TEN MORE COMMANDMENTS

I embarked on this project somewhat light heartedly but wound up absolutely in earnest. What I’m after here, I have come to realise, is a superstition-free code of ethics. Usually it’s somebody’s deity or other who comes up with such ideas which certainly makes it easier to bind believers into a social contract but ultimately sets up conflicts with the unconverted. This is my humble offering therefore towards a god-free code of conduct. I’ve worked hard not to descend to the sanctimonious, but it’s up to you to decide the degree to which I’ve succeeded.
Admittedly nobody’s doing any commanding here and they might be more accurately termed precepts but it’s all about marketing isn’t it? Ten More Commandments it is. Sue me, Moses, see if I care.

11. GET AWAY WITH IT Do no harm
There’s an old cynic’s cliché that says the eleventh commandment is ‘Don’t get caught’. That is not what I intend. Getting away with it goes deeper. Is it Google or Microsoft whose motto is ‘do no harm’? It should be both: It should be written into Company Law. I believe that to judge the morality of an action one must examine its consequences. Count your victims and measure (exactly how one does this is an open question) the degree of damage your act has created. No casualties, or better still improvement (we could argue about what that is too) then you’ve Got Away With It.
The eleventh commandment is about socially and environmentally responsible behaviour.

12. DON’T GET STUCK. Let go
There are two ways to become stuck – the voluntary and the involuntary. If your life is in a rut then perhaps you’ll like this one: if you’re on a roll right now you might experience a slight tendency to resist. Either way the trick is to relax your grip. By and large your oppressors are your own beliefs. I don’t mean become a creature without volition like a leaf on the wind. I tried that once and discovered there are contrary wills out there and if you don’t occasionally jostle for space even the sweetest souls can’t help but step on you. Carpe diem! Seize the day, yes, but don’t throttle it. Life, my friend, is a butterfly. Hold out your open palm and there she will settle and open up her pearly wings to you. Close your fist even for a moment and either she is crushed or flown. This applies to love, to wealth, to mood, to ideas, to the creative urge. Keep an eye on things for sure, but learn to trust the universe.
And for goodness’ sake don’t winge.

13. DON’T TRY TOO HARD. Be cool
I found myself the other day trying really hard not to try too hard and I knew I’d really lost the thread. ‘If you’re in a hole,’ they say, ‘stop digging’. Currently there’s someone, not entirely part of my life yet, whom I’ve been trying to impress. If she’s going to like me it will be for the me-ness of me, not some contrivance. So what did I do? I applied the Letting Go rule and although I don’t think I’ve quite won her heart as yet I discover the her-ness of her all along has been floating beside me on the stream of life. See? – there’s the butterfly and oh how she shines. I’m not going to stop doing the best I can though – see the get-it-right rule below.
Put this another way – force and coercion bend the world out of shape and between the lines of the be cool rule is an exhortation to non-violence. But I much prefer to talk about love than war.

14. DON’T APOLOGISE FOR YOURSELF Respect yourself.
Now I don’t mean ‘never apologise’. Apology is right and proper way to express contrition when one had wronged another. It declares willingness to embark on reparation and a resolve to do better in the future. But never, ever, self-disparage. The person most responsible for the maintenance of your dignity and self-respect is you. You cannot rely on others to do this for you. If you accidentally back into someone in the checkout queue say ‘excuse me’ or ‘please forgive me’ and save your sorrys for the serious stuff. To present yourself as unworthy is to invite contempt.
But don’t take yourself too seriously, eh?

15. PURSUE YOUR DREAMS Use your imagination
If you don’t have a dream how you gonna have a dream come true?
Without a dream to chase, life can become most dreadfully dull, at best a kind of endlessly complacent cycle of the satisfactory. And when you’re in that hole and you’ve stopped digging but still can’t find a way out, try using your imagination. There are prizes for the best ideas, I promise.
There’s nothing wrong with the occasional Impossible Dream either. The world needs Impossible Dreams (unless they involve Thousand Year Reichs). Given the probability of an ID coming to fruition we need shedloads of them to keep up the odds. And besides, a good few turn out not to be as impossible as you may think. Your perceived impossibility quotient could well be a measure of your own lack of imagination. The optimal technique, I find, is to have only the one ID at a time and therein invest your all. If you’re stuck, start with little daydreams and work up from there. Necessity is actually the Father of invention: its Mother is imagination.
I’ve always been a bit short on ambition myself, so this story has stuck in my gullet ever since I heard it (from a Christian priest curiously enough). An earnestly good man dies and approaches St Peter at the pearly gates. He has all his answers ready – he’s kept the commandments (the first ten anyway), been charitable and upright; he’s gone to church regularly. Instead of the expected question, St Peter floors him right away. ‘What risks have you taken?’ he demands. I still don’t know if the man gets in or not, or more to the point, how I rate my own chances.
As a matter of fact the imagination rule is almost impossible to sidestep since pretty much the entirety of our social reality is based on the imaginary. God, America and the Dollar are made of nothing but our dreams. I’m not knocking them, they are (though you may have your own views on their enactment) some of the most brilliant IDs of all time. And in the face of the almost universal public subscription to such notions, is it not a huge conceit to affect disbelief?
And finally folks, consider the construction of the Self. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

16. LIVE TO THE FULL Have fun
Are you ready to rock and roll? Love life. This world is bursting at the seams with light and colour and sound and perfumes and tastes and all the delights of the spirit and the senses. Cash in your birthright of joy and resist to the utmost any who would seek to rob you of it. Exuberance is beauty. Laugh. Educate your sense of humour. Be Up not Down. Up-Up-Up-Upbeat, got that? Up. Don’t indulge the Down. Stop listening to Oasis - all that whining and complaining like sulky children, it’s bad for you. I know I can hardly talk with my prediliction for masses for the dead but in my defence the likes of Beethoven and Fauré do death about as full-on as you can get. So yes indeed, when it’s time, weep to the full as well.
Living to the full means dwelling in the present. Too much our consciousness is smeared across space and time, worrying about the future, dwelling in the past. Be here now.
Live ten tenths. When you’re dead you’ll wish you had paid more attention to your genitalia. Look on the bright side. Throw yourself up to the ears into the stream of life and wallow – don’t be foolish enough to think you can contrive to fill your private pond, just splash about, joy flows ever on. The Ten Thousand Things are there for your delectation. Illusions they ultimately may be but as phantasms go, matter is ultimately beguiling. Whoever wrote that we incarnate to eschew matter and mortify the flesh must have been barking mad. Revel in it, else what’s the bloody point?
This should not be taken as an invitation to excess and intoxication. Best include yourself under the do no harm rule. So…
16A. DON’T OVERDO IT

17. BE LOYAL Be friendly
This one’s about creating a robust and sustainable social infrastructure.
When, back in 1987, Maggie Thatcher, then Queen of England, said ‘There is no such thing as society’ she was making, in my view, one of the crassest and most socially damaging statements I have ever heard from a politician. ‘There are only individuals and families.’ she said. Listen lady, civilisation is not wrought by the neighbours conspiring on their own, by narrowed-eyed Crowleyites or solitary amoral Nietzchians relying solely on personal will, but by members of the human tribe working in harmony. Love shall be the whole of the law. If you’re already a loyal tribe-member, whether by virtue of your nationality, ethnicity, deity, skin-tone, football team or whatever, then I’m glad you’ve started out on the road to the social skill of affiliation. Such alliances however are all too often predicated not simply on the goodness of Us, but on the badness of the Other Guy. This won’t do. Until you’re a fully committed member of the human race entire then Grasshopper, you have not learned.
Sneerleaders, jeerleaders. Lately they appear to be becoming fashionable in some parts. There isn’t time for disparagement - if it’s a load of rubbish why fritter away your life running it down? – you only cheapen yourself and win the kind of pals who’ll wind up sneering at you. And betrayal, there’s an especially expensive vice, doubly pernicious because it works backwards in time, cancelling prior investment of love, trust and respect.
Love, friendship and co-operation are basically much more fun than competition. Be on the same side - not really so difficult since, it seems to me, the goals that most humans have in common are not ideological or religious so much as the honest pastimes of planting taters, making babies, singing songs.
A few random acts of kindness wouldn’t go amiss either.

18. BE PROFESSIONAL Get it right
Our thoughts and our actions make the world. If what you think and do is crappy you will make a crappy world. Do you want a crappy world? No? Then adopt an ethic of excellence and make yourself a quality world instead. Either you give it your best shot or you short-change yourself with a half-assed outcome which will serve only to underscore the sense of pointlessness you’re endlessly complaining about. Job satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) is the greater part of the paycheck. And this is about everything, not just the marketplace.
When sitting sit, when standing stand. Above all don’t wobble.

19 BE PREPARED FOR CHANGE Adapt!
The cause of suffering is rooted not so much in desire and attachment but in the failure to adapt. Besides death and taxes, the third certainty in life is that things change so you’d better learn to live with it. The ability to adapt is one of the great evolutionary advantages of the mammal so this one should come naturally. Embrace your changes. Adapt and evolve! Become ever more magnificent.

20 DO IT WITH STYLE Ars longa, Vita brevis
When God had finished making all the animals, ‘Go forth and multiply…’ he told them and they all rushed enthusiastically away and got on with it. ‘…With style!’ he shouted after them but, apart from the swans it remains an unanswered question as to how many of them heard.
Just doing it is not good enough. There ain’t nothin’ new under the sun, some say. If they’re right, if it is merely a matter of endlessly reinventing the wheel of birth and death then at least you can make some attempt to inject (besides, as a Professional, quality) grace, beauty and originality into your opus.

And so to summarise, here, in a nutshell, is how to do life.
Do no harm; don’t get stuck; be cool; respect yourself (but don’t take yourself too seriously); use your imagination; have fun (but don’t overdo it); be friendly; be professional; adapt! And whatever you do, do it with style.
Rob Valentine February 2008

I feel some acknowledgements are in order. Consider this my philosophoscar award acceptance speech. My grateful thanks to
Yunyu my muse
http://www.myspace.com/yunyu
Camilla – there’s lots of you in this. Thanks for the gift of all that wisdom over the years
Buddha Gautama with best wishes
William Blake. His Proverbs of Hell constitute my first Guest List. Well worth a visit at -
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Blake_-_Proverbs_of_Hell.html
Jesus Christ. No hard feelings. It’s your followers who cause the problems.
William Shakespeare
Claire for putting me on the right track about apologies
The TV series ‘Kung Fu’ and ‘Monkey’
Mark L, probably the world’s coolest Anthropologist (ah, but which world?)