***What I think I learned***

First Draft on 45 years

1) Wrestle with books: challenge their premises as you willingly submit to their moments of entrancement; break their spine, glue their cover and mark their pages; when you find a good partner, study them and return for additional bouts.  This is a physical, masculine approach but it is balanced by the inert mentalism of a book.

2) Medical Model / "Accept the Horror" : Read history books to find the horrible, horrible things we have suffered from nature and other humans.  Crimes spill out like a stream of broken body parts that the media fish stories out of - skip the middle man and leave at the bulk of it. Letting the horror of living into you life stops most pointless moralizing. Either you roll-up sleeves to help in a rational and merciful manner or leave.

3) Consumerism looks so Ugly - real moral UGLINESS - but it is the default philosophy of North Americans and unless you really struggle it keeps engulfing you.  

4) "bodymind" - I need to walk to digest ideas, walking is like a mantra for the body to free the mind.  The mind is not separate from the body: a tense minds pinches the body, an injured body tires the mind. Philosophy is big into 'freedom from the flesh' but the flesh houses the mind so intimately there is little difference.

5) "The first step is the biggest": When reality is converted to numbers or words you suffer a massive information loss that further manipulation of the converted data cannot overcome.  The next step of wisdom is "GIGO".

6) Humans are an anxious species - so we create massive entertainment complexes to distract us or convince us we are ultra-confident. Seeing past society's big bluff restores some sympathy to the world.

7) Reality is 50% objective and 50% subjective - stop arguing and get to something interesting.

8 ) Thinking there are "2 sides" to an issue is brain-death ("the left & right"). There are 500+ sides to any issue and generally one ethical path. I will take hard-won certainty, I will take realistic diversity - but the binary "both sides" poison that kills both.

9) History is more radical than fiction despite being largely fictional itself.

10) If you care enough to discuss a topic for 2 minutes, than just $@#@ing google the answer! - especially you with the smart-phone. That's respecting the topic. Everything else is over-sized egos and rickety memories.

11) "Slave's Rebellion": You can only force minimal effort out of people - yet enough people will give their lives for yours if not asked. Capitalism cannot reconcile these facts. Treat others like slave and you get the horrible "capitalist" life-experience where you have to buy vacations and friends. Refuse the 'slave/master' game and you see a different world.

12) "Still waters run deep." Lots of water-sports and jet-skis on the surface but it's the quiet intense one you have to watch because - for better or worse - they are communing with their own depths.

13) Respect is a two-way street. Anyone who ask for it without offering it does not deserve it.

14) Wear your clothes backwards or inside out occasionally. The norms of this culture are so twisted that doing the opposite of them is often as sane and ethical as obeying them.

15) If you don't daily struggle with capitalism, you'll never even see glimpses of life outside of it.

16) You only get one trip, so you might as well "take the tour" and see the seething universe you were born into.

17) Gender roles can be horribly trapping things - but don't deny yourself the pleasures of gender-stereotyped activities because of this. Align with your culture and evolutionary drives occasionally.

18) "Male is as male does."  The more you act as "males are suppose to", the more you betray your deeper masculinity. The Y-chromosome has a high mutation rate.

19) Most of the time "you" is just whatever evolutionary drive/neurosis/habit has grabbed the wheel for the next bit. The "real you" is whatever observes all those werdios grabbing the wheel. 90% of behavior is unconscious - but that ratio can be modified.

20) One meme/phrase that makes me hate your opinion no matter what your politics, is when self-entitled gawkers say "time to sit back and grab some popcorn!" (see #3)

21) "Evolution is a long haul" - the handful of years we get doesn't give a very wide perspective

22) Humanize the necessary violations, eliminate the rest. Use hardcore Reason & Mercy to judge 'necessary'.

23) "80 in 80" - 80% of US male babies in 1980 were strapped down and had their penises mutilated (50% in Canada in 1980). All human cultures are half-crazed with sadism .

24) My philosophy: Cut your Reason with Mercy, Guide your Mercy with Reason. Creation already said yes, and matter has become mind, we're doing the easier part. Wonder daily.

25) The :thanks: section of any book I write will be to faceless internet pirates. My deepest thanks to the Swedish and Russian pirates of the 21st century and their comrades across the globe.

26) When I was young I wanted "the answers", now I want to handle the paradoxes wisely.

27) If you aren't grappling with the first level paradox, you haven't tackled the subject. The higher level paradoxes are the real goal.

28) Hate is like uranium - a great source of power but what do you do with the toxic byproducts it produces?

29) Even if you are not a misogynist - check your misogyny thoughts. I learnt this as much from criminology as feminism. misogyny is a powerful drug for males, handle it with care.

30) My first real taste of inner misogyny came after the sudden death of my mother. Some part of me felt abandoned despite knowing this was completely irrational. This is a primal root of misogyny.

31) We need more crowd-sourced mothering and fathering. I still remember the time a women came up to be during a winter protest and asked if I wanted gloves because she gets nervous when she sees bare skin in blistering wind. I still think of my pseudo-father at Comics North. The idea that strange humans might care about you is radical.

32) Same with kids trusting you. The first time a child places utter faith in you, you change.

33) Never split bills among friend. You can never pay your "fair" share, the debts we have to other humans cannot - should not - be monetized. The cheque your employer gives to you means nothing to me.  And pooled wealth lets people of all bank accounts levels join without shame. Who is rich today might be poor tomorrow.

34) Money is Psychoactive. Subscribers to capitalism use giving $$$ and paying for stuff as domination or relieving their guilt.

35) The minimum price for me to violate my ethics is $75,000. Anything lower than this I ignore. What's your price? If you wait until the very moment to decide they'll snap you up for a few hundred.

36) "Would you kill an ant to reduce your debt amount by $5000" Murdering a living creature to adjust imaginary number is a basic moral question in out societies.

37) I don't subscribe to the "path of excess is the road to wisdom' but I do believe that "everything in moderation, including moderation."

38) If you are the type of person who would have resisted The Church in previous eras, the modern equivalent is the Corporate Media.

39) "The first hit is free" Always approach other humans in good faith - let them defect. I rather be sucker punched than live defending against one. This works in game theory and real life. Misanthropy is like misogyny - too powerful to play lightly with.

40) "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." My favorite Bushism. Being friendly and a cynical bastard are not contradictory.

41) Always approach institutions in skepticism because "bureaucracies are designed to diffuse responsibility."

42) "Everyone is nice" - This is my equivalent of "Good Germans". Most people are surface friendly - so what?

43) I subscribe to "Forteanism" as defined by Fortean Times magazine: benevolent skepticism. I have no time for the wave of horrible neo-skeptics who mistake easy snide dismissal for intelligence.  

example

example of Fortean v. Neo-Skeptic:

44) I don't think any male can be as hardcore as a single chickadee or squirrel during a Canadian winter. It's -20, no sun for days, fishers and foxes on the prowl, other squirrels looking for your caches. Look in their eyes and winter stares back.

45) "If there is no techno in heaven, I ain't going" The timber of synethic sounds and music touches my soul. It always has. Any potential afterlife utopia has to do effect me more than Moogs or I'm not going.

46) 90% of narratives about illness and crime are magical thinking with a dash of pseudo-science.

47) "this is what you want, this is what you get": reality has very little attachment to your desires, money can confuse you on this because you CAN buy your desires but reality will re-assert itself again and again.

48) "i need my conscience to watch over me, to protect me from myself": Can you name your inner demons and how you manage them? I give them literally names.  
If you cannot name them then they are running parts of the show in your name!                     If they are not managed or leashed then they are attacking others!    

49) "assert the opposite": A psychological/media tactic that simply asserts the opposite rather than engage in discussion. If you say 'the sky is blue', they will automatically respond 'no, it is red'. The goal is to demoralize and confuse. This is part of the fake "left/right" paradigm. AVOID.

50) "50/50" : the psychological and political goal where an ambiguous outcome is desired to prevent change. Everyone is equally wrong so ethics are pointless. The status quo wants all elections to be 51/49 and decided by the courts. This is part of the fake "left/right" paradigm.   AVOID.

51) Treat drugs like spirits. Give them a personality (based on their experience) and, more importantly, give them your RESPECT. For example, the Green Goddess is very forgiving but she only gives her true gifts to those that respect her. I give her a thought and thanks before I partake of her gifts. When I don't, if I ask her to remove her gifts and to shun me until I'm respectful again.

52) You can never re-capture the first "high". When I was a kid I had an unexpected quasi-mystical by leaving open a bedroom window during the winter, the next morning the room was freezing but the big blankets I was under were glorious. So for the next few Fridays I left the window open again - but the experience was never the same. I remember that realizing this made me feel melancholy and mature. Some much more important is withering as you do this...

54) Rural/communist thinking about anything: Does it work? Does it work in rough conditions? Are you sure? Any back-up plan? Have you kicked it? OK, we'll improvise using duct tape and clothes hangers...   

55) "Hosting is a Duty": Make sure you host people occasionally - it is the core of society. When you host, take it seriously - crafting a 'good time' takes effort. I have thrown a a number of parties with 30+ people and I never touched an intoxicant until 4am when everyone else was safely passed out except...

56)....the 'real party' is at the end of the night ... once weak-willed have been culled ...

57) study History and Nature:  Reality is full of entrapping paradoxes, cruel ironies and tragic endings. Mercy develops from expose to Horror and Emptiness.

58) Mercy is not Sentimentalism. There is overlap but not much.

59) Key to Philosophy: Ask naive questions. The more fundamentally naive the better. What is Life? What is 'is'? Why? Why?

60) Key to Socializing: Ask naive questions. Find what the other person is passionate about and then ask earnest naive questions.

61) "Everyone is an Expert in something your not": Even if this is just their own life. Find what people know AND RAID IT. People want to be raided on the topics they love if done in good-faith.

62) High-level philosophy: Ask naive questions ... and be skeptical of the answers

63) I'm too old to keep doubting my intuition. Intuition is not mystical, it is more like your brain's awareness far exceeds your current limited focus.  Let reason/skepticism judge but don't absolutely do not dismiss your 'quiet inner voice' - cultivate it!

64) Our egos think they are stronger than the world but "this world is the rock on which all hearts must break." Unfortunately egos destroy ourselves, others and society in their misguided wars with reality.

65) Drugs are tools, so RTFM. More than 400mg of caffeine (per day) and you are just flooding making the drug less effective. A cup of coffee is about 100mgs. Melatonin comes in 3g capsule but the science literature shows anything over 50mgs is pointless, so I tried a fraction of the dose got the same effect and no grogginess like the full capsule gave.

66) The biggest danger of drugs is that they encourage you to think you need a MATERIAL solution to our SPIRIT's ache. The is the defining misinterpretation of Western culture. So we always collapse our inner pain down to a medical condition.

67) "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" - Q: Doesn't that take the fun out of buying stuff? A: Hopefully! Why should buying stuff be fun?

68) Pleasure has no ethical force.  The prisons are filled with people pursuing their pleasure at other's expense.

69) All your hard work just buys thicker chains. Bosses and politicians take the profit your sweat brings and invest it anti-union candidates, pro-monopoly law and oversea factories. It takes a hard-working obedient population to create an empire that enslaves the world.

70)  The difficulty of work has nothing to do with how much you are paid. Banksters think 'liquid lunches' are hard work and reward themselves accordingly. So how smart and rational are those financial wizards? They need a idiot-proof stock markets with built-in 'circuit breakers' to prevent them mass panicking and destroying the economy.    

71) In every war (or war scare) you get to see who supports it and who doesn't. After the Iraq invasion in 2003 I could dismiss 99% of the corporate media as blood-hungry propagandists and I have never regretted that decision.

72) A philosophy teacher once said that either you are trying to communicate or you are doing violence. I have thought about this and generally disagreed because violence often has a /message/ to it and a respectful silence is not violence. As I mature I think my objections obscure the truer point. Respectful silence is trying to communicate, 'instructive' violence still refuses a 2-way exchange. The lesson he was trying to teach was that 'public relations' tactics that seek "poison the well" or whose only goal in the nullification of communication are violent.

73) "Violence is tricky to see". Many North Americans underestimate the violence of nature, history and their governments yet overestimate the violence of neighbors and the prevalence of serial killers.  People watch 'fake violence' for fun, play 'fake violence' for fun, want more capitalism punishment, more guns and more drone attacks on non-white peasants. They also hate bullies, hate 'hate speech' and hate people who roughly treat animals.

74) "Mug yourself" : There is a saying that "a conservative is a (white) liberal who has been mugged (by a black man)", my motto is "mug yourself" and skip the reactionary political transformation but become aware of the violence of reality.

75) The more you can allow the violence in, the more you can recognize peace. [#73-75 are expansions on #2: "Let the Horror In"]

76) Daily Writing changes you. It intensifies the conversations you have with yourself. It fills your head with your own creations. It drags your thoughts and opinions out of the river of consciousness and makes them stand still so you can reflect on them.  This is no different than saying exercise builds muscles but in a materialist world it still seems odd.



77) The lesson I learned from 9/11: Don't turn over narrative control to the government and corporate media. Keep telling your own narrative. It is safer to plunge into your own personal fantasies than use their story-line as your setting.

78) Young people use art (singing. drawing, dancing) to impress others and develop their skills. Later we emphasis the community aspects of art. It has slowly dawned on me that I also use art as a vital psychological tool to maintain my humor, mercy and sanity.

79) R2N is my KI against prolonged internet exposure. [KI = KI (potassium iodide) a salt of iodine that can help block radiation injury.]

80) Hobb's stages of Maturing Media Consumption.
Stage (1) You mostly consume American/Japanese mass entertainment and sports
Stage (2) You consumer 'cool' entertainment (still mostly American/Japanese)
Stage (3) You regularly read a major newspaper or news broadcast from your country
Stage (4) You seek out alternative media or magazines from your country
Stage (5) You read the local paper.

81) At least once a year cry for your dead loved ones. It hurts but forgetting all the love and companionship they gave you is so much worse.

82) #16 refers to "taking the tour" - this means through research and experience you have matured enough that you are not freaked out by being on a 'wild planet' full of crazy hyper-apes.  It also connotes a compassionate attitude to human extremity and nature is general. You have visited the extremes in history, the natural world and your own mind.

83) I must caution that "taking the tour" strips off some your ego in weird ways.

84) Close to "taking the tour" is "I want to see us like the gods see us!". Every academic discipline is a demigod-like perspective on a subject, a jump into the sky to see the larger systems running below, populations, timelines, geography, cultures and the self are subjects to be scrolled through. Again I'm not clear that pursuing this doesn't "strip off some your ego in weird ways."

85) 'Ego' and 'Self' are slippery terms, my usage is 'ego' mean your personality (character, persona, imprints, habits, shadow and ethics); 'self' means all that - but it also covers' 'non-ego' states of consciousness like trance, shock, sleep.

86) Can someone who "took the trip" or "saw us like gods" return to society and impart any of their experiences in a useful manner? This is the final question asked by Joseph Campbell' Hero's journey theories. It originally applied to shamans/schizophrenics/TLE but I have enlarged it.

87) Hate, lust and greed are a fuel sources. How you channel them is a dividing line between immaturity/maturity.

88) After 40 you must pursue 'maturity' as a goal just to keep balanced. Don't worry about the social definitions of 'maturity' but be firm in your commitment. Maturity isn't the opposite of humour and spontaneity, it is the opposite of uncontrolled regression.

89) If you want to learn plants/trees/birds/stars, just start naming them - you can figure out their proper names afterwards.

90) Always make guesses and learn from your successes and failures but this leads to another lessons #10 and #91/

91) Guess, but be humble in guessing. Being wrong is fine, as Socrates said "I"m the smartest guy in this room, because I know how much I don't know" The rational part of my brain carries around a red stamp that reads WARNING! ARROGANTLY WRONG! and it stamps people whether I want it to or not. The world is already super-confusing, try not to add to the confusion (unless your having some Discordian fun)

92) Some things heal. The innate healing power of biology is close to magic. You cannot 'heal' yourself, you can only assist in the healing process that is already occurring.

93) Wait 1/2 hour between waking up and interfacing with a computer. The neural-computer-media pathway is so powerful that carving out some plain 'reality' when you first wake-up is a good counter-balance.

94) I had to kill a broke-neck squirrel with a shovel about a month ago. I'm not sure if I've ever consciously taken a mammal's life before. Even such a minor killing change your worldview because 'killing' is now an option to me. I can see the seductive side of it too, life is complicated and ambiguous, killing just takes a few seconds of iron-hearted action which is much easier. The squirrels don't look at me in a different way but I see them in a more realistic light.

95) People think having a pet is about emotions but it far closer to a science project. Animals are very complex and come with a huge amount of evolutionary needs. Sentimentality about animals is fine but it -must-supplemented by serious ethological research.

96) People who always 'pay their fair share' are the true capitalists. The delusion that items and actions can be separated from the stream of societal interconnection (much less ecological), isolated, given a number and then be 'fairly' bought and sold is the key delusion. Everyone I know who insists on paying their share of a meal is social petty and objectively delusional.

97) When I get weak I get 'moral' when I feel strong I can handle the ambiguity of reality. This is the part of Nietzsche I agree with.

I'm aiming for an even 100 before 2021 to wrap this up~!

98) My mother took me outside and told that nature was her church. As I grow older I keep realizing how true this is. Sure, every Canadian 'likes' nature but when I go outside tired and depressed see a snowflake on some lichen and immediately cheer up its far more than just a pleasant sentiment. Christianity offer the simple promise of immortal humans, Nature offers the immediate reality of non-human complexity. My 'soul
is soothed by experiencing the intricacy and complexity of creation that surrounds me. I'm not even sure why it does.

99) It's good to drag out your 'morality' and shine a light on it. 'Morality' is the breeding ground for many unsavory things and this was my attempt to exposure some beliefs I have to see if they seem as appealing in the harsh light of public exposure. Re-reading this list, sometimes I cringe, sometimes I nod in agreement but the cumulative effect is I'm not the same person who started it in Jan 2020. I can see some are written from the brash "Hobb" perspective, some are written in response to ego injuries, some reflect very deep parts of myself. There is something uncanny in seeing your own personal river of consciousness frozen into words and sentences.

100) Hug Trees! No grand wisdom to end this but a simple truth. In my 20s in decided to try that act hippies always get accused of ("tree-hugging") just to be oppositional. So I went outside and gave a big hug to the giant red pine beside my house. As I closed my eyes I could feel my heart-beating and imagined the sllloooowww pulses of the tree's own circulatory system. It was the first time I knew tree were alive as a experience not just a fact. I started smiling when I hugged that big pine - and I still smile with every tree I hug.


Well. I'm done a year of revelation and reflecting (this began Jan 2020) and I'm happy to bring this to conclusion. In writing parts of yourself down you free yourself from them, it's weird, despite the moral purpose of the list I actually have more 'breathing space' with these tenets than I began. What a grab-bag of hard-learnt morals and pompous preaching! I hope this list can find its way to helps anyone (or any creature) besides myself.

PAX

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