![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 1st, 2019 11:54 amSo I’m binge-reading self help books at the moment. And right now I’m on Fear Less by Dean Sluyter. And I’ve gotten to a bit where he is recounting an evening when he was running meditation workshops for prisoners. The story revolves around the identification of “That Guy.” Your life would work out if it wasn’t for “That Guy.” It gets fairly easily and amiably to the realization that the absence of “That Guy” won’t make your life better, there will just be someone else who will then become “That Guy.”
But then the book goes farther. Rather than stopping at “That Guy” not being the problem, Sluyter brings up the Dalai Lama and Gurus. Who does the Dalai Lama identify as his guru? The teacher that brought him to his level of enlightenment? Mao Zedong. The man who ordered the invasion, mass murder, and exile that destroyed the Dalai Lama’s original way of life in Tibet. The ultimate “That Guy.” Sluyter even upgrades him to the term Nemesis, the destroyer. His Nemesis was his ultimate teacher.
Which is when my training kicks in and I start nodding. Because this is the Hero’s Journey. It’s the protagonist’s Nemesis, the antagonist, who teaches them what it means to be the best them. It’s the conflict between the Thesis of the protagonist and the AntiThesis of the antagonist that produces the new Synthesis of a “better” world. At least for one of them. And in one view, an alternate around the idea of 4 act structure, there is even the idea of enlightenment’s stepping back from thought and old action: Thesis, Antithesis, Nothingness (Which I can’t for the life of me remember the word for or the book it comes from), and finally Synthesis. The importance there is not just incorporating the lessons of the Antagonist but also using them to undo the Protagonist’s own flaws brought into the system and exposed by the Antagonist.
So it’s worth asking: How is your Antagonist your teacher?
But then the book goes farther. Rather than stopping at “That Guy” not being the problem, Sluyter brings up the Dalai Lama and Gurus. Who does the Dalai Lama identify as his guru? The teacher that brought him to his level of enlightenment? Mao Zedong. The man who ordered the invasion, mass murder, and exile that destroyed the Dalai Lama’s original way of life in Tibet. The ultimate “That Guy.” Sluyter even upgrades him to the term Nemesis, the destroyer. His Nemesis was his ultimate teacher.
Which is when my training kicks in and I start nodding. Because this is the Hero’s Journey. It’s the protagonist’s Nemesis, the antagonist, who teaches them what it means to be the best them. It’s the conflict between the Thesis of the protagonist and the AntiThesis of the antagonist that produces the new Synthesis of a “better” world. At least for one of them. And in one view, an alternate around the idea of 4 act structure, there is even the idea of enlightenment’s stepping back from thought and old action: Thesis, Antithesis, Nothingness (Which I can’t for the life of me remember the word for or the book it comes from), and finally Synthesis. The importance there is not just incorporating the lessons of the Antagonist but also using them to undo the Protagonist’s own flaws brought into the system and exposed by the Antagonist.
So it’s worth asking: How is your Antagonist your teacher?
