How many of us have become drunk and addicted to drugs, developed tumours and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell phone use, simply because we don't do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, call us? The resistance is defeating us.
If every dazed and mysterious soul wakes up tomorrow morning and has the power to take the first step towards realizing its dreams, then every contraction of the guide will be out of work. Prisons will remain empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries, along with fast food, plastic surgery, and infotainment companies, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and medical professions will collapse from top to bottom. Domestic violence will die out, as will addiction, obesity, migraines, and road rage.
Dad gets drunk, mom nurses, Janie shows up to church with the Oakland Riders tattoo. It's more fun than a movie. A success: Nobody accomplishes anything.
The act of the victim is a form of passive aggression. It seeks fulfilment not through sincere action or contribution made through an individual's experience, insight, or love, but through manipulation of others through the silent (and non-silent) threat. The victim forces others to come to his rescue or act as he pleases by holding them hostage for possible further illness / mental breakdown/melting, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do whatever he wants.
Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronor, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Have you seen one of his paintings before? I also did not defeat him; I was the resistance. Call it an exaggeration, but I'll say it anyway: It was easier for Hitler to start world war II than to face an empty square of cloth.
Resistance comes when you do: any act that refuses immediate gratification in favour of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Any action that derives from our higher nature rather than our lower nature.
Resistance appears to be coming from outside of ourselves. We put it in spouses, jobs, presidents, and children.
Resistance arises from within. It is self-produced and self-perpetuating.
The more important the invitation or action is to the development of our spirit, the more resistance we feel towards pursuing it.
We never tell ourselves, "I will never write a symphony." Instead, we say, "I'll write my symphony; I'll start tomorrow."
A large advertising agency in New York, our boss used to tell us: He invented a disease. Come on with the sickness, he said, and we can sell the cure. Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These are not diseases; they are marketing ploys. Doctors didn't discover it, as did the copywriters. Done marketing departments. Pharmaceutical companies did.
"This is a pretty impressive acting," noted Jerry Seinfeld over his twenty years of dating.
The Resistance also told me that I should not seek to educate or present myself as a provider of wisdom; That this was vain, selfish, and perhaps even corrupt,
What is the feeling of resistance? First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. Low-grade misery reigns overall. We feel bored, we feel anxious.
We live in a consumer culture that is acutely aware of this unhappiness and has mobilized all of its for-profit artillery to exploit it. We sell a product, a drug, a distraction.
The artist and fundamentalist arise from societies at different stages of development. The artist is the advanced form. Its culture possesses the richness, stability and surplus of resources to allow for the luxury of self-examination. The artist is rooted in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He was lucky. He was born in the right place. He has the essence of self-confidence and hope for the future. He believes in progress and development. He believes that humankind is advancing, albeit hesitantly and imperfectly, toward a better world. The fundamentalist does not present such an idea. In his opinion, humanity has fallen from a higher state. Truth is not awaiting revelation. It has already been revealed. The prophet of God uttered the word of God and recorded it, whether it was Jesus, Muhammad or Karl Marx. Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the weak, the defeated, the displaced, and the dispossessed.
The fundamentalist cannot tolerate freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he regresses to the past. Imagination goes back to the glory days.
His creativity is reversed. It creates devastation.
Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.
A truly free individual is only free to the extent of his self-mastery.
Those who will not rule themselves are doomed to find masters to rule them.
Individuals who are aware of their private lives rarely criticize others. If they speak at all, that's to offer encouragement.
Inside the Actors Studio: The host, James Lipton, always asks his guests, "What factors make you decide to take on a particular role?"
The actor always answers, "Because I'm afraid of that." The professional deals with the project that will make it extend. He takes on a mission that will carry him into uncharted waters, forcing him to explore unconscious parts of himself. Is he afraid? Hell, yeah. It is fossilized. (Conversely, a professional reject the roles he played before. He's not afraid of them anymore. Why wastes their time?) So, if you're paralyzed out of fear, that's a good sign. It shows you what you need to do.
If you feel immense resistance, the good news is that there is enormous love there, too. If you don't like the project that terrifies you, you won't feel anything.
(Santa Barbara & Okay, California): It is inhabited by upper-middle-class people with more time and money than they know what to do with it, as the culture of healing also pervades. The concept in all of these settings seems to be that one needs to complete one recovery before one is ready to do one job. This way of thinking is a form of resistance. What are we trying to address, anyway? The athlete knows that the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. It should play painfully.
What is the best way to avoid work than to go to a workshop?
What is worse than the hate is the word "support.”? Any flesh and blood support we get from people is like monopoly money; It is not legal tender in this area as we have to do our work.
"Who can go through your day without two or three excuses. It's more important than sex. Have you ever spent a week without justification?"
Justification: a series of reasonable and rational justifications for why we shouldn't do our job.
Much of it is true. But all this means closely. Tolstoy had thirteen children and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong contracted cancer and won the Tour de France.
The working artist will not tolerate problems in her life because she knows that problems prevent her from doing her work.
For a book (or any project or project) to catch our attention for all the time it takes to reveal itself, it must enter into some inner bewilderment or emotion that is of the utmost importance to us.
The more psychological energy we spend on razing and re-razing tired and boring grievances in our personal lives, the less juice we have to do for our work.
Hades comes from the Latin root meaning "love." The traditional explanation is that the amateurs pursue their vocation out of love, while the professional does it for the money. Not the way to see it. In my opinion, amateurs don't like the game enough. If he did, he wouldn't pursue her as a side-line, as distinct from his "real" career. The professional loves her very much and dedicates his life to her. Committed full-time. This is what I mean when I side-line say professional transformation. The resistance hates it when we turn into professionals.
Inspiration comes every morning at nine in the morning.
resistance; I will not let it bother me. I'll sit down and do my job.
The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for the artist.
The artist who sticks to his calling volunteered for Hell: a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
Do the qualities distinguish us as professionals?
1) We show every day.
2) We show whatever happens.
3) We stay at work all day. Our minds may wander, but our bodies remain at the wheel.
6) We accept payment for our work. We are not here for fun. We work for the money.
7) We don't over-publicize our jobs.
8) We master our working style.
The amateurs, on the other hand, overemphasize their artistic ambitions. He introduces himself to it. He is a musician, painter, and playwright. The resistance loves this. The resistance realizes that the hobbyist composer will never write his symphony because he is over-investing in its success and overestimating its failure. The amateurs take it so seriously that it paralyzes him.
Now think of the amateurs: the aspiring painter, the wannabe playwright. How to follow up on his call? First, he doesn't attend every day. Second, it doesn't show whatever happens. Third, he doesn't stay on the job all day. Not committed in the long run. The bets for him are fake and fake. He gets no money. He over-introduces him to his art. He has no sense of humour about failure.
The professional, despite accepting money, does his job out of love. He must love it. Otherwise, he will not devote his life to her of his own free will. However, the professional has learned that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke on. The apparent separation from the professional, the cold character from his behaviour, is a compensatory tool to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes at work. Playing with money, or taking the stand of someone playing with money, reduces the fever.
The professional focuses on technology. A professional masters how and leave what and why to the gods.
Professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself to be superior to her. He wants to have a whole arsenal of skills when inspiration comes.
It wants us to share our self-esteem, who we are, and why we are, to the response of others to our work. The resistance knows that we cannot stand this. no one can. The professional blows up the critics. He doesn't even hear them. And he states himself that the critics are unintentional mouthpieces of resistance
Critics: They can express in their reviews the same toxic poison that the resistance itself is making inside our heads. This is their true evil. Not that we believe them, but that we do believe in resistance in our minds, for which the critics act as subconscious speakers.
A professional realizes his limitations: he gets an agent, he gets a lawyer, and he is held accountable. He knows she can only be a professional about one thing. He brings other benefits and treats them with respect.
Making yourself a company (or just thinking of yourself in this way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist doing the work from the will and the consciousness that runs the show.
If we think of ourselves as a company, it gives us a healthy distance. We are less subjective. We do not handle strikes personally.
The most important thing in art is work. Nothing else is important but to sit down every day and try.
The ancients felt powerful primitive forces in the world. To make them friendly, they introduced them to human faces. They called them Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite. The American Indians felt the same mystery but presented it in lively forms - Bear Teacher, Hawk Messenger, Coyote Trickster.
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”
None of us is born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead, we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul. Another way of thinking is this: We’re not born with unlimited choices. We can’t be anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be but to find out who we already are and become it.
A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for. The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he’s superior to them. The truth is, he’s scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of being authentic in front of them, scared of writing what he feels or believes, what he thinks is interesting.
Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?
Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue.
If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.
