12 rules for life free download

Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street.

What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight with our shoulders back and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! The book grew out of Peterson's hobby of answering questions posted on Quora, the one being "What are the most valuable things everyone should know?

It's a warning to me". The book is written in a more accessible style than his previous academic book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief The book is divided into chapters with each title representing a specific rule for life explained in an essay. The founding idea is that "suffering is built into the structure of being," but although it can be unbearable, people have a choice either to withdraw, which is a "suicidal gesture", or to face and transcend it. However, living in a world of chaos and order, each human being has "darkness" which can "turn them into the monsters they're capable of being" to satisfy their dark impulses in right situations.

The scientific experiments like Invisible Gorilla Test show that perception is adjusted to aims, and it is better to seek meaning rather than happiness. Peterson noted that "it's all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you're unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. Such individuals typically come from hyper-sheltered families, where nothing terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland wonderful or else.

They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes.

To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life. Maybe you are a loser. Maybe you just have a bad habit.

Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you should stand up for yourself.

It will also decrease the probability that you will get to live in a good neighbourhood, have access to the highest quality resources, and obtain a healthy, desirable mate. It will render you more likely to abuse cocaine and alcohol, as you live for the present in a world full of uncertain futures. It will increase your susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and dementia. Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead.

Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space. Alterations in body language offer an important example.

If you are asked by a researcher to move your facial muscles, one at a time, into a position that would look sad to an observer, you will report feeling sadder. If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier.

Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified or dampened by that expression. If your posture is poor, for example—if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual protected, in theory, against attack from behind —then you will feel small, defeated and ineffectual.

The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently. You might object: the bottom is real. Being at the bottom is equally real. A mere transformation of posture is insufficient to change anything that fixed.

And fair enough. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe.

You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the all-too-real fact of the dragon. You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it. That can all occur practically or symbolically, as a physical or as a conceptual restructuring.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended.

It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality it means acting to please God, in the ancient language. To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children.

It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly. It means casting dead, rigid and too tyrannical order back into the chaos in which it was generated; it means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and more productive order.

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse.

Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating.

Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing so will not only genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you—it will also make those good things feel better when they do happen. Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement.

Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair.

Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny.

Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy. Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

Imagine that a hundred people are prescribed a drug. Consider what happens next. They might not even take it at all. Physicians and pharmacists tend to blame such patients for their noncompliance, inaction and error. You can lead a horse to water, they reason.

Psychologists tend to take a dim view of such judgments. We are trained to assume that the failure of patients to follow professional advice is the fault of the practitioner, not the patient. We believe the health-care provider has a responsibility to profer advice that will be followed, offer interventions that will be respected, plan with the patient or client until the desired result is achieved, and follow up to ensure that everything is going correctly.

This is just one of the many things that make psychologists so wonderful — :. Imagine that someone receives an organ transplant. A transplant typically occurs only after a long period of anxious waiting on the part of the recipient. Only a small number of donated organs are a good match for any hopeful recipient.

This means that the typical kidney transplantee has been undergoing dialysis, the only alternative, for years. It must happen five to seven times a week, for eight hours a time. It should happen every time the patient sleeps. No one wants to stay on dialysis. Now, one of the complications of transplantation is rejection.

Your immune system will attack and destroy such foreign elements, even when they are crucial to your survival. To stop this from happening, you must take anti-rejection drugs, which weaken immunity, increasing your susceptibility to infectious disease. Most people are happy to accept the trade-off.

Recipients of transplants still suffer the effects of organ rejection, despite the existence and utility of these drugs. This beggars belief. It is seriously not good to have your kidneys fail. Dialysis is no picnic. Transplantation surgery occurs after long waiting, at high risk and great expense. How could people do that to themselves? How could this possibly be? Many people who receive a transplanted organ are isolated, or beset by multiple physical health problems to say nothing of problems associated with unemployment or family crisis.

They may be cognitively impaired or depressed. They may not entirely trust their doctor, or understand the necessity of the medication. Maybe they can barely afford the drugs, and ration them, desperately and unproductively. So, you take him to the vet. The vet gives you a prescription. What happens then? You have just as many reasons to distrust a vet as a doctor. Thus, you care. Your actions prove it. In fact, on average, you care more. People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.

Your pet probably loves you, and would be happier if you took your medication. It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds and maybe even their lizards more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves? It was an ancient story in the Book of Genesis—the first book in the Old Testament—that helped me find an answer to that perplexing question.

Then He created birds and animals and fish again, employing speech —and ended with man, male and female, both somehow formed in his image. That all happens in Genesis 1.

That is Genesis 2 to To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel.

In whatever manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens any more than they could view the moon and the stars through the glass lenses of the equally recent telescope. Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.

Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was something similar to the stories we tell each other about our lives and their personal significance; something similar to the happenings that novelists describe when they capture existence in the pages of their books.

Subjective experience—that includes familiar objects such as trees and clouds, primarily objective in their existence, but also and more importantly such things as emotions and dreams as well as hunger, thirst and pain. It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective, and they are not easily reducible to the detached and objective—even by the modern reductionist, materialist mind.

Take pain, for example—subjective pain. Everyone acts as if their pain is real— ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality. The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters The scientific world of matter can be reduced, in some sense, to its fundamental constituent elements: molecules, atoms, even quarks.

However, the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third as there are three is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.

It is our eternal subjugation to the first two that makes us doubt the validity of existence —that makes us throw up our hands in despair, and fail to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out. Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed.

It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand. Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too. Order, by contrast, is explored territory. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. Order is the floor beneath your feet, and your plan for the day.

Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.

But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided. In the domain of order, things behave as God intended. We like to be there. Familiar environments are congenial. We seldom leave places we understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair.

Most people would rather be mugged than audited. Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell?

Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand. Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding serpent. Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.

Order is the stability of your marriage. Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse.

Order is the place and time where the oft-invisible axioms you live by organize your experience and your actions so that what should happen does happen.

Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances. When that happens, the territory has shifted. Make no mistake about it: the space, the apparent space, may be the same.

But we live in time, as well as space. In consequence, even the oldest and most familiar places retain an ineradicable capacity to surprise you. You may be cruising happily down the road in the automobile you have known and loved for years.

But time is passing. The brakes could fail. You might be walking down the road in the body you have always relied on. If your heart malfunctions, even momentarily, everything changes. Friendly old dogs can still bite. Old and trusted friends can still deceive. New ideas can destroy old and comfortable certainties. Such things matter. Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.

All that response is instinctive, in some sense— but the faster the response, the more instinctive. Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male Chaos and order are two of the most fundamental elements of lived experience— two of the most basic subdivisions of Being itself.

Things or objects are part of the objective world. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood to the degree that they are understood at all as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears.

Order and chaos are not understood first, objectively as things or objects , and then personified. That would only be the case if we perceived objective reality first, and then inferred intent and purpose. Perception of things as tools, for example, occurs before or in concert with perception of things as objects.

We see what things mean just as fast or faster than we see what they are. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations. The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes.

They have been male or female, for example, for a billion years. The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals.

It was in a still-respectable one-fifth of that time that mammals, who take extensive care of their young, emerged. Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures particularly, other humans were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were literally our natural habitat—our environment. From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner.

It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A lot of that is other beings, their opinions of us, and their communities. Over the millennia, as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective world— outside the personalities of family and troupe.

Outside is outside of what we currently understand —and understanding is dealing with and coping with and not merely representing objectively. But our brains had been long concentrating on other people. Thus, it appears that we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-human world with the innate categories of our social brain.

Our minds are far older than mere humanity. Our categories are far older than our species. Our most basic category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and begun to interpret everything through its lens. This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals, including the chimpanzees who are our closest genetic and, arguably, behavioural match.

It is because men are and throughout history have been the builders of towns and cities, the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks, the operators of heavy machinery. Order is the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. Order, when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly.

It does so as the forced migration, the concentration camp, and the soul-devouring uniformity of the goose-step. Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made. It is also what matters, or what is the matter—the very subject matter of thought and communication.

In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts Most men do not meet female human standards.

It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same.

The Star of David is, for example, the downward pointing triangle of femininity and the upward pointing triangle of the male. The same symbol was used in China to portray Fuxi and Nuwa, creators of humanity and of writing. Elkhonon Goldberg, student of the great Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, has proposed quite lucidly and directly that the very hemispheric structure of the cortex reflects the fundamental division between novelty the unknown, or chaos and routinization the known, order.

We all have a palpable sense of the chaos lurking under everything familiar. Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought.

The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by or exists on the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you.

Some of the techniques listed in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.

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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, psychology lovers.