The hero story is another fundamental element of the clinical theories, I would say. It's predicated on the idea that you learn through voluntary contact with that that frightens or disgusts you. And that's a hallmark of psychoanalytic theory. Carl Jung said his primary dictum was instirquillinus invinitor, which I'm sure I'm massacring because it's Latin, but it meant in filth it will be found. And one of the hallmarks of the clinical theories is that within the confines of everyone's experience, and you can think about this as experience out in the world or experience in the unconscious mind, there are dirty little secrets, let's say, and skeletons, and dreadful old fears, and remnants of abuse, and memories of pathological behavior, and failures of courage that you leave you undeveloped, perhaps out of avoidance, and that the psychoanalytic process is precisely the careful encounter with those forgotten and repressed elements of the self in the hope that a clear encounter will redeem them, unite them with the remainder of your personality, and make you stronger in consequence. And I would say that that's just a variant of the manner in which human beings learn, we'll talk about this more in relationship to Piaget, because you always learn when you're wrong, which is very annoying. Now what do you learn when you're correct? You're walking in the world, you're operating in the world, you have a sense of what you want to have happen. You're always looking at the world through this sense of what you want to have happen. You're acting so that what you want to have happen will happen. And when it happens, well, then you're happy, because, well, first of all, you get what you want, and that's good, maybe, depending on what you want. But it's also good, because if you get what you want when you act, then it turns out that your model of how to act is valid, right? The outcome that you get what you want indicates no error on the part of your model. But it's very frequently the case that when you act to get what you want, you don't get what you want. And then that's unpleasant, because you don't get what you want. But it's even more unpleasant, because it brings with it the hint of a suggestion that the manner in which you're construing the world is incorrect at some indeterminate level. So for example, if you tell a joke at a party, you presume that when they hear the joke, they will laugh. And then if you tell the joke, and it goes flat, or even worse, disgusts and offends people, then you're going to be taken aback. And that's partly because you didn't get what you want, and that's not so good. But it's more because there's something wrong with the way you conceptualize the situation. And then you're faced with a problem, and the problem is the emergence of a domain of the unknown. It's like, well, what kind of mistake did you make? Maybe you're not as funny as you think you are. That could be a big problem. Maybe you're not around people that who are the way you think they are. Maybe they don't like you as much as you thought they liked you. I mean, the potential for various paranoid thoughts of increasing severity to come welling up at you in a situation where you make even a trivial social mistake is quite broad. And when you make an error of that sort, you have to face it and sort through all the possibilities so that you can find out what it was that you did wrong and how to retool it so that in the future, you don't make the same mistake. Well, that requires, in some sense, what you might describe as a journey into the belly of the beast, the beast being that place where things have fallen apart and where you're overwhelmed with negative emotion and chaos and confusion. And that's a very old story. That's the story of the journey to the underworld. And the hero is the person who makes the voluntary journey to the... Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. 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Break it down into smaller pieces and help them devise strategies of approach and mastery and that improves the quality of their personality and helps develop them into people who won't make the same mistakes over and over again. The course of time is really very much like the course of a ship in the ocean because here's the ship you see and it leaves behind it a wake. The wake fades out and that tells us where the ship has been in just the same way as the past and our memory of the past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the past and we go back and back to prehistory and we use all kinds of instruments and scientific methods for detecting what happened, we eventually reach a point where all record of the past fades away in just the same way as the wake of the ship. Now the important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wake doesn't drive the ship any more than the tailwags the dog. Supposing there's a neurotic, difficult child, one school of thought used to say, well bang him about, beat him up and maybe he'll change. But then they said, oh no, that's not fair to the child to beat him up because it was his parents. They didn't bring him up properly. And so then they say, well punish the parents. Well the parents say, excuse me, but our parents were neurotic too and they brought us up badly so we couldn't help what we did. And so since the grandparents are dead we can't get at them and in any case supposing we would pass the whole blame back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And they say, they started all this mess. But then Eve would say, no, the serpent tempted me and I did eat and it was the serpent's fault. So you see, if you insist on being moved, being determined by the past, that's your game. But the fact of the matter is it all starts right now. But we like to establish a connectivity with the past because that gives other people the impression that we're saying, if you ask me then why am I talking? Well I could say I'm making a living this way or I have a message that I want to get across to you. But that is not the reason. I'm talking for the same reason that birds sing and for the same reason that the stars shine. Is I dig it? Why do you dig it? Well I could go on answering all sorts of questions about human motivation and psychology but they wouldn't explain a thing because explaining things by the past is really a refusal to explain them at all. All you're doing is postponing the explanation. You're putting it back and back and back and back and that explains nothing. What does explain things is the present. Why do you do it now? Now this is a slight cheat because that doesn't explain it either. Because what happens now, just as the sound comes out of silence, all this comes out of nowhere. All life suddenly emerges out of space, bang, right now. And to ask again why does it happen? It's an unprofitable question because the interesting thing is not why but what? What happens? Not why does it happen? I can say, well I am doing this now because I did that then and so I am producing for you a continuous line of thought. But actually I'm doing it backwards. I'm doing it always from now and connecting up what I do now with what I did so that you can see a consistent story. If I define myself as the whole field of events, we'll say the organism environment field which is the real me, then all the things that happen to me may be called my doing. And that is the real sense of karma. But when we speak about freedom from karma, freedom from being the puppet of the past, that simply involves a change in your thinking. It involves, in other words, you are getting rid of the habit of thought whereby you define yourself as the result of what has gone before. And instead get into the more plausible and more reasonable habit of thought in terms of which you don't define yourself in terms of what you've done before but in terms of what you're doing now. And that is liberation from the ridiculous situation of being a dog wagged by its tail.
