Humans are incredibly resilient, considering their squishy makeup. However, you will want to provide your human incarnation with the best food and treatment if you want her to thrive, stay engaged, and live as long a life as she possibly can in this chaotic, carbon-based, quantum-powered universal plane.
It can be hard to tell humans apart since they all have four limbs and walk upright. Upon closer inspection, you’ll discover your human is unique, with her own character, talents, and genetic variations.
Before you assume your human can be trained to behave in a certain way, or you expect her to fulfill complex commands, get to know her as an individual. While she may not perform an action that may be popular among other humans, she may have her own strengths that will allow her to do any number of actions that only she can do.
Obviously, behavior, command and action are why you acquired a human incarnation. But, humans are not toys. You must address their basic care and feeding before all else. These are deceptively simple needs that can lead to the most chaotic, quantum-level disasters if they are not addressed every single day.
Remember, this life does not come with an extended warranty – or a money-back guarantee.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of acquiring a human incarnation is that you must assume occupancy before you can provide your organism with these basic requirements by yourself. Thus, other humans must provide your needs. Some humans are better at this than others.
Unless your human carefully evaluates the care she learned from her first human contacts, she may simply perpetuate bad self-treatment, thinking it is the best for her. As a result, you may find yourself at a time in your existence where your human incarnation is in pretty lousy shape with no real clue how to take good care of herself.
This brief, modest Guide attempts to provide a few practical tips for daily maintenance and troubleshooting of your human existence. Remember, this life does not come with an extended warranty – or a money-back guarantee.
Occupying a mortal existence AND maintaining constant function is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.
BREATHING
The very first skill your human incarnation must learn is sucking in and blowing out air. If mastered, this task will occupy every moment of your human’s life.
If you find something is amiss with your human, she isn’t responding well or is acting unusual, check with her breathing before all else. There will be times when your human does not exchange air, but that only happens when something is creating a significant challenge to your human, like swimming underwater, running from a tiger or carrying stinky garbage to the alley.
You may quickly resolve many, many issues with human incarnation by rebooting her breathing. Remember, breathing is sucking in and blowing out air. Often, the human neglects one or the other task. Take the time to guide your human slowly through each stage of the breath.
Refrain from mocking or judging your human for forgetting this most basic task. Occupying a mortal existence AND maintaining constant function is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.
Do your human a favor, keep her interior ocean full of clean water.
WATER
Humans live almost exclusively on dry land, but don’t be fooled. They are water-based organisms. Rather than swimming in the liquid so essential to their existence, they carry their ocean inside of them. This is terribly inefficient as every action humans take, including breathing, depletes their water reserves.
Humans must constantly replenish their cellular sea. The great challenge for watering a human incarnation is that, unlike breathing, this cannot be accomplished without a conscious effort.
She must seek out, procure, and consume water, often taking time away from far more entertaining and seemingly important tasks. And yet, if she does not monitor and maintain her water levels, all those far more entertaining and seemingly important tasks will take on the challenge level of running from a tiger – or carrying stinky garbage to the alley.
Do your human a favor, keep her interior ocean full of clean water. Since humans tend to resist their best care (hence the need for this Guide), you may find it easier to camouflage the delivery of this liquid life essence in an entertaining and changing mix of flavors, vessels and locations.
Food does not come from humans, it comes from the sun.
FOOD
The most difficult and yet very first step to fulfill this basic need is identifying food. Your human incarnation encounters an infinite amount of matter on a daily basis, much of which can fit in her mouth, some of which can pass through her organism without causing death, and very little of which will actually keep her existence operating at optimum levels.
To make the whole matter of identifying food matter more difficult, there are many other humans who produce matter that looks exactly like food, but is not, in fact, anything that should really pass through the biological engine that keeps your human alive. This category of matter includes things like rubber cheeseburgers, fast-food, and the Wienermobile.
The core challenge of identifying food is so great that some humans dedicate their lives to the answer, some build religious belief systems around it, and some spend great amounts of money to fool other humans into believing their definition of food. (Curiously, all of these apply to the Wienermobile.)
With this in mind, if your human incarnation wants to perform other actions beyond defining food, she might aim to acquire nutrition that has passed through as few human hands as possible. Food does not come from humans, it comes from the sun.
Plants, being far more grounded than humans, chose to keep solar energy transfer as simple as possible. They adopted photosynthesis. Humans, already being willing to walk around in their own personal ocean, chose to harvest their solar fuel from other organisms. It’s only incidental that this action allowed humans to get back at those smug plants.
Since plants are dependent on the up-again, down-again sun cycle, humans sometimes harvest their solar energy from other animals who store the energy they took from plants in the form of delicious meat hanging all over their bones. However, the topic of eating animals is an express ticket right back to the battle over defining food (and oddly back again to the Wienermobile).
To steer clear of the Wienermobile conundrum altogether, this Guide advocates a close examination of the way anything claiming to be food affects the operation of your human incarnation. If your human is performing poorly or malfunctioning, you may need to evaluate what she has identified as food and help her develop a definition that serves her biological engine better.
Your human incarnation is limited in her ability to completely secure her existence.
SECURITY
Once your human incarnation is comfortably breathing, hydrated and fed, she must face the unending awareness that her continued existence is under constant threat of attacks on a microscopic, biological, chemical, mental, cosmic, and even virtual level. Many humans complain loudly – and frequently – about their lot in such a chaotic universal plane, despite the perks of being carbon-based.
This Guide takes the attitude that it’s a little late to argue the contract of existence. Keep in mind that even stars explode. If they didn’t, you never would have all that squishy carbon to assemble into a body to occupy. The best thing is to make the most of the peaceful times between attacks on the microscopic, biological, chemical, mental, cosmic and even virtual levels.
Since there is simply no way to permanently secure your human incarnation, even though it is one of her most basic needs, it may be helpful to remind your human frequently about all the things that are secure in her life. If you’ve already addressed her breathing, water, and food, these are good things to point out to her.
Threats from tigers, stinky garbage that needs to be taken to the alley, or anything that compromises your human’s ability to pursue the next three basic needs, must be addressed. The action to be taken can span the widest range of human behavior: running away, shutting the door, making a witty retort, putting a foot in a delicate place on another human’s body, or even breaking a societal dependence on fossil fuels. Like with food, entire human civilizations have risen and fallen and been mocked for centuries afterward because of their approach to perceived threats.
With that in mind, take the time to understand the cultural context of your human incarnation to determine how her security could be compromised by forces beyond her control. Although it contradicts many powerful human empires, this Guide takes the stand that anything that violates your incarnation’s physical body and degrades her existence can most certainly be identified as a security threat that requires attention and correction.
(Even though the Weinermobile fits these parameters, please note that this Guide is referring as well to oppression that eclipses the visual and conceptual blight of mobile processed meats.)
Your human incarnation is limited in her ability to completely secure her existence, especially considering the constant threat of attacks on a microscopic, biological, chemical, mental, cosmic and even virtual level, but giving her a clear and compassionate assessment of her security level is an essential component of maintaining her well-being.
Sleep is a weird state for the human incarnation.
REST
Having satisfied basic care up to this point, most human beings are ready for action. Paradoxically, action may be the last thing they need. With the possibilities of carbon-based activity before your human incarnation, she may ignore the most essential source of her lifelong energy: rest.
Human resilience enables one to function and perform commands even if they are desperately tired. In challenging situations, like tigers, stinky garbage, or fleeing the Weinermobile, your human can tap into reserves that give her the ability to get herself to safety. This is why it is helpful to address security before rest.
Once secure, though, your human incarnation may be reluctant to surrender the energy of emergency. She may avoid sleeping, reclining, even sitting down, simply because rest can feel like dying.
Sleep is a weird state for the human incarnation. She must deny herself the use of her four limbs, relinquish even her sight, and enter a state of suspended animation, unaware of her physical surroundings. Wired as they are for movement and command, it’s no wonder humans try to deny this basic need. It only reminds them of their limited existence.
This is why it is so very important that you provide your human incarnation with consistent, adequate periods of rest and deep sleep, even if she says she isn’t tired. What humans cannot see is that deep inside their organism, rest gives their operational systems time to both repair and build new networks of information and processing that will enable them to perform actions and commands in ever-better ways.
Regarding Dreams:
Perhaps the most vexing aspect of sleep for the human incarnation is dreams. Not only must she enter the dream world without her carbon-based body, she must confront bizarre, illogical, and frequently frightening distortions of her own life.
There is simply no way around this.
Your human will function best if you give her some positive, assuring explanation for these surreal mind movies. Only you can determine what will work best for her, but dreams could be anything from neural processing to astral visits to the spirit world.
Or more.
Have fun with it.
The sharing of existential space with another being is an essential element of your human’s care.
COMPANIONSHIP
The human incarnation provides you with a solid, yet squishy, carbon boundary. This makes it necessary to connect with other incarnations physically, as it is exceptionally difficult to simply drift into any other organism’s consciousness. In fact, companionship, the sharing of existential space with another being, is an essential element of your human’s care.
It may be helpful to remember that your human incarnation gained entry into this existence through the body of another human incarnation. Connection with another being gave her life and was necessary to sustain her life when very young. Companionship defines her experience of existence.
Depending of her developmental stage and unique characteristics, though, that companionship may take many different forms. Your human incarnation may crave close proximity with a single other human, or she may eagerly seek out connections with many, many different humans, or she may find companionship with animals, plants, even the Weinermobile. To point out a pattern, companionship can have many different definitions.
This Guide encourages you to allow your human incarnation a wide interpretation of companionship, depending on her current life situation and what allows her to thrive, stay engaged and live as long a life as she possibly can in this chaotic, carbon-based, quantum-powered universal plane.
Whatever definition suits her, provide your human with the experience of companionship every day.
It is impossible for a human to know the most effective and successful way to accomplish anything without first knowing the system in which she operates.
PLAY
At this point in your human incarnation’s care, she can effectively fulfill most any behavior, command or action that falls within her unique existential skill set. This is when it may be most tempting to set her to the tasks that drove you to occupy human existence in the first place. Indeed, it may be necessary for her to go straight to work. Keep in mind, though, that the importance of playing cannot be overlooked.
This carbon-based, quantum-powered universal plane, despite being chaotic, operates through systems. Any action or command given to your human must comply with concurrent systems of gravitational orbits, tectonic shifts, hormonal cycles, and even more terrifying forces like the touring schedule of the Wienermobile.
It is impossible for a human to know the most effective and successful way to accomplish anything without first knowing the system in which she operates. This is what play does for your human. Through playing, she gets the chance to explore and experiment with many different systems, understand similarities between systems, and learn more about her unique skills and talents. Those experiences are critical for her to be able to actually get anything really useful done.
Once again, the definition of play is something you must discover for your unique human incarnation. There are humans who find play in pushing tiny stones around a square board, others delight in pushing other humans around a square mat, and still others pursue games that having nothing whatsoever to do with pushing. (Some people even pursue play by writing Guides to Your Human Condition.)
Your human incarnation can use all the kindness she can get.
We expect an awful lot of our human condition, considering it is such water-soaked, squishy, and needy organism. It’s a testament to the stout human nature that they will fulfill behavior, command, and action even when their most basic care and feeding is woefully denied.
Too often, we fail to realize what our human condition might accomplish, the marvelous secret it might unlock about this plane of existence, if treated with care and attention. However, it’s never too late to make life better.
No matter how busted-up or run-down your human condition may be when you find yourself in the position to consistently supply these basic needs, you’ll be amazed how she rises to the very fullest potential of the life remaining to her carbon-based body. What’s more, you may find that your human’s unique skills and characteristics will shine in new ways, enabling her to spread her life energy beyond the limits of her skin boundary, even improving the lives of other humans.
Life does not come with an extended warranty – or a money-back guarantee – so when it comes to existence on this universal plane, your human incarnation can use all the kindness she can get.
edited 10.20.22
originally written 4.26.15
