Who Should I Be?

You may have sometimes wondered whether you have become the person who you were destined to be, or the person you want to be, or ought to be. How are the expectations about who you are, or who you should be, framed? Do you often pose this question to yourself, with a view of changing or reinventing yourself?

Perhaps you want to be a model, but the most important people around you value you not for your attractiveness, but because you’re the best mother possible for them. It may be that you want to be seen as strong, as a tough guy, but people don’t see this in you at all. Perhaps who they actually see is someone who always knows the right thing to say, who listens, is caring and trustworthy, someone that they can always rely upon to talk to without feel judged. Perhaps we have seen how children who were slow in school were treated by teachers and other students, so we decided we were going to be the clever ones who always had the right answers – but even though we view ourselves that way, others don’t view us as intelligent but just as a hard worker.

Maybe you view yourself as successful, but everyone else in your family feels like you are trying too hard to seem special, and what they really value about you is how you cook amazing food, or make thoughtful birthday cards.

Learning these kinds of things may even be very disappointing to our ego. I know it was for me. We may find it disempowering and frustrating that people just don’t see us in the way that we expect that they should. This is often because the masks we try to wear never tend to do anywhere near as good a job at representing us as we think they should.

In a world full of horses trying their hardest to be unicorns, just a simple, honest horse is a rare phenomenon. Striving to be special has become thing one thing we can expect from nearly everyone, making the thrust toward specialness perhaps the most ordinary of human traits.

The way we build our expectations about who we are, or how we should be in our minds is often bound up with our core beliefs about who we originally learned to want to be. These are often conclusions made very early on in life about our role and our place in the world. Maybe when we were children, we thought we weren’t safe, so we wanted to be viewed as a strong protector. Perhaps we saw how unhappy that the people in poverty were around us, so we concluded that appearing well-off and fancy was valuable.

What really matters is that we have unexamined core beliefs that feed directly into who we think we should be, how our role should play out in life, and how this ought to be reflected in the eyes of others present in our lives.

Instead of recommending that we go about throwing out every single belief we have about ourselves and others, why don’t we simply start by looking at how we hold onto our own views about ourselves and how we expect to appear before others? If we can just loosen our grip on these expectations, we might be surprised at what rises to the surface in our relationships without forming any firm rules about how we would like to appear.

The mind can act as an extremely powerful filter. Our beliefs can totally cloud what appears in front of us to the point where we are not seeing any of reality.

Some lines of self-inquiry in a quiet space might be: how important is the way that I am perceived by others relative to the truth of who I am? Who am I, truly? Who am I without the influence of expectations from myself or others? Is it true that I will only be a success as a person if my circumstances and appearance match up with my ideas of what a successful person is? What are some of the ways in which I have created and been following my own recipe for misery?

Would my true conditions for success ever strike anyone as particularly commendable or special? If yes, or no, would that ultimately prove of lasting consequence? What if I found my calling, along with peace, happiness and well-being, but nobody on the planet ever recognised the value of that for my entire life?

Would I be able to live with that, or would I choose what my mind had in store for me that has not made me happy or peaceful, but might convince others that I was special, powerful, advanced or successful? What would the ultimate value of that be? Could you dispense with every idea of being whatever your version of a worldly success was? How would that feel, and what exactly would be left?

Our masks for ourselves have been tailored since childhood. Some of the shaping of that mask is due to the efforts of others imposing their values and expectations upon us, and still more of it is about how we have continued to shape that mask in response to others’ expectations.

Those claiming power and authority demand we act one way, so we make our mask look like we either obediently conform, or we are in rebellion against them. Perhaps because the world tells us that tough guys are survivors, we wear a mask of being a man of the world, an impervious survivor. Perhaps the world tells us we have nothing material to contribute to society because we lack success or attractiveness, so we wear the mask of the intellectual one, or the holy one, the one who is mysteriously above it all.

Point this out to any mask-wearer and they will be angry and embarrassed. Mask-wearers the world around seem to hold to a mutual understanding of not calling each other out, because we risk exposing ourselves.

The simple fact of the matter is, a mask is just a mask. Other egos know that. They even rely upon it to make sure you will fall into line with their delusions.

In the game of delusions and lies, the demon Mara is always one step ahead of you. You aren’t ever going to out-illusion the source of all illusion. No one succeeds in the world of Maya, the world of illusion, they just keep going around in smaller or bigger circles. The only progress we can make in this is when we give up the game of appearance. Our activities beyond this then are virtually invisible to the world of ego, because they don’t factor into ego’s schema of gaining and getting.

Only appearances matter to the False Self, so why would it value authenticity? We can’t even say whether our masks are even perceivable to other egos in the way we think they are. We assume that one way of appearing, behaving or speaking makes us seem powerful or admirable in the eyes of people, but to most people it may make us appear reaching or weak-minded. We wear a mask that we assume means people will think we are insightful and have special access to all the answers, whereas people might really just see us as a blowhard.

Even when people agree exactly with the fiction we portray, then what? Does our fiction become true? Even if our ruse is successful, what will sustain us until next time?

I remember as child I was obsessed with every subtle movement of my body conveying the appearance of having a robotic metal skeleton like the Terminator. This was mainly because I had concluded, in my nine-year old’s mind, that nothing else in the world would impress pretty girls more. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I would bet my last dollar that over the course of that time I was engaged in this ruse, not a single person (never mind a pretty girl) concluded that I was just a skilfully disguised Terminator.

What most people don’t focus so much upon is that wearing a mask is painful, however you have made it. It is uncomfortable, it is heavy, it is unnatural. We all wear them because we think we have to, being part of the human tribe. When I was pretending to be a Terminator, I was not experiencing joy. I was experiencing great suffering, having concluded that I needed to beg others for love and a sense of worth.

Taking a mask off is a relief for people, which is why people feel such relief when they are by themselves. Note that when we are around entities that we do not perceive as judgmental of us, such as our cats or dogs, we can still unwind and relax. It is fellow humans where we invest the sense of not only threat and demand, but the sense of promise that we may be meted out a rare share of love, praise or worth.

Our masks rarely convey the impression on others that we assume they do. We all take them off when we go to sleep at night, so why not practice leaving them off when we wake up in the morning? See what the real-world consequences are of you not following your own rules about how you should appear , and who you think others should think you are.

You might just find a welcome respite.

I have personally discovered that the greatest possible gift I could have given myself and the world is to retire one mask-wearer, one source of delusion. Looking back on this life, I maintain that I would rather have this freedom than any mask the mind could conjure. The really relevant question is: who should you be?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

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Why Parliament Is Full Of Abusers

This week the New Zealand mass consciousness has been obsessed with the issue of Parliamentary bullying. The cases of Sam Uffindell and Gaurav Sharma have revealed that there are some deeply abusive and sadistic people among our Parliamentarians. This essay explains why this is, and why we would be foolish to expect anything else.

Parliament is the top of the social dominance hierarchy in New Zealand. The people in there get to decide what the rest of us are allowed to do, and if we defy them they can set the Police onto us. Parliament are above laws. They can lie, they can slander, they can cheat, and no-one can touch them. This great power creates a great incentive for people to fight their way into Parliament, to the top of the social dominance hierarchy.

There are two ways to get to the top of any dominance hierarchy, whether it’s a family, tribe, country or empire: intimidation or inspiration.

In a state of Nature, there is only intimidation. The alpha chimpanzee is invariably the one with the greatest combination of strength and aggression. He rules by fear. Anyone who challenges him is liable to have his scrotum torn off or his eyes gouged out. A wide range of submissive behaviours evolved so that non-alphas could demonstrate their lack of threat, and thereby earn the alpha’s mercy.

Pre-civilisational human life was not much different to chimpanzee life today. The one at the top of the dominance hierarchy was also the one with the greatest combination of strength and aggression. But the advent of civilisation changed everything. Civilisation transformed the human being from a wild animal into something else.

In a state of civilisation, there is inspiration. It’s possible for individuals in possession of a divine spark to gain the allegiance of their fellows not through cruelty and fear, but through the promise of leading them to greatness. The greater the civilisation, the more inspirational the leaders are. The greatest of all civilisations give us leaders like Alexander, Marcus Aurelius and George Washington.

Inspiration is by far the best way to lead, because it provokes the least amount of blowback. Rule by intimidation makes people feel fear, which often calcifies into resentment. This resentment, as Machiavelli observed, is liable to spill over into unrest and violence. Much better, he concluded, to be loved than to be feared.

Intimidation is easy. It’s mostly a matter of what’s called social dominance orientation, or SDO. The will to dominate is the main quality that intimidates other people. Research has found that “higher SDO was associated with pursuit of hierarchy-enhancing jobs”. For the reasons mentioned above, politician is one of those jobs. So people who are naturally intimidating often strive to become politicians, creating a selection bias.

Inspiration is hard. No-one is really sure how to do it, or what’s necessary. A belief in God might be necessary in order to truly inspire, or fearlessness in the face of death, or high intelligence, great wealth or a favourable birth. No-one really knows. Good leaders don’t need to know the specifics, because they can intuit the way forwards.

It’s fair to say that good leaders rule by inspiration and bad leaders rule by intimidation.

Unfortunately, New Zealand is beset by bad leadership. Not only are we near the bottom of a historical nadir, but we are also crippled by democracy, the remnants of cultural Christianity and a peculiar resentment-fuelled anti-elitism, all of which combine to keep our best people down.

The end result is that there are no real leaders in Parliament. All they’ve been since the Third National Government is just a pack of scum-sucking grifters doing the bidding of international banking and finance interests. That doesn’t inspire anyone. So our Parliament is full of abusers because there are no good leaders to inspire people to follow them, leaving abusers to battle their way into the top positions.

Our political system selects for psychopaths because any dominance hierarchy without one or more psychopaths at the top of it is inherently unstable. If the person at the top of a dominance hierarchy is not a psychopath themselves, they are liable to get dislodged by more aggressive underlings. So, from the point of view of the Establishment, putting abusers into top positions promotes stability.

Almost everyone in Parliament is an abuser, and that goes triple for those at the top of Parliament. Can anyone listen to Jacinda Ardern or Andrew Little justify their continuation of cannabis prohibition, and not realise they are psychopaths? Can anyone listen to Christopher Luxon or Brooke van Velden bay for cutting the benefits of the poor, and not think likewise?

Given all this, it’s not hard to understand why National selected Sam Uffindell as a candidate despite his history of bullying: a history of bullying is a qualification for a job that requires grinding five million other people into submission. This is why National never disavowed Nick Smith, even though Smith regularly turned up to meetings drunk and abused his staff, or any of the countless other alcoholics, narcissists and sex pests that have floated through National’s ranks over the years.

In summary, our political system is full of abusers because we have no leaders good enough to inspire people to follow them.

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The Subtle Trap Of Misunderstanding

Choosing wisely and unwisely, along with the consequences that follow, constitutes the greater part of our human lives. We will all make many wrong choices in our time. Don’t be tempted to withhold from making the wrong choice because you think you need to be good, or in order to be worthy or righteous. This is a subtle misunderstanding.

The only way for wisdom to really bear fruit in this life is to move and act from a space of understanding. The goal here, as with all things in this life-long project of self-inquiry, is understanding.

Understanding requires that you meet what is trying to move out of your inner state into an expression in the world. We begin with mind in all things, and then it moves outward into an expression.

This can be either wise or unwise, skilful or unskilful. This is what eventually affords us with wisdom or what the Buddha referred to as ‘Right View’. Right View is not a claim there is an objectively correct solution for everything, rather it indicates a correct way of looking things. It speaks to our orientation. Are we wanting to be right, or are we wanting to understand? Are we wanting justification in all we do, or do we want to see deeply into the way things really work?

In some ways we are better off making mistakes again and again if we don’t understand yet – but at least choose with your eyes open. Then you will learn something. When understanding arises for you, it will have substance and lasting value. You will then have the capacity to be grateful for the mistakes you have made and see how graciously you have been humbled and corrected.

A lot of people find this mysterious, but it really needn’t be. If you know what to look for, it won’t be mysterious. The small windows with which you see into unconscious patterns of behaviour, when used regularly and with ongoing commitment, eventually allow you to see more. The windows gradually become wider, allowing for a broader view of things within.

Many things are so small that we are content to simply let them fly, whether it is making a comment, using a certain tone, allowing something to privately irritate us, or withholding affection or appreciation from someone as punishment. This is because we don’t tend to be aware of the total impact of our small errors.

If you want to get grit out of your shoe so that you can stand and walk comfortably, you don’t just want the biggest pieces out, nor do you only want most of the small bits out – you want all of it out. The smaller pieces will bother you even more when there is less grit in there.

It is the same principle with your inner environment.

If you want peace, you need to look at every tiny factor that contributes towards an outward movement from misunderstanding. Grit in your shoe is grit in your shoe – one subtle interruption to peace of mind is an interruption to all of your peace of mind, not just a part of it. The False Self can be deluded into thinking that it wants certain particularly troublesome pieces of grit out so that it can focus on keeping the others, but that is the power of delusion for you.

Some suffering actually works for ego as a convenience, other suffering not so much. If you want to get rid of your suffering but keep your unreasonable expectations, or your long-standing arguments, your progress in self-discovery will be impeded. You can only go so far when you place artificial limitations on your process of inquiry.

A lot of writers on this subject tend to hesitate from giving specific examples. I’m not sure why this is the case. I think it may be because when we are given specific examples, it is seen as a little like being spoon-fed, and the idea is that it may reduce our capacity to independently assess for ourselves whether an act expressed is unconscious or in harmony or with the truth of who we truly are.

It makes sense to me that we can’t just be given beliefs or moral principles to fall into alignment with, because this would disregard the role of understanding. I feel that in some cases, being given specific examples does serve to shine some light on the kinds of things we are looking for in this type of exercise. Perhaps not all the time, because we do need to learn a measure of independence in this arena. We should be able to look for ourselves with fresh eyes and discover what is pertinent to us, not because someone who thinks they know better has told us that this behaviour is wise – this won’t help much.

The Buddha is reputed to have once said:

“…just as a goldsmith would test his gold by burning, cutting, and rubbing it, so you must examine my words and accept them, but not merely out of reverence for me.”

The Buddha was first and foremost a human, and he was being totally upfront with us about our shared human interest in discovering for ourselves the value of what is said, not the projected image of whoever appears to be saying it.

You don’t need someone you think is enlightened telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, that would be old hat. Do you really want to give the power of your mind away so easily? What if it is the only realm of jurisdiction that you really have? What would you do with the knowledge of an enlightened being if you didn’t totally understand it? Would you keep it in your head, like a treasure kept in a box?

Again, understanding is paramount – you need to know what it is, how it works, how to use it – otherwise it is no good. If I write a sentence, I anticipate that it will be tested by a discriminating reader, not swallowed hook, line and sinker. If you test what is said, you are practicing what the Buddha taught; you are practicing wisdom. If you do not test what is said, but you take hold of it anyway, you are practicing idolatry or false religion – even if what is said is true.

This is what a baby does. A baby will suck anything that is put into its mouth. If we want to be adults in this world, if we want a life that reflects our maturity, we can’t afford to just take anything in without knowing what it is. Abandoning all discrimination is not the same thing as faith.

I will give some examples of typical unconscious patterns, not to tell you what is wrong and what is right, but to help open your eyes to areas of your life which you may need to examine in order to foster skilful living. There will be many areas close by that require similar attention. As always, the responsibility for a thorough investigation lies with you.

Maybe no-one has told you this before, but I have total confidence in your capacity to examine your inner world in a balanced, healthy and truth-conducive way.

It is not a chore; it is one of the most beautiful things humanly possible. The results remain to be seen. I do not withhold an attempt describe the results in order to be mysterious, but to respect the freshness of your own experience. Suffice it to say, those who have gone before you in this venture have discovered that all we have to lose in self-inquiry is that which is not real to begin with. Then you can marvel at what remains.

I will now share some brief examples followed by a specific thought form that might accompany them, and afterward, a general explanation of how these contribute to our suffering. Some of these may be things you have noticed before either in yourself, or perhaps in others. We are all particularly adept when it comes to noticing symptoms of falsehood and delusion in other people.

When you deliberately leave certain books out to imply to others how complex or intelligent you are. “I’m great. I know so much – people love me”.

When you want to demonstrate to strangers that you are capable of walking or driving away from the traffic lights with a high reaction time. “I am faster than you. See?”.

When you walk, speak or move a certain way hoping that others will make the connection that there is something very special or distinguished about you. “I am a dark horse – I am very sophisticated”.

When you feel a sense of desperation when you want to win an argument, defend yourself, or make a point to others. “I just have to be right and express my opinion”.

I have given just a few examples, because we really could fill a book with them. I know some of them seem juvenile, but we do carry a lot of misunderstandings all the way from childhood through to adulthood in only superficially modified form – it is all a way of begging for love, worth and attention.

We don’t need many examples for the spirit of these movements to be identified. You can sense the place within you that they emerge from. More generally people just call this suffering, but in Buddhism, this is referred to specifically as ignorance. It is a gut-level sense of being a separate being, a fragment of the universe that defines itself as so small that it must be promoted and defended in order to ensure its foothold in existence. It is ignorance in the respect that the attitude is in ignorance of your true nature.

Our true nature rests in unity, and doesn’t need to be promoted or defended. Interpersonal advertisements are not a tool of the true self, which has no need to show strength, skill or virtue. Being itself establishes worth, and understanding will reveal this.

Every little thrill that you get when you entertain any one of these deluded thought forms is strengthening and supporting that separate sense of self. When a spider builds a web, it has to maintain the structure constantly, making repairs and adjustments in tension here and there, otherwise the whole thing will decay and fall apart. The false self is doing the same thing.

Every minuscule portion of energy you send its way will keep the whole operation running – and an ego can subsist on very little energy for a very long time.

Have you noticed what happens for example when you really make an effort to look attractive, and you haven’t received a compliment about your looks for a long time? If that sort of thing is really important to us, we might start to remember a time where a compliment did make us feel wonderful, if however very briefly, and relive it all over again. Or, we might fantasise about a fictitious scenario.

This helps an ego in starvation mode so that the sense of a separate self is held more firmly in place. What would otherwise happen is the pain of withdrawal might become so great that the deficiency of the personality structure is itself called into question. This variety of ‘rock-bottom’ event could provide the critical mass needed to awaken out of the mind’s dream-state, so the False Self tends not to let that happen.

I say this in some regard to appease the honest part of your curious mind, but please respect that none of this is to be believed. It is to be explored and investigated by you.

These brief examples I have given you may seem paltry and trivial, but like the grit in your shoe, every tiny bit contributes and something small can ultimately result in a great deal of suffering.

None of this is of any use if we don’t arrive at some measure of true insight, allowing for the relief of suffering. I wouldn’t mention these small things otherwise. What I most want you to see about them is the way in which they promote a certain aspect of you while simultaneously denying another. You should also see how each of these brings two things with it – thrill and suffering, inseparable like two sides of a coin.

Do you get a sense with each of these examples how the tiny revenue of excitement that is a reward in each one of them contributes to keeping you locked into a worldview in which there is a separate ‘you’ there, stretched between duality of values, worthy or unworthy, good or bad, strong or weak? See whether you can get a palpable sense of what it feels like to be rewarded chemically and psychologically with each of these, because this is the thrill of the ego, the False Self.

The tiny thrill is a poison that is making you sick, because you have misunderstood through a culture of learned ignorance. You thought that the only way to feel anything was to be addicted to thrill, and then confuse that with happiness. You actually got it totally backward – thrill is suffering, and real joy comes through peace which is the absence of suffering.

We all got it completely backwards.

It is all the small links in the chain that bind the addiction to personal identity. Each one is worth examining, because you might just find the chain falls away altogether with a little persistence. Successfully understand one dysfunctional energetic form deeply within your mind and heart, and you will be well on the road to understanding them all and discovering a peace without boundaries.

We were all caught in the same honey-trap. This may be embarrassing for a time, but that too is a natural phase. See what it feels like to give yourself some peace and let that embarrassment and shame go – we don’t need to make another victim identity out of it.

When we use a sense, or a muscle, we know what happens. Our abilities become clearer, stronger. Our task in inquiry is just the same way. We develop an acute awareness of when energetic movements within our minds or hearts are coming from a place of separation, wanting to isolate ourselves as an identity – the special one, the rebel, the hero, the holy man or the victim – and we sense keenly when movements originate from a sense of unity.

The latter are harder to spot, especially at first, because they are spontaneous, and lack of premeditation that the movements of separateness thrive on. This is why the unity that moves through you is sometimes referred to in Buddhism as sunyata or emptiness.

It isn’t that there is literally nothing there, it is that unlike separation, it doesn’t depend on structured form and content to maintain its abiding existence. This is why it never feels compelled to promote or defend itself, and why it feels peaceful and secure without clinging to anything even though change is happening all around it.

Sadly, many people in this life will never come to know the value of this because of just how deeply we have been collectively enthralled by the addictive conditioned states that the modern world excels at producing. The truth is, you can’t serve two masters, and you can’t bend two bows.

I have confidence that what is true in us wants so profoundly to express itself through us, particularly at this time when our established human ways are consistently failing us, that those of us who are called to the responsibility of self-inquiry will meet this task head on, and likely with rapid success. Not only is this peace waiting for us in our own lives, but it is waiting to be shared with every entity in all times and places.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

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Equatorial Mentality Vs. Polar Mentality

There are many different ways of dividing the people of the world into two groups. Men vs. women, East vs. West, K-selected vs. r-selected, industrialised vs. developing, whores vs. gangsters. This essay introduces another: equatorial mentality vs. polar mentality.

Equatorial climes, as anyone who has been to the tropics will know, are hot. Sunlight beats down directly from above. Near the Equator, it’s often above 20 degrees Celcius even at night. Sometimes living there can feel like living in a greenhouse.

Polar climes, by contrast, are cold. Sunlight strikes the surface of the Earth from the side. In wintertime, cities above the Arctic Circle have days where the Sun does not rise above the horizon at all (the “Polar Night”). This is where the real tundra begins, where the climate can only support small trees and bushes.

Contrary to popular belief, there’s more to the global temperature gradient than the simple fact that polar climes tend to be less sunny. For example, some cities in the Congo and Equitorial Guinea get only 1,500 yearly sunshine hours, whereas even Stockholm gets 1,800. The intensity of the sunlight is more important, particularly the intensity of sunlight per square metre.

Not every latitude of the surface of the Earth receives the same intensity of sunlight. Near the Equator, where the rays of the Sun strike the surface of the Earth at right angles, the sunlight is the most intense. The further one goes from the Equator to the poles, the more obtusely the sunlight strikes the surface, and the less intense it becomes.

The fact that the intensity of sunlight varies depending on latitude has immense ecological consequences – and, thereby, ethological consequences.

Because the sunlight is more intense at the Equator, and because the food chain is based on sunlight, the intensity of life is also greater there. Strong sunlight and warm temperatures are the most conducive to life, and so the Equator tends to feature jungles and rainforests that are teeming with insects and animals. This life must compete against other life for space to live.

At the Equator, therefore, the immediate challenge for anything living is against other living beings. Nearer the poles, by contrast, the immediate challenge is against the environment. There is much less life per square metre, and so much less danger from predators and parasites. The main dangers there are the cold and lack of easy food supplies.

This means that a different set of behaviour patterns had to evolve to meet the challenges of equatorial climates, as compared to polar climates. These behavioural patterns evolved alongside particular mindsets. There is an equatorial mindset that is more compatible with equatorial behaviour patterns, and there is a polar mindset that is more compatible with polar behaviour patterns.

The equatorial mindset doesn’t think ahead. There are no winters near the Equator, so there is no possibility of freezing to death. As such, there is no need to stack firewood for the winter, or to build a solid, warm, airtight house. Fruit is plentiful all year round in the tropics, so there’s no need to plan for the long-term storage of it. As such, there is no evolutionary pressure selecting for long-term thinking.

The polar mindset, by contrast, is always thinking ahead. It has to. Polar winters will kill everything not prepared for them. It’s common for Northern Europe, parts of North America and parts of Northern Asia to experience winter temperatures below -30 Celcius. What’s worse, winters in such places can last for six months. Anyone who doesn’t plan adequately for such weather will die.

These contrasting mindsets explain the contrasting impressions that some people make on each other.

The equatorial mindset is that, if there’s nothing to do, just chill out. Tomorrow will be much like today so, if there are no pressing matters, one should just take it easy and not risk overexertion. This is why people in Equatorial countries are often found sleeping during the middle of the day.

This is often interpreted as lazy by the polar mindset. The reality, however, is that when it’s hot, it can be dangerous to use too much energy. Heatstroke is an ever-present threat in tropical regions. Anyone who pushes themselves too hard is liable to pass out. So taking it easy whenever possible makes sense near the Equator.

The polar mindset, by contrast, is to always keep oneself busy. Sooner or later, winter will come, so if there are no pressing matters, one should prepare. Chop firewood, fix the house, gather food – and do it now because it will soon be too cold and dark. This is why people in Europe, North America and Northern Asia work long hours. The polar mindset doesn’t feel comfortable unless it’s working.

This is often interpreted as neurosis by the equatorial mindset. ‘We only have one life, so why not relax and enjoy it?’ reasons the equatorial mind, which doesn’t understand why the polar mind works so hard when the final reward for all of us is death. The hunger of the polar mind to achieve things and to impose order upon the world seems inhuman to the equatorial mind.

Like feminine and masculine, the equatorial mindset and the polar mindset will often clash. The polar mindset tends to accumulate more money, and this provokes resentment in the equatorial mindset. The equatorial mindset has a tendency to act impulsively, and the violence and theft that results provokes resentment in the polar mindset.

The equatorial mindset vs. the polar mindset is one of the great divisions in the human species, and understanding it goes a long way to understanding human behaviour.

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