Full episode with Steven Pressfield (Jun 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgtedwKGhXs
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Steven Pressfield is a historian and author of War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else. I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and the Warrior Ethos. Also his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans and the battle at Thermopylae, The Lion's Gate, Tides of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written.

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In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance, with a capital R, as the invisible force in this universe of ours that finds a way to prevent you from starting or doing the work.

Where do you think resistance comes from?

Why is there a force in our mind that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts?

I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking, it's called the Yetzir Ha-Rah, right?

And it's a force that if this up here is your soul, Neshamah, trying to talk to you, us down here, the Yetzir Ha-Rah is this negative force in the middle.

So I'm not the only 1 that ever thought about this.

But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer, but here's my answer.

I think that there are 2 places where we as human beings can see our identity.

1 is the ego, the conscious ego, and the other is the greater self.

And the self in the Jungian sense, the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground, which what I would call the muse, the goddess or whatever.

And I think, and the ego is just this little dot inside this bigger self.

And the ego has a completely different view of life from the self.

The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here, Lex.

The ego believes that time and space are real.

The ego believes that each 1 of us is separate from the other.

I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me.

And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear.

Because we are all made of flesh, we can all die, we can all be hurt, we can all be ruined, bump, bada-bump.

So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create, as we were talking about before, comes out of that fear of death.

The self, on the other hand, the greater self that butts up against the divine ground believes that death is not real, that time and space are not real, that the gods travel swift as thought, And the ego also believes that, I mean, the self believes that there's no difference between you and me, that we're all 1.

If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right?

And in the world of the self, of the greater self, the dominant emotion is love, not fear.

Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here, a long way to answer your question.

When Jesus died on the cross, or when the

Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives at Thermopylae.

They were acting according to the rules of the self.

Death is not real, no difference between you and me.

So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels are in a struggle between these 2 things, the ego and the self.

To me, resistance is the voice of the ego saying, and it's a fearful voice, because if, when we identify with the self, we move our consciousness over to the self, as artists or scientists, opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces, the ego is tremendously threatened by that.

Because if we're in that space, that head space, we don't need the ego anymore.

So I think resistance is a voice of the ego trying to keep control of us.

In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump

That's probably a very good example, right?

It's a zero-sum world for him and for anybody that's in that.

And the opposite of that would be somebody like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.

And That's of course why they all wind up getting assassinated.

Because that voice, that ego, is hanging on to itself and feels so threatened by, I could talk more about this if you want.

It's just, it's interesting why the fear is attached to the ego.

I really like this dichotomy of ego and self and that struggle.

It's just, ego has a, you know, the self-obsession of it.

Why is resistance trying to undermine everything?

Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories.

In a story, the villain is always resistance, is always the ego.

The hero is always, of course, always is not everything, but you know what I mean, pretty much represents kind of the self.

If you think about the alien on the spaceship, that's like the ultimate kind of villain.

First it goes on the guy's face, then it pops out of his chest, but it always just has that 1 monomaniacal thing to destroy, you know?

And just like the ego, just like resistance.

And maybe alien is a bad example because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of Fight on the same terms as as the alien but maybe a better example might be something like Casablanca where in the end the Humphrey Bogart character has to Acting operating out of the self has to give up his his selfish dream of going off with Ingrid Bergman, Neil Salon, the love of his life.

And instead, you know, puts her on a plane to Lisbon while he goes off to fight the Nazis and you know, in the desert.

I don't know if that's clear, but in almost every story, the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear, is that zero-sum thing.

And in almost every story, the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others.

It's letting go of that fear is what leads to productivity and to success.

Do you think there's a, this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible, but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage to resistance?

Like what would life look like without resistance?

I think, I also believe that resistance, like death, gives a meaning to life.

If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, you know, what would we be?

We'd be in the Garden of Eden picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know?

And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden is really about this kind of thing, you know, where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters into their own hands and acquire knowledge that until then, God had said, I'm the only 1 that's got that knowledge.

And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge, they're cast out into the world you and I live in now, where they do have to deal with that fear and they do have to deal with all that stuff.

It's a human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes from the resistance being there and the struggle to overcome it.

And also the other aspect of it is that it's not real at all.

So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it, you know?

of like turning on the light in a dark thing.

Not quite, because it comes back again tomorrow morning.

So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day.

So what's been, maybe recently, but in general, maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless, or 1 of the more relentless sources of resistance to you personally?

It's about writing for me, and evolving within my own body of work.

It never goes away, it never gets any less.

Do you have particular excuses, particular justifications that come out?

Well, I would say it's always the same, but it's really not because resistance is so protean.

And as you move to hopefully a higher level, resistance gets a little more nuanced and a little more subtle trying to fake you out.

But I think you learn that it's always there and you're always gonna have to face it.

I mean, your battle is sitting down and writing to some number of words to a blank page.

Do you have a process there with this battle?

Do you have a number of hours that you put in?

Yeah, I'm definitely a believer that even though this battle is fought on the highest sort of spiritual level, that the way you fight it is on the most mundane, I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way.

I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning and I sort of am rehearsing myself.

Face, you know, the gym is called resistance training, right, you're working against resistance, right?

And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed, I hate to, you know, so, But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day.

And like I said, over Knockwood, over years, I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset and it's not as hard for me as it used to be.

The real resistance I think for me, and I think this is true for anybody, is the question of sort of what's the next idea?

What's the next project that you're gonna work on?

And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse.

If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums, it's kind of, well, what's the next album?

But, and then for him, what's after that?

Because that body of work is already alive.

It already exists inside us, kind of like a woman's biological clock, and we have to serve it.

And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer.

I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer, that they're not, you know.

So the next resistance to me is sort of, or a big aspect of it is what's next?

You know, when I finish the book I'm working on now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.

And let's see, at the same time, you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen single line of albums.

So it's already known somewhere in the universe what you're going to do next, is the sense you have.

I don't know if it's like predetermined, you know, but there's something like that.

Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's, well, It's kind of

Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse, it's 1 thing for sure, it was always going to be that 1 thing.

But really, in reality, it's a distribution.

I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write a Joni Mitchell song, you know?

went on Broadway, I mean, he still did that, which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

Why not take his music to there, you know?

In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.


Speaker 0: In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance, with a capital R, as the invisible force in this universe of ours that finds a way to prevent you from starting or doing the work. Where do you think resistance comes from? Why is there a force in our mind that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts? With laziness, excuses, and so on.

Speaker 1: That's another great question. I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking, it's called the Yetzir Ha-Rah, right? And it's a force that if this up here is your soul, Neshamah, trying to talk to you, us down here, the Yetzir Ha-Rah is this negative force in the middle. So I'm not the only 1 that ever thought about this. But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer, but here's my answer.

I think that there are 2 places where we as human beings can see our identity. 1 is the ego, the conscious ego, and the other is the greater self. And the self in the Jungian sense, the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground, which what I would call the muse, the goddess or whatever. And I think, and the ego is just this little dot inside this bigger self. And the ego has a completely different view of life from the self.

The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here, Lex.

Speaker 0: No, perfect.

Speaker 1: The ego believes that death is real. The ego believes that time and space are real. The ego believes that each 1 of us is separate from the other. I'm separate from you. I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me.

It would only hurt you. And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear. Because we are all made of flesh, we can all die, we can all be hurt, we can all be ruined, bump, bada-bump. So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create, as we were talking about before, comes out of that fear of death. The self, on the other hand, the greater self that butts up against the divine ground believes that death is not real, that time and space are not real, that the gods travel swift as thought, And the ego also believes that, I mean, the self believes that there's no difference between you and me, that we're all 1.

If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right? And in the world of the self, of the greater self, the dominant emotion is love, not fear. Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here, a long way to answer your question. When Jesus died on the cross, or when the

Speaker 0: 300

Speaker 1: Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives at Thermopylae. They were acting according to the rules of the self. Death is not real, no difference between you and me. Time and space are not real. Predominant emotion is love.

So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels are in a struggle between these 2 things, the ego and the self. To me, resistance is the voice of the ego saying, and it's a fearful voice, because if, when we identify with the self, we move our consciousness over to the self, as artists or scientists, opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces, the ego is tremendously threatened by that. Because if we're in that space, that head space, we don't need the ego anymore. So I think resistance is a voice of the ego trying to keep control of us. In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump

Speaker 0: is the ego. That's probably a very good example, right? Yeah, he's, yeah.

Speaker 1: It's a zero-sum world for him and for anybody that's in that. And the opposite of that would be somebody like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. And That's of course why they all wind up getting assassinated. Because that voice, that ego, is hanging on to itself and feels so threatened by, I could talk more about this if you want.

Speaker 0: No, for sure, that's fascinating. It's just, it's interesting why the fear is attached to the ego. I really like this dichotomy of ego and self and that struggle. It's just, ego has a, you know, the self-obsession of it. Why fear is such a predominant thing?

Why is resistance trying to undermine everything? It's fear,

Speaker 1: it's out of fear. Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories. In a story, the villain is always resistance, is always the ego. The hero is always, of course, always is not everything, but you know what I mean, pretty much represents kind of the self. If you think about the alien on the spaceship, that's like the ultimate kind of villain.

It keeps changing form, right? First it goes on the guy's face, then it pops out of his chest, but it always just has that 1 monomaniacal thing to destroy, you know? And just like the ego, just like resistance. And maybe alien is a bad example because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of Fight on the same terms as as the alien but maybe a better example might be something like Casablanca where in the end the Humphrey Bogart character has to Acting operating out of the self has to give up his his selfish dream of going off with Ingrid Bergman, Neil Salon, the love of his life. And instead, you know, puts her on a plane to Lisbon while he goes off to fight the Nazis and you know, in the desert.

I don't know if that's clear, but in almost every story, the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear, is that zero-sum thing. And in almost every story, the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others.

Speaker 0: It's letting go of that fear is what leads to productivity and to success.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 0: Do you think there's a, this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible, but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage to resistance? Like what would life look like without resistance?

Speaker 1: That's another great question. I think, I also believe that resistance, like death, gives a meaning to life. If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, you know, what would we be? We'd be in the Garden of Eden picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know? And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden is really about this kind of thing, you know, where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters into their own hands and acquire knowledge that until then, God had said, I'm the only 1 that's got that knowledge.

And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge, they're cast out into the world you and I live in now, where they do have to deal with that fear and they do have to deal with all that stuff. It's a human condition.

Speaker 0: It's a human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes from the resistance being there and the struggle to overcome it.

Speaker 1: To overcome it, right. And also the other aspect of it is that it's not real at all. It's not even like it's an actual force. It's all here, right? So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it, you know?

Speaker 0: You know? Or it's just, It's sort

Speaker 1: of like turning on the light in a dark thing. It's like, it's gone.

Speaker 0: But not quite because it's never really.

Speaker 1: Not quite, because it comes back again tomorrow morning.

Speaker 0: Yeah, exactly. So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day. So what's been, maybe recently, but in general, maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless, or 1 of the more relentless sources of resistance to you personally?

Speaker 1: I mean, it's always the same. It's about writing for me, and evolving within my own body of work. It never goes away, it never gets any less.

Speaker 0: Do you have particular excuses, particular justifications that come out?

Speaker 1: No, it's always the same. Well, I would say it's always the same, but it's really not because resistance is so protean. You know, it keeps changing form. And as you move to hopefully a higher level, resistance gets a little more nuanced and a little more subtle trying to fake you out. But I think you learn that it's always there and you're always gonna have to face it.

Speaker 0: I mean, your battle is sitting down and writing to some number of words to a blank page. Do you have a process there with this battle? Do you have a number of hours that you put in? Do you sit down?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm definitely a believer that even though this battle is fought on the highest sort of spiritual level, that the way you fight it is on the most mundane, I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way. I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning and I sort of am rehearsing myself. Face, you know, the gym is called resistance training, right, you're working against resistance, right? And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed, I hate to, you know, so, But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day. And like I said, over Knockwood, over years, I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset and it's not as hard for me as it used to be.

The real resistance I think for me, and I think this is true for anybody, is the question of sort of what's the next idea? What's the next book? What's the next project that you're gonna work on? And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse. I'm kind of saying, what do you want me?

Or I'm asking it of my unconscious. If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums, it's kind of, well, what's the next album? You know, now he's on Broadway. That was a great idea, right? Yeah, that was great.

Where'd that come from, You know? But, and then for him, what's after that? You know? Because that body of work is already alive. It already exists inside us, kind of like a woman's biological clock, and we have to serve it.

And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer. I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer, that they're not, you know. But you know what I mean. It'll take its revenge on us. So the next resistance to me is sort of, or a big aspect of it is what's next?

You know, when I finish the book I'm working on now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.

Speaker 0: And let's see, at the same time, you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen single line of albums. So it's already known somewhere in the universe what you're going to do next, is the sense you have.

Speaker 1: In a sense, yes. I don't know if it's like predetermined, you know, but there's something like that. Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's, well, It's kind of

Speaker 0: like quantum mechanics, I guess. Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse, it's 1 thing for sure, it was always going to be that 1 thing. But really, in reality, it's a distribution. It could be any number of things.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. There's alternate realities.

Speaker 0: Alternate realities, yeah.

Speaker 1: But they're not that far apart. I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write a Joni Mitchell song, you know? No matter how hard he tries. Well, he still

Speaker 0: went on Broadway, I mean, he still did that, which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. So I think you're being, in retrospect,

Speaker 1: it all makes sense. I think it is

Speaker 0: a Bruce

Speaker 1: Springsteen thing to do. It's a next sort of evolution for him. Why not take his music to there, you know?

Speaker 0: In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think. Yeah. Because if

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The Ego is the Source of Fear - Steven Pressfield | AI Podcast Clips