The Ego is the Source of Fear - Steven Pressfield

00:00:00.000 | In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance,

00:00:05.000 | with a capital R, as the invisible force

00:00:08.200 | in this universe of ours that finds a way

00:00:11.320 | to prevent you from starting or doing the work.

00:00:16.320 | Where do you think resistance comes from?

00:00:21.120 | Why is there a force in our mind

00:00:22.840 | that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts,

00:00:26.080 | with laziness, excuses, and so on?

00:00:28.600 | - That's another great question.

00:00:30.280 | I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking,

00:00:35.200 | it's called the Yetzir Ha-Rah, right?

00:00:37.440 | And it's a force that if this up here is your soul,

00:00:41.520 | or Neshamah, trying to talk to you, us down here,

00:00:45.040 | the Yetzir Ha-Rah is this negative force in the middle.

00:00:48.000 | So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this.

00:00:50.520 | But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer,

00:00:53.480 | but here's my answer.

00:00:55.900 | I think that there are two places

00:01:00.380 | where we as human beings can seat our identity.

00:01:03.600 | One is the ego, the conscious ego,

00:01:06.880 | and the other is the greater self.

00:01:09.460 | And the self in the Jungian sense,

00:01:12.220 | the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious

00:01:15.660 | and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground,

00:01:19.420 | which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever.

00:01:22.560 | And I think, and the ego is just this little dot

00:01:25.360 | inside this bigger self.

00:01:27.460 | And the ego has a completely different view of life

00:01:32.460 | as from the self.

00:01:35.680 | The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here.

00:01:38.940 | - No, perfect.

00:01:39.940 | - The ego believes that death is real.

00:01:43.300 | The ego believes that time and space are real.

00:01:47.180 | The ego believes that each one of us

00:01:49.960 | is separate from the other.

00:01:51.860 | I'm separate from you.

00:01:53.340 | I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me.

00:01:56.380 | It would only hurt you.

00:01:58.220 | And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear

00:02:03.220 | because we are all made of flesh.

00:02:05.460 | We can all die.

00:02:06.300 | We can all be hurt.

00:02:07.140 | We can all be ruined, bump, bada-bump.

00:02:08.820 | So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create

00:02:12.940 | as we were talking about before

00:02:14.380 | comes out of that fear of death.

00:02:16.020 | The self, on the other hand, the greater self

00:02:19.820 | that butts up against the divine ground

00:02:22.000 | believes that death is not real,

00:02:24.500 | that time and space are not real,

00:02:26.980 | that the gods travel swift as thought.

00:02:29.460 | And the ego also believes that, I mean,

00:02:33.620 | the self believes that there's no difference

00:02:35.900 | between you and me, that we're all one.

00:02:37.460 | If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right?

00:02:42.060 | And in the world of the self, of the greater self,

00:02:45.620 | the dominant emotion is love, not fear.

00:02:49.140 | Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here,

00:02:52.760 | I'll try to, a long way to answer your question.

00:02:55.160 | When Jesus died on the cross,

00:02:59.520 | or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives

00:03:04.520 | at Thermopylae, they were acting according

00:03:07.600 | to the rules of the self.

00:03:09.520 | Death is not real, no difference between you and me,

00:03:14.320 | time and space are not real, predominant emotion is love.

00:03:17.960 | So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels

00:03:22.960 | have, are in a struggle between these two things,

00:03:28.540 | the ego and the self.

00:03:30.140 | To me, resistance is the voice of the ego,

00:03:33.900 | saying, and it's a fearful voice,

00:03:37.540 | because if, when we identify with the self,

00:03:42.460 | we move our consciousness over to the self,

00:03:45.020 | as artists or scientists, opening ourselves up

00:03:48.640 | to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces,

00:03:52.900 | the ego is tremendously threatened by that,

00:03:55.280 | because if we're in that space, that head space,

00:04:00.260 | we don't need the ego anymore.

00:04:02.440 | So I think resistance is a voice of the ego

00:04:05.920 | trying to keep control of us.

00:04:09.240 | In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego.

00:04:13.520 | - That's probably a very good example, right?

00:04:15.860 | - You know, it's a zero-sum world for him,

00:04:20.800 | and for anybody that's in that,

00:04:23.340 | and the opposite of that would be somebody

00:04:25.940 | like Martin Luther King, or Gandhi.

00:04:28.520 | And that's, of course, why they all wind up

00:04:31.380 | getting assassinated, because that voice,

00:04:34.340 | that ego is hanging on to itself,

00:04:37.260 | and feels so threatened by,

00:04:42.060 | - I could talk more about this if you want.

00:04:43.680 | - No, for sure, that's fascinating,

00:04:46.120 | it's just, it's interesting why the fear

00:04:49.320 | is attached to the ego.

00:04:50.920 | I really like this dichotomy of ego and self,

00:04:54.240 | and that struggle.

00:04:56.080 | It's just, ego has a, you know,

00:05:00.720 | the self-obsession of it, why fear is such a predominant

00:05:05.720 | thing, like why is resistance trying to undermine everything?

00:05:12.000 | - It's fear, it's out of fear.

00:05:14.040 | Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories.

00:05:16.800 | In a story, the villain is always resistance,

00:05:22.880 | is always the ego.

00:05:24.960 | The hero is always, of course, always is not everything,

00:05:28.960 | but you know what I mean, pretty much,

00:05:30.600 | represents kind of the self.

00:05:32.600 | If you think about the alien on the spaceship,

00:05:35.680 | that's like the ultimate kind of villain,

00:05:37.360 | it keeps changing form, right?

00:05:39.240 | First it goes on the guy's face,

00:05:41.000 | then it pops out of his chest,

00:05:42.840 | but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing

00:05:47.360 | to destroy, you know?

00:05:49.720 | And just like the ego, just like resistance.

00:05:54.560 | And maybe alien is a bad example,

00:05:57.520 | because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight

00:06:00.640 | on the same terms as the alien,

00:06:02.840 | but maybe a better example might be

00:06:05.120 | something like Casablanca, where in the end,

00:06:09.080 | the Humphrey Bogart character has to,

00:06:11.880 | acting, operating out of the self,

00:06:14.520 | has to give up his selfish dream

00:06:19.360 | of going off with Ingrid Bergman,

00:06:21.520 | Neil Salon, the love of his life,

00:06:23.520 | and instead, you know, puts her on a plane to Lisbon

00:06:28.320 | while he goes off to fight the Nazis,

00:06:30.040 | and you know, in the desert.

00:06:31.440 | I don't know if that's clear,

00:06:34.120 | but in almost every story,

00:06:36.880 | the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear,

00:06:41.440 | is that zero-sum thing,

00:06:43.840 | and in almost every story, the hero is someone

00:06:47.480 | that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others.

00:06:52.480 | - It's letting go of that fear

00:06:55.680 | is what leads to productivity and to success.

00:06:57.960 | - Yeah.

00:06:58.800 | - Do you think there's a,

00:07:04.560 | probably the answer is either obvious or impossible,

00:07:07.840 | but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage

00:07:10.720 | to resistance?

00:07:13.380 | Like, what would life look like without resistance?

00:07:17.760 | - That's another great question.

00:07:20.400 | I think, I also believe that resistance, like death,

00:07:25.200 | gives a meaning to life.

00:07:26.720 | If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, you know,

00:07:30.560 | what would we be?

00:07:31.440 | We'd be in the Garden of Eden,

00:07:33.040 | picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know?

00:07:36.960 | And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden

00:07:40.840 | is really about this kind of thing, you know,

00:07:42.840 | where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters

00:07:46.640 | into their own hands and acquire knowledge,

00:07:51.640 | that until then, God had said,

00:07:54.160 | "I'm the only one that's got that knowledge."

00:07:56.600 | And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge,

00:07:59.920 | they're cast out into the world you and I live in now,

00:08:03.520 | where they do have to deal with that fear

00:08:05.240 | and they do have to deal with all that stuff.

00:08:07.880 | It's a human condition.

00:08:09.760 | - It's a human condition, and the meaning and the purpose

00:08:12.680 | comes from the resistance being there

00:08:17.680 | and the struggle to overcome it.

00:08:20.520 | - To overcome it, right.

00:08:21.920 | And also, the other aspect of it is that

00:08:24.360 | it's not real at all.

00:08:27.200 | It's not even like it's an actual force.

00:08:30.160 | It's all here, right?

00:08:32.520 | So the sort of, in a way,

00:08:37.520 | it's sort of a surrender to it, you know?

00:08:40.260 | You know, or it's just--

00:08:43.920 | - Surrender to its reality.

00:08:45.760 | - Sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing.

00:08:47.920 | It's like, "Oh, it's gone."

00:08:49.280 | - But not quite because it's never really--

00:08:52.880 | - Not quite, 'cause it comes back again tomorrow morning.

00:08:55.200 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:08:57.080 | So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day.

00:08:59.800 | So what's been, maybe recently, but in general,

00:09:02.800 | maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless

00:09:06.200 | or one of the more relentless sources of resistance

00:09:08.800 | to you personally?

00:09:10.240 | - I mean, it's always the same.

00:09:12.640 | It's about writing, for me,

00:09:14.300 | and evolving within my own body of work.

00:09:20.680 | It never goes away, it never gets any less.

00:09:26.520 | - Do you have particular excuses,

00:09:28.240 | particular justifications that come out?

00:09:32.520 | - No, it's always the same.

00:09:34.180 | Well, I would say it's always the same,

00:09:35.880 | but it's really not because resistance is so protean.

00:09:38.940 | You know, it keeps changing form.

00:09:41.020 | And as you move to, hopefully, a higher level,

00:09:45.200 | resistance gets a little more nuanced

00:09:47.040 | and a little more subtle, trying to fake you out.

00:09:49.840 | But I think you learn that it's always there,

00:09:54.040 | and you're always gonna have to face it.

00:09:56.400 | - I mean, your battle is sitting down

00:10:00.840 | and writing to some number of words to a blank page.

00:10:05.000 | Do you have a process there with this battle?

00:10:10.080 | Do you have a number of hours that you put in?

00:10:13.520 | Do you sit down?

00:10:14.360 | - Yeah, I'm definitely a believer

00:10:16.960 | that even though this battle is fought

00:10:19.520 | on the highest sort of spiritual level,

00:10:22.100 | that the way you fight it is on the most mundane,

00:10:26.120 | I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way.

00:10:28.880 | I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning,

00:10:32.040 | and I sort of am rehearsing myself.

00:10:35.240 | The gym is called resistance training, right?

00:10:39.240 | You're working against resistance, right?

00:10:41.240 | And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed.

00:10:43.760 | I hate to, you know.

00:10:44.760 | But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day.

00:10:51.480 | And like I said, over Knockwood, over years,

00:10:55.760 | I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset,

00:10:59.120 | and it's not as hard for me as it used to be.

00:11:01.920 | The real resistance, I think, for me,

00:11:04.200 | and I think this is true for anybody,

00:11:05.620 | is the question of sort of what's the next idea?

00:11:08.900 | What's the next book?

00:11:11.120 | What's the next project that you're gonna work on?

00:11:13.520 | And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse.

00:11:17.840 | I'm kind of saying, what do you want me,

00:11:20.040 | or I'm asking it of my unconscious.

00:11:22.480 | If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums,

00:11:25.300 | it's gonna, well, what's the next album?

00:11:27.080 | Now he's on Broadway.

00:11:28.440 | That was a great idea, right?

00:11:30.000 | Where'd that come from, you know?

00:11:33.680 | (laughing)

00:11:34.840 | And then for him, what's after that?

00:11:36.880 | Because that body of work is already alive.

00:11:42.760 | It already exists inside us,

00:11:49.040 | kind of like a woman's biological clock,

00:11:51.440 | and we have to serve it.

00:11:54.360 | And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer.

00:11:57.960 | I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer,

00:12:01.480 | that they're not, but you know what I mean.

00:12:03.200 | It'll take its revenge on us.

00:12:06.080 | So the next resistance to me is sort of,

00:12:08.280 | or a big aspect of it is what's next?

00:12:12.440 | When I finish the book I'm working on now,

00:12:13.800 | I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.

00:12:15.800 | - But see, at the same time, you have a kind of,

00:12:19.760 | you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen

00:12:24.680 | single line of albums.

00:12:28.000 | So it's already known somewhere in the universe

00:12:31.440 | what you're going to do next, is the sense you have.

00:12:33.920 | - In a sense, yes.

00:12:35.480 | I don't know if it's predetermined, you know?

00:12:37.920 | But there's something like that.

00:12:40.420 | - Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's,

00:12:45.400 | well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess.

00:12:48.440 | Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse,

00:12:53.000 | it's one thing for sure,

00:12:55.560 | it was always going to be that one thing.

00:12:57.520 | But really, in reality, it's a distribution.

00:13:01.240 | It could be any number of things.

00:13:02.800 | - Yeah, I think so.

00:13:03.640 | There's alternate realities.

00:13:04.840 | - Alternate realities, yeah.

00:13:06.120 | - But they're not that far apart.

00:13:07.460 | I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write

00:13:10.280 | a Joni Mitchell song, you know?

00:13:12.640 | No matter how hard he tries.

00:13:13.480 | - Well, he still went on Broadway,

00:13:14.440 | I mean, he still did that,

00:13:15.880 | which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

00:13:18.320 | So I think you're being, in retrospect,

00:13:21.920 | it all makes sense. - I think it is

00:13:22.760 | a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

00:13:23.840 | It's a next sort of evolution for him.

00:13:25.720 | Why not take his music to there, you know?

00:13:28.840 | - In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.

00:13:32.760 | 'Cause if you pull it off, especially.

00:13:35.020 | (chuckles)

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