"Many years ago in Thailand there is a temple that was called the temple of the Golden Buddha." "And there was a huge statue of the Golden Buddha." "And word came to his village where the monastery was that an army from neighboring country was about to invade." "And they've got the brilliant scheme to cover the Golden Buddha which is quite large with mud and concrete so better look basicly like a stone Buddha and the army would perceive no value in it." "Sure enough this army rolled in with its ... arms and weapons and as they passed by the monastery they saw nothing but a big stone Buddha and they have no reason to plunder it Well years went by because the army continued to occupy" "until there was a time in the monestary and the village when no one remembered that the Buddha was golden until one day a young monk was sitting on the Buddha meditating on his knee and as he got up a little piece of concrete" "happened to crack off and he saw something shiny." "He realized there was gold under there and so he ran to his fellow monks and said "The Buddha is golden, the Buddha is golden", and they all came out and realized he is telling the truth" "they took the pics and harass." "And eventually they unearthed the Golden Buddha." "So what's a metaphor here?" "The metaphor is that each of us is golden by nature were born golden we were born high, we were born knowing, were born connected to our bliss, were born knowing truth, we were born knowing everything that every great spiritual master has ever said," "we were one with the Christ, the Buddha, everyone but then we went to school and they said you had to be just like this, and they said these are sweat boys and sweat girls, white people and black people and on and on and on," "and so we developed the casing of stone over the Buddha to ... at a young age, maybe four or five six or seven, we believe that we are the stone Buddha, not the Golden one." "And then, something comes along that cracks that casing, maybe it's an injury, a divorce, financial setbacks, our governmental change, something that really scares us and bugs us (?" "HÍ) and knocks off a piece of our armour, and all in that moment that the armour is being knocked off, they get a look inside and see the golden." "Let me tell you friend, that the moment you see that gold the armour and the concrete will never satisfy you again." "At that point you truly enter to the true heroe's adventure an all you want to do for the rest of your life is pick away the stone because the gold is so much more fun." "Finding Joe" " A film by Patrick Takaya Solomon (suggested subtitle instead of this for SEO purposes):" "The Hero's Journey Movie" " Joseph Campbell Who is Joseph Campbell and why should we care?" "(Robert Walter" " President:" "Joseph Campbell Foundation)" "A topic that comes up a lot." "Joseph Campbell was one of the leading mythology experts of all time" "Joseph Campbell is a philosopher." "The man who had this ability to see the truth in a world where we've lost sight of that in many ways. and actually started by studying" "Native American mythology." "He fell in love with it when he was a kid." "This was his bliss." "He went on studying the aboriginal cultures he studied Greek mythology, he studied Arthurian legend," "He dissected and really diagrammed all of our stories." "He compared philosophies, mythic stories of the whole world." "All myths, all movies all novels, all romances" "He found this one story within (Chungling Al Huang, Founder-President:" "Living Tao Foundation / Tai Ji Master) all the stories, that we can relate to, no matter where you come from." "He recognized that in spite of all the different stories we seem to be telling, there is really only one." "And He called it the Hero's Journey." "There must have been thousands and thousands of hero's stories (Gay Hendricks Ph.D., best selling author, The Hendricks Institute) from every culture, but until Joseph Campbell came along certainly I never realized how they all kind of fit together and how they were" "basically the same story." "I was religion major in college." "I was taking my final exam." "(Rashida Jones" " Actress/Screenwriter)" "I had a moment where I've just gobsmacked." "It was just like holy crap, it's all the same thing." "I mean it is really all the same thing." "The hero's journey is a pattern." "You can almost think of it as an algorythm, that has three basic parts:" "separation, initiation and return." "Separation: you are in one kind of a reality in one kind of a place and you are separated from it." "Initiation: you're put into another place, where you are in some manner initiated." "Return: you come back. A SIMPLE VERSION OF THE HERO'S JOURNEY is, someone starting out in their normal protected world (Catherine Hardwicke, Director of "Twilight")" "and then getting a call to adventure.A call to adventure." "There's a vision, there's a quest." "(Deepak Chopra M.D.)" "It's the story of the hero enduring some trials, (David L. Miller Ph.D.)" "various trials and ordeals, meeting different obstacles along the way." "People that hurt you." "People that help you." "Doors will open as Campbell would say for you where there are no doors for others." "Dragons will appear that are your your dragons alone." "you get to like ?" "meet?" "the innermost cave where you're really challenged, like the greatest crisis, in which you find your true self." "The achievement, the glory." "But then that's not the end of it, that he has to bring that back to the community, there's a return to tell the story." "That is a heroic journey." "Separation, initiation, return." "All of the adventures of the human story are in there." "All the heroes, all villains, all the gods and goddesses and all of the nights and of all the fantastic creatures we can conjure up in animation, they're all in there," "Because they're all in here in the heart, because they're all in here in the head." "This is where they come from." "If you look at some of the greatest pieces of literature (Robin Sharma, best selling author, Sharma Leadership International) the greatest works of philosophy, they all have what" "Joseph Campbell called The Hero's Journey." "And if you look with a piercing eye you can recognize his outline in just about any move your story you would read." "Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter." "Wizard of Oz: that's a classic story of the hero's journey." "You first see Dorothy and our natural environment and just like out here in regular life a person is operating in their natural environment every day and living in their house and that kind of thing." "And then something happens to shake that world up," "And you go on a journey in which you have to face certain tests and challenges Storytelling is typically about people learning something." "You go to a place which is dark and mysterious, you are faced with yourself there is a relationship between facing fear and this kind of soul game." "You acquire a quality, a hidden strength, a value, moments where somebody is tested somebody moves to a place where it feels like a crisis point and then they are restored, redeemed, made better through that trial." "And we call them heros." "If all of these stories boiled down into one map, ?" "we can use that map, because all human beings are the same ?" "whether they're going through a war like World War II or going to a war inside ?" "it's basically the same kind of process. ?" "In other words we're not separate from the characters we see in our movies and our novels, they are us, this one journey." "The whole idea of the hero's journey is a journey of life, clear patterns to guide you through. ]]]" "You're born, you have a childhood, you have adolescence and you try to find the place for you to become an adult. ]]]" "and you go through adventures, you struggle with the inner conflicts and finally you become a hero: you slay the dragons, you succeed in conquering all the demons and use them (?" ") to step over threshold ]]] and finally you have arrived." "We're all born, we die but within this short span we have to have some meaning, some reason for this existence. ]]]" "Doesn't have to be higher mighty and fantastic ]]" "You can have a very simple life and still go through the very similar pattern We've grown up watching great heros' journey movie, it's that impulse within us that seed of potential that wants to be actualized." "It's being talked to during those movies and being whispered to: ]]]" ""It's time for you to do that!"" "That's the story here, that's what it's all about." "It is a wonderful narrative, iconography for how to live life." "The idea that "Try hard, you get", the little engine that "I could, I think I can," "I think can, I think I think I can, I CAN!"" "This idea that we really can do better, be better that our greatest selves are still hidden and that the future is the prospect of coming to terms with that self." "Dorothy had to confront her inner barriers and so the journey she went on was not just a journey to find out how to deal with the Wicked Witch of the West, ]]] it was how to deal with her own inner resources, how to claim her own inner resources ]]]" "and at the end of the movie how did she get back home?" "Well, she cicked her heels together, so she had it all the time, the ability to get back home but it didn't get mobilized for her until she went through all of those challenges and was able to kind of test herself." "It's kind of the ordinary moving into the extraordinary." "Its going through the dark to come out to the light." "Going from an unsatisfying life to a satisfying life by pushing through the scariest things you can imagine." ""The funcion of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of Aha!" "Yes." "I know what it is, it's myself"" " Joseph Campbell The most important thing that the myths teach us is to go beyond what we perceive as the limits of our possibility." "So mythology needs to be seen for what it is which is: ]]]" "which is a metaphor for our human existence." "It's not a history lesson." "It's ametaphor for life and for universal experiences." "Lot of people reading myths and they say it refers to something historical:" "the creation of the world or something like." "But Joe didn't think that." "He thought that it's really a narrative about the psyche." "What Jung called the self." "The problem is that many of us are metaphorically impaired." "We don't realize that this thing that they're talking about is actually a metaphor for a transformation process." "Just kind of like the Holy Grail, where it's not the thing, ]]]] it's not the actual concrete Grail, it's an intangible thing, that the Holy Grail is a metaphor for that intangible (?" ") feeling." "And so if you look at a book and it says you will go to heaven, and you don't realize that they're talking about heaven on Earth, heaven in our bodies, heaven right now, in the now, ]]]" "you might fall into a trance of thinking that you're literally gonna go some place else if you follow the rules." "Having been brought up in a mythical culture," "I was very familiar with the different motives, and themes that were encapsulated in say a mythical being." "Whether it was the Lord Shiva or Ganesh, or a goddess, just thinking the name of that person, the whole story was evoked." "Carl Jung called these archetypes." "Archetypes of primordial, encapsulated stories or mythologies and they are there in this form of a seed in consciousness." "When you plant that seed in consciousness, that archetypal seed, that mythical journey, in there the seed starts to sprout and as it sprouts, the patterning forces create situation, circumstances, events and relationships for the unfolding of the story." "It's better to have a story to look through life ]]] than an explanation. ]]]" "The reason for that is the story is richer." "I say select two or three heros and heroins either in mythology or religion or history and then ask these mythical beings to incarnate through you." "And then don't be surprised when you see situations ,circumstances, coincidences, synchronicities, relationships sure suddenly show up, that actually are part of the story that you have been seeking to express." "Once upon a time in the forest there was this little tiger cub amongst the flock sheep." "And he ate grass, and he wondered around with the sheep, and when he tried to say anything all that came out was a certain a little meow." "Not much of a roar." "And one day through the forest comes a large male tiger And he is just about to pounce on the sheep when he sees this tiger cub." "He says, what are you doing here?" "And the tiger cub goes, beeee." "He picks the tiger cub up by the s?" "of the neck, and carries him over to pond and he puts his face over and he says: ]]]" ""Look, see that face?" "]]]" "You're not a sheep, you're a tiger!" ]]]" "The male tiger says, okay, we need to do something." "He slays a sheep and he grabs a big runk ?" "of meet, and he shoves it into the little tiger's mouth." "And the little tiger gagged on it as all do on the truth. ]]]" "But it went down. ]]]" "And he got a little bit of energy, and pretty soon, ]]] he had a bigger tiger roar." "And eventually he had a full Tiger roar and he went off with the male tiger." "I think the moral here is self-evident:" "if you're a tiger living among sheep you' rea a really poor specimen of a tiger." "And we are all Tigers living among sheep." "We are all individuals with a self that we don't even begin to understandand." "And unfortunately, when you can open the metaphor out, the food we get from the culture around us is maybe food for sheep." "It's not food for Tigers. "Your life is the fruit of your own doing." "You have no one to blame but yourself"" " Joseph Campbell" "We have to catch at least the spark of what your life is going to be or you may spend those dreary decades in corporate America, climbing the ladder only to discover its against the wrong wall." "You get to the top, who cares?" "If this path of the hero's journey is fairly simple in design, why then isn't it that everybody is a living it? Well the answer is that most people on the planet live under a kind of a" "mass hypnosis." "There's a tremendous pressure even in the media on really keeping people in their place in the sense of keeping them happy, tranced out consumers." "It's a trance of comfort, it's a trance of not sticking your hand up above the crowd very much." "That keeps the enterprise going." "Most people think it's a luxury and a great privilege to stay home and look at their 800 inch television you're just spaced out, not developoing." "We're stimulated by some images, by some loud noise." "It's about collecting things and stuff, and making a lot of money and doing a lot of things and it's impossible to enjoy that because you end up on that treadmill and you can't get off." "And so most people, unfortunately, because they are so victimized by the environment, they have no time to think, or be themselves, they become bundles of conditioned reflexes and nerves that are constantly being triggered by people and circumstance," "into very predictable outcomes and predictable patterns of behavior, ]]] there's no creativity That's the trance, that's the wasteland, where we're just guided toward this weird sense of what's real on our lives," "and those ideas that are imposed on us from the outside about what we should and should not do." "It usually starts out with something like you shouldn't talk to that person because they're from a different tribe, you certainly shouldn't marry that person ]]] you should go to this school, you should have a certain type of car, you should live in a certain type of house," "you should have a certain number of kids by this type age, should should should should should. ]]]" "What I experienced in my own life was I gotta have the degree from this university, I gotta have this advanced degree from this" "University preferably either a law degree or a medical degree or something to that effect some letters after my name which would say that I have a stamp of credibility" "I can go out and make my six figures in society, ?" "kind of deem me worthy ]]]" "I have countless examples of young people who go to college because they are expected to go to college and they study biology because ]]] since the time they were six they were supposed to be a doctor. ]]]" "It's very difficult for a person who was brought up in this environment of instant gratification with the media and with advertising with all the promises of instant gratification by buying something, for example, or having a certain" "level of afluence that you lose contact with this mythical domain which is actually part of your soul." "It's there in everyone." "It's their passion, it's their bliss, it's their unique skills." "it's their unique good ways of expressing themselves, is their soul / song ?" ", which if they think, ]]] they could do anything." "If you look at every heroic journey, the hero has been confronted with the fact that the world that they thought was reality was nothing more than illusion." "I go back to The Matrix... what was the matrix?" "It was just this big illusion, it was the dominant values and beliefs that the world had put around this guy Neo, the seeker on the hero's journey, and what did he do?" "He felt this longing to go beyond the illusion, to go beyond the matrix," "So he took the red pill, and he woke up to reality." "And what was reality?" "Reality was he was full of potential. "The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero..."" " Joseph Campbell Separation begins with what we call "The call to adventure"." "Campbell tells us there's literally almost a phone ringing. ]]]" "It's like the universe, the divine, god, whatever you want to call it, literally dialing you up and ringing ]]] and giving you a call asking you to step out into what is your journey. ]]]" "Something breaks into the ?" "reality and makes it impossible for you to continue." "Well, you can hang up the phone, you can run away." "But he'll ?" "keep coming back, it will keep coming back until you finally answer the call." "If you're not paying attention, the wake up calls come in the form of a sledge hammer." "You know if you're paying attention, they might come in a tical ?" "feather." "So we don't always get the call as a choir of angels with trumpets singing ?" "to his?" "beautifully warm sunny morning." "In Star Wars, Luke comes back as his house has been burnt down." "He's gotta go." "Often times it comes in ?" "the depth of our despair in losing a job, getting fired, getting divorced, having your house foreclosed on..." "These things that you would never want to have happen are ?" "often the exact things we need to catapult us, to catalyse us into that next version of ourselves. ]]]" "Bad things happen to good people and when that happens to them they typically are thrown for a loop ?" "because they frequently have felt everything's going along, I'm doing everything right, what happened.. Well, you know, the universe has just up ended you and it does do that." "The Chinese symbol for crises is too symbols." "The first one is danger and the second one immediately is opportunity." "So crisis both enjoy anopportunity" "This idea that if one storyline collapses that that's the end of the movie is not true in human life and never was true in human life." "I know people who have prospered in the most extraordinary way in the worst type of adversity, but actually it revealed something to them about themselves that they didn't know and that became the new journey they took." "Let me put this into really practical hundred-pound terms because if the camera had been pointed at me when I was 24 years old what it would have seen was a person who weighed" "320 pounds you would have seen me puffing on two or three packs of Marlboros a day, a relationship that I didn't want to be in and I had a job I hated, everything was wrong in my life and so" "those are ripe moment for a wake-up call in life." "You know, if you haven't been paying attention enough so that you end up with a job you hate, a relationship you don't want to be in, a abody you don't like, and you're addicted to a bunch of things, you're ripe" "for a sledgehammer blow from the universe and I got it." "You step over a threshold, meaning you move from one world into another, sometimes you're shoved from one world into the other." "I went out for a walk and I stepped on the ice on the road and my feet shot out from under me and I smacked my back of my head on the ground, frozen ground, and it knocked me out just enough I wasn't" "completely unconscious but I had a vision while I was semi-knocked out, I could see down through all the layers of myself to this pure consciousness inside and I could see how all the fat I had was organized around a whole ]]]" "bunch of feelings I didn't want to let myself feel, ]]] like sadness from childhood ]]] and lot of old grief in my family and anger and things like that and I realized that the fat was there to keep me from" "feeling those feelings and so as I began to come back to normal consciousness" "I made a vow that I was gonna change my life so that I could live in that state of pure consciousness instead of having to have all of that armour around me." "Once you make the decisions that Joseph Campbell is talking about, about really hearing the call and being willing to take on the challenges of that new awakened life, once you do that you begin to feel a power ]]]" "that it's like nothing else I have ever experienced." "And I think a lot of us are just plain very afraid of that. ?" "]]] I tend to think that people wake up to the fact ]]] that they're the hero of their own life when they get tired of being the victim of their own life." "At the point that you say "Enough", "I know", "I don't want to listen to my parents anymore" "I have had it with my boss", "I'm really having problems perhaps" "the sermon I'm being taught", you can either surrender to victimhood and a lot of people do, ]]] or you can surrender to a fundamentalism: you can basically give your responsibility to someone else and say "Tell me what to do and I'll do it"" "or you can say "I have a choice here and I'm responsible"" "Now, what does it mean to be the hero of your own life?" "It means to be responsible for your own adventure." "Campbell talks about metaphorical death, where something dies ]]] so the something can live and in every hero's journey there is ]]] some death-moment where some old has to go on some new has to stay." "He quotes Nietzsche and he says that "The snake that cannot shed its skin must parishthe" When death is a motif in a myth it doesn't refer necessarily to what happens at the end of one's biological" "and physical existence." "It's an indication that change has taken place." "I went through that process when I stopped being [Joseph Marshall III, best selling author] a travel administrator and started becoming a writer" "I put that aspect of myself away, it was valuable and I learned a lot and I draw on it, but it enabled me to go on. ]]]" "No death, no life." "No death, no transformation." "No death, no change." "Than I said, okay, I don't want that anymore, I want this, put that away made myself into something else." "In essence, resurrected into being a writer." "The whole key to a blessing death is recognizing that it is just the death of one old form that has played itself out and has no use anymore, which always, as the Phoenix, rises and gives way to some new form that has new intrinsic meaning and makes your life even bigger and better." "You want have new birth, new revelations new insight into life as you grow as a human being." "You will learn to keep dying. "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us"" " Joseph Campbell" "I think its tricky to afford a proof." "I think there are proofs in our lives" "I think the proofs exist in our ability to transcend the worst things that have happened to us." "My proof is I was abused as a little boy not something I chat about typically but in this context, it was the worst thing ever." "It went on for a very long time and... It's who I am, in part, because I had to face that," "Because I had to wrestle with that, because I had to accept that and acknowledge that and forgive and all the terribly difficult things that come with that." "I had to tell my parents... you know it's this... and by the way it's one of the things that you work with for the rest of your life." "But from that most difficult thing also came a kind of understanding" "I get high marks on compassion." "I wouldn't wish it on anybody..." "But it is part of what made me me." "So the truth is it's not what happens to us, it's what we do with it." "The forest represents the darkness, the unknown, the edge of your world." "And it takes the courage of a hero to go into that forest." "The people in your community don't understand why you want to go into that forest." "In fact, they are pulling you back, asking "Why can't you be happy with what you have here?" But there is this urge that exist within the hero to "Go and explore!"" "Joseph often used the Knights of the Round Table." "When they behold golden chalice." "There's a story with King Arthur, and his knights." "After the Knights have seen the grail and decide to go forward on a quest the made a vow." "They decided the knightly thing to do, the noble thing to do as individuals seeking their own inner collective, was to go in to the force at their own points." "Each knight enters the forest where it was darkest and there was no path." "They cannot follow other people." "They have to go in, find their own entry into the dark forest. ]]]" "Campbell makes it really clear:" "If you go into the forest where there's already a trail, that's the one sure sign that you're not on your path." "Because if you follow somebody else's entry, it's somebody else's path." "That's not going into the forest." "That's not initiation." "You need to find your own path and that kind of comes from that impulse within, to go out and really discover who you are, beyond just the narrow confines of how you have been conditioned what you have been told to do," "and go out and explore for yourself which is true if it is and how you can go out and rock it. "Follow your bliss"" " Joseph Campbell The hero's journey for me is having the courage to look within yourself and say" ""What am I here to do?"" ""What am I most passionate about in my life?" "What are my greatest gifts?"" ""How do I give them to the world?"" "Joseph Campbell captured it with the phrase "Follow Your Bliss" "Follow Your Bliss"" " I don't think more profound teachings have ever been given than this one." ""Follow your bliss" means listening to your heart and following your truth." "Just to be specific about the word "bliss", it's not ecstasy, it's not happiness." "There's a serenity in bliss." "I like to talk about your bliss as "the thing you can't not do"." "So it's your authentic journey." "I'd heard "follow your bliss" but didn't know where it came from and what's cool is that it's grounded in deep Hindu spirituality and philosophy and it comes from the Upanishads." "There were three launching points into enlightenment:" "sat, chit and ananda." "So sat means beingness, chit means consciousness and ananda means bliss or rapture." "Joseph Campbell said to himself "I don'treally know what my beingness is, if I'm honest with myself, I don't really know what my consciousness is, but I do know what my bliss is and I can follow my bliss."" "And that idea of trusting ourselves and trusting that deep impulse within us to go out and follow our bliss, do what makes us feel most alive:" "that's the path, that's the key, that's the essence of the hero's journey. "Follow your bliss" does not mean: get addicted to pleasure." "It's more than just something you wish for." "It doesn't mean escapism, it doesn't mean hedonism." "[Lynne Kaufman, award winning playwright.]" "It doesn't mean selfishness." "It doesn't mean listening only to sensory pleasures like having sex with anybody you look at or sticking up a candy store if you want candy... Don't follow what other people think is your bliss!" "Don't follow your wallet!" "Follow the thing that's presenting itself as your most serene and fulfilling state." "Sometimes it's difficult to let go of that inner resistor and just say "Okay, I accept the possibilities of the present," "I will follow my bliss, I will listen to the call of spirit"" "Huhhh, that's a very big deal! Daddy said "What do you wanna do" I said "I need to leave school." "I'm never gonna learn anything." "I'm not going to University." "I want to play drums." I learned to play drums in the attic and [Mick Fleetwood, founder:" "Fleetwood Mac]" "That's my world and totally naive, like sshhhss..." "So Dad sends me off to London." "With the drum kit." "So I went to London, and all of it came true." "Of course, I'm not saying I gotta be rich, I gotta be famous, but I have to be doing something I love to do!" "And I have so much passion!" "And I didn't even know what that was really all about." "But I do now." "How do we find our bliss?" "This is what everybody is asking." "The first thing is, ask yourself, "Where am I passionate about?" "What are the things I love doing?" "What are the activities, when I engage them, it feels like hours go by in minutes?" "That's one big clue about what your bliss is." "What I say is, find out what you most love to do!" "And then do more of that thing." "Ask yourself right now:" "What was it that made me different as a child?" "What set me apart?" "What caused me to cry at night on my pillow cause I didn't fit in within the crowd?" "That is probably precisely where the door to your bliss is going to open." "Go back and find it." "Let's say you never had to think about money, and you never had to think about dying." "With all the money in the world and all the time in the world how would you express yourself and how would that benefit the ecosystem, the larger web of being?" "We have to find a a way of reflecting on those experiences that we've had that engaged us in where we became lost and totally absorbed in them." "So for some people a way to that might be to write these things down, others don't think like that, they don't like to use words all the time, so maybe collect some images or cut some images from magazines," "collect music that's always inspired you." "But some way to bypass that apt of barrier to your own sense of energy." "It's not about being successful, it's not about feeding a family." "Write some bad poetry, do something that gives you that Moment." "You can write in a journal, because writing a journal is a conversation you have with yourself." "You can get to know your gifts, your talents, your weaknesses, your hopes, your dreams, your lessons." "Joseph Campbell always gave the same advice to his students graduating Sarah Lawrence." "Don't do what Daddy/Mommy says!" "Because Daddy/Mommy has one interest in mind for you, and that's your security." "And if you bargain away your life for security now, you will never find your bliss! I started skating because my older brother was into it." "[Tony Hawk, professional skateboarder]" "And I enjoyed it but" "I didn't take it that seriously until the first time into a skatepark and I saw these guys literally flying out of empty swimming pools." "I got so excited that that was even possible as a person to be flying in the air with a skateboard in your hand." "Once I saw what was possible and what you could do with this thing that I would have come to enjoy" "I had to keep going, I mean, I just want to fly." "I think is really important to do things that make you happy and I know that sounds very obvious and you know, some reviewed viewers might say, Well, now let's hold hands and sing" "Kumbaya but when you look at every great inventor, every great business person, every great scientist, you look at these people who have got to the so called mountain top and almost every single one of them to a person" "didn't do it for the money." "They did it because they were chasing their bliss." "If you're following a dream, then you're doing what you love, it's not always going to be a financial success but it will be a personal success because you're still doing this thing that you love doing and that's more important." "I would describe [Laird Hamilton, professional athlete] my discovery of surfing: exposure." "I was just watching surfers, watching what they were doing and what surfing was all about, and the routes that they were taking and the ways they were doing it." "I think I new subconsciously before I knew consciously." "I think I knew that I was gonna do something in surfing, that surfing was gonna be a big part of my life so I wanted to absorb all the information I could." "Just because you don't know what a call on your life is right now, doesn't mean play austrich and stick your head in the sand and say:" ""Well just because I don't know then I guess I shouldn't move towards anything."" "The very fact that you're looking for you bless means that you're in the process of getting to your bliss." "A part of life and a part of the whole journey is exploration." "Human ?" ".......... is often very deep." "You don't know you're there." "And we don't know that we're there often because we don't look for them." "We don't take the journey." "Some people found them." "And many people have not found them." "Because they have not found their talents they think they don't have any." "I believe passionately that we all have deep talents." "Go looking." "Try things you've never done before." "With the things you wish you had done but you never did, well, why didn't you?" "Go do it!" "Try!" "If you always go the same route to work, take some different route." "The people you never speak to go, go and speak to them." "At least, put yourself out there, but don't anticipate what you'll find." "Put yourself in uncomfortable situations at least every seven days." "If at least every seven days people aren't laughing at you or scratching their heads, wondering why you're dreaming so big or doing what you're doing, or have such a fierce resolve to achieving your goalsn," "than I don't think you're stretching enough and ultimately we grow the most when doing the thing that stretches the most." "My personal journey:" "I was bright enough I got in the best University but a part of me needed the journey." "I was interested in the West." "So I jumped at the next opportunity to get a scholarship and get on the boat and then I saw my boat to the west." "It took 14 days." "I landed in Portland, Oregon and to be a foreign student." "I stretched myself." "I arrived, I knew very little English." "I went to a class called "English for foreign students", I learned English." "And I embraced a Western culture, I stretch myself." "So suddenly I saw a part of me which 757 00:49:08,066 -- 00:49:12,999 I never knew was there." "One of Joe's most beloved quotes about bliss is that "When you follow your bliss, the Universe will open doors where there were only walls."" "What a wonderful image and in fact a lot of people's experiences are so like this." "You feel like you're beating your head against a brick wall And then suddenly you shift just a tad ?" "and low and behold, there's a passage that opens up. when you truly forth and trust your bliss, unseen forces have the power to rearrange things to accommodate your step of faith." "I took the Robert McKee course, I thought well, that's not that hard and I wrote a screenplay and" "I sent it to a friend of mine who was somebody's assistant who left it on his desk and some other agent wandered by and picked it up and read it and said, "Oh, this is good" and so than my friend went "Oh, shit" and" "ran to his boss and said you should read this because that guy over there who's a junior agent, liked it and his boss was a senior agent and then" "I got a phone call." "It was fantastic." "It was the greatest thing ever." "And so it seems like I sold the first screenplay I ever wrote." "But the truth is, I kept writing untill I got lucky." "If I stopped writing I would never got lucky." "got like" "There's no luck coming to my house going, "Hey, here's a book deal."" ""Hey, we want to buy it, that screenplay that you haven't written."" "Just keep doing it and then eventually, you're likely to get lucky." "Why do most people not follow their bliss?" "One word: fear." "Right?" "We're literally overwhelmed by fear and primarily we're overwhelmed by the of what other people would think of us." "Campbell says that "What will they think of me, must be put aside for bliss"" "One the biggest inhibitors of following our bliss is" ""What will they think of me?"" ""Am I going to look like an idiot if I follow my bliss and I fail?"" ""Am I going to look like a fool?" All these different questions coming to our mind." "Your friends and family, can be very well-meaning." "But really, will collude with you to create a story that is hard for to get out of." "For example," ""Don't do music, you won't be a musician." "There's no point trying to be a dancer, because you'll never make a living there."" "I think that's the first step to the journey." "They're the demons, we often have to face them." "We are each our own greatest inhibitors." "People could say "oh yeah, this guy is holding me back" or "this situation", but really, you hold yourself back." "You're deciding, hey, I don't wanna look bad in front of those guys, or I don't want those guys to say some bad things about me so" "I'm not gonna do that." "Who made that decision?" "You! "I'm not going to do that."" "It means you decided." "There's a poem of Rumi, the great mythical poet from the Middle East, in the 12th century, who said "I wanna sing like birds sing Not worrying who listens, or what they think" But if you can do that, then you can achieve the impossible." "For me, one of the most formative times, the first, probably most formative time was when I dropped out of law school." "All of my friends at the time told me at least stay here for the first year." "I could make you the first master I was literally noxious at the idea of completing this," "I burned my resume." "I had no desire to live within the corporate world in any sense." "and in the same 24-hour period of time ended my relationship of five years and I dropped out of law school." "It was an incredibly gut-wrenching, soul wrenching time." "Moved back in with Mom." "There were several months when I just layed in bed and slept and red." "It wasn't a pretty process." "But the only thing I knew I wanted to do was to coach a little league baseball team." "A little bit of instinct that I had, a little bit of bliss I had in my life at that time was to work with these kids." "And I had no idea what would come out of it and then 3-6 months later I had an idea that wow there's an amazing opportunity to serve families and sports." "The internet was just getting going, it was just 1998 and I had a vision of what I could do to serve these families and created a company that there's no way I could have imagined when I dropped" "out of law school." "No possible way." "But as it turns out I started this business we won the business plan competition UCLA be raised five million dollars I hired the CEO of ?" "to be our CEO and we hired the law firm that I would have wanted to work for before I graduated from law school so this is beautiful, this sense of this is it, this is what happens when we follow our bliss," "magical things happen that we couldn't have imagined when we were going through the tough point of making the decision to take the leap to go for it and to make the difference in our life. ?" "There are two roads in life:" "the Red Road and the Black Road." "The Red Road is the tough road because it's narrow, it's winding, it's full of storms, it's full of obstacles." "The Black Road is easy." "It's straight and it's wide." "Doesn't offer any challenges." "The storyteller never says, you have to travel this road or you have to travel this road." "They end up telling you the story of the red and black road by saying this:" "The choice is yours." "Always the choice is yours." ""Find a place where there is joy and the joy will burn out the pain"" " Joseph Campbell" "I was living a spontaneous life with my father the bond, the passions that my father share with me." "We got on a plane, seven in the morning on Santa Monica Airport, flying towards Big Bear where I had won a ski race the day before, we were returning to Big Bear to collect my trophy." "On the way we hit a storm, we crashed head along, right into this rugged out a $200 fee ?" "its the level we crash ?" "I woke up, our bodies were sprawled ?" "in this45-degree icy chute." "It was a blizzard was harder find everybody took me about half hourfor from is peace everybody where they were" "My dad's girlfriend Sandra was still alive my dad was hunched over and I was unclear whether he was dead or just so knocked out three you know through like comatose or something ?" "I just told myself that he was knocked out" "At a certain point I had to admit that he is not gonna ?" "help me any more that I was on my own" "Sandra and I took shelter under a wing." "Many things happened." "Eventually we started down this initial icy shoet." "She slipt and was killed. ?" "An hour later I came across her body." "I covered her with twigs and leaves and stuff." "Even though I knew she was, dead pretty much." "But her eyes were open so it was a bit confusing for me at that age I was 11 and then I continued down in the varied terrain in all kinds of things happening got stuck in snow I had a get through Little Creek culturesand and" "broken rocking I E San I just wanted togo away more than anything in the world I wantthe pain to go away now had I not had I not him gone in there and seenthat that thing that that thing I fear themost" "I would not have learned to serve find the jam in the treasure pain those answers that were there forme and had I not face up and i not gone and stared in theeyes and think I feared most" "that why one run promos I would not behere now this book which is really besides havinga kid" "P not satisfying experience in my life home this Campbell talks about the fact we go on the hero's journey there's a drag in we must slay world now a dragon is the most challenging fears creature they can ever be created" "him mr." "GV my Joe Campbell describes the dragon as being a beast covered with scales and on every scale it says either that shelter but thou shalt not on the so this beach is a constructional all love the rules regulations social obligations cultural creations that have" "made you feel that you either have to or can't do certain things I'm no slaying the dragon to me is the most interesting the final moment the time when you are faced with the scariest thing you've been faced with him" "you get to take everything we've learned and and not the guy I am that if you were to ask you what's the one thing that keeps people from the mountain tops what's the one thing the keeps people small rather than allowing them to present their genius to" "the world it's it's their fears are is Joseph Campbell says its third reagan's the mysterious anything that gets in you the new it's a beast it's a monster the name here yes you know let me face every day you know only fear that we can be" "rejected that we're going to be you know no one's gonna answer return our phone call that no one's gonna like well we made a while we did what we said on fear that isn't based om has a tendency to" "creep it moves through your experiences it starts to talks if I your perception cuba com scared love is what web along with and fear is what we learn" "I think there's a great truth in that" "I want to hold a player you know I had this idea I knew it was physically possible million usually do it Hot Wheels do this Labor Day com and so I A presented the idea to my sponsor the time" "they said adding it to do this lizard that sounds awesome the around I designed around you know in all this is on paper and it was my idea and I'll never forget driving up and seeing it and this wave fears crash early Ly coming" "what tonight are you serious like I made a loop" "I'm really in it like and I'm the only one that's even volunteering to do it and at that point I felt like I was so much at stake to not do it you look at the time no was building" "extravagant Rams no one really had money to do that kind of thing and there was no psych and I just had asserted internalize and say okay you keep telling yourself this is possible this is the time we got to make this happen and little by little I figured" "out my text heavy heavy hits that day the the actually now we own one for Hutchins tour the that we could do into every single night but but that first time you know that was cells is frightening but I had to I had to really step back" "in OK you can use the mail fears are very interesting fan first but we need to realize that fear is an inherent part in the human experience but it's not about getting rid of fear where's it going hours now there's" "nowhere for it to go the issue is to have courage to move forward in spite a few you feel the new the courage is not a lack of fair the courage is is dealing with a faint and nobody would have a it's not as courageous you didn't and from their own fair" "and that's not going to tell that just doing summit if I'm relatively and challenging Curtis when you know what to do can you do it and lack of courage is when you know what to do and don't do it courage is is the ability did to get up" "after your phone gigante exploring the unknown and and trying stuff the maybe people have thought was impossible is just like a muscle if you want to get stronger you wanna run a triathlon to run a marathon or do whatever you want to do" "physically you know you need to train you need to get stronger current is exactly the same thank you think a bit like courage GM you've got a consistently go up your fears go one step past one step past you'll find your comfort zone expanse each time you do that" "things used to freak you out won't freakyou out as much and now you have the tools you have the strength literally to lift more in your life as you face your fears one more authentically there is some" "power monsters get by being dark in the closet I'll and there is some diminishment arm by facing them facing them head-on and are are suggests Campbell talk to the slaying dragons and with most others do their lives whether it's a difficult assignment at" "work when there is a difficult conversation we know we should have with a loved one whether something we're resisting we leave can run in the opposite direction rather than running away we should go closer to you because once we can see" "here fierce the death here you know the concern do the things that scare you you know courageous what comes after it is okay to be scared shouldn't stop you a healthy warning election stuff the No of mmm over dragon that hordes all the stories talk in those terms for several reasons" "am on the one hand we could call a projection tennis psychological sense so we project out and we create and antagonised that we have to slay more but what's actually happening is we're I'll dealing with the energies inside ourselves what he's outside is in fact a" "reflection what's inside that it back you've sorted shows n your 10 the new of course in Star Wars which wasn't pretty much entirely based on camels paradigm blue sky Walker has to go into K where he does battle with Darth Vader" "the new we're finally he cuts of Darth Vader's head in the head rolls to his feet and Darth Vader's helmet opens up" "North Jersey City but his own face he thinks that is evil outside of him when the struggle between good and evil is understood to be going on inside of us it can be very beneficial this is part is a personal transformation" "overcoming I negative aspects emphasizing are good ones but what often happens of course we want to feel that we are good so we don't find the negative within ourselves we're gonna find it somewhere out there the great optional for most" "as ready as ourself you know if we can overcome that basic fare about what we might achieve and we take that risk" "I think all kinds of things open up in and Campbell stands now we we can all be heroes I'm the hero encounters these obstacles and Wales and the and that's how we react when we find ourselves in a situation where we have" "that and cognitive dissonance how do I get out amid the nobel first thing is you have to surrender you have to stop fighting in the mood are the new so slaying the dragon is really coming to terms with that inner part of Use" "yourself that you think is bigger than your and in doing that then you grow bigger sent to your cell go however I think dad its loving your to hack that's the much more efficient thing to do it also feels a lot better" "theme when you do that then frequently whatever the dragon was hiding reporting this step away and give it to me they give it to you because there's no began when you're fighting you find yourself we stop fighting yourself" "then you're no longer engaged in the fight in Europen to what might come true though is a gift in battling demons and overcoming because that's what our soul's journey is about its about facing fear growing beyond" "and as we overcome our fears regain power you look at our lives the best most rewarding moment com after stroke as such what we do with our allies is what makes us Europe or not arm and there's grace in knowing and there's aTF yeah" "believing hey every minus mishap a plus way the first row cover article where Nash in other words on one level to make it here you had to deploy CA have that health challenge a got fired in a kiln arguing that" "has not troublesome but one awareness can you add to it see get a far bigger picture helps you master at a certain point in the hero's journey it's going to become a Down you loving and accepting yourself pension why" "that's a powerful moment because that line she worked directly with the universe now there's no more war going on inside yourself and as that gap heels between your unlovable South in your ability to montana lovable self became an awesome power" "life the way we think the kindness as linear" "I'm born I'm gonna go through these things I'm gonna die here's journey tells us know you're gonna go here you can have this adventure in uni come back and guess what you gonna be right back where you" "were now you can go over here have this adventure you come back you're gonna go here you can have this invention unit come back and guess what you gonna be right back where you were now you can go over here have this" "adventure you come back and guess what you right here what did you bring back I'm what the hero brings back the No is a story Gomes for example go commission a big he went out any look for the plan to be more challenging" "he went through all kinds it runs with the feminine with her the monster and so on but he finally swam to the bottom of the sea and got the plant immortality he came up on the short put it down while he was bathing" "the snake serpent came and got that plaintiff immortality but he went home to o'rourke anyway and he had this story to tell for gil comish there was no concrete objective thing widget to give to the community no gold" "no treasure and so on the story the train getting the treasures treasure and so the giving this story is the invitation for other people to make the same journey that's why it's a circle and never hit love that idea that there's a circle" "and the circle needs to be closed and the way to close the circle is to come back return with something different than you started with and to share that not to me is like a perfect hero's journey deaths" "the ultimate in to the US Attorney's not slaying dragons not being the bad guy it's giving back the essence in that journey looks like about how can I make a difference and who can I make a difference" "24 and then it gets really easy a kind get a shirt for the future taking he's getting more here's more only my friends star artistic said he's trying to make moving he doesn't have the money" "what can we do it visually all love said we're doing things that we are going to do anyway but down so we can make money for him and make him finish the movie and then all since I will let's do that again that was great when I found this success in skating and I never dreamed possible" "the first thing I want to do is try to help kids get a facility in and that was the first thing I did I start a foundation for public skate parks it today we've helped build about 500 skate parks" "it's my passion it's what I would love to do is provide facilities for these kids to deserve a chance I love talking to young writers about writing there's a scholarship by primed which is up screenwriting scholarship at Wesley" "where I went to college the away to up everybody who wants to be what we are with a crow this if you speak to somebody at the level of the mine can you speak to them if you speak to me a hot" "you will speak to the hot work if you speak through your life in your life has the story then you changed that's what mythical beings and it's why stories are great because my story right now which is my also my truth" "may have an effect on you and therefore" "I'm picking the in trouble" "I'm making an external and through that" "I'm sharing experience no matter how long you get to live life is ultimately for sure before all the silver in the dust and the street sweeper gets buried next to see you know all that really matters at the end of the day is how big" "showed up and how courageous were I think when we are on our debt that's what feels are hurt integration crack is not all risks we talk not all the opportunities he sees and all the times we we don't live in look silly" "bushels are the bread at the industrialized world responded in taking all the opportunities didn't sees and it's really all you gotta do to get to the next step" "I believe we all have in this to think to ourselves okay a choice between our bob is a story you're telling nixon feel the morning it if you like you can overcome and that nixon deal transcend about a week ago room" "I'm %uh"