Part 5: You Must Battle the Enemy Within
Stutz warns there is a penalty for spiritual immaturity. We become demoralized and so mired in learned helplessness that we can’t even get out of bed. Part of us wants to use the tools to reconnect with higher powers, but we have a dark force inside us whose mission in life is to impede our growth and impede any of our attempts to connect with our higher angels.
Stutz calls this dark force Part X. It is the part of you that Stutz says “X’s out your potential.” It is a voice inside your head. In my case, the voice says things like the following:
“What’s the point?”
“Life is shit.”
“It’s all bullshit.”
“What a joke.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“You’re the same piece of shit you always were.”
Part X is an insidious saboteur. To make this point, I tell my students about the way I once pushed away a girlfriend due to my paranoia. One day I inexplicably saw in her expression “a new look” that suggested to me that she was resolved to leave me. For three days straight, I asked my girlfriend if she was leaving me with intervals of no more than thirty minutes apart. After three days, my girlfriend indeed left me after which I said, “Aha! Nothing gets past me!”
The relentless saboteur inside us is also discussed with great cogency in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles. Both Stutz and Pressfield argue that we were born to engage in the daily battle of creativity, that this battle is defined by resistant forces that would have us live a life of avoidance, addiction and consumerism, that we must create habits that maximize our mission to do meaningful work on the limited time we have here on Earth, and that individual improvement is a moral imperative not just for our own mental health and creative fulfillment but for the benefit of others.
Neither Stutz nor Pressfield believe this life we have is our own. We are defined by our connection with others and how we engage with others. Our responsibilities, therefore, are defined by our relationships with others. Self-gratification is an abnegation of those responsibilities and continued denial of those responsibilities will result in the penalty of despair, demoralization, learned helplessness, and the greatest agony of all--to reach the end of our lives and suffer the regret that we squandered the life that had been given to us.
Like St. Paul who in The Epistle to the Romans two thousand years ago laid out the human condition as dark forces undermining our quest to cultivate our higher angels, Phil Stutz and Steven Pressfield claim there are demonic forces inside us and that we must constantly summon our higher forces: through the persistence habit of art, self-expression, and service to others. Failure to embark on a consistent campaign of connecting with the higher powers will result in moral disintegration. We will have to pay a heavy price.
At this point, I am wondering to myself: Did Phil Stutz and Steven Pressfield repackage St. Paul’s ideas for the modern secular age? Is that a good thing? Can we enjoy the original Mexican food of St. Paul and then head north to San Antonio and enjoy the Tex-Mex of Stutz and Pressfield?
To continue my exploration of Stutz’s notion of the cosmic battle inside us, I consulted his subsequent book, co-written again with Barry Michels, Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression, & Unleash Your Soul’s Potential. Stutz begins by elaborating on the Life Force, which animates us toward the process of becoming flourishing, fulfilled human beings. We see the Life Force, Stutz observes, with a toddler who is learning to walk stumbles but keeps getting up over and over until the child becomes proficient at walking.
As an amateur piano composer, I find the Life Force informs my compositions. I will compose the beginning of a song that has something in it that captures my interest, but most of the song is cliche, boring, and derivative, but I keep working the piece over and over and through trial and error the song evolves into something that feels special and “fully-baked” to me. Sometimes the process takes five years or more. I assume that is the work of the Life Force.
One of the major arguments of Phil Stutz, Barry Michels, and Steven Pressfield is that you develop daily habits of hard work and focus and by doing so, the process creates a life of its own whether you are writing books, composing music, or painting on the canvas. Your hard work is an investment in something that is living and breathing of its own accord. You breathe life into your art. You struggle against the darker forces in yourself--Part X or the Resistance--and you create life and make a contribution to this world. You summon the Life Force.
I can’t emphasize this cosmic battle enough. Phil Stutz again and again says we are in a wrestling match with ourselves: We are wrestling Part X, a part inside us that wants to destroy us. In his book Coming Alive, Stutz along with his co-author therapist Barry Michels break down Part X into four major parts: instant gratification, lethargy, demoralization, and hurt feelings.
Instant gratification includes mindless eating, porn, consumerism, social media attention are all weapons that help Part X destroy our Life Force. We can easily squander our entire existence on instant gratification. The tools for our demise are ubiquitous. We need to cut through the chaos and see that instant gratification is an ally in the war Part X wages against the Life Force inside us.
Lethargy comes from the voice in Part X that says since all endeavors are useless, there is no point in trying. Don’t lift a finger. Don’t even get out of bed. Life is bullshit. Why work up a sweat over it? Excessive negativity and pessimism fuel lethargy and what some religious people call acedia, a spiritual form of spiritual and mental apathy. Since Part X wants to cut off the Life Force in us, it wants us to give up and die. We can put up a facade of superior intellect and say we have “ennui,” but we are in essence in a state of cowardly avoidance. Our lives are cut off from the Life Force and we are prisoners of Part X.
Demoralization is a form of depression, abasement, and humiliation we often exaggerate as a response to other people’s perceived criticism, effrontery, and doubt. We also become demoralized from seeing our own abasement from succumbing to Part X so that we can get trapped in a negative feedback cycle. Because we are cut off from the Life Force and living under the direction of Part X, we have no rebuttal to the self-judgment we inflict upon ourselves. Demoralization comes from compulsive and masochistic self-deprecation and defeatism, which are in perverse ways a sort of infantile egotism. We berate ourselves and we do so operatically because we are addicted to the attention and drama. In the end, we become lugubrious, a state that is so pathetic that it has a component of the absurd and the comical to it. In the early 90s, I saw the depressive comedian Richard Lewis tell Larry King that for Thanksgiving he would suffer from terrible loneliness and would dine alone wearing a black armband. Richard Lewis is the king of the lugubrious.
Part X doesn’t just cause us to have hurt feelings in the normal sense but in the grand sulk-for-a-decade sense. Slights are inflated so that if someone doesn’t invite us to a dinner party and fails to give us the opportunity to say no, we will be hurt for a lifetime. The drama of being hurt compensates for the empty life we lead as a result of being cut off from the Life Force. The real cause of our hurt is not our perceived slights and offenses but that deep down we know we are guilty of squandering the life that has been given to us. We are squandering the Life Force and the inner expression we chose not to cultivate as we allowed Part X to dominate and weaken and in some cases exterminate us.
One thing Stutz and Michels make clear: You must call Part X out. You must see Part X inside you, name it, and see it as a separate entity inside you. It is not your whole being. It is a part of you. You weaken it by identifying it and recognizing when it is at work inside you. Barry Michels could hear the negative and angry voice of Part X inside him. A conventional therapist would say the anger was from having a dysfunctional relationship with his mother, but Michels counters that such a fixation on the childhood past gives Part X power because Part X is a part of us that is acting in the here and now. Michels could not conquer Part X, or at least manage it, until he took responsibility for the toxic Part X voice inside him.
Michels also adds that Part X is a learning tool. By learning how to manage Part X, we cultivate the Life Force. Part X will cut us at our knees over and over, but we will keep getting up. Indeed, Michels refers to a famous quote by Confucius: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
As Phil Stutz and Barry Michels give us the tools to conquer Part X as it manifests in instant gratification, lethargy, demoralization, and hurt feelings, they have a lot to say about the power of self-denial and deprivation as they pertain to resisting indulgences avoidance techniques that distract us from our purpose in life. For one, the authors claim that “deprivation is a portal to more life.” The corollary must also be true: Self-indulgence is a portal to less life. For two, the authors write that “Deprivation frees you from being enslaved by your impulses.” These impulses could pertain to gluttony, lust, consumerism, and so on. Their point is that we are looking to externalities for a problem that is within us: vacancy. We are empty and the more we feed ourselves the emptier we become. The solution is to look inward, confront the vacancy, stay calm, and find that beyond the vacancy is a love inside us that we were meant to use to be in service to others. Laying down our lives for others fills us more and more. We will no longer try to fill the void with cars, clothes, timepieces, and trophy partners.
To deal with temptations, the authors observe that we lie to ourselves about deprivation. We claim that if we don’t get what we want we will die or at the very least this deprivation is an insult to our existence. They point out that we are not being rational. In fact, we are highly irrational because we are in an altered state. As an example, I can tell you that my social media friends and I are addicted to expensive timepieces. We spend way more time looking at watches than is healthy. We are overcome with FOMO, heightened arousal, and “watches on the brain” to the point that when we “pull the trigger,” buying a watch on the Internet, we did not do so with prudence and deliberation. Rather, we did so like helpless addicts and like helpless addicts, these watches don’t bring us joy but shame: They are a reminder of our failures, our lack of self-control, and our succumbing to Part X. In other words, these timepieces, which are supposed to bring us joy, are a testament to the fact that we have been cut off from the Life Force.
I can’t look at this matter of deprivation without thinking about food. Like most people, food is a source of great pleasure and comfort. Like most people, I eat more than I should. I soothe and comfort myself with food. I medicate myself with food. I glory in food. Certain foods put me in the altered state--pizza, popcorn, carne asada tacos, barbecued brisket, spaghetti, to name several examples. I am tormented by being an omnivore. I’d prefer to be a vegan, but I can’t get full on vegan ingredients, and I become obsessed with how hungry I am. In other words, the realm of food is an effective way to study Part X, the notion of deprivation, and the ways deprivation can teach us about freedom and connecting with the Life Force.
Regarding Part X, when it comes to weight management, I find there is an excessively negative and pessimistic voice inside of me when it comes to limiting my calories: “You’re hungry all the time. You have the appetite of a high school football player. Any diet, especially a vegan one, will merely result in you being ostracized from friends and family. Diets don’t work. People lose weight for a while, but then they gain it back and even more. Diets will screw up your metabolism. You’re naturally big. Your Set Point wants you to weigh over two hundred, so screw it. You love food too much, bro. Your wife and daughters are always baking and bringing home donuts and cake. Too many temptations, my man. Of course, you eat at night. That big bowl of cereal reminds you of your childhood. It’s comforting. Without that bowl of cereal, you won’t be able to get to sleep. A man needs his sleep.”
But there are contrary voices in my head: “You look like shit. What’s that burning feeling in your left foot whenever you close in on two hundred and forty pounds? Neuropathy? Isn’t that pre-diabetes? Why don’t your pants fit you anymore? Are you going to buy bigger pants on eBay again? Shit, dude, what a loser.”
If I’m reading The Tools and Coming Alive correctly, I can’t avoid my health, my body, and my approach to eating. I need to be engaged with everything I do, including making healthy meals for me and my family. Writing about my struggle to eat well, I am reminded that Stutz told Jonah Hill that the Life Force is based on our relationship with our body, with others, and ourselves. Paying attention to the body and its signals: a pudgy face, a burning left foot, and a sore lower back A lot of weight gain and its accompanying ailments come gradually through denial and avoidance.
As I try to meet these challenges through the prism of The Tools as described by Stutz and Michels, I can feel strong resistance, what I feel must be Part X. It tells me I’m a joke and my writing all these tools down is a waste of my time. The voice goes like this: “Dude, you failed. You were supposed to write a novel in the vein of the great French novelist Emmanuel Carrere, but you’re just summarizing chapters from a couple of books. Since cutting down on the Internet and getting your collection down to six watches, you have been writing more but to what end? All you have is a dozen essays that no one wants to read. And this current essay you’re writing about Phil Stutz is shit. I mean, look man, this thing is an incoherent, meandering beast. You want your old life back. You know it, man. You’re in denial.”
I counter: “I’ve been playing more piano, I’ve been on less social media, I’ve deleted my Twitter account, I stopped making YouTube videos about watches.”
“You still fantasize about fame as the great balm. You’re still vain.”
“Yes, I struggle with that chimera. I’ve become flattened. The flattened effect has afflicted us all as we’re all on social media too much. Yes, it’s true, I haven’t been writing my shitty counterfeit Emmanuel Carrere book. I’ve been summarizing chapters from a couple of books. My memory is shot. It could be my age. I read one Tool and I forget it soon enough, just like my piano songs. Everything I want to learn requires repetition and repeated reinforcement.”
Setting aside my Part X voice for a moment, I should acknowledge some benefits of trying to incorporate Phil Stutz’s tools in my life:
- I’ve identified Part X.
- I see responsibilities beyond my selfish ego.
- I’m not watching YouTube videos.
- I see getting sucked down those videos as a form of hell.
- I see Part X, The Resistance, and Original Sin as the same thing.
- I value time more.
- I have a nightly reading ritual with my laptop on my laptop desk.
- I’ve been playing more and more piano in my hunger to reconnect over and over with the Life Force.
- I see that my self-improvement helps others in my circle, including my wife and children.
- I have been feeling contrite about my past as that past life is in sharp contrast to my current attempt to connect with the Life Force.
- I wrote this list when Part X was telling me to quit writing this morning and this list has given me some clarity.
As I wrote a list of the benefits I’ve experienced since using Phil Stutz’s tools, I noticed I could not get out of my head the Seiko SPB297 “Blue Birch” timepiece, a watch that I had sold a month earlier. I wanted to rebuy it. I felt empty without it, incomplete. Having these thoughts made me think of Stutz’s Big Black Sun. Self-control is about finding depth and abundance within and not looking for fullness from external sources.
Perhaps the most important part of Stutz and Michels’ books is that if you’re going to conquer your demons, you have to experience the Life Force. You can’t just read about the rules. You have to live and experience them.
In my case, I notice my piano playing goes on a higher plane when I stop watching YouTube videos. The brain fog is removed, the sense of musical importance and connection is stronger, and I write my best music when I’m not in the hell dungeon of such stimulation.
Perhaps all these external forms of stimulation in the service of instant gratification and filling the vacuum are part of the hell, part of Part X’s grand plan to sabotage us and our purpose in this world.
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