Book Summary: Beyond Order - 12 More Rules for Life

IMAGINE WHO YOU COULD BE, AND THEN AIM SINGLE-MINDEDLY AT THAT

You are something that is becoming—and the potential extent of that becoming also transcends your understanding. Everyone has the sense, I believe, that there is more to them than they have yet allowed to be realized.

Who are you? And, more importantly, who could you be, if you were everything you could conceivably be?

And all of this, being very difficult to understand consciously but vital to our survival, is transmitted in the form of the stories that we cannot help but attend to. And it is in this manner that we come to apprehend what is of value, what we should aim at, and what we could be.

Each of us, when fortunate, is compelled forward by something that grips our attention—something that calls to us for reasons we can neither control nor understand.

The phenomena that grip us are like lamps along a dark path: they are part of the unconscious processes devoted to integrating and furthering the development of our spirits, the furtherance of our psychological development.

You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you. Something manifests itself out of the darkness as compelling, as worth living for; following that, something moves us further down the road, to the next meaningful manifestation—and so it goes, as we continue to seek, develop, grow, and thrive.

Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path.

You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration.

Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up

In this manner, you will zigzag forward. It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself.

DO NOT HIDE UNWANTED THINGS IN THE FOG

Someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive.

That knowledge brings with it an arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise, but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete.

I will trust you—I will extend my hand to you—despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me.

A certain necessary humility must accompany such raw revelations. The world is full of hidden dangers and obstacles—and opportunities. Leaving everything hidden in the fog because you are afraid of the danger you may find there will be of little help when fate forces you to run headlong toward what you have refused to see.

Impaling yourself on sharp branches, stumbling over boulders, and rushing by places of sanctuary, you will finally refuse to admit you could have burned away the haze with the bright light of your consciousness, had you not hidden it under a bushel.

Then you will come to curse man, reality, and God himself for producing such an impenetrable maze of impediments and barriers. Corruption will beckon to you, led as you increasingly will be by dark, unexamined motivations—bred by failure, amplified by frustration—viciously culminating in the resentful belief that those who have transgressed against you are getting from you exactly what they deserve.

This attitude and the actions and inactions it will inevitably produce will impoverish your life, your community, your nation, and the world. This will in turn impoverish Being itself

NOTICE THAT OPPORTUNITY LURKS WHERE RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN ABDICATED

It appears that the meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.

It is a strange and paradoxical fact that there is a reciprocal relationship between the worth of something and the difficulty of accomplishing it. Imagine the following conversation: “Do you want difficulty?” “No, I want ease.” “In your experience, has doing something easy been worthwhile?” “Well, no, not very often.” “Then perhaps you really want something difficult.” I think that is the secret to the reason for Being itself: difficult is necessary.

How is it possible to gauge the rate at which challenges should be sought? It is the instinct for meaning—something far deeper and older than mere thought—that holds the answer. Does it serve those you love and, perhaps, even bring some good to your enemies?

That is responsibility. Constrain evil. Reduce suffering. Confront the possibility that manifests in front of you every second of your life with the desire to make things better, regardless of the burden you bear, regardless of life’s often apparently arbitrary unfairness and cruelty.

All other approaches merely deepen the pit, increase its heat, and doom those who inhabit it to continual worsening of their already serious problems. Everyone knows it. Everyone’s conscience proclaims it. Everyone’s true friend or loved one observes it and despairs when they see someone for whom they care failing to do what needs to be done.

What might serve as a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future.

Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder.

If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path. The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning—if not perverted by self-deceit and sin (there is no other way to state it)—manifests itself when you are on the path of maximum virtue.

DO NOT DO WHAT YOU HATE

We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all the other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and pursuit. That worthiness motivates us to act, despite the fact that action is difficult and dangerous.

When we are called upon to do things that we find hateful and stupid, we are simultaneously forced to act contrary to the structure of values motivating us to move forward stalwartly and protecting us from dissolution into confusion and terror.

If you wish instead to be engaged in a great enterprise—even if you regard yourself as a mere cog—you are required not to do things you hate. You must fortify your position, regardless of its meanness and littleness, confront the organizational mendacity undermining your spirit, face the chaos that ensues, rescue your near-dead father from the depths, and live a genuine and truthful life.

Maybe you can find something that pays better and is more interesting, and where you are working with people who not only fail to kill your spirit, but positively rejuvenate it.

Maybe following the dictates of conscience is in fact the best possible plan that you have—at minimum, otherwise you have to live with your sense of self-betrayal and the knowledge that you put up with what you truly could not tolerate. Nothing about that is good.

And let us be clear: It is not a simple matter of hating your job because it requires you to wake up too early in the morning, or to drag yourself to work when it is too hot or cold or windy or dry or when you are feeling low and want to curl up in bed.

Resentment generated by such necessary work is most often merely ingratitude, inability to accept a lowly place at the beginning, unwillingness to adopt the position of the fool, or arrogance and lack of discipline. Refusal of the call of conscience is by no means the same thing as irritation about undesirably low status.

That rejection is the turning of a blind eye, and the agreement to say and do things that betray your deepest values and make you a cheat at your own game.

And there is no doubt that the road to hell, personally and socially, is paved not so much with good intentions as with the adoption of attitudes and undertaking of actions that inescapably disturb your conscience.

IF OLD MEMORIES STILL UPSET YOU, WRITE THEM DOWN CAREFULLY AND COMPLETELY

To orient ourselves in the world, we need to know where we are and where we are going. Where we are: that concept must optimally include a full account of our experience of the world to date.

If you do not know what roads you have traversed, it is difficult to calculate where you are. We map the world so that we can make the move from where we are—from point A—to where we are going—to point B. We use our map to guide our movement, and we encounter successes and obstacles along the way.

It is far from uncommon for people to worry, sometimes unbearably, about what lies ahead of them. That worry is a both a consequence of and an investigation into the multiple pathways extending from now into the future. Each concern requires multiple decisions. All of this requires something like choice—free choice, free will. And the choice to act seems voluntary; it is a simple thing (although very psychologically unsatisfying) to succumb to paralysis of will.

It is our destiny to transform chaos into order. If the past has not been ordered, the chaos it still constitutes haunts us.

There is information—vital information—resting in the memories that affect us negatively. It is as if part of the personality is still lying latent, out in the world, making itself manifest only in emotional disruption.

What is traumatic but remains inexplicable indicates that the map of the world that guides our navigation is insufficient in some vital manner. It is necessary to understand the negative well enough so that it can be circumvented as we move into the future if we do not wish to remain tormented by the past. And it is not the expression of emotion associated with unpleasant events that has curative power.

PLAN AND WORK DILIGENTLY TO MAINTAIN THE ROMANCE IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP

There must be a broader, relationship-wide strategy in place to maintain romance with your partner across time.

Regardless of what that strategy might be, its success is going to depend on your ability to negotiate. To negotiate, you and the person you are negotiating with must first know what you each need (and want)—and second, be willing to discuss both forthrightly.

There are many serious obstacles both to knowing what you need and want, and to discussing it. If you allow yourself to know what you want, then you will also know precisely when you are failing to get it. You will benefit, of course, because you will also know when you have succeeded. But you might also fail, and you could well be frightened enough by the possibility of not getting what you need (and want) that you keep your desires vague and unspecified. And the chance that you will get what you want if you fail to aim for it is vanishingly small.

Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance. But trust has its requirements, as well, apart from the courage required of the individuals wise enough to distrust but brave enough to risk putting their faith in a partner.

There are also immense practical advantages to this, if practiced properly. There will come a time in your life when you have done something you should not have done or failed to do something that you should have done.

Life is too difficult to negotiate alone. If you tell your partner the truth, and you strive to act so that you can tell the truth about how you act, then you have someone to rely on when the seas become high and your ship threatens to founder. This can literally be a matter of life or death. In a relationship where romance remains intact, truth must be king.

Persistence under such conditions is a necessity, a terrible necessity, akin to surgery. It is difficult and painful because it takes courage and even some foolhardiness to continue a discussion when you have been told in no uncertain terms by your partner to go the hell away (or worse).

Hope, of course, can drive us through the pain of negotiation, but hope is not enough. You need desperation, as well, and that is part of the utility of “till death do us part.” You are stuck with each other, if you are serious—and if you are not serious, you are still a child. That is the point of the vow: the possibility of mutual salvation, or the closest you can manage here on Earth.

So, you grow up when you marry, and you aim for peace as if your soul depends upon it (and perhaps that is more serious than your life depending on it), and you make it work or you suffer miserably. You will be tempted by avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to employ the trapdoor of divorce so that you will not have to face what must be faced.

But your failure will haunt you while you are enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship you stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not improved a whit.

The next thing you have to do—I know this from both my clinical and marital experience (thirty years of each)—is actually talk to your partner for about ninety minutes a week, purely about practical and personal matters.

Just pure, practical communication: partly because you have a story, your partner has a story, and you have a joint story. To know your story, you must tell it, and, for your partner to know it, he or she must hear it. It is necessary for that communication to happen on an ongoing basis.

If you dip below ninety minutes a week, you generate a backlog, and your mutual story begins to unwind. At some point, that backlog is so large that you do not know who you are yourself, and you certainly do not know who your partner is, and you become mutually alienated. Your relationship loses its coherence. That is a bad situation.

DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME RESENTFUL, DECEITFUL, OR ARROGANT

You have your reasons for being resentful, deceitful, and arrogant. I want you to know how you might resist that decline, that degeneration into evil. To do so—to understand your own personality and its temptation by darkness—you need to know what you are up against. You need to understand your motivations for evil—and the triad of resentment, deceit, and arrogance is as good a decomposition of what constitutes evil as I have been able to formulate.

You perceive and act inside a structure like that all the time, because you are always somewhere, going somewhere else, and you are always evaluating where you are and what is going on in relation to your goal.

Part of this thinking in stories is our tendency to see the world as a selection of characters, each of which represents either where we are or are going, the unexpected occurrences we may encounter, or ourselves as actors.

You are resentful because of the absolute unknown and its terrors, because nature conspires against you, because you are a victim of the tyrannical element of culture, and because of the malevolence of yourself and other individuals. That is reason enough. It does not make your resentment appropriate, but it certainly makes the emotion understandable. None of these existential problems are trivial.

The fact that unfortunate things are happening or are going to happen to you is built into the structure of reality itself. There is no doubt that awful things happen, but there is an element of true randomness about them

Furthermore, it can be of great utility to realize that each of the negatives that characterize human existence are balanced, in principle, by their positive counterpart.

It is in our individual capacity to confront the potential of the future and to transform it into the actuality of the present. The way we determine what it is that the world transforms into is a consequence of our ethical, conscious choices. We wake up in the morning and confront the day, with all its possibilities and terrors.

We chart a course, making decisions for better or worse. We understand full well that we can do evil and bring terrible things into Being. But we also know that we can do good, if not great, things. We have the best chance of doing the latter if we act properly, as a consequence of being truthful, responsible, grateful, and humble.