Author Steven Pressfield on Ego Causing Procrastination; Being a Force of Nature

Not only is it universal in that everybody experiences it, but they all seem to experience it with the same script. You know, you're not worthy, you're too old, too young, too fat, too thin, whatever. Or let's do something else, let's distract ourselves with something else. So everybody gets the same thing. I mean, I always say that it's a force of nature, you know? It's not personal. It's not specific to you, even though that voice in your head sounds like it is specific to you. It's saying, Joe, and then it's hitting you right in the points that are your sore points, you know? Yeah. But it's really not personal. Everybody seems to experience the same thing. And... What do you think it is? When did you write The War of Art? 2002. And in that time, after writing that, I'm sure it's obviously been a very successful book. So you've had time to think about this. Like, what do you think is going on? Like, why are people... Why is that a force of nature? What is it? I'll give you... This is my lengthy explanation, but I'll give you my theory. Please. If we think of the human... Everybody's got to bear with me. This takes a minute or two. If you think of the human psyche, we got the ego, which is like a little black dot in the middle of a greater thing that we would call the self. Like the Jungian self with a capital S. And the self contains the collective unconscious, all the aspects of the unconscious. The hero's journey, the archetypes of the unconscious, all of the sort of intuitive stuff. When you, I would imagine, come up with great comedy material or any kind of material, it's coming from that self, coming from that deeper place. And even when Jung or Joseph Campbell describe the self, they have a... I have a little diagram in the war of art where adjacent to this larger self, they'd have like three arrows and the arrows are coming from what they call the divine ground, which I take to mean whatever greater force is out there, you know, that will come to you. So, this is a long way of saying that the ego, which is, right, your I part, the part that identifies with this body and with the ego wants to be in control, right? The ego is where you drive down to the store, you get it, whatever it is, right? But when you're trying to tap into that greater intelligence, like if you're writing, if you're trying to come up to, if you're a musician, if you're any kind of creative person, you're trying to surrender to that self, to that greater self. And I feel like the ego hates that. The ego knows if you make that shift to identify with that greater self, then the ego is out of business. So, I think, this is my theory, that the ego produces resistance to try to stop you from connecting and trusting and believing because it is a leap of faith, right, to get to that other level, wherever it is. So, the ego says to you, who do you think you are to try to tap into that thing? Who do you think you are to come up with this idea? It's been done a million times better than you'll ever do it. You don't have the chops to do this. You're going to fall on your ass, etc., etc., etc. Or, let me distract you. Why don't we chase some women? Why don't we get drunk? Why don't we hang out with our buddies? Whatever it is. But so, I think that what the ego wants is to maintain its control, right? And if you make that shift into that greater self, that's when you really are starting to tap into great stuff. That's where the great stuff comes from. And that puts the ego out of a job. At least, this is my theory, Joe. So, I think that the ego produces it. I mean, it's interesting, animals don't experience resistance. I'm sure they don't, right? Right, but they also don't experience creativity. True. But they're in that greater world, I think, naturally. Right. They're free. They're in that God energy. An eagle or somebody that's flying, you watch the tiniest little wings or feathers even, you know, control it. They're not thinking about anything, right? When they're hunting or whatever it is. So, anyway, that's my theory on what resistance is. Now, Seth Godin, you know who he is. He's a believer that it's the... Who am Seth Godin? I do not know this. Seth Godin is a kind of a marketing guru, one of the earliest guys on the internet from way back when, when it first began. And is a great teacher of marketing and stuff like that. And also a wonderful guy in this areas in the sense that he is highly ethical dude. Like when he talks about businesses, startups, and all the things that he's kind of helping people with, ethics is a huge part of it. So I really respect the guy. And he's a great deep thinker too. Now, he thinks it's what he calls the lizard brain, the amygdala, which I'm not even sure what that is. I guess it's the reptile brain at the back of your head that that's what's producing something that wants producing resistance. But anyway, I respect his thinking on that, but I think it's what I just explained to you. What you're saying makes a lot of sense. And the ego, whatever that thing is, that it's so interesting how it's not able to see that it would actually benefit the ego if you didn't have resistance. Yes. Which is really weird. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Yeah, because if the ego was wise and had like foresight, it could see the future go, if we just give in and relax and relinquish control, then we're going to come up with better stuff and our life's going to be better. Be able to buy a nicer house. Maybe if you go on trips, your work will do well, everything will be good. It's a deep subject because also if you think about the egos of you of what life is, I'm going to go into some deep stuff for you to mark this stuff, right? You don't have to clarify. The ego has a whole view. The ego believes that this material world is all there is, right? The ego believes in death. The ego believes that when this body dies, we die, right? The ego believes that this flesh can be hurt, can be maimed, can be broken, et cetera, et cetera. So the ego is naturally lives in fear. I think that the predominant emotion of the ego, if we're living in the ego, which 99% of people do, our predominant emotion is fear, right? And fear, even though we might not know it, fear of death, which is kind of why people want to achieve, I think, right? Let me make a name for myself, blah, blah, blah, why people want to have children, children will live on, why they have insurance, why they try to succeed and have a big house and this and that and the other thing, right? It's all sort of coming out of a mindset of fear. Whereas this giant self, in my opinion, the bigger self that is connected to the thing, its predominant emotion is love, if you ask me. Now the ego, another thing the ego believes is that I am separate from you, right? We are all separate individuals, right? I could hurt you and it won't hurt me. That's what the ego thinks, right? That's why so much of the evil that happens in the world comes out of that, right? We can torture these sons of bitches and it won't happen to us, right? Nothing bad will happen to us. But the self believes exactly the opposite. Once you get into that deep level, right, that we are not separate from one another, that you and I are bound together in some kind of way along with all of humanity and all of the animal life and all of the planet, all of the oceans and all of that. And so the predominant emotion in that self is the emotion of love. So the ego, this is my belief anyway, the ego being centered in fear is going to try to hang on to what it's got, right? If the ego thinks that it's living our life, it's calling the shots, it's going to hang on to that, you know, out of fear. And that's why I think it's so strong, resistance is so strong. The closer you get to moving into that self, into that greater space, like if you're sitting down and trying to write a novel and you get into a kind of a flow of it, that's what the ego is really afraid of because it's such a kind of empowering and intoxicating experience. The ego says to itself, shit, if this guy stays over here very long, he's never going to go back to, you know, to where I call the shots. I think that's why it makes itself, it puts such an intense shot at you to stop you from getting there. So this greater self, what is, what do you think that is? If the greater self is all about love and the greater self is what recognizes the connection between all of us, what is the greater self? Okay, it's a great question. I know that you're a guy that's into psychedelics to some extent, right? I mean, when you, now my only experience with psychedelics is back in the sixties, you know, so I haven't done any of the stuff that people are doing now. You want some? No, thank you. I'm too old for that. You're not too old. But one of the things that you know... You have resistance, that's resistance to psychedelics. Maybe so. But one of the things that you know from LSD or from mescaline or anything like that, right, is you suddenly see a whole other world that was not there before, right? Even though you're looking at that wall, all of a sudden that wall becomes so beautiful, right, that you can't even say anything except, wow, right? So that I believe, I was thinking in those moments, this must be the way Jesus sees the world or the Dalai Lama sees the world or God sees the world. And when I come back to my regular self and I see this kind of normal shrunk down world, that's not the real world, right? There's another world that's greater. And so that's sort of my feeling about it, Joe, that when the self, when you enter that, there is a greater world. We're living in that greater world right now. We just can't see it, you know? We just see what's in front of us. And I think another aspect of it to me, you would know a lot more about this than I do, being more in the present of this, is that if you're living in that kind of psychedelic world, you really can't drive a car, you really can't operate heavy equipment, you really can't handle the stuff you have to handle, you can't do your taxes, right? So in order to kind of live, you do have to sort of shrink that world down, right? To push all the beauty aside and all the amazing shit aside. But that doesn't stop the fact that that stuff is there, right? I always wonder, what was it like before we were born and what's it going to be like after we die? Are we going to live in that world? Are we going to enter that world again? And what is that? What will that be like? Do you think that this narrowed down world that you're talking about when the psychedelics wear off, do you think that's an artifact of the cold, hard reality of being an animal living amongst predators and other violent human beings on earth where in order to survive, in order to raise your children and protect your village and provide food to each other, you kind of have to have this very simplistic, just as you said, narrowed down, just different ways. You can't just wax euphorically about the concept of the universe and life and love. I do believe that, yes. And I think that's why, again, like what I was saying about the ego being dominated by the emotion of fear, right? And also our parents, right, and our society, our school, everything, for our own good as we're kids growing up tells us all that, right? It kind of indoctrinates us into that world for our own good, right? It wants to protect us, you know? On your way walking to school, nobody's going to beat you up, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I do think that's the case. It's kind of a strange world, isn't it, that God created for us? I mean, on the one hand, there's this beautiful other dimensional reality out there, but then there's this hardcore world of predators, you know, in order to, you know, like what did you just have on Instagram today? An alligator taking off the leg off a deer? I mean, that's that... Did I? You don't even know if it was there, but it's there. We just saw it a few minutes ago. I had it on Instagram? Yeah, I think so. Oh, it was... Diana had it shown it to me. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, there was a crocodile that took a pig and snapped it in half. Oh, is that what it was? Like that. Yeah, I didn't see it. It's like a terrifying video. But, yeah, that's the world, right? The guy gave us, right? Yeah, sure. And predators and prey and monsters. Yeah, yeah.