Today i want to share my plan with you for the next season of our podcast, The Ten Thousand Heroes Show.
This season, I’m going to focus my solocasts on my own definitions of what a hero is, using the last 2 years of this podcast as my body of research.
I’ve come up with 10 different definitions of heroism so far, and I’m going to do an episode about each one of them over the next few months.
Today, I’m going to describe, briefly, each of those 10 ideas.
But before I do, I just want to plant an idea in your head:
Conflict Is A Spiritual Path
Conflict is the process that brings us the experiences we need for our own
Growing
Knowing
and
Transcendence.
Let’s take it seriously for a moment. If that were true, how would it change how you approach your life?
Your asshole boss.
Your lazy kids.
The latest school shooting,
Or vaccine mandate,
or supreme court decision.
This question has been very alive for me recently, thanks to a mediation course I took with Ken Cloke last month.
Which, just to say, was absolutely amazing, and I would encourage every single thoughtful human to take it.
But it’s very clear in mediation that conflict is our portal to growth and understand.
Bizarrely, that’s also my conclusion from my foray into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
And it’s really showing up in my adventures with cold dips, which so far, have been incredibly short and painful.
Anyhow, that’s a theme to look out for — conflict — in these 10 definitions of what is a hero:
1. A Hero Is In The Flow
By Flow I mean being in the moment, present, with a sense of timelessness. Maybe there’s even an acceptance of uncertainty that’s part of this. I’m going to try to interview Lao Tzu. I’m especially interested in the question of whether it matters what flow I’m in.
If I’m in the flow of dropping bombs or scamming old ladies, is that still heroic?
2. A Hero Does Tonic Work
This is a concept Matt and I came up with last work, based on the Chinese herbal tradition’s notion of Tonic herbs, which are herbs you can take regularly for long periods of time with only positive benefit.
My claim is that Tonic Work would benefit everybody involved: the practitioner, their colleagues, their community, and their clients.
3. A Heroes Loves and Accepts Themselves
This one is pretty obvious to me. The basic idea is that everything else we’re trying to do here — whether it’s relationships or work or mediation or making money, are all just veiled attempts to accept ourselves for who we are.
And thank goodness too: We would never have had twitter wars or LSD or the atomic bomb or Beethoven’s 7th or round-up or pluots or foam surfboards if the people involved were so self-accepting that they didn’t feel the need to DO something.
Even so, there’s a lot of great heroic benefit to be had here.
4. A Hero Lives In Ikigai
I can’t tell whether Ikigai is really a traditional Japanese concept or some new-fangled self-improvement construct attributed to the Japanese.
Regardless, it’s come to mean the intersection of
What you love
What you’re good at
What you can get paid for
What the world needs
Similar to Tonic Work, it seems that finding and inhabiting this notion of Ikigai would be beneficial for everybody.
5. A Hero Slows Time
This is something I’ve seen over and over in my explorations of the past couple of years, from domains as diverse as martial arts, sports, mushroom hunting, meditation, NVC, chess, and the end of the Matrix when Keanu Reeves finally gets it and can dodge bullets.
The key mechanism, as far as I know, is increasing the density and acuity of observation to the point where your stream of processing input is so fast that the actual tempo of reality appear slow in comparison, giving you then “more” time to make a skillful action or decision.
Bonus points for being super-heroic as well as plain heroic.
6. A Hero Masters Emotion
This comes up almost every day with almost every person I talk with. As a culture we are leaving behind the notion that emotions are bad or meant to be silenced or dealt with or even “managed”, and headed towards embracing that every emotion is informationally dense.
Emotions are giving us knowledge about what we really want and need to do. Clearly they need to be integrated into decision-making as a whole, but in this sense, a hero knows they have emotion, are aware of their emotional reality to a minute level of detail, understand what the emotion is communicating to them, and is able to use that information effectively.
7. A Hero Zooms Out
This is some classic enlightenment stuff here. If we can zoom out and witness that which we normally identify as the Self next to all those other characters we normally identify as the Other, so much of the petty struggle and traps drop away and are left with compassionate for those funny characters.
I’m imagining my daughter playing with her dolls. Some are actually dolls. Some are drawings on pieces of cardboard. Some are sticks. But she is zoomed out, omnipotent, and witnesses their dramas with compassion and glee. She is radically and heroically free.
8. A Hero Is Spiritually Obese
Here’s another classic one, for me, which I’ve accessed both through psychedelics and meditation: This sense of expansion of the self so the normal membranes which seem so real, and which separate our bodies and our consciousness from “Others”, just melt away and we begin to include the formally-other beings as ourselves.
This is really easy to do with kids and pets, but pretty hard to do with anybody else without a lot of practice. And yet, when we can access this kind of Obesity effortlessly, the whole false dichotomy of selfishness and altruism dissolves. It makes no sense when my self is so large.
This is actually one way I see the evolution of consciousness and why I’m bullish on our ability to make it — we have been getting more and more Obese over time. In the beginning it was the family and the clan. Then the city sports team and the nation state, crossing all kinds of formally insurmountable ethnic and religious lines. And we still have trouble with that of course. But the trend is just Fatter and Fatter and for me it’s this Spiritual Obesity that is going to save us all.
9. A Hero Sees All Sides
This is directly from that mediation workshop with Ken Cloke. For Ken, a mediator is somebody who can role play every perspective in the room. Not just the opinions but the deep needs and interest that underly everything.
Once we can do that, nobody can simply be “that asshole” any more. Everybody has a story, a history, motivations, trauma. Our actions, as shitty as they often are, make sense. Imagine if you could “See All Sides” in this way of your greatest foil. If I could truly put every one of Dick Cheney’s wars and profiteering arrangements in perspective.
It would be marvelous, wouldn’t it?
10. A Hero Is Made of Heroes
This is going back to Jeff Salzman’s episodes and the developmental perspective. We have multiple characters alive in us, and to be a hero is to take what is heroic about each one of those. In my conversations with Jeff, he talks about 5 of those levels, and when I get deeper into this one, we’ll pick out what is heroic about each of those 5:
From the child whose only way of understanding the world is magic,
To the raw desire for power and autonomy,
To the deep love and respect for order and virtue,
To the amoral genius of rationality,
To the heart-opening realization that everyone has a story.
Alright, friends, that’s the overview of Season 6. I’ll do some interviews too, especially if I can find guests that can address these 10 definitions. Conflict welcomed, because, as you and I know:
The only way out is through.