just to set the record straight..
I use the word, specifically to point-out that it's UNrelated to the n-word.
WHEN we kowtow to disinformation,
THEN we are accommodating disinformation's rule.
Fight it tooth & nail, ever mm of the way.
Ideological disinformation, national-narcissism disinformation, historical disinformation, linguistic disinformation, Scientism's disinformation & other pseudoscientific disinformation, ALL of it.
I used to think like that, sorta.
Read Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change" book, on people's unconscious-mind's mechanism for fighting-off growing-up.
Then let it percolate in your mind for a few decades, while you watch humankind's process.
I'd now make a law requiring that the top people be Kegan5 unconscious-mind-development ( he calls 3, 4, & 5 something like "socially-based sentience", rooted in needing to feel liked, "self-authoring" mind, which I call Bulling-BOSS mode, it's an obnoxious mode male-culture values because it's so "alpha".
Youtube's Wranglerstar & Veritasium are both poster-people for it, 1 in working-class Kegan4 the other in middle/upper-middle-class Kegan4, & both displaying Kegan4's obnoxiousness.
I spent most of my adult life in it, and wish I could just retroactively slice most of my life from Universe.
"systems-of-systems" mode is Kegan5. )
it's consistent that if you field a Kegan3 person to be your negotiation-representative, and the other side fields a Kegan4, you're run-over.
If you field a Kegan5 & they field a Kegan4, you're run-over.
IF they field a Kegan4, THEN you need equal/opposite bullying, in order that the zero-sum-game not beat your side to shit.
However, IF they have the uprightness to field a Kegan5 & you can too, THEN Win-Win becomes possible.
Young-adults, Kegan3's ( the Kegan3 stage can continue for the entire rest of a person's life, from post-adolescence to 100yo or more, but it is mentally/psychically a young-adult stage ), cannot accept that evil is real, the way someone mentally-older can.
Kegan3's are in the absorbing experience into their unconscious-mind, stage.
Kegan4's are in the pushing meaning out of their unconscious, "authoring" themselves through that unconscious-pushing-out process stage.
Kegan5's are in the this is true for them, that is true for these other people, the-other is true for me, and this is how it all fits together stage.
I'd not permit any naive Kegan3's to rule any major operation, nor permit any zero-sum-game-"validity" Kegan4's to rule anything important.
That book gives people the means of converting fighting-off-growing-up to actually-successfully-growing-up, and so it is worth many life-years or life-decades, to many.
Nobody in the whole world has any reason to accept that my values have any validity in them, though, that is true.
All who hold that there is no understanding which should be prerequisite to authority, well they all outnumber me, don't they?
shrug
This I've found tests to be true, however.
( bonus point:
it has been published that the DreamTeam formation is a team-of-7, with 2 who match the Kegan5 mental-development, 2 who match the Kegan4 mental-development, & 3 who match the Kegan3 mental-development.
The Kegan4's bursting with ideas, but not understanding all the systems-of-systems gotchas, means the team is more likely to be able to innovate,
the Kegan5's, if they can do it without demolishing the Kegan4's morale, can ask questions to corner the Kegan4's into considering all sorts of things they hadn't, so they prevent lots of stupid mistakes,
& the Kegan3's are the "glue" which holds the team coherent & harmonious.
I'm mixing multiple sources together, but they really were identifying the same thing, only each was doing-so without some of the other pieces.
New Scientist had an article on The Dream Team, years ago, Chris McGoff's book "The Primes" is part of it, the Kegan & Lahey book is part of it, some HBR stuff as well, perhaps some stuff from the managers-of-programmers books, what's her name, Roth? can't remember...
fit it together, though, and it fits properly: there is a balance which produces working momentum, instead of institutional-mentality, and that working momentum is based on the substance of the minds of the people in the team, and ignoring the unconscious-mind-development stage .. is ignoring the BIG part of each person's iceberg.
: )
And pushing that ideology/religion as established/tested/validated science should be a criminal-offense.
Falsely representing oneself as something is criminal-fraud, in some jurisdictions..
Being the US, of course, there's little hope for integrity to win any case..
Which makes the break-even point for such wingsails, which cost one hell of alot more than a few tonnes of fuel did .. rather far-away/long-term, doesn't it?
There was also a system using huge parachute-kite things, on carbon-nanotube-ropes, fired up into the sky with rocket-assist, and the things could apparently pull the ship, quite effectively...
.. the service-subscription the ship was supposed to pay-for gave them the optimal route for fuel-savings vs time-to-get-there..
here, it was sorta like this, but the kite-sail looked different, and I'm pretty-sure they were saying something about nanotube cable for the kite, and it wasn't just a concept, it was actually-working...
https://marinersgalaxy.com/giant-kite-pulls-ship-across-atlantic/
I seem to remember that at the beginning of covid, some shipping companies just shortened the bulbs on their hulls, to optimize for a slower cruising-speed, and saved money that way..
again, where's the break-even on it
Science: the ruthlessly-objective, systematic, progressive annihilation of both direct & indirect ignorance, no matter what that does to one's worldview.
THE keystone book in understanding this, is Douglas Hofstadter's brilliant "Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", which hammers that if one remains within a self-consistent formal-system-of-knowing, then it ISN'T POSSIBLE for one to be knowing Universe-complete, and that is mathematical fact.
Journalism, real journalism, is the essence of science, just without the hard-rigor.
Anybody who isn't competent in understanding what Hofstadter's book means, isn't competent in philosophy.
https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Journalism-Revised-Updated-4th-ebook/dp/B08ZXRQLZT/
"That which isn't matter, DOESN'T EXIST."
That is materialism.
"God: The Failed Hypothesis", by Victor Stenger, iirc, was the book that made me see what the fundamentalist materialists were saying.
Unreadable gaslighting, materialist dogma is.
The whole "The Hard Problem" of Consciousness is produced by the definition of "real" to be identical-with "matter".
Artifact-of-the-view.
aka prejudice.
You deem it delusion that the Soul-memories of some of its other-lives/incarnations nuked my Catholic upbringing?
lol
I changed my worldview as a direct result of evidence, and that took years, because the smashing-of-assumptions was sooo profound...
... and you are gloriously certain that it is only my delusion, because it is axiomatic that That Cannot Validly Be,
and you deem me incompetent in Science?
That is funny.
I've proven unable to put my proper, revised, with systematic links to things, including a scientific paper proving that Western Medicine has been gaslighting an entire category of patients, up, and I've downvoted my comment that you replied-to, to make it no-longer-significant on this discussion,
but I'm leaving it up, so that all the denigration can be visible, and everybody, for all time, can laugh at the "defective" that I am, who wrote a spur-of-the-moment 1000-word comment, and didn't get it hammered-out perfectly-clearly.
Feel free to denigrate my replacement comment, which had to be posted in 2 parts, because of some kind of character-limit, possibly at 10k chars.
Wishing you well, but your contempt for my understanding is insulting, and your presumption that knowing-of-previous-lives-of-one's-continuum is delusion axiomatically, is also insulting.
Awareness is simultaneously immaterial AND real.
All "science" which ignores/denies that, isn't science, it is ideological-addiction/prejudice, and gaslighting.
At population-scale, so long as you don't have either a population primed with materialist prejudice, or with anti-subtle-awareness-habits like eating pork or eggs, it is entirely possible to test whether reincarnation is real,
and there are multiple books on the scientific testing of such, as with documenting a child's remembering of some previous-life, and then going to that part of the world & doing the history-research to discover that what that kid said, was true.
Don't do the research, if it'd violate your assumption-river/religion, though, obviously: devout materialism is comforting for you, then remain in it, if you want, and glory in the amassed Authority which contempts my empiricism & objectivity.
"The Boy Who Knew Too Much", is, iirc, 1 of the available options, though there is another book which is, apparently, a huge & dry scientific work, yellowish cover, iirc.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, but I hope we never meet:
The intersection of Empiricist-Objectivity & Kaizen is the ONLY TRUE assumption-river/religion, in my eyes, and whatever cosmology works most-completely, not most-self-consistently, but most-completely, is what I need to hold to,
...and that you have already deemed axiomatically to be only delusion.
Good.
Honour your path.
*** BEGINNING OF PART2 ***
Pyrrol-disorder ( amygdala-hijack always pressuring, and ambushing/breaking one into PTSD-RAGE, with any "straw that broke the camel's back" ), was treated best with the mixture of Zinc Gluconate, Zinc Picolinate, Arachidonic-acid-precursor Evening Primrose Oil ( 2 big capsules / day ), and P5P form of one of the Vitamin B's.
This gave me the ONLY experience I've ever had, in my life, of not-fighting-the-pressure-of-pending-amygdala-hijack-every-second, and it left me .. HAPPY. Never experienced anything like that, before...
Why'd I quit it? I'm an old-testament Vajrayana, & meditation must be my primary-weapon of self-conquering, not pills, AND taking Zinc every 6 hours was a brutal regime, and it was razor's-edge chemical-balance to maintain.
Walsh is right that people with pyrrol-disorder ( which wrongly eradicates zinc from our bodies, leaving too-little for normal management of copper, or for methylation-of-DNA for that matter ) require dangerous ( to others! ) levels of metals-intake to reach correct-balancing between copper & zinc. I was taking enough to probably kill any non-pyrrol-disorder person: 4x the Tolerable Upper Limit. It worked, though, exactly as Walsh indicated.
So:
Solitude, & systematically healing food, & the corrections for 2 epigenetic-disorders that Western Medicine won't allow are real ( because it'd GUT authority-based psychiatry if the evidence were admitted ), that demonstrated exactly what actually is wrong, and gave me leverage in owning my life, more completely.
Next?
.: Scientific Method & Objectivity is itself one of the therapies I broke the gaslighting of doctors ( and medical-professional parents ) with, and so must be considered a valid therapy, too.
Kaizen, aka relentless evolving, as one's personal Religion.
( my cosmology is Vajrayana, simply because Universe's-speech, aka Evidence, broke the worldviews I was brought-up in.
Ramakrishna Vivekananda too contempted the prejudice masquerading as "science", that I call Scientism, which presumes materialism, and therefore presumes that Awareness/Knowing/Meaning/Will can't be real, but that is prejudice: all those are testable and objectively-real.
What produces cities, if awareness/knowing/meaning/will don't exist??
"Randomness & mindless statistical process", according to fundamentalist materialism's dogma. )
Some have even tested entanglement in the macro-scale by experiment:
the experiment of having dog-owners set a video recorder in their home, with timestamping on, and they mark down when they decide to leave for home, at work, and the video records if the dog(s) light-up right then .. obviously, it doesn't matter how many such pairs don't demonstrate such entanglement: if even 1 pair is so good at demonstrating it, then that falsifies the dogma that "That Can't Happen" and "That Isn't Possible".
the experiment of having women in some quiet context, and a wired camera that can see them is connected to a switcher, and one, or another, person is watching a monitor, and sometimes that monitor is showing the woman... can she identify when someone is watching her?? IF yes, THEN that, too, falsifies the materialist Scientism/prejudice "That Can't Happen" and "That Isn't Possible".
I haven't read the book, but only the first few pages...
it is from this book that I got those 2 examples, and yes, they do stand up to replication.
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery-ebook/dp/B0076PGG6Y/
Since I've experienced enough evidence to know when authority-based-"science" is gaslighting me,
and since even physicist Weinberg commented on the fact that 100 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE ( a Googol, as he observed ) contradiction between evidence & established-theory, re the measured Cosmological Constant, vs The Standard Model of Cosmology
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
Scientism is unfalsifiable, Science holds that ONE "Black Swan", that actually exists, FALSIFIES "All Swans Are White", no matter how Scientism keeps conveniently-measuring only white swans, as a means of "proving" that only white swans exist...
Karl Popper would have called-out that NON-falsifiable dogma ISN'T AND NEVER WAS Science, as would have Carl Sagan...
Evidence convinced me of what I hold to be true, and I'm continuing on that path, until I die, in the hopes of breaking my Soul/CellOfGod/ChildOfGod/Atman from getting perpetually-recycled in Universe.
( deem the existence of awareness to be delusion, and the existence of awareness-beyond-this-body to be delusion, all you want: Mom brought me up Catholic, and it was discovering that some of the Soul-memories I'd recovered were of previous-lives, that blew-up ALL the Abrahamic-assumption-rivers/religions, for me. It took YEARS to adjust to that forced-change-in-worldview.
Notice that Ramakrishna Vivekananda observed, in the 1800's, White man's absolute contempt for Universe violating materialism, and refusal to either do the experiment honestly OR to accept the testimony of anybody who actually did the experiment.
Here is a taste of his scientific mind: https://ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_1/addresses_at_the_parliament/v1_c1_paper_on_hinduism.htm
I'm not going to bother digging until I find the point, somewhere in Volume 1 of his Complete Works, where he explicitly states that it "takes guts" to do the experiment, and that White man won't do the experiment: find it yourself, if you care about that. )
IF you prefer authority-based-medicine, and have the gall to ignore the evidence even called-out in one of John Brockman's books, probably "This Idea Must Die" ( that "evidence based medicine" which provably ISN'T evidence-based, it is authority-based ), then contempt me, categorically, as defective, in your religion.
Here is that article from Edge.org, which was made into a chapter of one of his books:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25433
Addiction-to-integrity & addiction-to-Universe's-actual-bizarre-unfolding/opening both are good addictions, to me.
That IS the assumption-river/religion of Empiricism intersecting Kaizen.
You have your assumption-river/religion, fundamentalist-materialists have theirs, I have mine.
Eternity is going to continue reprpocessing/recycling ALL energies contained within Universe, and I want out, pronto.
Remain within, if that makes you feel great.
That is what evolution means, within a continuum/soul, obviously: your soul sows, through you, your soul reaps, through future "lives"/incarnations. How could it work properly if you just don't mean anything? MEAN what you mean: self-honesty, no matter how contempted by the currently-fashionable prejudice, is healing!
Notice that Evolution works externally, ie between generations of a species UNTIL human-category-life, and then, because self evolution becomes possible, it becomes possible to "climb the inner mountain", as buddhism calls it ( naming that inner-mountain "Mount Meru", but many mistake it for some external thing, nowadays ).
: )
Born autistic, lost 10% of my brain between about 10-16, then, in the last 14y or so ( I'm gaining on 60yo ), a thousand-ish concussions, trying to break my will-to-live with a cudgel, so I could murder my life, but eventually learned that will-to-live is stronger, in this brain, than I am, so I'm stuck living, and therefore am stuck living with the consequences of all-3 waves of brain-injury.
It takes years to grow-in new/replacement brain, but the meditations do speed the process.
Western minds may find convincing in a book named "Super Genes" by geneticist Tanzi & co-author Chopra, https://www.amazon.com/Super-Genes-Astonishing-Optimum-Well-Being-ebook/dp/B00TNDIDNG/ and it cites the science backing its arguments for malleable/earnable healing.
Here is a scientific-paper SHOWING where 20% of the child-onset-"schizophrenic"'s brain is lost, where 15% is lost, where 10% is lost, & where 5% is lost.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877521/
That doesn't include all the other damage, at overall, or at micro, scales, that is just PROVING that brain-injury is the primary fact of "schizophrenia".
Know that the 10% brain-volume-loss has been known-about since the 1920's.
IF you lost 10% of your brain due to stroke, or aneurism, or a physical spike wound, or due to concussion, they wouldn't tell you that "it is all in your mind: it is your illness-of-mind, and it ISN'T POSSIBLE for any healing to be real, that too is your illness-of-mind", but, if a child loses 10% of their brain, through a 5-year-long "forest fire", as that paper calls it, of epigenetic-error, that child will be told exactly that.
Gaslighting can eat rocks.
( :
I have now discovered that it ISN'T POSSIBLE, either through my app, or through the web-interface, to EDIT a comment, WHEN one's revision is too-big.
Therefore, I have to create a completely-new one, in order to revise one.
AAAnd .. apparently it ISN'T POSSIBLE to contribute a comment this-long, so I'm now having to break it into pieces, too...
I'm leaving-up my previous edition, so that you can see all the denigrations of it, as they stand.
Revised: Obviously, a 1000-word spur-of-the-moment reply ended-up too convoluted to be anyhow valid or intelligent or sane, in the community's determination.
Therefore this 2000+ word revision of it.
NONE of the links are "affiliate links" of any kind: they exist so you can directly consider the referent I'm identifying, AND so you can read reviews of that referent, yourself.
ToC:
Solitude
getting away from prejudice/abuse/gaslighting, including by doctors & Western Medicine as a whole, as much as I can.
discovering that the Ayurvedic claim that there are 3 fundamental-metabolisms ( as well as 4 mixed-metabolisms ) is hard, testable fact, and this immensely improved the healingness of my food, once I understood.
discovering that there are 3 epigenetic conditions underlying most of "psychiatry", which rejects this testable-fact, and that both the Undermethylated-DNA-disorder treatment & the Pyrrol-disorder treatment testably, provably, work.
Empiricism/Objectivity intersection-with Kaizen: the only TRUE assumption-river/religion is the intersection of Empiricism/Objectivity with Kaizen, Kaizen being relentless rational evolution.
To all the Western Medicine & Scientism gaslighters that hold it to be established that "there never has been, and isn't, ANY evidence of brain-healing in adults", read these books by Dr. Norman Doidge, IF you've the intellectual-integrity to do so:
https://www.amazon.com/Brains-Way-Healing-Discoveries-Neuroplasticity-ebook/dp/B00KWG9L2A/
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers-ebook/dp/B000QCTNIW/
AND know that this is the guy who nuked "the established Medical Knowledge that That Can't Happen", when he woke-up from a coma, because he had GROWN A REPLACEMENT CORPUS CALLOSUM 'ROUND THE BACK OF HIS BRAIN.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9474-rewired-brain-revives-patient-after-19-years/
I spent several YEARS intermittently-catatonic with brain-injury, and was gaslighted by doctors that there was no brain-injury, and that it was "my mental illness" to believe that I could make my brain heal.
It seems obvious to me, that I did ditch their drugging, and haven't been much-of-the-time-catatonic since last-century.
It seems obvious to me that that fact is, itself, objective, factual evidence.
My 3 layers of brain-injury are:
Autism ( you can read about the brain-damage in terms of amygdala being 2x the normal size, so the amygdala-to-cortex-ratio is off by factor-of-2, you can read about the wrong-number-of-microcolumns, & the wrong-height-of-microcolumns on the cortex, you can read about our faceblindness, you can read about how eye-contact is emotional-violence to us, you can read about how social-process-circuitry is broken in us, you can SEE for yourself the autistic-bodylanguage in Richard Feynman's videos, and even-more-extremely in Temple Grandin's TED talks, etc. )
"acute, child-onset 'schizophrenia'" ( I will be linking to a paper SHOWING that that is brain-injury, according to medical-research scans, later. The cause of that 5-year-long wave-of-cell-apoptosis brain-decimation is, according to the evidence I've got, epigenetic, and both mitigatable-before-it-hits and mitigatable-after-the-fact, as my obvious recovery would testify, outside fundamentalist Scientism. )
when the bullying-prejudice's gaslighting got too-strong, I began trying to cudgel-my-will-to-live-to-death, so that I could then murder my life, as a means of teaching the Soul/CellOfGod/Atman that was having my life to GROW THE FUCK UP AND STOP INDULGING IN SUCH ABUSE-TOY LIVES. I failed, obviously, and now have bad memory-problems as a result of about 1000-ish hard-concussions with weapons, of whatever was ready-to-hand, through more than a decade.
What worked:
Many YEARS of Solitude & Isolation.
Getting away from the abuser/prejudice/gaslighting, and since it is normal-culture, itself, whose prejudice is my fundamental abuser, then getting away from everybody, for years, gave me the means to continue existing, eventually living, & even healing.
I don't expect solitude to work for anybody other-than the ones that "Enneagram" calles a "5".
( Richard Rohr commented that monasteries are filled with enneagram-5's: he was right. )
That, combined with Frawley's ayurvedic appropriate-to-one's-metabolism ingredients food, which massively helped my health,
IF you've the intellectual-integrity to DO the experiment, THEN https://www.amazon.com/Ayurvedic-Healing-Comprehensive-David-Frawley-ebook/dp/B003TO5EF0/ and https://www.amazon.com/Yoga-your-Type-Ayurvedic-Approach-ebook/dp/B0028UBEVO/ BOTH are required for necessary-and-sufficiently-complete understanding:
the "Ayurvedic Healing" book includes the best test-checklist I know-of, and it is the ingredients-lists that make the book into scientific-experiment's basis:
Simply discover which of the 7 possible metabolic-types you are, then, IF you are not of the all-3-mixed-together one, THEN you can do the experiment thusly:
I consider the probability of Frawley's book ( and NOT ANYTHING of the bullshit "ayurveda" from the internet! ) of being as stunningly-accurate in its prediction of what would be beneficial vs harmful to be extremely low: it was TOO consistently & improbably right.
It has proven, through the years, to remain so, as I've broken my metabolism from the one I spent nearly 1/2 century in, and then I broke that one, and so on, ending-up in a mixed metabolism.
Having that ingredients-list on me, when I was shopping, improved my health significantly, no matter how much contempt/prejudice Western Medicine has for such evidence.
They won't do the experiment, because they already "know" that "That Can't Happen!" and "That Isn't Possible!", which, exactly as many have noted since the 1800's, is one of several White prejudices.
& William J. Walsh's "Nutrient Power" book, which really oughta be corrected, a bit...
https://www.amazon.com/Nutrient-Power-Heal-Biochemistry-Brain-ebook/dp/B00J75IQUA/
I replicated both his Undermethylated-DNA-disorder treatment and his Pyrrol-disorder treatment, each 4 times, and at-least 2 different ways.
Undermethylated-DNA-disorder: enteric-coated SAM-e, 40mins before breakfast, with clear water ( or tea, but NO carbs/food ) worked in 3 months, and Methionine worked in 4 months. The only times in my life I've ever experienced ZERO stress, which was awesome.
Takes-away my academic-drive, though, so I only would use Methionine now to "take the edge off", if the stress of Undermethylation-distortion were gimping me or my life.
*** END OF PART1 ***
Here is an article which was included in John Brockman's book:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25433
on how too-much "evidence-based" medicine isn't replicable.
I trust what TESTS to be true, as that is the best religion of all: empiricism.
Shove your gaslighting, ppl...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9474-rewired-brain-revives-patient-after-19-years/
He grew a replacement corpus-callosum 'round the back of his brain.
"no evidence" is a lie.
Read Dr. Norman Doidge's books, if you've sufficient intellectual-integrity to do so:
https://www.amazon.com/Brains-Way-Healing-Discoveries-Neuroplasticity-ebook/dp/B00KWG9L2A/
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers-ebook/dp/B000QCTNIW/
I spent several years much-of-the-time-intermittently-catatonic with brainloss, a few decades ago:
Recovery isn't mere-makebelieve, as Scientism so authoritatively asserts,
...and being gaslighted by people who are adamant that "no evidence exists" when it's staring them in the face, is insulting.
Scientism can go gaslight other people:
I know the difference between authority-based-"science", properly called Scientism, and ACTUAL-EVIDENCE-based Science.
Please read John Truby's book "The Anatomy of Genres", and have your mind BLOWN by all the psychology in the different 14 Genres of story, dominating our cultures throughout the world, now...
It will make fiction in book AND movie form sooo much richer for you, and it will make other-people much-more-understandable, as well...
I'm autistic, am NOT likely to ever watch another movie in my life ( waaay too overwhelming ), but now I understand story so much better...
Truby's got a special place in his heart for both Godfather I & II.
With reason, his explanations show.
There are an amazing number of awesome stories identified in that book, as examples demonstrating this, or that, aspect of story...
Please read it from beginning to end, so the explanations ( which build on each-other ) weave into the whole, properly ( instead of just hitting 2 chapters & not getting why it doesn't make as much sense as I'm suggesting it does ).
The only significant error in the book worth noting, is the misunderstanding of Comedy:
Improbably-violated-expectations is the PROPER definition of it, and there is no requirement for any "drop", which seems an American subset of humour.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?
( :
"Listen, twit: I'm sorry that..."
: P
The single most-important thing you CAN do, is understand yourself as profoundly as you can.
Read John Truby's book "The Anatomy of Genres", which is on the 14 story-genres that we form our own meanings of.
He's got a few details wrong
( like mistaking the Wild West village for what Village-archetype is, when real Village-archetype is the Tribal Mother Village,
and he misunderstands humor, as well, believing that the US-culture "drop" ( related to put-down ) is the core of humor, but the entire category of creative-misinterpretation is humor that isn't dependent on "the drop".
Hofstadter, in his "Godel Escher Bach" book, identified that the real shape of humor is the moebius strip: a strange loop.
You walk around in a "circle", and .. discover you're now somehow upside-down??
Surprised-by-improbability, would be near-the-heart of it.
Anyways )
Truby's book is CRAMMED with psychology insights into our forming, our growing-up, etc.
I'd require it of all high-schoolers, planetwide, for their HS diploma:
simply by making people encounter considering how they're forming the meaning that they, themselves, are, would lever humanity up into much greater global understanding/competence, though it'd take a generation or 2 for the effects to become visible...
Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar" & Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" are both important, too, because if you know that some of the dimensions of culture they identify work a particular way for you ( ie doesn't-work or you-need-this ), then suddenly, that spotlights something in your nature that has harmony in a specific subset of cultures, and shows you why that is doing this, in you..
( libraries exist: you don't need to buy those, but the Truby books, you'll probably fill with notes.. )
_ /\ _