St. BERNARD

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,

To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once!

The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,

And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire:

Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, re-member me.

Exit

King Hamlet,

Father of  Hamlet, (Deceased).

Act  II, Scene I.

When you are ready to listen, Beatrice will appear. 

A man I knew who was at this point on his journey asked me where his guide was. 

He needed her so badly. I suggested he look for her in his active imagination. 

When he did, she appeared instantly and she told him, “I’ve been waiting for you for twenty years. You only had to ask.” 

Beatrice will be there the moment you ask and are truly ready to listen.

Beatrice shows Dante the vision of the unitive world. 

She takes him through the rest of Purgatory and into Heaven. 

Then, at the last moment, she gives way to another guide, St. Bernard, which is puzzling. 

But Beatrice is the psychopomp — a wonderful medieval word for soul guide — who leads Dante through the deep levels of Purgatory into the vision of Heaven, a journey of wholeness and healing. 

Dante owes his success initially to Virgil, but primarily to Beatrice, who leads, inspires, and awakens him spiritually.

“Bernard is Dante Alighieri’s last guide, in Divine Comedy, as he travels through the Empyrean.

Dante’s choice appears to be based on Bernard’s contemplative mysticism, his devotion to Mary, and his reputation for eloquence.”

St. Bernard (1090-1153) is an interesting character, and not only because he has a breed of dog named after him.  In 1113, he and 30 other Burgundian youths sought entrance into the Abbey of Citeaux (founded 1098), birthplace of the Cistercians.  Three years later he was sent off to found the third Cistercian Abbey in the Vallée d’Absinthe, Valley of Bitterness; he named this place, instead, Claire Vallée–Clairvaux, on June 25, 1115.

In 1118, 1119, and 1121, Clairvaux founded 3 new abbeys to make room for those taking holy orders within its walls.  The abbey was becoming a force within mediaeval Christendom.  Indeed, during Bernard’s lifetime, some 290 Cistercian monasteries were to be founded.

As Abbot of Clairvaux, St. Bernard was to be a man of influence both in ecclesiastical affairs — helping spur Peter the Venerable on in the reforms at Cluny, for example — and in temporal affairs, defending ecclesiastical rights against those of kings and princes.  He sought to encourage not only monks but bishops, priests, and the laity to live lives of simplicity and holiness rather than the excess often displayed by clergy and the upper classes in the Middle Ages.

He also wrote various works and homilies, including “On the Love of God,” a work which later was to influence the devotional life of a young Augustinian friar named Martin Luther.  Amidst his writings, he also complained about the influx of contemporary music in church.  Apparently, in a lot of churches at this time, people were playing secular instruments in the secular style in sacred space.  Bernard longed for nothing but Gregorian Chant in church.  No doubt in Clairvaux and the other 290 Cistercian monasteries founded in his lifetime, this is what he got.

Despite all of these virtues, one cannot leave behind St. Bernard without mentioning the less pleasant aspects of his life.  St. Bernard lived during the age of the Crusades.  Now, one could argue that as a political war to reclaim land on behalf of the Eastern Roman Empire and make safe the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem, the First Crusade in the 1090s was as justified as any other mediaeval war.  Unfortunately, during that war, and especially in the years that followed it, the concept of the Crusade as a “holy war”, as something ordained by God, developed.  Muslims were not merely enemies of the West in political terms but were, in fact, the enemies of God and worth killing.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was a man of his day, not just in terms of monastic reform and ascetic zeal.  He helped provide the theological framework for the Crusades and preached the ill-fated Second Crusade (1145-47).  Before St. Bernard, the term miles Christi had referred either to the Christian or, more frequently and specifically, to the monk.  Monks were the soldiers of Christ, fighting demons, praying continually, training through asceticism.  Now, however, Bernard turned the term from the spiritual to the physical; the miles Christi was the Crusader, fighting for Christ against the Muslims (or, as the [somewhat outdated] Catholic Encyclopedia puts it: “Mohammedan tyranny”).

I do not wish to dwell on this aspect of St. Bernard.  However, while we should not seek out only the faults of the saints, we should behold them with both eyes open.  Otherwise, we will write notably naive things like this:

There were thousands of men, generally young, who left society and often a military career to take up the cloistered life.  If to this number one adds the members of some 290 other Cistercian monasteries founded during Bernard’s lifetime, one has some idea of the tremendous peace corps, with tens of thousands of members, taht Bernard helped to establish.  What architect of peace has played such a role in his century or in any other? (Jean Leclercq, quoted by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgove, New Monasticism)

Nevertheless, St. Bernard is worth noting and admiring.  Admirable is his zeal for reforming and founding monasteries as well as the lifestyle of the average Christian.  Admirable as well is his defence of orthodoxy.  Admirable, to be sure, are his many influential works, the orthodoxy of which withstand the centuries even if his Crusade ideology does not.  These many works and sermons have gained him the title “Doctor of the Church.”

His learning and zeal for holy living are to be emulated.  May we live as he does.

Here’s The Rules That We’re Already Acting Out

I think this is partly what happens in Exodus, 

when Moses comes up with The Law. 

He’s wandering around with the Israelites in The Desert.

 They’re going left and going right, 

worshipping idols, having a hell of a time, 

and getting rebellious. 

Moses goes up in The Mountain, 

and he has this tremendous revelation 

in the sight of God. 

It illuminates him, 

and he comes down with The Law. 

Moses acted as a Judge —

I know this is a mythological story 

—in The Desert. 

He was continually mediating between people who were having problems, and he was constantly trying to keep peace. 

What are you doing when you’re trying to keep peace? 

You’re trying to understand what peace is. You have to apply the principles. 

 What are the principles? 

Well, you don’t know. 

The principles are whatever satisfied the people enough to make peace.

Maybe you act as judge 10,000 times, and then you get some sense of the principles that bring peace. 

One day it blasts into your consciousness, like a revelation: ‘Here’s the rules that we’re already acting out.’ 

That’s the Ten Commandments. 
They were there to begin with. 

Moses comes forward, and says, 
‘Look, this is basically what we’re already doing, but now it’s codified.’  

That’s all historical process condensed into a single story, but, obviously, that happened, because we have written law. 

In good legal systems, that emerges from the bottom up.

 
English Common Law is exactly like that: it’s single decisions, that are predicated on principles, that are then articulated and made into the Body of Law.

The Body of Law is something that you act out. 

That’s why it’s a Body of Law. 
That’s why, if you’re a good Citizen, you act out The Body of Law. 

 The Body of Law has principles. 

Ok, so the question is, what are the principles that guide our behaviour? 

Well, that’s something like what the archaic Israelites meant by ‘God.’ 

Later on, Moses is carving out the Ten Commandments onto a slab of stone. He talks to Malak again, who tells him that if he truly believes in what he's writing, that he ought to continue. 

The Hebrews make their way through Mount Sinai. 

A significantly older Moses rides with the Ten Commandments close to him.

He looks out and sees Malak amongst the crowd before he seems to disappear. 

The Hebrews then continue making 

their way to the promised land.

"Where does the information that’s in the dream come from? It has to come from somewhere. You could think of it as a revelation, because it’s like it springs out of the void, and it’s new knowledge. You didn’t produce it; it just appears. I’m scientifically minded, and I’m quite a rational person. I like to have an explanation of things that’s rational and empirical, before I look for any other kind of explanation. I don’t want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced, in some manner, to biology, an evolutionary history, or anything like that. But, insofar as it’s possible to do that reduction, I’m going to do that. I’m going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air, because they can’t be pinned down. In that category, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we don’t understand, at all.

Artists observe one another, and they observe people. Then they represent what they see, and transmit the message of what they see, to us. That teaches us to see. We don’t necessarily know what it is that we’re learning from them, but we’re learning something—or, at least, we’re acting like we’re learning something. We go to movies; we watch stories; we immerse ourselves in fiction, constantly. That’s an artistic production, and, for many people, the world of the arts is a living world. That’s particularly true if you’re a creative person.

It’s the creative, artistic people that move the knowledge of humanity forward. They do that with their artistic productions, first. They’re on the edge. The dancers, poets, visual artists, and musicians do that, and we’re not sure what they're doing. We’re not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell are they doing? Why do you like music? It gives you deep intimations of the significance of things, and no one questions it. You go to a concert; you’re thrilled. It’s a quasi-religious experience, particularly if the people really get themselves together, and get the crowd moving. There’s something incredibly intense about it, but it makes no sense whatsoever.

It’s not an easy thing to understand.where does the information in dreams come from? I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We watch that forever, and we’ve got some representations of those patterns that’s part of our cultural history. That’s what’s embedded in fictional accounts of stories between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, and the romance. These are canonical patterns of Being, for people, and they deeply affect us, because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. We flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. There’s waves of behavioural patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd, across time. Great dramas are played on the crowd, across time. The artists watch that, and they get intimations of what that is. They write it down, tell us, and we’re a little clearer about what we’re up to.

A great dramatist, like Shakespeare — we know that what he wrote is fiction. Then we say, ‘fiction isn’t true.’ But then you think, ‘well, wait a minute. Maybe it’s true like numbers are true.’ Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think that numbers aren’t true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, because the abstraction is so insanely powerful.

Once you have mathematics, you’re just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. It’s not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. You take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and you think, ‘well, it’s not true, because it’s fiction.’ But then you think, ‘wait a minute—what kind of explanation is that?’ Maybe it’s more true than nonfiction. It takes the story that needs to be told about you, and the story that needs to be told about you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and it abstracts that out, and says, ‘here’s something that’s a key part of the human experience as such.’ It’s an abstraction from this underlying, noisy substrate. People are affected by it because they see that the thing that’s represented is part of the pattern of their being. That’s the right way to think about it.

With these old stories—these ancient stories—it seems, to me, like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It’s like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again, and at the end of that process—it took God only knows how long. They’ve traced some fairy tales back 10,000 years, in relatively unchanged form.

It certainly seems, to me, that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old, and are likely embedded in prehistory, which is far older than that. You might say, ‘well, how can you be so sure?’ The answer to that, in part, is that the ancient cultures didn't change fast. They stayed the same; that’s the answer. They keep their information moving from generation to generation. That’s how they stay the same, and that’s how we know. There are archaeological records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years: it was discovered in caves, in Japan, that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.

We’re watching each other act in the world, and then the question is, how long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense, is as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems, and that’s a long time. That’s some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. We’ve been watching each other, trying to figure out what we’re up to, across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into your bodies—which is why we can dance with each other, for example. Understanding isn’t just something that you have as an abstraction. It’s something that you act out. That’s what children are doing, when they’re learning to rough-and-tumble play. They’re learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way—learning to cooperate and compete. That’s all instantiated right into their body. It’s not abstract knowledge, and they don’t know that they’re doing that. They’re just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform.

We’ve been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what is it that we’re up to, and what should we be up to. That’s an even more fundamental question: if you’re going to live in the world, and you’re going to do it properly, what does properly mean? How is it that you might go about that? It’s the right question; it’s what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? It’s not what the world is made of; it’s not the same question. How do you live in the world? It’s the eternal question of human beings.

I guess we’re the only species that has ever really asked that question. All the other animals just go and do whatever it is they do. Not us. It’s a question, for us. We have to become aware of it. We have to speak it—God only knows why. But that seems to be the situation. So we act, that acting is shaped by the world and society into something that we don’t understand, but that we can model. We model it in our stories and with our bodies, and that’s where the dream gets its information. The dream is part of the process that’s watching everything, and then trying to formulate it. It’s trying to get the signal out from the noise and portray it in dramatic form, because the dream is a little drama. And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is. You have something like articulated knowledge, at that point.

I would say the Bible exists in that space that is half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge. Going into it, to find out what the stories are about, can aid our self-understanding. The other issue is that, if Nietzsche was correct, and if Jung was correct, and Dostoevsky, as well…Without the cornerstone provided by that understanding, we’re lost. That’s not good, because then we’re susceptible to psychological pathology. People that are adamant anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that, if we abandoned our immersement in the underlying dream, we’d all, instantly, become rationalists, like Descartes or Bacon—intelligent, clear thinking, rational, scientific people. I don’t believe that for a moment. I don’t think there’s any evidence for it. I think we would become so irrational, so rapidly, that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would seem positively rational by contrast—and I think that’s already happening.

You have the unknown world. That’s just what you don’t know, at all. That’s outside the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit. Something like that. It’s chaos itself. You act in that world, and you act in ways that you don’t understand. There’s more to your actions than you can understand. One of the things that Jung said—I loved this, when I first understood it. He says that everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. You should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you don’t want it to be. That’s really worth thinking about, because you have a pattern of behaviour that characterizes you. God only knows where you got it. It’s partly biological, and it’s partly from your parents; it’s your unconscious assumptions; it’s the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you; and it’s aiming you somewhere. Is it aiming you somewhere you want to go? That’s a good question. That’s part of self-realization.

We know we don’t understand our actions. Almost every argument you have with someone is about that. It’s like, ‘why did you do that?’ You come up with some half-baked reasons why you did it; you’re flailing around in the darkness; you try to give an account for yourself, but you can only do it partially. It’s very, very difficult, because you’re a complicated animal, with the beginnings of an articulated mind, and you’re just way more than you can handle. So you act things out, and that’s a kind of competence. Then you imagine what you act out, and you imagine what everyone else acts out. There’s a tremendous amount of information in your action, and that information is translated up into the dream, and then into art, mythology and literature. There’s a tremendous amount of information in that, and some of that is translated into articulated thought.

I’ll give you a quick example of something like that. I think this is partly what happens in Exodus, when Moses comes up with the law. He’s wandering around with the Israelites in the desert. They’re going left and going right, worshipping idols, having a hell of a time, and getting rebellious. Moses goes up in the mountain, and he has this tremendous revelation in the sight of God. It illuminates him, and he comes down with the law. Moses acted as a judge—I know this is a mythological story—in the desert. He was continually mediating between people who were having problems, and he was constantly trying to keep peace. What are you doing when you’re trying to keep peace? You’re trying to understand what peace is. You have to apply the principles. What are the principles? Well, you don’t know. The principles are whatever satisfied the people enough to make peace.

Maybe you act as judge 10,000 times, and then you get some sense of the principles that bring peace. One day it blasts into your consciousness, like a revelation: ‘here’s the rules that we’re already acting out.’ That’s the Ten Commandments. They were there to begin with. Moses comes forward, and says, ‘look, this is basically what we’re already doing, but now it’s codified.’ That’s all historical process condensed into a single story, but, obviously, that happened, because we have written law. In good legal systems, that emerges from the bottom up. English common law is exactly like that: it’s single decisions, that are predicated on principles, that are then articulated and made into the body of law.

The body of law is something that you act out. That’s why it’s a body of law. That’s why, if you’re a good citizen, you act out the body of law. The body of law has principles. Ok, so the question is, what are the principles that guide our behaviour? Well, that’s something like what the archaic Israelites meant by ‘God.’ It’s not a good enough explanation, but imagine that you are a chimpanzee, and you have a powerful dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society. That represents ‘power’—more than that, because it’s not sheer physical prowess that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy. It’s much more complicated than that.

You could say there’s a principle that the dominant person manifests, and then you might say that principle shines forth even more brightly, if you know 10 people who are dominant and powerful. Then you could extract out what ‘dominance’ means from that. You can extract what ‘power’ means from that, and then you can divorce the concept from the people. We had to do that, at some point, because we can say ‘power,’ in the human context, and we can imagine what that means. But it’s divorced from any specific manifestation of power. How the hell did we do that? That’s so complicated. If you’re a chimp, the power is in another chimp. It’s not some damn abstraction.

Think about it. We’re in these hierarchies, many of them across centuries. We’re trying to figure out what the guiding principle is. We’re trying to extract out the core of the guiding principles, and we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being. That’s God. It’s an abstracted ideal, and it manifests itself in personified form. That’s ok, because what we’re trying to get at is, in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual. We’re trying to figure out what that means. You need an embodiment. You need an ideal that’s abstracted, that you could act out, that would enable you to understand what that means. That’s what we’ve been driving at. That’s the first hypothesis. I’m going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we’ve formalized as God, but that’s the first hypothesis: a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself, first, as a concrete pattern of behavior that’s characteristic of a single individual—and then it’s a set of individuals, and then it’s an abstraction from that set, and then you have the abstraction, and it’s so important.

Here’s a political implication: One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be God—literally to be deified and put into a temple. You can see why that might happen, because that’s someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy, who has a tremendous amount of power and influence. The Christian response to that was, ‘never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself.’ It’s brilliant. You can see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that, so that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to a divine principle, for lack of a better word. Even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. We still believe that, because we believe our Prime Minister is subordinate to the damn law.

Whatever the body of law, there's a principle inside that even the leader is subordinate to. Without that, you could argue that you can’t even have a civilized society, because your leader immediately turns into something that’s transcendent and all-powerful. That's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union, and what happened in Maoist China, and what happened in Nazi Germany. There was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to. You’re supposed to be subordinate to God. What does that mean? We’re going to tear that idea apart, but partly what that means is that you’re subordinate—even if you’re sovereign—to the principles of sovereignty itself. And then the question is, ‘what the hell is the principles of sovereignty?’ I would say we have been working that out for a very long period of time. That’s one of the things that we’ll talk about. 

DROWNING

People need Ordering Principles, 

and Chaos otherwise beckons.

- Peterson

I hate it when They drown me....

— Buffy, The Vampire Slayer

LUTHOR :

Krrrrrryptonite..!!

You're asking yourself, "How?"

Didn't your dad ever teach you to look before you leap?

Crystals. They're amazing, aren't they?

They inherit The Traits of The Minerals around them... 

kind of like — A Son 

inheriting The Traits 

of His FATHER !

Look buddy, we sent you there 

to die, but ya' had to come back . . . 

Oh yeah. All those photos? 

Those stories about 

Krypton still existing? 

It was me. 

And him.

Lex looks toward Stanford. 

Thankfully, 

The Press doesn't check Facts like they used to.

 

Hey,  you took away five years of my life. 

I just returned the favor.

SUPERMAN :

I'm still Superman!

SUPERMAN REVENGE SQUAD :

Get up! Come on!

Now, fly.

•STABS HIM WITH A KRYPTONITE SHIV AND SNAPS OFF THE BLADE•

LUTHOR:

So long, Superman.

“We require RULES, STANDARDS, VALUES 

— alone AND together. 

We’re pack animals, 

Beasts of burden. 

We must Bear a Load, 

to justify our miserable existence. 

We require Routine and Tradition. 

That’s Order. 

Order can become excessive, 

and that’s Not Good, 

But Chaos can swamp us, so we drown — 

and that is also Not Good. 

We need to stay on 

The Straight and Narrow path. 

[I seek,] Therefore [to] 

Provide A Guide to Being There. 

“There” is The Dividing Line 

between Order and Chaos. 

That’s where we are simultaneously 
Stable ENOUGH, 

Exploring ENOUGH, 

Transforming ENOUGH, 

Repairing ENOUGH, 

and 

Cooperating ENOUGH. 

It’s there we find The Meaning that justifies 
Life and its inevitable Suffering. 

Perhaps, if we lived •properly•, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. 

Perhaps, if we lived •properly•, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, 

Resentment, then Envy, 

and then 

The Desire for 

Vengeance and Destruction. 

Perhaps, if we lived •properly•, we wouldn’t have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own Insufficiency and Ignorance. 

Perhaps we could come to avoid those pathways to Hell — 

and we have seen in the terrible Twentieth Century 

just how real Hell can be.

Humanity, in toto, 

and those who compose it 

as identifiable people 

deserve some sympathy 

for the appalling burden 

under which 

The Human Individual 

genuinely staggers; 

Some sympathy for subjugation to 

Mortal Vulnerability, 

Tyranny of The State, and 

The Depredations of Nature. 

It is an Existential Situation that 

no mere animal encounters or endures, 

and one of severity such 

that it would take a God to fully bear it. 

It is this sympathy 

that should be the proper medicament 

for self-conscious self-contempt, 

which has its justification, 

but is only half The Full and Proper story. 

Hatred for Self and Mankind 

must be balanced with 

Gratefulness for Tradition and The State and 

Astonishment at what Normal, 

Everyday People accomplish —

to say nothing of 

The Staggering Achievements 

of the Truly Remarkable. 

We Deserve some respect. 

You Deserve some respect. 

You are important to Other People, 

as much as to yourself. 

You have some vital role to play in 
The Unfolding Destiny of The World. 

You are, therefore, morally obliged 

to take care of yourself. 

You should take care of, 

help and be good to yourself 

the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. 

You may therefore 

have to conduct yourself habitually 

in a manner that allows you 

some respect for your own Being — 

and fair enough. 

But every person is deeply flawed. 
Everyone falls short of the glory of God. 

If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. 

That would not be good. 

That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. 

That simply cannot be the proper path forward. 

To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. 

THIS IS •NOT•  

“What You WANT.” 

It is also NOR “What Would Make You HAPPY.” 

Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. 

That does NOT mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. 

“Happy” is by no means synonymous with “Good.” 


You must get children to brush their teeth.

They must put on their snowsuits when they go outside in the cold, even though they might object strenuously. 

You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—
Able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. 

Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself? 

You need to consider The Future and think, 

“What might my life look like if I were caring for myself •properly•?"

"What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, 
so that I could shoulder my share of the load, 
and enjoy the consequences?"

"What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?”

You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. 

You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. 

You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on The World. 

You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. 

You have to articulate your own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play. 

You must discipline yourself carefully. 

You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself. 

You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person. 
It would be good to make The World a better place. 

Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord. 

We will have to work to bring it about, and strengthen ourselves, so that we can withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its entrance. 

Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. 

These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. 

Strengthen the individual. 

Start with yourself. 

Take care with yourself. 

Define who you are. 

Refine your personality. 

Choose your destination and articulate your Being. 

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted,

 “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.” 

You could help direct The World, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward Heaven and a bit more away from Hell. 

Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that. 

You could aim elsewhere. 

You could, in fact, devote your life to this. 

That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. 

That would justify your miserable existence. 

That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden. 

You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.