The Next New Ten Commandments

Ex animus (“from the soul/spirit/heart-as-mind”)

The Next However Many Exhortations

A Handbook for the Next Generation of Advice-Column Writers

1. Start with definitions. Agree on what we’re talking about before we start hashing out propositions.

2. Jump right in.

The Basics

3. Don’t try to compare yourself to others—there’s no external standard. Everyone looks out through “a different set of eyes,” and every role is of value in the whole scheme of things.

4. Define yourself by parsing who and what you’re not. Continually redefine your definition. (If you’re not your body, your feelings, your attitudes, or your thoughts, who are you?)

5. Respect all beings as full beings, regardless of age, size, or type of physical body.

6. Recognize that on their biological timeline humans become adults at a point somewhere between 24 and 30 years of age—until then the body is still in a state of physical growth toward adulthood. In light of that, don’t make the mistake of assuming that a young person’s mental precocity equates to full-blown adult consciousness and, presumably, wisdom and common sense. Instead, recognize his or her location on the biological timeline, act appropriate to that assessment, and make generous allowances. Let the timeline run its full natural course. At the same time, see 5 above.

7. Imagine (or learn to imagine) “what it’s like” for other people, from their point of view.

8. Learn to recognize “bad code”—semantically ill-formed expressions that embody undesirable contexts and realities—and don’t pass it on. (Maybe that’s where that biblical “sins of the fathers”/“iniquity visited upon the next few generations” idea comes from—people passing on “bad code” unawares—which is the real curse. In fact, it’s re-curse-ive.)

9. Be on the lookout for fear-as-fuel as a possible driver of actions, decisions, solutions, imaginings, perspectives, emotions, states of being, and perceived problems.

Perception (Meaning Making)

10. Learn to discern, examine, and question your own perceptual filters, your own meaning-making processes. (Examining our meaning-making processes requires continually updating the definition and scope of “I”—see 1 and 4 above.)

11. As the mind’s owner and not as the mind itself, question the authority of the mind.

12. Learn the linguistic structure of your native language(s) and, ideally, of as many other language frameworks as possible—including your idiolect. Know that these are substrates for constructed realities.

13. Recognize that one’s underlying experience (“deep experience”) shapes the linguistic and physical expressions (“surface expressions”) of that experience. As below, so above.

14. Recognize that language, a specific type of expression of one’s experience, is a framework that in turn generates or shapes experience and meaning, as part of a looping process. As above, so below.

15. Allow for your own discomfort when encountering perceived differences in others.

Play Nice Together

16. Have each other’s back. Live like you’re wearing a team jersey silkscreened with something like “Humanity”, “The Planet”, or “All of Life”.

17. Live as if you’re god in your universe and everyone else is god in theirs, but act as if they don’t necessarily know that. (That is, own your own thoughts and perceptions, but don’t expect others to share that perspective.)

18. Act like a gracious host or hostess toward everyone and everything in your world.

19. Make a point of dispensing with Musical Chairs–like frameworks that produce a lone winner and a plurality of losers. Find alternatives to contexts that define people and outcomes in a binary way (such as “winners” and “losers”—where even a phrase like “Everyone wins” smacks of the same limitations).

20. Learn to recognize those among us whose behavior suggests they are strictly self-oriented (they cannot imagine “what it’s like” for or empathize with others), figure out how to act humanely toward them, and at the same time keep social and political power out of their reach.

21. Don’t try to play tennis with ping-pong players or polo players. You may not like the returns.

22. Learn to discern when people are in possession of their consciousness (behaving as beings) from when they are not (when they are identifying with their thinking mechanisms, feelings, or beliefs), and be kind.

23. Refrain from using, and be aware of others’ use of, sarcasm, ad hominem remarks (including name calling), or other expressions that our childlike “companion consciousness” will hear and take literally.

24. Don’t alter a person’s body without that person’s informed, uninfluenced consent. (“Thou shalt not mutilate thy neighbor’s body.”)

25. Don’t use force—physical, mental, logical, emotional, etc.—on others or their bodies, whether surreptitiously or openly, to elicit a result from them. If you can’t get the response you want without using force, question your motives and/or learn to communicate your needs better.

26. Don’t harm other human beings to assure one’s own survival. (Don’t subscribe to an impoverished, “us against them” context, or model of the world, in which you are deprived of the synergy and unexpected resources of individuals’ acting together.)

27. Make sure the means to an end are free of meanness. (Be kind to yourself and others; seek to do better than the mean, or “average.”)

28. Be kind to everyone (the I Bow to Peter Dinklage Rule), and of course temper that with wisdom. Although research says it isn’t just those who act with kindness who benefit, but also recipients and onlookers, also allow for acceptable exceptions.

Nature

29. Live in accordance with nature’s principles so that even in nonnatural settings nature can live within you and you can thus live within nature. (Since contexts determine outcomes, or at least seriously shape them, and since nature is a Really Big Context, to say the least, it would perhaps behoove us to pay attention to nature as a context.)

30. Look for and seek to recognize the wisdom and special consciousness of our cocreatures.

31. Recognize that life is in everything, including rocks and minerals. (Renowned scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose demonstrated that metals react to stimuli just as living cells do, for example.)

32. Regard that we all came from a mother, whether human mother or mother nature, and respect and honor the female principle.

Miscellaneous Drawer

33. Dispense with box-oriented thinking, whether inside-the or outside-the. (Drawers are okay.)

34. Develop a reliable BS-meter. (“Thou shalt use common sense.”)

35. Make art. War is not art. There is no art to war.

36. Don’t take yourself seriously, especially if you think you’re your thoughts and feelings.

37. Take life seriously, but not solemnly.

38. Love yourself more (the Bill Bixby Finally-Figured-It-Out-Near-the-End Rule).

39. Don’t complain about How It Is. (If you’re god in your universe—that is, in your perceptual reality—complaining is a joke. To whom do you complain? But it’s okay to create a new How It Is.)

40. [Add your own.]