In 2019 I discovered metamodernism which soon led me to Hanzi Freinacht. I read his article 5 things that make you metamodern and began following his work. In 2022 Hanzi began talking about the book he was writing. I bought it as soon as it was available and began reading it on January 1, 2023.
I have written many book reports but my experience with 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People To Master Ordinary Life is more likely to be something special. There are 10 people that I have identified that seem to me to have deep undertanding and considerable wisdom. Hanzi Freinacht is one of them and I have very high expectations of what I will discover in his book.
Prologue: Revealing the Real Title of This Book
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.
Challenging the Canadian
...the Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson.
I am not a fan of the Canadian. I first heard about Peterson from my Christian conservative friend, Henk Wilms, and I have followed the story - up and down and up and currently seemingly downward. Initially I was astonished at his rise to the top of the list of Canadian intellectuals. I much prefer Charles Taylor, Patricia Churchland and many others. I am pleased with Hanzi's respectful attitude towards Peterson, a good balance of disagreement and agreement. My thinking is much more in alignment with Hanzi than with Peterson.
Peterson is a clinical psychologist and, in many ways, a political conservative..
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.
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...
And I agree. It´s all stories all the way down. But this too is a story, just another useful lens we can see through.
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
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).
The Real Title of This Book
This book could equally have been titled Sublime Mediocrity.
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.
The big surprise for me in this self-portrait by Hanzi is that his IQ score falls within the normal range. When I read his essays I always feel the power of an intelligence superior to my own. For years I have described myself as average and ordinary and I think my claim on this description is much stronger than that of Hanzi Freinacht.
This is a book that aims to do just that: to become a master of mediocrity; a consummate average Joe or Jane.
And I like the twist that Hanzi adds.
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.
Inappropriate Honesty
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.
I have not read Hanzi´s other books but, based on what other people say, The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One seems to have elevated Hanzi above the mediocre.
Introduction: Get Up, Grow Up?
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...
Yes, I have felt the magic at times in other circumstances and I have noticed when it faded. However, my discovery of metamodernism in 2019 still feels special to this day, awesome and magical. I wish I could share the magic with others, but writing this book report helps me cope.
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”... 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.
The issue of the hour is staying sane and reasonably happy in genuinely confusing and simultaneously undeniably tremendous times.
Beginning around 2015, I have observed some members of my family and some friends moving in a direction away from sanity. I am working at staying sane, staying happy and building meaningful relationships with others who are staying sane. I have found a community, Emergent Commons, that seems sane to me.
Being Exceptional Is Common
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?” ...in the end, even the extraordinary are indeed mostly ordinary.
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... The world needs reasonably balanced human beings who’ve healed their trauma and who function well in their daily lives.
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.
The Scale of Subjective States
Start by taking a look at this “scale of subjective states” that I have proposed in earlier work:.
Lower states:
1. Hell
2. Horrific
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
This is such a useful framework and I hope other thinkers will build on it. It seems to me that we need more tools to help us share our subjective states with each other as we build meaningful relationships. I hope to sometime have occasional discussions with others using this framework.
From about 2001 to 2006, I experienced a long difficult period in my life. Almost every day my subjective state was a 5 or 6. Once during this time I seriously considered suicide.
But now most of my days are at level 8, some days at 9 where I feel very ALIVE and from time to time I have moments of joy, a 10.
In my reading I come across some people who claim to be mostly in states 11, 12 and 13. Many such people are selling something, a path to how others can be like them. I have a lot of skepticism towards them. But my sense is that there are people who are genuinely in high states of subjective wellbeing but perhaps not comfortable sharing this with others. I hope to find and engage with some of these people.
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?
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.
Since I am already mostly at stage 8, this book does not offer me very much. But I remain highly motivated to keep reading and writing. This is giving me some of those moments of joy.
And Beyond, Beyond, Beyond
The twelve commandments I issue also relate to what lies beyond our lifespan: our unavoidable death and our legacy.
...I have found no reason to believe that the fear of death can ultimately be overcome... Facing that inconvenient truth, we’re all tempted to create some kind of immortality project... Yet, even these things will die. Complete annihilation awaits.
Here I have a rare disagreement with Hanzi. Not only do I believe that fear of death can be overcome, I think that it is important to do so in order to reduce existential angst and avoid becoming trapped by nihilism. But I agree with Hanzi´s conclusion.
...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... The aim of the mediocre life is to truly live our lives, and then to truly die... 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.
First Commandment: Live in a Mess, Moderately
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… 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.
I have a messy desk, too messy. I am trying to focus on what truly matters to me and this book report is high on my list of priorities at this time. But I would benefit from having lower priority items in better order.
Hitler and Einstein Walk into an Office
When people feel clean, they also feel more morally entitled to judge others… we are here witnessing the increase of what might be called self-righteousness, also called sanctimoniousness, sententiousness and holier-than-thouness… 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.
These people seem to have become less, not more, competent in making a contribution to the world by following the “clean your house” rule… 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.
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.
And I think I am making a little bit of progress cleaning up on the inside.
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.
Second Commandment: Fuck Like a Beast
This commandment is here to break you free from the shackles of inhibition and to release a stronger and fiercer passion in your life.
Although the title of this chapter seems somewhat crude to me, the content is profound. However, I do not feel inhibited. And I suspect this will be my least favorite chapter of the book.
Inhibition: The Cosmic Coma
We rarely feel fully alive. We’re in state “7” on the scale of subjective states…
Generally these days, I am mostly in subjective state 8 and feel ALIVE.
…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.
I think Hanzi is making a very important point. I think that there has been too much emphasis on culture and not enough on biology. At our core, we are animals.
…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.
In other words, most of the time in most circumstances we need to keep our inner beast under control.
The Beast Behind Bars
The human soul always hungers for more, and it will take on whatever self-aggrandizing delusions it can get away with.
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?
Good questions.
Cosmoeroticism: It’s the Hunger, Stupid
In a footnote, Hanzi credits Zak Stein and Marc Gafni with the origination of the term cosmoeroticism.
Cosmoeroticism 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… 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.
This may be true for some people but this has not been my lived experience. I have had, and continue to have, a rich spiritual journey. The term cosmoeroticism is new to me and the concept is not central for me. This may be one path but not my path. My good friend David Bryen would probably align closely with Hanzi.
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… How well can you understand the needs of others if you are not intimately familiar with your own needs?
I agree with Hanzi´s conclusion but not how he gets there.
What the Beast Needs
When was the last time you (spontaneously) roared and howled like a wolf during sex?
Never, Hanzi, and never have I had the slightest such desire and I have no sense of inhibition about this.
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 Child Returns
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.
I have done the work of resolving my childhood hurts and doing so was important for my personal growth. I am in agreement with Hanzi on this point. But for me the idea of a beast was not part of the process.
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.
I appreciated the personal disclosures by Hanzi, an interesting story. But again, my lived experience was unlike his. I suspect Hanzi is generalizing too much from his own experience.
Other readers may relate much better to the Second Commandment than I did.
Third Commandment: Live Sincerely, Ironically
Unlike the last one, I love this chapter. I was on the verge of tears of joy reading it, a rare experience for me. I long to connect with others who have read this piece of brilliance and had a similar reaction.
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).
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.
Irony Brings Trust
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).
I have long valued sincerity and authenticity. But I have taken myself too seriously and probably made it difficult for others to trust me at times. Hanzi has given me a growth opportunity, a path forward.
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.
From personal experience, I can support Hanzi´s assertion that facing nihilism is a necessary step in personal development. Few do. But I was forced to at midlife when I lost my Christian faith and, for me, God died.
Hanzi uses the song My Way, written by Canadian Paul Anka at age 26 and performed by Frank Sinatra, to colorfully make his points.
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.
We cannot effectively go from modern to metamodern without going through the deconstruction of postmodernism.
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.
The above sentence is one of the most meaningful ones I have read in a long time. Some will not see its beauty and wisdom. I want to find the others who see it as I do.
Jesus: Lost and Found
…this broad view of religion… the nihilistic stance is simply to not believe in any of that: it’s bullshit.
I have lived this at very deep levels, realizing it is all bullshit. For about five years, I lived with extreme cognitive dissonance. And for that I am now very grateful.
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.
Oh yes, Hanzi, it felt brutal at the time, losing all that magic of being a True Believer. And today, all around me, I see people looking for Saviors who promise magic. Many have not yet taken the red pill.
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.
But please, keep reading.
And now, if the red pill has been properly gobbled down, and only now, do we take the blue pill… Real magic is felt, not believed. Or let me restate that a bit more precisely: Magic is an experiential, not an objective, category.
When I first discovered metamodernism, The Stoa, Collective Presencing and Emergent Commons I felt the magic. Time passed and the magic faded. As a result I think I have come to be in right relationship, or at least a better relationship, with each of them.
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…
By continuing to read we come to the following passage:
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
…another saying that recurs these days from serious spiritual practitioners and followers of a path: “You have to eat the whole fish.” …Okay, fair point. Well, the problem is—and I’ve seen this again and again—is that the whole fish eats you.
Said another way, do we get ideas or do ideas get us?
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.
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).
For twenty-five years I was very religious, a True Believer. That phase of my life was followed by twenty years of being neither religious nor spiritual. In retirement I had an awakening and began seeing myself as “spiritual but not religious”. But now I am beginning to see the value of being religious in the sense that Hanzi, John Vervaeke and others envision.
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.
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.
Let’s get started with Vermeulen’s and von der Akker’s both-ands.
- Pragmatic romanticism
- Informed naivety
- Magical realism
Keep Clapping, You Double Extremist
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.
And I would like to add Doomer Optimism.
Fourth Commandment: Turn Workout Into Prayer
…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.
If we wish to achieve good lives, we must also achieve the inner states that can withstand social pressure.
Yes! In my opinion, to have a good life today means being able to not become entangled in culture war. It means not having our attention captured by others. And, of course, it means more than this but these two factors are particularly important at this time.
The Five Steps of Workout
I speak here of the “body-mind” because, after all, the body and the mind cannot be clearly delineated…
One of the most misleading phrases in the English language is “mind and body” as if human beings have two distinct components. Hanzi understands this deeply but the term “body-mind” is not much better. We need a new term. The concept that I would like someone to capture in a single word is that we are complex systems (This is not a metaphor!) that function in multiple dimensions of existence as described in the TOK framework being built by Gregg Henriques.
…turn your workout into a prayer, a practice of your whole body-mind, connected to higher subjective states, tuned in to life itself.
- 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 Body-Minds
Let’s try to understand this “body-mind” thing a bit more clearly.
The first three Body-Minds are easy for me to understand and I will focus on the fourth.
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.
…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”.
And why is this significant? Because…
…we can thus affect the entirety of reality as it appears to us, the nature of reality itself, by affecting our concrete, living bodies… 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.
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… 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.
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”.
If Hanzi is out of his depth here, where does that leave me, someone with no non-dual lived experience???!!!
…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…
On an intellectual level, the above paragraph is not new to me. For years I have been thinking about John Stokdijk as a subject that is observing John Stokdijk the object. I began thinking about this since 2014 after reading Sam Harris describing the joy of puncturing the illusion of the self. I listened to all of the John Vervaeke The Elusive I YouTube series. And I can hear the Buddhists telling me to stop thinking and start experiencing. And they may be right. And I want to honor the lived experience of others. And I ask for the same in return. I have never experienced the puncturing of the illusion of the self nor non-dual awareness. However, I have not yet tried psychedelic drugs.
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.
I captured my journey with Eckhart Tolle which I captured in my book report on A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
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.
And I read and reported on Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
Posture/Core and the Four Ss
Excursion: Your Social Status
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… cardio workout can and will affect your subjective state.
This I can confirm from my lived experience. I discovered the joy of running at age fifteen and I am still going strong at seventy-one. And there have been studies that have hinted at the possibility that running yields the same benefits as meditation.
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.
…there appears to be no limit to how high the spiral of improved subjective states can go… more or less in perpetual states of peace and bliss.
Meditation, in a wide sense of the term, is basically a kind of workout we’d be dumb to leave out entirely.
So, according to Hanzi, I am dumb. But he soon redeems himself.
…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.
In my view, there are too many people who spend hours on the cushion as a signal of their enlightenment to the rest of us. But I think Hanzi is the real deal, not merely signaling. And there are others who have spent many hours meditating who impress me.
Maybe meditation isn’t for everyone.
And maybe it is not for me.
Fifth Commandment: Quit
…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.
…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.
I strongly agree with Hanzi on this point. My career was mediocre, partly because I quit many jobs, some too soon and some too late. Getting the timing right is not easy. But I think I quit the benign Christian cult I was in for twenty-five years at about the right time, midlife. I quit living in Canada at the right time, when I retired. And more recently, I quit as the leader of the Ajijic Book Club at the right time.
Why Are We Doing This At All?
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… life is about relationships; to one another, to ourselves, and to existence itself.
The Scale of Conflict Resolution
This section is very good but I will not capture very much of it in my summary.
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.
In a perfect world, we could always take the first option: finding a shared higher ground and a renewed relationship.
The principle to apply in our own everyday lives and relationships is: Don’t minimize conflict, minimize resentment.
The capacity of quitting, of saying no, is the essence of freedom… 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.
When to Quit
All cults rely on the inability to quit… But quitting a cult is hard… 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.
Amen. This is a big part of my lived experience.
The Adult Quits, The Child Commits
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.
Your Life as a Work of Art
I literally did this - My Life is a Work of Art.
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.
From transforming, to compromising, to fighting it out, to quitting, this is what we must do to turn our lives into pieces of art.
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.
Sixth Commandment: Do the Walk of Shame
…shame and guilt… we cannot escape dealing with the emotions themselves… Let me warn you: this rule of life, and the two that follow, get pretty harsh.
This chapter did not feel harsh to me, although it did feel important. I see guilt and shame in other people but not so much in myself. I am not claiming to be better than other people, just different. My struggles have been with depression, anxiety, frustration, irritation and grandiosity. These I cannot escape dealing with.
Method to the Madness
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.
I do not seem to be able to bring up the emotions I struggle with just by thinking.
The Inventory of Shame
You Are the Opposite of Everything You Want to Be, and Others Can See It Very Clearly
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… There are pros and cons to this idea… 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.
Thank you, Hanzi. This is refreshing. I am tired of people implying that I have shadow work to do.
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…
Yes. There are limits on the individual path to personal growth. But using others as mirrors to better understand myself is a skill I have not yet developed.
The Inventory of Guilt: Underdog Reversal
We’re talking real guilt, where you, with very good reason, are guilty as charged for being a lousy piece of shit.
Again, this does not resonate strongly with me. I am no angel and I have certainly done others wrong over the course of my life. Nor have I been badly treated by others, except in a few very significant instances.
Look for situations where you’ve been at a great advantage over someone in terms of power:
My career spanned 43 years, 30 in management. I had considerable positional power and, looking back, I treated my subordinates well. I was not the perfect boss but on more than one occasion, employees told me that I was the best boss they ever had.
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.
Of this I am guilty. I followed leaders who should have been opposed, particularly when I was young and trying to avoid career limiting moves. But later I opposed some leaders and I paid the price for doing so.
The Eye of the Creator
Accepting our own dark side isn’t so bad.
Agreed. We are animals with a nature that wants to selfishly survive at the expense of others. Our dark side is natural and containing it is unnatural, but necessary.
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.
The real modality of healing is acceptance; acceptance of each painful emotion and whatever function it has served for us
Seventh Commandment: Sacrifice Immortality
Terror: Tame the Dragon
…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… the fear of death lies at the heart of human existence…
While I agree with this, there is almost nobody the I can openly discuss this with. I was forced to face this terror at midlife when I lost my Christian faith and gave up my belief in eternal life. And I learned that I can actually live better now than before.
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.
…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.
Hanzi is expressing ideas that are new to me and he is describing something I have not experienced.
The Shackles of Subtle Slavery
…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.
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…
Each time someone or something triggers a negative emotion in us, it is a watershed moment in our lives.
Is There Life on Mute
…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.
In my youth I was often depressed and did not experience the aliveness I feel today.
Reverse Death Therapy
Every disappointment is a little death.
…reverse death therapy… not working with death and dying, but with life and living… we go through all the things that shine for us, all the things that went well… You are building stability into your emotional system by accepting that these things could just as well not have been… You just lucked out.
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.
Eighth Commandment: Heal with Justice
…we should heal our emotional wounds by connecting to our sense of justice… justice and emotional healing are two sides of the same coin.
Groundwork One: Perception
…as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio famously quipped: “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think”... 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.
Trouble can arise—there can be “cognitive dissonance”—when thoughts, actions, and emotions contradict one another… book. I’d like to add a fourth dimension: perception (or “sensing”, as it involves all senses and our automatic interpretations of these).
And harmony between these four (emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and actions) is more likely to create harmony in our relations to other beings as well.
Groundwork Two: Focusing the Primary Emotions
Secondary emotions are those that arise in us as a result of underlying, “authentic” primary emotions. emotions. Often, these include anxiety or angst (especially of the vague, generalized kind), confusion, and that sense of muteness… The only value they have is to call to our attention that something is off…
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.
…at the bottom of the sadness, there is a scared little inner child, looking for safety.
Thinking of emotions as secondary and primary is a new framework for me.
From Broken Emotions to Wholeness
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.
Justice Means Wholeness
This understanding of wholeness or integration between emotion, cognition, perception, and actions helps us to understand what justice really is.
Become a Social Justice Warrior in Your Own Life
…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.
Greater than Love
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.
Injustice and the Adjectives of Evil
…signs of inconsistency… you need to tell lies… You avoid sitting down and talking… you need to “maneuver”... You carry secrets… You notice strange memory lapses…
The Right Kind of Assertiveness
It’s the superpower of assertiveness, i.e. the capacity to stand our ground in the face of social pressure… There really is no compromise between justice and injustice.
Can a Lawyer Ever be Happy?
The Eighth Commandment was a somewhat difficult chapter for me to understand because Hanzi presents a new way of thinking about justice.
Ninth Commandment: Burn Your Maps
But the Ninth Commandment was a chapter that was easy for me to comprehend and appreciate. For the first half of my adult life I was a devoted member of a benign Christian cult. At midlife I lost my faith and I burned all my maps. I quickly found new maps to guide me and they served me well for twenty years. But in 2015 and 2016 I realized that I did not understand the world I lived in very well. Once again I burned maps and sought new ones.
…one of the most important aspects is your “world map”—your basic assumptions about reality and your place in it.
…you can’t view the world without your own filters, you are de facto always reading your own world map… But your perception of what’s going on, in turn, depends on which map you’re reading.
All Boundaries Are Drawn on Maps
Maps are our collections of theories about life in the everyday, taken-for-granted, sense.
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.
Maps of Meaning?
In our days, when we are experiencing what some have called a “sensemaking crisis”, 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.
…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.
You Already Have the Best Map (Don’t You?)
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.
This long paragraph describes me, how I feel most of the time. In my experience it also describes a lot of other people I know. And then I think I am better than those other people because I have awareness of this about myself and it seems they do not.
…it’s apparent that we’re also “emotionally bribed” to believe in the superiority of our own worldview.
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?
But on an intellectual level, I realize that it is absurd to think that my worldview is the best possible.
But the commitment to update our maps of meaning can be life-long, and, indeed, it should be.
YES! YES! YES!
Moments of Clarity
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.
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.
Yes, this approach is what I now aspire to. A significant step forward for me occurred in 2019 when I read The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0 by Peter Limberg and Connor Barnes. Collecting multiple perspectives is a core principle of the metamodernism that Hanzi advocates.
Mutually Forced Red Pills
Red pill, blue pill and black pill seem like Game A concepts to me. Rarely talked about is the purple pill which I think captures the spirit of metamodernism. But the purple pill is another story for another time.
…expanding your world map always entails an opening into a renewed sense of mystery.
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”.
Yes. Having once been a True Believer myself, I deeply understand the harms of being one.
Spiritual Bungee-Jumping
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.
I do not like to travel alone but Hanzi is inspiring me to embrace this path.
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.
Yes. I am very satisfied with my current map and cannot imagine a better one. I cannot even imagine new territory to explore. The idea that perhaps a future me will have an even better map is mysterious and exciting.
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.
What a great chapter!
Tenth Commandment: Do What You Hate
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.
Three times in my life I sought the help of psychotherapists. And I was far more comfortable with one than the other two. She had the ability to easily and deeply understand me. I felt seen and heard and it was a very pleasant experience. The other two challenged me in ways that did not feel good at the time but yielded lasting insights. From one I learned that I had an unhealthy fear of being alone. From the other I learned that I had difficulty making significant transitions.
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… your weakest weak spots.
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… Jungians will believe that you need to integrate your shadow…
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.
And now I wonder what that might be for me.
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.
What are my blind spots?
Get the Right Kind of Therapy
…proposed by none other than a highly energetic 23 year old pre-med school dropout back in 1973: Ken Wilber.
Hanzi outlined Wilber’s seven layers of consciousness, which made good sense to me, but Hanzi concludes that…
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.
I just went along and listened to the therapists, and they really didn’t know their way around the spectrum of consciousness.
And Hanzi gives some advice:
…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.
All the Tea in London
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?
It seems to me that something beyond cognition could be good for me. But I do not sense that sorrows and troubles are holding me back at this time. Nevertheless, what Hanzi advocates seems useful somehow.
Eleventh Commandment: Kill Your Guru, Find Your Others
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.
I do not have a guru to kill so I will focus on part two of this chapter, finding a meta-team.
The Lure of the Guru
The obvious example to draw on in the context of this book is, of course, Jordan Peterson.
I was amazed by the rise of The Canadian as a guru and public intellectual on the world stage.
Money Is the Enemy
So around the rich, famous, and powerful alike, we tend to become dumber when it comes to truly doing our thing in the world.
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.
Growing Transpersonal Power
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.
…upgrade into a little community of knowledge and learning, where we learn together and from one another.
The meta-team is not “just a team at work”, as they are also friends and have chosen one another… two or more people, perhaps up to six or seven.
The meta-team consists of the ones who view you in a positive light, but fairly correctly and accurately so.
This is something I feel motivated to do: build my own meta-team.
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.
Principles for Cultivating the Meta-Team
Hanzi gives a lot of “good how” to advice.
Twelfth Commandment: Play for Forgiveness
The moment you opened the book—no, the moment I typed the first key on the first page—our clash was inevitable.
The Goal Beyond All Other Goals
I have contemplated all of these commandments together, as one seamless whole…
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.
It’s a goal that cannot quite be reached. It’s a direction, an ideal… 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.
It seems to me that where Hanzi takes this idea is quite profound, although I do not feel the rage.
The Rage, the Enemy, and the Grief
I know that people deny the existence of the rage… 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.
Again, Hanzi, I do not feel this rage, but I think I do understand it. In a certain way, life is absurd. In a certain way, life is utterly meaningless. That realization should lead to rage. But once we know this at a deep level, we can laugh. We can live life to the full. I am not in disagreement with Hanzi but I think I am already at the point to which he is trying to bring people.
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.
YES.
Struggle is reborn as play.
YES.
But even beyond the rage—indeed, beneath it, lies a bedrock, untouched by the storm. It’s the grief… 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.
YES. At one point in my life I felt so hopelessly broken that I seriously considered suicide.
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.
YES. As I write, we have just passed the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The world is unjust and terrible, full of suffering. Yet personally, I feel ALIVE, full of gratitude and even some joy.
Hanzi quotes what the atheist Stephen Fry would say were he to encounter God.
“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.”
BUT…
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.
Death by Game Theory, Death by Virtue
Forgiveness is about the rules of the game being breached… When you break the rules, you are contributing to breaking the game itself, and bringing the whole to ruin.
YES. I want to break the rules and change the game form Game A to Game B, from modern and post-modern to metamodern.
The Art of 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.
AMEN.