7 CHAPTER : CONCLUSIONS
7.2 F URTHER R ESEARCH AREAS
W
ow, thanks for still being here.Seriously, I know you've got a kazillion other pressing things to do and I deeply appreciate you spending your valuable time on what I hope you’ll eventually come to see as a heroic journey. (Not to give away the punchline or anything, but the Hero here is YOU!)
I also want to thank you for being open to the idea of considering the world from a different perspective.
We men are used to being right all the time...heck we’re supposed to already know how everything works. So it takes a real man to admit that his old way of approaching the world and the lovely ladies in it may have been, if not entirely wrong, then possibly skewed and certainly incomplete.
And just so there's no surprises, I should warn you ahead of time that the singular model of the mind I’m going to share with you is--what’s the word? oh yeah:
weird.
It’s very weird stuff.
But you know what else is weird?
Life.
Life is weird.
Life is incorrigibly weird.
People are weird.
Quantum physics is weird.
And women--they are quite possibly the weirdest things ever invented.
But you know what's not at all weird? That old-fashioned, computer-controlled paradigm of how we operate called the Standard Dogma.
That’s not weird at all.
It makes perfect sense.
Which itself is weird, when you think about it.
Here’s a secret that the Keepers of the Standard Dogma definitely don’t want you to find out...
No explanation of the human experience that isn’t weird can possibly be true.
Speaking of the Standard Dogma, you ever go to one of those motivational seminars with the rest of your office or on your own where they get you all pumped up and screamy?! Where the word
“Mastery” or “Destiny” or “Greatness” appears somewhere in the title?
Where you're glad-handing the other hyper-excited attendees and swapping earnest promises to become multi-millionaires by the end of the calendar year? Where you diligently fill in the blanks of the workbook that shows you the precise path to
“recalibrating your mind-map to ultimate success” or whatever?
Then by the end of the day or weekend, the hub-bub dies down and life returns to normal. Weeks pass. Months. And nothing. You don't become a multi-millionaire. In fact, you don't change at all.
So what was that all about?
How could you be so intoxicated with upbeat emotions and certainty for your future at the seminar...and ultimately have so little to show for it down the road?
Seriously, what was that all about?!
Well, it turns out that the “you” who was at the seminar—the you making new friends who dress nicer than your old friends, or the you so enthusiastically writing down the 13 Action Steps to Mastery/Destiny/Greatness—is not at all the same
“you” that has to actually show up in and day-out and put in the work to get wherever you're going, now is it?! peacocked pickup guru isn't the same you sitting next to some sweet thing at a Starbucks a few weeks later....and so not a single one of the “gains” you made during that intense weekend shows up to help you start a conversation with her, much less seduce her into your bed.
Or maybe you simply went on vacation and noticed yourself acting quite differently in this new environment surrounded by a bunch of crazy strangers.
The reason what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas is because whatever happened there didn't even happen to “us” in the first place—it happened to a totally different side of us, our Vacation Self, if you will.
Of course, the Standard Dogma doesn't account for any of this. According to their model, there’s just One monolithic of you. Everything Big Self Help teaches depends upon the “fact” that the gal who shows up for the firewalk and the gal who later sits down to create a new online empire are one and the same.
Except...they're not.
But you don’t need me to tell you that. You already know there’s not just “one” of you, don’t you? It's more like there's a bunch of “you's” hiding out behind your Name.
After all...
To your mom, you're a son.
To your boss, you're an employee.
To your minister, you're a believer.
To your teacher, you're a student.
To your doctor, you're a machine that needs debugging.
To your cat, you're its personal servant.
And on and on through the many roles you cycle through each day in the course of being “You”. Most people in your life glimpse only one narrow aspect of who you are...and label you accordingly.
Your coworkers never see your musical side, and your musical friends might be appalled by your spiritual side.
We instinctively compartmentalize and label others according to the one specific arena of life from which we know them. Perhaps you’ve experienced the awkwardness of running into a former school teacher at a grocery store and realizing she’s an actual person with appetites and needs just like you?! All this time you thought she was “merely” your 4th Grade teacher. But it turns out someone married her!
And then apparently had sex with her because she has kids! And now she’s out buying food for those kids!
The horror...the horror.
Or maybe’ve gone to a party and saw this creepy schlubb whom you absolutely cannot stand, and he turns out to have a side of himself that’s a virtuoso cello player, and all the pretty women at the party are ooing and awing over him and you're like, “Noooooo way! That guy's a total loser. He cannot be good at anything, dammit!”
But he is good at something. He has a part that’s really good at playing the cello.
Yup, that happened to me, once!
Damn that guy!
Despite the world's insistence on putting labels on us—Republican, gay, Libra, egghead, playboy, etc.—
no one of us is just one thing.
Here’s the starting point for our radically new model of seduction that just might change your life forever...
You, me and everybody else you'll ever meet in your entire life is made up of parts...and each of these parts is responsible for a different aspect of how we interact with the world.
That straight-as-an-arrow financial analyst who does your taxes on the side might also have another side to him in which he and his trophy wife are enthusiastic, same-room swingers with other couples on the weekends.
That leggy Vegas showgirl might have a quiet, bookish part of her that loves nothing more than staying home on a Friday night, curled up with a tragic Russian novel.
Myself, I am an author, playboy, globetrotter, hypnotist, juggler, father, shaman and more. Much more.
All of these are legitimate sides of me, yet none are fully me.
The aspect of me that you experience depends entirely on the game you and I are playing together.
Right now I'm connecting with you through the
“writer” side of me. If you were to plop down at the table next to me at the Starbucks in London directly across the street from the British Library where I'm working right this very second, I wouldn't be able to talk to you at all...at least not while I'm still writing.
My writer only knows how to play the game called writing. He (quite literally) doesn't know how to talk.
On the other hand, if you and I met while I was out dancing like a madman, which I often do, you wouldn't begin to guess that any part of me could ever sit still long enough to put pen to paper and fashion a single sentence, much less an entire book.
And so on.
The reason people get upset when we “label” them is because they realize they’re way more than just that one side of themselves. Although they get bent out of shape when they're being labeled, of course they turn around and do the exact same thing to everybody else they meet.
They “label” their mechanic as a mechanic. It wouldn't occur to them that he might also be a caring dad, a middling lover and a bad-ass heavy metal bass player.
Society puts labels on us.
Our friends put labels on us.
But, mostly, we put labels on us.
None of those labels are true. Or, at best, they are only a little bit true...and even then only in a narrow
context.
Yet we all do it...
“She's just a dumb blonde.”
“Trevor's a jock.”
“Bob's a Libertarian.”
“Peggy is lazy.”
“Amanda's a prostitute.”
“My dad is a jerk.”
Here's a rather significant secret that the Keepers of the Standard Dogma “accidentally” left out of their manual...
No one person is just one thing--we’re all made up of different parts that take turns playing different games for us.
Now it sometimes happens that we become so invested in a single part of who we are that we begin to identify ourselves AS that part—especially if that part causes a disproportionate amount of uproar in our life.
People who've smoked cigarettes for many loooong years will readily refer to themselves as smokers, as if a “smoker” is actually Who They Are.
In truth, nobody is a smoker.
Sure, some people have a part of themselves that smokes, but that's not “who” they are. Smoking is just a game that part of them plays some of the time. (Or a
lot of the time, if they’re a super-heavy smoker like I used to be!)
All of humanity share various Major Parts that can be found in each of us--corresponding to our sexual side, our creative side and so on.
In addition, any individual can develop an unlimited number of Minor Parts that are unique to them. Now these sides are minor in name only, since their benefit or detriment to someone's life can be quite profound.
These aspects of ourselves can learn to play big or small games such as smoking cigarettes or flying a plane or even being afraid of flying.
I cannot play a single musical instrument, so I don't have a musical instrument playing “side” of me.
But you might have one, and yours might even be able to play more than one instrument.
On the flipside, I speak several languages fluently and so I have a robust aspect of myself that knows how to learn, recall and communicate via foreign languages--while yours may be less well-developed or even absent altogether, especially if you're a typical American!
When an employer posts a job notice requesting applicants “with experience”, what they're really saying is that they're looking for somebody who has already developed a part of themselves that knows how to play the game called Barista or Stripper or Mini-Boss on an aircraft carrier.
A significant reason why homo sapiens triumphed over the competing human-esque species during the past three million years of evolution is because of our innate ability to generate new parts to respond to new stimulation from our environment. A new minor part can emerge at any time in our lives. The great American poet Maya Angelou took up the piano—
thus creating a brand new aspect of herself in the process—at the delicious age of 65!
I didn't have a “smoking side” of me until I was already 22 years old and already graduated from college. But this new part of me took to its game with such a vengeance that within a decade I was smoking five (5!) packs of cigarettes per day...and it subsequently took me more than two years of dedicated labor in full-blown Mad Scientist mode to figure out how to get this “little” part of me to stop and play some other game instead..
The culmination of my journey to persuade my former smoking part to finally quit depended on my giving it another game to play that seemed at least as large and important as smoking all those cigarettes had previously been.
If our minor parts couldn't change, then nobody in history (myself included) would ever have quit smoking, nobody would have ever gotten over their shark phobia and not a single former Nice Guy would ever have turned into the kind of Bad Boy that women find so irresistible.
Criminals also have lots of different sides, just like the rest of us. Often only a single part of a criminal is demonstrably bad, while the rest are quite normal and even boring. (This, by the way, is why 99% of the
neighbors of heinous criminals later tell newspaper reporters, “I never saw this coming...the side of him I saw every day was so sweet and helpful...what a charming young man he was!”)
The nicest guys you'll ever met are gangsters...until you cross them, of course, and then their “little” gangsta side comes out to play—with a gun and stuff. If that happens, hopefully you’ve got a part that can run real fast!
The realization that we are made up of inner characters, if you will, that take turns “being” us comes as quite a shock to some people...in part because it seems almost inconceivable that this take on the human experience never once came up in a lifetime of schooling, corporate training and PBS documentaries.
Only the small secrets need to be protected.
The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
--Marshall McLuhan
Yet as soon as most people hear about it, the whole thing makes perfect sense--and even helps explain many of the previously inexplicable conflicts in their life. Think back to a recent crossroads, where you felt uncertain about a big decision. Perhaps one side of you desired one outcome, while another side wanted something completely different.
different parts of you, each with completely different agendas. Everybody has lots of sides that compete aginst one another to get their own needs met.”
“Oh,” she said, “I thought it was just me. I figured maybe I was crazy or something.”
“You're still crazy, Becky, just not because of that!”
Since the fact that we're made of major and minor parts taking turns being who we are is largely kept hidden from us, people can deeply guilty and shamed about a previous bad decision without ever realizing it wasn't “them” who erred, but rather one small part of them that briefly got the upper hand.
I once knew a Okie who was (mostly) a very good girl. So much so that the only way for her naughty side to come out was to drink an outrageous amount of tequila.
And that did the trick. Tequila invariably brought out her sexual side to play. But her tequila-fueled side was not what you might call “picky”, and she sometimes woke up next to some of the most heinous men in town--highly embarrassed and confused by her experience.
The knowledge that we consist of various, often competing parts, is hardly breaking news. It’s been known since the dawn of civilization by every practicing Medicine Man, Witch, Kahuna, Shaman and Wisdom Keeper.
In more “civilized” circles, pop culture favorite Carl Jung explored this very same turf in the 1950's,
calling the many sides of us Archetypes.
The Keepers of the Standard Dogma praised Jung for his imagination (he gave the parts delightfully poetic names such as Shadow, Animus and Trickster), but they were too entrenched in promulgating their own brain-as-badly-programmed-computer model to pay much attention to him and his work never achieved its due.
A decade later, a rogue psychiatrist named Eric Berne reduced Jung's small army of archetypes to just three parts, which he referred to as Ego States and awarded the most utilitarian of names: Parent, Adult and Child.
Berne called his model of the human experience Transactional Analysis (TA), based on his belief that each interaction between two people constituted a single transaction between them.
Dr. Berne drily described ego states as a “coherent set of beliefs with related behavior patterns”. But in his lighter moments he likened an ego state to a game that one part of us learns how to play. This game could involve doing theoretical physics, gambling or any human activity whatsoever.
Transactional Analysis enjoyed a surge of public popularity in the sixties and seventies, where it briefly put New City intellectuals and community college dropouts on the same footing.
Yet Prof. Berne never particularly intended TA to be a working system for laypeople to understand themselves and improve their lives, not least since he never got around to exploring the most important human transactions of them all—the ones between
the separate ego states within a person that occur out of sight of the rest of the world.
Because, as we shall soon discover...
The real game’s on the inside.