Why You Need To Set Your Precepts For A Productive Life

So you got fired, or maybe you landed a new job, and you went out for a drink. Three days later you come to in the Café Du Monde with a beignet in your left hand and a café au lait in your right.

Your right hand hurts like hell, but your anus doesn’t, so you figure everything worked out okay. Now after your hangover wears off, you start asking yourself, “Why did I do this to myself again, and how the hell do I stop this from happening?”

One of the most damaging things to come out of the SJWs’ playbook is the idea that it is okay to do whatever you want, anytime you want, with anyone you want.

Simply put, no it isn’t.

Your grandfather wasn’t a saint, but both he and grandma recognized that some things aren’t in anyone’s interest. Because they had a grounding in traditional culture and religion that you don’t, they had a leg up on spotting these things in advance and staying away from them. Also, the world they lived in had very specific methods for dealing with young men, and women, who decided to act like a horse’s ass.

But a solution does exist to solve your problem today: welcome to the world of precepts. A precept (prēˌsept) is defined as a general rule intended to regulate behavior or thought.

If you are religious, get into your religion, quit being a knucklehead, and start following the damn rules. If you are not, you need to come up with a playlist of those things that guide your life. The Ten Commandments, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, and the 13 Principles of Faith all provide an excellent guidelines for determining your own personal set of precepts. Or, as Franz Bardon would say, “bind yourself and be free.”

A type of protection

Simply put, precepts exist to protect you from yourself when you are weak. The real issue is that most people cannot recognize when they are weak and what this means. Specifically, people are prone to doing the wrong thing when their will is weak. From personal experience this is not when you are suffering from an untreatable disease and dying in a bed. At that point in time most people have a very focused will on one issue: staying alive.

A weakness in will usually exhibits itself when you feel like a demi-god. And if the old Norse and Grecco-Roman stories provide any kind of guide, this is when that part of you that you spend most of your waking hours ignoring says, “That guy was really disrespectful, you should kick his ass.” And you do…or it says, “Go to the tea house and have unprotected sex with a dozen women.” And you do…or it says, “It’s only a little cocaine.” And you do.

Precepts prevent this from happening by using the wisdom of Dave Chappelle and saying instead, “Hey brother, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. That will get you 5 to 10.”

Using positivity

As a practical matter, a precept should be a positive command. Anything that denies you something shouldn’t come from a position of conflict, as that will have some interesting, and uncomfortable, psychological effects over the long term. A good example is, ”I will do something productive for one hour every day,” if you are the kind of guy that tends to sit on the couch watching too much TV.

A bad example of this kind of thing is, “I won’t sit on the couch watching TV all day.” One encourages a positive behavior and the other penalizes you for a negative behavior.

Once you have your list of personal precepts, and I have about 26 as a point of reference, you need to put these into effect. The easiest way to do this is using the power of autosuggestion. This will take you five to ten minutes upon waking and another five to ten minutes right before you go to bed. Get a rosary, a mala, or any set of prayer beads.

Immediately before bed repeat each of your personal precepts, one after another, for five to ten minutes. As you say a given precept aloud, imagine the words coming out of your mouth and sinking down into your bones where they rest. Once you have completed a precept, grab ahold of the next bead of the chain of beads and go into the following precept.

Repeat this exercise upon waking.

This is one of those little tricks monks in a monastery use to fix bad behavior, and it is pretty effective over the long run. In the beginning, you will continue to violate your self-determined precepts and don’t worry about this initially. With time, you will begin notice that you are about to violate a precept and it will catch in your mind as you decide not engage in whatever that behavior is. Finally, you will lose the desire to violate your precepts altogether.

In essence, your daily practice will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And your life will be better because of it.

Read More: 8 Essential Rules To Surviving The Workplace