Author/lecturer Steven Barnes and The Hero's Journey

Steve is an award winning novelist and screenwriter. He's got over, and this is hard to fathom, he's got over 2 million words in print. He's here today to talk to us about a personal development system that he's created called Life Writing. His method is the work of an exceptionally creative mind. I think you're going to see that when he speaks to you. And with the challenges we have ahead of us, especially in government, I think it's going to be useful for us to open up some of that creativity. Please join me in giving Steve Barnes a very warm Kern county welcome.

By the way, I wanted to call attention to what happened when Chris was talking about the practice diary. Did everybody notice the emotion that came up in his voice at that instant? Okay, good. That's gonna be something important for us to remember. We're gonna come back around to that. I notice stuff like that. It's important to notice stuff like that. I want to start. The theme of this has to do with storytelling. It's something that I've been fascinated with since childhood. All I ever wanted. There were three things that I wanted to do in my life in just three. I wanted to be a professional writer and I managed to do that. I wanted to be a martial artist and I have three black belts and all kinds of fun stuff. And I wanted a family to hold and love and care for. And I've been married to my soulmate for 15 years and nothing is more important to me than being a dad and raising a child. My 28 year old daughter just got married four weeks ago and I have a 10 year old son who is just beginning the process of finding out who and what it is that he is. And I remember when I took my daughter to Tanzania to do research on a novel that I was writing called Great Sky Woman and we got charged by an elephant. A crazed Floridian tourist was teasing the elephant that it was at the edge of our camp and the lip of Ungorogoro Crater. And it charged us and we went, you know, we went running. If you've ever seen a pachyderm in the wild coming at you, it's quantitatively and qualitatively different from seeing one at a zoo or a circus. This is a different thing. You are in its world, it is not in your world. And it was letting us know in no uncertain terms that it did not want us there. And flying home from Africa and thinking about what had just happened, where several tons of angry pachyderm had attempted to pin us against the side of the bus and reduce us to chutney. One contemplates one's mortality. And I realized that I wanted to boil down everything that I felt that I knew about life and put it into some way that my daughter one day, having her own children, if her grandfather, if her dad was not there, would be able to say, this is who your granddad was. And now with my 10 year old son, for him to be able to say one day to his children, or perhaps his grandchildren, this is what granddad was. Or this is what great granddad was. The question of how do we put meaning to something as formless and amorphous as an entire human life is a difficult question. But storytelling is, in essence, a way of creating meaning out of chaos. It is the linking together in a linear sequence of things that are nonlinear. Because all of us remember more vividly the first kiss that we ever got than we remember what we had for breakfast last Tuesday. That emotional content is what we use to spin together the meaning of our lives. So what is this thing called story? And why is it important? Why is it such a catchphrase in corporations and governments and things of this nature? Because the person who controls the story of a situation controls the narrative. Control the narrative. You control people's emotions, you control their emotions, and you control their actions. It's critical for us to understand this. We don't see life as it is. We see life as we are. Whatever it is that we believe deeply enough becomes our reality, whether it is objective reality or not. So the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves about the things that we experience are about our governments or about our jobs, our careers, our lives, whatever our relationships. What is a story that we tell ourselves about these things will determine the results that we get. People who are waiting in waiting rooms for loved ones who are in surgery do better if they're reading fiction than if they're reading nonfiction. Why is that good? Questions. All these things are questions. But all of it's going to come back to the question, what is story? And by the way, another thing we're going to come back to is the fact that there are only basically two questions to ask in life. One of them is, who am I? And the other one is what is true. In storytelling, we write about two things. What are human beings? And what are the worlds that those human beings encounter? There are only those two things and the way that those things interact. But once again, that's what it does. What is it? We can dance all the Way around that question. We're going to, we're going to examine that from several different directions. But I'm going to start because we experience countless thousands of stories, probably millions of stories over the course of our lifetime. Every commercial that we hear, every television show, every comic book, every movie, every book, every short story, and every joke we hear has to do with this question. What is story? Now, having written, actually, I hate to say this, but it was 3 million words. A million here, a million there. Who's counting? The one thing I never did a whole lot of was humor. And it was, you know, science fiction, horror, suspense. I wrote four episodes of Baywatch. But please don't hold it against me. I've got a great Pam Anderson story. I'll tell you sometime, but you got to catch me privately. But the first time I ever understood what humor was, and this was important to me because I was trying to figure out, what is this stuff? The first time I ever understood what humor was, was a Rodney Dangerfield joke, curiously enough. So you're about to hear my Rodney Dangerfield impression and I want you to pretend that I'm a 60 year old white guy, you know, with a, you know, pinched with a tie. No, no respect. No respect at all. Yeah. So anyway, I heard this Rodney Dangerfield joke and went like this. Went to a party last weekend, took my girlfriend, ran into her ex boyfriend, 6 foot 2, blonde hair, blue eyes. She said, george, this is Rodney. Rodney, this is goodbye. And I listened to that and I said, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. Why is it brilliant? Well, what is Rodney Dangerfield's Persona? You think about what it is that made it possible for him to tell a joke like that. His Persona is I don't get no respect. So he is the man who gets no respect. Right. Okay. So I took my girlfriend to a party last weekend. Ah, his girlfriend. Somebody who he cares about. Someone who he has a heart space connection with. Immediately our attention rises because this is a guy who is a congenital loser. He takes someone he loves to a party, something bad is going to happen at that party. We know this, okay? Ran into her ex boyfriend. Oh, six foot two. What does Rodney Dangerfield look? I don't know how tall he was, but he looks short. He has a body. Blonde, you know, six foot two, looks like. He has a body that looks like mashed potatoes in a sock. So we know this does not end well. Six foot two, blonde hair, blue eyes. Oh no, a Nordic. God. All of us have been abandoned. Everybody got lost at the mall, got Lost at Disneyland. Everybody has had a girlfriend or boyfriend dump them. We all have that. So our anxiety level starts rising. The only question now is, it's no longer how bad is it going to be? The question is now, when are we going to get hit with it? Okay, George, this is Rodney. Rodney, this is goodbye. Bam. All that tension is released in an instant, and we laugh. It's the exact same dynamic that's used in a horror film, by the way, except in a horror film, you scream. Scream. Laughter. Same thing. Release of tension. Storytelling in a tiny form, utilizing the high context reality that everybody identifies with. Having lost, we understand his Persona from hundreds of hours of watching Rodney Dangerfield over decades. So the tension. We already know where he's going to go. He just hits us with it before we expect it. And we release the tension with a laugh. Wow. Meaning, effect. Cause, effect. Bam. So clear. Brilliant. But step back again. What is story? We see how story works. We see what story does. We see why story is important. But once again, what is it? In the 1950s, a cultural anthropologist named Joseph Campbell wrote a book called It Was the Masks. Was it Mask of the Heroes? It wasn't the Heroes. The Hero's Journey is what came out of it. But he wrote a book and he wrote several articles dealing with the fact that he had studied comparative mythologies from around the world. And he found that there was a commonality to all the stories that were being told. And it didn't matter whether you were talking about an Eskimo shaman or an African storyteller or Broadway playwright or a Hollywood screenwriter or a Celtic bard, it didn't matter. There was a consistent story that was being told in all these different places. It was the Hero with a Thousand Faces. That was the name of the book that he wrote. And he created something that he called the Hero's Journey. He codified it, and I've adapted it very, very slightly. And he said basically that there were 10 steps in this hero's journey. So if I could have the. How do I get the illustrious technical people. I get this. I don't see anything yet. Hello. Hello. Aw, it's not going. Don't tell me it's not working, but I'm not going to worry that it's not working. Huh? Don't worry about it. We can, you know, we. We will make this work. Anyway, so there were 10 steps to the Hero's Journey. The first step in the Hero's Journey. And what we're going to do now is I'm going to relate the 10 steps of the hero's journey to one of the most famous applications thereof. Because the truth is that everybody is familiar with this because George Lucas used Joseph Campbell's work as the basis of the film Star wars, especially the original film, now called A New Hope. So the first thing that Joseph Campbell said is, first, the hero or heroine, because it doesn't matter whether it's a male or female, is confronted with a challenge. In the original film Star wars, this was the moment when Obi Wan Kenobi said, come with me, Luke. Learn the ways of the Force. In other words, you have a steady state in your life. Something comes in to interrupt it. The second stage of the hero's journey is the reflection refusal of the challenge. For some reason or another, the hero will say no. Now, in Star wars, it was. I promised Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru that I'd work on the moisture evaporators. Remember that? Okay? Ah. Okay, There we go. So the first step is the hero is confronted with a challenge. And is that coming up on the screen someplace? It's not coming up on the screen. Then why am I using this if you can't see it? Oh, there you go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. For the moment there, I was thinking I really wasn't getting any respect. It was an act. It was a Persona. It was a joke. Okay, so hero is confronted with a challenge. Come with me, Luke. Learn the ways of the Force. The next step. There we go. Hero rejects the challenge. I promised Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru I'd work on the moisture evaporators. Right? So the third step is the hero accepts the challenge. In this particular case, somebody left Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru with a bomb me sign on their backs. The stormtroopers killed them all, and Luke was conveniently free to go and do what he wanted to do in the first place. I've always been a little suspicious of this. You know, it. Also, I'm the kind of person, I have the mind that says that. When I watch the wizard of Oz, I notice that Glinda the good witch is left as the last power in Oz after the evil witches are dead and the wizard is gone. I always kind of wonder if there is a sequel that takes place 40 years later where Dorothy has been working herself to death on a little 20 acre farm and another twister goes through. And a bottle is deposited by the twister, and she opens it up, and in a munchkin's hand, she reads this note says, help us. Glinda's gone insane. But I don't know. It's just me, I'm sure. But the hero accepts a challenge. If the hero doesn't accept the challenge, you've got no story. Right. Nothing happens now, by the way, there are plenty of writers who will play with just elements of this. You don't get every one of these steps in every story. That's the mistake people make. The 10 keys of the hero's journey are like the 88 keys of a piano. You don't make music by hitting them all in order. You don't hit all of them every time. You understand what emotional impact each note has. You play them out of order in different intensities with different rhythms, so as to either fulfill or surprise the expectations of the person listening. And that's how you create art. So these are steps that represent things, and we'll go more deeply into that. So the third step is the hero accepts the challenge. The next step is that the hero then sets out along the road of trials. In other words, they do the stuff that is between where they are and where they need to be in order to face whatever the final difficulty is. In Star wars, it was the travel to Mos Eisley Cantina, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, and they go to Alderaan, which has already been blown up, and they go to the Death Star. And then they go over here. Just the places that he goes. Okay? And the next step after that is the gathering of allies and powers. Now, the road of trials and the gathering of allies and powers take place pretty much at the same time. They kind of overlap with each other. And in Star wars, you know, what were the allies and powers that he gained? Who were the allies? Obi Wan Kenobi, R2D 2C, 3PO, Princess Leia, Chewbacca. The truth is, if you watch all six of the movies, you realize that even Darth Vader was really an ally when it came right down to it, because it was really the Skywalker family versus the emperor. Oh, God. You didn't see it? I'm sorry. Did I blow that for you? Okay, Darth Vader is Luke's dad. And the titanic sinks. Oh, come on, please. Give me a ring. So what powers does he gain? He learns how to use a lightsaber. He learns how to operate the Force. He learns how to operate one of the little TIE fighter things, the ack ack guns and so forth and so on. In other words, he learns the skills that will enable him to survive when he meets the final challenge. Because if the farm boy he was in the first scene was transplanted into the last climactic action, he'd be dead within moments. So the entire story is nothing more than either teaching the things he needs to learn or educing from him, drawing forth from him the skills that he needs in order to succeed. Okay, the next step is that the hero is confronted with evil and is defeated. And this is where the rubber meets the road. And this is where it's important that you understand what's going on here. Defeat. Now, this is. Writing is an art form, not a science. So what I'm about to say is an opinion as much as it is some sort of objective reality. But I would say that the moment of initial defeat is the moment when Obi Wan Kenobi is killed. Because Obi Wan Kenobi was supposed to take Luke to being a man. You know, he was his father replacement figure. So when Obi Wan is killed, it should plunge Luke into deep depression, because this is a film of action rather than emotion. They don't dwell upon that lack. They don't dwell upon what Luke just lost. Instead of that, they go into an action scene which pumps the adrenaline up and keeps things rolling. But that is a terrible moment. Luke has completely walked away from his prior life in order to be something he wants to be. Teach me to be a Jedi like my father. And the person who's supposed to teach him how to be a Jedi dies. Now, that defeat sends the character spiraling into what is called the dark night of the soul. Now, the dark night of the soul is the moment when it feels that all of your innate capacities are insufficient to. To complete the task at hand. I don't have what it takes. I can't do it. The way through the dark night of the soul is called the leap of faith. And the leap of faith is always, always one of three things. Faith in yourself, that somewhere inside you there's greater strength, power, wisdom than you have ever known. Faith in your companions or faith in a higher power. It's always one of those three things. And if you want to know why George Lucas is a billionaire, answer the question. In the original movie Star wars, which of the three was it? And it is a trick question. Huh? It was all three. Exact. Exactly. For the first time I have ever seen in a film, it was all three. Because the Force trust your feelings, Luke. The Force not only binds the universe together and it's a spiritual, but it also flows through you. So it was both Luke having to trust himself to be able to use this universal power and trusting his companions because Han Solo comes diving in out of the sun and saves him by blowing away Darth Vader's wingmen. If you take the leap of faith, if you've gathered your allies, if you have taken every step you can take, if you have accepted responsibility, then what you see over and over again in world mythology is the acceptance of the idea that this is the path to victory. You confront evil again, and this time you are victorious. Boom. Death Star blows up. And the last step, the student becomes the teacher. Also known as the return to the village with the elixir movement to the higher level. In Star wars, they Darth Vader, not Darth Vader. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are given medals. Medals are what you get in a society when the society says your behaviors are worthy of emulation. Do what this person did, who has the medals. Everybody applauds, credits roll. They are demonstrating what it is to be a hero. Now let me ask you a question. If you see this pattern all over the world, why do you see it? I mean, do you think all the storytellers got together 20,000 years ago in some underground caves and said, let's do it this way. Where did this come from? Because anytime you see the same behaviors or the same things, thoughts as emergent properties and cultures or emergent information memes in different cultures that are separated by thousands of miles, it is reasonable to assume that it arises from something within the cultures rather than something that is imprinted upon them from above. And I suggest to you that this pattern can be seen because it is the pattern of our lives. That no matter what you try to do, this pattern obtains. When you tried to learn how to ride a bicycle, the first thing you did was you saw people riding a bicycle and you were confronted with a challenge. I want to learn how to ride that bicycle. Initially, perhaps you rejected the challenge. I'm afraid of. I'm not sure I can do it because there's always the pull and the push back. But if you learned how to ride a bicycle, you accepted the challenge. I'm going to learn how to do it. And you set out on the road of trials. I'm going to have to practice this. I'm going to have to do this. During which you gained allies and powers. What allies? Your brother, your sister, next door neighbor, your mom or dad who bought you a bicycle. What powers did you need? You needed vision, you needed courage, you needed proprioceptive sense. Knowing where you are in three dimensional space. You needed coordination. You need all those different things to put it together. And you went out and you started practicing. That was your road of trials. And initially you had a confrontation with evil. Doesn't have to be an external evil. It can be your own fear. But probably it was your confrontation with that rose bush on the corner. And you were defeated and you fell down and you started crying. And you say, I can't do this. I'm scared. I'm hurt. I can't do this. I'll never learn how to do this. I just won't. And somebody. Because remember what I said, that the way through the dark night of the soul. I can't. Is the leap of faith. It was faith in yourself. That any belief that something you want with all your heart and that you're prepared to fight for and try for over and over again. That if you can hold that dream in your heart, that there is something inside you that has the power to give it to you. Or maybe. Maybe it was trust in your companions. A brother or sister who said, you can do it. I didn't used to be able to ride a bicycle. I know what it is to be scared. I hate that rose bush too. Let's kick the rose bush. But if you get back on the bike and I'll help you, I'll be right at your side. I promise I won't let you fall off again. You can do this. I swear you can do this. Somebody put their heart back into you. Or maybe you believed as many do, that God would not let us hold a dream in our heart that we do not have the capacity to bring into existence. Whatever it is. Something helped you get back on that bicycle. And you tried again and you did it. And the last thing was, Look, Ma. No hands. And then you turned around. The student becomes a teacher. And you taught your little brother or your little sister or your cousin or your friend how to ride a bicycle. And you found out something that is just incredibly important. That human beings as individuals aren't much smarter than chimpanzees. That what makes us special is the ability to transmit more information to the next generation than is lost in the noise. That that sacred object obligation to teach, to share, to overcome, to pass on. What we have learned is part of what makes us what we are. It's critical. So we have this pattern. And every one of you has seen this pattern a thousand times. And we can step back and ask, who are we and what is true? Who we are is the heroes walking the path of our lives. Little bits of protoplasm moving between birth and death, trying to find significance, Trying to find love. Trying to find more pleasure than pain. Dreaming of being the experts that we worshiped when we were kids. Dreaming of being that thing. Dreaming of being masters. Like Chris said, there's a man who is the greatest master of any discipline that I have ever known in my life. He was my first karate instructor, a gentleman named Steve Muhammad. Champion trainer of champions. Absolute mensch. Just, you know, father to hundreds of kids in our neighborhood. Just a good man, a lethal warrior. More street fighting experience than any 10 people I have known. On every account, he is beyond the level of master. The Chinese martial arts community call him a sejo, which is a level above a sifu or a sensei, someone who's created their own movement system. And I went to him. He's in his 70s now. I went to him. And still lethal. Oh, my God. I asked him, what is mastery? Because whatever you say mastery is, I know I can believe it. And he said that mastery is control of your basics. In other words, you have your basics at the level of unconscious competence, such that you can create spontaneously under pressure. Now, if you take that definition and you combine it with other ideas about mastery from people like George Leonard, who, who research this thing, you come up with a very interesting model that I want to offer you that has to do with that road of trials. And it is that mastery is a verb, not a noun. It's a process, not a position. There is a path of committing yourself to being the best you can be in your lifetime. And once you have your basics and set foot on that path and commit to following that path for a lifetime, you are as much a master as anybody else on that path. Because what masters know is that mastery, the idea that you are done, is a joke. That no matter how far and how fast you run, you are always the same distance from the horizon. And they know. They're just students. Their cup is emptied every night and they struggle to refill it every morning. And the only reason they call themselves masters is because the children need something to look up to. They know that all there is is the work. All there is is the commitment. All there is is finding one goal after another, finding some way to care about what it is that you're doing every day so you can get up in the morning and say, thank God. Another day for me to test myself. Another day for me to fill my cup. Another day for me to serve my community. Another day to find some way to bring meaning into my life. Because you cannot do it from external challenges, there has to be a personal meaning, a personal reason why you do the things you do, or you won't get out of bed in the morning. To be the hero in the adventure of your lifetime is to take the combined knowledge of every culture on the planet that says this is what your life will be. You will strive, you will find teams of people to accomplish the things you can't do by yourself. You will be honest enough to admit that you do not currently have the skills necessary to fulfill what you must do later in the journey, but also have the confidence to believe that you have something within you that can grow to face those challenges. You will face the inevitability that you will fall off the horse. You will fall on your face. You will fail. You will cry, you will slide into depression. You will say, why me? I can't do it. I'm too little. And you have been this way a thousand times before. A thousand times before. You have failed. But you got back up and succeeded. Why do we hide that from ourselves? Why do we conveniently forget that we failed so many times and succeeded anyway? Because your ego thinks it's you and it isn't. Your ego is made up of the masks that you wear in order to get along with the world. To please your lovers, your husbands, your bosses, your children, the people that you encounter. We construct those masks. They're simplified versions of who we are. Because who we really are is beyond any definitions, beyond any limits. It's pure energy manifests as something more solid as we interact with the world, as we slow ourselves down. But if you make the mistake of remembering, if you've ever held a newborn baby and it is crying, it's not fear or rage or pleasure. It is pure, undifferentiated emotion. It is that pure Buddha baby scream. Earth below, heaven above. No one in the world like me. That's where we began. And as we bump into life, we lose enough pieces of that that we begin to define ourselves as our masks and forget that we're not our masks, we're not our travails, we're not the voices in our heads. We are the hero. We're the pure energy. We're the light. And every time you face a challenge that seems to be bigger than what you thought you could achieve, every time you move through it, and then every time you turn back and you join someone's team and you help them, or you lift up a child or you do something that isn't just for you, it's for your community. Every time you do that, you are joining an infinite chain of human beings that stretches back to both. For the Paleolithic, back when people decided to pass on more information than they lost, realized that they were going to die, and that they had to live for something that was bigger than their own lives so that what they cared about moved on. That's what the hero's journey is. It is acceptance that it is a journey. It is acceptance that there are things that we must do that are better, bigger than anything we believe about ourselves. I ask that each and every one of you ask yourselves every day, what are you doing today that is bigger than you? Why are you doing it? How does it feed the love, the hunger inside you? How are you moving above and beyond so that the heroes of yesterday will look at you and smile, and the heroes of tomorrow will look back on you and wish they could be as large and as brave and as courageous as you were. Thank you very much.