PROVERBS

1 Self-righteousness is incompatible with humility, while humiliation negates what is righteous.   Humility is the knowledge and graceful acknowledgement of your flaws and faults both in your personal and your human nature.   Humiliation is the exposition of your ignorance or denial of these.

2 All are born supremely ignorant and perfectly powerless.   With knowledge comes power, and with power comes the knowledge of power – with that intoxicating knowledge, the quest for power intensifies, and the quest for knowledge other than that of power subsides, and what is not brightly lit by the glare of this lust for power falls into the shadows of the soul.   The true light of self-knowledge can become painful.

3 Pain is felt by all who are aware.   Pleasure is only slightly less common among us humans, though some find pleasure in pain.   Pain and pleasure aren't the only ingredients of life, though, and other factors are integral to our happiness or misery.   Contentment is rare, and not always desirable!

4 What we desire is important to us for only a short time, though it can consume our entire existences.   We are consumed by desire even as our desire is consummated – the economy of desire in a consumer society is paramount; making us social parasites.

5 A parasite that kills its host is a poor parasite.

6 Society can be impoverished by entrenched parasitic interests.   Who kills a man kills only a man – who kills ideas only because they conflict with his own kills free thought, the dynamo of a living, growing society.   As with other living things, a society is either growing, or diseased, or dying.

7 Conflict is essential to understanding – understanding is essential to human life.   Therefore, do not approach those you disagree with angrily or condescendingly or stubbornly, but rather gladly, with eagerness, reverence, and tolerance.

8 Human understanding is the way humans experience life, while other animals and plants have a different experience entirely.

9 Experience is the best teacher; that's why it is also the most expensive teacher.   Consider what you lose in life to be a teaching fee – thus you will gain by your loss.

10 How precious is that which is lost!   While you had it you were content, never a thought for the time it would be gone.   Contentment leads to complacency, thence to loss, thence to despair.

11 Despair not from loss, it is merely an aspect of change, which is a constant.   Fear of change is cowardice – the noble way is to seek to affect your world so that change will flow the way you can see it should.

12 Cowardice and venality devolve to those who do not choose.   Nobility of mind, however, requires more than mere choice – it also requires humility and good intent.

13 All things repeat.   Patterns vary, but they are everywhere you look, and everywhere you don't.   If you don't look for the patterns you will stand no chance of making them more beautiful.

14 Beauty is not in order alone, nor is it in chaos alone.   Order and chaos are beautiful when they are where they ought to be, and not in each other's place.

15 Determining what ought to be is not possible, so trying anyway is a noble art, rather than a mundane science.   An artist knows s/he might fail – when art fails, both artist and devotee suffer.

16 Suffer not those who would usurp power, over you or over many, by force or guile.   Don't forget to beware those to whom such power is appointed, either.

17 Power, these days, is usually entrusted to those who can best demonstrate a lack of real conviction, and a willingness to play the games of power for no end other than to be a player.   Also, it helps to have the knack of looking good, of saying little while speaking much, and of covering one's ass.

18 Looking good is easy, while depth of beauty is rare.   Peeling the veneer from most of us would render us intolerable to others.

19 Intolerance is truly the most intolerable thing.   The arrogance that makes a person think s/he has all the answers to others’ questions is our greatest barrier to mutual respect.

20 Mutual respect is what we need most.   Which is better?   To trust someone you don't know, and take a risk, or to deny m and risk your self-respect, your peace of mind, and a big chunk of your humanity?

21 A big chunk of humanity believes God is dead.   For tens of thousands of years truth was determined this way:   God said it is so.   Naturally, there were disagreements, and soon it was apparent to most people that not everything reputed to be divine was true.   When sciences developed that showed a tendency toward increasingly accurate depictions of our world, increasingly at odds with the reputed divine, what percolated into the mass consciousness was that God is dead.

22 The existence of God is not certain – nor is the definition.   Nonetheless, God is certainly not dead, even if It dies over and over every day.

23 Beauty is divine, whether or not there is a God.   The divinity of truth and the demonic nature of falsity are evident to us, regardless of our awareness of the corresponding deities.   Whether to use or to waste, whether to love or to hate, whether to use judgment or to judge are questions we all answer every day, and bring the beauty or ugliness into our lives.