Transcription
Many years ago in Thailand, there was a temple that was called the Temple of the Golden Buddha. And there was a huge statue of the Golden Buddha. Word came to this village where the monastery was that an army from a neighboring country was about to invade. And they got the brilliant scheme to cover the Golden Buddha, which is quite large, with mud and concrete, so that it looked basically like a stone Buddha. The army would perceive no value in it.
[Applause]
And sure enough, this army rolled in with its case signs and weapons. And as they passed by the monastery, they saw nothing but a big stone Buddha, and they had no reason to plunder it. Years went by because the army continued to occupy until there was a time when the monastery in the village, when no one remembered that the Buddha was golden.
Until one day, a young monk was sitting on the Buddha meditating on his knee. And as he got up, a little piece of concrete happened to crack off, and he saw something shiny. He realized it was gold underneath. And so he ran to his fellow monks, said, "The Buddha's golden! The Buddha's golden!" They all came out, and they realized he was telling the truth. And they took their picks and hammers and eventually unearthed the Golden Buddha.
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Now, what's submitted for here's the metaphor is that each of us is golden by nature. We were born golden. We're born high. We're born knowing. We're born connected to our bliss. We're born knowing truth. We're born knowing everything every great spiritual master has ever said. We are one with the Christ, the Buddha, everyone.
But then we went to school, and they said, "You had to just like this, and this would boil it. Girls do this, with black people this, with white people this," and on and on and on. And so we developed a casing of stone over the Buddha to a point where at a young age, maybe four or five, six or seven, we believed that we were the stone Buddha, not the golden one.
And then something comes along that cracks our casing. Maybe it's an injury, a divorce, financial setbacks, our government will change, something that really scares us, bugs us, and knocks off a piece of our armor. And only in that moment of the armor being knocked off do you get to look inside and see the gold. Then, let me tell you, friend, at the moment you see that gold, the armor and the concrete will never satisfy you again. At that point, you truly answer the true hero's adventure, and all you want to do for the rest of your life is pick away the stone because the gold is so much more fun.
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Who is Joseph Campbell and why should we care? A topic that comes up a lot. Joseph Campbell was one of the leading mythology experts of all time. Joseph Campbell is a philosopher, the man who had this ability to see the truth in a world where we've lost sight of that in many ways. He studied all of these classical myths, traditions, and they actually started by studying Native American mythology. He fell in love with it when he was a kid. This was his bliss. He wound up studying the Aboriginal cultures. He studied Greek mythology. He studied Arthurian legend. He dissected and really diagrammed all of our stories. He compared the philosophies, the mythic stories of the whole world. Our myths, our movies, our novels, our romances. And he found this one story within all the stories that we can relate to, no matter where you come from. He recognized that in spite of all the different stories we seem to be telling, there's really only one. And he called it the hero's journey.
There must have been thousands and thousands of hero stories from every culture, but until Joseph Campbell came along, certainly I never realized how they all kind of fit together and how they were basically the same story. I was a religion major in college. I was taking my final exam. I had a moment where I was just gobsmacked.
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It's just like, "Holy crap, it's all the same thing!" I mean, it is really all the same thing. The hero's journey is a pattern. You can almost think of it as an algorithm that has three basic parts: separation, initiation, and return. Separation: you are in one kind of a reality, in one kind of a place. You are separated from it. Initiation: you're put into another place where you are, in some manner, initiated. Return: you come back.
A simple version of the hero's journey is, you know, someone starting out in their normal, protected world and then getting a call to adventure. A call to adventure. There's a vision, there's a quest. It's the story of the hero enduring some trials, various trials and ordeals, meeting different obstacles along the way, people that hurt you, people that help you. Doors will open, as Campbell would say, for you where there are no doors for others. Dragons will appear that are your dragons alone. You get to, like, the innermost cave where you're really challenged, like the greatest crisis, and you find your true self, the achievement, the glory. But then that's not the end of it. That has to bring that back to the community. There's a return to tell the story. That is a heroic journey. Separation, initiation, return.
All of the adventures of the human story are in there. All the heroes, all the villains, all the gods and goddesses, and all of the knights, and all of the fantastic creatures we can conjure up in animation. They're all in there because they're all in here. Because they're all in here. This is where they come from. If you look at some of the greatest pieces of literature, the greatest works of philosophy, they all have what Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey. And if you look with a piercing eye, you can recognize his outline in just about any movie, a story you read. Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Wizard of Oz. That's a classic story of a hero's journey. You first see Dorothy in her natural environment. And just like out here in regular life, a person is operating in their natural environment every day, living in their house, and that kind of thing. And then something happens to shake that world up. And you go on a journey in which you have to face certain tests and challenges.
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Storytelling is typically about people learning something. You go to a place which is dark and mysterious. You are faced with yourself. There is a relationship between facing fear and this kind of soul gain you acquire. Quality, a hidden strength of value. Moments where somebody is tested, somebody moves to a place where it feels like a crisis point, and then they are restored, redeemed, made better through that trial. And we call them heroes.
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If all of these stories boiled down into one map, we can use that map because all human beings are the same. Whether they're going through a war like World War II or going through a war inside, it's basically the same kind of process. In other words, we're not separate from the characters we see in our movies and in our novels. They are us. It's one journey.
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The whole idea of the hero's journey, a journey of life, clear patterns to guide you through. You're born, you have a childhood, you have an adolescence, and you try to find the place for you to become an adult. And you go through adventures, you struggle with your inner conflict, and finally, you become a hero. You slay the dragons, you succeed in conquering all the demons, and you step over stress with the final. You have arrived. We grow old, we die, but within the short span, we have to have some meaning, some reason for this existence. It doesn't have to be higher, mighty, and fantastic. You can have a very simple life, still go through the similar pattern. We go on, we watch a great hero's journey movie. It's that impulse within us, that seed of potential that wants to be actualized, that's being talked to during those movies and being whispered to. It's time for you to do that. That's the story here. That's what it's all about. There's wonderful narrative iconography for how to live life.
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The idea that, "Try hard, you get the little engine that could. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I can." This idea that we really can do better, be better, that our greatest selves are still hidden, and that the future is the prospect of coming to terms with that self. Dorothy had to confront her inner barriers. And so the journey she went on was not just a journey to find out how to deal with the Wicked Witch of the West. It was how to deal with her own inner resources, how to claim her own inner resources. And at the end of the movie, how did she get back home? Well, she clicked her heels together. So she had it all the time, the ability to get back home. But it didn't get mobilized for her until she went through all of those challenges and was able to kind of test herself. It's kind of the ordinary moving into the extraordinary. It's going through the dark to come out to the light. Going from an unsatisfying life to a satisfying life by pushing through the scariest things you could imagine. You. The most important thing that the myths teach us is to go beyond what we perceive as the limits of our possibility. So mythology needs to be seen for what it is, which is a metaphor for our human existence. It's not a history lesson. It's a metaphor for life and for universal experiences. A lot of people read the myths and they say, "Well, that refers to something historical, the creation of the world or something like that." But Joe didn't think that. He thought that it's really a narrative about the psyche, what Jung called the self.
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The problem is that many of us are metaphorically impaired. We don't realize that this thing that they're talking about is actually a metaphor for a transformation process. Just kind of like the Holy Grail, where it's not the thing, it's not the actual concrete grail. It's an intangible thing. But the Holy Grail is a metaphor for that intangible feeling. And so if you look at a book and it says, "You will go to heaven," and you don't realize that they're talking about heaven on earth, heaven in our bodies, heaven right now, in the now, you might fall into a trance of thinking that you're literally going to go someplace else if you follow the rules. Having been brought up in a mythical culture, I was very familiar with the different motifs and themes that were encapsulated in, say, a mythical being, whether it was Lord Shiva or Ganesh or a goddess. Just thinking the name of that person, the whole story was evoked. Carl Jung called these archetypes. Archetypes are from module encapsulated stories or mythologies, and they're in this form of a seed in consciousness. When you plant that seed in consciousness, that archetypal seed, that mythical journey, then that seed starts to sprout. And as it sprouts, the patterning forces create the situation, circumstances, events, and relationships for the unfolding of the story. It's better to have a story to look through at life than an explanation. The reason for that is the story is richer.
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I say, select two or three heroes and heroines, either in mythology or religion or history, and then ask these mythical beings to incarnate through you. And then don't be surprised when you see situation, circumstances, coincidences, synchronicities, relationships, short, suddenly short, that actually are part of the story that you have been seeking to express. Once upon a time in the forest, there was this little tiger cub amongst a flock of sheep, and he ate grass, and he wandered around with the sheep.
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And when he tried to say anything, all that came out was a sort of little meow, not much of a roar. And one day, through those forests comes a large male tiger. And he's just about to pounce on the sheep, and he sees this tiger cub. He says, "What are you doing here?" Tiger cub goes, "Meow." The tiger picks the tiger cub up by the scruff of the neck, and he carries him over to a pond, and he puts his face over, and he says, "Look, see that face? You're not a sheep. You're a tiger." The male tiger says, "Okay, we need to do something." He slays a sheep, but he grabs a big hunk of raw meat and he shoves it in the little tiger's mouth.
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And the little tiger gagged on it, it's all done. The truth, but it went down, and he got a little bit of energy. And pretty soon, he had a bigger tiger roar, and eventually, he had a full tiger roar. He went off with the male tiger. I think the moral here is self-evident. If you're a tiger living among sheep, you're a pretty poor specimen of a tiger. And we are all tigers living among sheep. We are all individuals with an A self that we don't even begin to understand. And unfortunately, if you could open a metaphor out, the food we get from the culture around us is maybe food for sheep, it's not food for tigers.
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We have to catch at least the spark on what your life is going to be, or you may spend those dreary decades in corporate America climbing the ladder only to discover it's against the wrong wall. You get to the top, who cares? If this path of the hero's journey is fairly simple in design, why then is it that everybody isn't living it?
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Well, the answer is that most people on the planet live under a kind of a mass hypnosis.
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There's a tremendous pressure, even in the media, on really keeping people in their place, in the sense of keeping them happy, tranced-out consumers.
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It's a trance of comfort. It's a trance of not sticking your head up above the crowd very much. That keeps the enterprise. Most people think it's a luxury and a great privilege to stay home and look at their 800-inch television. If you just spaced out, you're not developing. We're stimulated by some images and some loud noise. It's about collecting things and stuff and making a lot of money and doing a lot of things. And it's impossible to enjoy that because you end up on that treadmill and you can't get off. And so most people, unfortunately, because they are so victimized by the environment, they have no time to think or be themselves. They become bundles of conditioned reflexes and nerves that are constantly being triggered by people and circumstances into very predictable outcomes and predictable patterns of behavior. There is no creativity. That's the trance. That's the wasteland where we're just guided toward this weird sense of what's real in our lives. And those ideas that are imposed on us from the outside about what we should and should not do. It usually starts out with something like, "You shouldn't talk to that person because they're from a different tribe. You certainly shouldn't marry that person. You should go to this school. You should have a certain type of car. You should live in a certain type of house. You should have a certain number of kids by this type of age." Should, should, should, should, should. What I experienced in my own life was, "I gotta have the degree from this university. I've got to have this advanced degree from this university, preferably either a law degree or a medical degree or something to that effect, some letters after my name which would say that I have a stamp of credibility. I can go out and make my six figures, and society can kind of deem me worthy." I have countless examples of young people who go to college because they expected to go to college, and they studied biology because since the time they were six, they were supposed to be a doctor. It's very difficult for a person who's brought up in this environment of instant gratification, with the media, with advertising, with all the promises of instant gratification by buying something, for example, or having a certain level of affluence, that you lose contact with this mythical domain, which is actually part of your soul. It's there in everyone. It's their passion, their bliss, their unique skills, their unique ways of expressing themselves, is their soul, which if they think they could do anything. If you look at every hero's journey, the hero has been confronted with the fact that the world that they thought was reality was nothing more than an illusion. I go back to The Matrix, which was what was The Matrix? It was just this big illusion. It was the dominant values and beliefs that the world had put around this guy, Neo, the seeker on the hero's journey. And what did he do? He felt this longing to go beyond the illusion, to go beyond The Matrix. So he took the red pill and he woke up to reality. And what was a reality? Reality was he was full of potential.
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Separation begins with what we call the call to adventure. Campbell tells us there's literally almost a phone ringing. It's like the universe, the divine, God, whatever you want to call it, literally dialing you up and ringing and giving you a call, asking you to step out. Until with your journey, something breaks into your quotidian reality and makes it impossible for you to continue. Well, you could hang up the phone, you can run away, but it'll keep coming back. It'll keep coming back until you finally answer the call.
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If you're not paying attention, the wake-up calls come in the form of a sledgehammer. You know, if you're paying attention, they might come in a tickle feather. So we don't always get the call as a choir of angels with trumpets singing to us beautifully. One Sunday morning in Star Wars, Luke comes back, his house has been burnt down. He's got to go. Oftentimes, it comes in the depth of our despair, in losing a job, getting fired, getting divorced, having your house foreclosed on. These things that you just would never want to have happened are often the exact things we need to catapult us into the next, that next version of ourselves. Bad things happen to good people. And when that happens to them, they typically are thrown for a loop because they frequently have felt, "Everything's going along, I'm doing everything right. What happened?" Well, you know, the universe just upended you. And it does do that. The Chinese symbol for crisis has two symbols. The first is danger, and the second is opportunity. So crisis is both danger and opportunity. This idea that if one storyline collapses, that that's the end of the movie. It's not true of human life, and it's never been true of human life. I know people who have prospered in the most extraordinary way in the worst type of adversity. But actually, it reveals something to them about themselves they didn't know, and that became the new journey they took. Let me put this into really practical, hundred-pound terms. Because if the camera had been pointed at me when I was 24 years old, what it would have seen was a person who weighed 320 pounds. You would have seen me puffing on two or three packs of Marlboros a day, a relationship that I didn't want to be in, and I had a job I hated. Everything was wrong in my life. And so those are ripe moments for a wake-up call in life. You know, if you haven't been paying attention enough so that you end up with the job you hate, a relationship you don't want to be in, a body you don't like, and you're addicted to a bunch of things, you're ripe for a sledgehammer blow from the universe. And I got it. You step over a threshold, meaning you move from one world into another. Sometimes you're shoved from one world into the other. I went out for a walk and I stepped on the ice on the road, and my feet shot out from under me, and I smacked the back of my head on the ground, frozen ground, and it knocked me out. Just enough. I wasn't completely unconscious, but I had a vision while I was semi-knocked out. I could see down through all the layers of myself to this pure consciousness inside. And I could see how all the fat I had was organized around a whole bunch of feelings I didn't want to let myself feel, like sadness from childhood, and a lot of old grief in my family, and anger, and things like that. And I realized that the fat was there to keep me from feeling those feelings. And so as I began to come back to normal consciousness, I made a vow that I was going to change my life so that I could live in that state of pure consciousness instead of having to have all of that armor around me. Once you make the decisions that Joseph Campbell is talking about, about really hearing the call and being willing to take on the challenges of that new awakened life, once you do that, you begin to feel a power that it's like nothing else I've ever experienced. And I think a lot of us are just plain old afraid of that.
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I tend to think that people wake up to the fact that they're the hero of their own life when they get tired of being the victim of their own life. At the point that you say, "Enough," you know, "I don't want to listen to my parents anymore. I have had it with my boss. I'm really having problems, perhaps, with the sermon I'm being taught." You could either surrender to victimhood, and a lot of people do, or you can surrender to a fundamentalism. You can basically give your responsibility to someone else and say, "Tell me what to do, and I'll do it." Or you can say, "I have a choice here, and I'm responsible now." What does it mean to be the hero of your own life? It means to be responsible for your own adventure.
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Campbell talks about metaphorical death, where something dies so that something can live. And in every hero's journey, there's some death moment where some old has to go, some new has to stay. He quotes Nietzsche and he says, "The snake that cannot shed its skin must perish."
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When death is a motif in a myth, it doesn't refer necessarily to what happens at the end of one's biological and physical existence. It's an indication that changes taking place. I went through that process when I stopped being a tribal administrator and started becoming a writer. I put that aspect of myself away. It was valuable, and I learned a lot from it, but it enabled me to go on. No death, no life. No death, no transformation. No death, no change. I said, "Okay, I don't want to cut anymore. I want this. Put that away. Made myself into something else." And in essence, resurrected into being. Right. The whole key to blessing death is to recognizing that it's just a death of one old form that has played itself out, has no use anymore, which always, as the phoenix rises, and gives way to some new form that has new intrinsic meaning. It makes your life even bigger and better. You want a new birth, new revelation, new insight into life. As you grow as a human being, you will learn to keep dying.
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I think it's tricky to afford proof. I think there are proofs in our lives. I think the proofs exist in our ability to transcend the worst things that have happened to us. Um, my proof is, I was abused as a little boy. And not something I chat about typically, but in this context, it was the whole, the worst thing ever. You know, and it went on for a very long time. I was very young. And I am who I am in part because I had to face that, because I had to wrestle with that, because I had to accept that and acknowledge that and forgive, and all the terribly difficult things that come with that. I had to tell my parents. I had to, you know, it's this, you know, and by the way, it's one of these things that you work with for the rest of your life. But from that most difficult thing also came a kind of understanding. I get high marks on compassion. I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but it is part of what made me. So the truth is, it's not what happens to us, it's what we do with it. The forest represents the darkness, the unknown, the edge of your world. And it takes the courage of a hero to go into that forest. The people in your community don't understand why you want to go into that forest. And in fact, they're pulling you back, asking you, "Why can't you be happy with what you have here?" But there's this urge that exists within you to go and explore. Joseph's often used the Knights of the Round Table when they behold the Golden Chalice. There's a story with King Arthur and his knights.
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After the knights have seen the Grail and decided to go forward on a quest, they made a vow.
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They decided that the knightly thing to do, the noble thing to do, as individuals seeking their own in the collective, was to go into the forests at their own points. Each knight enters the forest where it was darkest, and there was no path. They cannot follow other people. They have to go in, find their own entry into the dark forest. And Campbell makes it really clear, if you go into the forest where there's already a trail, that's the one sure sign that you're not on your path. Because if they follow somebody else's entry, it's somebody else's path. That's not going into the forest. That's not initiation. You need to find your own path. And that kind of comes from that impulse within to go out and really discover who you are beyond the narrow confines of how you've been conditioned, what you've been told to do, and go out and explore for yourself what your truth is and how you can go out and rock it.
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The hero's journey, for me, is having the courage to look within yourself and say, "What am I here to do? What am I most passionate about in my life? What are my greatest gifts? How do I give them to the world?" And Joseph Campbell captured it with a phrase: "Follow your bliss." Follow your bliss. I don't think more profound teachings have been given than this one. Follow your bliss means listening to your heart and following your truth. There's something specific about the word bliss. It's not ecstasy. It's not happiness. There's a serenity and bliss. I like to talk about your bliss is the thing you can't not do. So it's your authentic journey. I've heard "follow your bliss," but I didn't know where it came from. And what's cool is that it's grounded in deep Hindu spirituality and philosophy, and it comes from the Upanishads. There were three launching points into enlightenment: Sat-Chit-Ananda. So Sat means beingness, Chit means consciousness, and Ananda means bliss or rapture. Joseph Campbell said to himself, "I don't really know what my beingness is. If I'm honest with myself, I don't really know what my consciousness is. But I do know what my bliss is, and I can follow my bliss." And that idea of trusting ourselves and trusting that deep impulse within us to go out and follow our bliss, do what makes us feel most alive, that's the path. That's the key. That's the essence of the hero's journey.
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Follow your bliss does not mean get addicted to pleasure. It's more than just something that you wish for. It doesn't mean escapism. It doesn't mean hedonism. It doesn't mean selfishness. It doesn't mean listening only to sensory pleasures, like having sex with anybody to look at or sticking up a candy store if you want candy. Don't follow what other people think is your bliss. Don't follow your wallet. Follow the thing that's presenting itself as your most serene and fulfilling state. Sometimes it's difficult to let go of that inner resistor and just say, "Okay, I accept the possibilities of the present. I will follow my bliss. I will listen to the call of spirit." That's a very big deal.
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Daddy said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I need to leave school. I'm never going to learn anything. I'm not going to university." Said, "I want to play drums." I learned to play drums in the attic, and that's my world. And totally naive, like, so Dad sends me off to London with the drum kit. So I went to London, and all of it came true. Of course, I'm not sitting out. I've got to be originally, I've got to be famous, but I have to be doing something I love to do. And I have so much passion, and I didn't even know what that was really all about, but I do now.
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How do we find our place? This is what everybody's asking.
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First thing is, ask yourself, what am I passionate about? Now, what are the things I love to do? What are the activities when I engage them, it feels like hours go by in minutes? That's one big clue about what your bliss is.
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What I say is, find out what you most love to do, and then do more of that thing. Ask yourself right now, what was it that made me different as a child? What set me apart? What caused me to cry at night in my pillow because I didn't fit in with the in-crowd? That is probably precisely where the door to your bliss is going to open. Go back and find it.
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Let's say you would never had to think about money and you never had to think about time, but all the money in the world and all the time in the world, how would you express yourself? And how would that benefit the ecosystem, the larger web of being? We have to find a way of reflecting on those experiences we've had that engaged us in where we became lost and totally absorbed in them. So for some people, that way to do that might be to write these things down. Others don't think like that. They don't like to use words all the time. So maybe collect some images, you know, cut some images just from magazines, collect music that's always inspiring you, but some way to bypass that outer barrier to your own sense of energy. It's not about being successful. It's not about feeding your family. Right. Some bad poetry. Do something that gives you that moment. You can write in a journal. Writing in a journal is a conversation you have with yourself. You can get to know your gifts, your talents, your weaknesses, your hopes, your dreams, your lessons.
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Joseph Campbell always gave the same advice to his students graduating Sarah Lawrence: "Don't do what daddy says, because daddy has one interest in mind for you, and that's your security. And if you bargain away your life for security now, you will never find your bliss." I started skating because my older brother was into it, and I enjoyed it, but I didn't take it that seriously until the first time I went to the skate park and I saw these guys literally flying out of empty swimming pools. I got so excited that that was even possible as a person to be, you know, to be flying in the air with a skateboard in your hand. Once I saw what was possible and what you could do with this thing that I had come to enjoy, I had to keep going. I mean, I just wanted to fly.
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I think it's really important to do things that make you happy. And I know that sounds very obvious, and you know, some of you viewers might say, "Well, now, let's hold hands and sing Kumbaya." But when you look at every great inventor, every great business person, every great scientist, you look at these people who have gotten to the so-called mountaintop, and almost every single one of them, to a person, didn't do it for the money. They did it because they were chasing their bliss. If you're following your dream and you're doing what you love, it's not always going to be a financial success, but it will be a personal success because you are still doing this thing that you love doing. And what's more important?
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I would describe my discovery of surfing. Exposure.
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I was just watching surfers there, watching what they were doing, and what surfing was all about, and the routes that they were taking, and the ways they were doing it. I think I knew subconsciously before I knew consciously. I think I knew that I was gonna do something in surfing. I knew that surfing was gonna be a big part of my life. So I wanted to absorb all the information I could. Just because you don't know what the call on your life is right now doesn't mean play ostrich and stick your hand in the sand and say, "Well, just because I don't know, I guess I shouldn't move towards anything." The very fact that you're looking for your bliss means that you're in the process of getting to your bliss. I mean, part of life and part of the whole journey's exploration, human results is often buried very deep. We don't know they're there, and we don't know they're there often because we don't look for them. We don't take the journey. Some people found them, and many people have not found them. And because they've not found their talents, they think they don't have any. I believe passionately that we all have deep talents. Go look. Try things you've never done before. If there are things you wish you'd done but you never did, well, why didn't you go and do it? Try. If you always go the same route to work, take some different routes. Meet people you never speak to. Go and speak to them. At least put yourself out there. But don't anticipate what you'll find. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations at least every seven days. If every set, at least every seven days, people aren't laughing at you or scratching their heads wondering why you're dreaming so big or doing what you're doing or have such a fierce resolve to achieving your goals, that I don't think you're stretching enough. And ultimately, we grow the most through the things that stretch us the most. You.
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My personal journey. I was bright enough. I got into the best university. But a part of me needed the journey. I was interested in the West. So I jumped at the next opportunity to get a scholarship and then get on the boat. And my slow boat to the West took 14 days. I landed in Portland, Oregon. And to be a foreign student, I stretched myself. I arrived. I knew very little English. And go to a classical English for foreign students. I learned English and I embraced the Western culture. I searched myself. Suddenly, I see a part of me which I never knew existed.
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One of Joe's most beloved quotes about bliss is that when you follow your bliss, the universe will open doors where there were only walls. A wonderful image. And in fact, a lot of people's experience is so like this. You feel like you're beating your head against a brick wall, and then suddenly you shift just a tad, and lo and behold, there's a passage that opens up. When you truly step forth and trust your bliss, unseen forces have the power to rearrange things to accommodate your step of faith. I took that Robert McKee course. I thought, "Well, that's not that hard." Um, and I wrote a screenplay. And I sent it to a friend of mine who was somebody's assistant, who left it on his desk. And some other agent wandered by and picked it up and read it and said, "Oh, this is good." And so then my friend went, "Oh!" and he ran to his boss. He said, "You should read this because that guy over there who's a junior agent liked it." And his boss was a senior agent. And then I got a phone call. That was fantastic. It was the craziest thing. And so it seems like I sold the first screenplay I ever wrote. But the truth is, I kept writing till I got lucky. If I stopped writing, I would never have gotten lucky. There was no luck coming to my house going, "Hey, here's a book deal. Hey, we want to buy that screenplay that you haven't written." You know, you just keep doing it, and eventually, you're likely to get lucky. Why do most people not follow their voice? One word: fear. Right. We're literally overwhelmed by fear. And primarily, we're overwhelmed by the fear of what other people will think of us. Campbell says that "What will they think of me?" must be put aside for bliss. One of the biggest inhibitors to following our bliss is, "What will they think of me? Am I going to look like an idiot if I follow my bliss and I fail? Am I going to look like a fool?" All these different questions come into our mind. Your friends and family, you know, it can be very well-meaning, but really will collude with you to create a story that is hard for you to get out of. For example, you know, "Don't do music, you won't be a musician. You know, there's no point trying to be a dancer because you'll never make a living doing them." I think that's the first step to the journey. There are demons we often have to face down. We are each our own greatest inhibitors. And so people, people can say, "Oh yeah, this guy's holding me back," or "this situation." But really, you're holding yourself back. And you're deciding, "Hey, I don't want to look bad in front of those guys," or "I don't want those guys to say some bad things about me." So I'm not going to do that. Who made that decision? You. "I am not going to do that." It means you've decided.
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There's a poem by Rumi, the great mystical poet from the Middle East, in the 12th century, who said, "I want to sing like birds sing, not worrying who listens or what they think." But if you can do that, then you can achieve the impossible.
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For me, one of the most formative times, the first, probably most formative time, was when I dropped out of law school. All of my friends at the time told me, "At least stay through the first year." And I couldn't make it through the first semester. I was literally nauseous at the idea of completing this. That burned my resume. I had no desire to live within the corporate world in any sense. And at in the same 24-hour period of time, did my relationship of five years and dropped out of law school. It was an incredibly gut-wrenching, soul-wrenching time. Moved back in with Mom. There were several months where I just laid in bed and slept and read. It wasn't a pretty process. But the only thing I knew I wanted to do was to coach a little league baseball team. A little bit of instinct that I had, a little bit of bliss I had. My life at that time was to work with these kids. And I had no idea what would come out of it. And then three, six months later, I had an idea that, "Wow, there's an amazing opportunity to serve families in sports." The internet was just getting going. This was 1998. And I had a vision of what I could do to serve these families and created a company that there's no way I could have imagined when I dropped out of law school. No possible way. But as it turns out, I started this business. We won the business plan competition at UCLA. We raised five million dollars. I hired the CEO of Adidas to be our CEO. And we hired the law firm that I would have wanted to work for before I graduated from law school. So this is beautiful. You know, sense of this is it. This is what happens when we follow our bliss. Magical things happen that we couldn't have imagined when we're going through the tough point of making the decision to take the leap, to go for it, and to make the difference.
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There are two roads in life: the Red Road and the Black River. The Red Road is the tough road because it's narrow, it's winding, it's full of storms, it's full of obstacles. The Black Road is easy, it's straight, and it's wide. Doesn't offer any challenges. The storyteller never says you have to travel this road or you have traveled this road.
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They end up telling you the story of the Red and Black Road by saying this: "The choice is yours. Always the choice is yours." Living the spontaneous life with my father. The bond and the passions that my father shared with me. We got on a plane, 7:00 in the morning, out of Santa Monica Airport, flying towards Big Bear, where I had won a ski race the day before. We're returning to Big Bear to collect my trophy. On the way, we enter a storm and we crash headlong right into this rugged mountain, 8,200 feet. It's the level we crash. I woke up. Our bodies were sprawled in this 45-degree icy chute. It was a blizzard. It was hard to find everybody. It took me about, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes, to find everybody where they were. My dad's girlfriend, Sandra, was still alive. My dad was hunched over, and it was unclear whether he was dead or just so knocked out that he, you know, sort of like comatose or something. I just told myself that he was knocked out. At a certain point, I had to admit that he wasn't able to help me anymore. That was on my own. Sandra and I took shelter under a wing. Many things happen. Eventually, we started down this initial icy chute. She slipped and was killed an hour later. I came across her body. I covered her with twigs and leaves and stuff, even though I knew she was dead, pretty much. But her eyes were open, so it was confusing for me at that age. I was 11. And then I continued down and varied terrain and all kinds of things happened. I got stuck in snow. I had to get through little creek gulches and broken rock and ice. And I just wanted to go away more than anything in the world. I wanted that pain to go away. Now, had I not, had I not, you know, gone in there and seen that that thing, that thing I feared the most, I would not have learned to sort of find the gem and the treasure of pain. Those answers that were there for me. And had I not faced that pain, had I not gone and stared in the eyes of the thing I feared most, that I wanted to run through most, I would not be here now with this book, which is really, besides having a kid, the most satisfying experience of my life.
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Campbell talks about the fact that when we go on the hero's journey, there's a dragon we must slay. Now, a dragon is the most challenging, fierce creature that can ever be created in mythology. Joe Campbell describes the dragon as being a beast covered with scales, and on every scale it says, "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
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So this beast is a construction of all of the rules, regulations, social obligations, cultural accretions that have made you feel that you either have to or can't do certain things.
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Slaying the dragon, to me, is the most interesting. It's the final moment. It's the time when you are faced with the scariest thing you've been faced with, and you get to take everything you've learned and knock this guy out. If you were to ask me, "What's the one thing that keeps people from their mountaintops? What's the one thing that keeps people small rather than allowing them to present their genius to the world?" It's their fierce, or as Joseph Campbell says, it's their dragons. There is anything that gets in you, it's a beast, it's a monster. Fear is, you know, what we face every day. You know, we fear that we're going to be rejected, that we're going to be, you know, no one's going to answer our phone call, that no one's going to like what we made or what we did or what we said. Fear that is unfazed has a tendency to creep. It moves through your experiences. It starts to toxify your perceptions. You become scared. And love is what we want. And fear is what we learn. And I think there's a great truth in that. I decided I wanted to do a full loop around. You know, and I had this idea. I knew it was physically possible. I mean, you know, you do what you do with Hot Wheels, you can do with a skateboard, right? And so I presented the idea to my sponsor at the time, and I said, "Hey, I think I could do this." And they said, "Sounds awesome. Let's build a ramp." And I designed the ramp, you know, and all this was on paper. And it was my idea. And I'll never forget driving up and seeing it. And this wave of fear just crashed over me. Like, "Oh my, what tonight? Are you serious? Like, I made a loop. I'm really going to..." And I'm the only one that's even volunteering to do it. And at that point, I felt like there was so much at stake to not do it, you know, 'cause at the time, no one was building.
extravagant ramps. No one really had money to do that kind of thing. And there was, and I was like, and I just had to sort of internalize and say, "Okay, you keep telling yourself this is possible. This is the time. We've got to make this happen." And little by little, I figured it out. And I took some heavy, heavy hits that day.
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Actually, now we own one for our hot jam tour that we can do on tour every single night. But, but that first time, you know, that was so, I was just frightening. But I had, I had to really step back and go, "Okay, you can do this."
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Fear is a very interesting fact. First of all, we need to realize that fear is an inherent part of the human experience. But it's not about getting rid of fear. Where is it gonna go? It's not, there's nowhere for it to go. The issue is to have courage to move forward in spite of the fear you feel. The courage is not a lack of fear. The courage is is dealing with your faith. Nobody would ever be smart as courageous, you didn't confront their own fear. That's not courage at all. It's just doing something that you find relatively unchallenging. Curt is when you know what to do and you do it. And lack of courage is when you know what to do and you don't do it. Courage is is the ability to to get up after you've fallen and and try again.
Exploring the unknown and trying stuff that maybe people have thought was impossible. It's just like a muscle. If you want to get stronger, you want to run a triathlon, to run a marathon, or do whatever you want to do physically, you know, you need to train. You need to get stronger. Courage is exactly the same thing. You think of it like a courage gym. You've got to consistently go up to your fears and go one step past it, one step past it. And you'll find your comfort zone expand each time you do that. Things used to freak you out won't freak you out as much. And now you have the tools, you have this strength, literally, to lift more in your life as you face your fears more and more authentically. There is some power monsters get by being darkened in the closet. And there is some diminishment by facing them, facing them head-on.
So Joseph Campbell talks about slaying dragons. And what do most of us do in our lives? Whether it's a difficult assignment at work, whether it's a difficult conversation we know we should have with a loved one, whether it's something we're resisting, we leave and run in the opposite direction. Rather than running away, we should go closer to. Because once we can see our fears, the death of the fear becomes certain. Do the things that scare you. You know, courage is what comes afterward. It is okay to be scared. That shouldn't stop you. A healthy warning, but it shouldn't stop.
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Oh, grrrrrr. Dragon that hoards all of these stories. Talking those terms for several reasons. On the one hand, we could call it projection in a psychological sense. So we project out and we create an antagonist that we have to slay. But what's actually happening is we're dealing with the energies inside ourselves. What is outside is in fact a reflection of what's inside. That in fact, you've sort of chosen your monster. Of course, in Star Wars, which was pretty much entirely based on Campbell's paradigm, Luke Skywalker has to go into the cave where he does battle with Darth Vader, where finally he cuts off Darth Vader's head. And the head rolls to his feet. And Darth Vader's helmet opens up. What does he see but his own face? He thinks that there's evil outside of him. When the struggle between good and evil is understood to be going on inside of us, it can be very beneficial. This is part of a personal transformation, overcoming our negative aspects, emphasizing our good ones. But what often happens, of course, we want to feel that we are good. So we don't find the negative within ourselves. We're gonna find it somewhere out there. The great obstacle for most of us, really, is ourselves. You know, if we can overcome that basic fear about what we might achieve and we take that risk, I think all kinds of things open up. In Campbell's terms, you know, we we can all be heroes.
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The hero encounters these obstacles and inflames at the, and that's how we react. When we find ourselves in a situation where we have that kind of cognitive dissonance, how do I get out of it? Well, first thing is you have to surrender. You have to stop fighting it. So slaying the dragon is really coming to terms with that inner part of you, yourself, that you think is bigger than you. And in doing that, then you grow a bigger sense of yourself.
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However, I think that it's loving your dragon. That's the much more efficient thing to do. It also feels a lot better.
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When you do that, then frequently whatever the dragon was hiding, hoarding, they step away and give it to you. They give it to you because there's nothing. What are you fighting? You're fighting yourself. When you stop fighting yourself, then you're no longer engaged in the fight, and you're open to what might come to you. There's always a gift in battling demons and overcoming them because that's what our souls' journey is about. It's about facing fear and growing beyond it. And as we overcome our fears, we gain power to look at our lives. The best, most rewarding moments have come after a struggle. As such, what we do with our lives is what makes us heroes or not.
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And there's grace in knowing that. And there's a gift in believing that every - is half of a + waiting for stroke of vertical awareness. In other words, on one level, it's a negative. Yeah, you had your device. Yeah, you had that health challenge. Yeah, you got fired. Okay, we're not arguing that was not troublesome. But what awareness can you add to it? So you get a far bigger picture that helps you master it. At a certain point in the hero's journey, it's going to become about you loving and accepting yourself as you are. That's a powerful moment because that lines you up directly with the universe. Now there's no more war going on inside yourself. And as that gap heals between your unlovable self and your ability to love that unlovable self, you gain an awesome power in life. The way we think of time is as linear. I'm born, I'm gonna go through these things, and I'm gonna die. The hero's journey tells us, no, you're gonna go here, you're gonna have this adventure, and you're gonna come back. And guess what? You're gonna be right back where you were. Now you're gonna go over here and have this adventure. You come back. You're gonna go here, you're gonna have this adventure, and you're gonna come back. And guess what? You're gonna be right back where you were. Now you're gonna go over here and have this adventure. You come back. And guess what? You're right here. What did you bring back? What the hero brings back is a story. Gilgamesh, for example, the Gilgamesh epic. He went out and even if it looked for the plan of immortality, he went through all kinds of trials with the feminine, with the monster, and so on. But he finally swam to the bottom of the sea and got the plan of immortality. He came up on the shore and put it down. While he was bathing, the snake serpent came and got the plan of immortality. But he went home to Uruk anyway, and he had this story to tell. For Gilgamesh, there was no concrete objective thing widget to give to the community, no gold, no treasure, and so on. The story of the Train getting the treasure is the treasure. And so the giving of the story is the invitation for other people to make the same journey. That's why it's a circle and never ends.
I love that idea that there's a circle and the circle needs to be closed. And the way to close the circle is to come back, return with something different than you started with, and to share that. And that to me is like a perfect hero's journey. That's the ultimate into the hero's journey. It's not slaying the dragon. It's not being the bad guy. It's giving back the essence of that journey. What's life about? How can I make a difference? And who can I make a difference to and for? And then it gets real easy. Hey, can I get a shirt? Oh, yeah, here's the shirt. Hey, can I get a board? Yeah, here's a board. Oh, my friend's got an autistic son, he's trying to make a movie, he doesn't have the money. What can we do? To finish the movie. All of a sudden, we're doing things that we are gonna do anyway. But down the said, we can make money for him and make him finish the movie. And then I'll send it. It's like, well, let's do that again. That was great.
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When I found this success in skating that I never dreamed possible, the first thing I wanted to do was to try to help kids get a facility. And that was the first thing I did. I started a foundation for public skate parks. To date, we've helped build about 500 skate parks. It's my passion. It's of what I would love to do is to provide facilities for these kids who who deserve a chance. I love talking to young riders about riding. There's a scholarship I fund, which is of screenwriting scholarship at Wesleyan where I went. Call it, we owe it to everybody who wants to be what we are when they grow up. They say, if you speak to somebody at the level of the mind, and you'll speak to them right. If you speak to me at heart, you will speak to the heart. But if you speak through your life, and your life is the story, then you'll change lives. And that's what mythical beings do. And that's why stories are great because my story right now, which is my also my truth, may have an effect on you. And therefore, I am picking the internal. I'm making it external. And through that, I'm sharing experience.
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No matter how long you get to live, life is ultimately very short. And before all of us know, we're gonna be dust. And the street sweeper gets buried next to the CEO. And all that really matters at the end of the day is how big we showed up and how courageous we were.
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And I think when we are on our deathbeds, what fills our heart with the greatest regret is not all the risks we took, and not all the opportunities we seized, and out all the times we went out on a limb and looked silly. What fills our heart with regret at the end of our lives are all the risks we didn't take and all the opportunities we didn't seize. And it's really all you've got to do to get to the next step. I believe we all have it in us to think to ourselves, I can't give up. That choice to not give up is a story you're telling yourself.
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Makes you feel the morning. That makes you feel like you can overcome anything. That makes you feel transcendence. And that's all we done.
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You.
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You.