One. Heaven and Hell
At sixty-one and assuming I’ve got twenty to twenty-five years left, I’ve been trying to engineer good habits as a way of maximizing my time management and living a meaningful, purposeful life through the use of the therapist Phil Stutz’s “Tools,” which I became aware of when I recently saw Jonah Hill’s documentary about his therapy with the distinguished psychotherapist. Simply titled Stutz, the documentary is Jonah Hill’s love letter to his therapist, but even more importantly it is Hill’s attempt to spread the news that there are tools we can use to help propel us forward when we are stuck in the maze of bitterness, resentment, depression, and narcissistic entitlement.
Like the Dantean concept of being lost in the woods, Stutz’s idea of the Maze is where lost souls flounder. It is where we seek, like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, some Great Payback that will heal us of all our wounds and compensate us for all of life’s perceived injustices. Of course, the Great Payback never comes and we squander our lives waiting feebly for our pain to dissolve on its own. In the Maze, we are stagnant yet foolishly hopeful for something big to happen, but this certain something never materializes.
I can’t think about this wasted life in the Maze without thinking about a famous quote from the TV series The Wire when detective Lester Freamon warns his fellow detective Jimmy McNulty that their job will never make them whole. There will never be some grand moment of glory that will make all the hard work worth it. They are slogging in the Maze in vain. Why? Because Freamon says life “is the shit that happens while you’re waiting for things that never come.”
Waiting for things to happen is not a recipe for success in Stutz’s doctrine. Waiting for things to happen will merely reinforce our imprisonment in the Maze. To live in the Maze is to live a life cut off from higher powers. It is separation from the Life Force. Therefore, living in the Maze is a form of damnation.
As we go deeper and deeper into our self-induced Maze, we become cut off from the Life Force, the Source, and our sense of gratitude. The Life Force and the Source are terms for the divine higher power that propels us forward in our lives and keeps us focused on living our lives with deliberation, purpose, order, and creativity. We reinforce this forward-moving life by getting into the habit of reminding ourselves how grateful we are to be on this journey that the Life Force animates. Living in this manner, we continuously move forward.
But Stutz’s world is a binary one. If we’re not moving forward, we are stuck in the Maze. In this toxic inferno, we forget to be grateful for what is good about our lives, we get into the habit of summoning the Black Cloud, which is supported by all our negative thoughts, we squander the limited time life has given us, and we become essentially wastrels. Let us be clear. The Stutzian doctrine paints a clear picture of heaven and hell.
Two. People Know You’re in the Maze
People don’t have to be familiar with the language or doctrine of Phil Stutz to recognize on an intuitive or unconscious level when they encounter me that I am a man who is lost in the Maze, a man whose brain is hijacked by various addictions and my addictive behavior cripples me, puts me in a bubble, and prevents me from growing and flourishing into a full human being. This makes me both self-conscious and ashamed.
As an example, I will focus on just one of my addictions: timepieces. Since 2005, I have been addicted to watches, especially Japanese diver watches. I can’t seem to get enough of these divers even though my wife says they all look the same. I also suffer from anxieties from not having enough time to wear and bond with the watches that I have, so I’m constantly selling some to minimize my collection only to miss them and rebuy them over and over. This buying and rebuying is an endless cycle that speaks to being stuck in the Maze or what my fellow watch addicts call The Weeds.
My watch addiction is worsened by the fact that I constantly think and talk about watches if people give me the opportunity to overwhelm them with my watch obsession and sometimes I don’t even wait for them to give me the opportunity. I remember around 2010 I had a college writing student from Korea who wore an expensive U-Boat to class, and we bonded over his love of the watch followed by his troubles with getting the mechanical Swiss movement to work properly. When I saw him on campus three years later and I immediately started talking about watches, he recoiled in disgust, screamed, and walked away from me. He could tell that I was a man trapped in the Maze, and he didn’t want to see his instructor, a man for whom he had at one time a certain amount of admiration, to be so conspicuously crippled by his addiction.
For another example, we have to fast-forward to 2022 and discuss my frequent visits to Watch City at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance. I have purchased a few watches there for my wife, but mainly I go there for bracelet adjustments or bracelet swaps because I never learned to be proficient with a spring-bar pusher tool and the like. For over seventeen years, Raffi, the owner and his second-in-command Matt have been kind, friendly, and helpful in my quest to get the ultimate bracelet fit. I am no doubt addicted to going to Watch City, not just for a bracelet adjustment but to commiserate with Raffi and Matt about watches.
Recently, however, when I bought an expensive Seiko limited edition diver and could not decide which strap to put on it, compelling me to frequent Watch City several times in one week for three weeks straight, I became annoying and Matt could not hide his annoyance. When I thanked him for doing what was probably the twelfth strap swap on my Seiko and told him that I was at last at peace with my strap decision, Matt said would a certain derision in his voice, “See you tomorrow.”
I need to make it clear that I harbor no animosity for Matt. I want to make it clear that had I been in his shoes, I would have had the same contempt for a customer who is always anxiously frequenting the store with the need for a strap swap the way a drug addict is waiting for his next fix. Matt could not help but see that I was in the throes of addiction, and it pained him to see a man in his early sixties so debilitated, so lost in the Maze of his own making.
I became acutely aware that Matt saw in me a man who was like a crack addict and this brought me shame. I could never unsee Matt seeing me in this fashion, and around the time I resolved to incorporate Phil Stutz’s Rules into my life, I bought a professional-grade spring bar tool and forced myself to learn how to do my own strap and bracelet swaps and adjustments. For pride’s sake, I no longer wanted to be an annoyance to Matt. He is a kind and generous man who did my strap swaps for seventeen years. He probably had not read Phil Stutz’s rules, but he knew on an intuitive level that I was a man lost in the Maze.
Three. Will We be Judged for the Life We Squander?
Because I have invested much time and energy in creating my own Maze, to use Stutz’s term for a place where we hibernate from real life, seek instant gratification, and undergo a sort of entropy or moral dissolution and because I am too old to afford time-wasting mind games and deceptions that I’ve honed over my lifetime, I have been eager to use Stutz’s tools explained in the documentary and his book The Tools to push myself out of the Maze and to seize the “Higher Powers” Stutz claims will help bring creativity, meaning, and order out of the chaos.
By trying to incorporate Stutz’s tools at the age of sixty-one, I feel like a fool who realizes late in life I have spent my lifetime eating spiritual junk food and hope I can reverse the process by “eating clean,” as it were, in order that I may emerge from my personal chaos and entropy.
This personal chaos is borne from spending most of my time in my Comfort Zone, a place where I seek convenience, pleasure, and escape from the type of challenges that would make me grow and lead a fulfilling life. Stutz also refers to this Comfort Zone as a “warm bath,” a place that lulls us to sleep, and eventually, if we slumber long enough, we expire irretrievably.
Wanting to luxuriate in the Warm Bath is a child’s dream of paradise. As a small child, I longed for this paradise when I discovered I Dream of Jeannie in 1965. The blonde goddess Barbara Eden lived in her genie bottle, a luxurious enclosure with a purple circular sofa lined with pink and purple satin brocade pillows and the inner wall lining of glass jewels shining like mother-of-pearl. More than anything, I wanted to live inside the bottle with Jeannie. That Jeannie's bottle was in reality a painted Jim Beam Scotch Whiskey decanter speaks to the intoxication I suffered from my incessant dreams of Barbara Eden. Living in the bottle with Barbara Eden was my unconscious wish to never grow up, to live forever in the womb with my first love.
The longing to be inside Jeannie's bottle is a regression impulse, and I can't talk about regression without mentioning Cap 'N Crunch. My mother indulged my appetite for this sugary cereal and bought me all its variations: Cap 'N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap 'N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. Quaker cereals took their winning formula of corn and brown sugar flavors and sold several variations with different mascots and names.
As a kid watching these cereals being advertised on TV, it was clear that too much of a good thing was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony.
Eating six versions of Cap 'N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a preadolescent boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn't want any choices.
You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage, and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has "found someone new" to give him hope of a new life.
That was essentially my relationship with Cap 'N Crunch. Not only was I stagnant in my food tastes, but I was also regressing into sugar-coated pablum. My love of cereal, which endures to this day, was the equivalent of finding comfort in Jeannie's bottle.
Wanting to live inside Jeannie's bottle continued in my teens, a period marked by a series of futile quests to find substitutes for Jeannie's miniature paradise. The most notorious quest happened in 1974 when I visited several friends and neighbors who had recently purchased waterbeds, tried them out, and became convinced that waterbeds would afford me a life of luxury, unimagined pleasures, and relaxation that life had so far denied me. I persuaded my parents to buy me one. My love affair with the contraption proved to be short-lived. Its temperature was either too hot or too cold. It leaked. It often smelled like a frog swamp. I remember if I moved my body, there would be a counterreaction, like some invisible wave force fighting me as I tried to get comfortable. One day the waterbed leaked so badly that the floorboards were damaged and my bedroom looked like something out of Hurricane Katrina. What was supposed to be a revolution in sleep proved to be a nightmare, and my quest to find a substitute for Jeannie's bottle had to be started afresh.
This default setting to recreate Jeannie’s bottle, the equivalent of the Warm Bath, persists to this day. We seek massage recliners, memory pillows, remote-controlled living room entertainment centers, streaming platforms that organize our media menu at the wave of a hand.
All this obsession with finding the comfort of the Warm Bath strikes me as a fool’s quest that will result in a squandered life. Will we be judged for the life we squander? To answer this question, I refer to Dale Allison’s small but riveting book Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things in which he writes that near-death experiences are universal. Every culture throughout time has had similar reports of people experiencing a Great Accounting in which they must vouch for the life they lived here on Earth.
Four. Trying to Summon My Real Shadow
I look at my life, and my commitment to living in the Comfort Zone, and I’m not very impressed. Much of my life was a cliche. I lived without a moral compass for many years and sought hedonistic delights, status, wealth, and fame--in short, living the life of a flagrant jackass. What kills me is that I engaged in this assholery for several years without any signs of self-awareness. My powers of insightful analysis were superb in eviscerating my fellow charlatans yet I never applied the same analytical acuity to myself.
To add to the cringe factor of these misguided years is that I actually saw myself as a “sensitive artist.” I wallowed in the music of The Smiths, Morrissey, and The Cure, and I read Kafka and Nabokov all the while fancying myself a deep thinker when in truth I was a self-regarding fraud.
My life as an imposter was evident in my early thirties. After teaching writing part-time at a half dozen colleges in the Bay Area for two years in the late 1980s, I got a full-time job teaching writing at a university in the desert of Central California. One of the administrators in Oakland who wrote me a letter of recommendation for the job told me, half-jokingly, at my going-away party that it was now my duty to be "The Light in the Desert."
But unfortunately, I was a burned-out lightbulb who had lost my way due to several reasons. One was that this was the first time I ever had money, which was dangerous. Having a relatively generous paycheck combined with the low cost of living in Central California, including a luxury apartment that cost a tiny fraction of my salary, gave me a false sense of wealth and encouraged me to spend beyond my means. This included the purchase of a car I didn't need, a 1991 white Acura Integra, and buying ostentatious clothing from various catalogs. Italian loafers with tassels, see-through puffy pirate shirts, and skimpy zebra-striped bathing trunks. I'm just scratching the surface of my sartorial debauchery.
As I look back, it terrifies me that I did not have an internal editor to tell me to control my conspicuous consumption. Just as a writer who writes to show off with ornate prose embarrasses himself without the intervention of a tough-minded editor, my life had become a book of florid pretentious prose, and I was in desperate need of pushing the brake pedal before I crashed.
My reckless money management and vulgarian fashion became apparent one evening when I stopped to get gas after coming home from a Basque restaurant. The ATM at the gas pump gave me my bank receipt and showed that my checking account was under a thousand dollars. Not even having a thousand dollars in the bank seized me with horror. It occurred to me just then that my Acura Integra was not only a car I didn't need, but it also compelled me to spend even more money on an upgraded stereo system and various car cleaning supplies to protect my car from dust, sun, and water sprinklers, which were known to pit car paint.
As I was putting the gas nozzle back in the holder, I noticed a giant tarantula lazily crawling over my Italian loafer. I was so full of Basque food I just stared down at the tarantula impassively as it made its way over my shoe and walked toward the nearby field. Staring indolently at the tarantula, I said to myself, "I am single with no children and no expenses to speak of, yet I am living from paycheck to paycheck. What is wrong with me?"
What was wrong with me was obvious. I was spending all my money on myself to look like a dandy with pointed loafers with no socks, Z. Cavaricci black pleated pants, and a moss green gossamer pirate shirt. Strutting around the desert town like a peacock was not only a sign of excessive self-regard. It was an advertisement for my impoverishment and a complete disconnection from reality. For all of my accomplishments, I was a fearful man-child hiding behind a wardrobe of flamboyant clothes.
Is describing myself as a spectacular self-indulgent mountebank a perversely masochistic and self-aggrandizing exercise? Clearly, it is. But I have another motive: I’m trying to summon my Shadow, the worst, most disgusting, and most shameful “second self” of my existence, to use Phil Stutz’s idea of this alter ego. Stutz warns that we cannot ignore The Shadow. Attempts to hide it will be in vain. We may acquire immense wealth and fame but always be insecure as we know deep down we are haunted by The Shadow. Stutz’s solution is to bond with the Shadow, visualize the Shadow, bring it out of the dark recesses of our unconscious and make it our palpable life partner. To bond with our Shadow is to summon Higher Powers, creativity, order, confidence, and the voice of authority.
For me, visualizing the Shadow is a challenge. But here are some thoughts:
As a child, I could not look at Burt Lahr as the Cowardly Lion without being terrified and I was so repelled that my body would jerk and I would cover my eyes as if I had looked into the eyes of evil. Is this my Shadow?
In my early twenties, I was taking a nap and in a state of lucid dreaming when my soothing reverie was interrupted by a burly freckled red-haired unkempt man in a flannel shirt smirking fiendishly at me. His lurid countenance startled me out of my nap. Could this glaring, snickering ginger man be my Shadow?
In my fifties, I once dreamed that a seven-foot- tall broad-shouldered man in a blue gangster suit with the head of a lion complete with a large flowing mane walked into a phone booth where he devoured live animals and spit out the bones. At one point in the dream, he made eye contact with me with his piercing blue eyes, and I knew he was pure evil. Is this avaricious lion-man my Shadow?
There are some common denominators to the latter two images:
If they are indeed iterations of my Shadow, they seem to represent evil, rapacity, and disregard for convention, laws, and morality itself. They seem feral, lusty, unencumbered, unfiltered, arrogant, sarcastic, virile, masculine, unconventional, and most of all, they seem to have contempt for me. Why? Because I worry about everything. I am cowardly, fearful, petty, two-faced, concerned with respectability, pensive, and neurotic--all the qualities my Lion-Man Shadow despises. Deep down, I suspect my Shadow detests me because I am just as depraved as he is, yet he has neither the time nor inclination to erect a facade whereas I busily craft a grand facade to hide my shameful impulses. To use modern nomenclature, The Shadow is balls out. I’m neatly tucked in.
If I’m to be an effective writer, I need to write balls out, that is with the Inner Authority of The Shadow, to use Stutz’s language. There has to be a quality of a bold, strong voice. Otherwise, any kind of self-expression I do, whether it be my writing or piano composition, will be weak tea.
All this talk about The Shadow has churned up a memory from 1987 when I was getting my Masters in English and seeing a Jungian psychologist in Berkeley to help me with my fear of intimacy, my depression, and my panic attacks. I was telling him about a recent dream in which I resurrected a dead prostitute by kissing her on the lips. I was wearing a flannel shirt when I found her on the deck of my parents’ house in Castro Valley. I lowered myself onto the deck, embraced her, kissed her, and she came back to life after which we both levitated toward the blue sky. I told my therapist, Dr. Moyers, a lapsed Seventh-Day-Adventist, that I had never felt so powerful and alive. If I’m not mistaken, Dr. Moyers referred to the man in the dream as my Shadow.
As I was doing the dishes one night after dinner and told my wife Carrie I had been reading about Stutz’s notion of the Shadow and trying to summon it, she looked at me skeptically, and said, “Does this guy have any credentials? Or is this his own personal approach?”
“He’s a trained psychiatrist,” I said. “He helps screenwriters get over their writer’s block by unleashing their Shadow. One of his clients is Jonah Hill.”
She rolled her eyes, then said, “Sounds like you’re joining a cult.”
“Don’t worry. I’m no one’s disciple.”
She looked at me skeptically and I resumed doing the dishes. I couldn’t develop the conversation further because I was somewhat confused about the Shadow. Was it merely my Id? And wasn’t being a mature adult learning to manage and even suppress the Id? Weren’t we all centaurs, half human and half beast, and the struggle of the human condition was learning to manage the beast? Or was the Shadow something else?
If The Shadow is some kind of creative muse and Guiding Light, as Phil Stutz and his protege and fellow Jungian therapist Barry Michels conceive it to be, perhaps I have misidentified it inside myself. Perhaps I should look elsewhere than the evil Lion Man or the luring ginger man. I may have to think back to November 27, 1978, the day San Francisco Mayor George Moscone was shot. I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and saw the distraught Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein announce his death on the local evening news. I brooded in my backyard, reclined on one of the deck’s patio chairs when a Giant Version of Me came to me in a vision, cradled me in his arms, and told me to be strong and good, and I wept for several hours. Was that my Shadow? Was it the malevolent Lion Man of my dreams or the benevolent Giant who cradled me in my arms?
Five. The Man in the Brown Sport Coat
I have to add something at this juncture, an anecdote which for some will seem like compelling evidence that my quest to live in accordance with Phil Stutz’s tools is not in vain but on the contrary is an exercise that is bearing fruit. In Phil Stutz’s The Tools, he writes that when we escape into the Comfort Zone, we get shut off from opportunities for growth and when we venture out of the Comfort Zone and seek challenges, we summon Higher Powers. Something like that happened to me as I made a commitment to get out of my Comfort Zone and replace self-gratification with a commitment to writing about my struggle to embrace Stutz’s rules. What happened is this: As I went to my Google Docs account to search for something I needed to write this book, the occasion of the death of Mayor Moscone and my vague memory of me writing about the powerful experience, I did not know what document on my hundreds of Google Doc documents I had written about it, so I typed “Moscone” in my search bar, and a document I had written nearly two years ago, titled “The Man in the Brown Sport Coat,” showed up. It was a document I don’t remember writing about a dream I don’t remember having. I read the document and apparently, I was describing a dream I had had. Titled “The Man in the Brown Sport Coat,” I believe this man may be my Shadow. I suppose I should present that document here.
I am walking downtown. It’s crowded. I see another version of myself. What’s striking about this man is that he is much younger than I am. He is in his early thirties perhaps. Unlike me, he has a full head of hair. He is wearing a brown sports coat. I’m guessing the sports coat is part of a uniform. The man is working in a crowded venue, a busy shopping plaza perhaps, or a museum, or a federal building of some sort. At first, I thought he was a bodyguard, but the more I think about it the more I think he was part of a security detail.
So from a superficial standpoint, he has a job in a public square of some sort, he has on some kind of employee-issued work uniform, he is six feet tall, medium build, a full head of brown hair. He looks like me and he is me in some ways, but he is not me. However, he seems to be the possibility of what I could be. I mean I am looking at this thirty-year-old version of me who is working a security detail and he has a full head of hair. Of course, I am twice his age and I am bald.
But what I find remarkable about him is his spirit. He is completely absent of vanity and self-loathing, qualities that define me rather well. He is someone who has undergone a recent spiritual transformation. He is overcome with gratitude. He has what I would call a pure heart.
What is strange is that sometimes I am inside him experiencing his pure heart with great emotion. But at other times, I am experiencing the man with the brown sport coat as a distant observer of him. I appear to be alternating between possessing his body and being him and at the same time being a spectator of him.
When I am him, I am navigating the crowd and there are a few times that I walk past fellow employees, both men and women, and when we walk past each other, we make eye contact, and it is apparent that these fellow employees have also undergone a similar spiritual transformation. Theirs might not be as recent as mine, but what I find remarkable is that when we make eye contact, I become very emotional, I can experience the purity of my heart, and I am overcome by gratitude from my transformation.
When I wake up, I am haunted by the Man in the Brown Sport Coat. I find it impossible to look at the Man in the Brown Sport Coat without framing this man in terms of giving me a moral imperative to somehow improve my life. I find it impossible to look at this young man without being haunted by some experiences from my past.
I am thinking of November 1978 when Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk were shot by Dan White and I brooded in my backyard when a Giant Version of Me came to me in a vision, cradled me in his arms, and told me to be strong and good, and I wept for several hours.
I am thinking of March 1979 when in my high school literature class I felt a burning fire in my body and the overwhelming notion that I was at peace (I said, “I’m at peace” over and over) and I walked out of class in tears, made it to my car, and sat behind the wheel wondering what had just happened to me. That experience reminds me of something I would later read about from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. He famously described an encounter he had with God so intense he wrote about it and put the writing inside his coat lining. He called his experience “The Night of Fire.”
So you see this is the context of your dream about The Man in the Brown Sport Coat. He was a man of purpose, purity of heart, calm, and self-possession. He was a man who had undergone some kind of recent transformation.
The very next night, you had another dream. You were your old self again, and there was a homeless man living in an abandoned cottage that you owned next to your house. You sent the homeless man and his dog on their way, but you felt compelled to give him a red flannel shirt so he could stay warm.
Your generosity was so limited that it disgusted you. Also, your half-measured kindness was clearly an inferior version of The Man in the Brown Sport Coat, but at least you had a conscience. At least, you strove to be a better person. At least you could compare your moral successes and failures in the context of The Man in the Brown Sport Coat.
So there you have it. This document had been completely forgotten. I only found it because I was trying to write a narrative about my struggle to get out of my Maze and live in accordance with Phil Stutz’s Rules.
I should add here that clearly The Man in the Brown Sport Coat may or may not be my Shadow, but clearly, he is my Aspirational Self. He is not a man trapped in the Maze. He is a man I would like to become.
Six. A Carbohydrate Coma Is Not Freedom
I am wasting my time beating my chest and lamenting that I didn’t flip a switch and take Phil Stutz’s tools seriously until I was sixty-one. This isn’t to say that I haven’t adhered to a schedule all my life, getting up, eating high-protein meals, doing an hour kettlebell workout, playing piano, and writing, but to be honest my schedule was compromised by consumerism and having the most adolescent notions of happiness. I’ve gone down so many rabbit holes on the Internet. I’ve had so many distractions. I’ve burned so many huge chunks of time. It’s not just the chunks of lost time that squander a life. It’s the brain fog in the aftermath that doubles and even triples that amount of time that gets wasted. There is no getting it back.
I learned from Jonah Hill’s documentary about Stutz and Stutz’s book The Rules that we burn time and squander our lives in essentially two ways: First, we get stuck in the Maze where we sulk and seethe with resentment and refuse to move forward with our lives until we get some kind of magical compensation for the injustices that have afflicted us. Second, we get caught up in what Stutz calls the “magical thinking” of believing that if we can achieve fame or acquire some other Big-Ticket Item, we can cease to struggle and engage with the mess of life and opt to luxuriate in our own Hakuna Matata, a life of opulence without worries. It occurred to me that we struggle in life with the belief that we are hostages to the indignity of hard work, and we believe that fame will pay the ransom so we can be delivered from the bondage of hard work. But freedom is not regressing back to the Warm Bath. This bath lulls us into a state of depression and lethargy.
When I think of this lethargic state, I am reminded of growing up in the 60s and 70s when we were oblivious to nutritional concerns like grams of sugar and carbohydrates. On weekend mornings, for example, my parents would sometimes take me to a local pancake house and I'd always order the apple pancakes. The stack of ten flapjacks served before me was so big that sitting next to it I looked like a helpless Lilliputian, and the question had to be asked: Was I going to eat the pancakes, or were the pancakes going to eat me? Of course, I ate the pancakes, every last one of them. They were delicious--drowning in apple pie filling, smothered in creamy-soft butter, and then finally doused with a half-gallon of maple and boysenberry syrup. I would wash the pancakes down with several tall glasses of orange juice. The amount of insulin-spiking sugars and carbohydrates I consumed during these breakfasts were so high that my morning indulgence would have given a modern-day endocrinologist a cerebral hemorrhage. Not surprisingly, I would go home, and rather than spend time with my friends who could be heard outside playing, I would be catatonic and nauseous in my bed for several hours in what could be called a Carbohydrate Coma. The abuse my pancreas suffered is immeasurable. The point is that this excess was not a recipe for happiness but the opposite: depression and crapulence.
When I watched Jonah Hill’s documentary Stutz, a switch in my brain flipped on when Stutz explained that we can’t begin to use his tools until we plant our feet in reality. And what is our reality? It is threefold: pain, uncertainty, and hard work. Rather than be depressed when I heard Stutz identify the three aspects of reality, I was happy because deep down I knew he was speaking the truth, that there was no resisting this truth, and that the faster I accepted this truth the better off I would be. Freedom was knowing and accepting with gratitude and courage that our shared reality is pain, uncertainty, and constant work. We are all in the same boat. We are all connected in this regard. Wisdom, humility, and the deep sense that we all share the human condition of pain, uncertainty, and constant work began with this foundation. I knew at that moment that I was going to investigate Stutz’s ideas, and I soon discovered he had a book co-authored with Barry Michels titled The Rules.
Indeed, Stutz attempts to chip away at our collective delusion that happiness rests in self-indulgence and laziness. He emphasizes that we have a purpose to be in the ongoing process of creation, that the act of creation is extremely difficult, yet this excruciating path toward creativity is what connects us to our Maker or the Life Force or the Source, whatever term you’d like. Stutz quotes Paracelsus: “Happiness does not consist in laziness… In labour and in sweat must each man use the gifts that God conferred upon him on earth.”
Some will scoff at Stutz. They will accuse him of merely writing a self-help book and repackaging a trite and self-evident platitude that hard work is the true path whereas self-indulgence is the path to despair and self-destruction. However, I am reminded of a quote that Albert Camus cited in his Notebooks from the artist Eugene Delacroix: “What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
It can not be said enough that there are powerful cultural forces that shape our collective imagination to conceive happiness and success as luxuriating in the Warm Bath of self-indulgence and that this delusion will result in our intellectual and spiritual extinction. I noticed this with special acuteness during the Pandemic when my college courses were moved online and my contact with my fellow humans was, with the exception of my wife and twin daughters, almost reduced to nil. I spent much of the Lockdown on my computer looking at houses in New Mexico and Georgia. I fantasized about selling my Los Angeles home for well over a million and buying a comparative palace in New Mexico or Georgia for half a million and spending the rest of my life in the Warm Bath of a giant house with a swimming pool and modern amenities. It would be a reiteration of my childhood fantasy from watching I Dream of Jeannie that I could find happiness by living with Jeannie inside her bottle.
But then the Pandemic lulled, the Lockdown was over, and I reluctantly went back to the classroom. I was moved almost to tears by the resilience of my young students who had suffered more than I had. Many had parents and other family members who worked in the service industry and didn’t have the luxury of hiding during the Lockdown. As a result, many of my students had families nearly not survive physically and financially due to Covid. Many didn’t have WiFi and the technology necessary to take their college courses online. But there they were in class, hungry for an education. I was humbled by their presence and I worked twice as hard to produce compelling content for them. One day I was speaking extemporaneously to my writing students about my primary objective as their instructor and I told them with all sincerity that my number-one job was to take all the chaos of their lives and give them order and clarity. I wasn’t merely obliged to be clear about the method of the writing assignments; I was obliged to persuade them that in the midst of their chaotic lives the writing assignments were relevant, compelling, and worth their time. This is a tough sales pitch but a necessary one. If I couldn’t produce order and clarity, I told them, “I might as well go home, drink beer, eat apple pie, curl up into the fetal position, and go into a coma.”
On another occasion, I told my students I would never leave Los Angeles. I had taught in Los Angeles for thirty years, I loved my students who had over the decades been kind and generous to me, and I could not imagine living or teaching anywhere else.
The point I am making is that living and teaching in Los Angeles, I had found that I could recognize my most meaningful existence in the context of what Phil Stutz calls the Three Aspects of Reality--pain, uncertainty, and constant work. Retiring to a palace in some other part of the country was not only the answer; it was the recipe for accelerating my own death. It was the beginning of being lulled into a Carbohydrate Coma from which I would never return.
Seven. Dark Forces
Phil Stutz makes it clear that we are a broken and demoralized people, fed the false promise of consumerism and the idea that we are “finished products.” This idea that consumerism will fix us and that we don’t need constant upkeep is an “unreal view” of what it means to be human. We must constantly use the Tools, create habits of showing gratitude to battle against the Black Cloud of negative reinforcement and engage in the daily struggle to create in order to find fulfillment. However, too many of us are like dieters when it comes to spiritual health. We do the things necessary to achieve a state of spiritual maturity, but like dieters once they reach their weight goals, we stop using the Tools and we fail to maintain the spiritual maturity we worked so hard to obtain.
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.”
Part X is an insidious saboteur. To make this point, I tell my students about the way I pushed away a girlfriend. 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. 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, 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?
Jonny writes:
I just re-watched Stardust Memories for maybe the 5th or 6th time - one of Woody's best. Anyhow, I don't know when you last saw it, or if you've seen it, but I really recommend watching it as it is isomorphic to this blog. I love the "answer" Woody comes to at the end - in a way, he makes the jump from the existential to the spiritual, although not calling it that. But the last scene with Dory is just beautiful.
I hate cutting it out of the movie, but here's the two-minute scene I'm talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3GOu0HuMP4