Beyond Order: Rule 2 - Imagine Who You Could Be and Then Aim Single-Mindedly at That | EP 264

Rule two is imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that. This paragraph is taken from a chapter sub-section entitled "Who Are You and Who Could You Be." An unforgettable story captures the essence of humanity and distills, communicates, and clarifies it, bringing what we are and what we should be into focus. It speaks to us, motivating the attention that inspires imitation. We learn to see and act in the manner of the heroes of the stories that captivate us. These stories call to capacities that lie deep within our nature but might still never develop without that call.

We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form. That is part of being a creature that is part nature and part culture. An unforgettable story advances our capacity to understand our behavior beyond habit and expectation toward an imaginative and then verbalized understanding. Such a story presents us in the most compelling manner with the ultimate adventure: the divine romance and the eternal battle between good and evil. All this helps us clarify our understanding of moral and immoral attitudes, personal and social.

This can be seen everywhere and always question: Who are you, or at least who could you be? Answer: Part of the eternal force that constantly confronts the terrible unknown voluntarily. Part of the eternal force that transcends naivety and becomes dangerous enough in a controlled manner to understand evil and bearded in its lair. Part of the eternal force that faces chaos and turns it into productive order or takes order that has become too restrictive, reduces it to chaos, and renders it productive once again.

All of this, being very difficult to understand consciously but vital to our survival, is transmitted in the form of the stories that we cannot help but attend to. It is in this manner that we come to apprehend what is of value, what we should aim at, and what we could be. So, chapter 2 is imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.

And for me, after being on tour with you, I think that's something that got into me through osmosis. I would be on stage, and even though everyone was there for you, I thought, "Hey, I'm part of this somehow. This thing, somehow, I became part of this." Then once I realized that when the PA announcer said my name, those people knew me. I thought that I'm me. I'm the guy they're talking about; like I'm doing something. And then it just helped my aim. It helped my aim. I wonder how many people just don't know how to aim because they have no experience like that; something like that.

Well, that's part of what tradition is supposed to teach you by presenting you with examples of great people of the past. The lesson is not supposed to be exactly bow down and worship these people; be like them. Be like them, and you could be. I mean, that's really the goal of the humanities. If that's not the goal, then students will study the humanities. As soon as that ceases to be the goal, then there's nothing of value there. I mean, great literature tells you the great story of good and evil always. It's good and evil against the background of chaos and order; always.

The evil characters are there to be bad examples, and the good characters are there to be good examples. Or you see the interplay of those forces within a single person, and it's a reminder of who you could be. You can find out who you should be. It's actually, this is something quite mysterious, I believe. And part of the proof, let's say, that we exist in a world of value, your conscience tells you who you should be. Now that doesn't mean that necessarily it's infallible, but people wrestle with their conscience. You know, there isn't anyone. I've never met anyone who is, you know, narcissists accepted, let's say. People are generally tormented by their conscience.

The reason for that is that they are deviating from the path that is their destiny. I mean, if you don't think that, well then what do you think? What do you think that conscience is? I mean I've asked my classes repeatedly: Do you have a little voice in your head that tells you when you've done something wrong or you're about to? Or a feeling? And they all, they all immediately agree with that. No one finds that a foreign concept.

So, if you don't know who you are, your conscience will remind you. No, sorry, if you don't know who you could be, your conscience will remind you when you deviate. Then you can start to attend to that. Think, "Well, look, I'm actually ashamed when I do this; I should stop unless I want to be ashamed all the time. It looks like I should stop." And then maybe you stop doing that, and then your conscience objects to something else, and maybe you stop doing that. As that happens, you start to develop a vision of who you could be.

The chapter indicates it, it looks at symbolic representations; it's an examination of a certain symbolic representation of the ideal. It's my attempt to assess tradition for what it can tell us about what the ideal human being might be like. The ideal human being is the person who forthrightly upholds the traditions of the culture and forges away into the unknown. We went through that and pulls new information in and rebuilds himself and the world, and that's who you could be.

Now, the difficulty comes in figuring out how to do that within the confines of your own life. So, in some sense, that's how to bring the divine to earth. There's this divine pattern, but it's general. See, this is one of the mysterious things about Christianity that's so remarkable about it: there’s the Christ that's eternal, the word of God, say, so that's a representation of something absolutely transcendent. But it’s married to the particulars of one particular time and space.

Obviously, critics of Christianity regard that as one of its major flaws. You know, there's this idea of God who is a carpenter in some out-of-the-way place, in some out-of-the-way time. But you’re someone in an out-of-the-way place at a particular time and place. For you, what that means is that for you to make contact with the highest of values, you have to bring that down to your particulars and figure out how you do that.

It’s going to be a way that no one else does it because you’re the only one that’s you. But you can aim at something; aim at something. The point of the chapter is that you aim at something, and that will shape you as you move towards it. Your aim will change. You’ll move. But that doesn’t matter. It gets you going, and you’ll be molded across time more and more into the person you could be.

Can you talk about that just from a personal perspective as someone that I've seen do it? I mean, that's what I saw you do every night. You took your intellectual curiosity to the end of where it would go. Sometimes you would get off stage and say to me, “Oh, you know, I took that as far as I could tonight.” Then the next night, you would go a little bit further with it or a little bit further. I knew there were moments because we did so many shows; I knew when you were a little past where you would want to go, and then I could see you come back.

But can you talk about what that was like for you in terms of your life, how you felt, how time felt, how the relationship with the audience felt when you’re doing it right? Because I feel like people don't know that when you’re doing it right, what does it feel like? Well, to begin with, and this happened when I was in graduate school. I had a lot of bad habits. I smoked like a pack of cigarettes a day, and I drank a lot. I came from this little town in Northern Alberta, and like many little towns, especially in Northern Canada, that alcohol overuse is de rigueur. You know, it’s—

So, I noticed that when I was in my early twenties that the only time I really regretted what I had done was when I was drinking. Now, it was also interfering with me writing because I couldn't concentrate well enough if I was hungover, but I also couldn’t really concentrate. I couldn’t tolerate the emotional strain of what I was writing about when I was hungover. It was too—I couldn't handle being on the edge because I destabilized my nervous system.

In any case, I stopped drinking, and the reason for that was, well, I decided I didn’t want to be ashamed of what I was doing anymore. It seemed—I thought, "Well, maybe I could not do things that were shameful and then see what my life was like." So that was sort of on the negative end, the constraint end. I think people get on the more positive end.

People get deeply involved in what they’re doing if they're in the right place at the right time, so that you—I would say you can tell this is the idea of heaven on earth to some degree. When time stops, when you’re not aware of the duration of time, when you're so engaged with what you're doing that you’re not aware of the duration of time, then you've got the forces of chaos, balance, and order balanced properly. It’s—you're not stultified and bored.

That's an excess of order; everything's too predictable. You're not overwhelmed; you’re dealing with—it’s like you’re playing tennis at the peak of your game. That’s partly what people experience when they’re great athletes, when they play in the zone. Yeah, and they’re always stretching themselves to their limit. You can tell that if you watch a gymnast, for example, who has a brilliant performance: they’ve stretched themselves beyond their domain of competence during the performance, and that's what makes everybody leap to their feet.

That’s the incarnation given embodiment right there in front of you for some moments, and everyone cheers that on. Do you think it’s weird how it becomes a fleeting moment in a way? Like, I know what you’re saying is true when I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and I’m on my game and my thoughts are right and straight. Time just moves, and then I go, “Whoa, a month passed. A month passed, and I was good that whole time, and I did write that whole time, and I was happier, and my relationship with David or whoever else is better in that time."

But that it becomes fleeting in that suddenly you could have a great month, and then suddenly something happens. Chaos returns; like, we almost forget that moment—you can't hold it. Well, it requires a lot of—it requires even to some degree some good fortune to maintain. I certainly haven’t been able to do that while I was ill, you know? And time—

One of the consequences of my illness, whatever it was or is, was time dilation. Like, days lasted weeks. It seemed like minutes lasted hours, and I mean that literally. That was terrible, the weight of time. It's the weight of brute mortality; it's the weight of self-consciousness, and you escape that immersed properly. So, and that second chapter is a pretty practical chapter. It’s like, well, if you’re not who you want to be, then think about how you could be better. Take a chance, aim at that, work at it, and see what happens.

So that’s— and that's a disciplinary routine, I would say. Yeah, and it takes you out of your current order. One of the sections of your book that I really loved was chapter two, where you get into alchemy, and you get into a discussion of... it was one of the richest chapters for me. Helen Lewis said I sounded like a stoned undergraduate. Well, I must like Stonehenge because she wrote this review in The Atlantic. And I was talking about—

Sorry, I’ll let you get back to this right away, but sure! She was talking about—I commented on this, the snitch in Harry Potter because I found that it's a very old symbol—that's a really old symbol. It shocked me to death that she used it. I couldn’t believe she used it because it’s really obscure, this symbol. So I talk about it in the book, and you know which—that’s what she dismissed as the ravings of a, you know, stoned undergraduate.

But then I thought, well, look, Rowling is richer than the queen; she came from nothing. She produced this empire; it’s an absolute empire of books—600 pages long that she could read to children in stadiums. A whole string of movies that dominated the entertainment landscape for like six years. It was a cultural— a global cultural phenomenon; it’s like, well, don't you think that's worth looking into? That’s what makes you a stoned undergraduate.

Or are you so clueless that you can’t see that when something like that happens there’s a mystery? It's why in the world would the story of a magical orphan become a multi-billion dollar, decades-long global cultural phenomenon? Well, if you're interested in culture, if you're interested in anything besides narrow politics, you'd think that would be— you think that would be worthy of investigation.

It’s not easy to see these things sometimes for the mystery that they are, no doubt. And I think it’s what you say about stories. Stories can be true stories. The story of Harry Potter and the snitch is a true story because it’s in resonance with a real idea—something that's in the collective consciousness, something that's in our primordial psyche in a way. And so when we hear it—otherwise, we're trying to be collective. Exactly.

We wouldn’t all enjoy it. And look, we can go to those movies—we suspend disbelief willingly, instantly—and we get immersed in the story. That's magic, that’s magic. What’s going on? It's worthy of investigation.

So anyways, I sort of sidetracked that. Well, that’s actually exactly where I was going, so I’m gonna read, I’m gonna read this section. And you’re talking about the snitch as the alchemical symbol of the round chaos, and you say this: "The seeker is the person who is playing the game that everyone else is playing and who is a disciplined expert at that game, but who is also playing an additional higher order game—the pursuit of what is of primary significance."

"The snitch, like the round chaos, can therefore be considered the container of that primary significance." For those of us who don’t know the Harry Potter movie, there’s a game called Quidditch, and it’s basically like lacrosse. You try to get the ball in the goal, but there’s a seeker who actually is seeking this magical golden orb, which has alchemical kind of roots and the round chaos.

If they seek that, the game is over, and it’s been given that, you know, that additional, as you say, primary significance. And this concept was really, really interesting to me to have it unpacked because I didn’t—I watched some Harry Potter and I saw it and I saw the game. Of course, it didn’t occur to me; it was just like, oh, this is the rules to this game.

But then I realized in my own life there’s the game that I’m playing; oh, I’m running on it and I’m doing these things. But what is my snitch? What is my round chaos? What is that ultimate higher order potential that I’m seeking? And so my question was, have you thought about for you—because we can obviously see the game being played as far as the normal Quidditch game—but for you personally, what is your snitch? What is your round chaos that you're seeking, the game within the game that you're playing at large?

Well, what’s always attracted my attention predominantly? So let me unpack some things here. Some of the interpretation of that symbol—a lot of it came from my reading of Jung because he's the only person that I’ve ever read who seems to know about such things, even knows that they exist. Jung believed that your interest, which is a relatively involuntary phenomenon, right? You get interested in things, but you can’t make yourself interested in something.

The interest grabs you and grasp your attention, and so Jung thought of that as a deeply seated biological mechanism, which it obviously is; it’s a neurological mechanism of some sort that governs it, possesses it; it has the capacity to possess your voluntary attention just like hunger does. When you get hungry, you’re typing away, writing a book or something, and you get hungry; hunger starts to grab your attention. Well, look, you’re interested in some things and you’re not interested in others.

Well, why? Well, some of that has to do with your choice, but not that much. A lot of it has to do with who you are in the deepest sense. Jung believed that you were likely to become interested in things that furthered your development, furthered your psychological development, made you more and more competent.

So, for example, you might really come to admire someone, and so what they do grabs your interest, and that happens with children quite a lot. They get interested in kids who are slightly ahead of them in the developmental curve, and then they mimic them. Your interest is something that grabs you to move you forward on the developmental curve, and so it’s the manifestation of your potential higher self in the present. Jung described that as the self. The self, in his view, was the totality of your being; it’s not definable; it includes you in the future, and in some sense, you are something that's coming to be in the future.

Hopefully, to be more than you are—although you know, not always because we also degenerate. In any case, your interest pulls you along on a particular developmental pathway. I’ve always been gripped in some sense by things that are very, very dark and most of what's by pathology of one sort or another, which is of course partly why I'm a clinical psychologist, you know? But I wanted to remediate it; I wanted to help.

But it was the compulsion to investigate the darkest of darkness, and whether that’s been good for me or not; well, that’s a different question. I suppose it has been extremely good in some ways, and it’s been complicated. We could certainly say that, but then more—I wanted to figure out what would protect us from that darkness.

And I guess it was because I was so shocked, existentially shocked, when I first encountered writings that pertain to the Holocaust and to other genocidal acts of that sort. I was always interested in that, for some reason, from a psychological perspective. It’s like, "What compelled people to do that and how can we not do it again?"

So anyways, anything that focused on that grabbed my interest; that’s why I read Jung extensively and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Those are the people I ran across—others as well—who seemed to have some answers as far as I could tell. So that’s what it’s been for me.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know why. It might be my proclivity toward depression; I really have no—I’m a creative person by temperament, and I also have this depressive illness. Maybe it’s the consequence of those two; I don’t know. Who knows, right? Who knows what pulls you forward? The ancients would typically externalize these forces. You know, when they couldn’t understand, and you talk about that with the god Mercury.

The god Mercury was the one that drew you to these different things, but yes, he's got wings, and he splinters, and it’s—that’s what your attention does. It pulls—it’s like in that Pixar movie, every time there’s a squirrel. The dog—that’s their snitch; that’s the rip of instinctual forces. It’s very comical, but in human beings, I think it’s unbelievably sophisticated because I do believe that we’re compelled to follow a line that leads to our further development.

I do think that that involves mimicry of the hero. For example, the hero, psychologically speaking, is that figure which represents a potential stage of development for you, and you’ll find your hero because you’ll admire something or someone. Why is that? Well, something's—well, I gave you the best explanation for that that I can. That’s the future you, in some sense manifesting itself in the present saying, “Here’s where you could go.”

Yeah, and that’s the instinct for growth. Another aspect that they externalized was the idea of the daemon, which is almost like the mercurial impulse that’s taken and stretched out for a long time. It’s something that’s continually drawing you toward some potential realization of what you’re capable of. They put that again in this kind of demi-god landscape, but of course, that was just their way of understanding things, although it also makes a tremendous amount of sense.

Sure, to make rage a god like Mars. Well, yes. Why? Well, it’s immortal. I mean, rage will be here long after you’re gone. You’re definitely its pawn at times. You know, it’s not obvious who's in control when you’re enraged. Yeah, in fact, at some levels of rage, that can even be a legal defense because we recognize that you can be out of your head. Your normal personality isn't in control, and really powerful motivational forces have that transcendent reality.

It’s not a—and rage is older than human beings. It’s really, really old, and it can have you in its grip. Sexual impulses, the same way; hunger. All of these things are unbelievably powerful forces, and they don’t just operate on the primordial level, as far as I'm concerned. There are sophisticated gods of motivation and we are possessed by them.

When we do such things as go to movies, we don't notice: what the hell are we doing watching this movie? Why are we entertained by it? Why does it grip our interest? We don't know; we don’t even question it. It’s like, well, it’s entertaining; it’s fun; it’s interesting. If it’s interesting, you don’t have to justify it, and then someone can tap you on the head and say, “Look what you’re doing.” And you think, “Oh yeah, that’s kind of odd that I’m doing that."

What the hell am I doing standing in line for three days to see Star Wars when I’m an atheistic engineer? What’s going on here? Oh, look at that; it’s a—it’s a religious impulse. Yeah. And I don’t have a religion, and so this is filling the gap, and that’s why I go to Star Wars conventions, and I’m possessed by something that I haven’t pursued.

One of the things that you wrote was really powerful for me to read because to me I think it described my snitch, my round chaos. That thing that I’m seeking underneath the games that I’m playing. I’m going to read this little snippet here: “Who could you be? You could be all that a man or woman might be. You could be the newest avatar in your own unique manner of the great ancestral heroes of the past. What is the upper limit to that? We do not know. Our religious structures hint at it.”

“How would someone who determined to take full responsibility for the tragedy and malevolence of the world manifest itself? The ultimate question of man is not who we are but who we could be.” That’s it for me! I mean, for me, I read that I was like, “Yep, that’s it. There’s the snitch with its wings and its golden, you know, Mercurius allure that I’ve— I’m really chasing underneath all of this.”

And I enjoy all these other things, but who could you be? Exactly. You see that in children. I watched little children play, and what they’re doing, you know, they’re attempting to grow forward. But they toy with identities. My little granddaughter—I wrote about her in this book too. It’s so funny watching her. She had Pocahontas, the Disney movie, and she had a Pocahontas doll, and she watched that movie a number of times.

And then for—well, it’s been a year now. She’s only three and a half. For a whole year, she has two names: Scarlett and Ellie. One’s her middle name, but she’s called one or the other. It seems to be perfectly comfortable with both. If you ask her if she’s Ellie, she’ll say yes. And if you ask her if she’s Scarlett, she’ll say yes. But if you ask her if she’s Pocahontas, she’ll also say yes. And then if you ask her if she is Scarlett, Ellie, or Pocahontas, she’ll say she’s Pocahontas.

She’s been insisting on that for a whole year. And so she’s playing out this role. I don’t know how much of her imagination is devoted to it, but enough for this trip. Like, that’s— how old are you? 40? 40, just turned 40.

Yeah, okay. So, you know, imagine that you had a fictional identity for 15 years. That’s approximately the same relative length of time, and the kids—they weave up a fantasy world, and then they play out an identity in that, and then they weave out another fantasy world and they play out an identity with that. They shape that identity by their interactions with other children and adults, and hopefully, they find an identity that suits them that other people also accept because your identity has to be something that other people accept or it isn’t going to work for you.

That’s all part of this exploration of who they could be. You know, the play is in fact the exercising of that realm of possibilities. And so a good father, a good parent for that matter, but I think this, I think at least is an archetypically paternal role, puts a border of security around the child. You know, the mother might be inside that border of security when she has young children, and play can take place there.

The play is the investigation of multiple identities with the hope of finding one that is functional, that is also socially desired because those things can’t be dissociated. One of the reasons I think that the identity politics has bothered me so much—speaking of snitches: you know, it’s bothered me. It’s like, “This bothers me.” And I’ve only recently realized that some of it had to do with what I saw as limitations on free speech, which is I have to say the words that, you know, some authority or some population demands that I say, which I don’t like.

But there’s something else too, which is that it’s based on a very misleading theory of identity. Your identity is not just who—how you feel about yourself at this moment, and you can’t impose that on other people because they don’t know how to deal with that. Like, even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know the rules of the game. You have to negotiate your identity with other people.

And so then you have to think of identity as something that’s negotiated with other people. So if you have an implicit theory of identity like the one that seems to be increasingly dominating the cultural landscape, which is that identity is something that’s only subjectively determined and can also change from moment to moment, then you’re misleading people as they develop because they come up with a very unsophisticated notion of what identity is, and that's not good because that’s core.

And like, part of your identity is your value to other people. That’s a huge part of it, and that's not subjective; other people make that decision. Yeah, so. And you talk about that. And I think it’s chapter three where you say that’s one of the ways we keep our sanity is talking to other people and the interaction with our community.

All of these other things that isolate us more and more to a single subjective perspective are going to lead to a certain madness. It is definitely—well, exactly. I tried to impress upon some of the trans activists that were after me when I first made some public statements. I said, "Look, I don’t think—I didn’t say it this eloquently unfortunately, but I what I would have liked to have said now at least was it isn’t obvious to me at all that your theory of identity is going to serve the function that you assume it is.

It’s not psychologically sophisticated enough; it’s not sociologically sophisticated enough. You can’t insist that other people play a game that they don’t know how to play, especially when you also don’t know how to play it except to say that it exists. So, and this sanity issue is, you know, a lot of us is externalized because we’re such social creatures.

Everyone has weaknesses; you know you’re gonna de-genarate along your weakest axis. If you’re fortunate, you won’t be able to control yourself because some of your weakness will be precisely that inability to control yourself on that axis. Like, maybe you have a biological predisposition to alcoholism, and you know, you have three shots of vodka in 20 minutes and you’re like on top of the world.

There are people like that; they often have extensive family histories of alcoholism. It’s a biological phenomenon. You can tell if you're like that if it’s really difficult for you to stop drinking once you start. It’s a real warning sign: it means alcohol is a great drug for you, subjectively speaking. But you know, hopefully, when you drink too much, other people are going to start telling you, “It’s like, no, you’re—and that’s actually how you start diagnosing alcohol abuse.”

"Are you getting in trouble with the law? Is it interfering with your intimate relationships? Is it interfering with your ability to hold a job?" It means that the addictive substance is starting to dominate your life in a manner that's counterproductive, and other people are there to ensure that you stay balanced enough so that you don’t deteriorate entirely.

You’re lucky if you have that. And the part of the point I make in that chapter, and I would say in both books and in Maps of Meaning as well, is that the primary obligation of a parent is to serve as a proxy for the social and the natural world. But let’s say the social world. Why? Well, because you want to train your child to be not only acceptable socially but highly desirable socially.

And the reason for that is, by the time they’re about three, three to four is the transition period, they’re going to be spending more time being socialized by their peers than by you, and that will increasingly be the case as they develop. If you haven’t made them—if you haven’t encouraged them through judicious attention to be socially desirable, they’re going to be rejected by their peers, and then they fall farther and farther behind on the developmental trajectory.

Jordan, you asked the Times person in the full-length article or a full-length recording, which I listened to. You said, “Hey, don’t focus on my illness in this—focus on why people resonate with my message,” which she of course did not. But that leaves me an opening; I’m gonna take it right now. It’s so interesting to see that—it’s so interesting because, you know, the only time that ever gets addressed is by the mainstream media—Jesus, you know, horrible cliché, but it’s usually sort of brushed off, and it’s usually, “Well, he seems to be attractive toward young men who are troubled.”

Well, first of all, that’s not so bad, is it? I mean, hypothetically, the most ardent feminist is primarily concerned with helping the troubled young man not be so troubled. But it’s brushed off in a cynical sort of way, and the cynicism is also disbelief that that could possibly be a serious enterprise.

Well, I think it’s a serious enterprise. Why do you think they resonate with you? I think it’s because—who knows? The final answer to anything, you know, but I took what I learned about what happened in the Second World War seriously. It’s like, wow, we can be really bad. We should do something about that. Like, that was unacceptable! Well, was it or not? Well, how unacceptable was it? Change your life unacceptable! Better be if you want it not to happen again!

And it’s not like the next time it happens we’ll make the previous time look like a picnic. We’re way more powerful than we were. You know, when we’re getting to the point—something Jung talked about, especially near the end of his life—we’re getting so powerful that each individual is now a force of almost unimaginable destructive power if they so choose to be.

And that just going to— that power is going to continue to increase, and what that means is that the degree to which each of us has our act together is going to be something upon which the world increasingly depends for its maintenance. I’m going to add something to why I think people resonate with you so much: in the book, you encourage people to think from an evolutionary perspective, which I think is incredibly important.

And I think what you offer people is one: you make— we all struggle with our own internal demons, and you allow people to see how that’s a heroic endeavor—maybe the ultimate heroic endeavor—to conquer that inside yourself. And then going back to the beginning, identity being a function of behavior. By helping people begin to identify as the hero, engaging in relatively straightforward behaviors like cleaning your room or liking the new book, making an area beautiful, refusing to give into resentment. Aim at one thing, which was one of my favorite parts of the book, and see how extraordinarily good you can get at that.

Like, I think that’s a good thing: you gotta aim at something. It’s like otherwise your life is meaningless! Well, what should you aim at? Well, I don’t know! Well, pick something; aim at it! As you move toward it, you'll get wiser. Then maybe your aim will change; that’s okay! But at least it’ll change in an informed way.

It’s like discipline yourself in one dimension, see what happens. Well, that’s exciting, and I think that’s something that’s open for everyone. You can do that! I shouldn’t say that because I don’t believe that. I think you can find yourself in a situation that’s so dire that you don’t—there’s no escape from it. But that doesn’t matter because this still—this is the hero myth! It might not be the best we have; it might not always work, but it’s still the best we have.

And the fact that it might not work doesn’t mean we should throw it away; it’s still the best we have! I mean, everyone dies! And so we fail in some sense. The fact that a symphony ends doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth listening to.

Yeah, when you put that in an evolutionary context and you acknowledge that people are compelled by biology to strive, they’re compelled by biology to progress, they’re compelled by biology to be courageous—that they will be rewarded for being courageous neurochemically. They will be punished for being a coward neurochemically, and yeah, well think about, you know, the thing about that biological explanation too is that we’ve been social for a very long time.

We’ve been social for so long that our social nature is programmed into our biology, and so you’ll be punished if you’re not useful to other people—yes, by your conscience, because you’re a social creature. And the question is, well, how could you be most—here’s another question that starts to verge on the religious: what does the most useful person look like?

Well, who is everyone hoping they’ll meet? And that’s a genuine question! I’m like, and that’s the ideal. The ideal is the person everyone’s hoping they’ll meet. That’s Christ in the Christian culture, psychologically speaking, independent of any religious claims.

So that’s—the essential idea of the archetype from the Jungian perspective. We have the image of an ideal, and because it is the ultimate ideal, it has a religious element. It’s compelling; it’s a judge. Why is it a judge? Well, if you fall short of the ideal, your conscience punishes you. So it’s a judge, and it’s merciful.

Well, why? Because if you act out the ideal, then your life improves. You know what I said? Well, the question: what is the relationship between these images of the psyche and reality? I don’t know the answer to that.

I don’t know where the archetype shades into reality. It depends, to some degree, on how you define reality. You know, I’ve been—people don’t like that statement, but when you’re asking questions that are deep enough, you start to have to ask, “What do you mean by true?” For example, what do you mean by real?

Because the questions you ask get so deep that they’re of the same kind as the question, “What is real?” or “What is true?” You know, think of it this way: reality is what we adapt to by definition. That’s reasonable! If you’re a Darwinian, you have to say that’s actually as far as you can go—reality is that which shapes us.

You can’t get a better handle on reality than that. Well, when you make a picture of objective reality, it's not the same as that; it’s a different picture, and it’s not obvious which one should play trump now. The hero myth, as far as I can tell, is an evolutionary artifact, and that means that for human beings, that the hero image is the path of optimal adaptation.

Does that reflect reality? Well, it does insofar as reality has selected that. Does that mean that reality is a story? Because the hero myth is a story, or at least that’s one of the things it is. Does it mean that reality has a narrative aspect? Well, it does insofar as we act things out. Does that mean that reality is ultimately a story? Well, I don’t know, but the answer isn’t obviously no.

In rule two, you say to imagine who we could be and then to aim single-mindedly at that, but reality gets in the way of you reaching that potential, and it can hurt. How can people cope with the pain of unreached potential? Well, part of—oh, that’s a really good question! Look, every ideal is a judge, right? So you posit an ideal and instantly you’re in an inferior position in relationship to that ideal, and that can be crushing!

Okay, so what do you do about that? Well, one answer is no ideals. Well, that’s not a good answer because then you don’t have anything to do, right? So—and that deprives you of a main source of pleasure, which is generated as a consequence of observed movement towards a valued goal.

So if you have a high goal and you see any movement towards it—there’s a potential; there’s a really powerful potential kick there. So you don’t want to dispense with that, but then if you set up an ideal, it can judge you very harshly. So then you have to rearrange your reward philosophy, and instead of punishing yourself as a consequence of perceived distance, you reward yourself for incremental movement forward.

And that’s not just theoretical. Look, I was stopped by three guys on the street this week, three separate occasions, and they all told me the same thing. They, you know, they said that they had read or something I wrote or listened to or watched something and that it had been helpful.

Whenever anybody says that to me, I always ask them, “Okay, exactly what was helpful and what changed?” because I want to know what's helping so that I can understand the target and hit it better. Generally, people are pleased to tell me, although sometimes it takes them a while to formulate exactly the description, but they all three of them said, “I stopped comparing myself to other people.”

So I stopped comparing what I didn’t have to what other people had. I left that off the table, and then I started to reward myself for improving over what I was yesterday. So they—and that’s profound change because it means that you actually get your reward structure transformed, and that’s a big deal because that’s your source of positive emotion and enthusiasm.

All of that. So now you can start to encourage yourself for genuine improvement. And it’s also pragmatically extremely intelligent because incremental improvement, repeated, is virtually unstoppable! That’s like the hallmark of behavioral therapy, that idea, because what a behavior therapist does is you come, and you say to me, “I’m not—things aren’t the way I want them to be.”

And then I say, “Well, how would you like them to be?” and “How are they not that?” So we lay out the problem, the territory, and then the next thing we do is lay out a trajectory, which is, “Okay, well, here’s something. You’re lonesome; you don’t have a partner.”

Okay, so what are the incremental movements can you make towards that goal that you would do that would be helpful? And so maybe you negotiate with the person because that’s what you do if you’re a reasonable therapist, and you say, “Well, look, why don’t you, uh, you decide as a consequence of the conversation, why don’t you write out a description of yourself for a dating site? Don’t post it or anything; just write it out.”

And then let’s see if you actually do that, and so then the person comes back next week, and they say, “I did that,” and not only that, I posted it.” And you say, “Great! What’s the next step?” Or they say, “Geez, you know, I just kept avoiding that.” And then you say, “Okay, well, we need to break that down.” You avoided it. Well, could you write one sentence about who you are right now while you’re sitting here?

And sometimes they can do that right away or sometimes they can't. And then you make a micro-analysis of that, and what you do is you reduce the magnitude of the move forward until you hit the point where you actually will do it. And that’s like the secret to good negotiation as well. If you’re negotiating with your wife, maybe you want one of her behaviors to change, and then obviously she has to be on board with that.

Hypothetically, that’s going to be a reciprocal process. But what you want to do is find a small improvement that is measurable, that is implementable, that will be implemented that you can then reward. And that’s—that’s how you can have your ideal! You can have whatever ideal you want as long as you’re willing to reduce your movement forward to achievable increments.

But that's okay because they compound! So, and I really learned this as a therapist; it was one of the things that was so fun about being a therapist is you can take someone through this process and start them on just the tiniest goal. You know, and it just seems trivial, but they'll do it, and then they start moving fast—faster and faster after that point once the direction has been established.

And people make incredible improvement over, you know, not unreasonable spans of time— a few months, maybe a few years, but which is not nothing. But it’s not decades, you know? I saw that time and time again.

So aim high but reward yourself for small incremental improvements, especially ones that repeat every day. Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that. That was a tricky one to have you do because the chapter is an analysis of an old alchemical drawing, and so you had to be constrained in the recreation of that because it had to duplicate all the elements of the original drawing or my chapter wouldn't have made any sense.

So which made it easier for me? Being constrained is easy; I know exactly what’s supposed to be there. Yes, well, people with an artistic temperament or maybe people with a wannabe artistic temperament often rail against constraint. But it’s—you want a lot of constraint, generally speaking; otherwise, you drown in choice, and that’s a big problem.

So this chapter describes this picture as a story that proceeds from the bottom up. You can take it in at a glance, but it also proceeds from the bottom up, and it’s the emergence of personality—well-developed personality—from nothing, in some sense, or from potential.

That’s another way of thinking about it, and it’s an unbelievably sophisticated image, which is why it takes me a chapter to unwrap some of it. So, what did you—what was the experience for you of working on this image?

I figured I was looking for one of the paintings to make inverted as opposed to black figures on a white background, which is usually the case. I’ve done it inverted, and I loved it. I loved how it’s black as opposed to every original I saw on the internet—that makes it very magical—the dragon there.

So the way the picture works, just as a hint, is that, well, the bottom sphere in some sense represents that which attracts your interest. And then that can transform itself into that which you’re afraid of. So you might have an ambition, for example, to pursue something you’re interested in, but then that turns into a dragon because you’re afraid of pursuing it.

But if you do confront it, then that turns into you. That helps you develop your personality. That’s that image in a thumbnail. It’s much more to it than that, of course. I love it.