Rules to Live by: The Mind Killer

With my last post, there was a fair amount of discussion about the dangers of riding at night. Rightly so, of course, because there's a lot of quickly moving steel that weights more than me and is far sharper than I shall ever be, and yet there I go, going dangerously fast around said mobile steel (cars, to the layperson). So I put on a helmet and wear plenty of very bright lights to ensure my own safety. I clothe myself in light and keep my head on a swivel. I do all the smart and reasonable things I can to minimize my own risk, to keep myself as safe as possible and to make my safety about my performance and behavior. But nonetheless, there, under my helmet and in the back of my mind, is that little burning doubt that I'm wrong and I forgot something and I can't handle my own safety.

That's the ember ember of fear.

Because fear is well described as a fire. It destroys and maddens, inspires foolishness and doubt. Fire and fear both spread, and leap from person to person.  If left unchecked, it can reduce entire countries to charred ruin. And yet, both fear and fire can be kept in check, and when they're little more than tongues, they're soft and gentle, easily manipulated.

The best part, the absolutely most fascinating part about fear and fire is that they are products of invention and reason. With this world in which we live, there is much to fear (I need not list examples here; you know your fears better than I), and it is through our reasoning faculties that we develop and keep our fears. And, in a wonderful example of life's ironies, the fears, begotten by reason, attack their birth-parents and seek to drive us to madness. I say "madness" because it has an epic feel to it (seriously, just shout out MADNESS once in a while -- it's fun!), but really, you experience a little madness whenever fear let's loose on you. I mean, there's no way -- none! -- that there's a creepy half-human with disjointed limbs crawling around on the walls of my mom's house, watching me.

Yet, somehow, that thought pops into my head when I turn out the lights.

I had a friend who was convinced her apartment was haunted, one night. Like, a bad haunting with her laptop being tossed around the room, and such. She was utterly convinced that her let was grabbed by something cold and inhuman. I myself am certain that everybody on the face of the earth is possessed whenever I wake up at two in the morning. Without a doubt, I will believe that there is a ghost or something taking control of your body, should I see you during the witching hour, as it's called.

Fear, we see, attacks reason, as I said before. But what, then, do we do? Do we allow fear to destroy our reasoning faculties until it passes by an outside force (wait until sunrise)? That works, but I don't like putting my future in anyone's hands but mine, even the sun's.

What I do prefer, however, is to attack fear itself. I meet it on its battleground of choice, and defeat it at its very best. When I was afraid of the dark, I would turn out the lights and close my eyes. I would drown myself in darkness and feel it sink in around me. Panic and fear would rise along my spine, and I could feel its shake enter my nervous system. I would think about the most horrible things that could possibly be looking at me in the darkness, imagine things more nightmarish than any I had ever seen before; I would taunt my fear and outdo its own creation! I would declare that I will not fear that darkness or any other, and that when I opened my eyes, there would be darkness there, and nothing more. That moment before I reopened my eyes was a precipice of reality. It was that edge of reason in which I would determine the world in which I lived. If I kept my eyes closed, the world was a product of my imagination and subject to its bending will. If, however, I managed to open my eyes, it was on the faith that my imagination was limited, wrong, and controllable like a flame. I opened my eyes on the faith that reason will prevail, and the world has rules where my mind does not.

Of course, I would open my eyes and each time the world was fine, boring, and dark. But not unreasonable.

What's fun, though, is that if my imagined sensation were true and if there were a hairless werewolf there in the darkness ahead of me, it would be quite unreasonable to act as if he weren't there. And so, in another irony of life, I had to act unreasonably to defeat fear, which attacks reason.

Consider my cycling. I am afraid of getting mangled in a car wreck and left for dead. I am absolutely afraid of that happening. However, I have to overcome that fear, and to do so, I have to ride my bike around cars and effectively behave unreasonably (I ride safely, I really do!).

Yeah, that's right: defeat fear, a product of unreason, by behaving unreasonably. Suck it, reality! That's the rule to live by: don't fear, not anything.

** I was going for a new tone with this post, hope it was fun to hear something closer to professionalism! Click ads or die! (that's not a threat, I'm just saying: click ads, peoples)

Life by Code: Belief

I think everybody needs a code. Like, one to live by, not a sequence of numbers and letters that allows them to operate (God knows we don't need any more of those!). To a certain extent, we all have rules we follow, ingrained in each of us through a variety of means. But, like everything else we do unconsciously, when we bring it into our own awareness and try to truly understand and perfect our rules they become something different, and we with them. The rules become a Code (give that a capital "c"!) and we become People of a Code (almost epic, no?).

I believe in living by a Code, and one of the first fundamental codes by which I live is that belief, without practice, is dead.

What I mean by that is it's what we do, our actions, our practice that ultimately indicates who we are as people. It is all fine to say you believe in something, but if you do not act as though such belief is true, then what's the point of believing it?

Really.
Believe there's a Minnesota?
Cool.
Actually act as though Minnesota exists in the world?
Cool; that's belief.
Act as though Minnesota doesn't exist? Be bemused whenever something comes from Minnesota, or they show up in the news? Refuse that you can actually go there?
It's not practical; it might as well not be there. And that's not belief, but it's a way of thinking we often engage ourselves in modern society.

Here's an illustration: say you believe in the evolution. As in, species evolved from earlier ancestors over the course of eons and eons. Okay, now how do you practice it? That's actually pretty simple, although there are two answers that come to mind immediately. First is, you just live your life and boom, you're participating in and practicing evolution along with the rest of humanity like gravity. Yaaaay we won; let's coast. Second is, you breed. You actually try to propagate the species and your own genetic pattern because, frankly, we're kickass at this whole evolution thing. We may not have bacteria beaten, but rabbits? Hells yeah.

Now the first practical scenario is the one that ultimately the high majority of people practice, in my encounters and investigations. It's light-handed, hardly offends people, doesn't require any work, and it requires only fundamental understanding of the concept. People say "Sure, all species and life as we know it gradually changed over many eons  to become what they are today. Now gimme my coffee!" It's convenient, but that's not practice, which means that's not belief: that's acknowledgement. If that were Minnesota, you would say it's there, but you wouldn't go, and why go there, why say you believe in Minnesota at all? It's a space that does nothing but exist.

So, the second scenario of practice is a LOT more active! You're actually participating in the evolutionary process (you actually visit Minnesota!). The catch with that, though, is that we've done it before as people; we've actively engaged ourselves in evolution. Basically, if you get a bunch of people together, and they say they're the best, they say their genes are the best, you get big problems. Do you want me to drop a Nazi bomb? It's pretty obvious that their ideas were inspired or based on (or unrightfully justified by, most accurately) evolutionary biology.

 So, while we say that evolution and Minnesota exist, and are as real as gravity, we ourselves cannot employ evolutionary thought processes as a society, and we cannot actually go to Minnesota. Or we'll be branded Nazis... Minnesota Nazis.

So next time you find yourself making a stand in who you are and what you believe -- whatever it may be -- ask yourself if you really do believe it, ask yourself if you practice it, if it's REAL to you and you live it. If you do, then yeah, you believe it, but if you don't, find out what you believe and stand by it. Allow your actions to shape who you are. Start by clicking ads.