To navigate, there's two things you need to know. The first is: where the hell are you - exactly, precisely. Right? Razor-sharp. What's good about you and what's bad about you. By your own... by your own reckoning. You don't have to... You can ask other people, but this is a game you play yourself. It's like, as far as I'm concerned... I'm taking stock. What is it that's okay about me, and what needs some work? And you gotta watch to not be too self-critical when you're doing that too, cause that can just be another kind of flaw. And then the next is: Okay well, where are you going? What's your destination? Well, and that's what the frame is. Now, you know, you could do that in a very sophisticated way. And you do that by thinking consciously about who it is that you are, in an articulated manner, and where you want to go, and why and how you're going to get there. And people hardly ever do that. That is- That's come as such an absolute shock to me, as an educator. I just- Cause one of the other programs, (I use this in my classes), one of the other programs in this suite of programs is called the "Future Authoring" program. And I started developing it my "Maps Of Meaning" class, which is where some of this material is from. And I got students to write about their pasts. It's like, okay - - we're talking about stories, so let's tell your story. Who are you? How do you get here, and what are you now? That usually helps people put things to rest, although it's quite stressful while you're doing it. Stress goes up when you're doing it, and maybe you feel miserable for a couple of weeks, and then stress goes down, and it stays down. So that's- and that's also why people don't do it. Because who the hell wants to have their stress go up? But if it's temporary, it's a sacrifice. So then, the next issue is: Well, where are you going? And one of the things, that... and this, I just still- I cannot understand. Is students, that had been in education system for 15 years, 14 years. High-end students, most of them! Not once in their whole bloody life, did anyone ever get them to sit down for like a day, and say: "Alright, justify your existence!" [audience laughter] Like... Well, seriously, it's like: "Here you are in university.
You're taking a bunch of courses, you've got some sort of vague career plan.
It's like, defend the damn thing a bit! Since you're gonna go live it, and everything. You're staking everything on it. It's like, what's your damn plan? And why are you so convinced, that it's not the plan of a babbling fool? Because if you haven't thought about it, then it is! And, if you really wanna go out there and live that out?" You know, one of the things Carl Jung said, was that "You're in a story, whether you know it or not." And then he made two nice comments about that. 1) If it's someone else's story, you're probably gonna get a bit part, and it might not be the one you want. 2) And if it's a story that you don't know, it might be one with a really bad ending. Or maybe it's just bad period with a worse ending. And if you don't know what the story that you're living out is, maybe that's the one! You know, maybe you got that from your mother, you got it from your grandmother, you got it from your aunt, or... God only knows, where you picked it up! Because you pick up things like mad, because that's what human beings are like. So maybe you're living a malevolent tragedy unconsciously. And then one thing you might ask yourself, is: "Well, how wretched and miserable is your life?" Let's add futile to that. "How wretched, miserable and futile is your life?" And you might say: "Well, yeah, 70% on each count!" It's like... then you're probably unconsciously living out a malevolent tragedy. And maybe that's not for the best. Or - it's either that, or the whole universe hates you. Right? Or 70% hates you. You know. So... so anyways, you know, we got students to start writing in detail about - not what they wanted. It's not a career thing. Cause that's the closest people usually get, is they have a career plan. It's like: No no, it's not a career plan, that's peripheral. Important, but peripheral. It's like: "Alright, you got three years, man.
You're gonna live them anyways. Devote those three years to setting the world up around you, so that it's the best, it could possibly be - for you. As if you were taking care of yourself,
as if you cared for yourself. Well, what would that look like?" You know, let's say, just for the sake of argument - - if you figured out where you were, that you could have, what would be best for you. Well, what is that? I bet... you never asked. People don't ask. And... So life comes at them like random snakes, and they sort of fend them off, and life goes by, and things don't work out the way people "expected" them to. But a huge part of that is: They didn't know where they were, cause they wouldn't look, or didn't know that they should look. Ignorance and willful blindness, right? Two great catastrophes. And they never figured out where they wanted to go - or why? Now, there's a problem with figuring out where you wanna go. And the problem is, that you make your conditions for failure clear to yourself. And people don't like that. So if you keep yourself in the fog, then you can't tell, when you screwed up! Now, that isn't so good, because you're still screwing up. You're just too... blind, self-blind to notice. Although in the short term, that's less painful. If you make your criteria for success razor-sharp, then you know every time you screw up. But that's great, because then you could fix it! You could either... ...repair the behavioral inadequacy, or the conceptual inadequacy, that you're using as a tool in that situation, or maybe you could adjust your damn plan! Either way you can fix it! And so... Okay, so you're living in one of these bloody things, and you might as well... It seems to me, [that] you might as well make it the best one you could live in, because you don't have anything better to do. Now, if you don't do that- if you don't do it consciously (and this is what the psychoanalysts pointed out), is that you have innumerable, quasi-autonomous subsystems, that make you up; that will generate stories impulsively, and you'll just act them out. And you know that, because - you watch yourself over two weeks, and you think: "Jesus, I did a lot of stupid things in the last two weeks." And you think "why?", and it's because you're a random- you're a collection of somewhat random, quasi-autonomous personality units, and lacking a leader. They're just gonna fire off whenever they want, you know? First you're hungry, then you're thirsty, then you wanna go to bed with your wife, you know. Then you wanna sleep in, then you wanna tell your boss off, then you wanna curse at the guy that cuts you off in traffic. It's like... You're kinda like a two-year-old, you know, just- it's one emotional frame after another, vying for dominance. There's no overarching hierarchy, and there's no king at the top.
