’re more ethical than the average person). But was it always true, on all occasions, from all possible perspectives? And is it even currently true in all regards?

Look at it this way. Over your lifespan you have become witness to a lot of bad things that other people have done. Not only that; if you stop and think about it for a while, you can likely enumerate quite a few examples of when you personally were treated unfairly, unjustly, or even with cruelty. I’ll simply list some examples from my own life as a starting point:

●        I’ve been beaten.

●        I’ve been threatened.

●        I’ve been lied to.

●        I’ve been bullied.

●        I’ve been mistreated by peer groups.

●        I’ve been abandoned by people very close to me.

●        I’ve been manipulated and conned out of money and free work.

●        I’ve been unceremoniously fired from jobs, based on false premises.

●        I’ve been thrown into and locked in a garbage container.

●        I’ve been let down and betrayed by close friends, including major social backstabbing.

●        I’ve been taken for granted and used, socially and financially.

●        I’ve been socially neglected and treated as “less than”.

●        I’ve been falsely accused of serious things.

●        I’ve been stolen from.

●        I’ve been silenced from speaking the truth (or folks have attempted to).

●        I’ve met people who play unfairly in social situations, using manipulation or “humor” in an ill-willed manner.

●        I’m attacked personally when it comes to my public engagements.

And that’s just me, probably being around average in this regard for a person who grew up in peacetimes and in an affluent society.

Maybe some of this is based on my own misunderstandings and misinterpretations or worries, but certainly enough, at least some of it actually happened. As Mark Twain said: “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

I guess I could enumerate many more things, and within many of these, there are numerous examples of specific nastiness that occurred. The point here is not to engage in any form of self-victimizing. What I mean to underscore is that it is not difficult for me to enumerate bad things that others have done to me (or, for that matter, awful things I see people doing to others, in the world in general)... But for every such thing I can think of, for every #metoo story or whatever we select, there must logically be a corresponding #itwasme story. Specific persons did these things. There’s a mathematics to it. And yet, strangely, I cannot seem to recall anywhere near as many things I’d be guilty of myself. That should strike me as odd. So that must mean I’m just an exceptionally kind person, right? A tragic hero, one that is in truth so much gooder than many others, and yet, having suffered so many transgressions?

On the surface, that is what the world looks like to most if not almost all of us. Let’s look under the rug, though, shall we?

Let’s take the kids who beat four year old me up and threw me in a garbage container and locked it before they ran away.[103] If I were to find those people today (kids who had alcoholics for parents), would they even remember it, given they’re still alive? Would they have it as a part of their identity? I am almost entirely certain that they simply wouldn’t recall it. They probably remember what someone else did to them instead. Maybe even what I did to them, who knows?

Still, though, the mathematics is there. For every one unambiguously crooked thing that was done, one person actually did do one unambiguously crooked thing. Things can be subject to interpretation, misunderstandings, etc., sure. To complicate things, there are so many actions that are only ambiguously evil, and so we can smuggle into our lives truckloads of things that from one perspective are fairly innocent, and from another perspective cruel and coldhearted. Matter of interpretation, right? And the convenient and self-excusing interpretations often win out when we’re on that side of the fence. But still, by and large, these royally rotten numbers have to add up.

So, let me make a prediction here: You probably were subjected to a list of crooked or unfair things that corresponds to mine… but you didn’t do as many bad things as those on that list, not that you can think of. And that’s true for pretty much everyone.

Doesn’t that strike you as weird? Well, yeah sure, we might make an exception for you: you’re good and others are bad. And when you have that thought, it's true, but when other readers have it, they’re lying to themselves. But you’re not kidding yourself, because you’re better than other readers of this book. The record shows it, right? The record being, of course, your own memory—based, in turn, upon your own interpretations of what happened. So it’s entirely trustworthy. Waterproof.

Now, consider the following: for the list to add up collectively across people, the average person must reasonably have a “list of guilt” that matches their list of bad things they were subjected to. And that’s just the average; some are going to be better, some worse. Of course you are way above the average in terms of bad things you did versus bad things others did to you; I have no doubt about it whatsoever. But, even so, let’s try out the idea—just to try it out—that you would be only somewhat better than the average. Can you then make a list of the times when you were the guilty party? Have you ever been the cruel and cold-hearted one, the aggressor, the abuser?

At least for my part, I found that I could in fact produce a list of fairly egregious things I had done throughout my life, and that I do feel genuinely guilty about them, and that working through that guilt is a great release. I’m not a saint, nowhere close.

The list of bad shit I’ve done—when more excuses and obfuscations are out of the way—is pretty jarring, frankly. ’ve been a real piece of shit.  IDoesn’t mean I’m all bad, but it does mean I’m definitely not all good on all occasions. And that is what it is. That is the untarnished truth of the matter: a douchebag wrote these lines.

I didn’t feel I had to share the list of past sins with people: I’d only trust sharing it with someone who has genuinely gone through the same process themselves, so that they understand that they’re not really that much better, and thus wouldn’t judge me. I didn’t even feel the need to write it down; the things are often subtle and difficult to explain exactly (“ambiguously evil”, right?). The mind will try to make excuses and dodge, of course: “Yes, yes, but I was in a very pressured situation; I really did my best, better than most would have in that spot; it wasn’t anything near what they had done to me; I really didn’t intend it as bad as it got; I was only a child…” and so forth. But guess what—everybody else had those same reasons and excuses for their bad stuff as well. The fact is that, like everybody else, you're a douchebag too.

Just going through all of the things I genuinely feel I did wrong, on a moral level, and acknowledging and feeling through the guilt until I can accept it and let go of it, seems to be working. Strangely enough, I don’t feel worse for it: I feel better for it. I feel stronger, more whole, more in control. I can see more clearly the evil that men do, in myself as well, accepting it, learning my lessons.

Okay, then, if guilt is so difficult to detect, where to start with the guilt radar? It might take a bit of self-scrutinizing detective work. But the more guilty things you can come up with, the easier it becomes to fish new ones out of the sea of the unconscious.[104]

First hint: When someone pokes your anti-self. If you’ve already been doing the shame work as discussed above, you will notice the contours of your “anti-self” pretty quickly. Quite likely, you’ve been cruel to people when they’ve somehow triggered your sense of this anti-self. So looking at our shame provides its own hints of our guilt.

Next hint. Look for situations where you’ve been at a great advantage over someone in terms of power: unpopular kids who wanted to be your friends but you were less enthusiastic about and even a bit embarrassed of, smaller and younger siblings who couldn’t reasonably fight back, employees or work subordinates, lovers who were desperate not to lose you, weirdos you didn’t really get at all, old family members who wanted more of your time than you of theirs, people of much lower social class who simply weren’t part of your world, people in the service industry, non-human animals[105] and even the insects you tormented when you were little… If you’re completely honest, you weren't always kind to all of these. And if you continue along the lines of brutal honesty, in silence, just with yourself, you may even find that you have enjoyed causing some of that suffering and felt entitled to do so.

Or, you may feel guilt about privileges and advantages in and of themselves: being from a richer country, a more powerful ethnic group, or just the favorite son of your parents—being the Abel and not the Cain, in one way or another. So great power differentials tend to be sticky with guilt, either because they caused you to act a certain way, or because you deep down feel it wasn’t deserved or justified.

Another hint: Have you been the underdog, the righteous rebel? The more convinced you’ve been of your own moral justification, the more likely it is that you’ve actually acted in ways that others rightfully viewed as awful. Most people feel they’re somehow the underdog—I know I reflexively do unless I bust myself. Elon Musk probably feels like the underdog when people criticize his latest remarks on Twitter. And I’m sure you truly are the underdog, but just try it out: what if you’re not, if you weren’t actually the weaker party, at least from some perspectives? It’s a question we should all ask ourselves from time to time: “What if I’m not the underdog?”

Just see how it sits for a moment. Let it soak, be calm like a bomb. What if you think you’ve been striking upwards, convinced that “little you” can and must defend yourself, but you’ve actually been the attacker, kicking downwards, whacking the living crap out of someone smaller and weaker, who perhaps wouldn’t have wanted to harm you in the first place? We all notice the disadvantages we are at (health, looks, ethnicity, gender, lack of privilege, low status, speaking with the wrong dialect, outsidership, pressure from others, impairment, that one annoying Achilles heel, and so on) but have a harder time recognizing the unfair disadvantages of others. And when we’re convinced we’re the underdog we tend to feel entitled to the mistreatment of others—we’re just evening out the odds, right? Settling the score. Oh yes, and then envy sneaks in there to spice it up: Those damned rich people, that complete phony who’s still somehow irritatingly and undeservedly much more successful than we are, and so on—we’re just being cool rebels, right? Not gremlins coveting what they have and we don’t. Not at all.

You were never the overdog? Not in your entire life? Sounds plausible.

More guilt radars. If you ever followed a “leader”, at work, or in a friends’ group, or elsewhere, chances are that you abdicated from your own responsibility and judgment. You hid in the herd. I know this one is hard to admit; we all like to think of ourselves as more independent than most others, more resistant to group pressure, and so forth. But, of course, we’re social animals and we all follow leaders at times. I once worked at a government agency (in a Scandinavian country) that dealt with labor statistics. On occasions, we would be asked to scrap and hide politically sensitive statistics. That is to say, we collectively lied to the public, being paid by their tax money to do so. Everyone went along with it. Everyone defended it, excused it, even among fairly idealistic and highly educated employees. Literally hundreds of people went along with only a minimum of protests. Lies in the open, following the leader, hiding in the herd.

Or—another thing to scan for—if you’ve ever had a prolonged period of crisis where you really “weren’t yourself”, you may very well have acted in ways that were unbearably selfish and unfair to others. You were gasping for air, grasping the last straw, and you lost sight of what was good or even acceptable for others. Such periods in our lives are often marked by having treated some people around us like dirt, using them as door mats.

There may also be times when you inadvertently have caused an accident to happen, or when your irresponsible choices and actions have otherwise caused trouble and suffering to others. To add another layer of complication to this, you may not be certain whether or not your actions and choices, or blunders, caused a bad thing to happen or not. Would they have developed cancer if I didn’t smoke around them? And so on. Such things can also cause lingering guilt.

Lastly, if you can recall social situations in which a strange, dark rage simply swept you away, one that just thundered out of you with such force and intensity that it scared others and yourself, or at least came as a great surprise… that’s very probably it: someone triggered your unconscious guilt. You’ll see this in people around cults, around infidelity, etc. The denied guilt is so painful that it triggers extreme aggression.

Basically, look for these categories in your life (when someone was way below you, or when you’ve been rebelling against someone “much stronger”, or when you followed a leader, or when you were in a long period of crisis, or the strange rage that flashes out of nowhere), and you’ll find it: you’ve been a douche. And your body-mind did take notice; it did keep a score. And that’s the deposit of guilt, which still, untreated and undenied, runs the show in your life.[106]

What does that mean, then? Well, for one thing, if you walk around with guilt, however buried, you simply feel less alive, one way or another. True, people with a narcissistic personality disorder don’t tend to feel guilt or even regret—but even these have been proven to deep down disrespect themselves. Hence, to truly respect themselves, even pathological narcissists could do with some self-scrutiny and the self-acceptance that follows with a bit of work. The idea here is not to become a good person because a God is watching and keeping the score; it’s that you feel more alive and less emotionally stunted if you’ve reckoned with the guilt in your life.

Would it be so strange if we turn out to be rather ordinary, mediocre, also in the moral sense? Maybe there really are saints that walk among us, who haven’t actually been douchebags. But at the very least, they have been dorks. Maybe Jesus wasn’t a douche—but a dork, he most definitely was. Again, there’s the iron law of mediocrity: upon closer inspection, even Jesus doesn’t look a thing like Jesus. Dorkiness is universal, just as mediocrity is the ground of being (but not, evidently, its sky, its upper limit). For all the destructivity and awfulness of the Christian obsession with “sin”, there is a truth to it: We become virtuous, not by “not being sinners”, but by noticing the log in our own eye (before the speck in our buddy’s), and by admitting to ourselves that we’re not that good after all. And accepting it.

Again, this echoes what we have discussed in earlier chapters: We may feel beaten down by realizing that Jesus is just another dork… Until we realize a still greater miracle is at hand: that a dork could save our souls. And so can a dirtbag such as yourself. Or at any rate, you can save your own soul.

The Eye of the Creator

Accepting our own dark side isn’t so bad. With the right kind of twinkle in the eye, a bit of forgiving humor, you can see that there’s a comic edginess to some of your evil, even as it’s simultaneously just sad and pathetic. At least a little part of you made demonic resistance towards those scared and weak parts of yourself. “Ah, I’m bad to the bone, baby.” Or, as so poignantly sung by that young musical genius of California, Billie Eilish, “I’m the baaaad guy—DUH!”.

Before long, you’ll be chillin’ like a villain. From that place of sin, from that low vantage point, we can look and aim upwards, towards being someone that we ourselves genuinely like and respect. It’s liberating.

In this manner, we work through both shame and guilt, which brings these unfinished inner stories to a close one by one, letting these ghosts of Christmas’ past go and finally rest. With shame, we also turn over our contempt (as the two are closely connected: shame is contempt for ourselves, mirrored in the gaze of the other). With guilt, we reduce our sense of judgment of others (as guilt and judgementality are interlinked, too: we won’t “cast the first stone”).

Shame and guilt are useful emotions as they provide us with feedback on our own actions. Others react to what we do, and the reactions of others elicit these self-inhibiting and self-correcting emotions. But we don’t want them stuck in our systems, in our bodies, running our lives. As with Rule Two, “fuck like a beast”, we are wise to move beyond our inhibitions and inhibitions are made of the same stuff: shame and guilt.

It’s pretty simple, really: your soul is not your role. That is to say, we have lots of very real emotions that don’t play out in who we appear to be in everyday life. In our everyday roles, we’re subject to all of those polished surfaces and inhibitions, which often hide our real emotions even from ourselves. And so we need to circumvent these “roles” that we play (however useful and necessary they may be for us to function in everyday life) and get at the emotions that don’t fit in with the roles we have taken for ourselves or been assigned by others. Then we need to live by those emotions, our more “authentic emotions”. Hey, if being authentic was so easy, everybody would already be doing it. The reason our culture is so obsessed with authenticity is, of course, that it is so difficult to be authentic without getting your ass kicked in everyday life.

As such, we build a richer life by working through our shame and guilt, because not only will we be less “muted” by our negative emotions, we will also be seeing a more beautiful world around us, as we don’t as easily view it with contempt and judgment. This also means that we appreciate others more easily, which means that they tend to like us better. By discovering our shame and guilt, we become accepting of ourselves, of others, and of reality itself, and this tunes us back into life.

When functioning from a place beyond shame and guilt, we begin to see others in the way they would like to be perceived: with dignity and respect, because we can notice their strengths and beauties more clearly when judgment and contempt are out of the way. If you’re very well acquainted with your own shame and guilt, you don’t need to look for the weak spots of others; it’s just entirely self-evident that every person you meet is also more than a bit pathetic, and so your gaze no longer needs to be spying for such things in them, to “reveal them” and then perversely commend yourself for the effort. Instead, standing out in relief against the background of human pettiness, you begin to notice that which now surprises you: their heroic qualities, their tragedies, their struggles, their uniqueness. And that dramatically improves your social skills—you spontaneously stop looking for what to disdain and judge in others, and start asking the questions that find out what you respect and admire in them. This is because you no longer, at a deeper level, disdain and judge yourself.

When you see the genuinely good stuff in people, what do you think happens? These good sides are reinforced: as with “magical realism”, you turn someone else’s potential into actuality by meeting the other with a purer gaze. The virtues and beauties of others are strengthened by being seen and recognized (at least on average, over time). And people become grateful for your noticing their particular majesty and preciousness, their own inimitable form of sublime mediocrity. You co-create the best in people. This is not just the eye of the beholder, but the eye of the creator.

The real modality of healing is acceptance; acceptance of each painful emotion and whatever function it has served for us.[107] On the other side of that healing is a sublime mediocrity, or why not the ordinary divine? As you heal, as your participatory gaze is purified from judgment and contempt, you begin to see the dignified versions of other people: the beggar becomes a struggling hero who has been through more than most of us can imagine; the awkward low-status person becomes a renegade outsider; the nasty bully becomes a fallen angel whose soul has been twisted by a life too cruel and tragic, and can now be met as a worthy adversary; the ugly duckling becomes a swan. There aren’t really any “trivial” people—not even the masturbating geeky 14-year-old—because they are all in the serious business of dealing with death, and they are all expressions of the unfolding of being since the Big Bang, and all creators of the future.

To meet the ordinary divine, you had to do the walk of shame… and guilt. And to your surprise, you saw that it was good. So you’re good, too.

Seventh Commandment: Sacrifice Immortality

“Life, as they say, goes on. Until one day it doesn’t.”

—Paul Cooper

“Why should I write for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?”

—Oscar Wilde

I now command you: Don’t strive for immortality. In this chapter, we shall face our deepest fears, not shying away from them. I know it’s hard to scare a reader with chapter intro, but, now, my friend, it’s time to get scared.

Once we have made proper inventories of our shame and guilt, and once we have worked through our depositories of these emotions stored in our body-minds, we can turn to fear itself. So, if we’re ready for it, we can begin to explore our fears. We spend time within them. We hang out with the terror.

Terror: Tame the Dragon

So we turn our gaze towards the terrors that lurk within.

Some versions of Theravadan Buddhism include practices that involve contemplating a rotting corpse, a skull, or our own frail body, to learn to face fear with equanimity. If you’ve gotten used to the idea of death, decay, disease, and pain, well, you’re less likely to freak out about these things and that can bring a certain sense of freedom. How free can we be when we live in fear?

Even without going to such extremes, we can lie down and contemplate that we will one day cease to exist. How do we feel about that? Facing this fear, the terror before nothingness itself, is a practice that helps to relieve the terror that rules them all. Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist, argued in his 1973 classic The Denial of Death that the fear of death lies at the heart of human existence; it even drives civilization, as we all try to cheat death through our achievements, our offspring, and other “immortality projects”.

An archetypal symbol of evil has, for millennia, been this denial of death. Why do you think vampires, zombies, ghosts, necromancers, and walking undead skeletons are symbols of evil rather than good? Shouldn’t the undead reasonably be paragons of virtue, as they manage to do what no doctor or healer can, that is, to cheat death entirely? No, the undead are evil because they cannot accept what we all must: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In that denial, they fight death, and unwittingly, they become enemies of life itself.

Another example of denial-of-death-as-archetypal-evil: As much as I loathe Harry Potter (burn the books, ban the movies, as far as I’m concerned; a stance that has granted me more than a few enemies, but I stand by it), J. K. Rowling did have a point when she named the antagonist Voldemort (vol de mort: “flight from death” in French[108]) and made it the villain’s ultimate goal to achieve immortality. The Emperor Qin—the guy who first united China, had that Terracotta Army mausoleum built, and after whom the country is probably named—became something of a real-life Voldemort. After he had ascended to the most powerful position of his time and began growing old, with so many enemies, and with such an achievement in his baggage, he reportedly became increasingly paranoid and obsessed with finding a cure for death. Legends at the time told of a cure to be found on a distant island, an elixir of immortality.[109] The emperor’s maddened quest for it led to the spectacular killing of quite a few scholars and potion makers at his court as his insanity mounted—possibly from drinking mercury in an attempt to cure aging. The whole ordeal was actually repeated a few generations later in Chinese history, with another emperor.

Today, I have quite a few friends and acquaintances in the ”transhumanist” community who try to reverse aging (folks with research careers in biology, biotech, bioinformatics, etc.) and “stop death from killing people” as they say. I wouldn’t rate them quite as “evil” as Voldemort, or mad as the Emperor Qin (in fact, they tend to be genuine idealists and honest scientists), but there is undeniably something rather existentially thin to the entire endeavor, something philosophically irresponsible. And, indeed, even if they were to be successful, we would still all die sooner or later.

Just to say: the fear of death is universal, acceptance of death (to the degree it’s at all possible) is a virtue, whereas the excessive denial of death puts you at war with life itself, with truth itself (as everything always falls apart in the end), and thus makes you evil.

So, let’s not strive for immortality. Let death conquer you, as it must. And then let love of life’s rareness flow from that acceptance. Let life take its proper place as king alongside the queen we call death. The two are forever intertwined. From that vantage point, we can see: How rare and beautiful it is to even exist!

But perhaps there is a terror yet more fundamental than the fear of death, one that we must grapple with in one way or another: the terror of terror itself.

If we’ve been in “very low states” as discussed in the introduction, we will know that these lowest states of experience are indeed states of sheer terror: when you are locked into what appears as an endless cycle of bottomless horror. This is a place unimaginably worse than death or the wish to commit suicide, because it appears genuinely inescapable. If, for instance, someone very malicious has pinned down our body so that we cannot move (so as to end our own life) while they subject us to torture, we are in a situation of terror worse than death. In such a setting, the pain and the terror are genuinely inescapable: there is no end in sight. We might even, for the sake of argument, add that our malicious captor has a way of prolonging our life, so that we won’t die of old age, either.

Likewise, extremely negative psychotic or psychedelic experiences have this sense to them: an eternity of sheer terror; all hope, all sense of the ordinary connection to reality, of being at home in the world, seem to have been only a cruel and distant joke, now trickling away into oblivion in a sea endlessly larger than that world we used to inhabit. Indeed, it appears as though the whole point of the life we lived was to make our suffering yet more unbearable for all eternity. Your ordinary state of consciousness was a trick, just another torture device.

In extremely low subjective states, life is an absurd tunnel of ever more absurdity: In parts, this is what the lives of child soldiers in African civil wars, of socially abject Afghan heroin addicts, or many of the pigs condemned to our industrial farming systems, must feel like. Or so I imagine. What do I know?

The lowest subjective states are no joke. And of course we’re going to be afraid of them. Very afraid. More afraid, for good reason, than of death. Or at least we should be. We bear within us a deep terror in the face of such suffering. Not just being “scared to death”, but being “scared beyond death”. Religions intuitively understand this by positing that there is a hell in some way or form: a place beyond death that is so terrifying precisely because it never ends.[110] Secular people (as in contemporary mainstream non-religious folks) all tend to have a lingering shard of this terror left in their unconscious: What if the fundamentalists are right despite it all, and we actually will suffer for eternity for not believing and submitting to their beliefs? What if life as I know it has all just been a cruel trick pulled on me? The fear of God is, in this sense, a real and inescapable thing: no matter how atheist you become, there’s still that little risk, which you sense in the background, that it was all a nasty trap, and that hell was real all along. And you’re going there and that’s that.

Not least in our days, when technology and science can create new forms of life, we come face to face with the fear of life itself taking a wrong turn towards the hellish. If some mutilated ,fully sentient, and immensely suffering freak of nature is created, what will its experience be? For how long? Is hell perhaps real, and just around the corner? With stakes so high and the tunnels of possible torment so infinite—is it a wonder that we humans so easily become so profoundly evil? If we have a sense that such a terror might befall us, what would we not be prepared to do to others to avoid it?

We also understand that, even if we personally happen to pass away fairly painlessly, there is always the risk that sheer horror might come to anyone we care about. The fact that this universe contains the undeniable potential for “very low states” of lived experience (real hell, in other words) brings with it a certain kind of seriousness, a certain kind of inescapable terror of being itself.

So, find your fears. Hang out with them, in manageable quantities. And feel through them until they lose some of their intensity. The process is similar to working through shame and guilt, except that, here, you often have fears that aren’t even directly related to what happened to you personally or to what you did. The terror is more universal. It resides at a yet deeper level. But if it is released, the healing is yet more profound.

I don’t think it’s realistic to face the deepest possible fears, but I do think that we can “go to the gates of hell” from time to time and try to bear it. It makes us genuinely unafraid of all those lesser monsters that come our way in life.

The fear even underlies shame and guilt. You could say that they form a kind of hierarchy: from fear to guilt to shame. We feel ashamed because our social standing may be in question. We feel guilt because our inclusion in the social realm may be in question. But both of these harken back to fear: the fear of losing everything, of being annihilated, of losing touch with a joint reality and falling into madness, of being caught in hell, whatever form that may take in our belief structure. It’s a good idea to work with shame first, and then guilt, and then fear—but working with our fears strikes at the very source of shame and guilt as well, liberating us from them further still.

This fundamental fear, this pure terror, is the ultimate “dragon” that we all face. It is this dragon we must tame, turning its enormous power into a force of creativity and good. Why not kill the dragon, one might ask? Because you can’t. It’s immortal, and you’re not. Even with transhumanist dreams of longevity, we all still die in the end (dying in 2000 years is dying, all the same), and suffering and terror are still real in the end. But if we don't face the dragon, we have no hope of taming it, either. So one of the greatest missions in life is just that: tame the dragon. Face your fear.

The Shackles of Subtle Slavery

There’s a word for the surmounting of sheer terror: and that’s courage. Courage is also what we need to truly “do our thing” in the world. Remember, as we said earlier, we’re looking for sublime mediocrity. Yes, we’re mediocre, and yes, that’s okay. But it’s also very common that we have exceptional capacities and gifts to offer the world, at least in some few moments that flicker by in our lives. The braver we are, the more we can do those stupid and embarrassing experiments that will put us on a learning journey to grow our exceptional talents and let us grab those rare moments of the sublime.

Now, doing those exceptional things is by no means easy. Others will likely feel threatened by any such attempts; they may even feel insulted. When you start facing your deepest fears and start to act more freely, you may notice a murmur around you: Who do you think you are? All the rest of us have paid the price of mature adulthood and given up on such childish and pompous ambitions; why should you get to treat yourself like you’re so special? Well, we won’t play along.

And so, strangely enough, we are not only shamed for our weaknesses and vices, but also for our strengths, virtues, and talents. When we hold ourselves back in this manner, when we are ashamed of our highest potentials, this is what I call Sklavenmoral (a German word, popularized by Nietzsche but with a somewhat different meaning), or “slave morality”. Sklavenmoral is the internalized envy of others. It is an incredibly subtle feeling, one we generally don’t notice, by which we close down our hopes, ambitions, and conscience. Jungian psychologists like to call it “the golden shadow”. If “the shadow” is all of the bad stuff you won’t admit about yourself and turn a blind eye to, its golden counterpart would be those marvelous qualities in yourself that you also turn a blind eye to. Talents and strokes of inspiration do, after all, call us forth: they demand something of us—to take a risk, to face possible humiliation, to take up a great burden or responsibility. And they risk making others resist and resent us. Might be better to throw away the key to the treasury and forget about it, no?

So, once we have worked through shame, guilt, and terror, we can turn to this subtle feeling of Sklavenmoral and try to see all the ways in which we have disallowed ourselves from truly blossoming in order to fit in, to not risk those rolled eyes, to not elicit the envy of others. Just as shame is paired with contempt, guilt with moral judgment, and fear with aggression or hatred, so Sklavenmoral is paired with envy. When we work through our own Sklavenmoral, when we release ourselves from the envy of others which we have internalized, we also reduce our own reasons to envy others. We can begin to wish others well, not just as in “hope you’re happy and healthy”, but as in “may your highest potentials manifest in the world”.

Envy is a sneaky emotion. It doesn’t announce itself. Most people under its grip will tend to think something else is going on. It has generally shown up as you told others of your goals, and their eyes glazed over and they failed to respond, ignoring what you said. Step by step, you were tamed, subdued, and started denying these potentials and drives within yourself.

Let us stop for a moment at the issue of envy itself. The problem isn’t, if we’re entirely honest, always that others envy us, it is also that we envy them. But if you work through your shame and guilt, you’ll have less inclination to hide your own envy from yourself (if you envy someone and don’t admit it to yourself, you tend to experience it as though the other person is super arrogant and somehow attacking you, even if you cannot think of any big or concrete things they did to you; you just feel a righteous anger towards the envied and an impulse to put them back into place). Once you can see your own envy for what it is, it becomes much less dangerous. If all the people who wanted to suffocate the dreams of others knew it was just plain old envy speaking, by far most of them wouldn’t act upon it. Besides, if you do unearth the deeper potentials in yourself by surmounting your own Sklavenmoral, so that you become a more powerful person, genuinely doing your own thing, you simply lose interest in comparing yourself with others. Envy loses its grip. So you don’t have to cure yourself from the very human emotion of envy; you just have to focus on removing the shame you feel around it and on not needing to envy in the first place by breaking your own shackles of Sklavenmoral.

To unearth your deeper potential is difficult. To see how Sklavenmoral is present in your body-mind, subtly pulling the strings, stopping you from trying to do your thing, is no easy task. And yet, if we have already set a basis by working through shame, guilt, and terror, we can access it. Look for your dreams, for your core values, for your conscience, and see if there are things you have been holding yourself back from. Notice if any shame arises when you picture yourself acting, for real, in your real life, towards such goals. Notice if you have memories of trying to share your ambitions and if any ridicule or questioning, or even accusations of vanity or arrogance, appeared in others.

(Hint: Have you found yourself excessively admiring someone? In such cases, that might be because they represent some disowned potential of your own. Our pedestals are made of disowned potential, as they say. So that’s one place to look for your golden shadow. For instance, a lot of people excessively admire Jordan Peterson—and what does that guy do? Yes, he’s very good at freely speaking his mind in public. So a lot of people probably need to work on that issue and would perhaps have something better and clearer to say if they did.)

We cannot live out all of our dreams. But it’s a damned crime for us to suffocate those few dreams and potentials that are in fact realistic and reasonable just because we didn’t know how to get them to fit in socially. Maybe the potential you first intuited wasn’t entirely reasonable. (“Best mandolin player south of the Sahara!”). But by disallowing yourself to even finish the thought, you never got to explore it well enough to find out if there was something else that wanted to—and could—emerge in you. One dream explored easily leads to another dream, perhaps a more calibrated and reasonable one (“One of Zimbabwe’s best mandolin players!”). The tragedy is that so many dreams are suffocated in their sleep, before they can become waking reality.

You’re mediocre, always will be, sure. But chances are you’re also glorious; at least in some ways; or at least you likely could be given the chance. And if you’re like most of us, you have become ashamed of that part of yourself, your noblest and most unique part. Trying and failing at something great is pretty much the meaning of “pathetic” in a nutshell. A little kitten trying out its lion’s roar—but letting out a measly squeak. And we’re all afraid of seeming pathetic. So Sklavenmoral tends to get the best of us. We should surmount our fear of our own greatness, our shame of our higher aspirations, and thus allow ourselves to be truly pathetic; that is, ironically enough, to be truly glorious. Allow the squeak to be let out and the roar will come echoing back to you. And you’ll stop and think: Whoa, was that me?

It’s okay for an ordinary person to do heroic and rare things. Or to publicly trip and fall when trying. Your attempts to do greater things may make others feel uncomfortable, but that’s only because they themselves are stuck in envious Sklavenmoral. That’s not fair or just, it’s just sad. Like David Foster Wallace said, the real rebels are the ones who risk ridicule.

Study how this Sklavenmoral works in your life: it’s not about wanting or doing unreasonable things, it’s about not unreasonably stopping yourself from exploring your dreams. Feel through the shame and apprehension that arise when you think of the highest and best thing you could do with your life. Get used to it. And let it subside. Then check again if there is anything that can be tried, anything that must be done. As that crazy but sometimes interesting pothead, Terence McKenna, said: “the problem is not to find the answer; it’s to face the answer”.

Surmount the terror, rise up to end the subtle slavery. This is the inner calling of the freedom fighter. And, yes, the surmounting of fear is also the struggle for freedom. Ernest Becker wrote the Denial of Death in 1973, but there was already another classic book at this time: The psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom (or: in another edition, The Escape from Freedom) from 1941. Deep freedom and sheer terror are intrinsically linked: We cannot be free if we are controlled by our fears, and so we seek to escape from freedom: into submission, even into totalitarian and authoritarian movements (which was what Fromm’s book was about, the Nazis). Hence, we expand upon our freedom by facing our fears, and doing so helps us to break free from the subtle slavery of the expectations and pressures that come from the envy and fears of others.

Freedom, in turn, is a social thing. It relates to how well we manage our relationships. We are only free when our relationships are harmonic; otherwise they undermine our efforts to do our thing in the world. Disharmonious relationships curtail personal freedom.

Managing relationships is about responding productively to the negative emotions of other people. These inevitably arise, sooner or later. And the more you have dealt with your own shame, guilt, fear, and Sklavenmoral, the more three emotion-managing capacities will have grown in you:

To not be triggered by the negative emotions of others, as you’re less of a minefield yourself with smaller depositories of stored up undealt-with negative emotions. This means that you don’t as easily get stuck in feedback cycle storms, where someone triggers you, you trigger them back, and things quickly devolve into a fully-fledged trigger fest.

To better understand the negative emotions of others (because you recognize them within yourself) so that you can see ways to proceed, know what to say (or not), and to respond productively.

And, as we have noted, blocked negative emotions tend to decrease your moment-to-moment subjective states, which makes it harder to be “your best self” when others flip out and start pushing your buttons. It’s easier to do the right thing when there are fewer negative emotions stuck in your system.

Each time someone or something triggers a negative emotion in us, it is a watershed moment in our lives. How we respond then and there shapes the nature of our relationships, the trajectories of how our relationships will evolve. Our lives can be viewed as a long stretch of such key moments, and our most important relationships will evolve according to what happens when we meet the resentment, anger, fear, or envy of others. Being good at managing these situations means being good at creating healthy relationships. Healthy relationships, in turn, have been proven through a mountain of research to be the one greatest predictor of a happy life (and happiness affects health, productivity, and so forth).

Shame, guilt, fear, and Sklavenmoral. Gotta love it. And yet, the dragon still isn’t tamed. It still roars from the depths below us, still hoarding treasures kept from us. We must go on.

Is There Life on Mute

The fear of death, and the underlying terror even more generally, are ultimately about losing the connection to life, that resonance where things connect and we feel at home. But such disconnections inevitably occur at a small scale throughout our lives: all the small and great frustrations and dissatisfactions we all live through.

Some of these we get to grieve properly, and our feelings about them are recognized and mirrored by others: the deaths of loved ones are usually acknowledged, sometimes the loss of a marriage or a job. There are rituals for at least some of these things, like funerals, ones that we can pin our emotions onto and process them. We might even manage to cry freely about it.

But life entails many smaller and less obvious losses and disappointments, ones that are not recognized, ritualized, and processed. For instance, the lives of incels (“involuntary celibates”) are fraught with sexual and romantic longings that were never met. Life becomes a long, cruel parade of moments that elicit desire, and then the dissatisfaction that follows, but no socially sanctioned or ritualized way to express it. It’s no wonder the incels gather at web forums and help one another cultivate a bitter and paranoid view of life, love, society, and often of women. They even tend to cheer on misogynist murderers who they feel champion the incel cause.

Even if we don’t go as far as the most paranoid web dwellers, it’s difficult not to feel at least some resentment, or at the very least some deeply ingrained dissatisfaction around some issues and periods in our lives. From not being seen and appreciated by our parents, to not finding friends as a small child, to not getting the love and sex we want, to not getting the job or professional identity we aspire to, to not getting the home and living standard we had hoped for or expected, to not playing the social role we’d like among peers, friends, and family, to not having children, to just the plain old lack of recognition—it all leaves us with a mute sense of “hmm, damn, okay”, of disappointment, of dissatisfaction. For many people, it may even be about food, health, or rest. Or a lack of fun and meaning or engagement. It’s the opposite of feeling alive.

And every time that happens, even if it’s just walking past an attractive stranger and feeling drawn to them, and our longing cannot realistically be met, we need to constrain ourselves a bit. When that happens, we feel a little bit of anger at the world. We can tell ourselves it’s okay, but a part of us feels that we’re being treated unfairly. Some periods in our lives can be so fraught with dissatisfaction that it haunts us even in later life phases: if you never got to feel that aliveness of being a youth, with romantic adventures and great fun with a peer group, that can leave a mark throughout the rest of your life.

Just as we can go through our shame, guilt, and so on, so we can go through our dissatisfaction in life by remembering and feeling through the emotion, getting to know it in detail. Both historically and as it occurs from day to day. If we can’t be the boss or sleep with this or that person, at least we can admit the desire to ourselves, and feel through the dissatisfaction, letting it be known and integrated.

How, then, do we properly integrate dissatisfaction once we have brought it to the surface? Here’s where I’d like to make a controversial suggestion. Many of the other things I have mentioned are not so different from what is already practiced in various forms of psychotherapy (facing and integrating emotions), which in turn build on ample clinical experience and research, but here I’m simply sharing a perspective based on personal experience. So just try it out and see how it fits for you. This isn’t medical advice (don’t sue me and all that), it’s a free-form self-help book, and so I can take greater liberties to share thoughts.

Okay, here’s the counterintuitive technique: When you feel the dissatisfaction linked to a certain event or issue in your life, tell yourself that you actually did get what you wanted. Fantasize for a while. And say “Okay, so what if I did get that lady of my dreams? What if I was met with respect and recognition then and there? What if I did land the dream job and was successful at it?” or whatever it may be about. And then let your inner child, the hunger, the beast, get what it really wanted, even if only in a daydream. Stay with the daydream until you start to feel joy and the satisfaction of your longing and desire, no matter how unreasonable. Look for a little “spark of joy” and stay with it.

The different scenarios you fantasize don’t have to add up. Maybe you were in love once when you were 20 and then again once when you were 21, and got neither of those objects of romantic desire. And yet, you can stay with both scenarios and imagine how you had long, fulfilling relationships to both of them. If you want to sleep with more people than what is even logistically possible, tell yourself that you already have slept with all of them, even if it makes no sense in practice. Keep at it, adding detail to your fantasy, until a sense of joy emerges. Stay with that spark for a moment. It’s that spark you’re looking for. Use it as your compass.

An important distinction to be made here, before proceeding with any of this, is the one between “coveting fantasies” and “satisfied fantasies”. The distinction is subtle but absolutely crucial.

●       The “coveting fantasies” are the childish and immature practice of thinking “ooo, if I could only sleep with so and so and have this and that much money”. These drive our focus and attention towards what could have been, and implicitly, keep us languishing is what is not, and will never be.

●     The “satisfied fantasies” instead go: “I am already sleeping with everyone I’d like to, and I already have what I need in terms of money, and I feel gratified and rich.” They’re different from the reflex reaction. They’re just there to calm down the unreasonable demands of the inner child. It takes a bit of practice to master.

To be clear: Avoid coveting fantasies and cultivate satisfied ones!

Just try it. If you’ll allow me an example taken from a “privileged male” perspective: Let’s say you’re a male boss at a medical clinic, and you realize that the pretty female nurses are rather impressed with you, your competence and authority, much more so than women may have been earlier in your life (before you had this kind of position). This sparks a vivid impulse to “harvest” that status and get some action, sexually speaking. However, actually sleeping with the nurses, while perhaps possible to get most of them to agree to, would stir great trouble: first of all, you may be married (monogamously), secondly, it would mix up private-professional boundaries, and thirdly, you could only reasonably sleep with one of them before things started to get really complicated on the job, and you’d actually like to do most of them. This isn’t a far-fetched scenario; it happens all the time to folks in similar positions (when you rise in social position).

In such cases, the dumb mental habit to have is to think “Ooo, I’d do this and that to dirty lil’ nurse Nancy if I had the chance” (a coveting fantasy). The smart mental habit is to think: “Sure, so I’d like to have sex with Nancy; and in fact, I might already have had it, indeed, let’s just say that I did, and that it was great, and that’s that, so I don’t need it anymore” (a satisfied fantasy). The difference between what happens inside of you in these two fantasy scenarios is dramatic. The first (coveting) scenario sets you up for increasing inner dissatisfaction, step by step turning you into the next Harvey Weinstein; the second (satisfied) one calms your inner beast and lets you remain a gentleman (or the gender-appropriate counterpart of that) with a mind preoccupied with other things than your own sexual gratification. Simply speaking, we are soothing the inner beast by addressing its stored up dissatisfactions, and that sets us up for an abundance mindset, which grants another virtue: generosity.

Generosity is the opposite of greed. In these days of overconsumption and hypercapitalism there is no shortage of leftwing and ecologist ideologues denouncing the greed of the world—but they seldom address the very source of that greed, which is the all-too-human sense of pervasive dissatisfaction, driving the scarcity mindset, that inner void to be filled. Such condamnations have little value; they just point fingers and don’t prevent greed from arising. In fact, by shaming greed, they serve only to hide it away, making it yet more pernicious and deceitful. When the hunger is there, when the beast pulls the strings, greed will find a way. We must counteract greed at its source, which is the dissatisfaction with life, the disconnectedness from feeling alive, and the scarcity mindset it brings.

You counteract greed by counteracting dissatisfaction—and that can be achieved, I suggest, by intelligent and carefully crafted flights of fancy.

Now, the reason this technique is controversial is that it sounds like you’re lying to yourself. Why not face the hard truths, right? Should we be telling ourselves things that aren’t true? But the reason this works well, I believe, is that we’re naturally still very well aware of the difference between reality and the daydream. We’re not actually fooling anyone. We’re not staying with a daydream to covet what we don’t have. We’re bringing our unfinished emotion, our inner drive, to its conclusion, feeling through the joy of that fantasy, so that we can feel more whole and let go of it. Then we feel a bit of stillness and peace inside, and then our motivational energies are redirected towards something else, often something less selfish. Or, at least, that has been my experience.

As far as I can see, the productive use of self-therapeutic fantasies is not self-deceit. In fact, it’s the other way around. Our accumulated dissatisfactions are reactions to the harsh facts of life, yes, but on a subtle and emotional level, it’s them that are lying to us: always telling us we don’t have what we need, that what we’ve got is never good enough, that there is some void to fill. Self-deceit comes from the dissatisfaction itself. And so we go through life not appreciating what we’ve really got, the beautiful realities of our daily lives, because there is always lingering dissatisfaction with one thing or another. By communicating directly to our primitive inner beast, and, at an emotional level, giving it what it wants, we can cultivate a sense of abundance.

Sure, we also do need to fulfill real needs for food, rest, connection, and gratification. I am not arguing that all real fulfillment of needs can be exchanged for fantasies. What I am arguing is that dissatisfaction is a negative emotion that gets stuck inside of us just like the other ones, and that it can be healed by firstly noticing it and feeling it through, and secondly by applying our creative imaginations to address it. It’s a lot like the “sincere irony” I wrote about earlier: first you take the red pill (“damn, I’ve been really dissatisfied and disappointed by this”) and then you take the blue pill (“ah, this is what I really would have wanted to happen, and now I’ll let myself enjoy it”). It’s the purple magic cocktail of a well calibrated both-and.

Because our dissatisfactions are often linked to shame and failure, we tend to hide them away and deny them. It’s pretty embarrassing to want something you can’t get. So we may need to work a bit to admit our dissatisfactions to ourselves. Or we might feel guilty about them, if their fulfillment would be harmful to ourselves or others. But we cannot help having desires, so noticing our dissatisfactions and admitting them to ourselves, then accepting them, is the best we can do.

From thereon, there is no reason, if you stop and think about it, to not enjoy the thought of something you didn’t get in reality. Go ahead and allow yourself to fantasize and enjoy. I guess the only exception would be obviously harmful urges towards revenge, violent sadism, or incest (which are very unlikely to reflect genuine unmet needs either way, but rather be emotional distortions; for instance revenge fantasies have been proven to make people feel worse, not better).

I would like to draw your attention to a strange impulse we all have: whenever we acquire a certain social position, a good one or a bad one, we tend to internalize it, to believe in it, to feel it must be justified. Can’t get a job? There must be something wrong with me. Can’t get laid or real love? Must be what I deserve. We do this unconsciously and automatically. We bow to the social hierarchies around us. We bow to the edicts of fate and fortune. Likewise, we tend to feel that others deserve what they get; we may even feel irritated if someone seems to like themselves more than we feel is warranted. And so, we tend to feel that we “shouldn’t” feel good about some area of our lives where we have been lacking. We feel like we don’t deserve to be satisfied with ourselves if we have faced rejection or bad luck. But once you notice this pattern of the mind, it becomes easy to bust it:

●        So if I have not been popular and successful, I am not allowed to feel popular and successful? Why ever not? Says who? Rather, it stands to reason that there is no justification whatsoever for me to torture myself, given that I still take in an constructively learn from the feedback I’m getting. The risk is not only that I torture my mind by keeping it in a dissatisfied state, but also that I perpetuate the lack in my life: rather than feeling that jobs are abundant, I end up feeling that I’m never good enough to get one, and that of course will make me less likely to get hired in the first place!

We have every right to use our active imaginations to create satisfied fantasies and to reprogram ourselves away from the downward spirals of lost faith in ourselves and our lives. Simply put: We don’t owe it to the universe to feel bad about not succeeding or failing to get what we want. Nor do we owe it to other people.

So, cast off the chains of failure. You don’t owe your failures to the universe. Things might have been slightly different, and then you would have got this or that thing you so desired. Pretend for a moment you did. And continue doing so until a spark of joy emerges, and until the sense of dissatisfaction subsides. The deeper layers of our body-minds can’t really tell the difference between a memory and a fantasy and so, at least in part, they may often be satisfied even by an elaborate daydream, by you telling yourself that you did get what you wanted.

The sense that you didn’t get what you wanted before is just a memory, just a projection of the mind. You have every right to experiment with changing that projection.

Again, we are centering the cosmoerotic here: a person cannot be reliably goodhearted as long as there are too many unfulfilled desires in them. If you feel rich and abundant in the joys of life, from the inside out, you breathe more freely, and your goodwill can be more genuine, your envy a weaker force. This makes body and mind come alive, feeling the flows of emotion without having them muted. Breaking free from inhibition doesn’t have to involve excessive partying at swinger clubs. Not saying that it can’t.

Reverse Death Therapy

Every disappointment is a little death. Some vulnerable and alive part of us craved union, connection, merging with the world (if it was to eat it, to master it, be recognized by it, or to have sex with it), and didn’t get it. So it shriveled up and retracted, becoming less alive, dying a little inside. In a sense, then, we’re still dealing with the fear of death here. We’re finding ways to not fear death as much, not even the many little deaths of the spirit that we encounter throughout life. We’re still doing a kind of death therapy, letting go of our fear of not getting what we want. At the end of that spectrum is, of course, actual death: if you’d get nothing of what you want and need, you die. Hence, dealing with our dissatisfaction is to work with our fear of not getting what we want, and, ultimately, our fear of death itself, and then, the terror that lies beyond death itself. Or, conversely, dissatisfaction is the long tail of our fear of death.

But, importantly, there is another aspect that needs to be included for our healing to be more complete. I call it reverse death therapy.[111]

If working through fear itself, including the fear of death, and then through our dissatisfactions (all the “little deaths”) is “death therapy”, then reverse death therapy means to work through the things that we did get and now take for granted; the things we feel are our birthright. And, to speak sociologically about social justice, I guess you could add: our privileges.

So I call it reverse death therapy because we're not working with death and dying, but with life and living. It's still a kind of death therapy, though. It’s the opposite of going through our dissatisfactions: we go through all the things that shine for us, all the things that went well.

Here, again, the imagination is our greatest tool. What are the things you are most happy, grateful, and proud of in your life? How attached are you to them? What would it have been like to never get those things, never experience them? What would your life have been like? Here, you use your imagination to fantasize about what life would be like without these things. What if your lovely husband would have rejected you instead of marrying you? What if you would have failed at that dream project? What if you’d never managed to get children? What if you’d never had that one great friend? What if you had never succeeded in becoming a medical doctor, or a writer? Who would you have been without your most cherished successes? You think it through, feel the appropriate emotions, and get used to the scenario, until it seems okay.

Counterfactual thinking is hard. Of course, you don’t know what would have happened in other cases than what happened to materialize in actual life. But that’s not the point. You don’t have to guess correctly what would have happened, you just need to vividly imagine what it would be like to not have something that you have. You are building stability into your emotional system by accepting that these things could just as well not have been. You work your way out of the role and position that life has dealt you, towards a general acceptance of life-as-it-happens-to-be.

This “reverse death therapy” is the mirror opposite of fantasizing about how your dissatisfactions are already met and your desires already fulfilled. Here, you go through the things that have been great, and which you now take for granted. But, of course, they’re not your birthright; you just happened to get them; the universe never owed you any of those things. You just lucked out. Even your skills and talents are gifts (we call it being “gifted”, as in something that was given to us, right?), and you might as well not have had these capacities. You didn’t choose your genes, or your place of birth; they were just handed to you.

When failure comes, when loss strikes, as they inevitably do, we will be better prepared if we have done our reverse death therapy properly. We will be more grateful for what we have. We won’t think of these things as proof that we’re special and deserve better than others. We are growing our equanimity, our acceptance for reality-as-it-is. All of our existence no longer hinges on a thin thread of the things we just happened to get in life; we begin to open up to the wider horizon of life itself, beyond the things upon which we have built our lives.

I don’t like the word “wisdom” very much as it is used these days, and I tend to be skeptical of “wisdom research”. But if I’d have to bet on one thing that may grow our wisdom, to the extent that’s a thing we can meaningfully speak about, it would be reverse death therapy.

You do reverse death therapy by imagining that you have already lost everything. As Monty Python said about death: “You came with nothing, you leave with nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!”

Lose it all. Let death win. Don’t strive for immortality, and the beauty of life asserts itself; a beauty beyond anything that can be grasped, clamored, or owned. We long, at the deepest level, not for possession, but for deeper freedom and connection. Such freedom is won only when that fundamental and self-evident sense of safety asserts itself in our lives; and that happens when the most fundamental fear—the great terror of existence itself—loses its grip. The child returns to chambers of wonders and gold when the dragon of terror is met with acceptance.

Eighth Commandment: Heal with Justice

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must do it because Conscience says it is right.”

—Martin Luther King

“Justice does not come from the outside. It comes from inner peace.”

—Barbara Hall

“Tariq ibn Shihab reported: A man asked the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, ‘Master, what is the highest form of jihad?’ The Prophet replied: ‘A word of truth in the face of an unjust ruler.’”

—(Paraphrased from) the Koran: Book 39, Hadith 61

We have now reached what I consider to be the most important chapter of this book, the commandment that rules them all. As with the other commandments, its premise is simple, yet its consequences are difficult, rich, and complex—and still resulting in a greater ease and simplicity in life for those who follow it. Conversely, I would claim, not following the commandment leads to confusion and misery.

This commandment holds that we should “heal with justice”; i.e. that we should heal our emotional wounds by connecting to our sense of justice. In turn, we tend to gain a clear view of our sense of justice only when we engage in healing our emotional wounds as we have discussed in detail in the two previous chapters.

Thus, justice and emotional healing are two sides of the same coin. Let us delve into this and make it crystal clear, shall we? To make this argument properly, however, let me first briefly introduce two topics: the first is how emotions, thoughts, actions, and perceptions emerge together in human beings; the second is about the difference between so-called primary and secondary emotions.

(And yes, these two excursions will connect to our larger point about justice. I’m not just rambling off-topic. Hang in there!—and don’t lose track of the main theme of the chapter: why healing with justice is so vital. It all connects.)

Groundwork One: Perception

The world-leading self-help writer, Mark Manson, offers a few key insights in his book, Everything Is F*cked (the sequel to his even more popular book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck).

One key is that we all experience “moral gaps” in every story we weave about our lives: either someone does good, and is still punished (they got it worse than we feel they deserved; think Jesus who was a good guy and was crucified for the effort), or they did something evil and were still rewarded for it (think Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator). We only feel that a story comes to its conclusion once the moral gap is closed (Jesus is resurrected and goes to heaven and then we worship him; Pinochet’s evil reign comes to a close and the people of Chile have judicial processes of revealing the dark history and paying respects to the victims of purges and oppression). And so, a Hollywood movie will usually end when the crook falls off a rooftop and gets impaled on a fancy sharp sculpture they paid for with their ill-gotten wealth, and the hero gets to drive off into the sunset in a Cadillac with a hot babe who now adores him for his bravery. French movies, by contrast, tend to just end with things hanging mid-air, which can feel weird at times, slightly dissatisfying, but perhaps also lets us stay with imagining possible future timelines and reflecting on moral or social complexities.

Now, such moral gaps elicit social emotions in us: attributions of shame and pride, guilt and deservedness, fear and overcoming fear, and a wanting for justice. An ending, a moment of peace and happiness, is when one story ends and a new one begins. Endings are the moments when justice is served. Have you noticed that those happy and peaceful moments in life, those moments of wholeness, tend to feel like an ending? Deep happiness and “the end” (of a story brought to its own intrinsic conclusion) are intimately connected. For instance, the desperate souls of seekers often conclude that the end is nigh. It’s a perverse form of hope for happiness to be coming soon: If happiness is an ending, the unconscious reasoning goes, then a total ending can bring about total happiness, at least for me (the bad guys will get a proper reckoning for their moral gap!). And so people read The Book of Revelation, become Jehova’s Witnesses, or delve into the Maya Calendar, or even project onto real catastrophic risks like climate crisis forecasts, and try to find an artificial ending to the story of all stories. But it doesn’t really work; you can’t just “add an ending and stir” to become happy; you have to work through the story itself, and the story is undergirded by emotions—each of which must be rolled out to its respective conclusion. The longing for “end days” is all a big avoidance scheme for not dealing with difficult emotions and the journeys they take us on.

Manson’s book puts great emphasis on the centrality of emotions: we sometimes think of reason and cognition (our thoughts) as the driver of the car, with emotions coming in and disturbing and distorting our rationality. But actually, he points out, it is emotions that are the driver of our vehicle. Or, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio famously quipped: “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think”. Emotions are what direct action, they pull the strings of movements of the body. We are, essentially, puppets of our emotions, and our thoughts just follow suit and rationalize to the best of their ability, sometimes correcting the direction here and there. If you remove emotions, we literally cannot make any decisions, and so we can’t actually do very much at all.

Let’s say you want to become a nurse. If you don’t have any emotions at all about it, or only negative, painful emotions, you’ll be incapable of acting towards that goal. Once the emotions are there your cognition comes in and tries to figure out how to become a nurse, and your actions become structured over time to line up many small actions towards that one greater accomplishment. When I was young, I really wanted to become a sociologist, and so I thought long and hard about how to achieve just that, and I derived pleasure and comfort from thinking about sociological perspectives on things in everyday life. Emotions drove my cognition, which drove my actions and eventually my habits, including my mental ones.

With Manson’s view, we thus have a triad of:

Emotion

Thoughts/cognition

Action.

Trouble can arise—there can be “cognitive dissonance”—when thoughts, actions, and emotions contradict one another. When such dissonance is there, the different parts of us are not integrated, and so we lack “integrity”; we lack a certain sense of wholeness and resonance through our being. Or that’s how I would define the idea of having or lacking integrity as we usually speak of it. Without such integrity, we are set in a disharmonious state, perhaps even an inner cacophony or chaos. And so we are presented either with an opportunity to change and transform until a new equilibrium emerges within, or with the less savory but all the more tempting occasion to lie to ourselves, to switch to thoughts that we don’t really believe, to deny emotions, or to compartmentalize certain actions to excuse them and push them out of the view of our conscience and self-image. In the latter case, we usually become, to speak bluntly, dickheads.

Cognitive dissonance and lacking integrity isn’t just for “some dumb people out there”; it’s the case for all of us. Life is complicated, and we are large, we have multitudes, so dissonance is the rule rather than the exception. Not lying in life is tricky, at least if we include emotional lies, lies at the subtler level, lies to ourselves.

From this viewpoint, we hardly need to explain the existence of dissonance and subtle dishonesty; they are the normal state of life. What needs to be explained is that relative stability (coherence between emotions, thoughts, and actions) is possible at all. Integrity is the exception, albeit an exception we all strive for. That’s in large part what we’re dealing with in this chapter.

So far so good. Let us now add another layer of depth to this.

The three categories—thoughts, actions, and emotions—affect each other continuously. In that sense, you can’t really say which one “comes first”. All emotions depend on cognition (if we think about a worrying health condition or a few vengeful mobsters that might show up at our doorstep any minute, this will naturally impact how we feel in that moment); cognition depends on emotion (if we’re upset, we’re likely to have much darker and more self-centered thoughts); actions are affected by both thoughts and emotions (to get up early in the morning and go to nursing class, we must have the idea of “becoming a nurse” in our heads, as well as the emotions to motivate us); and, of course, actions will affect our thought patterns (we’ll find rationalizations for whatever we find ourselves doing) as well as our emotions (we can feel good about getting up in the morning, or reap emotional benefits from having done our workout or whatnot). So it’s not just that emotions drive our thoughts, which steer our actions. Our thoughts also stimulate our emotions (an important key to many forms of therapy, like CBT). And our actions can actually change both.

The three categories criss-cross in so many, so complex manners, that it actually becomes difficult to entirely distinguish them from one another. Where does an emotion end and a thought begin? Where does the thought begin to count as an action—when you accidentally say it out loud, or when someone gets you to reveal it? They co-arise as a seamless whole—but there is still enough independence of each for them to be able to contradict one another. This “whole” can be harmonious, or less so. Such harmony, in turn, depends on our own capacities within each of the fields (our emotional, cognitive, and action capacities), the balance between such capacities (if we’re much more cognitively intelligent than emotionally adjusted, this can lead to complex but ultimately excessive and counterproductive ruminations, etc.), as well as, of course, how well we resonate with our social surroundings and the other way around. And so, if any one of them is offbeat, dysfunctional, or just too limited, the other two are likely to be affected.

I guess I’m just saying: emotions, thoughts, and actions emerge together and affect one another. When they align, that’s happiness and a life that flows well. When they crash and contradict, that’s chaos, confusion, and suffering.

Thus far I am only saying roughly what Manson has already explained in greater detail in his book. I’d like to add a fourth dimension: perception (or “sensing”, as it involves all senses and our automatic interpretations of these). We don’t neutrally perceive and interpret the world around us, like a mirror. We cocreate it with our gaze, with the interpretation of what meets our senses. The mind will highlight and notice different things, depending on our emotions, cognition, and actions, and of course such perceptions will color each of these.

And so, the four categories that arise together are:

Emotion,

Cognition/thoughts,

Action, and

Perception.

We have four fundamental categories of this little model of the human mind. Of course they’re going to interact. When we feel down, we will literally perceive a darker world (emotion colors perception) and the very same social interaction that would otherwise have seemed innocent enough can now be viewed as full of malicious innuendos. When we learn new thought patterns, like Freudian psychoanalysis, we will now begin to perceive things that correspond to those ideas (in the case of psychoanalysis, things like “projections” and “rationalizations” in the actions and communications of others). If we learn physics, we will perceive the law of gravity in action. If we learn about art, we will perceive a Baroque painting, rather than some fat six-limbed children (arms, legs, wings) flapping around with gilded harps. We will perceive information as true or false depending on our existing thoughts and emotions about the issue. Actions shape perception, too: When we play basketball, we will perceive the openings in the opponent team’s defense, focusing on the ball and the position of the players, to the point where we can literally miss a gorilla walking across the ball court—we were just lost staring at the bouncing of the ball![112]

And, in turn, what we perceive will naturally elicit emotions in us: is that big guy rushing towards me to hug me or to throw me off the bridge? Makes a big difference. Should I feel awkwardly flattered by his enthusiasm to see me, or scared to death? And that, naturally, affects cognition: should I be thinking of something to say, or look for escape routes? And that drives, of course, action: stay and meet the awkward hug politely, or run like hell–or judo him off the bridge himself?

Our perception of the world is not straightforward; it co-arises interdependently with emotion, thought, and action. Why is this important? What is the cost of omitting perception from our model of the embodied mind? We’ll get to that. But even as, in the two previous chapters, we delve into dealing with shame, guilt, fear, and the rest of those debilitating emotions, please note the following: to untangle an emotion that has got stuck in us, we cannot focus solely on the emotion. Yes, we must feel through and get to know the emotion. But that is not enough. We must then inquire into our thoughts around the emotion, the story we have that elicits that emotion and keeps it stuck. Then we must see what the actions of ourselves and others entailed. And—here’s where viewing our own perception is crucial—we must be able to make up our minds about what we truly believe is occurring or has occurred.

Think about it—our emotions naturally depend upon what we perceive, upon our interpretations of events, particularly social events which are inherently complex and multifaceted. Let’s say one of the emotions we need to work through is resentment at how a former boss stepped on us before the whole team. Did they in fact bully us, or were they offering constructive feedback to the best of their ability, in a manner that was relevant to the team as a whole, while still trying to help us save face? How can our thoughts even tell the story without having a certain perception of the events? We can go some way towards releasing emotions without having such pieces put into place, but we’ll have a much harder time, since we won’t know exactly where the “moral gap” or sense of injustice lies. We won’t “find our feet”, as it were.

As the research of Lisa Feldman Barrett and her team has shown, you can’t even have what we properly call “emotions” without an interpretation: something contracts in our belly... are we hungry or angry? To feel something, you need to somehow perceive the sensations in your own body-mind; you need to “construct” the emotion—which of course you do quickly and automatically in your brain, involving different parts of it. Even emotions are entirely dependent on your perceptions, both of the situations we find ourselves in, and of the perception of the very sensations that crop up within our bodies (our gross, subtle, and causal bodies, to use words that no respectable researcher like Lisa Feldman Barrett would ever touch with a stick). The mind makes a projection given its interpretation of current circumstances, an interpretation of events and sensations, and voilà, an emotion arises![113] The emotions aren’t essences with their own neurological fingerprints: they arise in every situation, always depending on our interpretations. Without perception, there can be no sense of justice, of moral gaps. And so, there can be no clear emotions.

A court of law works no differently: to establish what is just, it must form as clear as possible a perception of what happened, and interpret the events that unfolded. So if no “inner courthouse” is set up to offer its ruling, the ruling of our own conscience, we’ll find it difficult to move on, to free ourselves of the grip of negative emotions stuck in our system. The emotions will be fragmented, unfinished, ambiguous, disconnected from an inner story. We won’t get “an inner ruling”, a sense of justice and a direction the story should take, and thus no conclusion to our emotions. And this happens pretty easily, because so many situations we experience are hard to know how to make sense of. No wonder, then, that so many ghosts of the past live inside of us, with so much unfinished business: we just don’t know what to finish, let alone how.

With the “boss incident” above, one interpretation (“the boss was a bully”) leads to righteous anger, holding the lesson to stand up for ourselves and to avoid idiot bosses; the other (“I was just being correctly taught how to improve my work”) leads to shame at our own inability to deal with fair and constructive feedback. If we can’t make up our minds about what happened, it might be difficult to think or feel anything about it, except being confused and having some anxiety. We won’t find our own inner compass, our boundaries, our bottom line, from which we take a solid stand and then deal with the emotions as needed. We won’t be learning the right lessons, either.

With distorted perceptions (perceptions corrupted by our own undealt-with emotions), we might even bring perverse “justice” to the table, say, punishing a person for their perceived arrogance, when in fact they were genuinely trying to help us. And so the emotions can rumble around and around with no resolution, with no ending in sight, making our actions incoherent and erratic, too. Those actions will then cause further confusion and further unresolved emotions in ourselves and others, where your story and mine will diverge more and more. That’s how we make enemies out of friends and family. We’re transported from Hollywood archetypical stories that play out towards a happy ending, to the complex hell of a French movie. I guess some people want to live in a French movie, but do they really know what they’re getting themselves into?

Perceptions and interpretations, of course, cannot be perfect. We don’t have the “eye of God”. But simply working through emotions can free up our thoughts, which can help us reevaluate perceptions, and that can free up new degrees of freedom of actions, too. Our stream of agency can become more harmonic, more musical, more centered around life-affirming goals, weaving together your story with mine into a greater whole, making us “fit together”, keeping us in higher “subjective states”. We all have work to do here.

If you were, for instance, sucked into a cult and spent twelve years working for free, getting guilt-tripped on Tuesday and Thursdays, and hardly got any sleep, it is entirely appropriate to change perceptions: you were not offered the chance of a lifetime to do something great, you were tricked, used, and abused. And now it’s time to get mad. But before that perception and its consequent interpretations are in place, you won’t be able to feel the appropriate rage. And the rage will live inside you, unfelt, undealt-with, and put your whole life experience on subtle mute.

Again, “truth is God”, and while we can never have absolute truth about what happened (our perceptions are too biased, our memories too flawed and skewed according to our present emotional flows), we can come closer to it by examining how perception, emotion, thought, and action emerge together. In that sense, doing this work brings us closer to our own deepest truths, our emotional truths, and thus closer to God. There will be a little more “God”, a little more sacredness, in our actions, because they emerge from a resonance with emotions, thoughts, and perceptions.

And harmony between these four (emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and actions) is more likely to create harmony in our relations to other beings as well. So the God we’re approaching is a sociable God; a sacredness that emerges in togetherness and mutual understanding. Hell, conversely, is the breakdown of this social universe, the failure of resonance.

Groundwork Two: Focusing the Primary Emotions

One more thing before we move on. In so-called “emotional therapy”, they sometimes distinguish between primary and secondary emotions. Secondary emotions are those that arise in us as a result of underlying, “authentic” primary emotions. Often, these include anxiety or angst (especially of the vague, generalized kind), confusion, and that sense of muteness which I keep coming back to. These emotions are secondary because they don’t really contain within them a specific stance, solution, resolution, or course of action. You can analyze them to death. Won’t help. You can watch them arise and abide in meditation. No avail. They don’t really want anything; they just feel bad and sick in general. The only value they have is to call to our attention that something is off, and that we need to somehow resolve something outside of our immediate awareness.

Underlying the secondary emotions are the so-called primary ones. Here you find joy, hope, longing, desire, rage, disgust, terror, guilt, shame, and all the rest of it. Genuine drives; emotions that have a target, a specific thing that you want to either approach, acquire, be perceived by, learn more about, escape, avoid, destroy, subjugate, or be conjoined with. Primary emotions are motivations: they drive action, they do something.

The secondary emotions are markers of repressed (or tangled up) primary emotions. Remember, when actions, thoughts, perceptions, and emotions don’t harmonize, we tend to get those weird, ambiguous, unreliable emotions. We can’t “listen to our hearts”, because there’s no archetypal story upon which we can pin our emotions and make them meaningful. They’re splintered, fragmented. If we try to listen to our hearts, all we get is noise.

Inner peace, or higher subjective states, come from taking the journey that leads us to the conclusion of these emotions: piecing “truthful” emotions together and addressing them.

More specifically, trouble tends to arise when emotional forces within us collide: say, romantic desire versus fear of rejection, and one of the drives isn't brought to its conclusion. Now, they don’t have to be concluded in concrete actions: you don’t actually need to slap your boss or sleep with the neighbor’s spouse. But they need to be recognized, contained, felt, and run their course as flows within you. And where “moral gaps” arise, where there is injustice, this must be recognized and atoned for in whatever ways practically possible. Secondary emotions can get stuck in us as habits or long-term plateaus we’re left at, but the primary emotions are what truly moves inside of us, or what tries to move and is stopped by colliding with something else. Hence, we untangle and free up the flows that run through our oceans of emotions by doing a detailed inventory of our primary emotions, in particular the negative social emotions.

This model (primary, secondary) is admittedly a bit crude. We obviously don’t have just two layers of emotions. For instance, we often feel mute and slightly anxious, and behind that there is rage, and behind the rage, there is great sadness, and at the bottom of the sadness, there is a scared little inner child, looking for safety. In reality, we often need to travel through several layers to find our emotional truths. But the two-step model is useful to set the frame for what we’re doing in this chapter: we’re circumventing the secondary emotions and dealing directly with the primary ones, thereby shifting the emotional basis from which the secondary emotions arise. We’re emotionally confused, and our task is to bring emotional clarity. Because the primary emotions are motivational forces that arise in response to the events we perceive and the stories we tell ourselves, they are naturally linked to action, and to the events that play out in our lives.

From Broken Emotions to Wholeness

Okay, now back to the main thread of this chapter. Thanks for your patience with this groundlaying work. You’ve been great.

The premise of the two previous commandments (Do the Walk of Shame and Sacrifice Immortality) is that we all carry around undealt-with negative emotions, and that it is these emotions that actually constitute the blockages of our inner flows. These are ultimately what stop us from “fucking like a beast”, from being in higher subjective states as a baseline; the inner blockages are always there, nagging us in the background of our awareness. These underlying, ever-present negative emotions[114] distort our perceptions and get us stuck in the wrong games of life, living for the wrong purposes, cultivating the wrong relationships, even cleaning our own rooms for the wrong reasons—spiritually speaking.

After much consideration, I have come to believe that the negative social emotions (fear, guilt, shame, and Sklavenmoral) are in turn brought to their conclusion by one and the same principle.

That principle is justice.

We shall become “social justice warriors”, not by downloading ready-made values and subscribing to them, but by rooting our sense of justice, our sense of “what must be done” from the inside out. We become social justice warriors in our own lives.

Justice alone can ultimately set the emotional flows into harmonic resonance, thus ceasing the blockages that force our inner subjective states towards the anxious and dull. Justice brings sanity to the world of social things. It is sanity, because justice is nothing else than when social relations are brought into harmony, into wholeness, into fitting-together. Justice heals, my friend; it brings you back to life. And so we must heal ourselves, and in extension, the world, with justice. We thus cannot avoid delving into and discussing how to connect to this quality, not as an abstraction or idea, but as something that rolls out like a hurricane from deep within, and still brings peace in the eye of the storm.

Justice is the one principle that ties it all together:

the working through of emotions, especially the primary ones,

the concluding of the inner stories of our lives (thoughts),

the shifts in perception, and

the capacity for productive action.

Clear as mud, isn’t it? Let me elaborate.

Justice Means Wholeness

So emotions arise together with thoughts (inner stories we tell ourselves), perceptions, and actions. When we work through primary emotions (again, our more authentic and deeper feelings), these are naturally tied to the things we believe have actually happened in our lives; to our thought processes, perceptions, and actions. As such, when our emotions shift, we also gain an opportunity to revisit and change key stories in our lives, which can change our interpretations of events, and help us see the actions of ourselves and others in a new light—which again evolves what emotions we feel, hence evolving what drives us as human beings.

This understanding of wholeness or integration between emotion, cognition, perception, and actions helps us to understand what justice really is. What we normally experience as a sense of “justice” is when:

our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and actions align with each other;

when these things align across different parts of ourselves, so that they reinforce one harmonious whole rather than contradicting each other; and

when we align with the emotions/thoughts/actions/perceptions of other people.

In other words, justice is nothing else than when these aspects (emotion, thought, perception, and action) are brought into harmony within ourselves and between us and others.

Justice is another word for social-psychological wholeness, for proportionality and mutual fit of social relationships and the stories that play out within and through them. It’s a state of resonance, of coordination, of harmony. It’s when things fit together and make sense across the dimensions of emotion, thoughts, perceptions, and actions. It’s when the brokenness we all feel finally heals. It’s when moral gaps are closed, or when a new stroke of insight, or the perspective of distance, helps us see that there was no moral gap to begin with, and that we have been outraged for no good reason.

A simple example is in order.

A friend of mine told a story about some shame that he has been carrying throughout his life. When he was fifteen, he took up a simple job that included both some tech work and some knocking on people’s doors while dealing with sales and customer service. Being a smart and techy young man, he finished the programming side of the job quickly and easily. But he was also introverted and a bit socially uncomfortable, so he ended up stalling the door-knocking part to the point of never actually finishing the job. His father was disappointed and scolded him: “You didn’t lift a finger!” the father would say, and repeated that on later occasions. More than twenty years later, this guy still suffered from a debilitating shame around any kind of procrastination behavior.

When I was told about this story, actually while discussing the writing of this book and the emotional importance of justice, I made the following comment: Maybe it was unreasonable for his father to blame a fifteen-year-old for having social anxiety, rather than encouraging him for what impressive work he had still managed to get done at such a young age and with no prior experience. Maybe my friend’s young self wasn’t so much at fault at all, and indeed, maybe his father was at fault for scolding and shaming him while offering no support. The effects of his father’s scolding were clear: whatever good might have come out of his finishing that little work project was not proportional to his feeling shame for over twenty years and having issues that made his procrastination tendencies worse, not better. In short, the guy was ashamed of something, but the shame and fault were not reasonably his.

Why had this shame stuck in his system for so long, and so badly? He couldn’t reach a conclusion to his inner story of shame, because the story didn’t quite add up. There was no principle of justice to tie the story together and lay his shame to rest. And so it had gone on for two decades already.

What was needed instead, I believe, was to look at the shame, and then to reappraise the story behind it, the perceptions of what happened, and the actions of the people involved. He couldn’t heal the shame because the shame wasn’t truly his to begin with. Rather, there was a moral gap to be closed between him and his father: What the father did was not that awful or unforgivable, perhaps, but it was not right. So the guy could and should let go of his shame, and instead feel the anger he may have had towards his father, and then figure out what would have been the just, the fair course of action that his father should have taken instead, like patting him on the back and saying “It’s okay, son, good going so far; tell me if there’s anything I can do to help you brave through the last part of this job”.

It was wrong to scold a fifteen-year-old for not finishing a job, rather than encouraging his good effort, and at least offer some support if things got socially challenging. That’s what needed to be addressed, not the shame of being a hopeless procrastinator. What was earlier a bundled mess of confusing shame could become a simpler and cleaner cut.

For the sake of argument, let’s say this guy’s father is no longer alive, so he can’t actually speak to him about it. Then my friend can still see a therapist about the issue, or he can simply work through the whole story again, going through the emotions that arise once he has gained a view of what he himself believes is just and appropriate in the given situation. He started with his own shame (an emotion), and this led him to his thoughts and stories, and this led him to reevaluate his perception and interpretation of the situation, and this led to a new view of his own actions, and what actions should be taken now.

If the guy would have only worked through his shame but didn’t reevaluate the bigger picture, there would still have been, on some level, something wrong with the whole story, and it would have continued to be bothersome. Only justice, a clarity concerning what one genuinely considers to be just when one has worked out one’s thoughts and emotions about the issue, can truly heal.

The example I bring up here isn’t such a serious one (even if, of course, it caused my friend some suffering). Think of more serious cases, like when people walk around with guilt and shame because someone molested them, abused them, or they had evil moms who subjected them to Munchausen by proxy. Here, people will be stuck with terrible trauma throughout their lives, until they one day manage to get the story straight, change their perceptions, and thus hit their appropriate emotions and work through these. Or at least there would be a proper chance for their trauma to heal to a significant part. Or, on a collective level, crimes against ethnic groups and oppression of minorities require justice to heal. After all, what good is expressing and hearing grievances if the realities of those grievances are not fairly weighed and then addressed? This is serious stuff—matters of life or death. Obviously, collective processes of justice (after the Rwandan genocide, after Pinochet’s dictatorship, and so on) are more complex, but some of the same principles apply: uncover and acknowledge emotions, correct stories told, change perceptions, and act to close the moral gaps that appear. Just remember that simplified and flattened calls for collective justice make up some of the most common grounds for new large-scale crimes to be committed.[115]

In the end, bringing each emotion to its conclusion also means bringing our inner stories to their respective conclusions, to their little “happy endings”. Reaching such an “end of the story” in turn changes our perceptions and actions, which of course changes how we feel about the whole thing in the first place. It makes it easiest to let go of it, to leave it behind as just another chapter in one of the books on the shelf.

As we saw with the research of Lisa Feldman Barrett, the emotions themselves depend upon perception and interpretation of the subtle sensations of our bodies. If we have perceptions that don’t add up, we will end up feeling “the wrong emotions”, or just very confusing and vague emotions, and as such we will be trying to conclude the wrong inner drama, telling a story that doesn’t make sense. Perception is so fundamental that it exists even within each emotion. Again, such emotional confusion casts you into the living hell of a French movie. Or just the endless practice of a bad psychoanalyst who keeps you on the couch for years, digging in the wrong places, for the wrong solutions.

Doing justice hurts and is always difficult in the short-term. It involves sacrifice. It involves making the hard choice, not the easy one. But it heals—not only yourself, but the whole world around you. Speak up against bullying, and voilà, the world becomes a better place. Sure, the bullies will try to disprove your negative interpretation of them, not least by treating the people around them better than they used to. And then the bullies start actually learning behaviors of respect and kindness. The bullies are just responding to your discrediting of them, they didn’t actually become better people overnight. But their pressured position of having to work harder to win people over piece by piece teaches them real kindness and respect. If nobody would have called them out, they would never have learned, and everyone would have had to put up with them forever more.

Before the bullies start adapting, however, they will of course first try to bully you right back into silence and some embellished or covert form of submission. Onlookers who didn’t speak out against the bullying—being more cowardly than you happened to be in this situation—might even at first support the bullies in silencing you and putting you back into place. It’s the most convenient course of action, after all. In the end, however, you stood up for yourself, and even the people who found your criticism too uncomfortable to deal with will begin to benefit, as the bullies will begin to treat them better as well, so as to disprove your criticism.

One person’s standing with justice is often all it takes to heal whole groups, whole companies, whole families. It can turn the tide. It can correct the course. But it takes grace and grit—which is luckily what all the other commandments are good for.

Become a Social Justice Warrior in Your Own Life

Here’s a certain identity for you to try on: you are a social justice warrior. Not necessarily of the feminist, environmentalist, or anti-racist kind—but one that continuously stands up for justice in your own life, and in the lives of the people around you.

I am suggesting that you should fight for your own justice, one that is rooted in your own thoughts and emotions: your own values. This means, of course, that you need to think clearly about justice. Muddle-headed ideas of justice will only have you end up being self-righteous, judgmental, or always picking a fight. Once we have worked our way through possible sources of emotional distortions, we may turn to the questions of how to think about justice. Justice, after all, takes some figuring out. It’s going to look different from context to context.

Here, some of the basic insights of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) may offer some hints.

Aaron T. Beck was a psychiatrist, credited as the foremost founding father of CBT. It is today perhaps the dominant form of therapy in medical and psychiatric settings; it’s also huge in social work and psychotherapy in general. Early in his career, Beck was taught the Freudian notion that depressed people had locked up anger, and depression was a symptom of this pent-up anger turned in on themselves. When he spoke to depressed clients, however, he didn’t necessarily meet angry people; many of them simply seemed to have become stuck in some really dark and obviously unreasonable thought patterns, and now interpreted things around them according to these, so that the world (and especially themselves) seemed rather awful. Interestingly, he had found that your thoughts cause your emotions. When negative thought patterns were rationally challenged and kindly nudged towards clearer thinking, people seemed to get better. Anxieties and depressions subsided. This realization sparked a revolution in psychotherapy, one that is still reaching its peak today, with CBT having expanded into a wide and rich variety of fields.

Interestingly, this line of thinking later led to the increasing introduction of meditation and mindfulness practice in cognitive behavioral therapy, as changing thought patterns can be tricky and may require practicing to discipline the stream of thoughts.[116]

Beck’s insight was simple and commonsensical, in a way: thoughts and perceptions matter, too, so why don’t we work directly with those? For my part, I believe that emotions tend to be the stronger force, as they will shape the stories we tell ourselves (the beast always finds a way), but the arrows really do go in both directions: your thoughts about something create your emotions, but then your emotions tend to shape your thoughts, too. Thoughts and emotions can best be evolved together, as they co-arise interdependently.

What, then, is the most reliable manner to think straight in matters that are social, that are emotional, that have to do with the stories of our lives and how we feel about them?

Here’s my suggestion: It is to put on a blindfold (so we become as impartial as possible) and then weigh what available information we have about what happened, comparing different interests against one another on a scales, and holding a sword with a sharpened blade in the other hand to make a clear and clean cut once a sound judgment has been reached. It is to invoke, or even for a moment to become, the Goddess of Justice. What is (socially) just in this situation, if we disregard who was who, if we wear a “veil of ignorance”? When we start looking for justice in each difficult situation, we have become social justice warriors in our own lives.

Thoughts cause emotions cause behaviors. And among the very strongest thoughts to create a reliable habit is to think in terms of identity: “I am the kind of person who…”. So the identity of standing up for justice in your own life and relationships is one of the best thoughts you can have in your mind, because it sets you up for habits that generate stability and happiness for yourself and others over the long term.

And then we need to work on our own thoughts to rid them of distortions. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is about thinking more “objectively” about the matters at hand, about not believing the first emotionally imbued thought that pops into our heads. Thinking in terms of justice is a lot like that. In matters where we truly are a casual observer, this tends to be fairly easy to do—if you get a rich and detailed picture of what happened. But if you’re part of the context yourself, this becomes so difficult. Hence, when in doubt about what is just, when we’re upset, we should pretend that we tell the story about someone else entirely. Don’t describe any character traits or intentions: just events and facts. Then weigh and judge. I’m not saying we should disown our emotions or our own interests: we should just bracket them for a moment, before we can put them back in. It takes practice, for certain. But it tends to help not only to get a clearer view and defensible position; it helps calm our tits and reduce some of our exaggerated judgments in the first place. Usually, the person you’re upset with is not half as evil as you think. Sometimes, perhaps, but it’s rarely the case.

If you look at your own cognitive process and make it as clear as possible, without partiality, investment, and distortion, you simply end up with a much more powerful, useful, and tenable position. So nobody benefits more than you.

The blinder you go, the clearer you see. The clearer you see, the more universal and uncorrupted your sense of justice. The purer sense of justice, the more wholeness and healing is likely to materialize in your life, on average and over time: you begin to align your emotions with your thoughts, with your perceptions, with your actions. But there are no guarantees for rewards. Ultimately we have to do it for religious reasons, in an act of sincerely-ironic faith: we have to strive to do what is right and just, because it is just and right. Doing what’s right simply happens to be the thing that also makes us happy and thriving, because doing what’s right means bringing ourselves and the world around us into harmony.

Now, there are some traps here. Again: Thinking in terms of justice does not mean disregarding what you feel or want in the name of what is fair. It also doesn’t mean figuring out who needs to get punished for what, or who deserves a reward. It means figuring out what truly makes sense for you to do next, given your true feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and earlier actions. Once these are harmonized, it tends to feel good to do what is right.

Greater than Love

Sometimes people say “When in doubt and difficulty, think of what is the most loving thing to do.” It’s not such a bad piece of advice. But if you think about it, you can come up with scenarios where the most loving thing to do is not necessarily the most just one. Should you “love” a school shooter?

If you flip that around, however, you’ll notice that the most just thing to do will also be the most loving thing, at least in the long run. No, don’t love the school shooter, because that would be callous and disrespectful to the other kids and families involved.

The same goes for that other cherished notion, fairness. Life isn’t always fair (in fact, it rarely is). Something can be fair but not just (“We both got one half the pie each, but my half was acquired by stealing half of yours, after you had made it for your kids”... which would be fair in a narrow sense, because we got the same amount of pie, but hardly just). But if you do what is just, it will also end up being the most fair thing, in the long run (“Your kids get the whole pie. I’ll wait for my turn to have pie.”).

Justice is thus the more fundamental value—underlying the other ones. If something is loving and fair, but unjust, it’s simply not all that desirable. If something is just but, at face level, unloving and unfair, it was still genuinely the best we could do in that situation.[117] If we bring love and fairness to their conclusions, all things considered, we’ll end up doing what is just.

That is to say, with the current definition of justice: We end up aligning what we do, with what we think, with what we perceive, with what we feel. We end up finding out the best truth available, and going from there.

However we twist and turn the issue, we come back to one and the same thing: emotional wholeness comes from justice. Justice heals. Per my definition, justice is when emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and actions align in a manner that brings social relations into coherence, into resonance, into harmony. It resolves what I earlier called “the problem of fit”.

Indeed, this holds true even beyond the confines of the realm of personal relations and emotions; it’s also true on the societal scale. One of the things I have learned from Anasuya Sengupta, my social activist friend, is that activists who work for the Global South (and minority rights of different kinds) don’t necessarily demand “equality”, or even “equity”. They demand justice: that which puts social relations into what is reasonable and proportional from an impartial perspective. If it was unjust that India was brought to its knees under European colonialism, and that India is still suffering the consequences for it in today’s postcolonial world, then it’s not “perfect equality” that would correct that. Only addressing the injustice of history and today’s power relations would. Again, we’re simply speaking of bringing the social relations into harmony and proportion. We’re looking for what’s reasonable given perceptions of the facts, the stories we tell about those facts, the emotions involved, and the actions that are being taken.

Hence, I would argue that the basis of justice in our own lives seems to spill over into the world around us: that which can heal each of us from within, is also that which can heal the world at large.

The problem is, of course, that it’s difficult to be impartial and thus to know what justice looks like in every situation. Our perceptions are so easily corrupted. Here, practicing within our own lives, starting from our own emotions and the stories they come with, provides a good start. There is an inherent link between becoming social justice warriors in our own lives and being non-hypocritical justice warriors out there in the world. This is social justice from within, grounded in honest work with our real human drives.

Injustice and the Adjectives of Evil

What happens when injustice prevails? What happens when emotions, stories, perceptions, and actions don’t add up? Well, it happens all the time; indeed, more often than not. It just means that the claim to justice is first buried, then bent out of shape, and finally forgotten, while the social world lives on as if nothing happened…

But, very soon, the cracks begin to show.

If justice means that actions, thoughts, perceptions, and emotions neatly align, injustice means that they contradict. And so the social order begins to break down—or in the case of personal or professional relationships, these break down. People do stuff without quite feeling it, without motivation, or with other motivations altogether; words lose their meaning (peace means war, freedom slavery and so on); inexplicable conflicts occur and are perceived wildly differently by increasingly polarized groups of observers. Weirder and weirder shit erupts seemingly out of nowhere, more and more often, monster problems crawling straight out of hell and into our living rooms. And eventually some form of revenge takes place, some revolution, some reactionary movement, some formerly righteous rage so torn and twisted it has become sadistic in its vengefulness. And that causes… New injustice to emerge. To close such downward spirals, always seek justice—in your own life, in the relations around you, and in society at large.

A note, then, to more conservative readers: If you ever cared even the least about maintaining and conserving the social order, you must also care about justice. Social justice. An unjust society is by definition one that doesn’t add up. A society of lies, self-deceit, and oppression is inherently unstable and ripe for violent eruption and hysterical change. Stability demands justice. It demands that we act in manners that do not necessitate lies, obfuscations, and repressed emotions; where our ears need not be shielded from the screams in the background.[118]

Now, as we have noted, we all tend to think that we are just—and that the people we are in conflict with are not. How can we be so sure that our justice is the real one, the greater one? Because there is no umpire God out there who can make the final judgment for us, all we can do is to compare perspectives. However, the more invested we are in a matter, the harder it becomes to disregard our own biases. It just becomes too tempting to ignore that which speaks against our case. It becomes too painful to try on negative assessments of ourselves. So we’ll do these things automatically distort, deny, or obfuscate. It’s the darkest magic there ever was.

It is, naturally, entirely unrealistic for us to achieve the perfect blindfold of a Goddess of Justice. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that we can be more or less biased in a certain situation or conflict. It is quite common that we view things in a different light a few years later—and, quite often, we will have come around to positions that others held and tried to tell us about, at least in part. This is because we have become less biased with the perspective of distance. So the fact that there is no perfect Goddess of Justice among us in no way disqualifies our striving towards her. But how do you pay your dues to her?

Actually, it turns out there are a few rules of thumb that, most often, reveal when there is injustice on your side—i.e. when you somehow have a story that does not match your actions, nor what you have perceived, nor your true emotions. Look for these hints in yourself—I suppose they are self-explanatory as to why they would be signs of inconsistency:

You find that you need to tell lies, even little ones. Concealing key information or omitting certain parts that grant another picture of the whole also counts as lying.

You avoid sitting down and talking through the issues and decline offers to do so (something feels too off or scary about the prospect, and that something will appear, upon closer inspection, to be that you’d likely lose face if you’d have to argue your case, or explain yourself, because unconsciously you already know it doesn’t hold up.)

You find that you need to “maneuver” by telling one person one thing, and another person something else.

You carry secrets for someone else at an emotional and social cost.

You notice strange memory lapses and that people can remind you of; things they say you’ve done but you only vaguely remember.

You get strange fits of rage that seem out of character (exception for this is if you’ve been directly targeted by abuse or violence, where such rage may be proportional; otherwise it’s more likely that it’s your self-image that is hurting as inconsistencies are revealed).

You find yourself talking about the negative character traits of other people—or your own positive character traits—rather than the facts of what has occurred. And so, you find yourself trying to convince others that so-and-so is a bad person.

You feel that if only one person or a group were to be removed, all would be well (you could be right, but quite often this is just the mind scapegoating someone).

You have an “ends justify the means” stance on something, i.e. doing something that would not under other circumstances be viewed as acceptable. Think of the communist purges in the 1930s—all the executioners of random farmers, “kulaks” so called, said to themselves that their crimes were necessary for the communist future and that they should get over “bourgeois sentimentality”.

You find that you get rushed with “feeling smart” and giving yourself credit for your strategic ruse and the iron will to see your plans through.

This is what being the bad guy looks like from the inside. But there’s one more sign that is apparent from within and from the outside.

If you read North Korean news sources, or the communications of cults on contentious issues, you will find a lot of… adjectives.[119] It’s weird, but it’s true. People use adjectives as qualifiers for their own version of the truth. And so “the bad side” will tend to use them more; really evil ones will tend to use them profusely. This is because, if your story adds up, you can just tell it straight, looking at the facts and events of the matter—like a court describing why someone is charged with murder. If you need to point out that “John maliciously entered the room and glared evilly at innocent little me, and I met him stoically and heroically with a pure heart”.... You’re probably not the good guy. And that means you still have work to do to integrate thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and actions.

So, noting these signs of injustice—which can of course reside on several sides of a conflict simultaneously—you get material to work with. Why do these inconsistencies show up? What is their source? Being a justice warrior in your own life must mean that you first and foremost fight the injustice of yourself, of your side, or your in-group or ideology.

As far as I have found, this is the greatest battle of our lives. Like the one against death, it’s a battle we cannot win. As they say: What doesn’t kill you… Mutates and tries again. And yet, life has prevailed and proliferated in its unfathomable creativity over thousands of millenia because every mortal creature strives to survive. Lies are more likely to occur than truth because there is only one correct answer to any (factual) question, and the number of possible lies infinite. Chaos is more common than order because it’s more likely, and so the death of an organism is more likely than its survival, because continued life is only possible under a very limited number of combinations of the matter that make up the organism, but its destruction can occur through an infinite number of rearrangements of its parts. And yet life prevails. Correspondingly, justice wins because we all long for healing and wholeness. And so we all fight in a Darwinian struggle where the point of attraction is the truth itself: the higher your truth, the more likely it is to take hold and flourish among the flowers of everywhere. It is not easy but it is sublime, and it lives on beyond and around you even if and when you lose and die.

The Right Kind of Assertiveness

And now, I’d like to bring up a certain superpower that comes from working through our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and actions to the point where we gain clarity about what we think is genuinely just. It’s the superpower of assertiveness, i.e. the capacity to stand our ground in the face of social pressure.

Many of us need to work on being more assertive, at least in some aspects of our lives. Maybe we can be assertive at work, but not with our families, or perhaps the other way around. Most people have at least some work to do here. What, then, is the strongest and most reliable source of the power to assert our needs and boundaries, or our integrity and values, for that matter? You guessed it—it’s justice.

Think about it. You’ve gone through the whole situation, including your own shame and guilt about it, and you’ve assessed your perceptions and the story you’re telling about it, until they all create a beautiful diamond that just makes sense on every level. Then you’ve seen what you, according to your own values and best effort, believe is just in the given situation. Maybe you need to address some transgressions or mistakes of your own, maybe someone else needs to, maybe a combination of both. You’ve already reached a ruling, a conclusion. From here on, you can be fairly certain you’re not overreacting, because you’ve let your negative emotions flow through you and subside. At some point, you find your truth. And you can hold it with certainty and conviction, with no hysterical undercurrent. It’s just plain and simple. You’re sure of it. Now, acting certain before you really are is bad. But sooner or later, you need to put a stake in the ground. Others will try to tear it right up—going after you with how incredibly unreasonable you are. If you’re right, though, and justice really is on your side, you will prevail eventually just by sticking to your guns. There really is no compromise between justice and injustice. There was no compromise between keeping Nazi concentration camps going and closing them down. Justice demands of us that we fight it out until injustice ends, and social relations are harmonized.

It’s plain. It’s right as rain.

You can even recognize justice within your body: something rests calmly in your chest, a sense of peace, of conclusion, that you’ve already won. You notice a certain solidity in your upper back, around your spine: a hardness that is not brittle, just very resilient. It’s clean. It’s plain. It’s not the least bit complicated. It has nothing toxic or virulent about it, because it’s just healthy, just right—even if it can come with a bit of righteous anger. And it would be right no matter who was who. It’s not personal, it’s universal (even if it may involve deeply personal issues and values). A strong current guiding a clear, still gaze and, surprisingly, a steady voice. If only for a brief moment, it spontaneously takes you over with a sort of strength you didn’t know you had. I guess you can also call this being-taken-over-by-justice by another name: courage.[120]

Now, when you assert your justified will, you still meet resistance, even fiercer than anything you’ve seen before. But with this level of certainty, you can just do what they teach people to do in “assertiveness training”, namely to repeat your position and argument “like a broken record”. It’s called, simply, the broken record technique. You calmly acknowledge the other person’s reactions, and then restate your case, again and again, until the resistance falls flat to the ground. Their excuses become cheaper than chips. If you’re right and justified—and they’re wrong—that soon becomes apparent. Or, if you feel called, you go Winston Churchill on them, to really remind them that they won’t be getting anywhere with you:

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend [the justice that we have concluded must be defended], we shall fight in fucking Florida if we have to, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall fight in cyberspace; we shall never surrender.”

Clarity on justice—moral conviction that is emotionally embodied and intellectually worked-though—is the greatest source you can find for assertiveness. And accessing that assertiveness from time to time builds your identity, the thought that “I am a social justice warrior, in a way that is neither self-righteous nor judgmental, and always case-sensitive.”

If you haven’t reached “justice”, that point of inner moral certainty of what is right and in accordance with your own values in a given situation, the other person can throw you off: they can come with counter-arguments that you’ll have to think through; they can push your guilt and shame buttons and make you reevaluate; they can lead you off-topic (the most common tactic by those stuck defending injustice); they can make you inhibit yourself by responding with their anger, mockery, or scorn. But if you’ve already worked through all that shame and guilt, and already achieved a balanced and nuanced view of the situation, you can see and feel clearly enough what justice demands. Maybe it’s the renegotiation of a relationship, maybe it’s quitting, maybe it’s your own apology combined with a prompt that the other party takes responsibility for their actions. You have defined the fair rules of “the game” (whichever game is played in that situation, whether it’s in matters of love, business, or even a wicked combination of both), and then you work on behalf of the game for it to become fair, to change the game that is being played for the better. Game change—as we’ve previously discussed. A harmonization of the social relations means that the game is set right, set straight according to its inherent logic, whether it’s a board game or a family drama. You work for the whole, while representing the part that is yourself.

Once you center on justice, your actions are not erratic anymore; they are coordinated with your thoughts, emotions, and perceptions (which are, in turn, increasingly coordinated with one another) and so they are resilient to the resistance other people might put up. A coherent synthesis has been reached: a deeper point of self-reinforcing equilibrium, when your actions, feelings, thoughts, and perception all align.

Just doing assertiveness training and randomly using the “broken record technique” to overpower unsuspecting shop clerks and spouses is not productive, and does not bring about harmonic social relationships. That’s just being a pest. Assertiveness out of context can do more harm than good. Psychopaths tend to be assertive, right? But when your determination is based on a sense of justice reached by working through your raw feelings, your true and primary emotions, what emerges is the right kind of assertiveness.

Certainly, there is a place for “just because” assertiveness and use of “broken record”. If you say that you want corn flakes and someone else begins to argue with you, giving you all sorts of justifications for why you shouldn’t—don’t get stuck in arguing with them. Just say “Aha, so you think corn flakes are unhealthy and I shouldn’t eat them. I still want the corn flakes, so I’ll just eat them” and then repeat with whatever new argument they come up with. That’s what conventional assertiveness training teaches; it helps us practice not to get stuck in the conversational projects and framings of others. Otherwise, the more assertive people will just steamroll over their less assertive others for years on end, and that is no dignified way to live life for either party involved. But for hugely important and complex issues, issues of justice matter. You may want to kill your neighbor for wrecking your car and then insulting you instead of repaying you, but justice isn’t on your side: it won’t harmonize the realm of social relationships. What you need is enough conviction to confront your neighbor and demand the justice you deserve. It doesn’t mean you can’t hear their perspective (why they were stressed out or traumatized enough to behave like a jerk) and acknowledge them in that, but that takes nothing away from the fact that they exploited and tread all over you, and it’s not okay. Once you see that clearly enough, you stand up for yourself, and ultimately for all justice everywhere.

Moments of such moral clarity don’t grow on trees. Don’t be too tough on yourself—in most situations we didn’t have the chance to reach that point of moral certainty, and so we can and will be thrown off again and again, unable to be assertive for the common good, unable to see what would constitute a fair game under these exact circumstances. But, with some effort, at least we can reach that sense of justice around the things that matter the most to us, our key issues, our key relationships—and then we can buckle up and Churchill our way to victory in those pivotal moments in our lives. And the more we practice it, the better we become at regulating social relationships for the genuine mutual benefit of ourselves and others. That’s what justice does. In turn, good social relationships are what predict a happy life more than anything else (this being one of the strongest findings in all of psychology).

Or, to put it in simpler terms: The more you cultivate a sense of justice, the less you fall for bullshit—and eventually, the less bullshit you’ll have in your life. Any injustice that passes unaddressed and lives on breeds resentment on the injured party’s side and an unconscious lack of self-esteem on the oppressor’s side. Standing up for justice increases conflict (at least in the short term)  and decreases resentment (at least in the long run). Remember: Don’t minimize conflict, minimize resentment. If you minimize conflict, you create superficially smooth and “harmonious” but fragile relationships; if you minimize resentment, you have a bumpier life, but your relationships become what Nassim Taleb calls anti-fragile: they thrive from disorder, from being challenged.

Antifragile, yes. You’ll notice that when you stand up for what is right, things start to heal around you; people’s behaviors, outlooks, and even personalities start to change. The world is less immutable than it appears: Things are fluid, especially relationships and people. When you find a clean sense of justice around a key topic, and you willingly take all the short-term costs and risks for defending it, yes, you will hurt But you won’t budge, and sooner than you’d think, mountains will. You will have defended the long-term happiness of yourself, of wide circles around you, and of generations to come. What Nassim Taleb never quite pointed out in his book, Antifragile, is that things can only be antifragile to the degree that they can heal. And the worlds of mice and men, social realities, are healed with justice.

Can a Lawyer Ever be Happy?

Speaking of happiness, did you know that lawyers are a rather unhappy flock? I’m guessing it doesn’t come as a surprise. One website states: “As it turns out, lawyers rate their career happiness 2.6 out of 5 stars which puts them in the bottom 7% of careers.”[121] And that’s interesting, given that the median US attorney makes more than twice the money as compared to the national average. Being a lawyer seems to make you rich and miserable. But lo, there is an exception to this rule about the legal professions. Judges[122], despite also having a legal line of work and being under considerable amount of stress to perform and make hard decisions, are dramatically different; they fare so much better on every measure than other lawyers that they actually approach the happiest of occupational groups (top 9%)[123].

Just a hypothesis here, but would it be so strange if judges are, at least in part, so much happier because they spend their days practicing the principle of justice? (Conversely, the argument would go, lawyers spend their days bending justice to fit their client’s case, so despite well-paid jobs, they’re unhappy. Studies have shown that highly competitive corporate lawyers seem extra miserable, not least as they bend regulations and their conscience to get ahead.[124])

I have no illusions about the magnanimity and perfection of judges; showing how court systems are biased and judges judge more harshly before lunch when blood sugar is low[125] is a favorite pastime of sociologists such as myself. And, yes, old male judges do like to fondle young female lawyers like the rest of powerful professionals (at the time of writing, the rape trials of Supreme Court Justice Matthew Rosenbaum are ongoing in the US, for instance). I’m not saying judges are angels.

Still, though, they do get to practice thinking about what they think and feel is the just, impartial thing to do, pretty much all day long, every day. Not only does that seem like a fairly meaningful job, but we can ask ourselves if that capacity might be spilling over into other relationships in their lives. I couldn’t find research to support the claim, but if I am correct that justice heals, and our capacity for justice grows through practice, the explanation for this seeming anomaly (a happy lawyer!) could be simple: judges are happier because they practice justice, and justice heals them from the inside out, and that heals their relationships, and good relationships are what make for good lives—happy lives.

In short: heal with justice.

And with that I would like to conclude this Eighth Commandment, one that is closely weaved together with the two previous ones: justice builds on working through our negative emotions, as it can thereby grow from the inside out, and thus fuel the assertiveness with which we set boundaries in our lives and address that which causes negative emotions for ourselves and other people. It’s hard to walk around full of disowned shame, guilt, fear, Sklavenmoral, dissatisfaction, and attachment to our successes—and still find the clarity of justice. Our perceptions and thoughts will be too distorted; there will be too many buttons for others to push to manipulate us. But if we do our emotional homework, as per the earlier chapters, we can piece by piece gain a clearer and clearer sense of justice. And thereby we can harmonize the social world, the human world, and worlds beyond.

I know I said in the beginning of the book that I don’t feel this book is such an important one to begin with, because it’s a self-help book. And that’s true. But I didn’t say that the ideas or the content are unimportant. The book is just unimportant because self-help books rarely work. Reading about how justice heals will unlikely lead to you healing your life with justice, even if it’s an important idea, sociologically speaking.

Prove me wrong, though, if you can: change your life and the lives around you by first finding out what you truly believe is just, and then by standing up for justice.

—

So, eight life rules down, four to go. Keep up the steam and you’ll be done soon. Let’s bring this boat home to the safe harbor of the ordinary life that awaits us. Sublime mediocrity glitters on the horizon.

Yo, heave ho! Let’s go!

Ninth Commandment: Burn Your Maps

“A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.”

―Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps

“There are only two kinds of people in the world: the ones who believe in stupid dichotomies of there only being two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.”

—Hanzi Freinacht

We ended the last chapter on the supreme importance of justice as the harmonizing principle that brings social life and its many strange pieces together into a coherent whole. Justice is never perfect. It cannot really be measured. But it’s the best we’ve got. As statements should be true, or works of art in some sense beautiful, so social relations and the actions that enact them should be just. The source of our vague anxieties is very often simply a lack of justice, an unaddressed injustice. We really have no choice but to at least try to achieve justice: i.e. proportionality and coherence of social relations. Even the hardiest nihilist will sometimes slip and reveal that they too care about the thin line between satisfying justice and the outrage of injustice. Even a psychopath has some justification of their actions. We all care about justice—but we don’t do it equally well.

No doubt, many readers have already murmured to themselves that it depends on whose justice we’re talking about. That is exactly the right question.

You’re right to point out that there’s very little comparison between the justice of a two-year-old and an international tribunal of human rights, between that of a medieval person and a contemporary world citizen, or between a psychopath and one of those monks who can explode EEG measurements with gamma brainwaves of pure compassion.

Where, then, do different “justices” come from? What is their source, their origin?

There are different aspects, of course, to how your own justice fingerprint comes about: your personality, the situation at hand, and so on. But one of the most important aspects is your “world map”—your basic assumptions about reality and your place in it. Obviously, what you believe is right and wrong in a given situation will depend on how you view the world. But because you can’t view the world without your own filters, you are de facto always reading your own world map, inherited from your culture. We noted earlier that perception is (together with emotion, thought, and action) crucial in deciding what is just. But your perception of what’s going on, in turn, depends on which map you’re reading. It depends on what inner “map of the world” you have available.

When you were two years old, you didn’t only focus on egocentric issues and getting more ice cream; you could indeed be morally outraged. You could react against, for instance, visibly unprovoked aggression (there are lots of cute toddler experiments to show as much). But you’d probably not have reacted against issues such as “an unethical treatment of private personal data for financial gain”, or “dishonest research practice”, which might be things that concern you today as an adult. There’s a chasm between the “justice” of the two-year-old and the justice of the adult you. Both are authentic enough—the moral outrage of toddler-you was no less real and emotionally rooted than the moral concerns of today’s you, the toddler’s conscience no less sensitive—but the justice of the adult-you is presumably more complex, more nuanced, and more abstract. The adult has a wider and more complex map of the world and, consequently, another sense of justice. It perceives other injustices, and thus it works to close other moral gaps than the ones that concerned the two-year-old.

Over time, your justice has come to follow another map: the worldview you currently hold. Hence, when you come to a certain moral conclusion in your life, and you commit to a certain moral struggle or line of action, it will necessarily be the best you can do—but it will always be limited by what your world map looks like at this point in your life. Thus, if you don’t turn your gaze around and pay attention to that map itself, you might be stuck with a very limited view of justice. So you might end up doing dumb shit.

Now, there is little reason to believe that your current map is the best you could possibly have. You know for a fact that it includes a lot of stuff that the two year old you would have missed. And you also know that the two-year-old was entirely unaware of the things that are today integral parts of your sense of justice. Why should we adults be principally different from toddlers? Like them, there are things we can grasp and that we know, and things we don’t, things we can still learn. If you missed something fundamental back then, what might you be missing now? How do you know if your world map needs to be updated, to change?

Let’s find out.

All Boundaries Are Drawn on Maps

It has happened more than once that I have confused people by speaking about “maps”. To me, the term just appears self-evident, so basic to my mode of thinking, that I cannot quite seem to explain it. On I go about “maps this, maps that”―until someone stops me in my tracks, asking politely what on earth I am talking about. At this point, I will usually give a quick definition and continue. More confusion arises, to the point of sighs and rolling eyes.

And yet, here we are. Out of these 12 commandments, this is the one people break the most. They get stuck with faulty, dumb, or outdated maps, and they ruin their lives—and those of others—by relying on them.

But to get into this, we need to stop for a moment to discuss what is meant by a “map” in this sense.

Everyone has theories, scientist or not, philosopher or not. Since theory just means “seeing”, there’s nothing more practical than a good theory. To go somewhere, to go anywhere, we need to in some sense “see” where we’re going, and have some idea of “what we’re traveling through” in the first place.

Want to stop global warming or climate change? What theory we have about what causes it will make all the difference. If we believe it’s due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, new questions arise: How do we reduce those at a global scale—is it a matter of politics and diplomacy, technological innovation, or lifestyle changes, or social justice in general, or perhaps even our fundamental relationship to nature and reality? Or, if it’s a combination of these, which one deserves the most effort, in what sequence, and by whom? How you answer these questions depends on your map of the world.

Theories are important. If we have good theories, in whatever field we act, we are more likely to be doing good things. Conversely, following bad theories tends to harm and kill people (some interpretations of Marxism come to mind, or phrenology and human race theories, or lobotomy in psychiatry…). Theories shape our perceptions, our interpretations—our “seeing”—and thus our thoughts, feelings, and actions, as we discussed in the previous chapter.

And so, theories matter.

Beyond different ideas about reality we may have learned through school or studies (gravity, evolution, blood consists of white and red cells, cycles of economic ups and downs), we also have “everyday theories”, the ones we don’t think of, the ones we take for granted, which just seem self-evident to us: “Smarter people are more scientific and less superstitious, and thus better relate to the real happenings of reality” is an example. A lot of people have that assumption (in my view it’s a pretty poor everyday theory, by the way).

What, then, do I mean with “maps” in this context? Maps are our collections of theories about life in the everyday, taken-for-granted, sense. A map consists of a thousand little theories, many of which seem to connect and support one another, together creating the great weave of our taken-for-granted reality. Your whole worldview is a world map of sorts, and then you have local maps for how you find your way around different things or matters. We have each acquired our maps through hard-earned experience and study: What is good for me, what should I aspire towards? What is good for the world, what should I be working for? Which sorts of people are trustworthy and the right ones for me to collaborate with, and which ones should I be avoiding? Who are the good guys and the bad guys in this world? How do I resolve personal issues and conflicts? How do I get what I want and need? How do I act ethically; what is right and what is wrong? What are the most important causes of problems, is it that people don’t believe in God or that they’re too unscientific, or that they’re stuck in capitalism, or perhaps that their level of personal development is too lacking? All of these are things that we perhaps don’t routinely think about, but for which we have maps that we follow. The map shows us what we think is really there in the world, how we believe the world works.[126]

At the very basic level, your map says to you what boundaries there are in the world. For France and Germany, there are boundaries geographically dividing the two countries. For a four-year-old, it’s the darkness over there in the corner of the room that hosts the unknown, a space potentially filled with snarks and monsters of horror untold, versus the safe space of the bed or the vicinity of caretakers. For the adult you, there are subtler boundaries, more complex ones: between integrity and inauthenticity, between justice and abuse, between pure relations and transgressive ones, between a conscience clean and the subtle betrayal of everything and everyone, between a life well-lived and the sacrilege of this infinitely precious opportunity spilled into the vast stretches of cosmic time. We all need to set boundaries—lines drawn between this and that, right and wrong. The possessors of the best maps set the smartest and most productive boundaries: the ones that protect us but still keep generating new beauties and surprises.

So, everybody nowadays says “set firm boundaries”. But each boundary begs a philosophical question: What’s the justification of this boundary? The easy pathway is to say: “Well, I don’t need to justify myself. If I don’t want something in my life, I can draw a boundary and then other people will simply have to relate to it.” But what may appear as a reasonable act of self-affirmation or even self-protection in one’s own mind can sometimes be viewed as severely harmful behavior in the larger scheme of things. Often people will be setting stupid and unreasonable boundaries that in fact are cruel and destructive to oneself and others. Worst case scenarios involve certain “get off my land” US southerners who shoot people, or when pedophiles set a boundary against mainstream society limiting them from acting on their urges. Those are, to be clear, not good boundaries to set. I urge you to become a master of setting fair, tenable, and productive boundaries—by working on your maps of meaning.

Maps of Meaning?

In our days, when we are experiencing what some have called a “sensemaking crisis”[127], we collectively struggle to align our different maps of the world. Your map doesn't align with mine, and that third guy’s just weird, man. Signs of this crisis are everywhere: a polarized America rallies around two (or more) very different maps of the world, ones that seem incompatible. People see and notice different parts of the world from different angles. Or they see the same phenomena, roughly speaking, but they interpret them wildly differently, and so they end up on a collision course with one another. Their maps even include explanations for why the other side is so seemingly deluded (it’s their envy, or greed, or simple-mindedness, or loss of common decency, or even a conspiracy). The different sides can’t make sense of the world they’re seeing; they’re referring to different “authorities of knowledge”, and they can’t make sense of one another. We all walk around with at least some bewilderment at the fact that most people view the world so differently than we do, and that they’re all so terribly wrong.

Beyond such polarization, you can see our map-making going haywire as a direct result of the Internet Age, with crazier and more far-out maps taking hold in the minds of many: Flat Earth (it’s a pretty big thing), conspiracy theories (did you know that Justin Trudeau’s real dad is Fidel Castro?), the trailer park scientology known as QAnon, and, of course, belief in the presence of extraterrestrial aliens (reptile or otherwise, take DMT and you’ll understand). It’s a sensemaking crisis, because we’re failing to make sense of the world together. “What does it all mean?” we keep asking ourselves and one another. It’s both a question of making sense of current events and making life “meaningful” and thus bearable. 

Or, you could just as well say, it’s a map-making crisis. Our maps of the world are faulty, incompatible. That’s why the practice of “meta-theory” (to study how theories of the world come about) is becoming so important: to resolve the issues of the world, we need to become better at not just understanding our own maps, but how our different maps relate to each other. We need maps of the territory of map-making itself.

As they say, “the map is not the territory”. A map of Sierra Leone’s geography is not the actual ground of that country, with trees, hills, buzzing insects, and shorelines for us to walk along and experience. It’s just a piece of paper that says “If you’re in downtown Freetown and travel a few kilometers south, you’ll hit the Western Area National Park, and there will be a rainforest, with chimpanzees, because the chimpanzee reserve is also marked on the map”. And yet, without the map, you wouldn’t know. We can’t live in our maps; we always have to be surprised by a world infinitely richer than any ideas we have of it, but at the same time we can hardly live without them.

Again, that’s why you need a good map even of how others map out the world. You cannot understand other people, how they think and act, if you don’t at least understand the basics of their maps of the world. We need maps about how maps are made and used. Maps about maps: Maps about how people make sense and find meaning.

You Already Have the Best Map (Don’t You?)

As you have no doubt noticed when speaking to other people, they don’t have the same maps as you do. In fact, they never do; they can have similar maps in some regards, but never the exact same one. They’ll have other basic suppositions about life, existence, and the world. They’ll know some parts of it in greater detail, some parts in lesser detail, and they’ll have another “common sense”. Effortlessly, reflexively, they’ll be making assessments about what is worthwhile doing and why, or predictions of how the world works. But their assessments and predictions are all wrong, as far as you can see. And, rather annoyingly, many of them can’t help themselves from trying to teach you their ways of seeing things. Sometimes it appears as if there is something to be learned, but more often, you’ll notice that their maps are crude and lack nuance, or just make false assumptions.

With this understanding of what a “map” is and noting that you can begin to become aware of both your own map and those of others, I’d like to make a simple prediction.

According to my personal map of how the world works, I predict that you (whoever you are, dear reader) believe, indeed you are almost certain of it, that you have a much better, more relevant, and more reliable map of the world than almost anyone that you’ve ever met.

It’s not that you think you know everything better than everybody else, not at all. People have their areas of expertise, talents that you do not, and some are smarter and wiser or more experienced. You know that very well.

But, by and large, you are just a little more reasonable than others. You think a little more independently, and you’re better at judging what’s sensible, and you’re a more reliable judge of character. In matters of politics, you’re a little less ideological than others: you just care about the facts and what’s real and effective, whereas others are more invested in certain ways of thinking. You’re a little better at psychology, at really seeing and understanding human beings. To the extent that you allow yourself to be naive, it is because you understand that sometimes it makes sense to have hope, and to the extent you are cynical about things, it’s for good reason. Others are stuck in ideologies and fixed ideas, but you weigh things, either by intuition and experience, or by virtue of your reasoning, often a balanced combination of both. So even if there are things to learn, at least you tend to know better than others what to learn from, and what to safely ignore. You see through bullshit more easily. You don’t let yourself get seduced by false promises, by tempting easy ideas, by the opiums of the masses. Quite often you see others being somewhat or even severely deluded, and somehow you just don’t fall for any of that. You have learned, through experience and studies, to see things just a little more clearly than pretty much anybody else.

Am I right?

“No, Hanzi! I have the worst map of anybody I know! I’m humble!”

But you’re not that humble. I don’t mean that people walk around thinking these things to themselves explicitly. We just assume it to be the case, implicitly. The reason this is the case is simple: We adopt the best maps that we can find, and thereby we assume we have the best map. Otherwise we would have gone for another one, wouldn’t we? And then we use our own map to assess the quality of our own maps: “It’s best to be socialist, that’s how you show the most class solidarity.” Had we come across a map of the world that we found more correct or useful, we would simply have adopted that one instead. Pretty much by definition, “we have the best map”, because it’s literally the best map we can think of.

Your world map always confirms itself: Either you're much too critically minded to be drawn into crazy conspiracy theories, or you are too critically minded to buy the mainstream media narrative, being one of the select few who recognize that “something else is going on here”. In both cases, you have the best map of the world. Or that’s what it seems like from your perspective.

Add to this the fact that we need our maps to feel a sense of safety and grounding in reality. Without our maps of the world, the world is, well, uncharted territory. You’re lost in the jungle, and can’t find your way back to the safe harbor of Freetown. And who knows what those wild chimps will do to you.

Add to this the bias that we all have―the wish to view ourselves in a positive light, as being smart and insightful and all that―and it’s apparent that we’re also “emotionally bribed” to believe in the superiority of our own worldview. And we’re pretty humble about it, too—if we may say so ourselves. Even while fully recognizing our superiority, we still let others have their own worldviews, let them learn more about the world on their own terms, leaving them alone and not bothering them or pressing our views on them. It’s so humble of us that we should get a medal (not that we’d expect one, in all of our humility). So not only do we have the best maps, we’re also the most humble of all. Gotta love us.

Taken together, it should come as no surprise that we all believe ourselves to have the best maps. We sort of have to believe it. The same goes for ethics, really. We always assume that we have the “best” ethics, the “highest” ethics, because the moment we truly change our minds about it, that becomes our new ethics—and we go “wow, now that I even changed my ethics again, despite already having had a pretty high ethics, this has to be the best one!” And this assumption tends to make it seem highly unlikely that some of those losers out there may have ethical stances superior to our own. After all, if we’re pretty much the most ethically sane person we’ve ever met, what’s the likelihood that animal rights is actually a thing if we—the most ethical person—don’t care about it? So, nah, animal rights can’t really be a thing. Otherwise, an ethical person such as myself would care about it. Because I don’t, it can’t really be a thing.[128]

Back to maps in general. This line of reasoning promptly leads us to the following question: If everyone naturally thinks that their own map of the world is the best one, how credible is that assumption? We can’t all reasonably be right about it, can we?

Well, then. Do you in all seriousness believe that this particular person, born into this particular position in society, at this particular moment in history, having this particular life experience, with this particular personality, at this particular point in their life, just happens to have acquired the most reliable and useful worldview of all of human experience? Why on earth would that be the case? Certainly, we could answer that you may have the best worldview, the best maps, for someone like yourself. But, then again, how likely is that? Everyone around you seems to have blindspots and fallacies in their thinking, too fuzzy ideas about stuff they don’t understand and of which you have a clearer view, things that limit them and hold them back. And this just doesn’t apply to yourself?

The Oracle of Delphi, the legend goes, reported that Socrates was the wisest of all the Greeks. And Socrates went on to conclude that this was not because he knew the most, but that he alone, of all the Greeks, realized that he knew nothing. Of course, Socrates thereby also assumed he had the best map of the world: one of perpetual wonder and learning anew. Hey, he even had it from the Oracle of Delphi itself, and was he quick to assume that the drugged, rambling priestess was absolutely right.[129]

It seems as though we can hardly escape the impressions that our own maps of the world are superior. Still, if we are truly to be “the wisest of all the Greeks”, the best that we can do is probably to assume—like Socrates—that our map of the world isn’t that good, after all. We should see through the delusion of certainty, the illusion of our own chosenness, the mirage that our particular perspective just happens to be the most universal one.

Or, to put it more concisely: we achieve universality by realizing our own particularity.

Thus, our ninth commandment reads: Burn your maps! This is a commandment because everything else that we do relies on our “maps of meaning”, on our ways of making sense of the world. It is only appropriate to assume that if everyone else’s map is wrong, so is ours. But at least we can make it a life commitment to continuously make it less wrong.

A rather depressing part of this endeavor is that it seems to become more difficult with age: young people have more plastic brains and minds and can more easily make fundamental shifts in their maps of the world. But the commitment to update our maps of meaning can be life-long, and, indeed, it should be. By committing to such openness, painful and difficult as it may be, we can make our lives at a ripe age more interesting and of greater benefit to younger generations. I guess that’s the deeper meaning of “life-long learning”.

Not all who wander are lost. I invite you to a life of intellectual and spiritual wanderlust. Yes, we must settle for certain truths to live by, certain narratives, certain biases, at least for significant periods of time. We need stations in life, we need to grow roots in our worldviews, and we need traditions to serve as foundations, shoulders of giants and all that. But we can also cultivate our capacity to move on―and travel wider inner worlds, yet more vast oceans of emotions, as well as broader intellectual horizons, throughout our lifetimes. Be a traveler, and you will get to inhabit multiple worlds throughout your life, as your map always becomes your guide to the world.

Moments of Clarity

We can call them aha-moments, or strokes of insight, or epiphanies. We all know what they feel like, those strokes of sudden clarity. First of all, let’s note that they don’t necessarily make you any smarter, they just feel good (we can just as easily get aha-moments when we accept a dumb idea, say, “the Earth is flat”). But if you increase the number of aha-moments in your life, chances are that, over time, your inner world map will be updated more continuously, and that you will have a greater chance of being well-adapted to the world around you.

What, then, are such aha-moments truly? They’re when your world map shifts. The German 20th century philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer held that true learning is when you’re somehow changed by what you learn. If I tell you “Hanzi once dyed his hair green by mistake and it nearly ruined his modeling career”, that might make you smirk at best, but it’s probably not an aha-moment. Hopefully, though, by reading this entire book and getting my view on how to live everyday life by twelve rules, there can be at least a few aha-moments: pleasurable—or even painful—shifts of how the world itself appears to function, shifts in your sense of what’s possible, strokes of inspired own thinking through which reality is subtly but dramatically rearranged.

A dynamic map is better than a static one. Our world map needs to have some stability, so we can actually plan ahead and connect one day of our life to the next, but if the map never changes, we can be pretty sure that it’s not being updated properly, and that we’re creating new problems in our lives.

Let me exemplify that last point. Imagine that you spend every day of 30 years doggedly pursuing one great goal, say, a communist revolution. One day, your map changes, and you realize that the historical progression of society is not actually one from feudal to capitalist to socialist to communist, but instead something else.[130] This is just to say: You switched your map of the world; you had some new aha-moment. Seen from this new vantage point, not only did you just waste 30 years of your life. You also caused considerable harm by working towards goals that were largely illusory (“damn, why did I spend all my money arming Maoist guerrillas!”). Of course, if your brain has grown older and more rigid (“less plastic”) and you’ve invested 30 years into the communist revolution, it might be hard to change and admit that you were wrong. It’s better to commit time and energy to updating your maps throughout your life, so you become good at it whenever it proves to be necessary. Changing your map is a skill to be honed, a capacity.

In the communist example above, you had a bad map (but, like everybody else, you of course believed you had the best one). Or at least one that wasn’t as good as it could have been. If you would instead have invested just a part of your time in changing your map―if you would have looked for new aha-moments―you might have learned what you needed to learn from the communist worldview in a few years, and then moved on before you’d spent your whole life following a mirage.

Or imagine you have an idea about a dream company, or curing aging with bio-tech research, or converting people to a certain faith, and then you realize that you were going after the wrong goal? It’s difficult to know what to do with our lives so we may wish to cling to a worthwhile goal once we’ve come across it, but if we get tunnel-visioned about it, we may miss greater and more beautiful purposes and opportunities. The world is full of people who eagerly pursue all sorts of goals, but how well thought-out are they, really? Is all of our hard work truly making the world better? We tend to assume it does, but somehow many of us must reasonably be mistaken, and all of us are mistaken at least in some regard. My guess is a very large part of people “on a mission” would make the world better by simply giving up on their dumb mission in the first place. Are you one of them? What are your dreams and drives and what core assumptions are they based upon? Trying to get rich and raising a large family will make us all happy? Will it? Releasing yourself from the clutches of capitalist consumerism will make you authentic and a better person? Will it? Fighting for stopping climate change means you’re always the good guy? Does it?

Wouldn’t the world be better off if people worked harder on trying to get a better grasp of the world, and so came up with increasingly suitable goals?

Let’s bring in my favorite person again as an example. My favorite example-person, that is to say: Adolf Hitler. Was his problem that he didn’t work hard enough? Was it that he wasn’t smart enough? Too untidy desk? Not enough willpower? Not clear enough vision? Didn’t figure who his target audience was? Nah―his problem was, fundamentally, that he had a really unreliable map of the world and how it works, and that left him with poorly construed goals and visions, let alone ideas of how to get there. Apparently, his map could get him to the (enviable?) position of dictator, but it was still a dumb map. Not only was he entirely wrong about the Jews conspiring to destroy Germany, he was also wrong about how to make his country happy and prosperous, even how to make himself militarily successful in the long run. Nazism was, all said and done, only “bad” because it offered an invalid map of the world. The map that was supposed to lead to a thousand years of greatness and glory instead led to twelve years of horror and collapse. The “Nazi map” makes poor predictions; it misrepresents and misinterprets the facts of the world. Imagine if all of that energy of millions of people instead could have been directed through some better and more valid map of the world. A few aha-moments could have made all the difference: Aha, the Jews are not actually conspiring to destroy Germany! Aha, human history is not a struggle between races!

I’m being silly here—and perhaps a bit unsavory—but you see my point: Maps matter. To a life-or-death degree. For millions.

If you insist on you truly being a better worldviewer than “almost anybody else”, that’s probably not because you have such a good map, but simply because you’ve become narrow-minded and closed down your own learning process. Or a megalomaniac, thinking you’re somehow better suited to understand the world than generations of geniuses from all over the world, who for some reason didn’t understand the world quite as well as you do. You’re failing to see your own particularity, and that means you have a less universal perspective. And a worse map.

So, let’s get back to those aha-moments that change our maps. If you’re like me and most other creatures, your perspective progresses one insight at a time, in aha-moments. Like ice cream, aha-moments actually come in several flavors, and we may wish to distinguish between them. It’s actually a whole little family of  “noisy moments”:

1. Aha-moments: You suddenly make a new connection (gamma brain wave spike in the brain, by the way) and you make a small but significant shift to how you will be seeing the world from here on.

2. Haha-moments: Similar to aha-moments, but they imply that you see a familiar thing through a new angle that is so surprising that you can’t help but burst into laughter. There is a sudden shift of frames through which you view the entire situation. This is the transformative power of humor.

3. Oh-moments: These are not real aha-moments, only small additions to your existing view of things, where you go “oh, that's interesting…”. If I told you that Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, with about 220 million inhabitants, you may not have known that exactly, and it adds something, but it most likely doesn’t challenge any particular view of yours. You fill in a blank on your existing map; you don’t change the parameters of the map itself. If you still find the thing you learned interesting enough to somewhat adjust your map, that’s an oh-moment. Accumulating oh-moments is important for becoming a nuanced thinker.

4. What-the-fuck-moment: Finally, a what-the-fuck-moment is that rare occasion when you more or less have to throw away the map you had and start sketching a new one. It can be stressful, confusing, and exhilarating like nothing else. Some of your basic assumptions about reality were just ripped apart, and you are being offered new opportunities to inhabit what appears to be an entirely different universe than the one you thought you were part of. When Newton figured that the moon is actually “falling towards the Earth”, I don’t think he simply said “aha”. He very probably expressed some 1660s version of what the fuck.[131] But usually it’s not about discovering the law of gravity, more often it’s some social feedback from your surroundings that shows you clearly that what you’ve been doing is just not working. It might involve your wife suddenly walking out the door and never coming back. But it starts a whole new universe—a whole new world map.

Now, everyday media consumption (news, documentaries, articles) tend to offer us plenty of oh-moments and sometimes a few haha-moments. Occasionally, they lead to an aha-moment. But they rarely, if ever, offer us what-the-fuck moments—even if they do try their best to do so.

Naturally, the what-the-fuck moments are both the most wonderous, frightening, and dangerous ones. Wish for earthquakes, for seismic shifts, for tsunamis. A long life that has experienced three or four such tectonic shifts will likely be much richer than one that has experienced none of them during adulthood (we all experience them as children, however); and such a person is much more likely to achieve some kind of “wisdom” with old age. Generally speaking, people who live a full lifetime up to 80 years will experience anywhere between zero and four genuine what-the-fuck-moments (or periods, as these what-the-fucks generally take some time to unfold) in their adult lives. I’d assess that most of them happen before 40, but it’s possible to have them later in life as well.

How, then, do we increase the wealth of these magical moments in our lives, when we are transported between universes—when the reality we took for granted folds beneath our feet and a wider and more wondrous world opens up, full of new horizons and events to explore? Where to start when it comes to suggesting ways to update one’s map? The main challenge is that all of our core assumptions are hidden to us. Core assumptions about reality are so strong and self-evident that we usually don’t even notice them as such. We just experience them as “reality”.

The answer is as simple as it is elegant and compelling: Workshops. Lots of workshops. And conferences. Weekend workshop—especially with a lot of important people in groups, who discuss in circles. Combine with spa for optimal effect. Do a bit of yoga and group therapy in between. Add mindfulness and the use of some hard drugs, and you’ll be blazing new maps of the cosmos and our meaning-making-place in it in no-time.

I’m kidding, of course. Sure, going to meetings and networking with different but still somehow like-minded people in new settings can offer a bit of stimulation, but mostly because we can come across people with whom we then cultivate deep relationships and go on joint adventures. (Cliff-hanger: We’ll discuss this in one of the following chapters, about “finding your meta-team”.) But beyond some stimulation and new friends, such things are largely a distraction.

The truly powerful way of getting new aha-moments is a combination of a few things, all of which we have actually already discussed in this book:

Keep yourself in a higher “inner state” so that you’re continuously open enough and simply have the energy and composure to be enthusiastic about new insights that come your way. Basically, do your “state management” as we discussed earlier. When you’re “tuned in to life”, the chances of being genuinely mind-blown increase.

Get yourself into the highest states (beyond “state 8”, into 9, 10, and beyond) as often as possible: this is when your mind is the most open, most plastic.

Make it a life duty to always be learning new things—through books, yes, but also by always having some kind of learning project, some course or something you’re working on to learn more about. (For me these days, that’s complexity, information, and popular works about the natural sciences. I’ll never be a natural scientist myself, but these kinds of disciplines scaffold and stimulate my own thinking in unexpected manners.)

Always obsess about there being big holes in your map that you just can’t see, because you’re being blind to some perspective that other people, even in your direct vicinity, may understand but you simply don’t. Remember that these holes are what can turn your life inside out and trick you, so that you wake up one day as the bad guy and the deluded one. Happens to the best of us.

Follow the other commandments of this book. They all lead up to this one. Keeping a moderate mess is good for creativity. Fucking like a beast connects to higher states and moments where you are likely to reevaluate things (also, just feeling more alive tunes you in to life and to the present moment and its surprises). Sincere irony helps you simultaneously take two seemingly opposite positions and see how they can fit together on a new, higher plane, and it gets you in the right stance of hopeful curiosity combined with unrelenting skepticism. Oiling the system of your body-mind with workout-as-prayer puts you in higher states and makes you more resilient, thus open to new shocks that can shake the core of your worldview. Working through your inventory of shame and guilt gets you past your emotional investments in your current worldview (and offers a great opportunity to reexamine how you’ve already changed your maps throughout life) and gets over your inhibitions and apprehensions. Getting over Sklavenmoral and the fear of death and beyond makes you more secure and at home in the world, so you don’t need to cling to your maps as eagerly. Always looking to act with justice in your life motivates you to continually reexamine your perceptions and assumptions of things, because you’ll want to be sure you’re doing the right thing, and thus be motivated to always update your maps. Unsurprisingly, it all connects.

I’m not saying the trivial thing: “Stay curious!” That would be about as helpful as telling people to stay healthy, or to stay happy. Of course, the question is how to do it. I’m saying: become aware of this dimension in your life—you currently have a map of how you assume the world works, and it quite probably sucks in some regards. So assume you’re a bit deluded. Everybody else clearly is, right? Your current world map is very likely going to let you make at least some awful mistakes, hurting yourself and others, and you’ll miss wonderful opportunities. Very probably, the things that crashed in your life thus far were largely due to bad maps. (This goes for me too, by the way, I also really need to work on my worldmap.) You might even be on the wrong side of history, you might be, in hindsight, one of the defenders of slavery, one of the Nazis, one of the crazy communists, or anything else. Who knows?

So invest time and effort into always improving upon your map, leaving the window of opportunity open to scrap your map if you’d find a better one. Not all of your time and effort, of course. You also need to shop for groceries and do the dishes. But a good amount—say a quarter, or a fifth. Otherwise, you can be pretty sure you’ll be investing the rest of your life in something less worthwhile than you could have. By working on your worldmap, you move the goalposts yourself; you change the game you’re playing in life, you evolve the story you're telling yourself. You don’t just add new chapters to the same old book about your life: sometimes you need to throw the old book out the window and write a new story altogether. And out of the cracks of the broken story of your life and of the world, a greater and more magnificent story can unfold.

And what’s the best way to always keep learning and improving upon your map? It’s to become an expert on what maps are out there and how they compare to one another. It’s by understanding other people, and how they see the world, and how they think that the world works. You collect perspectives. You become a listener. That’s why I like to say, only half-jokingly, that whoever has the most perspectives when they die wins. Become darn good at listening to and understanding others, always suspecting they understand something you don’t, no matter who they are. That way, you multiply your number of teachers, and that increases the chance of getting aha-moments and a good map. I can hardly think of something more valuable to invest in.

Even if you get into conflict with all the people you’re listening to and learning from, your sense of justice will have a greater chance of prevailing in the end if you understand them more accurately. That involves understanding the stories they tell themselves, regardless of how false those stories may be from your perspective. Sure, sometimes such understanding must involve being able to argue for why their story does not hold up, and must thereby be a smokescreen for something else, for some hidden motive. There are hidden motives in the world, and there is deceit. But even to counter deceit, the better you understand others, the stronger you are. You simply “win” against other people more easily if you understand them better, and your wealth of understanding means that you can more often go for the win-win transformative solutions we discussed under Rule Five (the one about quitting), reframing a conflict to begin with and turning it into something good for everyone.

It makes sense. The people who listen to and learn from others the most, and who take pains to understand them correctly, who put themselves into states of openness and resilience in the face of new challenging assumptions, are the ones most likely to make the best maps—and this determines, at the deepest level, how well their lives turn out. So once you’ve burned your own, become a map collector. It’s your best shot at changing the world, first your own world, and then the world around you.

Mutually Forced Red Pills

What’s wrong with the movie The Matrix? Well, it’s already in the title, isn’t it: the singular form. Sure, there are illusions that keep us trapped, but it’s matrices in plural, many of them, and they cut through one another. And then there are anti-matrices, things that feel like “waking up” but which make you dumber than you ever were (conspiracies, decidedly dumb religions, etc.). People who have really gone off the rails and went a few flights too far east, west, and over the nearest cuckoo’s nest always say the same thing: It’s all so clear now.

But here’s a thought: What if the “all” is not supposed to be clear? In sociology, we have a thing called “middle range theory”. It means something like “theories that don’t try to explain everything in one big heist, just make some limited things more understandable and predictable.” An example would be: “Studies have shown that more unequal societies tend to be more violent, and it’s a very strong correlation, which can be shown to be a causal relation, i.e. that inequality causes people to fight over resources.” What changing your world map is about, is not to become “so clear once and for all”, but about investing time and effort into always noticing where you have been confused, and clearing a few things up at a time—including your basic assumptions about “everything”. Eventually, this can lead to radical reassessments, yes. But if you find some “one big clarity”, you’re usually in for trouble.

A total sense of clarity is not a sign of actually reaching the answers. It’s just a red flag that you’re becoming deluded or your mind being short-circuited. Rather, expanding your world map always entails an opening into a renewed sense of mystery. It can make you more sure about certain things in the world (Einstein predicting the observation of gravitational waves and so forth), but it leads you to wondering more and more. A better world map is one that increases your capacity to wonder. And to live with a sense of bewondered awe is not so bad.

In today’s world, nothing is more common than the use of the red pill analogy from the movie The Matrix. So, the person who takes the red pill “wakes up”, right? To the “real world”. Then guess what people are trying to “red pill” one another about? Well, it’s the profound truths of Nazism[132] (“you’ve been told a lie all the time, trust your instinct!”), of Flat Earth, of Qanon, of the political realist Right, of the materialist-Marxist Left, of queer feminism, of the truth that there is only one savior and his name is Jesus Christ, no, actually just one prophet and his name Mohammed, and that civilization will collapse due to ecological disaster, and that quantum physics upends basically everything you assumed to be real, and that trauma actually drives all the different surface phenomena we experience as behavioral disturbances in society, and that we should just wake up from the illusion of maya and the material realm altogether because it’s all actually suffering, and that we are being brainwashed by surveillance capitalism and an information society that empties out our very selves… On it goes. We’re all red pilling one another. We’re all forcing red pills down one another’s throats. If the masses could only realize what we do! We, the chosen ones who know.

Now, I guess there are some red pills that most of us could agree upon aren’t actually profound and insightful—say, Flat Earth Society, or certain ideas about reptile aliens in the British royal family. But what about the ones in which there really are deep and mind-blowing insights to be had, ones that few can literally imagine, but that just aren’t saying the same thing? Which one gets to be the “waking up from the Matrix” one? For those of us steeped in the sociological discipline, many report strong experiences of tremendous but simultaneously tragic strokes insight about the workings of power and knowledge in society—but these are things of which almost any natural scientist seems to be naively unaware. We cannot help but to wish to “red pill” them. However, we sociologists truly don’t have the first idea about the farther reaches of quantum physics, of the incompleteness theorem, of even the basics of experiential deep ecology, or the states of self-lessness understood within spiritual disciplines, each of which would red pill the living crap out of us social scientists in manners we literally cannot comprehend. So who gets to be the Morpheus of whom (i.e., the person administering the red pill in the movie)? In God’s eyes, who has the deeper and truer map? What’s the map of maps?

There are many matrices. They cut through each other. There are multiple red pills. In real life, I’m probably your Morpheus—and you’re mine. There’s not one sleep and one awakening: there are multiple dimensions of being awake, and no one person or perspective can master all of them. No, not the Dalai Lama, either. As I discussed in an earlier chapter, we all tend to view the world a little too hierarchically, whether we identify as being pro or against hierarchy. But the richer view we get, the more non-hierarchical (not just anti-hierarchical) we tend to become: sure, there are hierarchies, but different ones and they cut through one another. The same thing applies here: sure, the Dalai Lama is probably way beyond you in ways you cannot even imagine—but the opposite is likely also true in some ways.

If anything, the insight that we all have world maps and that these are by definition incomplete, and that the maps can red pill one another, inoculates us against the tendency of becoming “true believers”. Yeah, sure, you may have had a stroke of insight that felt cosmic, that shattered the earth and sky, that gave Mother Gaia herself an orgasm, that lit up the worst terrors of the universe with a burning light of love, and all that jazz. But what do you think the others were doing meanwhile—just sitting there and being boring? Are you so sure they don’t understand something equally or even more radically transformative that you don’t? Maybe you’re far above a person, but that person is simultaneously far above you in a manner you cannot imagine? Maybe they’re just playing with you, watching you in see-through, from above? Maybe you’re a child to them, just as they seem a child to you, only in ways you cannot understand. Maybe what you’re telling them is awfully predictable. You have this experience with other people, don’t you? Don’t you think others have it with you?

The world doesn’t need preachers and proselytes—it needs ironic prophets, the believers who don’t quite believe themselves, because they trust in a reality bigger than themselves. The earth will be inherited, then, not by the meek, but by the sublimely mediocre.

Spiritual Bungee-Jumping

Maps aren’t there to be owned. They own us. And then we draw our little life projects on them, our tiny dramas and traumas and stories and rises and falls and get-backs. And, of course, our so cherished boundaries. So once you break the chains of shame and guilt, and face the dragon of fear, walk through the desert of dissatisfaction and own up to that dark hunger, and ultimately, give your gifts away at the altar of wisdom and gratitude—you are rewarded—but not necessarily with a good map of the world. You are rewarded with enough inner safety and sense of beauty to be able to relax for a while, to rest and be happy for a moment. And from there on, you may be able to let go of your map, to see if there is another, larger web of meaning that catches you if you jump off the edge of your world-as-you-know-it.

You change your map by going far into uncharted territory, where you don’t know what to expect, and where you don’t see others going. It is the destiny of the most unique and beautiful part of your soul to travel alone. Your most unique insights are, naturally, the most difficult for others to understand and give you recognition for, but these insights are also the source from which you may truly challenge the perspectives around you. Simply put, the area in which you are most developed is also where you have the most different vantage point from the people around you. There’s a logic inherent to this loneliness: If you go where others can't follow, don't expect them to follow. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Your most unique or specialized characteristics are by definition the skills, talents, sensibilities, traits, and insights that others lack.

This is the proverbial “desert” that you travel through before you have your stroke of insight and acquire wisdom: a profound loneliness that precedes the reunification with a larger and lighter embrace. Of course, most of us get lost in the desert and promptly return to the nearest safe harbor, back to the community of more like-minded people. The greater potential we intuited remains to us just a feverish dream, a mirage on the horizon. But as Nietzsche said, the camel traveling alone through the desert can eventually transform into a roaring lion, and the lion can become a child. Struggle is reborn as play. At the end of this journey into the unknown is not the “enlightened master”, not the wise-guy. Nietzsche saw it clearly: You never get to be master in the end. The attainment just puts you back in the stance of openness, of learning—the child returns.

And so, we navigate through our games of life that we draw on our maps of meaning, but then, just when we think we’re about to win, we never do: We just realize that the map we were tracing, the very notion we had of “all possible stories that can play out”, was but a small speck on a yet larger map that we were hitherto unable to imagine or comprehend.

There aren’t any enlightened masters. Just as there isn’t a God in the literal sense, there isn’t a Buddha (and that’s why you should kill him if you see him in the street, as the saying goes). The world doesn’t work that way. There are just people with bigger and better maps. People who have bungee-jumped right off the edge of what you and I thought was possible to think, to experience, to live through. And even those people have something to learn from you, too. If they don’t realize, it’s their loss. So the real spiritual master is the curious child. If there’s a sense of loss in no longer believing in that adult version of Santa Claus, at least there is something we gain in the process: the sense of dignity and democratic equality that comes from not viewing the world as hierarchically, not looking for authorities, not being authoritarian. It turns out, in the end, that all the precious gifts that Santa brought were actually produced, selected, and packaged by ordinary people like you and me. If you ask me, that’s a more beautiful picture, in the end.

So, you update your map by jumping off the edge of your sense of reality. Talk about leaving one’s comfort zone, or safe space. And that bungee-jumping into a space of madness, of directionlessness, of darkness, off the edge of meaning and rhyme and reason, requires that sense of trust in reality itself, that fundamental sense of safety towards which we have been working throughout this book. That sense of the universe-as-home that lies beyond any particular conception or thought of it: the wordless relationship of peace that rests in what we have termed the causal and non-dual layers of experience.

It’s the strangest thing: This inner peace is not a quiet one, not a meek one. It is tremendous, dynamic, dramatic. It cuts through our life story and beyond it. Inner peace is the space within which new maps of meaning can arise, and upon these maps of meaning, we can write the days of our lives, interspersed by nights of dreams and their inner states beyond any comprehension of our rational minds. A more spacious inner life allows for a larger map of meaning, and thus for a greater meaning.

So the challenge of changing your world map, of getting those rare what-the-fuck moments that rip your reality into shreds and give you rebirths as a child, is to feel truly safe. The safer you feel, the more curious you can afford to be, the more open to the perspectives of the stranger, the opponent, the outsider. If you feel safer, you can travel deeper down the rabbit holes of life and existence.

Speaking for myself, I am currently operating one particular “map of the world” which I have roughly inhabited for about a decade. I don’t believe that I will ever manage to exchange it fully during the rest of my lifetime, but God knows if there is another, wider horizon waiting for me. I do realize, however, that there must be people in the world, current ones and future ones, that have such maps. I very probably even know some of these people myself, without recognizing it. I am also sensing that I oscillate more and more between intimations of an incomprehensibly larger and more wondrous new map, and the doubt of the holes in my own worldview that creep up in my sleep. And if I am completely honest about it, there is only one way I can feel about that fact: small and terrified. A lion shrinking to the size of a child.

At the end of the day, our maps never correctly describe the world, as reality is always greater than our attempts to understand or represent it—”the map is not the territory” as they say—and so whatever struggle plays out in your life is just a cosmic joke at your expense. But if you can see a million maps around you, all obviously more wrong than your own, take a guess if there might be a million ones better than thine, ones you’re blind of? The point isn’t to avoid being a cosmic joke; it’s to make your life into a good cosmic joke. I’ve always been of the opinion that good jokes are better than bad ones.

Excuse the bad joke.

Tenth Commandment: Do What You Hate

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Therapy is too good to be limited to the sick.”

—Erving Polster

The problem with cognitive behavioral therapists is that they all have anal fixation. And the problem with all psychoanalysts, in turn, is that they obsessively navel gaze about their childhoods and never get anything done, always fleeing from making even the most trivial improvement to their everyday lives and the habits they need to work on. Plus, they hate science.

The problem with all psychologists, from the math-impaired Jungians and spiritual screwball psychosynthesists, to the natural-science-envy-driven behaviorists and mathematical psychologists, is that they aren’t sociologists: they’re bad at seeing contexts and structures. But the problem with all sociologists is that they keep pretending that they want to change society, when in fact they just need to get their shit together in their own lives. It’s not patriarchy. It’s your dad.[133]

I’m only half-joking here. Here’s the thing: People believe in the kind of psychology and therapy they’re good at, that speaks to them, that’s comfortable to them, that matches their personalities. When selecting therapies, you tend to choose as you always do; whatever floats your muffin.

But… What is therapy about, fundamentally speaking? Is it about slam-dunking and homeruns? About doing what comes naturally to you, what you’re great at, again and again? Maybe for the therapist, sure. If you’re great at feeling and containing deep emotions, that means it’s probably the sort of therapy you should be specializing in. If you’re great at finding a positive angle to reframe tough situations and get out of a rut, you might want to be a “solution-based therapy” practitioner. Or if you’re a complex thinker who can deal with many issues at once and coordinate them into one great scheme, so-called dialectical behavioral therapy might be your thing.

Is the same true when we are the clients, the patients, the person to be healed?

Achilles’ Heels

If you’re the patient/client, therapy is about what you’re bad at; indeed, so dismally bad you’re not even aware of how to wrap your head around it. It’s about the stuff you’ve been avoiding your whole damned life, every minute of it. That’s why you don’t need further elite training in it, that’s why you need therapy, buddy: because there are some things you suck so much at that you basically need medical attention to remedy it. The good part of accepting that you’re sublimely mediocre is that it becomes easier to also accept those Achilles’ heels of yours as well—your weakest weak spots.

Your hobbies are about doing what you love. Your social life is about being with whom you love, as long as your boundaries are respected (otherwise: restore justice and if that cannot be done, quit). Your career is about that thing they like to name with the Japanese word ikigai: the intersection of what you love doing, what you’re good at, what pays the bills, and what the world needs. But therapy is different. It’s not about doing what you love. It’s the opposite of ikigai. It’s about doing what you hate, what you’re bad at, what pays the therapist’s bills, and what you need but most people in the world really don’t.

Want to get rid of your arachnophobia (fear of spiders)? You know what to do. But you’re not going to like it.

How, then, do you know what you’re really bad at? It sometimes happens that somebody else diagnoses our problems and then figures out the best form of therapy we might need. Sometimes, psychiatry can do this for us: seeing if we may meaningfully be described as having PTSD, OCD, ADHD/ADD, autism, schizophrenia, or even a personality disorder—and then guiding us towards an appropriate treatment based on former psychiatric experience and research. But even so, the practices of therapy (of conventional and alternative forms) and even psychiatry are not as well developed as medicine in general. If you go to the doctor and they conclude you may have cancer, you end up with an oncologist. If you have anxiety issues and you go to a therapist, your diagnosis will likely largely depend on who the therapist is, not on your issues or symptoms. If you’ve arrived at the reception of a psychodynamic therapist, they’ll probably conclude that you’re having unresolved childhood and family dynamics issues and that you really need to be deeply listened to with care and attention to realize it yourself, step by step, with the help of some sensitive probing questions. If you’ve come to a cognitive behavioral therapist, they’ll conclude that your issue is that you’ve developed unhealthy and negative thought patterns as well as harmful and incorrect assumptions about yourself and reality, and that you really need to learn to challenge and develop those. If it’s a logotherapist, they’ll conclude that you need to find your own inner voice, stand up for your life’s purpose, accept that it entails suffering, and reconnect to the deeper meaning of your life’s story. Jungians will believe that you need to integrate your shadow: the stuff you’ve denied in yourself and are projecting out onto others. If you’ve come to a somatic (bodily, subtle body) Rosen therapy practitioner, they’ll be absolutely positive that your issue is that you have old tensions and blockages in your body which are keeping you from being fully alive. And trauma therapists will be convinced that you have a trauma that numbs you out and you need to painfully reconnect to and reexperience before it will let go of you. And, of course, much of conventional psychiatry will think you have an issue that can be at least in part biochemically understood and remedied. Not to mention what psychedelic enthusiasts will believe you need to do.

On it goes. The diagnosis does not depend on you or your issues, at least not primarily. It depends on the therapist, their proclivities—their intellectual allergies and infatuations—and the setting they’re working within. And if you stop and think about it, there’s something rather backwards about that fact. Sure, the therapist in any of the above examples may be right. Who knows? They might bull’s eye their way to just the right healing or pathway for you. But chances are, they won’t. Chances are, you picked the therapist that is most like you in terms of philosophy and worldview and that their way of grasping your issue is only “true but partial”. Chances are you’ll find and stay with a therapist who will do almost exactly what you would already have done in that situation: feel more (if that’s your thing), think it through properly (if that’s your thing), do hard drugs (if that’s your thing), and so on. And chances are that’s exactly the wrong kind of therapist for you. They’re probably the bull’s eye for someone else, but all wrong for you.

The thing that the “therapist you love” focuses on is what you’ve already been doing all of your life. That’s what brought you to that particular therapist. That’s the source of your misery in the first place. And then you found a new friend and paid them handsomely to help you keep doing the same old thing. People who already obsess about their dads and childhoods see psychoanalysts. They go for years and years. It becomes a little house religion. They dig around and around. They don’t get better. Of course not—they’re doing what they love, right? But therapy is about doing what you hate. They would have needed to see a cognitive behavioral therapist (CBT practitioner) or similar, and they would have started making progress quickly and efficiently.

Another way of saying all of this, which connects back to the previous commandment, is that the best therapy is likely to be the one that most challenges your world map. After all, your anxieties and inner contradictions tend to be about the stuff in yourself and your life that you don’t quite have a handle on, the stuff that is off your map, or where your map is mistaken, the stuff that would seriously challenge your worldview if you opened up to it.

Or to make almost the same point yet more generally. Let’s divide your psychological traits and skills up into a hundred different categories, ordering them from the ones you’re best at to the ones you’re worst at. The top thing of those 100 is where you excel—perhaps to an incredible degree—and the bottom one of those is where you suck—perhaps also unbelievably so. Now, chances are, the thing where you’re far, far below the average is something that ricochets around your life and holds you back enormously. Therapy—or coaching or whatever it is you need—is about that Achilles’ heel. It’s about treating your Achilles’ heel, about redpilling yourself out of your worst blindspots. It’s not very glamorous, because 90% of everyone you’ll ever meet just doesn’t have that particular weakness, issue, or problem, so you’re basically taking a red pill that almost nobody else needs. In this regard, you’re worse than all those normal people. But, on the other hand, they all have some pathetic side that they really need to work on, too. The glory of sublime mediocrity is that you can admit to yourself that you do have such weaknesses, just as anybody else, and that by working on them, you can radically improve your life. Again, it’s about doing what you hate—just in a safe and therapeutic environment where, yes, it may be painful, but no, it won’t harm your confidence, self-esteem, or reputation.

One of the most brilliant movies of all time came out in 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once. Watching it, after so many gasping recommendations from intellectual colleagues, I felt that these script writers and producers must have been reading my mind. In many ways, it’s the philosophy of this very book—but compressed into the format of an action comedy. The main character, a middle aged first generation immigrant Chinese American woman who works relentlessly to keep her failing business, a laundromat, afloat, learns to travel across the multiverse to become not just her actual self of this reality, but her potential self, i.e. any version of herself that could possibly have existed given a shift of flukes and choices. And yes, of course, she becomes a kung fu master and a famous singer, among other things. When she inquires into why her particular uninspiring life gets to be at the center of this multiverse adventure, she gets this answer: “It’s because you’re so bad at everything, you have the potential to become anything.”

And, yes, that’s exactly right. We are all accustomed to thinking linearly around our potential. If we’re a 1/10 at something (in the worst tenth of people performing this thing), why work our asses off just to become a 2/10, right? Better focus on something we do well, no? I mentioned that you might be held back disproportionately by that one Achilles’ heel, and if you improve upon it, your whole life improves. But the most magical part, I haven’t mentioned yet : It’s that it is very often the case that if you have a weakness and work through it, it’s not that you are transported from a 1/10 to one step up—you actually tend to go straight to the top, no holds barred. So a person with dismally bad social skills can, for instance, by having had to do a bigger lift to function socially than anyone they’ve ever met, become a social genius. An afraid person can become the bravest one you’ll ever meet. The one who lacks assertiveness can suddenly become made of steel and then some. It’s not true of everything, but it’s quite often true of psychological qualities and capacities: your weaknesses are hidden blessings. There’s a reason for this: the people who don’t have an issue never have to work through all the steps and analyze it to death, they just don’t need to bother themselves with it, as it just automatically works at least somewhat. The person who was awfully bad at, say, seduction or finding inner peace, can learn a thousand tricks of the trade and work doggedly to surmount all the blocks and challenges of that issue. And, quite often, that means far surpassing all the “naturals”. Talent you had to work for tends to be worth more.

Turn your weakness into strength, they like to say. And that’s where therapy comes in.

Get the Right Kind of Therapy

Let’s take a look at a map (ah, maps again!) of different schools of psychology and therapy and how these may be related to one another and to different kinds of issues. It was proposed by none other than a highly energetic 23 year old pre-med school dropout back in 1973: Ken Wilber. This youngster was promptly catapulted to fame in the transpersonal psychology and spiritual communities of America and beyond, and he’s today something of a the pope of progressive spiritual people. He called this map The Spectrum of Consciousness. And although some of the assumptions made there don’t seem to hold up to more rigorous scrutiny, and while some of his use of terms sounds too woo-woo to be taken seriously by more established communities of psychologists, I think there is good reason to closely consider its core structure. What the young Wilber proposed was that the different schools of psychology (and therapy) can be organized along an axis. This axis is based on which layers of the mind that each school of psychology understands, addresses, and can potentially heal. Some issues go deeper and are more fundamental to our psychological constitution, other issues are more shallow and can be addressed by things like changing our thoughts or beliefs about ourselves. And beyond that, there are things that pertain to our sense of meaning and spiritual experiences (what I call “high subjective states”). It’s a spectrum.

I won’t go into greater detail about this spectrum, but its main features are as follows (note, however, that this is my own reinterpretation, update, and simplification of it):

First layer: Psychosis etc. The most basic and deepest (psycho-)pathologies have to do with your fundamental sense of safety and sense of reality—and so they concern issues like being psychotic, having hallucinations, schizophrenia, and so forth. This is connected to the layer of the self that is formed in infancy and who you are as a biological animal. Here, you usually need serious psychiatric attention, medication to counter the psychotic tendencies, and a highly controlled environment so as not to harm yourself or those around you.

Second layer: Personality disorders, etc. After that fundamental sense of reality we all need as a foundation to navigate the world, there is the emergence of our “self” as a basic category within that world. With problems at this level, we are looking at the genesis of the confusing onslaught that is borderline disorder, other severe personality disorders, and just any gaping hole in the basic sense of self. If your two-year-old self could not feel safe and your feelings and wants were not met productively, you may always be struggling to draw clear boundaries between yourself and others, your thoughts and emotions versus the world around you, your own needs and those of others. Here, you need the therapist to provide a ground-up structure for you. It is truly painstaking work, always confusing and burdensome, but progress can sometimes be made. You generally need advanced, comprehensive, thorough-going, and multi-pronged approaches, such as dialectical behavioral therapy (to triangulate for the results you need, as your problems are too deeply rooted and manifold for any one thing to work on its own: you can’t just do talk therapy because you’re too tense, you can’t just do mindfulness because you’re too caught up in painful thoughts, so you need to coordinate many different things at once for any of them to work.)

Third layer: Stored-up family traumas. Beyond that core layer of the self are the basic social relations through which you further define your sense of self and relation to others, which includes which attachment patterns you form (if you have an easy time trusting people and feeling love and so on). Pathologies at this level have to do with a profound sense of betrayal, with not being able to trust others, with never feeling at home in the world, with having inexplicable anxieties that follow you around no matter what. Here, psychoanalysis and related psychodynamic practices tend to find their home. How was three or four or five years old you treated? Is there a buried, unfelt rage waiting to erupt? Is it about your mom, or dad, or some abuse or neglect you were subjected to? It soon gets very personal, very sensitive, very humanly messy. This is where Freud hits home (or at least his general intuitions, if not his specific theories and concepts) and the psychodynamic tradition is at its strongest. A part of you never grew up. It needs to be uncovered, be rid of shame and self-deceit, and honestly met and integrated. You may need to become an inner parent to yourself and similar things. Freud built his ideas, in turn, partly on Nietzsche: you need to unearth something, do an archeology of your own mind, uncover your own truth, no matter how shocking, weird, or embarrassing.

Fourth layer: Unhelpful thought-patterns that keep you down. And then there are things that have to do with your implicit assumptions and thought patterns that were formed to a large part when you were a big child or an early adolescent. What coping mechanisms did you fall into? Did you become a pleaser or a fighter? Did you assume that success is not for you, that love is for someone else, that you’re somehow different from others in a bad way? Were you bullied, singled out, excluded, rejected? Were you scolded by parents or denigrated by siblings for your feelings, desires, and interests? This is where stuff like cognitive behavioral therapy starts to come in handy: It’s about rewiring these old habits of thought, action, and perceptions. You’ll hear therapists working at this level saying stuff like “Your thoughts cause your emotions.” Old habits and silently made assumptions keep you making the same old mistakes, and then hating yourself for it. The negative inner voice whacks the living crap out of you—but you can learn to question it, to turn it around, to challenge its claims about reality, to reprogram your mental habits (and your everyday habits, too, for that matter). This is what Wilber calls changing your “script”.

Fifth layer: Issues of adult identity. After that, you have general issues of self-esteem, confidence, social identity (suffocating gender roles, ethnic stereotypes, body image issues, anyone?). It’s possible to live a fairly happy and productive life even with such issues weighing down on you over the years, but life is undeniably lighter without them. Here, stuff like self-help, general training in introspection (noticing your own thoughts and feelings), and critical thinking (yes, even sociology can help) can shift the game. Simple techniques addressing this layer involve things that social workers, life coaches, and counselors tend to use: motivational dialogue, solution-based brief therapy, assertiveness training, and more generally the application of positive psychology. These kinds of issues are often the ones that are shared by broad swathes of the population, and are linked to different social struggles in society (Trump voters feel that their self-esteem has been hurt and they’ve become “strangers in their own land” as one sociologist put it;[134] Black Lives Matter feel that they are disrespected due to race, and so on).

Sixth layer: Issues of existential anxiety and lack of purpose. We may then add a yet higher layer of “adult development issues” that pertain to finding a deeper meaning in life. More often than not, these issues surface when you have already achieved a lot in life, such a career and family that previously you believed would make you fulfilled. Many people who experience success in the conventional sense report suddenly feeling that life begins to lack meaning, that they lose their sense of direction. This tends to spark a renewed search for meaning in life. This search can sometimes also be a response to profound suffering and tragic events during adulthood, such that you need to find meaning in a world where you’ve become disconnected from life’s glow and magic. This is where existential therapy or logotherapy tends to fit the bill, perhaps also so-called “humanistic psychology”: the therapist pushes you to find your inner truth, to admit to yourself that you feel you have a higher purpose or calling, to be authentic by taking responsibility for your life story and for making it meaningful. This usually involves first wrestling with some pretty simple but profound truths about the meaninglessness of existence—as the existentialist philosophers of the 20th century taught, why not kill yourself and all that—and from that position of “letting go”, being able to do what Kiekegaard called the necessary “leap of faith”. Taking the leap, you’ll know you can’t be sure, but you still take responsibility for the meaning you grant to the void.

Seventh layer: Spirituality and stuff. Well, I differ somewhat from Wilber in my view of where spirituality comes in—I believe you cannot just add it on top of all those other layers, but rather that spiritual experience reconnects back to the first fundamental layer of experience that has to do with staying safe and non-psychotic (the subtle, causal, and non-dual as discussed under the Fourth Commandment, where a non-dual pathology would also be one of psychosis). But that being said, it is true that if you’ve been healing and aligning the first six layers, you tend to need to go deeper into experience itself, and that might lead you into religious or contemplative practices, into psychedelic exploration (so-called psychonautics), into an interest into wider and more philosophical topics that don’t just concern yourself but all of reality, and of course just reconnecting to the very basic safety and happiness you can feel by being alive in a mysterious, beautiful, and tragic universe. As we noted in the introduction to this book, it’s all about which inner states we can experience, how reality arises within us. Once you’ve achieved relative inner peace and mental health, you can go ahead and experiment with practices of the higher inner states, because there is less blocking you from accessing it. Traditionally speaking, the solution to minimize other complications and hurts and traumas, and so being able to focus on spiritual attainment, has been to live a monk or nun life. The problem, of course, is that monks and nuns tend to have a fairly limited life experience and thereby be rather poor at understanding the world around them or the lives and issues of others. They tend to become rather nice but also rather helpless to remedy the injustices of the world or to otherwise provide productive solutions. Still—it is true that what Wilber calls the paths of yogis, saints, and sages, are actually psychological traditions that can and do transform how minds function, sometimes with remarkable results.

And here’s the thing I have kept saying to pretty much everyone for years, but that people seem to resist with the tenacity of thick brick laced in teflon:

●   Out of these seven layers, whatever your own “favorite” level of depth of psychological issues happens to be, it does not matter in any way whatsoever for the psychological issue at hand.

That’s just your personal taste speaking, not the circumstances at hand that need to be dealt with. So if you happen to prefer deep and emotional things, that does not make it any more likely that you or another person you’re analyzing doesn’t need to change thought patterns and habits. Not profound enough for you? You want their issue to be about deep emotions that need to be made known and integrated, leading up to a contemplative pathway? Well, you see, the problem analyzed just doesn’t care what you think should be the problem. Or if you’re a CBT person or behaviorist who likes rational and down-to-earth explanations, that does not mean that the issue at hand is “not about that mushy bullshit”. It might very well be about that mushy bullshit. The deepsters “just know” that behavioral therapies are too shallow. The behaviorists and cognition folks “just know” that going deep is a self-indulgent waste of time. But just as you can go too shallow and not get to the root of a problem, you can also go too deep and dig right past a problem. There may even be a sense of hurt pride involved: to a deeply suffering person it may be easier to admit to oneself that one is struggling with a spiritual crisis than to admit the banality of it all: you need a haircut, a job, a routine, some healthy food, to stop ruminating, and to get laid. In fact, the most common problems in our lives are embarrassingly trivial and shallow, and so insisting on being profound about trivial matters is, well, dumb.

Remember: this sort of bias really goes both ways, people won’t listen to this because they so eagerly want the world’s problems about their own favorite issues. The biases people have here are just astonishing. People just won’t budge on this one—never saw a single person take this point to heart, actually.

And here I am writing about it in a self-book. Sigh.

Anyhow. All of this of course adds an extra layer of complexity to the issue of “go see a therapist”. You need to hit roughly the right notes on this “spectrum of consciousness”. If you’re having issues with your mental hygiene (too many negative thoughts) and financial habits (pushing aside every thought about saving rather than spending), you can go to psychoanalysts and explore the dark side of your mom[135] all you want, but it won’t help. In fact, you’ll be making matters worse by distracting yourself from the stuff you actually had to deal with and paying someone you couldn’t afford to help you do it. But you actually needed a coach and some basic CBT training about making, saving, and spending money, or viewing yourself as a financially responsible person, and so on. On the other hand, if you actually unconsciously hate your dad, you can do CBT or positive psychology to the end of days with ever new affirmations and good spirited reminder post-its on the mirror, but your life will still be strangely miserable—until you one day do the actual work of digging up, admitting to, and then getting over your anal fixation or daddy complex or whatever it might be. (Okay, I’m not a literal believer in Freud’s old “anal fixation” concept, but you get my point: things that have to do with deeply personal issues and family patterns over generations).

Makes sense, doesn’t it? For therapy to work, you need the right therapy. Therapists won’t tell you that, though. Or they rarely will. They’ll use their own favorite framework for understanding your problem, and then analyze your situation from there on—and surprise-surprise, more often than not your problem will just happen to be something within their exact area of expertise.

So, sure, therapy becomes a bit more complex. But at the end of the day, it’s not rocket surgery: You may have pathologies within one or more of these layers, and you may scan through what sorts of issues you have in your life in order to glean hints as to which sort of therapist you might want to go see. For my part, I once went to a psychodynamic therapist when I’d really have needed an existential one. It didn’t really work. Later on, I did the psychodynamic work I needed, but not through talking therapy—I’ll get back to that later on. I did lots of spiritual work, but I missed simpler and more fundamental issues of habits and thought patterns. I got it wrong, because I hadn’t read this book, let alone written it. I just went along and listened to the therapists, and they really didn’t know their way around the spectrum of consciousness. They just looked at the whole through their own thin sliver of it. I guess they needed to work on changing their world maps.

But really, this Tenth Commandment is one that concerns which therapy you need: Do What You Hate. It’s not quite absolute, but it’s the best principle out there, for all I know. That means, do the thing that comes the least naturally to you, because that’s quite likely where the action happens, where your Achilles’ heel is. If you go to a therapist for years and it’s very interesting but you’re not really getting better, stop going there, for crying out loud (Fifth Commandment: Quit), and try something else.

All the Tea in London

Nice punch, huh? And yet, you’re not quite convinced, are you? You’re way too [smart-insightful-scientific-profound-emotional-embodied-developed-or-whatever-it-may-be] to buy into that form of therapy. Life is just too short for that sort of crap, for that utter bullshit. That bullshit actually disgusts you a bit, with all its cheap jargon and nothing real. You look down on it, and for good reason. You just like to keep it real. Phony is for those other losers. And you can be the judge of what is real and what is bullshit.

Nah, I won’t do it. Not on my watch, we’re not doing that lousy excuse for therapy. Not for all the tea in London, darling.

Well, if you’re willing to bet all the tea in London, the stakes are undeniably high. Let’s take that up for a moment. What, in truth, drives you to be willing to bet all that tea just to avoid trying out a form of therapy that doesn’t speak to you?

For instance, if you’re too embodied, humanist, and spiritually sensitive to do CBT, you still have to explain the uncomfortable fact that it’s by far the most successful therapy in the world, in terms of measurable scientific evidence of improvement in people’s lives. Or this was more or less the case until something called “meta cognitive behavioral therapy” showed up on the scene a few years ago, which seems to compare favorably to CBT. But if you ask me, it’s in many ways a further distillation of the insights behind CBT: you work with your thoughts and practice your capacity to see them and evaluate them, not being run by them as if on autopilot.[136]

But let's go on. It’s not just that fluffy people don’t like crunchy therapies. Crunchy people loathe fluffy therapies. If you’re too scientific for spiritual and contemplative work, you have to deal with the equally inconvenient truth that the highest forms of wellbeing ever observed and empirically indicated with brain scans pertain solely to spiritual masters with tens of thousands of hours of contemplative practice. If you’re too rational for somatically based therapies—those starting from the tensions in your body and its habits of movement—you need to explain why you think that the mind affects itself and the body but not the other way around. If you insist that thoughts cause emotions, you get in trouble explaining why we tend to have angry thoughts when angry. If you are against digging around in your distant past and childhood, can you explain why there is so much consistent evidence that early childhood shapes your psyche?

In brief, given the sheer complexity of human beings, would it be so strange if there are many different pathways to inner peace, healing, and better regulated behaviors?

Okay, so if we do accept that the form of therapy you hate—the dorkiest one you can think of, the one you wouldn’t lower yourself to doing—may in fact be the one you truly need, what are some rules of thumb to look for to find your best, and most passionately hated, therapy?

It’s generally the case that we need the kind of therapy that is opposite to our personal proclivities and biases. We men very often have trouble accessing our emotions in manners that are just stupefying to most women. They cannot believe their ears when we reveal the poverty and vagueness of our emotions. It’s as if we were emotionally retarded—and we are, I guess. And so men generally need emotional therapy to help name and feel emotions fully, psychoanalysis to admit our buried rage and shame, and most of all somatic therapy to skip right to the raw feelings of the body itself, beyond any thoughts or excuses. But the crowd of clients for all of these is always mostly women.

For women, in turn, they tend to be more self-blaming and neurotic than men, with more imposter syndrome and self-debilitating thought patterns. Part of this can be explained and fought with feminist perspectives: women are taught to think somewhat less of themselves, to give space to others, to be self-aware, to judge the shapes of their bodies, that they’re there to please others, and so forth. But even so, women are also naturally somewhat more neurotic than men[137], with more anxiety[138] and lower self-esteem[139]—and the self-depreciating thought patterns would stun most men who are often a bit more happy-go-lucky about life and their own place in it (until their testosterone levels start to drop as age kicks in). So women tend to need CBT: to actively and deliberately challenge their assumptions and thought patterns piece by piece, step by step, until they arrive at a more self-affirming, self-caring, and self-confident place. In a sense, it’s about challenging irrational thought patterns that have accumulated. However, women tend to want to seek out a sensitive psychodynamic therapist and talk through old wounds over and over again.

And then you have the people who are somewhat smarter than the average therapist. I don’t mean this ironically. The average therapist is an intelligent person, but not exceptionally so. It’s not that hard to become a counselor. For highly intelligent and hyper-gifted people (who will be over-represented in the readership of this book, to state it bluntly), the chances of encountering a therapist as smart, nuanced, complex, and critically minded as oneself are fairly slim. So they’ll be able to see how limited the perspective of their therapist is, be able to pick apart their reasoning, see through how the therapist over-employs their models of how the world works, and so on. This, of course, sabotages the chances of truly making progress through the therapy, as the relationship of trust between therapist and client is undermined. You sit there tiring of the dumb and predictable questions and the off-mark analyses. What to do? Well, there are therapists who you don’t need to listen to, who just work through your body and its raw emotions, leaving you to do most of the thinking that can come up: somatic therapists, like Rosen therapy. Other forms include hakomi, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and neurosomatic therapy. Worth a try, isn’t it? If you’re already good at thinking, and still have sorrows and troubles holding you down, why not work on that which lies beyond mere cognition? As a side-note, it stands to reason that the same argument also applies to people of unusually low intelligence, as these are less likely to be able to follow the reasoning and successfully comply with the insights of more mentally demanding therapies. Working with the body (the gross, subtle, causal, or non-dual layers of experience, as discussed under the Fourth Commandment) is more direct and universal. Just as the mind affects the body, the body affects the mind.

We have all been taught the adage that whatever therapy speaks to you is the best one for you. I turn this conventional wisdom on its head. Yes, compliance to the therapy and a good relationship between client and therapist are vital. But if you stop yourself from resisting the therapy and therapist you feel a bit allergic towards, if you apply yourself to the very thing that is most counterintuitive to you, there are likely greater victories to be won. You’ll be terribly mediocre when you try what you’re bad at, but it’s the sublime mediocrity of a healing hero, of Achilles tending to his heel. Push it to the limit.

In therapy, do what you hate—and, darling, all the tea in London shall be yours.

Eleventh Commandment: Kill Your Guru, Find Your Others

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

—Linji Yixuan, ninth century Chinese Buddhist monk

“With great dedication, I have followed and learned from many great masters, all of them YouTubers.”

—Quote I simply made up for the purpose of this chapter

This penultimate Commandment has two parts: first, you need to kill your guru, and then you need to find (and co-create) your own meta-team. The first part is fairly straightforward, even if it’s more important than ever in these days of YouTube gurus and TikTok fandom. So let me try to elaborate: Your real “others” are your meta-team. What do I mean with “meta-team”, and why is having one a great replacement for gurus?

The simple and short version of it is that we do well to resist the lure of trying to find one really wise and powerful mentor, one designated-person-supposed-to-know, one guru with so much of the answers to life—as these actually deplete our personal power and independence, gaining power over us and drawing us into rabbit holes we’d rather avoid. Instead, we can invest our energies into cultivating equal and lateral relationships with tight networks of friends with whom we can go on great adventures.

The Lure of the Guru

It’s highly understandable that we are attracted to strong voices that stack up aha-moments for us. They say one thing that blows our minds, and we go “that’s interesting”. They say another thing, and then another one, and we go “oh, you’re interesting”. From there on we become curious about them, stalking them a bit online, or going to their rallies (usually, though, these will be relabeled as “workshops” or the like). After a while, we cannot help but feel flushed with an exhilarating sense of admiration. It happens to more and more of us—and it has happened to me as well, in my younger incarnations.

The obvious example to draw on in the context of this book is, of course, Jordan Peterson. How much time would you guess that his more devoted followers or fans have spent listening to, reading, or otherwise discussing him and his work—and then engaging with the person himself and the dramas that play out around him? Do you figure that all of those hours were genuinely well-spent for all of those people? For my part, I have difficulty seeing how such followership would not have a steeply decreasing return on investment. When you’re spending your 1000th hour on some person you found online, will it really add as much to your life? What do these followers think is going to happen? Will they all suddenly begin to be as good at psychology, or pick up his knack for public speaking? If that was the case, we’d be seeing a blinking army of incisive young men blowing people away with their communication skills by now.

But it’s not to single out Peterson—there is, naturally, a veritable smorgasbord of digital gurus to choose from, smart ones and less so, with followings small or great. Some of these gurus do turn out to be crooks sooner or later, exploiting and manipulating their most loyal devotees. However, even for the ones that don’t squarely turn cultish and rotten, I cannot help but feel that this tendency of our time is tragic. You can’t find a dad on YouTube, nor a mom, nor a new best friend (I mean, sure, you can make new friends on any social media, but it’s not the gurus). Those “screen people” won’t become a replacement for a hole in your heart, not even if you join their workshops or satsangs live. And you may be taking part in one big distraction instead of actually getting out there, doing your thing, and living your life.

Excessive admiration of a great figure is almost always a projection of potentials in yourself that you’re disowning for the fear of the responsibility and risks that come with actualizing them—or because of Sklavenmoral, the internalized envy of others. You also tend to postpone the real work of becoming a constructive parent to your inner child, because you project that responsibility onto a “screen person” instead. The whole thing with being in love with an online or offline guru is very often a scheme for postponed actualization of the potentials in your own life. By watching and listening to the guru, you get a false sense of accomplishment, of partaking in something great that you would like to be doing. But you’re just clicking on new clickbaits and paying for tickets to see them in the flesh. 1-0 to the social media giants. As they say: He who lives by the screen, will die by the screen, in its cold glow. The same could be said of certain ashrams, too. You go there and, sure you work on spiritual experiences, but you come home a smaller person, because you gave so much of yourself away to the guru.

We know that most forms of totalitarianism have the rise of a guru figure or the closely corresponding phenomenon of a leadership cult as one of their first steps (as we’ve seen, this brings a sense of meaning, but also negative and darker emotions in us). From this point on, people begin to give away their autonomy, responsibility, and conscience to a leader who speaks powerfully and presumably wisely. The guru always tells you how much they are only bringing forth what’s already present within you, how the last thing in the world they’d like is to control you, and how they’re so different from other gurus because of it. All gurus do it, even the ones who eventually demand full, religious obedience from their devotees. And so, you’ll always hear cultists speaking about the beauty of their particular cult leader, that he or she just brings out what’s beautiful within each and every person… That’s why we end up literally lining up to kiss their feet (true story, I have lost friends to foot kissing).

And once you join such settings—online or offline—you can get increasingly stuck, as your irrational reverence is compounded by the presence of other devotees who help you notice ever new aspects about the guru to admire and marvel over. You begin to resemble the other fans and followers to an eerie degree. People can tell which guru you’re following just by listening to you for five minutes, you don’t even have to name them. It’s groupthink, the basic building block of totalitarian and cultish developments. It has happened more than once that I hear young men speak for a few minutes and then I ask “Peterson, right?”. And, yes, it always is.

Democracy, in contrast to totalitarianism, builds on the balancing of different perspectives and an increasing capacity for people to bridge differences and cooperate across them, turning them into mutual strengths (as we shall see, is how the meta-team works). You have teachers, but you never forget that you are also one yourself. Such open-ended processes of learning and making up your own mind don’t make you as boring to listen to as guru followership does.

In the place of gurus, there are safer and more appropriate outlets for our need to fawn and admire, such as worshiping a rock band (who you just listen to and hopefully don’t take advice from). Or even a fictional or semi-fictional guru, or saint, or adequately bearded prophet—maybe one that you invented yourself with your sincerest irony. I sometimes say that gurus, especially of the spiritual type, promise summer, sun, and socialism but end up “fooling you and fucking your wife” (hey, it’s what has happened again and again in some version, also to my own friends). Best stay with the safe alternatives. It’s okay to scream with the whole itty bitty committee when The Beatles arrive on stage. But if it is your great teacher or leader you’re screaming after, rather than a pack of entertainers, it might not end as well.

Thought experiment: If all gurus and pundits suddenly got offline and stopped having followings, and all got jobs at McDonalds—would the world be a better place or a worse one? Literally thousands of dangerous cults would dissolve overnight and cause no more harm, pyramid schemes would end, people would have their own brains back to think with! We’d be better off, after a bit of turmoil as all the lost souls would have to crawl out of basements and back into daylight looking for something to eat. And then see if whatever guru you might have an infatuation with is truly an exception.

Are they? They all say or imply and let others say about them that they’re leading the edge of the revolution, of the awakening, of the return, of this most-important-thing. And sure, it’s okay for anyone to try to say and do something we find important and worthwhile. But somehow it becomes apparent that if all those thousands of gurus who gained a followership never actually did lead that most important struggle in the world, that it was mostly hype, self-importance, and even harmful manipulation… Will yours be different at the end of the day? Maybe Santa Claus just doesn’t exist, the wise master. Maybe, behind the smoke screen, it’s just a little “wizard of Oz”. Maybe we’re all just scared little kids and need one another to figure out things together. I know I am. But somehow, I find that to be a more beautiful and credible picture: little kids facing the dire straits of life together, saving themselves—or failing to.

Take a moment to examine if there are any guru-follower tendencies in your life, past or present. They reveal something. Unflattering things, yes, perhaps. But also, and crucially, they reveal something good about you. What quality is it you’re hoping to manifest when you obsess about this person? Now, that’s probably the very real potential you’re hiding from. Take that power back and take responsibility for  manifesting it in and through your own sublimely mediocre life, small as it may feel. So quit. Ditch your guru or gurus. It’s a trade you won’t regret. If you see the Buddha on the road, you know what to do. And if you see the Buddha on YouTube, same thing. Just do it with style, like a ninja. Buddha’s gonna fight back and try to keep ya.

Money Is the Enemy

It’s not only charisma, a few delightful ahas, and millions of views on YouTube that dazzle us; it’s also excessive wealth and the super rich.

Great wealth, to put it mildly, may be a mixed blessing for people who seek to partake in genuinely meaningful endeavors. It all comes down to the fact that a) wealthy people tend to become powerful, and b) wealthy people tend to not access real, and honest feedback from others, because everyone fears slighting them, which makes it much more difficult for them to be clear-sighted in the long run. Put these two together, and you have a recipe for bad decision making.

For my own part, I recently accidentally talked myself out of getting financially supported by a newly made NFT multimillionaire who was a strong supporter of my work. In a conversation, I ended up strongly opposing the direction he wanted to take as well his and his colleague’s reading of what my work implies in practice. “The most arrogant person I’ve ever spoken to” he said to our common friend. Hum. And then I got myself fired from the philanthropic team of a self-made tech billionaire, although for less clear reasons. And just the other day, I wrote a letter to another self-made billionaire, warning him not to collaborate with an authoritarian government with a heinous human rights record, stating that I would need to distance myself publicly if the collaboration proceeds. This time, I was thanked in an email, but we shall see how the situation develops.[140]

I can’t say I regret any of these things or feel that I should have acted differently, or that I was made any less potent by sticking to my guns. The opposite seems to be the case: here I am, freed up to write this letter directly to the worldsoul in the form of a self-help book. And I feel I can respect myself more; I can live more fearlessly and think more ferociously.

We all have a tendency to fall in line a little too much around extremely rich people, because we figure that if we impress and win acceptance now, we can access great resources for worthy and productive projects later. This tendency tends to steer much of the social logic around such wealthy benefactors—and thereby, truth-seeking and genuinely idealistic or transformative projects actually become more difficult to advance around them than if they were simply out of the picture and people were drawn in mainly by their own inspiration, concern, and interests. What motivational psychology calls “intrinsic rewards” are key to any idealistic and ethical pursuit. “Extrinsic rewards” (money, glory, or why not the sudden deference of those who formerly looked down upon us, or even the sexual submission of desired bodies, these things) tend to bend idealism and creativity out of shape. So around the rich, famous, and powerful alike, we tend to become dumber when it comes to truly doing our thing in the world. Integrity is hollowed out. Sure, the “patron of the arts” system was important during the Renaissance, and still has a place to this day, but that’s for supporting one particular person to act pretty freely—not to create whole contexts of innovation and transformation. In idealistic contexts, it simply means people start maneuvering for position close to the money hose and then try to dominate people downstream.

Certainly, you can be the rebel at the courts of the wealthy and speak back to them. But it won’t work, for the most part. What would you hope to achieve? People will side with their paycheck, not with your idealism.

It’s just very difficult to not let that big pile of money become central to everyone’s thinking and agency around the rich person. Their leadership becomes based on the fact that they have the money, and people can’t help themselves from jockeying for the approval of the one with the resources. Before long, you have created a Jabba the Hut of privilege and put them in charge. Money is, of course, a great tool. It can help to run or start businesses, it can make more money just by sitting, and it’s absolutely wonderful at doing such work as digging holes or raising an Eiffel Tower. It’s also great at funding charity work. But when it comes to sparking and feeding idealistic and visionary projects for the betterment of society, it’s often more of a curse than a boon. The billionaire who starts a project gets many allies quickly, it is true. But then the vitality and staying power of their projects tend to be limited. The shine wears off. When funding wanes, so does the engagement. There’s even research from experimental psychology to suggest that simply the exposure to large numbers and large sums in and of themselves make people less empathetic and more self-servingly calculating.[141] Talk about suffocating the spark of idealism and transformation.

But the strongest reason for the relative impotence of money as a source of genuinely innovative projects for the good of the world is, I believe, what you might call “interrupted learning cycles”. In a project where people collaborate as equal adventurers and try to create results that stick, what doesn’t work very soon gets abandoned. When people acquire employee status and need to report back results to a funder or boss of some sort, lest they lose their livelihood, the incentives change: now you need to argue for the importance of your work either way. And then you need to get colleagues to agree it is important, and in return, you claim their contributions are important and relevant. Instead of innovation, you get a system of social games for mutual approval or disapproval. And so, as long as the funding stays on, you can have relatively large collections of highly intelligent, creative, and goodhearted people stuck in a long cycle of doing fairly unimportant work that eventually is discontinued.

In other words, money is power, yes. But it’s a shallow form of power. You cannot buy late night conversations and dreams and intellectual banter between trusted friends who continuously refine a common goal. You cannot buy a heart made of steel in its determination to change what must be changed because it is unjust. And that’s what the world needs. So it is very difficult to transform financial capital into a real, transformative source—or, at least, the exchange rate is very poor. I have seen time and again how great quantities of money for years on end can achieve astonishingly little, even while paying extremely competent people. It’s natural for idealistic people who happen to become very rich to want to use their wealth for such grander purposes, rather than just chilling out in luxury and boredom for the rest of their lives. But the task turns out to be much more difficult than it appears.

Finally, another weakness of money is that the very act of employing people means that they don’t create their collaborative relationships spontaneously and organically. They're sort of thrown together by being paid from the same source, and so you won’t get the strongest possible synergies between them. In fact, oftentimes, they will end up getting in one another’s way, not least by burdening one another with expectations and tasks that they aren’t suited for—or by pulling in different directions, or competing for the money hose.

There are about 2700 dollar billionaires in the world—and of course many more multimillionaires—and if we’re reasonable about it, we realize that each of them cannot truly change the world. If you were one out of 2700 people in a township of that many, you wouldn’t feel it was that easy for you to simply change the entire culture and life of the community.

Just as you should kill your guru, and resist following the rich, you will do well to abandon the old idea of “first I’ll get really rich, then I’ll be able to do great and ethical things”. Chances are you won’t do great things, even if you end up owning all the tea in London—the financial assets are often the enemy, paradoxically making you impotent, making it harder for people to speak truthfully back to you. Truthful, short-cycle feedback is the mother of all high-quality creativity, and it becomes so much harder to come by if a huge pile of money is involved. If you get really rich, you’ll feel clever, sure, because you end up on top of conversations time and again as people get flustered and don’t know how to respond, or because they simply hide their disagreements with you. But it’s a gilded cage, a bubble you’re locked into, and often you would have achieved the same or better results if you had spent the same time on a project without throwing a million pounds sterling at it. Without the money, you’ll have to persuade and inspire people for real—and that will have actual staying power and reap actual rewards for yourself and the world. If an idea sucks, and you throw lots of money at it, people will prolong its suffering in hospice until the money wanes, simple as that. You get zombie projects, with people playing you and themselves for fools. I’ve seen people panicking behind the back of billionaires, having breakdowns because they’re asked to perform tasks that simply don’t make sense, and they’re too afraid to disappoint the rich person so they can’t simply tell them: “Man, this is a crap project, and a crap task, based on shoddy work of your own and on obviously false assumptions. Here’s how I’d approach the matter…” Instead, people start blaming others: “I could do this, but due to that person…” The only thing alive is the flow of money and the distortions and excuses that keep the money flowing.

Oh, and it’s also that thing. Money attracts bad guys—from dictators to cult leaders to run-of-the-mill sociopaths to common profiteers happy to pose as idealists. So be careful out there. To the rich person, everybody seems so nice all of a sudden. Not all of them are.

Sure, self-made rich people are generally highly intelligent and gifted. But due to their wealth, they’re stuck in a loop where they struggle to access honest feedback for years on end. For most practical purposes, they’ve become the dumbest person in the room, and we’re chaining ourselves to them as our leaders—ones that cannot be deposed and seldom challenged, because they’re always two words away from victory over their interlocutor: “You’re fired!”. I’m not being communist here, I’m just asking: Is this a smart plan? Does it serve our collective intelligence?

Simply put, money is great at doing dumb shit—including useful and important menial work, for sure, like running companies and getting people the food and medicine they need. If nobody pays the ice cream factory workers, no ice cream for you. The workers won’t spontaneously collaborate to make ice cream years on end: money coordinates our actions in such cases and gets us to collaborate in ways we otherwise would not have. But money is bad at doing smart shit, like transforming the world, healing the soul, harmonizing human relationships, stirring our conscience, establishing and defending justice, or sparking unstoppable genius.

For certain, you need to get paid for your work, pay the bills and achieve a level of security, but it’s better that idealistic projects find ways to pay for themselves rather than getting tied to the wealthy few—and for that to happen, you may need a bit of help from your friends.

Growing Transpersonal Power

If gurus and rich allies lock in and undermine your power in the grander scheme of things—and the same thing may even be said of money itself (after the point of securing your own living)—what, then, grows your power and releases it to freely create good things in the world?

Meet the meta-team. Again, it’s a clunky word, but bear with me. The meta-team is a certain kind of group you gather around yourself, or that you find and join, or co-create. They share in the adventure of life, while committing to changing the world together—in a clear direction, but one with many open ends, changing and adjusting over time. What binds them together is a deep friendship and care for one another, but a friendship that is based on something larger and yet more beautiful than the welfare of the members of the group itself. It’s a bit like the fellowship of the ring, except better gender balance.

Perhaps you might even say that the meta-team is the “next stage” after following a guru and a rich person. We can all benefit from truly learning from someone who has skills and capacities we would like to have. But at the end of the day, we can only learn so much from one person, and then we’ll start wasting our time. The next step is to upgrade into a little community of knowledge and learning, where we learn together and from one another. That is what I have in mind with the meta-team.

Here’s how I think about it. When you gather people in a group, you will soon notice that they came for different reasons. I once started a political party with a few co-founders. What happened will always stay with me. The political party issued a manifesto that explained the profound importance of inner development in resolving the great issues of society. People started joining—folks were on fire with the idea that public life could be about such things as healing, embodiment, social resilience, and the general level of mutual understanding and trust. Even practices of meditation were an important part of it, to decenter one’s own perspective, we argued, and to more easily connect to abstract issues such as sustainability and ecology. We imagined that such a “process-oriented party” would be better equipped to seek the truth by always creating the best settings for dialogue and debate, and would find collaborations more easily across the political spectrum and thereby have a disproportionately large influence on actual politics. The folks who joined felt so at home, so inspired, that they had found their tribe, they were all discussing how marvelous they found our manifesto… And at the general meeting, I and my co-founders were out-voted by a strong majority who made the decision not to found a political party. Stupefied, I stood up and explained that it didn’t exactly make sense for people joining the party to vote against its existence, and that I’d simply start over with the co-founder and a new crowd of members. Otherwise, the majority was basically telling me and a few others what to not do with our own time. There was shock and disappointment in the crowd: You will leave us? We thought we were in this together? It dawned on me that we had tried to start a political party working for change, but we had attracted people who felt that this was their tribe, the purpose of which was the mutual support and care of its members, according to the values expressed in the manifesto. Sure, it would be nice if society at large expressed such values, but people had joined to get those needs met then and there.

Hah. Well, what do you do? The majority got their way, I moved on to other things, and the tribe largely dissolved without an ethos of “something big is happening here” (when I was no longer around talking about all the awesome things the party would achieve). I shrugged and decided to withdraw to the Swiss Alps to become a writer and social theorist.

The sociological lesson I draw from this story is the differentiation between forms of groups and what drives them, between reasons for people to come together, stay together, and act together. We have already encountered two such forms: the party and the tribe. But let’s list all five of them:

1. The tribe—people live together and make life happen. It’s about mutual care, friendship, and solidarity.

2. The party—people come together because they have a shared desire to effect change in the society around them, not always the same change but at least according to a vision less dissimilar than that of members of other parties. This can be a conventional political party or any other such movement for change, even an art movement. It represents a certain part of society, a certain perspective or truth that asserts itself and wishes to expand its influence.

3. The organization—people come together to regulate their exchanges and coordinate to reliably produce some well-defined result. It can be a search engine, medical care in war zones, or an ice cream factory. It’s not about the members themselves but about the results; the members can be exchanged.

4. The team—people come together to match corresponding and complementary skill sets and capacities for mutual benefit in achieving an already set goal.

5. The network—people come together to exchange social connections with one another for mutual benefit but with each person possibly bringing their own agenda or purpose.

By now, you may have guessed what I have in mind by the term “meta-team”. It’s a group of people whose mutual relationships manage to somehow successfully straddle all five of these forms, where each of them is transcended and included into a richer and more complex synthesis. The meta-team is not “just a team at work”, as they are also friends and have chosen one another; its members have not just been lined up by a third party employer. It’s not an organization, because it does not function according to formal regulation—but it still can get together and start companies or write contracts and social agreements. It’s not a political party, but it still works for a shared vision of change and larger purpose. It’s much tighter and more directed than a network, but it is fairly open-ended and people continuously exchange social contacts.

The meta-team is two or more people, perhaps up to six or seven. After that size, it becomes unrealistic to keep everyone sufficiently connected with everyone else. It’s a tight group of friends kicking ass together in the world for the greater good, doing awesome things that amount to more than partying on Ibiza—or at least making sublimely mediocre attempts to do awesome things. Or you might say it’s like one of those liquid crystal compounds: they can take on very different properties: behaving as liquid one moment, being hard as steel the other.[142] The meta-team needs to be able to take on these five properties and move seamlessly between them. Each of them takes practice, the growth of shared experiences, and the honing of skills.

The meta-team is when the relationships of a small group are integrated across three normally distinct spheres of life: the Personal, the Professional, and the Political. Conventionally, we have to join, say, a political party—and, sure, we can make friends there, or even get a political career started, but the party itself will always work according to the logic of politics, nothing else. Likewise, you can have political agreement with your friends, but at the end of the day, it’s about personal relationships, and so on. We all hate Venn-diagrams, but I think at least an imagined one is in order: Imagine three overlapping circles, one Personal, one Professional, and one Political.

The meta-team is that spot in the middle, where all three overlap, where the personal is political, the professional is personal and so on. It’s not like in a tribal or traditional society where these things aren't teased out from one another (you marry to join kingdoms or inherit farms, you work as a serf and that’s also your political status, and so on). It’s that the spheres are integrated: You are no longer a quiet prisoner of your corporation, where, even if you rise to its top and become CEO one day, you realize you still cannot live by your values. You no longer cannot explain your work to even your best friends, who would also be bored to death if you tried. You no longer have friendships that are solely about movies, pizza, and Ibiza—instead you call your best friend on Monday morning and explain a new way to save the world, but first we have to support them in finding a job… The personal, professional, and political are integrated, so that your group of friends work together for a great goal and support one another’s complementary skill sets and professional development, in all the ways this may take, which very often just means the care of intimate friendship.

The meta-team consists of the ones who view you in a positive light, but fairly correctly and accurately so. They know your strengths and weaknesses and still appreciate you and believe in you—and vice versa. Should you care what other people think of you, by the way? Uhm, yes. The secret to life is not to “not care what others think of you”, but to care even more about it, to even obsess about it. But the problem is that most people will think very limited things of you from very limited perspectives. Hence, their thoughts of you will be largely incorrect, very narrow. And it’s caring about those narrow and incorrect perspectives that deprives life of its meaning and gets us into the impossible lose-lose game of maintaining ten different positive but flat and false views of us that even contradict one another. Or trying to disprove the negative and equally flat views of people who disdain or dislike you. So, for certain, we need to cast off our dependence on the incorrect and flat assessments of us that really have almost nothing to do with who we are and what we do. That’s what people really mean when they say “you shouldn’t care what others think” (or what they would mean if they could think it through properly).

But when it comes to giving off correct and rich expressions of yourself to others, others who you in turn have rich exchanges with, I can hardly think of any more meaningful endeavor. Does it matter to me if others literally believe that I am, say, a serial killer of children? It does. It matters intensely. And if some conspiratorial or mistaken idea pops into the wrong person’s head, such things may indeed come to be believed about me. If we followed the maxim “don’t care what others think”, I shouldn’t give a damn, right? According to the principle that sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression maintenance”, we are all bound to control the impressions we give off: the wrong impression can very easily be made. Goffman famously observed in his studies on the Shetland Islands north of Scotland how people walking across the grasslands up to the houses of others would change their posture and demeanor as they approached. We habitually put on a show from the moment we have gained a social self-identity, from the moment we become aware that others see and evaluate us. We can’t help ourselves from doing it.

Right now, this very moment, I bet that there is someone out there who genuinely believes that you disdain and disrespect them, even if you do not. There is another person who believes you to be much less brave than you actually are. There is one who thinks you’re less honest than you are, less talented, and so on. And all of these impressions, these little mental avatars of you that others keep in their minds, guide how they relate to you, and those modes of relating to you set the boundaries for who you can show up as in your life and in your relationships. It sets the limits for that most social of all qualities of your life: your freedom.

You become free only by getting people to have useful images of you in their minds—and useful images have to be both positive, nuanced, and realistic. If they either despise you or worship you, it doesn’t make you free. So it’s by planting correct and sane assessments of yourself in the minds of others that you win in this game of life—you just have to avoid getting stuck in trying to live up to disprove or images of you that are too narrow and one-sided. And how do you do that? By really getting to know others, by deepening your relationships with them, so that they can get a rich and nuanced view of you in your many dimensions. But truly knowing people is hard. And that’s why you’ll need to work on finding and cultivating that meta-team every day of your life: the close network of people who really know you. And, unmistakably, they will notice that you are both mediocre and absolutely sublime.

Having a meta-team is not only great fun and a source of comfort if we manage to create and uphold it—it makes you remarkably more powerful, in the deep sense of this word. The projection of power never stops by your fingertips; it is never contained within your own person, body, or mind. It is always social, always emerging through your relationships. And it always depends on the quality, ethics, beauty, and coherence of what you seek to achieve in the world in the first place. If you work from the inside and out (becoming a “social justice warrior in your own life”, as we discussed) and continuously improve upon your goals together with others, making them more and more embodied in yourself, and then cultivate relationships with others based around such goals, you are becoming much more powerful: you can make greater events come into being, because you are aligning your own values and relationships with tenable pursuits. The power goes through and beyond you. It’s both personal and not personal. It is not the power of a CEO or a wealthy person or a dictator, it is transpersonal power.

It doesn’t matter how skillful or rich or well-positioned you individually become if at the end of the day, what you say and seek to achieve is not rooted deeply in yourself and the people around you. If others truly listen and truly care about the same goals—your ideas, hopes, and dreams will be heard and lead to shared action. Other power just falls flat in the greater scheme of things. You don’t need a Fortune 500 company, or even a presidency. You need a meta-team. After all, there were so many people who already got a presidency, and did that make the world such a great place? Did they all become happy?

The meta-team optimizes for transpersonal power. Not superficial power, not false power, not power of the self over others or any other such gilded cage, but the power of self in togetherness with others. Real power. The power to freely create, to dream, to breathe together, to dance through life and death, to mend the tragedies of existence. What else would a sane mind use power for? What worth is power that cannot do these things? Was Mao Zedong a powerful person, in the deeper sense? Maybe not, actually. He couldn’t materialize his dreams, because the dreams did not cohere and were not rooted in a group challenging and improving upon his perspective. Is Vladimir Putin powerful—really? He can blow up the world, but fails in his every endeavor these days. What power is that?

No other social form than the meta-team will truly optimize for transpersonal power. An organization will lock you up. A team will not drive deep change in the world and will pin you into a defined role. A party will not care for its members and their relations. A tribe will stick together but never go on a real mission. A network will make exchanges but fail to coordinate and deepen those exchanges for the common good and for greater goals. There’s a time and a place for all of these social forms—we can hardly live without parties and companies and networks and communities (or tribes), and sometimes we need to create new ones. But these already exist in abundance, and people are still drawn to gurus of all sorts, ending up kissing feet rather than co-creating solutions to the horrors of the world.

Our sociological imagination has been lacking here. We haven’t been able to imagine the social settings we need to truly flourish and grow. People have been starting the wrong kind of social settings, ones that are either stale and impotent or downright harmful. We need a new social form in our sublimely mediocre lives. We need a world full of sparkling little meta-teams, of groups of trusted friends who engage in playful struggle together, continuously improving upon their maps of the world, co-creating with sincere irony, and giving each other slack when we fail. Those who aim high together have richer lives, but also more ups and downs to be contained, cared for, and healed.

Humanity often slams herself for her will to power. But at the end of the day, people pursue status with greater ferocity than with which they go after power. This is backwards—we have it all wrong. We should hunger for more power and we should rise to grab it. It’s just that power, if you really look into it, means that you are free, cared for, unafraid, creative, and committed to something that is true, just, and beautiful. And that power emerges only in and through very high quality relationships that span from your innermost core towards wider circles of inclusion, care, and brotherly love.

The meta-team is a group of equal co-creators, explorers, committed to caring for one another and to doing what is right. Sure, some people can be more competent within them, but with enough care and complementary skill sets and characteristics—the meta-team works to make such differences desensitized and emotionally “contained”. Sure, Laurie is better at making money than Bill, and Bill is a great networker and listener. There, we are left to marvel together at how mediocre people together can do great things, if only they have a strong enough common purpose.

In a sense, it should come as no surprise to readers that a self-help book written by a sociologist should come to such conclusions: it’s the quality of the group and the relationships that matter the most. That’s where the action happens. That’s where real power lies. Everything we’ve discussed so far in terms of finding our own emotional grounding and values leads up to this: It leads up to becoming a social justice warrior within your own life. From there on, the gurus are just a distraction. Real power lies in the meta-teams. It’s not the A-Team, not the league of legends or heroes. It’s that very fact that we find people at a corresponding level of competence and with similar goals, become friends, and then grow wings together—by mutual care, mutual aid, and mutually upheld ethics. In the meta-team, we are more than individuals, more than the sum of the parts. It’s not always clear where I start and you begin, which ones are my ideas and drives and which ones are yours. We become intertwined, but not like drones in a hive. We’re part of the same higher principle that asserts itself in and through our life stories evolving together, refining our skills, deepening our struggles, rebirthing them as play on new maps of meaning, with new values explored, carved into new tablets.

Principles for Cultivating the Meta-Team

A lot of the following is written for the “creative class” segment, so if you feel it doesn’t apply to your life, no sweat, just skim and you’ll be fine. But my sense is that much broader groups should be made aware of there being such a thing as a meta-team. Otherwise they get stuck in all sorts of life-goals pertaining to only one of the five forms: if I only become the boss of this organization, if I could only become a respected member of the right team, if I could only form the party that truly represents my values… Not saying these things cannot be what you need. But chances are that you’re actually looking for a meta-team.

A whole book could be written on the principles of co-creating a vibrant and resilient meta-team. And, in fact, it should be written. (Any takers, dear readers?) But for the purposes of this chapter, let’s sketch a few principles. I’ll list them in no particular order—thinking aloud here, so you may need to develop the understanding of these from your own perspective. There are do’s, and there are don’ts.

Don’t start from a professional setting: slowly grow idealistic friendships. First of all, your meta-team is not, not, not your “team” at your day job. These people may be nice—more often than not, they are—but they’re ultimately there only because some third party is paying them to. They are not fundamentally your friends, at least not by default. They may have some unionized common interests with you, but they don’t share your unique perspectives and drives, as the social setting is not self-organized. They’re co-workers and even if you’d become best friends with one or two of them, the setting as a whole is defined by the goals set by a third party. You can start from other settings that aren’t necessarily friends’ groups: you can advertise your purpose and find people to work with. Generally speaking, friends are the best starting point for relationships that can evolve into a meta-team, but you need to understand that the more wild and unique the adventure you’re going on, the harder it is to find resonance with just any random old high school friends. So you might wish to make new ones. Once such resonance is there, though, it’s often easy to become good friends and close allies pretty quickly. The risk is that you tend to get too eager and over-invest and start having very high expectations of one another (“You will help me fulfill all of my dreams!”) and before long you’re having intrigues and status battles. So remember that mutual friendship is the primary fuel of any such setting, and it takes hundreds or thousands of hours of interactions to grow resilient roots and clear communication.

Don’t fall into the Mutual Recruitment trap: start doing the dirty work and see who’s your real friend and ally. This one is funny and also a little bit tragic. People have this sense that they want to contribute to the world—but then they encounter other people with visions, and before you know it, both parties are trying to maneuver one another into being “a part” of “their” bigger whole. And your project is always the greater whole, right? Because you’ve seen the farthest (having “the best map” and all that). So, sure, you may try a round or two to recruit people to a purpose that has come to you (not if Jesus spoke to you personally, though, then you’re just starting a cult and need psychiatric care, fast). But if others don’t join, don’t fake you’re interested in their work and then try to “make it a part” of your network or—shiver—platform. The others are smilingly trying to get you to be part of their platforms, insolent as they are, unable to see the unselfish universality of the platform you’re creating. They’re very often just listening to you to figure out how to get you to follow them, starting with putting your face, name, and title on a webpage that says you’re one of ‘em—so that they can impress others to join, and maybe figure out later exactly what this whole platform is about. In the transnational “change-maker” class, nothing is more common than the quest to “find the billionaire to fund my platform and recruit all the best people, uniting all of them into a larger whole, and once Oprah Winfrey joins my team, the world will change forever”.

Is this you?

As good as all of this may sound, it’s neither useful, realistic, nor original. Instead, you need to find the mission or vision that moves you, and then start working, no questions asked, no permissions requested, no super-wealthy involved. Then you’ll notice friends show up when you’ve hit a good and inspiring enough project where your talents come to the fore. This means that you’ll need to get over any ideas that “I’m the person for great vision and leadership, for seeing the whole, for bridging different worlds” and admit you’re mediocre and need to start where you’re actually at. But that’s okay, because your mediocrity just became sublime when you stopped running away from it and started doing your thing. It’s hard to dare to do your thing, but it’s not just for “great” or exceptional people. You choose yourself and commit to your vision, your justice, your values, and life becomes interesting, and its suffering a bit more worth it. The more work you’ve put in yourself, the more you actually have to invite others to.

Don’t formulate a shared purpose: cultivate “source alignment”. This one is exceedingly important. Don’t write down your meta-team’s “purpose” in a document and commit to that. What a preposterous thing to do. It never works. It doesn’t work for Coca Cola, it doesn’t work for Google, and it barely works for the UN’s many agencies. Values formulated on a static webpage have no value as they will always fail to regulate people’s action in the heat of each new situation. (Remember the time you had some tough issues at work and went on the company webpage to remind yourself and feel into those values you talked about in a workshop? Me neither.) But much more importantly, they will always become a mockery of what actually goes on and what drives you—and that will lead to decreased, not increased, motivation. If simply agreeing on a fluffy “purpose” (dignity, excellence, humility!) is destructive, what is the constructive way to get people to converge around truly meaningful projects?

Rather than the vague fiction of a “purpose”, all groups have something else, something that’s very real. We can call it “source”. Source is, in a sense, embodied purpose: the things that truly drive the key people in a setting, and how these drives take shape depending on the characteristics, personalities, resources, and skills of those people. In early Microsoft, who was “source”, that is the person that, if you remove them, the whole thing just won’t be the same? Bill Gates, right? It’s not that he made it to a certain formal position, it’s that he happened to have the contacts, funds, ideas, and drive to create Microsoft. If you would have removed him from that setting and instead let him work on a parallel-world company, Megahard, his “source” would have been carried over there, and Microsoft wouldn’t really have become a thing.

The same is generally true of any highly progressive and egalitarian organization structure—they generally had one or a few visionaries who created the social context to begin with.[143] People on the Left are wild with the worker cooperative Mondragon in northern Spain, which in 2019 employed over 80.000 people. Source? One guy, a Catholic priest named Father José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga founded it in 1956. Anyway—that’s source, the thing that works from within and through those key people to make something happen, that makes events and new social realities come into being. Chances are, you have been the “source” yourself in some settings in your life: where pretty much anybody else was exchangeable, but if you were to be removed, the whole thing would cease to exist or become something else entirely.

Now, the practice that I use in meta-team settings is called “source alignment”. It picks apart what the source is within the participants, and lets them get to know one another in depth according to the question: What do you really want? If you understand what somebody wants, what they truly ache for, then they’ll become much more predictable to you (and vice versa). And the source within you has three parts:

●    First, a high-end with a noble cause and a heroic story to go with it (“I want to save the whales, because I too know what it is to almost be nullified!”);

●    secondly, a WII-FM radio channel is always tuned in—What’s In It For Me?—the thing that we seek to gain for ourselves (“I really want to be recognized as cool and competent” or “I need to buy a house for my family”);

●       and the third part is what “the beast” wants, as we’ve discussed throughout this book—basically, the stuff that’s hard to admit but still drives you (“I feel that if I save the whales, nobody will ever think I’m the black sheep again, they’ll regret every bad thing they ever said about me!”) and this part is of course largely unconscious and may take a bit of self-scrutiny to uncover.

Now, the meta-team feeds on when your source, your innermost drives, from the highest to the lowest, align with another person’s. They don’t have to be the same, they just have to align, meaning that one step in their preferred direction will also be somewhat a step in your preferred direction. That sort of friendship is one where every part of you begins working for the wellbeing, flourishing, and fulfillment of the dreams of the other. I can tell you, having such friends feels absolutely amazing. Remember that the meta-team moves at the speed of trust, and if trust, as discussed earlier, has four dimensions (competence, goodwill, reliability, and aligned interests), there is nothing more vital you can do than to align your innermost wishes and wants. It can take work. It will. Conflicts do arise and sometimes lead to farewells, and not necessarily fond ones. But once the stars align, nothing in this world can stop you.

Don’t do empty networking: do deep work. If you don’t have a clear source and a context for that source, you may be tempted to always be booking new meetings with new people—hopefully as influential, well-connected, and talented ones as possible. Once you start having a bit of success and some good connections, there’s always links to new connections, each of which might possibly offer mindblowing opportunities. Best not miss out and talk to as many people via LinkedIn as possible! The problem is, of course, that if everybody puts too much focus on this aspect, whole segments of the most talented population end up doing little more than talking to one another about talking to one another. More networking is not always better: you must also invest in existing relationships to make them flourish, and you must focus on more difficult and demanding tasks that risk real failure: doing that One Most Important Thing You Can Think Of, and doing it with commitment and focus, owning full responsibility for it. Chances are a lot of the empty networking is only a very elaborate form of procrastination. So, at least for long stretches of time, limit your networking, your number of coffees, meetings, and video calls, and get some work done. When I retreated to the Alps to write books, more than a dozen people told me that I should “open up” and “not go solo”, even that I should be less selfish and more in tune with the people around me. But, of course, concentrating on doing some of my own work gave me something to actually talk to people about once I was done.

Don’t write the meta-team membership list in stone: expect iterations and changes. Your chances of co-creating a resilient meta-team at the first attempt are close to zero. Rather, you will have to start kissing frogs to find the princes, and in turn be a frog/prince for others. When you find a friend with which to start a project you really believe in, that’s a very good start. Then more people can be added, either as close friends and allies, or as part of wider networks (or tribes, or organizations, or parties, or teams). One place to start is to establish that with each person you meet and try to work with, you can at least agree on these ideas on cultivating a meta-team relationship. It needs chemistry and trust, and you may need to sometimes mourn the loss of relationships you’ve invested into but which can perhaps remain friends, or colleagues, or something else, but cannot be in your own meta-team. Meta-teams can have great resilience, but they’re alive, and you have to follow the honest impulse: what can be co-created here under conditions of mutual care?

Don’t reveal everything: just get rid of politeness. It’s a popular practice to do something very close to the “source alignment” I described above, but which is instead highly harmful. It’s also extremely common: It’s to “share vulnerabilities” within a group so as to strengthen interpersonal sympathy and mutual trust. It doesn’t work and very easily backfires. If you start “sharing” before there’s enough mutual trust and respect (and remember that people always feign trust and respect before they really get to know each other, as to be polite), people won’t be able to help themselves from making negative assessments and predictions about the persons who said something negative about themselves. Let’s say one person reveals they have a huge anxiety about going to the gym. If the others gathered don’t already know this person and understand how skilled and confident they are in many other settings, they likely won’t take this as a piece of brave self-exploration, but rather as an unflattering insecurity. If the others then reveal less vulnerable things, they will likely collectively feel superior to the very person who was most loyal to the spirit of the self-revelation game. And that would defeat the whole purpose of it. There is a place for revealing vulnerabilities, but in most settings it’s applied in a manner directly destructive to the quality of the group. So don’t fall into the trend, and quit if people start pulling you into it.

What one should focus on instead is to “get rid of the politeness”. The problem for groups working together is very rarely that we’ve never heard about what abuse everyone may have suffered as children—it’s that we’re too polite and cannot be frank with one another, that we cannot speak our minds safely and effectively without getting tangled up in arguments or risking social sanctions or prolonged conflicts. If you have a set of very long friendships as the core of your meta-team, this tends to take care of itself spontaneously: very close friends are seldom counter-productively polite. My meta-team is ruthless towards my texts, and frankly this book emerges as much from a network of very creative friendships as from a single person. In every social setting, there is a limit to how much “radical honesty” can be stomached. If you go past that limit, you don’t get greater trust, you get social decay. So I suggest a sort of “conservative” radical honesty: that everyone should be careful about what they say, and piece by piece build the kind of trust where you can speak so freely that you finish each other’s sentences and high-five as ideas and goals emerge when you come together. Once you get to that point, you’ll notice you can definitely talk about vulnerable stuff, too. But most often you won’t need to, because you’re busy talking about what to co-create, and how.

Don’t look for resumés: shake the freak tree and invite the best of what drops to the ground. Remember that the meta-team is a deep alignment between you and friends that spans the personal, professional, and political. Here, you just don’t combine people by matching their skills. You match the people and how their lives intertwine as they expose themselves to ever new circumstances, evolving together, co-adapting, deepening their bonds, and sometimes breaking apart to form new ones. This means that you’re better off with unusual minds and personalities—they may be difficult to integrate, but the synergies between them can be stronger still. In other words, you won’t identify your partners through their resumés, but by seeing how you can surprisingly jive with people who are somehow strange to you and wildly different. The freak tree sometimes does deliver.

Hone the main skill: communication. And why do we wish to be able to speak without politeness? Because it helps our effective communication, which we’ll sorely need if we are to bridge the perspectives of different folks who fell from the freak tree. Whatever else you might be doing in your life, investing in actively working on communication skills is a good idea. If your level of transpersonal power depends upon relationships, and all relationships consist more or less of communication—well, then communication matters, doesn’t it? Why is the king king? It’s the strangest thing, if you think about it. For some reason, there’s this “designated person” whose every command everybody follows—until you pass an invisible border (it can be a mountaintop, the middle line of a river, or even a straight line steadily floating across the desert, drawn by 19th century imperialists) and then everybody follow the commands of some other monarch. Of course, you could say that the king rules by virtue of controlling the military, so if you don’t follow commands and edicts, you’ll get in trouble. Sure. But why then do the army do what this particular person says? The king can hardly physically match the might of the combined armed forces. Or they might have inherited the throne. But then someone must first have done something to acquire the throne to pass it on in the first place. And what they did was this: More often than others, the king is the person who communicates the right thing, to the right people, in the right way, at the right time. The king is the person who speaks.[144] It’s a weird thing, but basically, it must come down to communication to a very large extent. Now, we’re not looking to become kings of our little meta-teams—it’s just to point out that how we communicate will set the limits for groups we can co-create and what these can achieve. Interestingly enough, though, there is not really a thing such as “being good at communication”. The field is too vast to be pinned down. Rather, we can, as with our “maps of the world”, adopt a stance of always assuming that our communication is not working optimally, that this explains many of the problems we may have with other people, and that we should always look for ways to improve. Just keeping this attitude will, over time, tend to result in actual improvements of the forms of communication we happen to need to master.

—

In summary: “keep it real” is a value we all tend to hold, if not always live up to. Frankly, life cannot be entirely real within companies, teams, or even tribes—or, for that matter, when we are the followers of certain gurus. So instead we need to create a social setting specifically designed to keep it real, to stay emotionally authentic, and to engage wider and larger parts of ourselves as human beings. It stands to reason that it is a wise commitment to strive towards such a setting as an ideal, even if it may not be within our reach: a meta-team of two or a few more people, perhaps up to six or seven. I would even guess that such a supportive and creative homestead is an antidote to much of the guru worship out there. Maybe people end up following gurus because they truly miss having their own meta-teams. We follow gurus, but what we want deep down is to co-lead a meta-team.

At the end of the day, finding a meta-team may not always be realistic and not suit everyone. Killing your guru, though, that’s for everyone.

Go now, my reader, and kill.

Twelfth Commandment: Play for Forgiveness

“If I owe Smith ten dollars and God forgives me, that doesn't pay Smith.”

—Robert Green Ingersoll

“Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.”

—Emma Goldman

“Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.”

—Scott Adams

“To err is human; to forgive is divine.”

—Alexander Pope

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
—Hannah Arendt

So, you’ve made it to the last chapter? You’ve got some nerve showing up here, having stalked me around for eleven commandments that you still haven’t followed—and now the clock strikes midnight. You really do wish to attain sublime mediocrity, after all? You want to raise your average subjective state? Okay, punk, your call.

But I won’t give you what you seek. I won’t reveal my final and deepest secrets. You’ll have to take them from me by means of playful struggle. It’s a fight to the grave; the eternal battle of reader against writer. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not here to fight, just to kill. Before this chapter is over, you are going to die.

Then again, the writing was on the wall. It was in the book all along: Twelve commandments for life and beyond. Life and death. The moment you opened the book—no, the moment I typed the first key on the first page—our clash was inevitable. Show me what you’ve got. The gods of war be with you; you’ll need every last one of them.

◆◆◆

There. I just challenged an unspecified number of readers around the world to mortal combat, including some of those rather fragile and cantankerous internet dwellers (we all know that there’s bound to be some such readers of this book). The most common reaction I get to this kind of writing is some version of a—often not quite polite and friendly—How dare you?

People tend to say or imply something along the lines of:

“You can’t just write that way. Who do you think you are? The rules of writing don’t allow it. You’re white trash with a PhD but you will never be respectable again, and your friends will turn against you because you’re just too damned rude and cocky, and you’ll have trouble with reactions from family members who think you’re being weird and scary, and every person around the world who dislikes you even the least now has cheap and freely available material to quote for them to show that you’re basically a savage boar, or some combination of immature and evil. You have to be mature and sensible to be a writer. ”

Well, I'll tell you why I can break every rule of the art of writing that ever existed and then some. It’s because I have, with age, become increasingly unafraid. And the less afraid I am, the less of a writer I become. Yes, you read that right: The less of a writer. Because there aren’t actually any writers. I’m a reader, just like you. I have no idea where these words are coming from, somehow bouncing off a keyboard, appearing on a screen, somehow mocking and surprising me. They flow from a source beyond me, from a larger fabric of mind, society, language, life, and cosmos.

And why is it that fear subsides? It’s because I owned up to my unhinged inner rage, integrated it, tamed its force. And then I took some steps on the path towards forgiving the world. Not just the world, but reality itself. The universe became my home.

What happened then? Well, I woke up to an entirely ordinary life. And I became… A still mediocre person. And I saw that it was good.

The Goal Beyond All Other Goals

You may remember that, at the beginning of this book, I suggested it is okay to strive for happiness—for having a subjective state “8” much more often, as I termed it. This means getting over that lingering low-level suffering that so stubbornly seems to follow us through life, state “7”, when life is “okay, sort of” but something still feels slightly off. I argued that notions of “meaning over happiness” (i.e. to hold that people should not strive to be happy, but to find meaning in their lives) certainly do have a point, but that they can easily end up providing us with excuses from taking the steps that would indeed give us peace and avail our minds to the beauties of the world.

Since those early simple arguments, we have been on quite a journey together. Eleven commandments have guided us through how such a peace of mind can be established: live in a mess, get over your inhibitions, quit stuff that doesn’t work, work through your shame and guilt, commit to always trying to figure out what is right and just and then fight for it, and so forth. The commandments have, I hope you can see, formed a sort of weave or pattern that fits together. The better you are at quitting relationships that don’t work, the easier it is to stand up for yourself in the struggles for justice that truly heal; the more you admit to having been held back by inhibitions and accept your lust for life, the easier it also becomes to see and admit that you’ve been held captive by the shame and guilt you have accrued over your life; the more you uphold justice around you, the better you can create and uphold a functional and vital little “meta-team” which in turn serves your capacity to do something that truly means something to you; the list could go on.

I have contemplated all of these commandments together, as one seamless whole. Whereas we surely could find examples of how the commandments clash or contradict, I believe that most readers will agree that for the most part they form synergies by reinforcing one another. There's a current that runs underneath them and interconnects them. This greater whole is about accepting everyday life, as well as our quite ordinary selves, and still finding ways to go beyond the mundane and delve into struggles larger than ourselves, into aspects of reality more magical than what everyday life normally allows. This is what I have called “sublime mediocrity”. It’s about being honest about our flaws—some minor and some downright awful—and accepting them, allowing us to really appreciate ourselves and what we can contribute. Following these rules leads us to a state of simply liking ourselves. From there on it is much easier to go on to work for a better world.

But where are we going with all this? Is there a goal that following these commandments leads us towards, as the ten commandments would presumably have led people towards closeness to the God of Abraham? We have mentioned a few contenders thus far, which have provided anchors throughout the book: to feel truly okay in everyday life so that the experience of life can bloom in full technicolor; to genuinely like oneself despite the inescapable fact that one will never be perfect; and to work for justice in all aspects of life, updating one’s view of what is just in the first place).

Yet there is a deeper goal behind all of these.

It’s a goal that cannot quite be reached. It’s a direction, an ideal. And if you think about it, the same is true of any goal: even a literal soccer goal is there to be scored again and again. It sets the direction for every game, for every match you play.

The goal or direction I have in mind is forgiveness. When you forgive is when you really “score” in life.

The basics of this insight is what they will teach you in every course, every therapy, every forgiveness meditation. Forgiveness is something you do for you; it means letting go of resentment, rumination, and prolonged inner self-harm. It is a capacity rather than a choice, but it always involves making a choice: to try to let go of hatred and animosity. Bitter emotions and the ruminations that come with them always present themselves as “your only friends in a dark and hostile world”, but they are not. Rather, hatred and animosity are the enemy, more so than whatever real-life foes or betrayals life throws at you. Forgiveness is victory over the pettiness and suffering of your own mind: it is the path to inner peace.

That doesn’t mean that “you should always forgive”. If life is a soccer game, forgiveness is the goal on the opponent's part of the field. You want to make it there, despite all troubles and resistance, and score—again and again. But you don’t want to shoot for their goal while standing next to your own goal post. You’ll miss, and you’ll lose. Nor do you wish to simply run straight towards the goal. What you need to do is to play with your teammates, collaborate, and wriggle and dribble your way across the field, and when in range and there’s an opening, give it your best at that one shot at glory.

Likewise, if your dad whipped you and your mom left you and your teacher molested you and your government locked you up and tortured you… You don’t wake up on Tuesday and “just forgive them”. Forcing yourself to feel something you do not is just being cruel to yourself; it means forcing yourself to be repressive and inauthentic. Trying to forgive more than we have the capacity for is like your local under 16s facing Manchester United and shooting directly for  goal directly from your goalposts. You’ll get your ass kicked all over again. And Manchester United, this demonic power, will score goal upon goal: renewed resentment, inhibition, wounded self-worth, lack of healthy boundaries, low subjective states… It’s the opposite of successful forgiveness.

Remember the idea that we have an inner child and an inner adult? The child has real, raw emotions, reality and its limitations be damned. The adult grows its skills and capacities and takes responsibility for the child, protecting it, feeding it, and letting it roam as freely as possible. The level of safety that the adult can create determines the degrees of freedom that the child can feel, to which extent it is allowed to play, to be real, to wonder, to surrender to the experience of being alive.

Well, the same thing holds true when it comes to forgiveness: real, heartfelt forgiveness can only be offered by the child. If the adult tries to force forgiveness upon the child, it is a form of self-violence that will end up creating harm, resentment, repression, and eventually violent upheaval. The adult plays the games of life, setting things up for forgiveness to occur: setting boundaries, clearly seeing what’s just or unjust, standing up for oneself, going through difficult emotions and self-scrutiny, taking a higher perspective. But the child alone forgives. All the adult can do is to play the games of life in a manner that makes it easier for the child to take the direction of forgiveness. And this requires, of course, that the adult mind understands fully and clearly that forgiveness is not always possible here and now, but that it is always the right direction to take—if even by detours of self-assertion and struggles for justice.

I have labored to craft a set of commandments that will lead you in the direction of forgiveness in your life. You make sure you cut yourself some slack, living in a mess so as not to be so tough on others, either; you quit people who mistreat you if nothing else works; you work through your own difficult emotions;  you challenge your perspectives and find new ways to see things; you cultivate close relationships that are not defined and confined by professional or other superficial roles… And so it becomes easier to score forgiveness. The most important part is that you first need justice. You really cannot forgive before justice has been achieved. Think about it: The Nazis rule and they’re killing you and your family. You go: “I forgive you, guys.” Noble, sure. But, first of all, your forgiveness isn’t likely to be genuine or at least not sustainable. And, most importantly, they will just go on killing your family and other families too, forgiven as they are.

Forgiveness comes after boundaries have been set, stuck emotions released and integrated, stories straightened out, bigger perspectives found and adopted—and when justice has been established and done. Not before. It’s a direction, a goal, not a commandment. It’s stupid to command the soccer players to “score goals”. Instead, instruct them wisely in playing the entirety of the game, and they will score when and if they can.

So what this final commandment adds is a sense of direction to the entire set that we have explored: on the deeper level of analysis, they all always aim towards forgiveness.

And forgiveness is the path to happiness.

When you forgive, the bad stuff that keeps you down is released, and you come alive again. You accept things as they are, and you have some freedom and power to act again—to act deeply, from the heart, on things that matter. Often those turn out to be small things, much less grandiose than the things you had in mind while you were still trying to get back at the world. When we are in a state of unforgiveness, our minds are tormented and seek to “show ‘em all” by means of glory, fame, achievement, or violent rebellion. When we are in a state of forgiveness, all of those things seem smaller and less important, because we are free to experience the beauty of the here and now. We are in a state of harmony and coherence. And that is also usually the more creative and constructive state to be in. So we forgive for ourselves, for our own sake. It’s what makes us healthy. It is what makes life worth living.

I suggested earlier in this book that we should not minimize conflict, but minimize resentment. Forgiveness is exactly that minimizer of resentment. It is never about avoiding a necessary and just confrontation or struggle (should Amnesty International “forgive” perpetrators of human rights violations by ceasing the documentation of these?). It is about minimizing the resentment that takes root in you and, indirectly, in other people as well.

When we forgive, something dies. You die. Or the story of you does. It is weird how strongly we rely on the story of someone or something else out there to pitch against ourselves, so that we can define ourselves as the good guy, the hero. But if you tame the dragon, if you forgive the enemy, you lose that story. Your “self” becomes strangely vacuous—at least until a new story pops up through the dramas of life.

So that’s what I had in mind when I said I’m going to kill you a few pages ago. Or rather you will kill your own inner adversary, the one that sabotages your processes of forgiveness. This adversary is, to a large part, the story of you that you identify with: the story of that tragic hero and the bad guys out there.

Luckily, it’s rare for authors to literally kill their readers. Sure, it happens—especially in 17th century academia, when dueling culture was trending across Europe and an insulted doctoral thesis could lead to death by pistol or sword at dawn. But I tend to forgive less-than-generous reviewers. Or I will. I’m working on it.

The Rage, the Enemy, and the Grief

Here’s the thing. They hurt you. They belittled you. They rejected you. They excluded you. They misused your trust and turned your kindness against you. They let you down, harmed you, knew that you suffered, and let you suffer. Sometimes they even enjoyed watching.

Sure, you did most of those things, too, to some degree—just in ways you didn’t quite take into account or register quite as clearly. And, sure, some of the things they did to you were in fact justified: it is okay to reject people, just as you have the right to decline offers from others, and it is okay to fight back in cases where you were being aggressive or unfair.

But we both know that far from everything they did to you was justified. A lot of it was just plain wrong, regardless of whether you may also have done something correspondingly bad. Two wrongs don’t make a right. They fucking hurt you, they abused you. And it’s not okay. It never was. You were outgunned, outnumbered, drawn into a situation where you were flustered into silence, where you were peer-pressured or threatened with exclusion. People used your position of vulnerability, or their positions of relative power, and they hurt you again and again.  And even when they didn’t mean to, they failed to show you respect. How many times did you swallow disrespect in your life, just looking the other way, if you’re entirely honest?

There is a game of appearances that we must play with regards to others, pretending that we were always treated with respect, so as to instill in them a sense of respect for us. If they knew about all the ways we were looked down upon and disrespected and failed to defend ourselves, they too would fail to respect us. And we would be unhappy if this disrespect spread to others. Best pretend it never happened, or it might happen again. Best to not even remember the truth. And so we are tempted to play the same game of appearances with ourselves: to deny that we were hurt, to pretend we were not.

The truth is, of course, that we all were hurt. You too. That’s how life works, simply because human beings are equations that don’t add up; we’re walking paradoxes. What is the natural response to this predicament, one that we all share if we’re entirely sober and honest about the matter?

It’s the rage.

Let's be real about this. It takes a bit of vulnerability, but we can do it.

Life contains so many and so severe belittlings for so many of us that we cannot but be pissed off. Royally. I don’t mean that we’re sometimes angry about something that happened, and then it passes. There is something else, something deeper and more permanent in nature. You came into this world open, hopeful, and trusting—and what happened? At one point or another, they let you down. They let you believe that this world was for you,  but then something shifted, and you realized it was a cruel trick, an illusion, that between the velvet lies, there’s a truth as hard as steel. And if you look squarely at it, the evidence for that fact is everywhere: Why are there homeless people? That’s how people would treat you, too, if you only happened to become more vulnerable still. Why do we harm animals, or let poor people stay poor? Why do we walk right past people who are very obviously in need of help? Why did they walk right past you when you needed them? How many times did such dark insights flicker past you, as shown in the ways that you actually were treated by others?

It’s not any old anger. It’s the rage. It’s dignity stepped upon that wants to stand up straight, but never got to. It is the little child who was hurt and betrayed, now returning as the beast, out of any and all adult control and beyond any sense of identity: there’s no story any more, just pure fury. It doesn’t matter if you’re a petite old lady with a pink umbrella and a doctorate, the rage takes over your entire being, converging all parts of you into one will, one force. Time to get mad as thunder.

I know that people deny the existence of the rage. They won’t admit it. They cannot. But looking at the world and how people in it act, anywhere and everywhere, it’s unmistakably there. It’s explosive violence against it all, against God. It’s a roaring “NO!” from the bottom of your heart and the core of your being. It’s a power so visceral, so alive, so fiercely burning that nothing in the world can stop it when it bursts forth.

Sure, tell me you don’t have it. I for one don’t believe you.

It’s this rage that we’re going to let run through us—killing everything in its path, our sense of self included. Yes, the rage doesn’t just tell people off. It kills without a blink; in a pure flow of fury, it takes control of your bare hands and plunges them into the chest of the enemy; it breaks their ribs between your hardening fingers, and rips out a pumping heart, inundating your body with their blood, its taste filling your mouth as a deep bellowing roar righteously echoes through you fills the world. It grabs them by the hair of their neck and bangs their head bloody against the asphalt, crushing bone and smearing brains on the ground, watching in triumph the complete disfiguration of the soft face of your enemy. The rage is its own meaning, it has all justification and the acceptance of all consequences of its limitless violence within itself always-already. It doesn’t matter if it’s murder. Beyond fear, beyond morality, beyond any and all shame, there is no inhibition left in the universe, its laws rewritten with the blood of all those who wronged you. The beast is unleashed, beyond all good and evil.

Jesus flying fuckballs. With such tremendous and murderous forces latent in the rage, it is no wonder we hide from its sheer power—a power that is ultimately our own, that lies at the very heart of our “source” that we tap into when we take on the tasks and projects we care the most about, together with our closest allies. But the very force of the rage is nothing else than the first step towards the power of forgiveness. It is by discovering, admitting to, feeling, and integrating this rage that we can begin to forgive not only one or two bad people who wronged and harmed us, but the painful predicament of existence itself.

This divine anger—admitted to, surmounted, integrated, felt, and contained—is agency unleashed and power gained. The rage is your friend, your unending source of rejuvenating strength. But never let it be your boss. Anger is powerful, but it is never wise. So your task is to tame the dragon, and only then to unchain it, to ride it into the glory of sublime mediocrity. Anger is weak and cruel when it does not serve justice, i.e. the greater whole of social resonance. But when aligned with your deepest sense of what is true and right, when aligned with ends for which lies need never be told, because all of your actions are self-explanatory, your rage can shake the foundations of the experienced cosmos and salvage mankind.

So the ends do not justify the means. They never do. Justice, by definition, is when your means, not your ends, are clearly justifiable; when every scrutiny and question make the justification for your actions clearer and smoother still. If you only perform justifiable actions, it’s hard to see how they could lead to non-justifiable results.

Interestingly, if you act justifiably, the formulations of your goals begin to evolve themselves. Our goals and values slide, but not downwards; they rise towards greater heights. The goalposts move, not because someone else is rigging the game, but because you play an increasingly  wholesome game to start with. And so you begin to try to score better goals, worthier goals, goals that make for a better game. Compare that with setting a great goal first, and then doing a mixture of good and bad things to get there: you’ll end up serving another goal altogether, but not one better than you imagined.

Hence, righteous anger is defined by being unafraid of openness, of the free flow of information, of scrutiny and critique. It needs no secrets. That’s why it is the real source of courage, the capacity to contain and overcome fear—even the deepest existential terror, which is the flipside of the rage. You need not fear being questioned, because you do have an answer, or at least you are set upon finding the very best answers to justify your actions. Not excuses, but the real answers for why you act the way you do.

And here’s the thing: anger brought to such usage, to such holy war, ceases to be painful for its carrier. It sings and chimes, through every cell of your body: I am here, I am responsible, and I am alive. Struggle is reborn as play.

What, then, can be said of the eyes of God, of an imagined being who could judge the actions of each of us? When you tame the rage and unleash your powers, you begin to affect the world much more. How, then, will you know if it has all been for better or worse on the day of judgment? After all, your sense of justice is just your own. It’s not universal and cannot be.

This is where we need the enemy. In the larger scheme of things, the enemy is our closest friend. Not the “enemy” you falsely constructed in order to have someone to blame. Your real enemy: the one that genuinely serves purposes that are conflicting with your own. Here’s how I think about it.

Your map of the world, from which you derive your capacity to imagine what is right and wrong in a given situation, is always, by definition, imperfect. So your holy war, your playful struggle, is also always imperfect, a fool’s errand in the eyes of a postulated omniscient God. But if you work your truth to its proper conclusion and fight with justifiable agency towards your ethical goals, you are doing the best you can to play your part in a larger emerging whole. This leads you to encounter (and engender) not only new friends and allies but also an increasing number of direct opponents. And these may very well be as justified as yourself, only from their positions on other maps of meaning. Thus your respective worldviews lock into mutual struggle—which is just as intimate as the exchange of ideas and perspectives among friends—and that’s where the fireworks of truth and justice truly happen. God sees not your individual actions (“Oh, here’s a pious young fellow who does exactly my bidding, how charming!” is probably not how an all-seeing God would reason). He/She/It/They would see your unique contribution to the larger, emerging whole. Human beings are relative, partial and particular; God is absolute, whole, and universal. God judges your contribution to the whole larger than yourself.

Thereby, we land at a crucial point to understand how anger must be tamed: your enemies are not truly your enemies—not in the eyes of God. God contains multiplicity, God has all perspectives, the “gaze from nowhere” that belongs to no particular single being; all of us particular beings must by definition just be a part of the whole.[145] Thus, people who you come into conflict with may seem dastardly and damned from where you sit, a fuck-ton of evil garbage. But if you fight them all the way to the gates of hell, to the darkest corners of human existence, you will see that they have been your brothers and sisters all along. They’re part of the whole, and the fact that they elicited your sense of injustice and rage may very well be one of the greatest gifts of your life. I’m not saying you should be kind to them; I’m saying you should follow your righteous anger to its proper end, but always keep it within the bounds of ethics, retaining a playfulness of the struggle.

Therefore, never try to destroy your enemies. Savor them. Respect them. It’s understandable you want to go Django on their hypocrite oppressor asses. If you’re perfectly honest with yourself, you do. But your enemies are just as useful as your allies and friends, only as intimate partners in life. Together, through conflict, you are bringing each other closer to a larger truth, even if that truth may only be reached by someone else entirely at a later point in time—perhaps someone who reflects upon and learns from your conflict. This is, I believe, why Gandhi insisted upon never killing any living being: you thereby destroy a part of the truth, i.e. the unique perspective of that being. No roaring rampage of revenge will ever set the world straight.

To make a sociological reference: The Belgian theorist Chantal Mouffe formulated what she called agonistic democracy, i.e. the stance that democracy and its resulting policies evolve just as much through the conflict of ideas and interests as through friendly discussions of common interests. The aim of our democracies is to contain and tame these conflicts, so that they are productive rather than destructive. The same can be said of conflict in general and the rage that fuels it: Sure, maybe there is a larger kumbaya in which all is oneness, but this kumbaya must contain all of the rage and conflict as well. Otherwise, it does not truly contain all. The eyes of God are loving of all, yes—and that includes the part played by the rage. Otherwise, it’s a thin kumbaya, a hollow hallelujah.

But even beyond the rage—indeed, beneath it, lies a bedrock, untouched by the storm. It’s the grief. The rage simply dissipates when it meets this yet larger force: its hurricane falls to a whisper once it meets the wailing wall within. The tears of existence.

As with the rage, I am not speaking of the normal grief of losing a loved one or going through a crisis or illness. I’m speaking of the fundamental grief that bemoans existence itself. Life did not turn out the way you had hoped. There were longings, love, desire—dear and embarrassing hopes in you. They drifted away, out of your reach. They never came back. You felt that nothing will ever be truly good or beautiful again. A part of you became alone. You have lived your life as though through a glass wall, never truly participating in what it has to offer. There were things that went so utterly wrong at some point in your life, within your very own family, that it simply broke your heart. There is a grief for the suffering of the world: the suffering that shook you to your core when you found out about it, but which you then looked away from, because you had to. We can fail to see it, this grief, we easily can. It’s too self-evident for us to even notice. But the reason there’s something a little “off” with—well, everything—is that the underlying grief is there.

This too, must be felt, accepted, integrated and—to the degree that it is at all possible—understood. When the grief takes over, we physically hurt throughout the body. Our guts and hearts ache. It’s an otherworldly sadness: heavy, dark, awful, and strangely beautiful all at once. Once we get to know it, we begin to truly approach forgiveness of the world and of existence itself. It is a sadness even beyond tears, beyond loss, beyond death. It’s a sadness for the existence of suffering in the universe, about the fact that there is nothing you can ever really do about it. No matter how well your life turns out, no matter how much good you do for others, suffering will exist in quantities you can't imagine.

If we begin to feel and accept the existence of that grief, we are coming close to forgiveness of a more cosmic kind: becoming grateful for the world even if it is unfathomably unjust and terrible. It is, after all, also immensely beautiful. Maybe it’s not all “worth it” and maybe there’s nothing we can do about that. But we can forgive the world and love it nonetheless. I guess we have to. This cannot be a “Stockholm syndrome” kind of love, loving the world because we’re too scared not to, as hostages love their captors. The only sane aim, the highest spiritual aim, is forgiveness of the world despite all the suffering its existence entails.

Here, the Christian religion may have got it entirely backwards. Satanists have long attempted to create a form of “reversed Christianity” but, in my mind, never convincingly so. Rather than inverting the idea of good versus evil, or the idea of humble submission versus proud individualist rebellion, one should reverse the direction of forgiveness. It is not God that came down in human form and forgave us; it is we who are here to forgive God for all the mediocre crap He made, ourselves included. The atheist Stephen Fry was once asked what he would say to God if he, to his surprise, should meet Him in the afterlife, at the pearly gates, and thus find out He was real. Fry replied not that he would regret not believing as the interviewer seemed to have in mind but something along the lines of How dare you? He then proceeded to list the evils of the world that an almighty creator must be held responsible for—and for which the almighty could only reasonably be condemned. It was one of those powerful rhetorical moments that millions remember:

“How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That's what I would say.

Now, if I died and it was Pluto, Hades, and if it was the 12 Greek gods then I would have more truck with it, because the Greeks didn't pretend to not be human in their appetites, in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness … they didn't present themselves as being all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind, all-beneficent, because the god that created this universe, if it was created by god, is quite clearly a maniac … utter maniac, totally selfish.

We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him? What kind of god would do that?”

But there is something lacking in Fry’s reply: Whether a God exists or not in any meaningful sense, our ultimate direction in life is to forgive reality in its entirety, and thus to forgive God. Even if you’re an atheist like Fry, you still have a whole world to forgive, whether or not you can blame it on a personal God. Even with twelve Greek gods, you still have to forgive the cosmos (which means the “order”) that brought them forth. If we are to take seriously the old saying that to err is human and to forgive is divine, this is a quest that lets us, ordinary people, strive towards the divine.

In the end, the position I suggest lands closer to Christian forgiveness than to Satanic rebellion. Forgiveness is still the key, but it is yours to give after you’ve taken a proper bite of the cosmos. Perhaps our tendency to worship a forgiving deity is a form of projection of our own capacity to forgive. Think about what an awesome power that is. Maybe it seems too great for us, for our little all too human selves, to hold such a divine capacity—too incredible to be true. And so we figure that God must be doing it, not us.

Or rather, I suggest a synthesis of both positions: forgiveness and rebellion, both in higher and more completed forms. If Satan is a symbol of the ultimate rebellion and individual self-assertion, he somehow fails to make the cut: forever stuck in a world where he is below someone else, forever resisting, gorging on pleasures and power but always still in anger and spite. Wouldn’t it be a greater and more total rebellion to take the power back and forgive God for the suffering of the world? And—if we’re entirely honest about what pisses us off—for our own suffering? We can do this regardless of whether we believe that God happens to exist in a personified form or not. Would not such a rebellion make you more princely than Lucifer, all said and done? Does not Satan end up looking like a prince of nowhere, a king of nothing, in his eternal incapacity to forgive God? At the same time, does not such a position of rebellion-though-forgiveness seem strangely congruent with the Christian ethos—the religion of turning the other cheek?

This is the sound of both-ands clapping.

It is a manner of thinking we are unaccustomed to. We have all been taught to believe that there are only three possible fundamental theological positions:

To believe in a religion literally (or some much more light-weight version thereof, such as playing a bit with the thought of believing from time to time).

To not believe (to be atheist or strong agnostic).

To believe in religions as repositories of deep, transrational truths, which hold true on an existential level, more so than even many of the most ardent literal believers tend to realize.

But if we follow the reasoning we just outlined concerning the inversion of Christian forgiveness, a fourth position presents itself: To view religions as repositories not necessarily of transrational truths but of transrational or existential truth claims—each of which can always be reevaluated, deepened, or in some cases downright rejected. In other words, the fact that you take a transrational stance on religion does not imply that you need to accept its existential answers. It means you try to read those deeper truths as clearly as possible and then seek to advance them to their highest (or deepest) form. If we do that with the doctrine of forgiveness, we end up with a new game of life—one where the ultimate victory is the forgiveness of God, the universe, of everything, everywhere, all at once.

While we may not achieve the complete forgiveness of “everything” in our lifetime, at least we can see it as the master direction for all other forgiveness in our lives. Healthy forgiveness never forces itself upon us; it’s never the ideals and demands of the adult commanding the child. It comes when the adult creates space for righteous rage, upholds protection from the enemies we all have, and invites the healing that takes place during grief, thus letting forth a sense of freedom and happiness as the child returns and dares to love again. That is the power of forgiveness. For my part, I can only call it divine.

Death by Game Theory, Death by Virtue

Forgiveness is about seeing and accepting the rage, the enemy, and the grief. Three steps, sweep away your inner dramas and the sense of self you have built up around them. It doesn’t make you any less clear concerning who can stay in your life or not or give people more opportunities to step on you—on the contrary, you set firmer boundaries and let people deal with their own problems, protecting yourself from them, thereby forgiving them much more easily. This is not something you can tell yourself to “just do”, but it sets the direction for life, and offers a compass. The reason you want to achieve justice in your life and work for it beyond yourself is that it is a prerequisite on the path to forgiveness: at the very least, your own clarity on what you believe would be just. As we have seen, this even leads to a theological argument: if we are to approach the divine through the ordinary, it is by forgiving and accepting existence in its entirety: Loving thy neighbor is not enough, you should also love his demon.

But enough of this hullabaloo of cosmic questions, of gods and monsters. We should now take a closer and more practical look at the structure of forgiveness itself.

The first point draws upon game theory: Forgiveness is about healing transgressions against the agreed-upon rules of the “games” that we perceive ourselves to be playing with and against others. If we play a soccer match and get our arses kicked 12-0, we might feel bad about it, but if the other team played by the rules and won fair and square, we really have nothing to complain about. We were out of our league and if we feel resentment we need to get our story straight and deal with it—otherwise, we’re being sore losers. But if we won by 2-1 and they only scored their one goal by cheating (say, seducing the referee), we do have something to forgive. Forgiveness is about the rules of the game being breached. And so, its ultimate goal is to re-establish fair play and cooperation once justice has been attained. (If anything, this underscores just how important it is to find your own sense of justice: without it, you won’t even know if you have anything to forgive.)

What do I mean with transgressions? Well, it depends on the game being played. If you bribe some people to vote in an election and threaten others not to, you break the rules of democracy. If you lie in a family conflict to get people on your side, you break the rules of trust within families. If you grow your business faster than your competition because you illegally evaded taxes, you break the rules of industry. When you break the rules, you are contributing to breaking the game itself, and bringing the whole to ruin. You ruin democracy, your family, the country’s business sector. And you tend to be most tempted to do so when you feel entitled to a victory that for some reason isn’t yours (when you were pretty sure you’d win, but then you lost for some reason, and the whole thing seems devilishly unfair, even if it wasn’t).

The games of life always break down sooner or later; their rules are always broken.[146] As beings partaking in these games, it is our predicament to play the best we can, to uphold fair and just games, and to evolve the games themselves so that they become more win-win, more generative of beauty and happiness. And the inner state of forgiveness is our way of healing a game that has been broken and gaining the larger perspective that allows for a new, higher, and larger game to emerge from the ruins of the old. The rule-breakers are the evil ones, for certain. But these enemies are the teachers; those who through their actions reveal the cracks and contradictions of the game we’re currently playing, guiding the path to a new and greater game.

The second point draws on virtues: If forgiveness can heal the games we live by, what steps need to be taken for this to happen? What is the structure of forgiveness?

When we talk about forgiveness, we usually not only make the mistake of thinking it’s a thing we can just choose to do (“score a goal against Manchester United, otherwise you’re a bad person!”). We also make the mistake of assuming it is a matter of black and white. Either you forgive, or you don’t. But, of course, it isn’t. If forgiveness is a direction, we can divide it into steps. It is sometimes appropriate for us to take just one step, sometimes several or even all the steps. We go as far as we can in the direction of forgiveness, judging on a case-by-case basis how far to go.

Inability of the mind to divide tasks, processes, and goals into their sub-steps is, by the way, one of the universal reasons that we fail at things: it goes for everything from finding common ground with people we disagree with, to managing large work projects, to changing our lives and habits. If we don’t see the sub-steps, our minds get overwhelmed and we don’t know where to start (or we pretend we can just jump to the last step and do a shoddy work of it).

There’s always a first step to take, however seemingly miniscule. And so it is with forgiveness. If full and conclusive forgiveness was always within everyone’s reach, we would already be seeing it everywhere. It isn’t and we don’t. But there is always a step towards forgiveness available to us, one that we can realistically work on taking, whilst never forcing.

It is helpful to know and to understand fully that forgiveness is the direction of life, whether we like the thought of forgiving someone particular or not. And it helps to know that you can work in that direction by intending to forgive, if you don’t force it upon yourself, offering only repression and fake forgiveness—or confusing forgiveness with accepting and condoning unacceptable and unethical behaviors.

One way of dividing the process of forgiveness into its sub-steps—or stages—is the following:

Stage One: Forgive yourself for having let yourself down. It is easy to overlook this stage and get stuck in the process of forgiveness, as you are projecting anger and disappointment on others, while these emotions unconsciously target ourselves. It thus becomes all the more difficult to achieve forgiveness, as you have not straightened your own story out: sure, others did what they did, but likely there was a part played by yourself. Perhaps you acted recklessly and put yourself at risk, or perhaps you didn’t set boundaries and enforce them, or perhaps you were kind and trusting where obviously inappropriate, or perhaps you did something to provoke and escalate conflict, or perhaps you gave your power away to someone else, hoping that they would relieve you from some burdensome responsibilities. Maybe it’s that you have adopted a sense of victimhood that makes you hurt much more than you truly had to. There’s very often an “own side” to being victimized—one that doesn’t need to diminish the moral transgression of the other party, but still matters. Hence, before we even begin to forgive others, let us try to forgive ourselves for our part in it all. On some level, you probably let it happen, and you may be pretty angry with yourself for it.

Stage Two: Forgive the reality of the situation. Look, what happened happened. You cannot change it (even if tampering with your memories can be tempting). It is the reality of the moment, and unless you accept that a certain harm has been done, a certain ethical breach has been made, it becomes all the more difficult to truly forgive others involved. The pain may still be there, but you can accept even that.

Stage Three: Forgive the honest mistakes of everyone involved. It is often difficult to know the difference between malicious or callous intent and honest mistakes (not least as all the crooks in the world will do everything they can to make the former look like the latter). But to the extent you can notice the parts of the matter that were honest mistakes, these are so much easier to forgive, and that teases out the rest of the transgressions that were downright unjust and malicious.

Stage Four: Forgive the enemy. The enemy is someone who has genuine malice or disregard for your experience. They may not admit this to themselves, and they always feel that they are underdogs, protecting themselves, and so on, but malice and disregard are real enough, even behind all smokescreens and rationalizations. There’s always a Picasso of pettiness to find sophisticated excuses or a Shakespeare of shit to embellish dastardly deeds with the poetry of opportunism. It has been shown in a million brain scans that people can derive pleasure from seeing someone else sustain damage of some sort—especially if that  someone is envied or a competitor. Likewise, there are those who may simply disregard or be unaware of your interests. Most people really don’t care about the suffering of industrial farming animals. They just don’t care. Many of the Russian invaders don’t care about Ukrainians—it’s just a fact. Now we are getting into things that are truly difficult to forgive. But going through the first three stages makes a world of difference from cold-starting with this one, and if we have managed to achieve this much, at least the issues are clearer and less tangled for us to be able to face it directly: they hurt us, they liked it, and we hate them for it, yet we should still try to forgive them. The enemy is a part of life, our best and most valuable teacher. It takes work, but forgiving your enemy also grants you spiritual victory over them, which usually translates into victory in life at large.

Stage Five: Forgive the game. Eventually, we may reach the point where we begin to feel that there was “nothing to forgive”. A bunch of weird stuff happened. Mistakes were made, perhaps more by others than by ourselves, some evil roared its head, yes, but it was all just a drama of Shakespearean proportions within a game we are now beginning to leave behind, along with the identities we held within it. The game and its flaws becomes transparent to us, and we begin to see another, larger game, a new paradigm, that we would rather play by. New rules for new days begin to emerge. You begin to forgive not only the particular situation that occurred and the people in it—you begin to forgive the game itself, how its cracks and errors allowed for some people to play foul and hurt you. And so you feel enthusiasm for playing a new and better game, building on what you have learned.

Through these stages, we let go of the game we were playing, and the ideas of self and identities we held within that game, and this kills us off—that is, our ego stories and dramas are killed and can be reborn at new, refined levels. There is even some research from Indonesia to suggest as much: forgiveness seems to help us cling less rigidly to a certain idea of our “self”.[147] And where does this process of forgiveness lead us? Towards virtue.

Which virtues? Well, the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the way that Aristotle’s old “virtue ethics” could be reintroduced in our days was by seeing the different games of life and how these can be harmed. If you win a chess match because someone sends signals with a vibrator in your sock (having used AI to see possible moves and then let you know when to stop and think with a buzz, which can easily sway a world championship level match, etc.)[148], that may feel like a win for you, but it is definitely not a win for the game of chess itself and its worldwide community of players.

A vice is that which lets you win at the expense of whatever game is being played. A virtue, conversely, is that behavior which lets the game itself be the winner, and you can thus win in a more sustainable game. Otherwise, you are wearing it down.

At the same time, as we have seen, the virtues that apply for each game come to the fore precisely by the vices of people breaking its rules. Thus, if there were no rule breakers, there could be no virtues, either. And the virtues are principles that make it clear how to play the games of life in the best ways possible.

In the end, as death always wins over life, so vice always wins over virtue: sooner or later, the game breaks down. All systems have contradictions, cracks in the wall. Evil always prevails. There is always something new to forgive. There is no problem we cannot create. But the victory of evil is always a pyrrhic one: when a game breaks down, there is always a new and larger game to be discovered, where new virtues can come into being.

And so, historically speaking, we have gone from virtues of, say, purity and piety, to virtues of democracy and scientific truth. New games have emerged, with new virtues guiding their players.

The world is rich with potential; there is no problem we cannot create. At times when life feels dark and unfair, think of this: When it really hurts, and evil reigns, and everything seems to be awry, remember that your game of life is dying and new, higher virtues are being born.

The Art of Crying in Public

The entirety of this book leads up to this sense of direction: always towards forgiveness, but never an arrogant or premature one—never one that underestimates the immensity of the task. Forgiveness is difficult. It takes time. And even so it only unfolds in steps, the later ones of which may be too much for us. Let us thus by no means judge the unforgiving—ourselves included. Let us be forgiving of unforgiveness.

How, then, should we practice the art of forgiveness? There are, of course, many books and resources out there to address this side of the matter—and a whole “Forgiveness Project” at Stanford. The training they offer has shown some promising results: even women who lost sons in the civil war, “The Troubles”, of Northern Ireland could make dramatic improvements on their mental health and reduce their feelings of hurt.[149] Actively and deliberately practicing the art of forgiveness seems to work wonders. Here I will suggest a few tricks of my own and leave you to experiment with finding your ways. The techniques may vary according to who we are, what we have to deal with, and so forth—but the direction itself appears to be universal and highly effective.

The first suggestion is to start doing “forgiveness meditations”. If you’re already doing meditation as a part of your body-mind workout, this becomes easier, as you can swiftly find the calm, focus, posture, and attitude to work from. Forgiveness meditations come in different forms: the less elaborate ones tend to be 10-15 minute “compassion meditations” or “metta practices” that involve focusing on your heart and feeling compassion for someone you love with whom you have an uncomplicated relationship, then for yourself, then for someone you don’t really have an opinion about, and last someone you have a beef with—in that order. The increasing difficulty means that you move more and more into conflicting emotions and begin to work actively with getting over your resentment towards someone else, seeing that they too suffer.[150]

Again, doing this before you have a clear sense of justice, your own opinion about what was done right or wrong, and what the proper boundaries are in the situation will only make matters worse. You can get into the nasty space of “spiritual bypassing”, i.e., calming your mind and on a surface level feeling loving and calm, whilst underneath boiling with lust for the blood of thine enemy. Not good for anyone involved, least of all yourself. These powerful practices can and should only come once you have genuinely reached the stage of “forgiving your enemy” and the path to that can sometimes be longer than we’d like to admit. At least forgiveness meditations can help us set the clear intention to forgive, and then, only when we’re ready, they also help us to truly let go.

But, if you go online and search for guided forgiveness meditations, you can find more elaborate and perhaps more powerful ones than the simple 10-minute compassion meditations. On YouTube, for instance, there are a number of rather corny, New Agey ones that use rich imagery and remind you again and again from many angles the importance of forgiveness. If you’re not too allergic to listening to such people, these meditations can be very effective. You don’t need to buy all the things the New Age folks and “teachers” say to enjoy the benefits of some of their forgiveness meditations. Shop around, try it out, that’s my suggestion, throw a fuck into it. Embrace the cringe for a moment; it won’t bite. And it might make the difference between living the rest of your days in inhibition and slight anxiety, or in relative happiness, peace, and sublime mediocrity. Bit by bit, channel the rage, meet the grief, forgive the enemy.

Speaking of meeting the grief: We all tend to cry too little. Or, really, most of us do. And the most emotionally powerful way to cry is not alone, pale, and crouched into a fetus pose under the noise of the shower. It is to cry publicly. To stand by our tears. To own our sorrows.

You may have noticed that—as sociologists like to say—everyday life is ritualized. There are rituals, rules, and norms for when and how to appropriately do what. And there are, unfortunately, rather few rituals for truly crying and mourning. It’s a flaw of our modern culture: always being too upbeat, too concerned with signs of success.

You could resist this culture, of course. You could stand up to its debilitating “emotional correctness”. You could do—as we all have a friend who did—a Facebook post of a photo of yourself with red, swollen eyes and resentment written all over your face, with the caption #noactuallythingsarenotgoingtoworkout and #ihatemylife. That’s what real despair looks like. It is not pretty, but it is what it is. It is a gutsy thing to do, no doubt about it. But then, of course, we wouldn’t be acting very appropriately and more harm and shame would come from our actions than healing and relief.

What can we do instead? Well, if modern culture has stupid elements of emotional correctness, and we approach it with sincere irony, we can always hack it. We can play according to its rules for deeper benefit. Indeed, it turns out that there are public spaces in which you can legitimately sit and cry: namely, graveyards and churches (or whichever temple you happen to frequent). There are even, in the graveyards, memorial groves that honor many dead or the tragedy of death itself, not the passing of one particular person. Such memorial groves are for sorrow and grief what nudist resorts are for nudity. There, nobody can legitimately blame you for resting on the bench and crying in public.

So cry. Let your tears run, my friend. It’s been a hard life. It will get harder still. But if we can cry, if we can feel the grief and let it take over our bodies and fill our minds, if we can embody it, hold it, contain it, animate it, we are forgiving the world and healing it from the inside out, making room for new beauty and happiness to be born, for our hearts to love life and reality itself. This, I believe, is the surest way that we can truly take responsibility for the world we create together.

Together, we walk the long path towards forgiveness, following and refining the rules that lead us there, never underestimating just how grand and difficult it is to forgive. And one gray, dark, and cold day we will meet there—in a graveyard, tears running down our faces, weeping for the sorrows, our own and those of one another.

And, right there it is: through forgiveness, the mediocre human being becomes sublime, her ordinary life becomes divine.

◆◆◆

Anyway, I need to go. I have some dishes to do and all that. My home is a moderate mess, you know. And my home is the loving cosmos. I will see you out there in the mix.

Until then, always remember my commandments.

[1] Conclusion from a 2008 study of the research literature: “There is some evidence that reading problem-focused self-help books tends to be helpful for people with specific problems. As yet there is no hard evidence for the effectiveness of reading growth-oriented books. This is a regrettable omission on the part of academic psychology.” Bergsma, A. (2008) Do self-help books help? Journal of Happiness Studies: 9, 341–60.

[2] If nothing else, while reading can have negative effects (we move too little, and may read to postpone doing things we should), book reading in general increases brain connectivity (while screen time may have the opposite effect). It also builds vocabulary and comprehension, prevents cognitive decline with aging, reduces stress, and can even increase empathy. So here we go.

[3] Technically speaking—and this is a fun fact—the “ten commandments” of the Bible are actually also twelve, not ten. But a couple of them tend to be grouped and thus we arrive at ten; this concept of “ten commandments” was further popularized by a certain 1956 film with Charlton Heston.

[4] I am also not “against Peterson'' just in general. I find him difficult to love, but like with most people, there’s some I like and some I really don’t. Back when he was a new phenomenon I wrote a critical article, but that targeted him primarily as a political commentator and new authority figure on YouTube. This was before the flood of leftwing commentators began doing the same. Reading his material since then, I have found some wisdom in it and I view some of his work and psychology in a positive regard, while still viewing his public statements and political stances largely in a negative light.

[5] Here, I’d like to note that Peterson’s second set of 12 rules (his second book) does indeed take a more social and relational perspective, albeit from a more conservative standpoint than my own, and perhaps I find that he does not go far enough in this direction.

[6] The working title of the book was 12 Much Better Rules for L*fe (And Beyond), but shortly before the publication I decided against it.

[7] Quoted in Zadie Smith’s article in The New Yorker, “Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking”, December 24th, 2021.

[8] Indeed, there are interesting parallels between Marx in his day and Peterson today: Marx defected from the upper classes of society to ally with, speak for, and lead disgruntled industrial workers of his day. Today’s working class and farmers are often more conservative, nationalist, and less environmentally concerned than the educated upper middle classes—and so their politics are different from 19th century socialism, but they are still in opposition to something that corresponds to a “bourgeoisie” (liberal, educated people). Peterson—with his engagement for trucker protests in Canada, farmer protests in the Netherlands, and so on—arguably represents the positions and sentiments of certain segments of today’s working and lower middle classes. He has, like Marx, become a renegade scholar and truly unmatched public intellectual in terms of influence. Since I first encountered him online in 2017 (and some of my friends interviewed him, including the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel and the UK chess grandmaster Jonathan Rowson who hosted him at the RSA, Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) I have had an ominous sense that Peterson’s influence on politics may have as destructive consequences as those of Marx. As Bertrand Russell once noted about Marx, he believed Marx to be driven more by hatred of the rich than by concern for the poor. Correspondingly, I cannot but strongly suspect that Peterson is driven much more by his dislike of liberal political correctness and the groups that represent it (like Canada’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau) than by concern for the common people who tend to be alienated by liberal values. There is thus a vengeful and destructive—one might say reactionary—tone to the entire endeavor. This will likely lead to fallout and suffering in terms of polarized politics, failed climate mitigation, legitimization of oppression such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and eventually the repression of liberal values and those that represent them. But this is not a book about politics, so let’s keep my commentary to this footnote.

[9] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. A magisterial work, although still with an insufficient analysis in my view. But that’s another story.

[10] A term by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist.

[11] https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/49126668 (downloaded May 16th, 2021). Just Google it if my link doesn’t work.

[12] CHT, Center for Humane Tech, is a Silicon Valley-based organization that questions social media from an insider perspective, as featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.

[13] Although Vervaeke, also a friend and a theorist I truly respect, adds a wider content to the term.

[14] All this is according to the Mental State of the World 2020 report, by Sapien Labs. See: Thiagarajan, T., Newson, J. (2021) Mental State of the World 2020. See: sapienlabs.org/mental-health-million-project

[15] From the Kaiser Family report “Generation M2”, 2010, p. 8: “For example, Hispanic and Black youth

average about 13 hours of media exposure daily (13:00 for Hispanics and 12:59 for Blacks), compared to just over 8½ hours (8:36) among Whites.”  This study is already a bit old, of course. If we look for more contemporary data, there is a 2022 study of over 10.000 smaller children (9 or 10 years old) which found a corresponding pattern: black children spent 1.58 hours more by a screen per day as compared white ones. That’s every day, so it arguably makes a difference. Nagata, J. M. et al (2022) Sociodemographic Correlates of Contemporary Screen Time Use among 9- and 10-Year-Old Children.The Journal of Pediatrics. Vol. 240: 213-220.

[16] Although, to be fair, one could argue that the entire world was affected by industrialization, just mediated through the process of colonialism.

[17] Another historical parallel is when narcotics seriously made it into Western societies in the 1960s and 70s: an unprepared society that did not know how to self-regulate around this left many young people exposed to addiction and the decay that followed. Berlin suddenly got its fair share of 13 year old heroin addicts.

[18] To be fair, I even consciously laid the ground for some of that by choosing a theatrical style of writing and going into hot topics, often as a contrarian (which, by the way, is not in and of itself a virtue or mark of excellence).

[19] Okay, to be entirely honest, I haven’t read all of the other ones.

[20] I’ll also skip the part about sexually harassing Whitney Houston on television: “French” is not an excuse. Hold me to it.

[21] I sometimes add a fourth ”H” to this population: the Hermetics. These are the folks who are interested in and expert at creating symbols and rituals that reflect the spiritual and existential predicaments and potentials of our time. These also form an important part of the emergent transnational creative class. Then, of course, one can refer to the “Quadruple-H Population”.

[22] If you compare the 73-year old Slavoj Žižek, a man who’s obviously struggling to stay cheerful, who in an email to the French historian Keanu Heydari replied: “Sorry for the delay of my reply. I am simply too old and tired for such things, I lack concentration. It is sad.” with Noam Chomsky who at the ripe age of 93 always replies, even to complete strangers (which myself and my relative who’s struggling with schizophrenia can attest to), the importance of staying reasonably happy, both to one self and the world, becomes obvious. It arguably also makes things more interesting. On a side-note, however, I personally tend to prefer Žižek of the two thinkers and writers.

[23] Kim, A., Maglio, S. J, 2018: Vanishing time in the pursuit of happiness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 25(4):1337-1342.

[24] Seriously, have you seen the skies and its vast, open expanses? Or, if you’re blind, have you noticed the richness of the background silence that encompasses every sound so perfectly, that holds every reverberation so lovingly? Or if you’re deaf and blind, and are still somehow taking part of this, have you noticed the basic goodness of the field of sensations, from warmth, to soft touch, to the freedom of simply taking a breath? Of course reality is tremendous. But we still need the homestead of the ordinary from which we can appreciate it, a fundamental sense of safety.

[25] There’s lots of research on this, too. Just use a search engine if you're curious, I won’t bore you with the details. But a good place to start is: Lyubomirsky S., King L. (2005) The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin 131(6) 803-55.

[26] There do seem to be cases of everyday people who trip over a profound inner change and seem to continuously hover in high states, as has been studied by Jeffrey A. Martin and his team, but these are rare at best, and the data need to be checked and corroborated for the findings to be conclusive. Even if true, it is unclear to which extent these can be learned from and the experiences spread to others. As an indication, I did take the “Finder’s Course” crafted by the same team, as did several of my friends, and none report having made this shift, despite promises of a 70% success rate by the team. This naturally does cast doubt on the research. In each and every case I observed, mediocrity reasserted itself—even if valuable meditation techniques were learned, one of which I’ll return to in this book.

[27] Who just passed away a few days before this was being written, peace be with him.

[28] Zhong C-B., Strejcek B., Sivanathan N. (2010): A clean self can render harsh moral judgment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (5) 859-862.

[29] Helzer E., Pizarro D. A. (2011): Dirty Liberals!: Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes. Psychological Science 22 (4) 517-522.

[30] Kevin T., Chapman G.B., Stich S. (2013): Cleanliness is Next to Morality, Even for Philosophers. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20 (11-12). Interestingly, as a side note, the pattern was reversed for (academically accredited) moral philosophers; they seemed to become a bit more lenient if primed to feel clean. So for readers who are philosophers, ignore this part of the argument, and go clean your room!

[31] An overview of the literature can be found in, May, C. “Most People Consider Themselves to Be Morally Superior” in Scientific American, January 31st, 2017.

[32] Skitka L. J., Bauman C. W., Sargis, E. G. (2005): Moral Conviction: Another Contributor to Attitude Strength or Something More?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88(6) 895–917.
Blanken I., Ven N., Zeelenberg M (2015): A Meta-Analytic Review of Moral Licensing.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41 (4) 540-558.

[33] Tappin B. M., McKay R. T. (2016): The Illusion of Moral Superiority. Social Psychological and Personality Science 8(6) 623–631.

[34] Speltini, G., Passini S. (2014): Cleanliness/dirtiness, purity/impurity as social and psychological issues. Culture & Psychology, 20(2) 203–219.

[35] Jack, T. (2018): Representations – A critical look at media’s role in cleanliness conventions and inconspicuous consumption. Journal of Consumer Culture, 0 (0) 1–23.

[36] Not my quotation marks, they’re from the original YouTube title.

[37] Simon, C. J. (2012) “Who's Judgmental? Five Key Symptoms” in Psychology Today, Apr 10, 2012.

[38] In Kondo’s vocabulary, tidying means putting stuff in order, cleaning means making sure it’s free from dirt. As she says, cleaning is a struggle against nature, tidying a struggle against yourself (because it was you who moved the stuff around in the first place).

[39] Formal statistics as we know them in the social and natural sciences of today, with hypothesis testing, significance, the power or correlations, etc., were developed in the 1920s and onwards.

[40] “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.” From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1955.

[41] Whereas various aspects of Durkheim’s study have been criticized for generations, his basic point has stood the test of time: the world’s suicide leader in terms of societies, Lesotho, has a rate about 292 times higher than that of the least suicidal society, Barbados. By comparison, having bipolar disorder (previously “manic depressive”) increases the risk by 10-30 times as compared to the general population. Society matters.

[42] That’s what I have called The Listening Society in other work; it’s a society deliberately geared to help each of us become a healed and healthy version of ourselves, thus becoming better for others as well.

[43] And other heroes of today’s university life, including Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-François Lyotard.

[44] This term, cosmoeroticism, is not a coinage of my own. My friend the educational philosopher Zak Stein noted in an email that he and Marc Gafni had been actively using and developing the term for years and this is very probably where I have picked it up myself. Their work should be considered the origin of my use of the term—without me necessarily adopting all their views and developments of the topic. See more in Stein, Z. (2018). Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern “Return” to a Metaphysics of Eros. Integral Review, 4(1).

[45] Indeed, let’s say I got this particular story wrong and it actually is largely false accusations, as Culadasa and some others claim: remember that this is a recurring pattern in spiritual circles.

[46] “Guy Sorman accuses Michel Foucault of abusing boys in Tunisia” in Daily Sabah, March 31st, 2021.

[47] This whole ordeal has a nasty “postcolonial” undercurrent to it; the colonizing France’s exalted intellectual was abusing the boys of the colonized Morocco. To be fair, though, already in Foucault’s day, postcolonial theorists like the Indian literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, were challenging the Eurocentrism of the leading French intellectuals. The accusations against Foucault only surfaced recently, so she was not privy to them, but she mounted attacks on the level of theory and basic assumptions: who gets to speak for the downtrodden and exploited? She was perhaps more right than she could have imagined.

[48] Here is a quote from a blog Slate Star Codex, where an entry from October 16th 2019 titled “Is Enlightenment Compatible with Sex Scandals” summarizes the discussions from an interview in another magazine (as you can see, different explanations are tried out): “Tricycle Magazine discusses various theories for why Buddhist sex scandals are so common. Maybe Asians from patriarchal cultures do badly when transplanted to the more sexually liberal West (…but Culadasa was white and born in the US). Maybe powerful men are naturally tempted to behave badly when surrounded by vulnerable female students (but Culadasa didn’t have sex with his students). Maybe the Mahayana emphasis on how enlightened people transcend ordinary human norms causes enlightened people to, uh, transcend ordinary human norms (but most of Culadasa’s training was Theravada).”

[49] Some of the most insightful people I’ve known have been sex workers; as I have understood it, this is due to their unique vantage position to see what’s hidden to the rest of us.

[50] Unfortunately also a guy with a somewhat shady record, by the way.

[51] If we have sex lives and partners at all; many people of course don’t for various reasons, which for the record is okay; and, yes, this chapter still applies to you if that’s the case, as we all have these inner flows, drives, and desires either way, and these can play out differently in sexually active or inactive people alike.

[52] But the Russian feminist activist/art collective Pussy Riot have a knack for balancing the need for dominance/submission with feminist sentiments.

[53] The left side of our bodies is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, the emotional and intuitive side (and less of the analytical processes, as has been discussed in works like My Stroke of Insight by the neuroscientist who got a stroke that deactivated the left hemisphere, Jill Bolte Taylor, and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary). It is also the side of us where the heart normally resides. A genuine smile can often, in my own experience, be felt from the heart as a kind of shining that beams up through the face. It’s common to view this “brain hemisphere” trope as outdated, but it turns out to be a highly relevant idea, just at a more complex level than previously imagined in the public debate. See these two referenced books for a thorough discussion.

[54] Quote poached from Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.

[55] You could arguably add a fifth dimension, which has to do with emotional report or resonance; that you feel seen and understood. This last aspect is important, but it often tends to be overemphasized in our time, as people are starved for authenticity and connection. It will likely fall into place if all the other four dimensions are there. What good, after all, is an emotional connection if you end up not being able to rely upon one another and if your goals collide?

[56] Websearch “Claude François Comme D'Habitude” if you don’t believe me.

[57] See the Wikipedia article for “My Way”.

[58] For readers interested in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of social science, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm has written a book that takes this “skepticism turned on itself” logic to its end. It is titled Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.

[59] “Postmodern” here largely corresponds to what I have called ironic/nihilistic in this text.

[60] Hashtag: Douglas Adams’ novel, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

[61] From John Vervaeke again: “The religion that isn’t a religion”.

[62] Edinger-Schons L. M. (2019). Oneness beliefs and their effect on life satisfaction. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 12(4) 428-39.

[63] Li J. P. F., Wong J. Y. (2020). Beliefs in Free Will Versus Determinism: Search for Meaning Mediates the Life Scheme–Depressive Symptom Link. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1, 1-14.

[64] “Revolutionary happiness” is a term I’m borrowing from Jason Ananda Storm.

[65] A term by my friend, Layman Pascal.

[66] To “oscillate” means to, like a wave, move swiftly back and forth between two poles.

[67] Real-life versions of trying the Robin Hood thing out include Stalin (robbing trains), the Blekingegade Gang in Denmark who robbed banks to fund Palestinian resistance, and Symbionese Liberation Army formed in Berkeley, California, who kindnapped and brainwashed the rich young woman, Patty Hearst. Neither of these appear to be moral role models.

[68] But, like with combining nationalism and socialism, be careful of “radical conservatism”, which basically is the stuff of the far right. That’s a bad both-and.

[69]And she refers to other people who have brought it up, see: https://tricycle.org/magazine/arent-we-right-be-angry/ (viewed on Dec 17th, 2022).

[70] Due credit: My friend, Canadian sociologist Brent Cooper, came up with the joke about “metamodernists” which inspired this formulation (“metamodernists” being a term for people committed to sincere irony, see my other work). It goes: “How do metamodernists masturbate?” “With both ands.” He presented this joke in Berlin 2018, with the preamble that there should be no polite laughter. So no polite chuckles now either, folks.

[71] He asked to be anonymous, but goes by the alias Ghasedak. A big thank you also goes to my other editor, Laurence Currie-Clark, who worked through the entire manuscript.

[72] Encyclopedia Britannica: Vedanta, one of the six systems (darshans) of Indian philosophy. The term Vedanta means in Sanskrit the “conclusion” (anta) of the Vedas, the earliest sacred literature of India. It applies to the Upanishads, which were elaborations of the Vedas, and to the school that arose out of the study (mimamsa) of the Upanishads. Thus, Vedanta is also referred to as Vedanta Mimamsa (“Reflection on Vedanta”), Uttara Mimamsa (“Reflection on the Latter Part of the Vedas”), and Brahma Mimamsa (“Reflection on Brahman”).

[73] Encyclopedia Britannica: Vajrayana, (Sanskrit: “Thunderbolt Vehicle” or “Diamond Vehicle”) form of Tantric Buddhism that developed in India and neighboring countries, notably Tibet. Vajrayana, in the history of Buddhism, marks the transition from Mahayana speculative thought to the enactment of Buddhist ideas in individual life. The term vajra (Sanskrit: “thunderbolt,” or “diamond”) is used to signify the absolutely real and indestructible in a human being, as opposed to the fictions an individual entertains about himself and his nature; yana is the spiritual pursuit of the ultimately valuable and indestructible.

[74] Terrance “Terry” Patten unfortunately passed away during the writing of this book. A friend and mentor of mine, I grieve his loss and hope that this chapter, and the entire book, serves some of the goals that he committed his life to.

[75] Note that I’m not here claiming that this is a complete “theory of emotion”. Such a theory must include at least four aspects: sensation, perception, interpretation/cognition, and movement of the body (action). Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on emotional psychology is particularly useful to understanding the interpretation part. I’m just discussing sensation here as a part of the subtle layer of experience.

[76] It is what one might call “ontological safety” because it has to do with our sense of reality itself, about feeling safe about our experienced reality “being real” in the first place.

[77] Lin I-M., Tai L.Y., Fan S.Y. (2013): Breathing at a rate of 5.5 breaths per minute with equal inhalation-to-exhalation ratio increases heart rate variability. International Journal of Psychophysiology 91(3).

[78] McGonagal, K. (2012): The Willpower Instinct. New York: Avery.

[79] Inagaki K., Shimizu T., Sakairi Y. (2018) Effects of posture regulation on mood states, heart rate and test performance in children. Educational Psychology 38 (9).

[80] It’s no coincidence most kings and queens wear crowns rather than hats: to wear it well, you must adjust your posture, thus affecting your psycho-physiology and appearance. Likewise, the sovereign tends to wield a spire—thereby adopting a posture where the arm is distanced from the body, the armpit exposed as in a confident and relaxed pose, hands facing downwards in a commanding stance.

[81] If you do pomodoros (25 min work, 5 min break, repeat four times, then 15 min break before you go again) during seated work like writing or programming, this is a perfect practice to bring in during the five minute breaks, as it helps to maintain posture during long hours of sitting.

[82] The orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex, apparently. See Tsukiura T., Cabeza R., (2011): “Shared Brain Activity for Moral and Aesthetic Judgments: Implications for the Beauty-Is-Good Stereotype” SCAN 6: 138.

[83] I learned about this by reading the Stanford primatologist Robert Sapolsky’s 2017 masterpiece, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, p. 35 and the entirety of chapter 12, pp. 425-77 in the 2018 Penguin edition. But the studies cited used by Sapolsky is Zink C. et al., “Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in Humans” Neuron 58 (2008): 273; and Freitas-Ferrari M. et al. “Neuroimaging in Social Anxiety Disorder: A Systematic Review of the Literature” Prog Neuropharmacology and Biol Psychiatry 34 (2010): 565.

[84] As for the other deeper meaning of Peterson’s rule, “standing straight” as in standing up for ourselves or our values and being assertive, we will get back to it in later chapters, but it is also affected by simple things like posture.

[85] This is a shorthand way of saying that the first piece you invest into something, it’s very valuable, but from there on, the more you do it, the less there is a gain from it. For instance, the first 15 minutes you put into exercise will lower the risk of heart attacks more than the subsequent 15 minutes. So just taking the first step tends to be more worthwhile than anything.

[86] Such as plantar fasciitis, Achilles and hamstring injuries, IT band pain, knee pain, and low-back pain.

[87] Sure, you can read the guy’s book and learn from it, just don’t trust him with the finances of any organization you’re running.

[88] This part, and thus the following ones, often don’t happen, it’s only on good occasions; but when they do happen, and you have an EEG meter, you can actually see a big spike in gamma brainwaves at this point, i.e. the quicker waves, also associated with euphoria, loving-kindness, and compassion.

[89] In my mind, this 8-step sequenced meditation also seems more viable than going directly to “the power of now” as taught by teachers like Eckhart Tolle. Tolle’s teaching would correspond to going directly to the last step, the quality of “immediacy”.

[90] Wish I could. But, alas—another mediocre creature under God.

[91] Sadly, people who do take their own lives have often convinced themselves that “it would be best for others”.

[92] Tricky, tricky, this part. Remember that an abusive and transgressive party will often try to appear magnanimous by claiming that “there is no conflict” and that they cannot for the world imagine why you’re so upset. They will try to get you to “see the bigger picture” which will always mean letting them off the hook and submitting to their unacceptable behavior. And they will try to sway third parties to their side by saying that only one side is keeping the conflict alive. But a bigger picture must always include the establishment of justice, as a whole chapter is dedicated to in this book.

[93] By the way, improving life on our planet and beyond is intimately connected to expanding our shared capacity for such “higher ground” solutions. This is the deeper meaning of “game change” (rather than “game denial” or “game acceptance”) and what is ultimately aimed for in the vision I keep coming back to: “Struggle-reborn-as-play”. In transformative moments, we can actually “get” the big cosmic joke that has been played on us, and we can respond to the world’s inherent paradoxes without bitterness and strife. What appears at one level as a life-and-death battle, can in the larger scheme of things turn out to be a playful opportunity for something new to emerge. As Leonard Cohen sang, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. But which light? The light that shines from the “higher ground”. Bitter conflicts and colliding interests can, when conditions are favorable, turn out to be growing pains, carving the path towards transformation, a new synthesis, even the bloody birth pangs of the revolution. Revolution does not just mean revolt and upheaval; its promise is always a redefinition of social relations in a manner that creates a new and somehow more encompassing whole. To be sure, tunnel-visioned revolutionary zeal seldom, if ever, creates such revolutions. Wizards do; alchemists do; those who can see nonjudgmentally with multiple perspectives and live with paradoxes, weaving new facts from former fictions, and new (partly fictional) narratives from the crude facts of the world. It should come as no surprise that the old master of leadership development and action research (research where you actively participate in and contribute to the social processes you study), Bill Torbert, has called such people “ironists”: to work towards such transformative solutions often requires the stance of sincere irony. Nobody can always manage to be such a wizard or ironist, but surprisingly many people have the potential within them to be this quiet type of “background hero” when the opportunity for transformation presents itself.

[94] On one side of the coin, we can only select the relationships that are available to us “sociologically speaking” (ever say a biker gang member having tea with a Muslim lady in burka at the local café, discussing Russian opera? In theory the choice seems free to make for both of them, but sociological structures more or less disallow it from occurring.). Our very sense of self emerges through interactions, and so our position in society will make some choices open to us, others not. On the flipside, all relationships are embodied within ourselves, and are thus of a deeply personal and unique nature, dependent on our own proclivities and choices. So whenever we are empowered, we can choose and shape our relationships to a higher degree. We also want, if we’re thinking straight, for others to be empowered to choose and shape relationships, so that we know that others relate to us from their own free will, from their hearts, rather than out of fear, guilt, or simply old habit. It just makes more sense to be in relationships that we genuinely want, and to be genuinely chosen by others.

[95] Conti R. P. (2015) Family Estrangement: Establishing a Prevalence Rate. Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Science. 3 (2), 28-35.

[96] Gilligan M., Suitor J. J., Pillemer K. (2015) M G Estrangement Between Mothers and Adult Children. Journal of Marriage and Family. 77, 908-29.

[97] Womick J. et al (2021) Exposure to authoritarian values leads to lower positive affect, higher negative affect, and higher meaning in life. PLoS ONE 16(9).

[98] Elnakouri A., Hubely C., McGregor I. (2022) Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 98.

[99] Hawkins D. N., Booth. A (2005) Unhappily Ever after: Effects of Long-Term, Low-Quality Marriages on Well-Being. Social Forces 84(1), 451-71.

[100] Boriskovsky, A. (2016) Don’t Stay for the Sake of the Children, Research Shows in DivorceMag.com. Of course, we could ask ourselves if the kids are right about this, or if their opinions are misguided. But at least this is what they themselves say they’d prefer.

[101] And other practices involving managing negative emotion for that matter, which, presumably, is why MDMA has proven to be such an efficient trauma healing remedy in clinical trials, not least among war veterans suffering from PTSD, since it allows people to revisit old painful wounds in a very high state, essentially being blissed out on super-high levels of serotonin.

[102] Case in point: the spelling and grammar correction program wants to change “when you abused” to “when you were abused”. Our inability to see our own guilt is so universal that our digital tools cannot even spell it. Oh, and it also wanted to change “comport ourselves” to “comfort ourselves”.

[103] A slightly simplified version of the story, but essentially a true one. I grew up in a fairly rough neighborhood my first years.

[104] Yes, the unconscious is a thing.

[105] Paid anyone to torment and kill defenseless animals so you could eat the spoils of their bodies, anyone? Oh, no guilt around that? None at all, because it’s not wrong in the first place and by the way lions also eat gazelles? Okay, just checking.

[106] The so-called Kindlab research team, under Oxford-based Oliver Scott Curry’s leadership, have recently suggested that human morality consists of 7 “elements”, all of which have evolved to further cooperation among humans. Each of these implies a corresponding morally negative action: 1) neglect your family; 2) betray your group; 3) cheat; 4) be a coward; 5) be arrogant or fail to show respect to those that deserve it; 6) be unfair; or 7) steal. I’m not sure the Kindlab team have hit a homerun with this theory, but at least they try to offer us a contemporary, updated, version of thinking about universal “sins” and “virtues”. To be exhaustive, we can look through this list and check which ones hit us if we stay with them. For my part, I’ve had heaps of guilt for being emotionally unavailable, in a manner that has indeed amounted to neglect and betrayal if I’m entirely honest. That guilt didn’t take a lot of digging to unearth on my part. So, guilt can also be found in how we have shown up in our close relationships over longer stretches of time. The “moral elements” they suggest are, conversely: 1) love your family; 2) be loyal to your group; 3) return favors; 4) be heroic; 5) defer to superiors; 6) be fair; and 7) respect property. See: Curry O. S. et al, “‘Moral molecules’ – a new theory of what goodness is made of” in Psyche, November 1st, 2021.

[107] Inspiration for this formulation from Hedé van Dekker and Adrian Wagner.

[108] Or flight “of” death, more precisely. Vol de la mort would be from death.

[109] In Chinese mythology, there are five islands in the Bohai Sea, inhabited by immortal beings who have discovered the elixir of life.

[110] Ah, there it is again, from the Fifth Commandment: Hell is when ya can’t quit!

[111] Due credits: This idea was brought to me through a discussion with my friend, Johan Ranefors. Johan also deserves my deepest gratitude and acknowledgement for contributing to formulating the key insights of no less than four additional commandments: rules number nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. The last section of this book would simply not be the same without the time and effort he put in.

[112] This is a famous experiment, just look up “gorilla ball court”, or “selective attention test”.

[113] Feldman Barrett L. (2017) How Emotions Are Made.

[114] For simplicity’s sake, I here focus on the emotions that are painful, that have “negative valence”. If we dig deeper into the issue however, we find that the problem is never simply painful emotions, but rather “broken emotions”. Broken emotions can also be intensively “positive” or pleasurable: say, the ecstasy of a Nazi rally before the dictator, or the schadenfreude we feel when others suffer, or just the happiness of stealing our neighbor’s bike. We all know that, in the larger scheme of things, such “nice” emotions mirror a larger brokenness. Truly positive emotions of course need to line up with motivations that are good for ourselves and good for others: inner peace making us kind and less defensive, gratefulness that translates to generosity, and so forth. With the same optic there are, moreover, “good” or “healthy” negative emotions, such as the grief that heals after bereavement, the anger that makes us react to injustice, and so forth.

[115] To stake out my position on this matter would fall outside the scope of the current volume. Suffice to say that I tend towards a more virtue-ethical stance on social justice (not equalizing the average incomes between groups, etc.). The virtues make up principles that can guide many diverse actors in many equally diverse situations, whereas a focus on perfect “equality” will often in practice lead to ethically untenable and socially unsustainable actions in the specific situations that people encounter. For this exact reason, many DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs amount to what the sociologist Lewis Coser termed “greedy institutions”; i.e., they set in motion programs that tend to take up more and more space, energy, and attention and still never achieve their goals. That’s not, as conservatives like Jordan Peterson like to claim, as serious as totalitarianism. DEI programs do not feasibly lead to Mao’s cultural revolution. But they can and do have problematic aspects and would benefit from a cultivation of social justice from the inside and out.

[116] Aaron Beck later became a proponent of such practices and met with the Dalai Lama in Gothenburg, Sweden, 2005. Not least as Beck passed away a few days before this was being written, I’d like to honor his memory by underscoring the value of matching changed emotions to shifts in thought patterns.

[117] The developmental psychologist, Carol Gilligan, famously argued in In Another Voice that men align around justice and women around care when it comes to moral reasoning. But can the most caring thing to do really be the unjust thing to do? Doesn’t justice even underlie the principle of care, as it by definition is that which brings the greatest possible social harmony? Caring injustice wouldn’t be worth very much. In contrast, a “just lack of care” would be, well… justified in that given situation, so it would still be right and for the best. Justice is sometimes forgiving, sometimes harsh (but never vengeful). But when it is harsh, it is per definition justified harshness, which still means that it is caring. It’s “tough love”, but only as tough as necessary.

A possible solution to this problem is to view justice and care as two sides of a coin: justice can only be attained by genuinely caring about the sentient beings involved (their feelings and perspectives) and care becomes hollow and often even cruel without justice (“I care so much about you that I’ll gladly torture another for the slightest benefit to you…”). That would validate both masculine and feminine inclinations.

[118] Likewise, non-human animals are being unjustly treated by any reasonable standard and it is only by distorting your perception and believing false narratives that you can deny it. It’s buried guilt speaking, right there. So shut the fuck up and go vegan. Face the dragon: hear the screams.

[119] From the North Korean Foreign Ministry, October 25th, 2022. The communique is titled We Have the Father.[Bolds are mine to mark adjectives.]:

“Today is a meaningful day. The day marks the 8 th anniversary since respected Comrade Kim Jong Un visited the newly built Pyongyang Baby Home and Pyongyang Children’s Home and left a trace of paternal affection and love.

The respected Marshal exerted himself tirelessly to build the Pyongyang Baby Home and Pyongyang Children’s Home into today’s wonderful and warm cradle for children. As we think about it, his tireless efforts and dedication appear in our eyes.

The respected Marshal initiated the building of a Baby Home and Children’s Home as a prototype in the world, and personally selected the picturesque bankside of River Taedong as their location. He also looked at the blueprints on several occasions, giving invaluable teachings on the construction work.”

[120] To be sure, people can fake being driven by justice by learning to emulate its assertive traits, and as such become very convincing and get others to agree to all sorts of unreasonable things. At an intuitive level, others can then be fooled that “well, if they’re that sure, they must be right”. That’s what happens a lot around the Donald Trumps of the world: people who can be assertive despite there being little justification for it. If the more nuanced and honest folks of the world cannot respond with a matching assertiveness, the crooks will bend social relations out of all reasonable proportion. Thus it is very important that people find their inner sense of justice and muster the assertiveness that flows from it.

[121] Data from https://www.careerexplorer.com/. November 2021.

[122] Krieger L. S., Kennon M. S. (2015) , What Makes Lawyers Happy? A Data-Driven Prescription to

Redefine Professional Success. Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 83 (2) 554-627.

[123] Also from careerexplorer.com. November 2021.

[124] Schiltz, P. P. (1999) “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession”. Vanderbilt Law Review. 52: 871.

[125] This was a thing in the media some years ago, but to be fair, I should mention that at least one researcher has shown that the effects were exaggerated, if still there: Glöckner M. (2016) The irrational hungry judge effect revisited: Simulations reveal that the magnitude of the effect is overestimated. Judgment and Decision Making, 11 (6) 601-10.

[126] Indeed, Jordan Peterson shares this interest in “maps”; his earlier and more academic book is called Maps of Meaning.

[127] A term popularized lately by Daniel Schmachtenberger.

[128] Likewise, interviews with criminals have long shown that they believe “squares” to be cowardly and docile, not actually more ethical than they are. If anything, the reasoning goes, the criminals are more ethical than the law-abiding citizens, given that they’re more honest with themselves. Similar findings exist in psychopaths, all the way up through the development of ethical reasoning and concern: you always believe that the person who has a higher ethic than you must be a phony or hypocrite. It’s difficult to believe in the authenticity of ethical sentiments that we do not share ourselves.

[129] That’s how the Oracle functioned; there was a young, beautiful and chaste priestess intoxicated with volcanic ethane gas, there to impart the portents of the gods. If we put aside the issue of credibility of this method of inquiry, we should admit that the whole thing undeniably sounds rather sexy. And it evidently was, as they eventually had to exchange young women for old ones to avoid sexual assaults from oracle visitors.

[130] Say, for instance, one where capitalist societies develop welfare sectors and then globalize and informationalize until they have a new host of problems of ecology and global inequality... and that digital solutions can bring about new forms of working together that are different from, and preferable to, those in industrial, capitalist society. That’s more the map I currently subscribe to, by the way.

[131] Not “eureka!”. Wrong guy, wrong century.

[132] I am referring here to the ominous rise of present-day social currents overlapping with or similar to Nazism. But note that the original German Nazis even had it as their slogan “Deutschland erwache!” Germany, wake up! This underscores how they, too, were red pilling everyone else.

[133] But sure, patriarchy also exists in some meaningful ways and needs to come under feminist scrutiny for injustices to be addressed. Read, for instance, UN reports on gender inequality in the world.

[134] Hochschild A., 2016: Strangers in Their Own Land.

[135] The Dark Side of Your Mom, it’s an album by Pink Freud if I’m not mistaken.

[136] By the way, do you want to know why CBT and similar ones constitute the most proficient therapeutic practices, statistically speaking? Considering what I have written above concerning the different layers of psychological issues, it could be argued that CBT-etc. works because it targets rather shallow parts of the mind, where the relatively “small and simple” issues reside, and these issues are both more common and easier to tackle than more deeply rooted issues. So the likelihood is higher you get results pretty quickly if you apply CBT or similar, whereas other therapies are not suited to tackle them. So if you apply that sort of therapy to a random set of people with different issues, you’ll get more “hits” that are resolved more quickly than if you’d apply psychodynamic therapy to the same population. That’s why CBT gets better statistics with an average population of clients. But the statistics arguably hide as much as they reveal. If my argument above about the layers of the mind is roughly correct, each form of therapy is better at different things. Here’s an analogy: If you’d randomly give out antibiotics versus cancer treatment to sick people, antibiotics would win in terms of how quickly it helps how many people, because it targets a simpler thing more reliably. That doesn’t make antibiotics inherently superior to cancer treatments in all instances. Same with CBT or solution-based therapy or motivational dialogue versus more extensive or profound therapies. Or that’s my take on this issue—if you have a better theory, the floor is yours.

[137] Costa P. T., Jr., Terracciano A., McCrae R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: robust and surprising findings. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81, 322–331.

[138] Feingold A. (1994). Gender differences in personality: a meta-analysis. Psychol. Bull. 116, 429–456.

[139] Kling K. C., Hyde J. S., Showers C. J., Buswell B. N. (1999). Gender differences in self-esteem: a meta-analysis. Psychol. Bull. 125, 470–500.

[140] Addition when reading through final edit: It went well, and the collaboration was canceled. Some people do have integrity and do listen.

[141] Wang, L., Zhong C.-B., Murnighan J.K. (2014). The social and ethical consequences of a calculative mindset. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 125(1), 39–49.

[142] Liquid crystals are states (or compounds) having both fluidity like liquids and long range order like crystals. A suggestion is to web-search for “liquid crystal compounds” to get an intuitive sense of this.

[143] A few years ago a book titled Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux made rounds and inspired progressive organizational designers and consultants across the world. It outlined a number of examples of highly progressive, participatory, and egalitarian organizations that nevertheless had the capacity to function hierarchically when necessary. The descriptions and studies there truly are inspirational—but they were all designed by one or a few persons, a “source”, something that Laloux failed to point out properly. As a consequence, his book led an army of progressives to waste one another’s time with unrealistic expectations and crash-landed projects: organizations that tried to use a formula, but lacked the source.

[144] A simple thing such as the quantity of time spoken has been shown to be a strong predictor of who becomes “the leader” in a given setting. See: MacLaren N. G. et al (2020) Testing the babble hypothesis: Speaking time predicts leader emergence in small groups. Leadership Review. 31 (5).

[145] And, then, if we wish to go a bit deeper on this issue, philosophically speaking, there probably isn’t “one big whole” for “God” to see—rather, incompleteness and incommensurability seems to be the nature of reality itself at a certain level of analysis, and so it must be the nature of God to be contradictory, i.e., again, genuinely a God of multiplicity.

[146] One way of conceptualizing the ecological disasters of our time is also by viewing “the game of ecology” having reached a point where it produced some players—humanity—that could break its own rules.

[147] It is a study of 200 college students that shows a mediating effect of forgiveness between self-compassion and so-called ego depletion. Basically, if the researchers are right, this means that if you become more forgiving, you also forgive yourself, and this makes it easier not to hold on to rigid and selfishly defined identities you may have. (I have only read the English abstract.) See: Rahman A. A. et al (2019) Forgiveness as a mediator on the effect of self-compassion on the ego depletion. Psikohumaniora: Jurnal Penelitian Psikologi, Vol 4, No 2: 181-190.

[148] Probably a true story, that one. There was some locomotion in the chess world quite recently, presumably involving vibrators, too. The reason I use the example, though, is that it’s the one that MacIntyre keeps coming back to in his classical book on the topic, After Virtue.

[149] It is the so-called “Northern Ireland HOPE Project” led by the Stanford forgiveness researcher Frederic Luskin. On a “hurt scale” from 1-10, the average dropped from 8.5 to 3.5. You can read more in Luskin’s 2016 book, Forgive for Good.

[150] In one study, compassion has been suggested to reduce your own levels of guilt. See: Meerholz E. W., Spears R., Epstude K. (2019). Having pity on our victims to save ourselves: Compassion reduces self-critical emotions and self-blame about past harmful behavior among those who highly identify with their past self. PLOS ONE, 14(12).