How is it that some old folks like life and enjoy it and others don’t? Some people go through life with an easy smile, while others are just never happy. People with an easy smile have a healthier sense of self. They also know how and when to ask others for help. Those who always seem bitter, are often interacting with others in an inappropriate way. I contend that people who are generally happy have developed better self survivor skills. This book is all about those self survivor skills.

Self survivor skills are more than an intellectual simulation of reality or clever word games. These skills are about you and me and the way things really are. There is a way things really are as a personal experience and there is a way most people think and talk about these experiences and the two are often in conflict. This confusion and conflict between experience and "the way things are" must be resolved by you before you can be truly happy and satisfied. This book was written to help you resolve these internal conflicts. With this book to help you focus on life - you can learn how to be deeply satisfied with your life and your direction with others. While this book contains no religion, it is expected that you might have and be successfully able to use your pre-existing strong religious beliefs. While strong religious beliefs are useful to many people still others don’t find these essential to their happiness or well-being. Each of us is different and this book attempts to respect these differences and build upon them.

Just what is a survivor? For this book a Survivor is a person who stands well against the winds of time. As the years go by, a survivor becomes more contented in the knowledge of who he or she is. A survivor copes with change well, making living adjustments as necessary, without bitterness, or regret. Being a survivor is not that easy. To survive, one must be more than smart. One must also be wise. To survive, one must stay clearly focused on the "Big Picture" and have a flexible plan to cope with the future. One certainly does not want to become paranoid, or depressed, in order to survive. We (the writer and hopefully the readers, too) assume that simple survival (like being able to breathe) is just not enough. We also want to keep life fun. To survive, we must keep our vision clear and not fall into some form of denial or delusional thinking. As long as we are considering our future, we also want to love and be loved. The purpose of this guide, then, is to present you with both information and a group process that I have found works for me. Hopefully, this will work for you, too, and will connect you to life in a healthier way. This book cannot guarantee your survival, but it can help you to have a better attitude, a more flexible plan for the future, the right education and the best long-term chances for your real survival.

This guide consists of almost three books which are very different. First is a linear sequence of ideas presented in a way that I think makes the most sense. The second book is a guide on how to run a self help group. This second book encourages you to jump into "dyads" as explained in Attachment two and to work in groups with the instruction lists in Attachment three. Yet another approach would be to start with the chapter on Activation and immediately form your own self-help group. There is no "right way" to approach life, and likewise this book recognizes that fact. The important concept here is your life, and what you really think, feel and choose. Some of my close friends are opposed to careful thinking and prefer to just feel what is right for them. Reading this book chapter by chapter is the traditional approach and you get what I think is the most logical approach. (Don’t let my engineering background spin you in a direction that doesn’t feel right for you. You can choose too.)

After a short introduction, this book approaches the subject of your survival on five levels. Each level is presented in terms of understanding from the previous material. The five levels can be summarized as;

1.) Self-creation, or the process of becoming your own person.

2.) The Limits of Self-creation, or what you need from others, and how to get it.

3) Trip laying and Contamination, how to let other people live their own lives.

4.) Enlightenment, or how to really find and know your truth.

5.) Plan Your Future, or how to find a flexible course to your best future.

6.) Activation, or how to live actively and "just do it".

Before we go anywhere in this book we need to establish who is the boss. In a normal book you are encouraged to become passive and let the book fill you up. This is not a normal book. Throughout this book you are expected and encouraged to think for yourself. You are not asked to believe in anything but yourself, and your own choices. This book is not trying to sell you any particular point of view. Your current beliefs are your own business, and if they are satisfying to you, by all means keep them. Nothing could be more damaging to your survival than to live a life that is not your own. You are the boss of your life. You must never be passive about your life. Fight this book at every step. Your survival requires you to be self aware.

Here in this guide you are expected to be skeptical. Skepticism is a state of mind that looks for alternate ways of viewing the commonly held "obvious conclusions" normally made by other people. When a skeptical person does reach a conclusion, they reserve the possibility of someday changing their minds and coming to another equally valid conclusion. Skepticism is normally frowned upon, but if you are to become a survivor, you must never lose this ability. Skepticism is your first and best defense. If you look around at how old people are, most of them are skeptical, and this is no accident. You could do much toward your survival by starting now to be a bit of a doubter.

Many people engage in self evaluation and personal change in order to achieve a more loving and open relationship with others. Although the focus on others and openness, can bring about many good results, that will not be the focus of this guide. We instead wish to focus on what we can do to become survivors through self evaluation and personal change. For those who prefer the other approach, fear not. Our approach here will also lead to warm and loving relationships with others, with the advantage of having cleaner boundaries, and therefore less possibility of abuse.

This book was written for your use. I was told by an English teacher that this book should be written in the third person, to allow the reader to be more detached from the text. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to please I thought too much would be lost in the process. Detached observation would certainly allow you to read this book faster, but would it have the same value? Life may be "hard" because you cannot spend your life in denial. Doing the impossible always makes things harder. I make the claim that life is not hard and you don’t need to keep it at arms length. When you are in denial you are detached, life is not as sweet or as satisfying as it could be. You do not want to allow your life to be detached from you. This book will require your involvement, just as your life will result in your death, you will pay a price. Reality is like that, so let’s not run away. Let this book be a good hard satisfying look at reality. If you are looking for a book that will provide you with an escape, put this book down and buy another book.

Who would want to read this book? People who are learning about life through the process of living and who want to understand what is going on and articulate it to others. So does this mean that I know something you don’t? Probably not. Each person who is "alive" knows on some level how to do that. You come to that knowledge on your own and by yourself. We all do it and we all know our own truth. If that is true, should you read on? We all know about life - but we are often not very successful at a truthful articulation of the way it really is. What I do here in this book is write about life. The way it really is - in a way that will bring about shared understanding.

The writer of this guide assumes you may be facing a life crisis. A life crisis is where you find yourself in deep opposition with the close people in your life. You might be a young person under the influence of a strong parent or you might be older and facing a mid-life crisis. Perhaps you are under a lot of pressure to make some decision, but you want it to be right for you. Unfortunately, as luck would have it, you are probably also surrounded by friends or parents with strong opinions and you have not had much time to think by yourself. You have been told a whole series of "right" and "wrong," but you may not have much of an idea of why these ideas have been separated into these categories. In short you want to maximize your future options, do it right the first time, and you do not want to suffer like the people around you. If you are older and facing a mid life crisis, all that you have known and taken for granted might now be called into question. You might be struggling with a whole series of new choices. You might be less flexible than the young person, but you have much more knowledge and experience. You will read this book differently, and hopefully you will get much more out of it.

Become an original thinker. If you wish to avoid the abuse of others, you must keep yourself nimble enough to pry yourself free from their logic. This will make you an original thinker. Unfortunately, some original thinkers have been crucified, or otherwise put to death, or somehow punished by their societies. Once you become different, someone may take it upon himself or herself to make an example of your behavior, and you might be punished. Therefore, before you go any further, you must recognize that as you become independent, you may be taken as a threat to others, their way of life, or their profit margins.

OK, if what you have read so far has not scared you away, what next? Lots of people have tried to become original thinkers. Many have failed. So where do you start?

Make your time valuable! You must learn to spend your time wisely. One way to get more value for your time is to organize yourself. Earlier in my life this kind of discussion used to scare me because it often led to some kind of slavery in which I was doing things for others and placing my needs after theirs. I can still hear my neighbor telling me when I was 13 years old, "If you organize yourself, you can get up at 5, deliver the newspaper on your bike, and be home in time to go to school by 8." That organization still does not sound appealing to me. I just don't want to work harder. I want to make my time more valuable to me! With this reasonable objection in mind, let’s just divide the total time we have into two sections - - our time and their time. Their time is time you must spend working on a job or doing something for others. Since my boss at work knows what he wants, let him organize work time. All we want to do is organize our personal time, and to organize that time to our needs and not the needs of others. (Later in this guide, we will narrow the gap between what you want and what others want. For now, with all the misunderstood outside pressures, we want to concentrate on you and your needs.)

Having narrowed down the subject of which time to organize to just our discretionary time, what do we mean by "organize?" Well, a list is a good start. If we first write down all the things we want to do, and then sort them by priorities, we end up with a list of what we want to do, with the first item on the list being the most important. With this list in hand, we are now "organized." Essentially, "organized" means that we have equal access mentally to a series of choices that must be made one at a time. We have a panoramic side view of the whole series, so when we turn to do the tasks, we know how each task fits into the whole.

Now, there is a trap in doing this process of organizing your time, and that is the small amount of time available to create the list. To keep this trap to a minimum, keep your "to do" list around you where you can easily add items as you think of them throughout your day. You will still need to process emergencies as they come up, rather than adding them to your lists, so you should keep the whole organizational process flexible.

A List doesn't have to be complex and exact, just a simple pencil outline like the following example: ->

Buy Tomatoes for Friday's dinner.

Write to college and ask about scholarships.

Pay back $5 to George.

Call Sue and ask her to next months Dance.

You can see this is just a simple list, one that might be constructed during a lunch break. Once you start building lists and using them, you will notice how it frees up your mental energy to think about something else. You will also find that more of what you want gets done. This may seem like simple stuff, but it is a very powerful technique, and it works. We will spend more time on this subject later in this guide, when we can go into greater detail.

Organizing your time will certainly make your time more useful to you, and therefore more valuable. In this process, there is a short cut. You can make your time more valuable by making other people think your time is valuable.

In my case, I made myself into an electrical engineer. This skill receives high wages. Other people see my time as valuable, and that lets me take time away from work, since I make enough to save what I spend. Therefore, I can work one year, and take one year off, doing something else. That makes my time valuable to me, and I have more free time than most people. I have free time, rather than a bunch of expensive objects. I also know that it is my choice. People must make their own decisions about how they spend their time, since your life is nothing more than your accumulated time.

Many people are simply afraid of life. They don't like the normal give and take within a context of overall change that keeps taking place. This fear of living hurts them by holding them in jobs they don't like and in general making them stale and stolid. They become brittle and unable to handle difficult situations. If you are to avoid this pitfall and stay awake, you must be willing to take some chances and for the most part become self-directed.

This all seems rather self-evident, that you must stay in charge of your own life to keep it interesting enough to cope with the normal give and take that life throws at you. Unfortunately, people lose their ways. If you look around you and ask people how they are doing, and listen to the silence between what they say, you can note the following; 1) people often do things to meet the "apparent" needs of others, and when failure results, the resulting blame becomes endless. Of course, this becomes tiring, with little chance of success. In short, guessing what other's need becomes a black hole for effort and consciousness. 2) Many people are muddled thinkers. They confuse one person with another. All stereotypes spring from this kind of muddled thinking. Fighting old stereotypes can be tiring, since nothing seems to change, since it is just wrong thinking it creates another black hole for effort. You cannot put enough effort into fixing a stereo-type. It's just wrong in the first place and you cannot force a good long-term solution.

So, back to our earlier idea: what do you do to enjoy life so you can keep nimble and avoid becoming stolid? A simple and quick solution is to allow yourself to be self-indulgent at times. Go ahead and "follow your bliss" as Joseph Campbell, the famous mythology writer, recommends. To allow yourself that freedom, you have to allow others to judge you in a way that may not flatter you. That's right. They might not like your freedom, especially at first. You can trust that as time passes you will have the opportunity to impress them too, and that this contrast - - between their expectations of what they tell you to do, and what you do - - will gain you some respect you cannot get any other way. You see, respect does not come to those who are only good, and do the right thing; it comes to those who exhibit power from choice. To have a choice means that other options are occasionally indulged in. Choice has to be real; it cannot be an idea of choice. Therefore, we come to another suggestion:

Give yourself real choices. Don't be afraid to occasionally make mistakes. It happens and you can always learn from your mistakes if you don't take them too seriously. I encouraged my son's long time girlfriend to follow her desire and join the Peace Corps and spend two years in West Africa. I don't know if my son appreciated my actions, but to be fully alive, you need to give yourself real choices. If you want the respect of others, you cannot sit home safe, you must slay a few dragons. Then when you become old and can't do anything else, you can sit around the camp-fire and tell good stories.

I always find it amusing how parents can tell their children that their choices are "real important." That is usually a coded expression for something like "remember what I told you. Now don't forget that I am older and wiser than you, and I know what is right for you, so do what I say." Unfortunately, you cannot live your parents life. For one thing, you are already too late! "The Times, They are a-changing". We are living in a new time, and this requires new choices. Don't be too hard on your parents, they probably just want you to feel even more satisfied than they are.

Another idea used by parents as a way of manipulation is the idea of "once done it can never be undone." This of course is to prevent you from even trying something new. Their statement is just to say in another way that life is real. No one ever points out "Once never done, it can never be experienced." You may spend your life wishing you had taken that other choice. There are always two sides to every question, so you must take the time to weigh all the pros and cons. The important thing is to take personal responsibility for whatever action you do choose. Remember this is your life, so live it as if there may be no reincarnation. This may be your only shot.

Learn all you can from others. Yes, I know, you are unique, and there is no other person on the planet just like you, and you are really a gift to the world. This is all true, but that does not mean that you cannot look around and see what you can learn from others. You see, they too are unique and a gift to you. All you need to do is pick up the gifts they offer.

What are these gifts that others offer up that we should learn? First there are two types of learning - - practical and conceptual. I tend to stress conceptual, since I want to write books, and I do not mind being a bit of a dilettante. I talk about automobile carburetors. I don't fix them. Talk was enough for me. What we wish to learn is often not obvious. Talking carburetors was not easy. I was ten and the older kids were talking cars. I was learning to fit in. I didn’t know - at the time - what I was really learning. This is often the case. You learn about the present mostly in the future. While a senior in college I made a half-hearted effort to learn to play the violin. I felt very self assured in my academic studies - yet I was going through a divorce. At the time wanting to play the violin was simply a gut feeling. I loved to listen to the violin - and it wasn’t like the piano. The piano was no good - it was logical and linear. Everything was in order. The violin had more chaos and magic. On a deeper level it was a good way to teach myself how to be humble. It worked. Standing on stage playing solo - before and after a bunch of 10 year olds - can be a sobering experience. I know more now. Nothing was wasted. In the effort I learned how to better fit in and appreciate others. I also learned to trust my gut feelings. You must pick the education that is right for you, but education in whatever form chosen is key to the quality of your life.

If we think in terms of Education for survival, what should you learn? First, you must separate real learning from simple data storage. In the ninth grade, I had a biology teacher who wanted me to learn the Latin names for all the parts of a grass-hopper. I was not interested, and my grade was a low "D". I already had a trust in my "gut" feelings. Fortunately, my teacher allowed us to enter the science fair, and if we won for the whole school, he would average an "A" with our grade.

For the science fair, I designed and built an X-ray tube from a canning jar, using some magnesium metal fragments, a brass pressure valve, a big soldering iron, and some airplane glue. With an old neon sign transformer as a power supply, I created my own X-ray equipment. I then got some white mice, and exposed them to 30 minutes of low-level radiation a day, for 30 days, and did a study of the white blood-cell count (Wright's stain and help from my dentist), and the mice's weight loss. Three mice were in the control group and three mice got radiation. I fed all the mice well, and kept them as comfortable as possible, but the three getting low level radiation lost weight. None of the mice died, but two became sterile, unable to reproduce, and for the one that had offspring, the baby mice had hair only on the tops of their heads!

As far as the biology teacher was concerned, I got an "A" averaged with my low "D" and I passed with a "C." I was happy. I think I learned what was important to learn, and what was not important. (Even my teacher had to admit that to some extent, although he dismissed it by calling me unique.)

The next concept you really need to understand at a gut level is that if you put your mind to it, you can learn anything. This is not to say that everything will come easy, especially if there are disagreeable personalities getting in the way. It is to say that if you focus, and optimize your activities, and carry flash cards, and read everything you can at the library on the subject, you can understand to what-ever degree you wish to commit. I think for myself, calculus, and, even more, my class on differential equations, was mind-blowing. I learned concepts that directly changed me forever, to forever make me a more powerful person, conceptually. New ideas may not go in easily, but once you see the light the view is magnificent! This is real learning that changes the student forever. Once you wake up, it is impossible to forget the experience and the gut level satisfaction of the larger panoramic view. If I have any regret, it’s that I did not study more quantum mechanics and really get a good handle on "Hilbert Space." I am convinced that the view would be religious in scope.

As you are learning, you must pay attention to the Context of what is going on. The backdrop becomes important. In high school, I thought it amusing that my chemistry teacher, had this deep down belief that all life was chemistry, and my psychology teacher thought all life was psychological, and my physics and math teachers were no different. Each saw a different context for life. Each could justify ignoring other areas to concentrate on the "really important stuff." In a way, all were bragging that they were closer to the real essence of life. Each was saying, "Follow me, and I will turn you on to the really important stuff about you and me and life in general." Obviously they cannot all be right! Therefore, to prevent yourself from becoming a driven slave, you must maintain your own context. Of course, the chemistry teacher thought he was the most important; that was only natural, since he could use that point of view to better enjoy his work. In truth, I don't think any of my teachers were working for money. They all wanted life-long respect and, yes, even love. Yes, I had some good teachers.

By paying attention to context, you can identify two types of languages - - local languages and global languages. Local languages are often specific to a limited context and do not operate globally. It may not be possible to find a larger meaning. Whenever you find yourself learning local languages, watch out. You may be wasting your time. I still cannot name the parts of a grasshopper, and I don't feel I missed much, because I did squish them and study their operation. (When I was a young boy of five, I did not even conceive that grasshoppers might feel pain, in the same sense that I felt pain, or I would not have pulled off so many legs. Now, at my age, I think it would be easier to learn about grasshoppers by learning the Latin names for all the parts. I might even settle for that kind of second hand indirect knowledge.)

In my mind, global languages, considered from the first person, are ideas and concepts that relate to you personally. They affect everything you see, think, or touch. These are ideas about communication, human health, human relationships, and how things work. As you can tell, my word definitions are personal, and my conclusions are first hand. You can think anything, just so long as it keeps you awake to what is going on around you, and you know your truth is true when you continue to be flexible when things don't go as planned. Of course, if everything is always going wrong, it may be time to change your point of view, and try something new.

The next thing I want to say about education is that self-discovery operates globally. You can save yourself lots of time, if you base your learning on self-discovery. This must be your primary mode. It is no good to blame others, since you will not be able to control them for long, and the effort will cause them to isolate you. Let others be different. Your first concern should be yourself. Unfortunately, lots of people get lost here. First they go into denial about what they do, and next they become super critical when they perceive it in others. In the field of psychology, this is called "projection". Their denial, becomes the magnifying glass they use on others. It is kind of funny how this dead spot in them becomes hypersensitive of others. We will explore this denial, and the resulting hypersensitivity later when we discuss the mind.

Let us return to the process of self-discovery. You cannot make progress unless you stop blaming others. This is not to say that you should become hyper vigilant in your actions. Just don't take yourself too seriously, and be willing to admit in public that what others see in you may be in fact true. Be willing to think about what others tell you. They are not telling you about you and your truth - they are telling you about their perceptions from their side of the relationship. It may be hard for you to hear things about yourself if you lose this perspective. What they are telling you is not about you - yourself - it is about how they see you. You are only fooling yourself if you ignore them.

In any case don’t get overly serious about what people say about you. When things get "serious" they often become reactive - and out of perspective. It would take a "mind-clear" person to really take himself or herself seriously. The "mind" is basically a mirror that reflects responsibility. It is a mechanism of the engine of thought, that keeps you innocent, or if inverted, always makes it your fault. It is a structure that filters reality. Getting rid of the "mind" is not easy, and you cannot do it without the help of another person. I will discuss the "mind" more in a later chapter. For now just do not take yourself so seriously, or conversely don't think that you have no part in your life. Recognize that there may be a middle way. All this in another way is to say that it is OK to be serious, but do not place yourself above or below other people in your evaluation of responsibility.

Let us go back to the purpose of this guide. We, the writer and hopefully the readers too, are trying to allow you to become a survivor years from now, through the mechanism of being skeptical, doing your own original thinking, and making real choices. We want to expose you to principles you can use, and point out some things you can check out for yourself.

Next you must recognize that you are your own authority. Accept that truth - and then start to pay more attention. With this authority of course you can "believe" me, my book, or anything else if you wish. The real question is - does it - in the end - help you to be your own person? That is not for me to say. It is your life. You are the authority. The thing I do, when I write things down, is to make them as true as I can. You must recognize that I may not know you, understand your experiences, or share in your larger goals. In short, you must become a critical reader about this and everything else you read or hear.

Become a critical reader. Recognize that it is not easy to become a critical reader as most of us want to love it or leave it. We are likely to hold our nose and swallow, or we spit it out. We want all good, or forget it. Becoming a critical reader is a life-long task. You do not start out knowing how to do it, but as you get older you get better at it. You can start by allowing the world be more complex. In many ways the youthful search for simplicity - is powered by the desire to escape life and avoid it. Being a critical reader is keeping one’s options open - you are staying awake and involved in life. Being a critical reader - is both the willingness to really listen - and the hard work of trying it out for yourself - in your own experiment - in your own life. There are no real rules - except those you agree to follow.

You have thus far been introduced to several important skills, a) Thinking skeptically for yourself, b) Making your time important, c) Giving yourself real choices, and d) Becoming a critical reader. These skills are tools in your very real job of self-construction. As you grow up, you are required to create yourself. This is your primary responsibility, the one that comes before anything else. There are no real rules, only skills you must try to master, amongst the chaos you grow up in. Unfortunately, you cannot expect to be recognized for these important skills. You must make the conclusions alone with yourself as the only judge.

This brings up the next big subject: Epistemology, or how do you know what you know? This is pretty risky business, what if you make a mistake? Many religions will indirectly tell you, if you think for yourself you are lost. They say "Don’t be different - think like us." I always find this amusing. You will get a reward because of your choice to join them, but what is this choice? It is really no choice. You are saved only if you choose to think like them. If you think different you must give that up. You must follow the rules. Rules. In other words, a robot, could follow all the rules, easily, so heaven ought to be full of robots, right? If you can only be religiously correct by making prescribed choices you are essentially giving up your right to choose, your own choices, i.e., you are now a robot. Being a robot may not be bad, but many of the wars being fought around the world are between religious groups. So if being a robot and following the Bible, Torah, or Koran were good, we would have stopped fighting long ago. Religious wars are the worse kind because no one will admit they are wrong and stop fighting. The problem with religions is not because they are wrong. In their mind and maybe even in truth "God knows" they are right. That is not the central road block. It is "rules" that become a relational block between them and others. Again we come back to "rules." People following "rules" are often so certain of themselves that they are very intolerant. They have with "rules" lost the ability to be even a little bit skeptical.

It is not possible to substitute "rules" for understanding without some loss in the quality of life. Even if the rules are good rules, following them blindly will directly result in a lowering of the reality in your interpersonal relationships. When you listen to other people you will be less able to really understand what they say. Your ability to weigh the magnitude of the concepts they present will be wrong. Your web of understanding will have holes in it where "the rules" are used. ( you don’t expect to get something from life without paying for it do you? )

So let us reject "the rules" and try to just understand. Return now to the subject of Epistemology. How do you know what you know? This question has meaning when we consider the problem of "errors." Within the subject of Epistemology, you can identify two types of errors, first order errors and second order errors. First order errors, and all simple errors, are errors that are clearly wrong, like putting your hand on a hot stove without gloves on. You burn your fingers, and you pull your hand away. It would be rare for you to make a first order error again, because it is easy to learn from your mistakes. Second order errors are more complex, they are errors which are clearly errors, but you think the overall approach was correct. In this sense you may put your hand on a stove, burn it and then conclude that your hand gets burned, so you have someone else touch the stove. They are also burned. But your belief, that it is possible to touch the stove without getting burned, is unshaken. That is a second order error, since you are likely to conclude that of the 4 billion people on the planet, only two of them get their hand burned, so you must keep looking for more people, since you are just having a bit of bad luck. Second order errors are often made over and over again, without change.

If you think for yourself, you are bound to make mistakes. That comes with the turf. The heart of the risk factor, can be identified as, "Is it worth it?" If you think for yourself, and you make a mistake, is it really worth it? If you are trying to avoid errors, then you really want to avoid second order errors. These are the ones that can destroy you. Second order errors, have "truth" links which remain unquestioned. This is why religious wars are so hard to stop. These are second order errors. Second order errors are rooted in a lack of healthy doubt. These people have lost their ability to be skeptical.

Return to the subject of Epistemology. How do you know what you know? This question has meaning when we discover errors. I have pointed out "second order errors" are the ones that can really hurt you. We can do something about this - by paying attention and being willing to have some skepticism. There is more to the subject of Epistemology and that is the subject of knowledge.

Knowledge comes in two flavors, direct and indirect. Direct knowledge is that which you have found with your own eyes, and ears. Indirect knowledge is learned from others. The most vivid knowledge is direct. Of course, all your knowledge cannot be direct. There just isn’t enough time. Still, direct knowledge is the type of knowledge you tend to trust. Direct knowledge is easy to change, since you know how you made it, and you know what evidence you used. Indirect knowledge might be easier to obtain but it is also more difficult to change.

I have several good friends who are very good people, who just cannot read on much further at this point. They face a crisis they just cannot get through. I have been told that if you can get through the next paragraph the rest of the book will not be a problem. I do not think there is anything here which is not self evident, although it may be painful to really come to grips with. I do not think I am saying anything negative about religion, and I hope you do not take it that way. The power or value of religion is not because it is reasonable or logical, that would not test your faith. Still, how do you stay out of the fire in Waco, Texas? You use some of your own knowledge, don't you?

If you rely completely on knowledge that is not your own, such as the Bible, you are in a sense, not being responsible. You are cheating yourself of direct knowledge by settling for indirect knowledge. This is not to say that the Bible is wrong, but to believe it without question, without interpretation, without any mitigating factors at all, is wrong. Use religious works as just another guide-book, perhaps older than the one you are reading but not much different. Everything you read is just something you must read critically. You can choose to have a symbolic interpretation, on a mythical scale, or a detailed recipe on how to have a happy marriage. You are not showing disrespect in this process. You are just creating your own existence. You have a right to understand ideas and concepts in any way that they make sense to you. Remember, this is your life, so care about it, and do not fall asleep, because it requires your involvement. You must actively work to create yourself. Don't be surprised to find out that you are unique. That just means you will have something to offer to others.

Even the trend toward scientific thinking, one of the major accomplishments of the last several hundred years, is not to be totally trusted. You must actively work to create your own truth. Of course, any good scientist will not be caught using the word "truth." Science is not a belief system, but a system of gaining relative knowledge. Knowledge within science is constantly changing. It may seem to be steady for many years, and then suddenly make a large shift, even to contradict its earlier widely held position. When a scientist uses the word "truth" it is considered to be within a relative context only. The scientist holds a bit of skepticism that some new experiment or new explanation will supersede the currently held "truth." Science is a process of improving knowledge, not a "sure thing," or a system for finding absolute knowledge.

Science is based on two principles: 1) the double blind experimental process, and 2) the ability to convince others of some new truth through conformation with experiments. That is to say that if one is to know the "truth" then one must create a test experiment that eliminates as much as possible the conscious bias of the experimenter and then one must convince others by letting them run similar experiments. Science is thus a process that first tries to separate bias from reality; and then, second, it functions like a kind of democracy. No single person is the keeper of science, since communication plays such an important part. Experiments are often created that involve using a placeboor some other design to take the understanding and prejudice of the experimenter out of the experiment. With double blind experiments, one experiment does nothing and the other is the actual test, and some method is used to prevent anyone from learning, until after the experiment, which is the real and which is the phony experiment. Mathematics is then used to characterize the "truth" of the experiment.

In a sense, each scientist is an explorer, and a skilled communicator, but all resulting knowledge is external to the self. In a good scientifically designed experiment bias is taken out. When bias is taken out the self is excluded from the resulting experiment. You can use science to study others, but not yourself! First you cannot run a double-blind experiment on your inner space, although you can probably communicate what you did do to others. Science will help you learn about the outside world, but it won’t help you to find yourself. You will find in yourself what you construct. Bias and personal choice are all important in finding yourself and your true nature. Again, you must actively work to create yourself.

So to review what has been presented so far. You will not be able to hide in Epistemology, or religious rules, or good science. You have no choice but to define yourself and to create your own output. The process of you working to create yourself is called self-construction. In a sense this is the process of you integrating all your experiences, and all your desire for direction into the comprehension of you, by yourself. This is not an easy process.