Alternitives to the Heroes Journey

 The idea of the heroes journey and it's relation to how we see ourselves, and stories we tell is a stroke of brilliance.

What we see is not real. There is a real world we are looking at, but at a physical level it can be argued that we cannot see the whole of the physical world. A dog has less color receptors than me, and I have less color receptors than a deep sea fangly fish. I am slightly color blind, which means shades of green and red look grey and white. Some people experience protective synesthesia, where they see color when a sense is stimulated. People like taking psychedelics because it changes the things they see and changes the way that they perceive things. Many forms of damaging the senses exist, and damages to the way that these senses interact with the brain exist in many ways. When it comes to the question of "what is real" the first question we need to ask is "how does my perception change what I think is real".

Perception is the only thing we have to figure out the world around us. We are faced with the cruelty of a chaotic world that makes no sense because nature doesn't work with a plan in mind. Trees have a biological reason for growing, we have no evidence that at the meeting of trees they decided it was their duty to grow plenty so there are homes for birds, air for life, and shade. Trees give these things but there was no plan for things. People give meaning to events that are meaningless. And we create this meaning from stories we tell.

Here is the part that stumps me, because I was introduced to European thinkers that had thoughts on dreams and the dream world, but I can't find the references yet. So for now, lets talk about stories. I find Dissociative identity disorder fascinating because it's not something I found familiar. I find connections between ADHD, bipolar, autism, and OCD, and it seems that this might because of where they are thought to exist in the brain. There is something in DID I find familiar, but it took me a while to pinpoint what. DID talks about littles, protectors, et al living in a system. To me, DID seems to dissociate internally, connecting trauma, thoughts and emotions to people and a voice that are in them, but when I stress I dissociate onto others. I not only see myself as the protagonist of my own story, but I have ways of describing myself, to myself. I was born and raised in the woods of Vermont, with barely any access to televised media. I am a sharp and intelligent person who is creative, can speak eloquently and know some words of other languages, I can speak on logic and mathematics and biology. I struggle with my place in the world and how to make the most of it for me. I have friends that reflect these things, and I see these things in some or all of them. When I am stressed about forces in this life, like the looming shadow of death and taxes, all I can see in my friends is myself. I cannot see them for the people who have another life with their own values, experiences and moral codes. They are me, but are themselves.

We tell stories, and not all stories are about a hero who saves the day. We tell stories about the villain, and these stories contain the things we find negative. The villain is someone who acts on the wrong impulses. The villain is Faust who becomes tempted by the devil, they are Darth Vader being guided by his fear and anger, they are that self centered bitch Briana at work who is always being a pain in my ass and is constantly acting for herself and her bitch friends. When I am stressed or anxious or frustrated, I see my negatives reflected in the people around me. There is usually no deeper meaning to these reflections, because these are reflections of human nature, or a flaw I see in myself. I see my lack of focus, organization, and communication of my pain in others because these things may exist as my coping mechanisms, and others are coping to different problems using the same tools. Or we might all be reacting to the same stimuli that exists in the real world, but our emotional perceptions and coping mechanisms are different, causing us to act differently and different is bad. Different is the antagonist. Empathy is realizing that others exist with inner pain and joy separate from our own. Goals and fears that might not be ours, turning into motivations and reasons that we cannot understand. In myself, I struggle with the idea that my motivations are not pure, and I do things for selfish gain, not for the good of all. And I tell myself a story where I am the villain. And I recognize that others don't act in a way that is moral or right, and that they stand directly in the way of my goals. So I tell stories where they are the villain.

There is the trickster's tale, a story of a clever protagonist getting one over on unsuspecting authority. One upping the boss man and proving that we, the supposed lesser, actually have the leverage and power. Loki the trickster exists as the center of some stories, but he doesn't always act for the good of the group. Can we trust the chaotic neutrals, because they sometimes do the right thing, but we cannot always agree with the reasons. We have stories of tragedy and comedy, both pointing out the sorrow and humor of the world. In stories like MASH or Catch-22, there might barely be a point or end goal to the story, the heroes and their existence are there to remind of us of the hopelessness of the world. We have stories of Justice and Retribution, stories of romance, stories of failure and happiness. We and our friends can be the protagonists of these stories, but we are not always the moral center of the story, and we struggle with the idea that we are not always motivated by good intentions. We are not always motivated in the correct way, because we are more than a character in a story. We are human, and human is a complex stew of emotion and experiences in a world that we don't understand but are trying desperately to make sense of before it eats us alive. We act for the good of ourselves, friends and community, but sometimes we act on emotion in a way that doesn't fit a structure. This structure gives us meaning. Gives us hope and love and a future to look forward to. Because otherwise there is no meaning, and we get lost in the swamps of sorrow.

These stories are not us though, these stories are told by the emotions and feelings we have. This statement is not a useful statement because not all emotions are caused by something we can control. A toxic person in my life who only exists to point out the flaws and negativity in the world can be thrown away. A flaw in my perception in the world and how this flaw causes negative emotions is a different beast. My ADHD cause me to focus on small things and makes me lose sight of a bigger picture. This woman is speaking to me, telling me what is in her heart and mind but I can feel like something is off. The medication helps me zoom out, so I'm looking at the way she speaks, and dresses, and acts. Sometimes I missed something, and it was something on a subconscious level that bothered me. Most of the time I was really just missing the other details in the rest of the big picture, and missed the truth in front of me. This thing in my head can cause me to focus too long on a problem and not eat, and hunger changes my mood. I get tired, others get cranky, and we let our emotions talk to each other, and say things that aren't always true.

I tell this to others, and I always say "take your medication". But where are the stories we tell ourselves coming from? My hunger stops me from thinking things through, and I take offense to things not directed at me. My exhaustion keeps me from speaking in full sentences, and I'm only able to speak in short bursts. They are separate from my ADHD, which wonders why my physical environment is a mess, why my brain won't stop thinking, and why my clothes smell like I haven't changed in 3 days. When my hunger speaks, I feed it, when my exhaustion speaks I rest, and when my ADHD acts up I reflect on why, then hit it with exercise or medication.

Whose voices tell you stories, and are they always heroes stories? Are you a trickster, someone else's villain, or are you caught in romance that struggles against unseen forces in the world.

What do we learn from Success?

He presents "The Hero Story" as a concept in psycho-analytics. I was only aware of it in story telling as a useful tool to create a plot, but here he is presenting it to us in psycho-analytics. We are the heroes of our story, we work to gain what we want, and gaining what we want makes us happy. When we don't get what we want, we are presented with the chaotic nature of the world and are forced to face this chaos. Psycho-analytics is a tool that help dive into the skeletons, old wounds, and the ghosts of failures past that still haunt us to this day by taking the plunge into the underworld to face these things head on. This gives us a way for dealing with failure, but looking at them as opportunity, not as something to get worked up over.

To start with, there is his model of learning which bothers me. I'm all about learning and learning strategies, and his statement "All learning comes failure" rings false with me. 

He expresses failures coming from actions, like telling a joke that fails, so does all learning comes from actions? "The stove is hot" is not a statement that needs to be acted on by touching it. I know the potential danger of hot surfaces not because of my third degree burns, but because I see how the hot surface acts with other things, and conclude that I shouldn't touch the stove. If I touch the stove, then my perceptions and assumptions of the situation were off. Learning can be done through action, but it can be done through observations.

I point because I'm wondering how do I fail through observation, but still learn? I can watch the failures of others and learn through their mistakes. He went off the ski jump and got really hurt is an observation of someone's failure, and it still forces me to confront the chaos of life. What did he think he could go off of the ski jump? Why did he fail? Would the same thing happen to me if I try that? Isn't it just as likely I can confront these things by watching others succeed? I can make a failure in observation, he succeeded because he drank the right beer. Maybe I can observe as a contrast to my own failures in life, i.e. he can succeed at that but not me because I'm pudgy and never learned how to ski. In my personal case, I can ski and I'm in good shape. Which means why not observe their success and seek to emulate how they achieved that through routines and training they did that might help me if I wished to do the ski jump.

If I decide to do that, then I can start learning through action which brings failure. I think a more accurate statement would be "Learning comes with failure" Failure will occur, but it's not the point we learn from. We learn from making the model.

Here's my model: We gather information, we test our hypothesis, we reflect on our results, and we start again at point one. We will gather information based on our assumptions. We can gather information on cultural assumptions (things we "know" in the US about race and information we get to prove or disprove these assumptions), previous experience (My tire went flat last week, because the tread was gone. My other tire went flat a few weeks before, because the tread was gone. Maybe I should change all my tires since they seem to be wearing out), and observations (this person is into me because they keep talking to me and putting extra effort into themselves when they around me. When I notice people doing that, it usually works in my favor). It's good mathematics and good science to challenge our assumptions and test them. Take an assumption, gather information from a source that doesn't agree with us, test the assumption with the new information, does it fail or succeed? We can do that by reading a book or watching a video or listening to a podcast of a person that has a different view. We need to reflect on this new information and how it fits in with what we know, and sometimes that means confronting a belief that is the core of who we are.

You are at a party, and you tell a joke the joke falls flat. Facing the chaotic nature of the world and asking why you failed is reflection. And I agree with that. You can reflect on success though. A reflection like "why did I fail then but succeed now" is a reflection on success. Looking at the success of others and asking what they did to succeed is a reflection on success.

Does this break and devalue the video and argument as a whole? Not necessarily. I have problems with the presentation of the video, and I have problems with the presentation of the hero's story, and I don't agree with the power of psycho-analytics. This argument about learning and the implications made can be analyzed though, where the other stuff might just be a bias on my part.

We are presented with "a thing that makes us happy", and we the audience will think the opposite is true. However, he shows us that we think of failure as negatives and these negatives are presented to us as stories. He doesn't say stories but offers examples like "Maybe you are not as funny as you think you are, maybe you are not around people that you understand." These are stories our anxiety tell us though. Or the stories our depression tell us. My happiness tells me stories as well, it feeds my ego and reminds me of my greatness. Feelings of loneliness tell me the story of the darkness and evil that exists in the world. I am not my feelings of anxiety. My feelings of anxiety and the stories they tell make up a part of me, because anxiety to a situation is an emotional responce to a situation that is all too human. I am also my happiness, my passion, and my joy and with them comes their own stories. While it is fine to reflect on my failures, I need to remember that I am a sum of both my successes and my failures. The stories are not necessarily the thing that is making me unhappy, the unhappiness might be the thing telling the story. I might reflect on the struggles of my childhood and my failures if I'm in such a mood, but I can also think about the fun I had in the same situation. The memorie I have still exists because of the powerful emotions that surround them, the stories that surround them comes from my interpenetration, and my interpretation may be biased at any given moment. My relationship with my father is something I can switch back and forth on. He taught me to draw, think about history, gave me an interest in how things work and encouraged our creativity. He is also the reason why I walk on the balls of my feet because he would get angry if I stomped around. Do I want to talk about him as an inspirational figure or an abusive authority completely depends on my emotional state. Overall, my relation with him now is good, even if I don't agree with things he says and I find myself struggling to share my new interests with him now. In the real world, he is a person with his own thoughts and experiences, but my perception of him comes in part from the stories my emotions tell me.

What I'm presenting is that these stories are a coping mechanism for the chaos in the world. I failed to get the promotion and now I'm unhappy can be a cause and effect situation. "Why do I continue to fail in my life" can be a thought that pops up as a reaction to failure. Acknowledging how we react to failure is a step to self awareness which leads to growth. He is presenting us with this awareness. What I keep coming back to is that in this video, there is a focus on the negative and the failure. "Why am I so awesome and good at what I do" is also a valid thought that leads to reflection on success. The first statement is a coping mechanism for failure, and in the second case we see it as a coping mechanism to success. You might of succeeded because you have the best stradgey for dealing with all the information, or maybe blind luck has sent you down a series of events that leads to your greatness. That's why we reflect on our greatness, to spend the time acknowledging where we came from, what helped us succeed, and how we might continue to gain what we want, as Peterson says. We can learn from our success, we learn our strengths. And we an reflect on how are strengths help us. I'm not ugly and some people find me attractive, which means people will treat me better then if my face was melted in an accident. I'm actually able to talk about wide variety of topics, which makes me some what charismatic. I'm mostly emotionally stable, which attracts people to me. These are all strengths, as opposed to the weaknesses brought to life by my failures. I tend to fail in planning, organization, and focus. I can get frustrated with the pace of things, which can cause me to react in a way that does not help me. Instead of talking things out with others, I can leap to assumptions and become grumpy and moody. I can snap at people over unimportant things when I feel stressed over things like money and job stability.

I like that there is an air of "you are the master of your own destiny" attitude of the video. I feel that reflection and analysis of your feelings is important. All learning comes from failure is an overstatement, however and that we can learn just as much from ourselves from our success and gaining what we want. Take the chance to reflect on the strengths as well as the weaknesses, and figure out how these things lead to your successes and failures.

Flaws and balance

Newton was a punk ass-bitch. In my mind, I like to start blog posts with something explosive and aggressive, and I woke up thinking that Tesla and Newton got it wrong. Nietzsche was wrong. A person can only depend on themselves if they are an ubermench, perhaps, but the problem is we are all humans. To be human is to be flawed.

 Anger, fear, frustration, lust too, desire and the rest are human emotions. We can force ourselves not to feel these things, but we miss out on an aspect of humanity, a dirty, disgusting side that is easier to hide away in the dark, away from our eyes. Never bring yourself to anger, lest you become something more. Fuck that. When you are angry, ask your self why. The anger did not make me break, destroy, and harm. A world of mixed messages, illusions, and powers beyond my understanding bombards me everyday, leaving me wondering how to act, or in times how to react. Emotions overtake us and lead our thinking when we don't ask why. In the narratives we like to tell, we fear anger because of the destruction. Anger is motivation, either a motivation to destroy or to propel us into action.

The grand of emotion of love have driven men mad, and brought the powerful Cleopatra down. Love is destructive, but we celebrate it, get caught up in it's excitement, and feel it's warmth travel through our body, protecting us like a blanket from a world that makes no sense. Anger makes the face hot, and causes speech to stutter. Love makes us blush and causes us to stammer on like a fool without a plan. "Love" didn't destroy Troy, just the base desires of sex, lust, and passion that are tied to it.

We all are human, and to be human is to feel anger rising from the deepest pits of ourselves. It is to feel surrounded by the warmth of feelings from those around us. We all have stood on the edge and seen the emptyness of it all, and have felt a sense of hopelessness. Feeling that we are less of a person for feeling something that is critical to the human experience is keeping something from ourselves. The wisdom of ancients points out that we cannot stop ourselves from eating, breathing, or drinking without serious physical problems, and ignoring why we feel the way we do leaves an empty, confused feeling. We feel emotion, but we don't look to the cause, and sometimes we make an ass out of u and me about where the feeling is coming from.

Our reactions to the emotions we feel is what makes us self aware. We think, therefore we can choose our reaction. In the madness of the boil of this stew we find ourselves in, it's our only true choice. The choice can set us up for the next choice, but we have no control over the hand dealt to us.

To be human is to be weak. Achilles used to be a great warrior, until he took an arrow to the ankle. The stories of man falling to the temptation of the flesh is an ancient tale and as mentioned before, it took the great Cleopatra down too. The wild passions of teenage love exists as a cautionary tale in Shakespeare, and there has to be something in the old testament about someone shacking up with a hooker and loosing sight of what is truly important. To be self aware is to recognize our flaws and our failings, and not to fight them. They might be the motivation to create something more and powerful, or they will pass and are nothing to dwell on.

Issac Newton and Tesla were punks that didn't understand how to incorporate another person into their lives, and claimed they were stronger without a relationship. And Tesla fought to be recognized in his own time. Another person supplements us, giving us the strength in areas where we are weak. Another person brings empathy, patience, cleanliness, and calm. In a world where things change so quickly, where people and situations flash before us like the fevered nightmares of the dying, popping in and out of focus with no context, another person is lighthouse to focus on, clarity to bring us out of the darkness. A Penelope for Odysseus to work towards, and hopefully a ying to our yang.

If you are in my life, chances are good you pocess a skill I feel I lack. Am I a sociopath? People are my friends, and I feel empathy and hurt for them, but they are there in my life because they are better at something. In most working relationships, it's organization. Or empathy, or patience, or dance. People come from a world apart from me, so I can become confused when I see the similarities, but the differences compliment me. Does that make sense?

Action question: How do you connect with others? In a working or romantic relationship, what are the skills that make up you, and you bring to a group.

So many notebooks!

 Howdy void, how y'all doing?

If you're anything like w'all, then chances are you are selling stuff, moving house, moving job, or all three at once.

It's a good thing w'all learned to be better stoics and Buddhists during the quarantine. And learned to center our minds, clean our space and get motivated to start projects, because who knows what is going on anymore or how to react. 

Anyways, found a ton of old journals. Stuff I've been keeping for the last 10 to 15 years.

Some of y'all might be looking at this and thinking, "That seems small for maybe 15 years." Others may be thinking "Was this taken on a potato? Is that a drinking cup tipped over in the back? I get the shampoo, but the box? It's so cluttered, get your life together and just come back!"

Well, ok, that was a little much of y'all to say to me. Void, that stung a bit. This all the stuff that was, uh, worth keeping? Not shown is a small box full of receipts and bills to bank accounts no longer with us, and  possibly a whole box of notes and doodles from high school. My life is clutter, and. So. Can. You.

I have ideas about things happening. They are mathematical, economical, and political coming from a place that is so logical. Let's talk about all the shit in notebooks I thought was important!

I have the loose notes left over from the last recession, the one where I spent the summer homeless in a tent. I'm excited to find that one, since I've always want to write about that experience. The magic, the wonderment, the confusion, the magic. I felt like god that summer, and it comes out all the time in those notes.

I got the piece of printer paper with a discussion on being frustrated about not knowing what to write scribbled in red sharpie. I might have the small short story about the guy who can only wake up in the morning after taking deep breaths from his herb bowl. Maybe I have that one. Or I lost that one and the one saying that I'm sick of waking up in the morning after drinking and having to apologize to everyone. BASICALLY, it was when I came back to my parents after living in the tent, and I was depressed and drunk and just whatever. You know, unhappy.

I have notebooks talking about being diagnosed with ADHD. One of the biggest changes in the notes is being diagnosed, then Hitchhiking New Zealand 5 months later. Got the New Zealand note books. I found several books to keep me going, one of which was Optiks by Issac Newton. And I spent time trying to work through a few of the examples in the book. Math becomes a huge deal in the note books later. Before, there's just me keeping lists, keeping track of money, and basic things. By the time I left my job in science, my notebooks have programming, research, and a bunch of combinatorics and calculus I can't remember anymore. Not really self taught, just found some smart patient people that wanted to explain this to me.

I have the notebook that has my first meeting with my Russian pal. 8 years later, and still chatting, and now I know some Russian, have been there twice, and have worked on so many projects together. Women keep showing up in these, but never "I'm working on things with her, things have ups and downs but we are excited!" No, I spent the decade beating my self up because nothing ever worked. Here's something funny: I met an old crush before leaving to NZ. I spent a massive part of the first month only talking about her. I was setting goals for myself, and wouldn't shut up about this, since I was hopping to make it work. Then I calm down and meet a french girl. Still have her note about places to visit in Southern France. I failed there, too, but then I stopped obsessing briefly and start to notice who else is out there. It's temporary, because the original move down to PA was fueled by this. Of course, I didn't tell her this. And it failed. And I spent another notebook bitching about this failure and how I'm always failing and blah blah blah. I was not prepared for that in these notes. I have all the fun things I remember, like "Eulogy for a Bong" then I read it and realize that I didn't know it's 60% me whining about a girl in high school. I fucking swear to god, I'm a highly intelligent 24 year old in foreign country whining about failures with women when I'm sexy just because I was foreign. 

And then I give up! Ignore the fact that I'm sitting in a bar in Boston and this woman is making small talk with me about my job. No, because I'm not up to my standards in my head! So I give up, and just stop trying to date until I go learn Russian.

So this is going long, but like, who the hell did I want to be? I spend these journals writing about the fact I can't write, whining about beautiful women I meet not wanting to sleep with me because they usually lived in another part of the country, and then I compare it to some nostaligic memory. Then I find the notebook from the nostaglic point and it's like "I have $40! I found maybe $5 more in change! Here is list of the food I can buy! Don't have a car, riding my bike uphills both ways!" You know what a notebook is? A reality check. Because now I find myself longing for the days I worked at Lambert, but at the time I just wanted to get out. This blog has worked as a journal too. So I look forward to the day when I find myself thinking, "Yeah 2020 was hectic, but the memories!"

There is such improvement though! Again, 2012 is me doing calculus along with Issac newton, 2017 is a ton of stuff I'm not sure how to follow. Fucking combinatorics. I start to come to terms with how ADHD affected me, which includes all the obbsesing over failures with women. Maybe another day I'll post a couple and talk about why my ADHD is doing it.

And where am I at now? Lost my job, but whatever. I know computers and networks and shit, and Vermont is pretty socialist with it's programs. I can get me an education and certificate. Lost my house, butt fuck it, I lived in a tent several times. One time I used a 5 gallon bucket as a shitter. It's temporary because I have 15 years of notebooks showing improvements. Even if I go through a big personal depression, which I've done twice now, it's temporary. And I come out the other side.

15 years of watching me working on myself. But hey next time w'all will talk about the roles others have in improving us. Here's an action question for y'all - do any of you know where you end and years of friends, teachers, parents, and mentors begin?