There’s this old idea that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale, right? From some monster that’s deep in the abyss. You see that in Pinocchio, for example, but it’s a very common idea. And I figured out why that is, I think.
Imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that if you set out a path towards a goal - which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path because that provides you with positive emotion, right? So you set up something as valuable, so that implies a hierarchy.
You set up something as valuable. You decide that you’re going to do that instead of other things. So that’s kind of a sacrifice, because you’re sacrificing everything else to pursue that. And then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal.
And so the implication of that is that the better the goal, the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it, so that’s one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically, because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage. Okay, so you do that.
Then what you’ll find is that as you move towards the goal, there are certain things that you have to accomplish that frighten you. Maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker, a better writer, a better thinker. You have to better to people around you, you have to learn some new skills and you’re afraid of that, whatever. Because it’s going to stretch you if you pursue a goal. And so that’ll put you up against challenges.
Okay, so all the clinical data indicates the opposite of safe spaces as Jonathan Haidt has been pointing out. What you want to do when you identify something that someone needs to do but is avoiding because they’re afraid - you have them voluntarily confront it, and so you break it down. What you try to do, if you’re a behaviour therapist, is you break down the thing they’re avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that’s small enough so they’ll do it. And it doesn’t really matter, so long as they start it, and they can put the next piece on, and the next piece.
What happens is that they don’t get less afraid exactly, they get braver. It’s like there’s more of them. And then here’s why. So imagine you do something new, and that’s informative, right? There’s information in the action. And then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions. So there’s more to you because you’ve tried something new. So that’s one thing.
But the second thing is, and there’s good biological evidence for this now, if you put yourself in a new situation, then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures. Same thing happens to some degree when you work out, right? Because your muscles are responding to the load, but your nervous system does that, too. So you imagine that there’s a lot of potential YOU locked in your genetic code. And then if you put yourself in a new situation, then the stress, that’s the situational stress that’s produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you.
And so that’s very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you. Okay, so now here’s the idea. So let’s assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads, that more and more of you – you get more and more informed because you’re doing more and more difficult things, but more and more of you gets unlocked. And so then, what would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest thing, so that would be the abyss, right? That would be the deepest abyss. If you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people in society, if you could look at that straight and directly and that would turn you on maximally.
And so that’s the idea of rescuing your father, because imagine that you’re the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that’s locked inside of you biologically, but that’s not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself, unless you challenge yourself. And the bigger the challenge you take on, the more that’s going to turn on. And so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges, and you push yourself harder, then more and more of what you could BE turns on. And that’s equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father, because you’re like the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you, and that’s all part of your biological potentiality.
And then if you can push yourself, then all of that clicks on and that turns you into who you could BE.
