I read today’s Monday Morning Memo, as usual, and it made me look. 1
Who are my favorite fictional characters?
At first I looked at the ones that weren’t supposed to survive, weren’t supposed to succeed, because they paralleled my own life experience.
But their influence on the multitudes was minimal, because they were about themselves, or maybe about one other person… and I saw that I have grown beyond that path. I have grown beyond the little Chinese boy’s character, my favorite as a child. I have grown beyond the deaf and blind yet dutiful character of Helen Keller, another favorite character of mine from childhood. I have even grown beyond “Socrates”, the orphan boy that became the Peaceful warrior in Dan Millman’s books. The little girl in the movie “King of Masks” or BianLian. that you can watch in the subscribers’ area of my site.
A new hero is needed
I am devouring the history of the Mongols, and I am contemplating following in the footsteps of Genghis Khan, whose childhood matches the early pattern, wasn’t supposed to live, wasn’t supposed to succeed, but who took it way way beyond, and became a history maker, a visionary…
Genghis saw that the way his people lived was a very small picture living: the energy wasn’t moving, and they had been living for thousands of years the exact same way, and would have lived that way, hadn’t he seen a path that would have forced them to evolve.
He forced his vision to the world: commerce, division of labor, the moving of knowledge, the moving of goods, a world where it is a one world where the whole world benefits from the invention of a genius on the other end of the world, and where the whole world benefits from the flowing of energy.
His vision did not inherit. His sons, his generals didn’t see the big picture: they saw the power, the riches, the personal benefits to them and theirs.
He was a leader. He changed the future of Europe, he changed the near future of his own people, but he didn’t change people.
He didn’t change what people saw. People continued to see themselves as separate from others, and they continued to think only for themselves.
If force could work, I would not shy away from force.
If I could force you to break out of the little box and the pretense of a bigger box, I would do it in a heartbeat, and you’d be grateful I did it.
But like in the example of the cocoon and the butterfly: wanting to get out of the cocoon that prepares the thing inside to become a beautiful butterfly, the next evolutionary stage of that thing… through pain and their own effort.
YOU don’t want to get out of the cocoon. You want to feel good, you want to feel good about yourself, but you have no desire to see what the next evolutionary stage brings, especially if it takes pain and work, seemingly endless effort.
You prefer to have a good time with what you got, with where you are.
All I can do is hope for disasters that destroy your current life, so what you have is not good enough any more.
New ice age? I can’t even think what disaster would dislodge you from your complacency. Maybe the next species that will take over as the peak of “creation?”
The Neanderthals were nicer people than the new branch of humans that overtook them. They were hospitable, and trusting… so the nasty new people took over, and then populated the earth.
Will the next highest evolutionary species be nice or nasty? None of us will live to see it.
- That is the best any writer or speaker can hope for… I wonder how many of you looks after you read my articles. Not many… I really only know of one person.
What is different about that person is that she passes the new knowledge, the looking, onto her children. She made her self-interest bigger than just herself: she includes her children. That is the first step in the direction of evolution.
The rest of you never shares. The rest of you never gets involved. Never looks beyond the surface. Neither here nor anywhere.
So, if you talk, you talk about. About me. About what I said. But you cannot, for the life of you, speak it as your own.
That one person works on it until it is her speaking, not me.
There is no other way. She reminds me of myself: when I did Landmark Education, I always volunteered to coach, or to re-deliver a seminar to people who could not make it. Talking about the seminar wasn’t going to be useful. I needed to re-deliver it, i.e. speak it as if they were my thoughts… But for that I had to work for hours, to actually make it my own.
Without that work, everything is like a rain: it may wash you a little cleaner, but you’ll never be the rain. Your job would be to BECOME the rain.
