the simple

A simple person should tell truths and not lie and be respected for it. But a wise man who does not lie is dangerous. If you must have knives in your pockets, fold them shut or sheathe them before walking about.

This is why we have fora: in the surgery, or the court, there is no sheathing, no lying, and razors stropped to a truthful fatality. The elaborate barriers of evidence, sterilization, ceremony, seniority, and more are testimony to our social understanding of the possibility, utility, and lethality of truth in its concentrated, weaponized, forms.

professions

A profession is remunerative work, undertaken for the general good over the bulk of the individual's productive life, that requires such commitment for the development of requisite ability and judgment. Income is necessary to remove distraction, and thus must be stable and ample, but never large or an enticement. Market-driven income practices eat away professionalism. For example, I am overpaid, both as a matter of fact, and as matter of impedance to professional development. The market more frequently underpays, though, and this is no better: a professional does not grow from a forager's diet. The conviction the market wreaks is that what I do is, after all, a job, not more. That is true, but it is a useless truth that displaces a vitally useful lie. To say that mud is water and dirt does no harm. But to say that an illustration is paper and ink, is harmful truth telling. The wisdom to work with truth and falsehood, neither for their own sake, nor by mechanical sorting, nor with a loss to truthful orientation -- this is the sport of a great soul, and in minute popular dilutions, the tincture that distinguishes professions from jobs.

an old story

Back when I was young and Baptist, one of the wise mothers in the church told me this story as a response to something I've long forgotten. One of her friends was Mormon, and she agreed to read much of the Book of Mormon together with her. Politely, the Baptist mother said that, in the end, she didn't believe the Book of Mormon was the word of God. "Pray," said the Mormon friend, "that the Holy Spirit will tell you what is true." The Baptist mother agreed, and the next week, waiting for laundry, the Mormon friend asked if she had.

"I did."

"Did the Holy Spirit speak to you?"

"It seemed so, but I find it very hard to tell the difference between the voice of the Holy Spirit within myself and my own thoughts voicing themselves within me."

And so it is. We cannot distinguish inward sources with much precision. Are my facts aesthetic preferences after all? And so on, even to the divine. The message matters more than the messenger not because this would be quite so if we knew the messenger, but because we do not.

Is my hatred for hate virtue, or even moral, or a weak stomach? The wrong question.

bodies

One should keep one's distance from one's body and mind - not because they are not fully one's self, but because they are. Better still to vary the distance between consciousness, mind, and body. And best to make the inductive variation in these distances a source not only of energy, but of order, even gladness.