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Master Monk

A father's restrained control is beneficial

You must remain the master of your child, yet the fertile monk wants to empower his genetic line, ready it for the competition of other lines. You want your line to be prepared to meet life's challenges with confidence, with faith in what one knows of their own abilities to meet the challenges which will be faced.

The monk values sentience above all. For sentient beings, the foundation of all true power is knowledge. Myths and convenient lies can seem useful for those who seek only simple pleasures, but one whose power rests on such devices is in the position of sitting on a bubble, which can suddenly burst from the tiny prick of brutal truth.

Parents (like governments) can easily fall in the practice of relying on myth bubbles to control their child's (or subjects') behavior, or to help achieve certain goals. These lies are crutches, and while they are useful for the handicapped, we of course must cast off crutches whenever possible. Otherwise we come to rely on them, and so remain crippled.

The mysteries of creation, existence, life's meaning and morality have many facets which one by one are revealed to those who look for answers in a variety of channels. The challenge is to bring together our string of discoveries into a coherent model of reality. Building our model from a single point of view results in a stable but unidimensional model.

As a father, the fertile monk may need to broaden the range of channels of information available to his child, or to temporarily silence all inputs when the child needs time to quietly process some new lesson. Data overload is a real hazard in a multichannelled environment, just as boredom and lack of stimulation are problems in an environment of prolonged isolation.