• Keep Your Weight Centered: Most people have a normal tendency to lean forward or backward while they walk. While walking over ice, however, it’s important to keep your weight as square over your hips as possible. Do this by straightening up your back.
• Think About the Force of Your Feet: You’ll be steady as long as you don’t ask too much of your sneakers’ treads. If you try for more force than the ice’s friction can supply, it’ll be a short fall towards a cold wall. Example: normally walking while leaning forward, a person keeps balance by pushing harder into her step to keep herself from falling forward. If you try to do that on a sheet of ice, however…
• Take Very Short Strides: This makes balancing and centering weight much easier (less ab-straining) and encourages light steps.
• Go Slowly and Maintain Concentration: Getting absent-minded about balance for even a short time could leave a bruise on your bum for weeks. Never rush across ice- you won’t have bruises, and you won’t feel foolish!

• So out of all the sensations thoughts feelings intuitions and imaginations you experience you choose a few and call it “I”. This is the ego, the brain function you identify with. It is the medium of your experience, but it is not “You.”
• Your Self consists not only of your conscious (i.e. ego-centered) mind but also of your unconscious processes. The unconscious consists of all experience lying below the threshold of conscious awareness (something impossible to measure).
• Acknowledging the unconscious, learning of it even though it may seem repugnant and hideous on first contact, is an important ordeal in the life of a person. It connects us with our animal self, from which we are not separate despite how we rationalize all of our behavior.
• The urge to create is an “autonomous complex,” it grows like a plant in the psyche’s soil.
• Art, religion, folklore, and myths are all projections of the unconscious as well as calls for discovery of the unconscious. As you contemplate gods you discover the echo of those gods within you.
• We inherit primal inner images or archetypes of experience, which remain unconscious and only bubble to the surface when relevant. This inherited knowledge explains instinct and intuition, knowledge and actions which take place without conscious effort and without having been learned.
• Extroverted people are focused on the outside objective world; introverted people, while still looking out at the objective world, see not always what’s actually there, but what the object of their attention represents in their own unconscious. They constantly project aspects of themselves onto the world, and so are dealing with their own thoughts and feelings even as they talk with somebody or solve a problem or confront a danger.
• Men inherit and carry in their unconscious an archetype for womanhood, the aenima, which every important woman in his life (from mother to wife) will represent in some way, or she’ll at least be a vessel to carry the aenima’s projection. Women likewise have an idea of manhood, the animus.
• There are four primary brain functions, and any one of them can become dominant in a personality and so determine much else in a person’s development: sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuition (familiar if you’ve ever taken a meyers-briggs personality test). Each function has characteristic effects on the personality if the ego chooses to identify itself with it. The ego typically identifies with the strongest function, most able to deal with the problems which the world presents (so the choice is arbitrary but also purposeful).

An incredible set of hypotheses, the book’s been difficult reading but has borne delicious fruit.

As you grow and your brain develops, the neurons in your brain coordinate themselves into groups, developing electrical pathways which determine the brain’s output to a given external stimulus. Normally these pathways are determined by which neural connections and reactions to the external stimulus produces a reward sensation; the most successful connection remain and determine future interactions with and reactions to the world. Unsuccessful neural responses and connections are re-wired or die out.

Sometimes, however, a neural connection will arise which may work in the short term, but in the long term will be unhealthy and even harmful. For example, a young person may have a bad social experience and decide to withdraw; this fulfills his short-term goal of pain avoidance but shuts him out from a full experience of life and the world. His neural connections are wired in such a way as to react to social stimulus with a fear response; his brain reminds him how going out of his shell worked out in the past and advises him to avoid social interaction. As this pattern of behavior continues, the neural connection is reinforced until it is practically a destiny. People spend their entire lives locked in this fear-trap and other similarly frustrating neural knots.

THC, by temporarily blocking off neural pathways, forces the brain to develop new connections it may never otherwise have established. At the same time, it suppresses identity and ego while sharpening focus, facilitating honest and relatively objective reflection upon one’s own self and behavior (effects vary between strains of the plant, individual people, and innumerable other factors. I’m describing ideal but not uncommon effects of the plant). Under these conditions, behaviors learned and reinforced over an entire lifetime can be objectively examined and overcome. Assistance from an understanding and helpful teacher of life would facilitate the process.

Of course this process can only take place in a setting which encourages the development of neural connections. Smoking weed and then watching TV or playing video games is unlikely to be helpful. Walk through the woods, actively listen to a song or admire a work of art, talk with people. Break your routine. I envision a new school of psychiatry which simply encourages people to confront themselves, and if they wish, to redefine themselves.

This strategy assumes that the teacher actually has something beneficial to teach his students. While rote memorization of facts which will be tested on a mandatory exam may benefit students somehow, this is mostly an arbitrary and self-defeating exercise in hoop-jumping. While dutifully carrying out the commands of those with power over yourself is a useful job skill in the current market, it can hardly be considered an education.

It is more important for young people to learn critical thinking, creative thinking, social skills, concentration, and an attitude of consistent, energetic enthusiasm towards the task they take upon themselves to carry out.

Again, these things are easiest to teach when a student is convinced of the truth that these attributes (thinking etc.) will be beneficial to them. The ability to do this seperates the people who consider teaching “a job” from those who genuinely enjoy the process of helping those close to them grow. These are the keepers of the flame.