You can listen to our first interview here, or through your favorite podcast site. For one reason or another, I don't think I ever released the transcript from the interview, so here it is. I will also be releasing the pdf version here at some point.
The new interview will be going up tomorrow on this site, also in transcript format.
☀
EP 015 Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, Authors of The Tools
Scott: Hello and welcome to the Start-up Geometry podcast.
This is your host, Scott Gosnell. Each week I talk to creators, innovators and
explorers about how and why they do what they do. If you enjoy the show, please
download us through iTunes. You can also rate, subscribe and comment on us
there. Every time you do so, it helps us to find new listeners and to reach out
to new people. Show notes can be found at bottlerocketscience.net or at
windcastlevc.com.
My guests today are Barry Michels and Phil Stutz, who are
the authors of a very good book called The
Tools. We'll talk about The Tools today and we'll look at some of the
projects that they're working with right now. Barry and Phil send out periodic
emails to their followers with stories, new ways to use the tools, and other
messages that will inspire you. So after you're done listening to this, I
recommend that you go over there and visit thetoolsbook.com, which is their
website. They have a real treasure trove of information you can't get anywhere
else and they have a wonderful mailing list that I've been subscribed to for a
while now. Hi gentlemen!
Barry: Hi Scott.
Phil: Scott hi.
Scott: I wonder if we could start, if you could just walk us
through one of your favorite tools. How the process works, what the tool is
for, and how you would employ it?
Phil: No one has never asked us that before.
Scott: I'm sure, it's a totally new question.
Phil: It's interesting. You go Barry, you're on the spot.
Barry: Well, you know, my favorite of the tools is the inner
authority tool. Not so much because I'm afraid of public speaking, which is
sort of the way we set up the tool in the book but because I love the whole
concept of the Shadow. The Shadow is a subject that we could spend 15 podcasts
on, but just to explain briefly, it's the part of your personality that you are
but wish you weren't. It's basically whatever you don't like about yourself.
And you mentioned creativity earlier, Scott. The Shadow can
either be a real boon to creativity or it can really get in the way. If there's any part of you that you're
ashamed of, it's very difficult to be creative because you spend more time
criticizing and trying to hide your Shadow than you do actually creating new
things. For myself in my own life, I've
gotten a lot of mileage out of working with my Shadow.
Phil: Yes, for me that's fine because the older you get, the
easier it is to accept the fact that everything is imperfect and your most
creative area, your most creative project is going to come back completely
flawed. And for me at least the Shadow is a way of both reminding myself about
it and utilizing the Shadow to get into more of a flow state. A good way to say
it is flow is your ability to tolerate imperfection. The only difference
between a professional and an amateur writer is that the professional can’t
quit because he needs to pay his mortgage.
Scott: I’m just laughing because that's very true.
Phil: We have this motto for writers which is, "Keep
writing shit, stupid." "Keep writing” has to do with willpower, "Shit" means, it's always
going to be flawed, imperfect and you have to not only tolerate that but look
at that as a guide post to forward
motion. And "stupid" means, nobody is smart enough to know
either the quality of what they’re writing or whether it will be accepted or
rejected. Our favorite book is Man’s
Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Scott: It's a very good book.
Phil: Yeah, the interesting thing about that book is when he
wrote it, it was a very short book. He said, “This particular book, I'm not
going to take any money for, it's a little bit off what I'm doing. I have no
idea how people will react to it,” and it became one of the bestselling books
of all time, but for me the idea that it was a little bit off his professional
track, opened up his unconscious and allowed things to pour out that I think
that it ordinarily wouldn't have. So, that's it.
Barry: The bottom line is, when you're willing to be
imperfect, that's when your unconscious really flows. Think about the ego as the part of you that
wants to be perfect. The unconscious doesn’t
want to be perfect, it just wants to flow.
So the more perfect the ego tries to be, the more it’s actually inhibiting the unconscious. When the ego can let go and says, "I'm
just going to let it all out," that’s when the unconscious starts to
flow.
Scott: Right and it's also that everyone has that
inner-editor and there's a time and a place for that editor to intervene and to
fix the problems that might be true in the work but if you have that editor
going all the time then you'll never have time to actually spit something out.
So you have to get that in the shitty first draft out and I think it was, Bird by Bird (by Anne Lamott)
Barry: Yes.
Scott: Which is a really, really good book on writing.
Barry: Yes.
Scott: It's just like, get the shitty first draft out and
then you can always fix it later and take all of those critical voices, whether
it's the teacher who said you could never write or your parents who said, “What
are you wasting time for with your nose on the book all the time,” or whatever
it may be, or you yourself and that sort of judgmental voice who just says, you
know, “You're writing about sex. People are going to think you're some kind of
crazy person,” and you sort of put them in jar and you turn down the volume and
you go forward and you write. Yeah, is that a related method or is that...?
Phil: Well, it's your decision. It's related to the new book
because... Am I allowed to say this, Barry?
Barry: I don't know what you're going to say, go ahead.
Phil: Okay, the new book is about we call,
"Part-X" which is the destructive part of everybody. Everybody has
got this built-in part that wants to block their progress, to keep them from
reaching their potential. Self-criticism and judgment are commonly Part X out
of control. We have a host of tools to nullify Part X.
For many people that come to see us, this is the first time
they have ever been able to control Part-X. The classic thing is that their thoughts
disrupt their sense of flow. It’s not just understanding X. You need a real
time tool to nullify X right in the moment. The tool we were talking about is
bonding with the Shadow.
Barry: Yeah, bonding with the Shadow or working with the
Shadow, yeah.
Phil: In the book it's called, "The Inner Authority."
Inner Authority may or may not be the best name for the tool, but it's very
telling because most people give away their authority to other people. The way
they do that is they let the other person judge them. They allow the other
person to define who they are and obviously they want to try to please the
other person. That's called Outer Authority. It's almost like you've made the
other person into a Roman emperor who puts thumbs up or thumbs down, who
decides what your value is.
Barry: Let me just jump in here because Phil, you talked
about using tools and I just want listeners to understand what we mean – even
if they haven’t read the book. A tool is a very simple five to ten second
procedure that you use inside yourself and you use it at a difficult
moment. For a writer, often that’s the
moment they actually sit down to write. If they can use a tool to bond with
their Shadow at that moment, they're more likely to go into a flow state. They
might also use it in the middle of writing if they're suddenly getting
self-critical or blocked for any reason.
And typically, they’d also use the tool after they're done writing. Whenever they’re finished doing anything
creative, most people usually beat themselves up for whatever they didn’t get
right. They don’t realize it, but
they’re really beating up the Shadow, which makes it less likely to show up for
the next writing session. So that would
be another time to use the tool.
Phil: Yeah, that's well said. But the next session begins the moment today's session is over.
You're already prepping yourself and your first task is not to beat yourself up
or destroy yourself over what happened today. And that creates flow because it
connects one day with the next. That's probably the best way to say it.
Barry: If you think about it, you’re giving the Shadow an
experience it rarely gets, which is constant positive feedback from the
ego.
Phil: Right.
Scott: So, the fundamental underlying issue is that a lot of
these problems that we have are caused by being out of balance with either
different parts of our self or with outside situations or interpersonal
relationships or something but there is an imbalance in these what you call
"forces" and the tools are a way or a solution to those problems in
which you are creating very quickly actions or thoughts or manners of
interacting among those various forces and pieces of yourself. Is that
accurate?
Phil: Yeah, that's very accurate. Let’s just say both of us
are very independent minded.
Scott: Okay.
Phil: At the moment there's a problem, whether the problem
is worry or the problem is fear, whether the problem is a phobia or the
problem, insecurity doesn't matter. You have to do something right at that
moment. That doesn't subsume all the therapy. Of course it's important to get
to the genesis of the problem and where you’d like to end up.
But all of that adds up to nothing. Both of us believe that
unless you give the person something
to do right at the moment, he will go back into X and stop growing.
Let’s say Part X is causing worry. That tendency to worry
has to be attacked at the moment. What you say to Part X is, "I'm not
going to let you take over my psyche, take over my life. I'm not going to let
you determine my view of the future." And you have to do something right
at that moment. One of the tools in the first book is called Grateful Flow,
which is a very good antidote to worrying. But philosophically the idea that
you can do something in the moment tends to be a revelation for a lot of our
patients.
Barry: Yeah, what we're saying is that human beings are
creatures of habit. But in this
instance, the habits are not behavioral, like smoking or overeating. They're
internal, emotional and cognitive habits. We think in repetitive ways, and we
feel things repetitively. To change a
habit – you have to intervene.
Understanding how you developed the habit won’t make it go away – you have to
take action. Again it's not action in
the outside world, it's action inside yourself.
But that’s actually a good description of a tool: it’s a way of intervening inside yourself
when you’re about to fall prey to a bad habit.
Scott: Okay, excellent. How do you set up the triggering of
these tools? You may or may not have a good feeling for when particular
problems are happening. Is part of therapeutic process to heighten that
experience or to identify or recognize that feeling and then to trigger the
tool?
Phil: Yeah, definitely. We call that a cue.
Scott: Yes.
Phil: So we just talked about worries. Here's the problem,
you have to train a person when they start to worry, and you’ll say, "We
have to deal with that." And he’ll say, "What do you mean deal with
it? I'm afraid I can't pay my mortgage, I'm afraid my kid won't get in to
private school, I'm afraid I won't sell this script.
So basically what they're saying is, "I have a good
reason to continue to be neurotic, right? I have a good reason to let Part-X
take over, I have a good reason to worry." The idea of the cue is, this is
the key of the whole thing, the cue says... So let's say I start to worry: The
moment that happens, whether it's at 4:00 in the morning when you wake up,
whether it's in the middle of your day, whether it's in a session with your
shrink, it doesn’t matter.
Right at that moment, you have to use the tool, which in
this case is called "The Grateful Flow". There always seems to be a
good reason to be frightened, worried, hating someone. You’re teaching someone
to function in a psychological way that they’ve never experienced before. Its
focus is purely on the present. It’s not ignoring the past, just making the
present key.
If you were a quarterback and all of a sudden there's a
blitz coming... and the quarterback has under three seconds to change the play,
something like that. So he does so many reps in practive that he can just do it
automatically. That attitude is what we’re trying to instill. We've got a lot of tools – we put five
of them in the first book. The next
book will have another four or five but this transcends the specifics of the
two. Barry?
Barry: Yeah, what Phil is saying is so important and so well
said. I know to the average listener it
probably sounds impossible, like "Oh my god, I have to be watching myself
every second." But the truth is,
the effort it takes actually makes life easier.
Once you get used to using seeing a cue and using a tool, you start to
feel a kind of freedom most people don’t feel.
There’s a real sense of liberation at being able to stop yourself from
worrying, or at getting yourself to do things you’ve procrastinated on
forever. Most people are a little
intimidated at first, but once they get used to it, it's like, "Oh my god,
this is such a better way to live."
Phil: Yes, the other thing is that something else happens
besides the tools removing your symptoms. No matter what you use them for
originally – you start to develop a different version of the world.
After a while you actually use the tools just to change your
state and get up in to that higher world or whatever you want to call the world
of flow. This whole philosophy starts with symptoms but actually transcends
symptoms and it becomes psychological and spiritual philosophy and actually a
way to live and Barry who's, as far as I'm concerned is the best, most
disciplined user of tools.
Scott: What do you use them for? What do you need them for?
Barry: Oh god, all kinds of things. I mean, I already told
you, I use the Shadow constantly in order to get myself to be more creative and
come up with stuff that I didn't think I could come up with. I use the
“Reversal of Desire” tool because, like every writer I've ever known, it’s hard
to get myself to sit alone in a room and come up with new stuff.
The Reversal of Desire is a tool that gets you to do things
you tend to avoid. To understand how it
works, you first have to understand what you’re avoiding. You think you’re avoiding a phone call, or a
difficult confrontation, or writing, etc.
But what we’re really avoiding in each of these instances if the pain associated with these things. There's a little bit of pain associated with
pretty much everything that we have to do – even if it’s just the pain of
making the effort to do it.
The tool is called “The Reversal of Desire” because our
normal desire is to avoid pain and the tool reverses that. It gets you to
embrace pain and move through it which then releases an enormous amount of
potential and energy that would otherwise be spent avoiding the pain – and
keeping your life small. The truth is,
life is filled with pain and you can’t really avoid it anyway. In fact, what we find is that people who use
the reversal of desire over and over again actually live with less pain.
Phil: I think somewhat uniquely, we delve into the forces
that are in the unconscious. Our most common desire is to avoid pain. So I
procrastinate, I avoid, I'm passive, I let my dreams get, you know, thrown
away, etc., etc. What we do is we take that same force and we turn it upside
down and say, “I will transmute it.”
It's more of a tradition in the ancient world, in the
primitive world where for them there was no real psychology. The forces were
absolutely real and you can see it on Greek mythology where the forces were
personified through gods and demigods, etc. About 1400 or 1500 alchemy became
very popular in Europe. The superficial interpretation of alchemy was you can
make a base metal into gold. You're going to get – but that wasn’t really what it
was. It wasn't known in public but alchemy was really the trans-mutational
process of your own soul forces and for a human being to be able to turn this
desire thing, to flip it upside down and use it for your own benefit. That was a secret; it was considered a sacred ability. They weren’t eager to
let the public know about it.
Scott: Yeah, sure. Sure.
Phil: The point is what we're doing now is taking that
tradition and let's say modernizing it and connecting it to everyday problems.
So the everyday problems becomes the cue to use the tool is also a trigger for
this alchemy so that your soul-force changes. At first it's hard to believe
that actually happened. Most people don't really believe change is possible
anyway, but we have, I think without question, proven to our patients that it
is. Which is very, very important.
Barry: I just want to relate what Phil is saying now to what
he said earlier. The truth is, problems
stir up these primal, lower forces (like the desire to avoid). But the positive purpose of those problems is
to give you an opportunity to transmute those forces into something higher and
discover potentials you never knew you had.
Phil: Yeah.
Barry: And when a person can really get that, not just as an
academic, philosophical idea but as an actual experience, they start to feel a
kind of ascendance, a kind of elevation that's really irreplaceable.
Scott: I've seen this in Tibetan Buddhism as well. Where
there's a phase where you say, "Okay, if you are a person with a lot of
anger." This process will transform this anger from just generally hurting
people into an anger that is directed at obtaining justice. If you are greedy
then we will transform this greed into a hunger for knowledge. So you'll become
wise.
And become truly fulfilled and you go through all of these
phases and they sort of sort people out and they say, "Whatever it is that
you're spending your psychological, your cognitive and your emotional energy
on. We will take this and we will turn it into something which is instead of
being a problem for you is a feature of your personality. It is an additional
(resource), and you can polish it up and turn it into this beautiful jewel that
will be something that can give you energy and can give you the drive to move
forward."
Phil: Yes, I agree.
The only difference what we're doing here, because we're doing it. We're here
to practice some psychotherapy. That's it's not a uniform training program, in
other words, but I mean….Life itself is going to present you with a problem.
The problem is going to be different for each person. You need tools because
you have to do something in response to the problem and that’s what transmutes
your energy.
It's a very different view of problems than traditional
psychotherapy has taken. Look, it doesn't mean when someone comes here and
we're going to tell him, "We don't give a shit about your problem or how
much you're suffering. We only care about using it and transmuting it."
It’s not fair. Everyone wants relief and they’re entitled to it.
Scott: So you get the relief but then you don't have to
settle at zero. You can continue on from having something that's negative to
going beyond and having positive psychology or additional capability or you
will have learned something through having solved the problem.
Phil: Yeah, 100%. We don't even think of it as problem
solving. It's just, you get the problem, you use the tool, you feel a little
better. Two weeks later or two years later the problem comes back then use the
tools again, you'll feel better again. It has a cyclical quality. Hopefully
each cycle takes you a little bit higher than the cycle before. Everyone is
ceaselessly immersed in this world of problems and ultimately means we're
ceaselessly immersed in evil, the acceptance of that is key.
So this is going to be a lifelong crisis. It's not really
about cure, it's about continued work. There's a tremendous desire in our
culture for what we call exonerations. So exoneration just means somehow you've
reached a point because you're famous enough or rich enough, you went to the
right school or the right spouse. Whatever it is, you reach a point where you
don't have to work anymore and we call it the realm of illusions like at that
point you take the perfect life, which is an insane joke.
Because I'm 68, a lot my patients are older. I had seven,
they're all male, seven guys, all of whom quit working. They wanted to “rest”.
Of those seven guys, two have died, one had to go to a mental hospital for very
serious depression.
Two of them lived but had various types of Leukemia, etc.,
etc. Now the ones who are alive they were back working, not initially working
for money but the idea is the illusion that can be an end point where you stop. THIS IS A DAMAGING BELIEF. WE’RE IN A
SALES, CONSUMER CULTURE AND THIS BELIEF IN EXONERATION IS VERY DAMAGING.
HERE ARE THE THREE
LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE. Number one, pain never goes away. There may be
different kinds of pain. Number two, uncertainty never goes away. No one really
knows what's going to happen in the future. Number three, the need for constant
work and effort. Which is what we're just talking about. ANYBODY THAT SAYS YOU CAN
BE EXONERATED FROM THESE LAWS IS LYING.
Barry: And in our society, nobody comes out and says
that. In fact, it’s the opposite. Advertising is constantly selling you the
idea that “if you just buy our product,” you’ll get beyond those three
principles. Just look at the way we view
celebrities – essentially we view them as people who have somehow garnered
enough fame and money that they are beyond pain, uncertainty, and ceaseless
effort.
It’s funny, when we were writing the section on exoneration
in book one, I actually watched advertising with a more critical, observant
eye. One evening this advertisement came
on: "You want to lose weight? Buy
this treadmill. We guarantee you will lose weight." I’d heard that ad a thousand times before,
but because I was writing about exoneration it suddenly struck me: it’s such a ripoff. Sure, you can buy the treadmill. But most people don’t have the willpower to
get themselves up on a treadmill; they can’t even get themselves out the front
door to take a walk. That’s how ubiquitous this sense of exoneration is: deep down we really believe there’s a way we
can consume ourselves out of pain, uncertainty and ceaseless effort. Or maybe we can get on a reality show and
join that club of special people that are
exonerated from … go ahead, Phil.
Phil: It's so well stated. Reality shows are now weak
compared to the effect of the Internet. Now
anybody with a computer can become famous and that's just more of the
poison. I believe that a lot of the social economic imbalances in this country
are accepted by the populace because of this hope for exoneration. In my
generation, they'd be on the streets,
burning shit down. Not necessarily for the right reasons but people don't care
as much about that because they're looking into an illusionary future and the
present doesn’t matter.
Barry: Phil and I in
a unique position. We treat a fair
number of pretty famous people and we can tell you with absolute
assurance: not a single one of them has
that magic exemption ticket.
Scott: I think there was one of the diagrams that they have
that was with the New Yorker article
that you did a few years ago talked about the realm of illusion as this static
picture on the wall and you say, "If only life were like that – but
instead life is like a string of pearls or something, each of which contains a
little turd.” It's constantly moving, constantly dynamic and there's always
something that's unsatisfactory about it, right? And you have to kind of keep
turning and working at it and that's the sort of the only happiness you get, is
the little bite size happiness.
Phil: If you talk about it that way, it's just a little bit
of happiness, but that’s not what really happens. Because what actually
happens if you stick to it for months and even years and even years, you might
not define it as being happy in the conventional sense which a lot to do with
pleasure but you become deeply satisfied and the reason you do is everything
starts to be more meaningful. The more meaningful things are the more you feel
connected to a larger Whole or something bigger than you are.
Part X doesn’t want you to know that; it tells you there’s
another way, you can avoid doing this for life. You can’t.
Barry: The bottom
line is, life has rules and they're immutable. Part X is the part of you that
seduces you into an exoneration fantasy.
But the only way to really feel any enduring satisfaction is to play by
the rules. That's how you fit in to life.
Scott: Yeah.
Phil: You sound depressed.
Scott: It could be worse, I think we all want think that
there is some way where you could finally cross the finish line, as you say,
"I'm being exonerated" but that doesn't happen. I'm one of this
people who is an epic procrastinator and I am one of the people who can
procrastinate so much that back when I first heard about you, I was writing a
book and I've manage to procrastinate that book away for years and years,
nibbling away at it but in the meantime have written three other books and
translated three books and written a screen play and done everything else. So
while that thing is sitting there procrastinated and in stasis, everything has
had to be worked on. That's my solution to my procrastination.
Phil: Do you still, like, work on that book?
Scott: Yeah, I still do. And it's still coming along, it's
just that happens to be the thing that got stuck in the slot to be
procrastinated. So now I have to find something else that I can procrastinate
about while I work on that.
Phil: Did you consider that book very important? Like more
important than the other stuff that let you grow?
Scott: Yeah, I did and the curious thing about it was that
this was a book that looks a lot like the tools but applied over to the world
of entrepreneurship. So there are all of this techniques and situations and
transformations that you can do on the creative work that you would do, that
help it work better and help you find your way to the creative work that you
actually wanted to do.
Phil: Yeah.
Scott: And it's all stuff that I do in my consulting work
and then I talk about it in my daily life and it's transforming all of that,
sort of chaotic stuff, down to something that isn't black and white. This is
very difficult.
Phil: Yes.
Scott: I'm sure that you two have done this long enough that
these books just pop out of you very, very rapidly. Am I right about that?
Phil: No.
Scott: Or no.
Barry: You're dead wrong.
Scott: I guess so, all you have to do is sweat blood onto
your keyboard and the words will appear.
Barry: Now look, it's axiomatic that anything that really
means something to you that really is an expression of your deepest soul is
going to be the hardest thing to write because it puts you on the line in a way
that other stuff doesn't and there's a peculiar kind of fear and pain
associated with that, that is difficult but we want to say not impossible to
overcome. A great tool for you to use, Scott, is the reversal of desire to
write that book, to work on that book a little bit at least every single day.
Scott: Yeah, it's like rick climbing but you'll get there
eventually and I will certainly try out the tool a little more often now. The
one that I use the most often actually is, "The Grateful Flow" It's
one that is very direct and it's very easy to see it work and feel it work and
in a previous life, I did a lot of neuroscience research and it literally hard
wired in to you that you cannot both be grateful and worried at the same time.
Barry: Yeah.
Phil: Yeah, as you have said.
Scott: And it's literally at the neurological level that you
can't have both of those things happening at once because the two little
centers that control each of those on an emotional level are connected and
they're both trying to fend the other one off and only one of them can win at
any time. That's my endorsement anyway but yes, I should try the, "The
Reversal of Desire" more often and will certainly do at the next time I sit
down to write.
Phil: Scott, do you have a picture of your Shadow?
Scott: Yes, I do.
Phil: The best way to get yourself to write a book that’s
particularly important to you is to give the whole project over to the Shadow.
That means three, four, five times a day, you tell the Shadow to do it the way
he wants it. You’re here to serve him.
Barry: Yeah.
Phil: But if you find it interesting, in fact maybe you can
do it and then in six months or a year we will have this discussion again.
Barry: Yeah, I was thinking about that. Just to pick up on
what Phil said, it's really good to think of yourself as just an amanuensis.
It's like, “I'm just the guy who's taking dictation from the Shadow. Whatever
he wants me to write down, I'm going to write down. The farther from the
subject I think it is probably the better, because it's just unlocking the
secrets he wants to tell. It's a very
humble attitude to take. It’s also an
attitude that encourages flow – because you’re willing to put out whatever
comes up. Obviously it has to be related
to what you want to say. But if you put
the Shadow in charge, it tends to take over and supply you with the most
important ingredient that the ego can’t supply for itself: inspiration.
Phil: Yeah.
Barry: The feeling of, “Yes, this is what I really wanted to write.”
Scott: Yeah, so the Shadow becomes your muse basically.
Phil: Yes.
Barry: Very well said.
Scott: We'll see if that helps.
Barry: We're going to hold you to it.
Scott: You said that right now you're working on book two of
The Tools and that, that's going to
focus some of the things related to Part X?
Phil: Yeah.
Scott: I wonder, have you ever read Steven Pressfield's, The War of Art?
Phil: Yeah, it's good.
Scott: It's very good, very useful. For the audience, highly
recommend it. Really good book about overcoming this part of you, which he
calls the Resistance that will critically take apart or interfere with whatever
the work is that you're trying to do. So what else is next for you?
Phil: Well, we feel the Part X thing is very, very, very,
very important. Our next task, I suspect in the next couple of years, you know,
when the book drops and then we go around talking about it and also we enhance
our social media presence. Our goal is to introduce this concept to the public.
Now you might say "Well, I'm sorry but this has been introduced a hundred
years ago." Which it has obviously. Most notably by Freud, but we feel,
the way you introduce it is very important.
In other words Part-X is a way of introducing the basic
inherent self-destructiveness in all of us. Our concept is simple, workable,
and profound at all times. We also have some new ways in which Part X presents
itself. Imagine you want to buy a big screen TV, the latest. You eagerly take
it home but when you open the box, the screen is cracked. You bring it back and
the guy says , "Oh of course, we'll give you another one." You take
the next one home, open it up, the screen is cracked. You do it so many times
you realize they’re all broken. That’s how you come into this world. The
cracked screen is Part X. The “crack”, the evidence of Part X’s presence,
becomes the stimulus to use the tools.
This is where the tools are crucial. They must be effective
or X will take advantage of you. There’s no middle ground. Barry, which idea do
you relate to the most?
Barry: It's probably the idea of intensity. But in order to
explain it, let me back up to Phil’s analogy. What he said about the cracked
screen is true but it doesn't completely capture the flavor of Part-X because
it's a dynamic force – attacking you in your head and in your heart.
The question is, how seriously do you take that? Is it just an intellectual idea? Or do you actually feel it as a cunning and devious enemy trying to sabotage me every
moment of every day? If you take it
seriously – like you would an enemy in your life attacking you – it’s going to
trigger your instincts for self-preservation.
You’ll feel aggressive, resolved, determined to fight back for
yourself. That’s what we call
“intensity” and it’s the precondition for fighting Part X. What we’ve found is that if you fight back
with intensity, you feel more alive, regardless of whether you win or lose any
one battle.
In other words, you could lose five battles in row with
Part-X, and you’ll still be ahead of the game because you fought back with
intensity. This is a complete
re-visioning of what we think of as the life force. It's given to you, but it's
something you can increase by fighting for it.
Phil: When you live without intensity you do things without
really doing them. You try without really trying. I played basketball in school
and there was always the issue of running back on defense once your team has
lost the ball. From the stands it’s hard to tell who’s really playing hard and
who’s faking it.
But if you’re playing with them it’s harder to be fooled
with those who’re faking it. Even if it’s the end of the game and they can
hardly breathe, those with true intensity will still run back on defense as
hard as they possibly can. Most people live like the guys who don’t exert
themselves when they run back on defense. These people walk through their
lives. Then you have a select few who bring intensity to everything. Barry is a
good example, he is obsessionally intense. This also inspires other people.
Strangely, I’ve never heard anyone in the field mention the
need for intensity. Life coaching has filled that gap; it deals with certain
areas which psychotherapy won’t touch.
Barry: This was a revelation to me when I was a young shrink
coming out of school. I didn't know any of this information and I wouldn't have
even used the word “intensity” in connection with psychotherapy. But I knew that something was missing from
the psychotherapy I’d been taught in school.
When I met Phil, what made him different from any shrink I’d ever met
was that he had so much intensity.
Frankly, it intimidated me at first, but I was also drawn to it. This was a guy who was so determined to help
you with your problems he was willing to pretty much say or do anything to get
you to change and that...
Scott: Can you give me an example of that? A specific
example?
Barry: Yeah, I’ll never forget. I think it was the first
seminar of his I ever attended. He asked
us to go around and identify the problem we wanted to work on. My problem, at
that time was that I felt like a complete failure. It was completely irrational – I had
graduated with honors from Harvard College, graduated from one of the best law
schools in the country, practiced law for three years, etc. In no way could my life be called a failure
but despite my accomplishments I saw myself and felt very much inside like a
failure as a human being. So I stood up
and tried to describe these feelings of failure … and at the end I laughed sort
of self-effacingly and said, "You know... I even felt like a failure
describing my problem just now. Like I don’t think I described it very
well." And Phil looked at me in a way that no one's ever looked at me
before, with the utmost seriousness, and he said, "Don't ever do that again."
And I knew what exactly what he meant. Putting myself down like that. I said to myself, "You know what? That's
right. I'm not going to do that
anymore." It wasn’t his words, it was the intensity with which he said it.
What he was really saying was “You’re in a war with Part X and at that
moment – you sided with the enemy
against yourself.” It was a very
powerful experience for me.
Scott: Phil, maybe you could tell me a little bit about your
favorite chapter in the new book.
Phil: In the new book?
Scott: Yeah.
Phil: I'm writing it now. My favorite chapter is “Goodness”.
Barry: Plato believed that there was this higher world. He
speaks about it in philosophical terms but we're trying to demonstrate to
readers that it’s an actual place you can get to by using the tools over and
over again. He said there were three
essential attributes of this higher world: truth, beauty and goodness.
He meant those terms in a way that's kind of different from
the way we use them now and we're going to take great pains in the book to
explain the difference. For example, we
think of truth as an intellectually correct statement. But he thought of truth
as a force, something that hits you and changes you as a human being. Phil is writing the “goodness” section in that
chapter.
Phil: Yeah, so the reason it's my favorite part it's not so
much the goodness part, the good has to be opposed by the evil. And what makes
a person good? You can’t delve into it without a thorough exploration into
evil. There are a few obstacles along the way. The first problem in our society
is because of the cynicism and the belief in logic and reason and the worship
of science, etc.
The second issue is that people no longer believe in evil as
a real entity. It has no palpable reality. Since psychoanalysis began in about
1900: it’s the first time humans tried to live without the sense that evil was
real.
What happened? The most vicious carnage, war after war and
it’s still going on. So they try to replace the idea of good with the –isms:
socialism, communism, Nazism, etc. It didn’t work very well. The reason it
didn’t work is that evil is real. What’s needed is a modern, individually
usable way to deal with evil. There’s a lot to that, but…
Barry: Let me interrupt for a second, Phil because that's
what Part X is. It's a fragment of evil that's built into every human being
because it's trying to sabotage your potential. Go ahead, I just wanted to say
that.
Phil: Yes, that's well stated. By the way, just so you
understand the exposure to evil. No matter what your theory is about it
remember that it won’t go away, nor can you kill it. It has its own agenda and
it's very expansive and proactive.
It's not just sitting there, it's not just taking notes,
it's not just giving you a speech, it's getting underneath the skin of human
beings and perpetuating its agenda. Its agenda basically is to prohibit the
human race from reaching its potential and more or less, do anything it can to
accomplish that. Most great literature circulates around this issue of good and
evil.
Very few people would go to the movie where the bad guys
win, put it that way. But here's the thing, the historical definition of good
is the absence of all evil. So to be good, you have to expunge anything that's
evil in you and then you become pure and good. That’s impossible. Every single
human being walking on the earth has some degree of evil inside them.
I knew a lot of guys in my generation that went to 'Nam.
They said that it was impossible before combat to predict who would do what.
The guy who could do 400 push-ups would be pissing down his leg hiding behind a
tree. What’s inside a human being is a mystery and we don't like to
particularly face it. The idea we could just get rid of the evil inside us is
reassuring but it’s false.
If you can’t get rid of evil, how do you become good? And
the answer is, you have to deal with evil and transmute it. That means facing
the evil in yourself and being honest about it. Not only do you have to do it,
you have to do it again and again and again.
At that point the function of evil changes. Instead of being
a pure obstacle, Evil becomes a stimulus
for your growth.
Scott: That's great. Okay, so that sounds like a really
exciting book to read. When should we expect to get our hands on it?
Barry: Around the beginning of 2017 it'll be out.
Scott: Thank you guys for coming by today.
Phil: Thanks for having us.
Barry: Thanks so much.
Scott: And I look forward to talking to you again in six or
12 months and hearing some more.
Barry: That would be great.
Scott: Now where can we find out more about you on the
internet?
Barry: Go to thetoolsbook.com. We're also on twitter and
Facebook but the website has other podcasts and interviews you might be
interested in. And if you sign up for
our emails, you’ll get all kinds of information. Phil and I have so much information there's
no way we're ever going to be able to disseminate it in our lifetimes. So if
you sign up for the emails you're going to get all kinds of information that's
just not available anywhere else.
Scott: Well fantastic, thank you for coming by again and
have a wonderful day.
Barry: Thanks, you too, Scott.
Phil: Scott?
Scott: Yes?
Phil: When we meet again in six or 9 months?
Scott: Yup.
Phil: Show up with the finish manuscripts.
Scott: I will.
Phil: Okay, good luck.
Scott: Thank you, bye. Take care.
Barry: Bye.
Scott: Thanks again for listening to The Start-up Geometry
Podcast. Again, you can download all of our episodes through iTunes. There you
can also subscribe, rate and review them. For more information or to see our
show notes, please stop by bottlerocketscience.net or windcastlevc.com/podcast.
Thanks again for listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment