Do the Work

even weirder and scarier than whatever color whales normally are).
     
    Next: a mortal to challenge the monster. He must be monstrous himself. Obsessed, arrogant, monomaniacal. Ahab.
     
    Knowing our theme (in other words, what Moby Dick is about), we now know the climax: Ahab harpoons the white whale and duels it to the death. No other climax is possible.
     
    Now we have Act Three. We have our end.
     
    Next: beginning and middle. We need to set the climax up and load it with maximum emotion and thematic impact.
     
    We must, in other words, establish both protagonist and antagonist, make clear to the reader what each of them represents and what their conflict means thematically in the broader scheme of the human (and divine) condition.
     
    Beginning: Ishmael. Our point of view. A human-scale witness to the tragedy.
     
    Once we have Ishmael, we have our start and our ultimate finish—after the whale destroys the Pequod and all her crew and drags Ahab to his death in the depths, Ishmael pops up amid the wreckage, the lone survivor, to tell the tale.
     
    End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.
     
    “But hey, Steve … I thought you said ‘Don’t think.’”
     
    Let’s pause for a moment then and consider the difference between thinking and “thinking.”
     
    Thoughts and Chatter
     
    Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that.
     
    These are not thoughts. They are chatter.
     
    I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.
     
    In this book, when I say “Don’t think,” what I mean is: don’t listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to those rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind.
     
    Those are not your thoughts.
     
    They are chatter.
     
    They are Resistance.
     
    Chatter is your mother and father’s well-intentioned expressions of caution, seeking to shield you from hurting yourself. Chatter is your teachers’ equally well-meaning attempts at socialization, training you to follow the rules. Chatter is your friends’ regular-Joe buddy-talk, trying to make you like them and follow the rules of the pack.
     
    Chatter is Resistance.
     
    Its aim is to reconcile you to “the way it is,” to make you exactly like everyone else, to render you amenable to societal order and discipline.
     
    Where do our own real thoughts come from? How can we access them? From what source does our true, authentic self speak?
     
    Answering that is the work you and I will do for the rest of our lives.
     
    Ready to Rock and Roll
     
    We’ve got our concept, we’ve got our theme. We know our start. We know where we want to finish. We’ve got our project in three acts on a single sheet of foolscap.
     
    Ready to roll? We need only to remember our three mantras:
     
     
Stay primitive.
     
Trust the soup.
     
Swing for the seats.
     
     
    And our final-final precept:
     
    4. Be ready for Resistance.
     



 
    The Universe Is Not Indifferent
     
    I blame Communism. I blame Fascism. I blame psychotherapy. They—and a boatload of other well-intentioned ideologies that evolved during the mass-culture, industrialized, dehumanizing epoch of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—all posited the same fantasy. They all preached that human nature was perfectible and that, thereby, evil could be overcome.
     
    It can’t.
     
    When you and I set out to create anything—art, commerce, science, love—or to advance in the direction of a higher, nobler version of ourselves, we uncork from the universe, ineluctably, an equal and opposite reaction.
     
    That reaction is Resistance. Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign force—tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable—whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals.
     
    The universe is not indifferent. It is actively hostile.
     
    Every principle espoused so far in this volume is predicated upon that