Position has to do with how you confront yourself and face your world. It has to do with your narrative, your story. You must become the man to achieve the goal, to do the deed, to win through. And you do this by making the Positions real within you.
You know and want this, or you wouldn’t have read this far. You must change your story. In Star Wars Luke is a farm boy till events catapult him into a situation wherein he must change or die. Neo in The Matrix is offered the choice of the Red Pill or the Blue Pill. The real choice is change or stay the same. This book is your invitation, and our tool is your Red Pill. Your choice.
Consider the changes that each of them goes through, and these changes write their new story. Same for you. They acquire discipline, purpose, and value. When you do this, you see yourself differently, and this is very important. Both of those heroes had dark moments in their stories, and they stayed the course, as you must also. All these things that write and change your life story I call positions. I have nine of them for you.
The positions are the building blocks of a new story., in which you are the hero, who completes his Hero’s Journey using the tools and techniques of the positions.
No matter how taken you might be with what I have said so far, nor how brilliant you may think the rest of this book, it will do you no good unless you make it your own. I repeat you must become the person to make the Journey. And for this we will construct a special tool that will serve you very well now, and for the rest of your life.
Such tools, secret books, and special weapons are common in legend, myth, and movie. Luke has the Force, and Neo has the ability to alter “reality,” with his mind. Thor has his hammer that he strikes the ground with, and Captain Marvel has the magic word, SHAZAM, {never worked for me.}. What will you have for your Journey?
I have a saying, a mnemonic device, that invokes all nine positions. With training, the mnemonic will launch the emotions and mental framework that you have trained into it. This is a learning device, as well as a technique. It is also a map of your journey and an affirmation that will negate the nihilistic forces about you. But there is nothing “magic,” about it. It is neuroscience and your hard work.
It reads like this,
“I am the man in the arena, the martial artist, Ronin 1 eye, laughing pirate, seeking beauty, in a strange world, and grateful, for the adventure.”
At this point you want you to consider that there is a reason all the other books you have read had little effect on you. And there have been some, eh? They may have been very well written, and when you read them you were charged up, and thought, now you had found the answer! But here you are later, pretty much the same. The reason is that what you read were words. You need Images & Emotions. Think how much you have been influenced by stories. When you are absorbed in a narrative you have a different mental state. The character’s difficulties become yours, you enter their world and feel what is appropriate to their circumstance. And all this is so much more powerful when you actually see the images, hear the music, and are absorbed into a movie.
Images and Emotions strike to your very core when you are seeing a movie. You have special neurons in your brain called mirror neurons, that incline you to mimic what you see, hence the power of visualization. And when the character you identify with wins, when they succeed, you will tend to absorb the winning behavior at a deep level…
Would it not be fantastic if we could make a movie of you, facing difficult circumstances, then training in special methods, and changing as you won out over your difficulties? And that is exactly what we are going to do. We are going to make a movie with nine scenes and you are its star.
You will watch this movie each day, and every time you are challenged, to summon the techniques and energy needed. So our mnemonic is not just a memory device to recall words for some test. The words replay the scenes from your movie, and the emotions you summon will drive the techniques you are learning and reinforcing each day. Do this, and you will be changed forever, just as our caterpillar has become a butterfly.
I am the man in the arena, whose daily life is training for the monsters.
the martial artist whose training, discipline, and values make him a..
Ronin who writes his own script, and drives it with the power of
1eye, the silent knowledge and intuition that allows the performance of the
laughing pirate which is the mental state generating maximum performance and
seeking beauty of which there is no limit.
in a strange world, now perceived as beyond previous classifications
and grateful for all the sights and experiences
for the adventure, and all its difficulties
Now we have a rough idea for our movie. We story board it out along these nine positions.
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Give that a little thought, and you can almost imagine the movie. Even more, with a little effort you can see this as the basic plot of all the movies you have enjoyed in the past. Lets consider two of them; Star Wars and The Matrix.
1.They leave their ordinary life to fight in an arena.
2.They learn a combat art requiring training and discipline.
3.They develop a separate identity from their ordinary one.
4.And they develop a super power.
5.They can perform incredible feats because of their mental state.
6.They find the world about them to be stranger then they had imagined.
7.And their path is confused by idiots, charlatans and clowns.
8.Their path leads them to meaning.
9.And they have no regrets.
10.Their stories certainly are an adventure
11.And they never give up
12.And at the end they have won.
All nine positions will do something similar with a corresponding Image and Emotion that will create your new inner movie, in which you are the hero. This forms a very powerful affirmation. You are replacing a dystopian movie, where you star as a “ho hum,” and using Images and Emotions, cued by words, to transform yourself. Just this much alone might be enough to change your life. I think so. But we are going to go further. In the hero movies the protagonist undergoes training, and so will you. We will have simple exercises that are created by repurposing some of your daily activities. Thus they will take no extra time, just a change in the way you regard what you do anyway.
Doing the exercises will produce changes in you in a short time, and also vastly change your worldview and core strengths. Coupled with the mnemonic, you will have the Super Learning System.
The Super Learning System is lacking only one thing, and that you have to help with. It is motivation. We just talked about Images an Emotions, and this is why. Change is difficult, or you would already have done so. Now you are in your Home Space, your worldview, habits of eating, exercising, posture, self-image, are all part of that Home Space. Even if you can see yourself as a caterpillar amongst the worms, still, that is your home space, and it is not easy to leave. For example, consider Dick Morrison.
Dick Morrison is a fictional typical man, with a shitty home space, who appears in Stephen King’s short story, “Quitter’s Inc.” He wants to quit smoking, and by chance encounters an old friend who tells him about Quitters, and that they helped him quit smoking and more. Dick eventually goes to Quitter’s and is told that they have a 98% success rate. Dick signs up. And after he signs up he finds out how they work. They know everything about him, his family, and friends. If they catch him smoking, and if he smokes they will, he and his family will suffer torture, and if he is caught a tenth time, they will kill him. He doesn’t really believe they would harm his wife or son, or even himself.
So he can stand it no longer and sneaks off for a cigarette. When he is caught smoking he has to watch as his wife Lucinda receives a half hour of electric shocks. Dick quits smoking, but gains weight. Now he is told to lose weight, or they will cut off one of his wife’s fingers. Now he really believes them. He loses the weight, and much later runs into the old friend who recommended Quitters. The friend has his wife with him, and she is missing a finger.
Stephen King tells it better and you can read the original in his book, Night Shift. But the point is that you can do it. You can do the impossible, if you can summon the emotion. And our Super Learning System wouldn’t be super if we didn’t cover that vector. I think we can do it better than Quitter’s Inc, and without cutting off your wife’s fingers. Instead we are going to use an another means of controlling emotion.
We said Images and Emotions, and we will get them both from movies. We are going to repurpose your movie watching time. Already we have discussed how the nine positions are really nothing new, but a part of the classical Hero’s Journey, so often portrayed in so many movies. And as you watch the images roll across the screen you feel many deep emotions. Sometimes more powerfully than you experience in your day to day life where there are many things going on at the same time, most of which you are used to. Also there is rarely background music appropriate to an upcoming crisis. Things happen, events go by, and mostly you don’t pay attention and don’t remember. Not a lot of emotion except for perhaps some road rage. But in the darkened theatre it is different. You are no longer a “Dick Morrison,” look-a-like. You become Luke Skywalker, or Rocky, or whomever, and over the course of two emotion charged hours you cross the nine positions and triumph. Adrian runs into your arms, trumpets play and Princess Leia hangs the medal around your neck, and you are a hero. Even for a time after, as you drive home, there is some affect still with you. That is part of what you are to recall as you process the mnemonic. The emotion that flows from an image of a hero crossing a position. This is powerful, and unique. Let’s see how this might play out.
You wake up, take a few breaths, and begin the mnemonic, “I am the man in the arena.”
For one second you feel yourself, strong, confident, balanced and ready. Now you are standing before the gate to the arena and you feel the warm sand beneath your sandals and the weight of the sword in your hand.
We are going to do this for each of the nine positions.