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[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Many years ago in Thailand, there

was a temple that was called the Temple of the Golden Buddha.

And there was a huge statue of a golden Buddha.

And word came to this village where the monastery

was that an army from a neighboring country

was about to invade.

And they got the brilliant scheme

to cover the golden Buddha, which was quite large, with mud

and concrete so that it looked basically like a stone Buddha,

and the army would perceive no value in it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And sure enough, this army rolled in

with its caissons and weapons.

And as they passed by the monastery,

they saw nothing but a big stone Buddha.

And they had no reason to plunder it.

Well, years went by, because the army continued to occupy it,

until there was a time in the monastery in the village when

no one remembered that the Buddha was golden,

until one day a young monk was sitting on the Buddha

meditating on his knee.

And as he got up, a little piece of concrete

happened to crack off, and he saw something shiny.

And he realized there was gold under there.

And so he ran to his fellow monks and said,

the Buddha is golden, the Buddha is golden!

And they all came out, and they realized

he was telling the truth.

And they took their picks and hammers,

and eventually they unearthed the Golden Buddha.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now what's the metaphor here?

The metaphor is that each of us is golden by nature.

We were born golden.

We were born high.

We were born knowing.

We were born connected to our bliss.

We were born knowing truth.

We were born knowing everything that every great spiritual

master has ever said.

We were one with the Christ, the Buddha, everyone.

But then we went to school, and they said,

you have to dress like this, and this what boys do,

and this is what girls do.

This is what black people do.

This is what white people do, on and on and on.

And so we developed a casing of stone over the Buddha

to a point where at a young age, maybe four, five, six,

or seven, we believe that we were the stone Buddha, not

the golden one.

And then something comes along that cracks our casing.

Maybe it's an injury, a divorce, financial setbacks,

a governmental change, something that

really scares us and bugs us and knocks off

a piece of our armor.

And only in that moment of the armor of being knocked off

do you get to look inside and see the gold.

And let me tell you, friend, that the moment you

see that gold, the armor and the concrete

will never satisfy you again.

At that point, you truly answer the true hero's adventure.

And all you want to do for the rest of your life

is pick away the stone, because the gold is so much more fun.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Who is Joseph Campbell, and why should we care?

Topic that comes up a lot.

>>Joseph Campbell was one of the leading mythology

experts of all time.

>>Joseph Campbell is a philosopher,

a man who had this ability to see the truth in a world

where we've lost sight of that in many ways.

He studied all of these classical myth traditions.

And he actually started by studying

Native American mythology.

He fell in love with it when he was a kid.

This was his bliss.

And he wound up studying the aboriginal cultures.

He studied Greek mythology.

He studied Arthurian legend.

>>He dissected and really diagrammed all of our stories.

>>He compared the philosophies, mythic stories

of the whole world.

>>All myths, all movies, all novels, all romances.

>>And he find this one story within all the stories

that we can relate to no matter where you come.

>>He recognized that in spite of all the different stories

we seem to be telling, there's really only one.

And he called it the Hero's Journey.

>>There must have been thousands and thousands of hero stories

from every culture.

But until Joseph Campbell came along,

certainly I never realized how they all kind of fit together

and how they were basically the same story.

>>I was a religion major in college.

I was taking my final exam.

And I had a moment where I was just gobsmacked.

It was just like, holy crap, it's all the same thing.

I mean, it is really all the same thing.

>>The Hero's Journey is a pattern.

You can almost think of it as an algorithm

that has three basic parts-- separation, initiation,

and return.

Separation-- you are in one kind of a reality,

in one kind of a place.

You are separated from it.

Initiation-- you're put into another place where you

are in some manner initiated.

Return-- you come back.

>>A simple version of the Hero's Journey

is someone starting out in their normal protected world

and getting a call to adventure.

>>The call to adventure.

>>There's a vision.

There's a quest.

>>It's the story of the hero enduring some trials.

>>Various trials and ordeals.

>>Meeting different obstacles along the way, people that

hurt you, people that help you.

>>Doors will open, as Campbell would say,

for you, where there are no doors for others.

Dragons will appear that are your dragons alone.

>>You get to like the innermost cave where you're

really challenged, like the greatest crisis,

and you find your true self.

>>The achievement, the glory.

>>But then that's not the end of it.

That is to bring that back to the community.

>>There's a return to tell the story.

>>That is the heroic journey-- separation, initiation, return.

All of the adventures of the human story are in there.

All the heroes, all the villains,

all the gods and goddesses, and all of the knights

and all of the fantastic creatures

we can conjure up in animation, they're all in there,

because they're all in here, because they're all in here.

This is where they come from.

>>If you look at some of the greatest pieces of literature,

the greatest works of philosophy,

they all have what Joseph Campbell

called the Hero's Journey.

And if you look with a piercing eye,

you can recognize his outline in just about any movie

or story you would read.

>>"Star Wars," "The Matrix," "Harry Potter."

>>"Wizard of Oz"-- that's a classic story

of a Hero's Journey.

You first see Dorothy in her natural environment.

And just like out here in regular life,

a person is operating in their natural environment every day

and living in their house and that kind of thing.

And then something happens to shake that world up.

And you go on a journey in which you have to face certain tests

and challenges.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Storytelling is typically about people

learning something.

You go to a place, which is dark and mysterious.

You are faced with yourself.

There is a relationship between facing fear

and this kind of soul gain.

You acquire a quality, a hidden strength, a value.

Moments where somebody is tested,

somebody moves to a place where it feels like a crisis point,

and then they are restored, redeemed,

made better through that trial.

And we call them heroes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>If all of these stories boil down into one map,

we can use that map.

Because all human beings are the same.

Whether they're going through a war, like World War II,

or going through a war inside, it's basically

the same kind of process.

>>In other words, we're not separate from the characters

we see in our movies and in our novels.

They are us.

It's one journey.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The whole idea of a Hero's Journey, a journey of life,

clear patterns to guide you through.

You're born, you have a childhood.

You have an adolescence.

And you try to find a place for you to become an adult.

And you go through adventures.

You struggle with your inner conflicts.

And finally, you become a hero.

You slay the dragons.

You succeed in conquering all of the demons.

And you step over thresholds.

And finally you have arrived.

We get old.

We die.

But within this short span, we have

to have some meaning, some reason for this existence.

It doesn't have to be high and mighty and fantastic.

You can have a very simple life, still

go through the similar pattern.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>We go out, and we watch a great Hero's Journey movie.

Is that impulse within us, that seed

of potential that wants to be actualized that's

being talked to during those movies and being whispered to,

it's time for you to do that.

That's the story here.

That's what it's all about.

>>There's wonderful narrative iconography

for how to live life, the idea that try hard you get,

the Little Engine That Could, I think I can, I think I can,

I think I can, I can, this idea that we really can do better,

be better, that our greatest selves are still hidden

and that the future is the prospect of coming

to terms with that self.

>>Dorothy had to confront her inner barriers.

And so the journey she went on was not just

a journey to find out how to deal with the Wicked

Witch of the West.

It was how to deal with her own inner resources,

how to claim her own inner resources.

And at the end of the movie, how did she get back home?

Well, she clicked her heels together.

So she had it all the time, the ability to get back home,

but it didn't get mobilized for her until she

went through all of those challenges

and was able to kind of test herself.

>>It's kind of the ordinary moving into the extraordinary.

It's going through the dark to come out to the light,

going from an unsatisfying life to a satisfying life

by pushing through the scariest things you could imagine.

>>The most important thing that the myths teach us

is to go beyond what we perceive as the limits

of our possibility.

>>So mythology needs to be seen for what

it is, which is a metaphor for our human existence.

It's not a history lesson.

It's a metaphor for life and for universal experiences.

>>A lot of people read the myths,

and they say, well, that refers to something

historical, the creation of the world or something like that.

But Joe didn't think that.

He thought that it's really a narrative about the psyche,

what Jung called the self.

>>The problem is that many of us are metaphorically impaired.

We don't realize that this thing that they're talking about

is actually a metaphor for a transformation process.

>>Just kind of like the holy grail,

where it's not the thing.

It's not the actual concrete grail.

It's an intangible thing.

But the holy grail is a metaphor for that intangible feeling.

>>And so if you look at a book and it says,

you will go to heaven, and you don't

realize that they're talking about heaven on Earth, heaven

in our bodies, heaven right now in the now,

you might fall into a trance of thinking that you're literally

going to go someplace else if you follow the rules.

>>Having been brought up in a mythical culture,

I was very familiar with the different motifs and themes

that were encapsulated in, say, a mythical being,

whether it was the Lord Shiva or Ganesh or a goddess.

Just thinking the name of that person,

the whole story was evoked.

Carl Jung called these archetypes.

Archetypes are primordial, encapsulated stories,

or mythologies, and they are in the form

of a seed in consciousness.

When you plant that seed in consciousness,

that archetypal seed, that mythical journey,

then that seed starts to sprout.

And as it sprouts, the patterning forces

create the situation, circumstances, events,

and relationships for the unfolding of the story.

>>It's better to have a story to look through

at life than an explanation.

The reason for that is the story is richer.

I say select two or three heroes and heroines,

either in mythology of religion or history,

and then ask these mythical beings

to incarnate through you.

And then don't be surprised when you see situations,

circumstances, coincidences, synchronicities, relationships

suddenly show up that actually are part of the story

that you have been seeking to express.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Once upon a time in the forest,

there was this little tiger cub amongst a flock of sheep.

And he ate grass.

And he wandered around with the sheep.

And when he tried to say anything, all that came out

was a sort of little meow, not much of a roar.

And one day through the forest comes a large male tiger.

And he's just about to pounce on the sheep,

and he sees this tiger cub.

And he says, what are you doing here?

And tiger cub goes, baa!

Picks the tiger cub up by the scruff of the neck,

and he carries him over to a pond,

and he puts his face over, and he says, look, see that face?

You're not a sheep.

You're a tiger.

The male tiger says, OK, we need to do something.

And he slays the sheep, and he grabs a big hunk of raw meat.

And he shoves it in the little tiger's mouth.

And the little tiger gagged on it, as all do on the truth.

But it went down.

And he got a little bit of energy,

and pretty soon he had a bigger tiger roar.

And eventually, he had a full tiger roar.

He went off with the male tiger.

I think the moral here is self-evident.

If you're a tiger living among sheep,

you're a pretty poor specimen of a tiger.

And we are all tigers living among sheep.

We are all individuals with a self

that we don't even begin to understand.

And unfortunately, you can open the metaphor out.

The food we get from the culture around us

is maybe food for sheep.

It's not food for tigers.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>You have to catch at least the spark of what your life is

going to be, or you may spend those dreary decades

in corporate America climbing the ladder,

only to discover it's against the wrong wall.

You get to the top.

Who cares?

>>If this pass of the Hero's Journey

is fairly simple in design, why, then, is it

that everybody isn't living it?

Well, the answer is that most people on the planet

live under a kind of a mass hypnosis.

>>There's a tremendous pressure, even in the media,

on really keeping people in their place

in the sense of keeping them happy, tranced-out consumers.

It's a trance of comfort.

It's a trance of not sticking your head up

above the crowd very much.

That keeps the enterprise going.

>>Most people think it's a luxury and a great privilege

to stay home and look at their 800-inch television.

If you just space out, you're not developing.

We're stimulated by some images and some loud noise.

>>It's about collecting things and stuff

and making a lot of money and doing a lot of things.

And it's impossible to enjoy that,

because you end up on that treadmill

and you can't get off.

>>And so most people, unfortunately,

because they are so victimized by their environment,

they have no time to think or be themselves.

They become bundles of conditioned reflexes and nerves

that are constantly being triggered

by people and circumstance into very predictable outcomes

and predictable patterns of behavior.

There's no creativity.

>>That's the trance.

That's the wasteland, where we're just

guided toward this weird sense of what's real in our lives

and those ideas that are imposed on us

from the outside about what we should and should not do.

>>It usually starts out with something

like, you shouldn't talk to that person

because they're from a different tribe.

You certainly shouldn't marry that person.

>>You should go to this school.

You should have a certain type of car.

You should live in a certain type of house.

You should have a certain number of kids by this type of age--

should, should, should, should, should.

What I experienced in my own life

was I gotta have the degree from this university.

I've got to have this advanced degree from this university,

preferably either a law degree or a medical degree

or something to that effect, some letters after my name,

which would say that I have a stamp of credibility.

I can go out and make my six figures,

and society can kind of deem me worthy.

>>I have countless examples of young people who go to college

because they expected to go to college.

And they study biology because since the time they were six,

they were supposed to be a doctor.

>>It's very difficult for a person who's

brought up in this environment of instant gratification,

with the media, with advertising,

with all the promises of instant gratification

by buying something, for example, or having

a certain level of affluence, that you lose contact

with this mythical domain, which is actually part of your soul.

It's there in everyone.

It's their passion.

It's their bliss.

It's their unique skills.

It's their unique ways of expressing themselves.

It's their song, which if they sing, they could do anything.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>If you look at every Heroic Journey,

the hero has been confronted with the fact

that the world that they thought was reality

was nothing more than illusion.

I go back to the "Matrix," which is, what was the matrix?

It was just this big illusion.

It was the dominant values and beliefs

that the world had put around this guy Neo, the seeker

on the Hero's Journey.

And what did he do?

He felt this longing to go beyond the illusion,

to go beyond the matrix.

So he took the red pill, and he woke up to reality.

And what was reality?

Reality was he was full of potential.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Separation begins with what we call the call to adventure.

[PHONE RINGING]

>>Campbell tells us there's literally almost a phone

ringing.

[PHONE RINGING]

It's like the universe, the divine,

God, whatever you want to call it, literally dialing you up

and ringing.

[PHONE RINGING]

And giving you a call, asking you to step out

and to live your journey.

>>Something breaks into your quotidian reality

and makes it impossible for you to continue.

[PHONE RINGING]

Or you could hang up the phone.

You can run away.

But you'll keep coming back.

It'll keep coming back until you finally--

[PHONE RINGING]

--answer the call.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>If you're not paying attention,

the wake-up calls come in the form of a sledgehammer.

If you're paying attention, they might come in a tickle feather.

>>So we don't always get the call

as a choir of angels with trumpets singing

to you as beautifully one sunny morning.

>>In "Star Wars," Luke comes back.

His house has been burned down.

He's gotta go.

>>Often times, it comes in the depth of our despair,

in losing a job, getting fired, getting divorced,

having your house foreclosed on, these things

that you just would never want to have happen,

are often the exact things we need

to catapult us, to catalyze us into that next version

of ourselves.

>>Bad things happen to good people.

And when that happens to them, they typically

are thrown for a loop.

Because they frequently have felt, everything's going along,

I'm doing everything right, what happened?

Well, the universe just upended you.

And it does do that.

>>Chinese symbol for crisis are two symbols.

The first one is danger.

And second one immediately is opportunity.

So crisis is both danger and opportunity.

>>This idea that if one storyline collapses

that that's the end of the movie is not true of human life

and never was true of human life.

I know people who have prospered in the most extraordinary way

in the worst type of adversity.

But it actually reveals something

to them about themselves that they didn't know.

And that became the new journey they took.

>>Let me put this into really practical, 100-pound terms.

Because if the camera had been pointed at me when

I was 24 years old, what it would have seen

was a person who weighed 320 pounds.

You would have seen me puffing on two or three

packs of Marlboros a day, a relationship that I

didn't want to be in, and I had a job I hated.

Everything was wrong in my life.

And so those are ripe moments for a wake-up call in life.

If you haven't been paying attention

enough so that you end up with a job you hate,

a relationship you don't want to be in, a body you don't like,

and you're addicted to a bunch of things,

you're ripe for a sledgehammer blow from the universe.

And I got it.

>>You step over a threshold, meaning you move from one world

into another.

Sometimes you're shoved from one world into the other.

>>I went out for a walk, and I stepped on the ice on the road.

And my feet shot out from under me,

and I smacked the back of my head on the frozen ground.

And it knocked me out just enough.

I wasn't completely unconscious, but I had a vision

while I was semi-knocked out.

I could see down through all the layers of myself

to this pure consciousness inside.

And I could see how all the fat I had was organized around

a whole bunch of feelings I didn't want to let myself feel,

like sadness from childhood and a lot of old grief in my family

and anger and things like that.

And I realized that the fat was there

to keep me from feeling those feelings.

And so as I began to come back to normal consciousness,

I made a vow that I was going to change my life so that I could

live in that state of pure consciousness

instead of having to have all of that armor around me.

Once you make the decisions that Joseph Campbell is talking

about, about really hearing the call

and being willing to take on the challenges

of that new awakened life, once you

do that, you begin to feel a power.

It's like nothing else I've ever experienced.

And I think a lot of us are just plain old afraid of that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>I tend to think that people wake up to the fact

that they are the hero of their own life

when they get tired of being the victim of their own life.

At the point that you say, enough, I

don't want to listen to my parents anymore,

I have had it with my boss, I'm really having problems,

perhaps with the sermon I'm being taught,

you can either surrender to victimhood, and a lot of people

do, or you can surrender to a fundamentalism.

You can basically give your responsibility to someone else

and say, tell me what to do, and I'll do it.

Or you can say, I have a choice here, and I'm responsible.

Now, what does it mean to be the hero of your own life?

It means to be responsible for your own adventure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Campbell talks about metaphorical death,

where something dies so that something can live.

And in every Hero's Journey, there's

some death moment where some old has to go

and some new has to stay.

>>He quotes Nietzsche, and he says that this snake that

cannot shed its skin must perish.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>When death is a motif in a myth,

it doesn't refer necessarily to what

happens at the end of one's biological and physical

existence.

It's an indication that change is taking place.

>>I went through that process when

I stopped being a tribal administrator

and started becoming a writer.

I put that aspect of myself away.

It was valuable, and I learned a lot, and I draw on it,

but it enabled me to go on.

>>No death, no life.

No death, no transformation.

No death, no change.

>>I said, OK, I don't want that anymore.

I want this.

I put that away, made myself into something else

and in essence resurrected into being a writer.

>>The whole key to blessing death

is to recognizing that it's just a death of one old form that

has played itself out, it has no use anymore, which always,

as the phoenix rises, it gives way

to some new form that has new intrinsic meaning

and makes your life even bigger and better.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>If you want to have new birth, new revelation, new insight

into life as you grow as a human being,

you will learn to keep dying.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>I think it's tricky to afford a proof.

I think there are proofs in our lives.

I think the proofs exist in our ability

to transcend the worst things that have happened to us.

My proof is I was abused as a little boy.

And not something I chat about typically, but in this context.

It was the worst thing ever.

And it went on for a very long time, and I was very young.

And I'm who I am in part because I

had to face that, because I had to wrestle with that, because I

had to accept that and acknowledge that and forgive

and all the terribly difficult things that come with that.

I had to tell my parents.

I had to-- and I by the way, it's one of these things

that you work with for the rest of your life.

But from that most difficult thing

also came a kind of understanding.

I get high marks on compassion.

I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but it

is part of what made me me.

So the truth is, it's not what happens to us.

It's what we do with it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The forest represents the darkness, the unknown,

the edge of your world.

And it takes the courage of a hero to go into that forest.

The people in your community don't

understand why you want to go into that forest.

And in fact, they're pulling you back,

asking you, why can't you be happy with what you have here?

But there's this urge that exists within the hero

to go and explore.

>>Joseph often used the Knights of the Round Table

when they behold the golden chalice.

>>There's a story with King Arthur and his knights.

After the knights have seen the grail

and decide to go forward on a quest--

>>They made a vow.

>>They decided that the knightly thing to do,

the noble thing to do as individuals seeking their own

in the collective was to go in to the force

at their own points.

>>Each knight enters the forest where it was darkest

and there was no path.

>>They cannot follow other people.

They have to go in, find their own entry into the dark forest.

>>And Campbell makes it really clear.

If you go into the forest where there's already a trail,

that's the one sure sign that you're not on your path.

>>Because if they follow somebody else's entry,

it's somebody else's path.

>>That's not going into the forest.

That's not initiation.

>>You need to find your own path.

And that kind of comes from that impulse

within to go out and really discover

who you are beyond just the narrow confines of how you've

been conditioned, what you've been

told to do, and go out and explore for yourself what

your truth is and how you can go out and rock it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The Hero's Journey for me is having the courage

to look within yourself and say, what am I here to do?

What am I most passionate about in my life?

What are my greatest gifts?

How do I give them to the world?

And Joseph Campbell captured it with the phrase,

follow your bliss.

>>Follow your bliss.

I don't think more profound teachings have ever

been given than this one.

>>Follow your bliss means listening to your heart

and following your truth.

>>There's something specific about the word "bliss."

It's not ecstasy.

It's not happiness.

There's a serenity in bliss.

>>I like to talk about your bliss

as the thing you can't not do.

So it's your authentic journey.

>>I'd heard "follow your bliss," but I

didn't know where it came from.

And what's cool is that it's grounded in deep Hindu

spirituality and philosophy, and it comes from the Upanishads.

There were three launching points into enlightenment, Sat,

Cit, and Ananda.

So Sat means beingness.

Cit means consciousness.

And Ananda means bliss or rapture.

Joseph Campbell said to himself, I don't really

know what my beingness is.

If I'm honest with myself, I really

know what my consciousness is.

But I do know what my bliss is.

And I can follow my bliss.

And that idea of trusting ourselves and trusting

that deep impulse within us to go out and follow our bliss,

do what makes us feel most alive, that's the path.

That's the key.

That's the essence of the Hero's Journey.

>>Follow your bliss does not mean get addicted to pleasure.

>>It's more than just something that you wish for.

>>It doesn't mean escapism.

It doesn't mean hedonism.

It doesn't mean selfishness.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>It doesn't mean listening only to sensory pleasures

like having sex with anybody you look at

or sticking up a candy store if you want candy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Don't follow what other people think is your bliss.

Don't follow your wallet.

Follow the thing that's presenting itself as your most

serene and fulfilling state.

>>Sometimes it's difficult to let go of that inner resistor

and just say, OK, I accept the possibilities of the present.

I will follow my bliss.

I will listen to the call of spirit.

[EXHALING DEEPLY] That's a very big deal.

[DRUMMING]

>>Daddy said, what do you want to do?

I said, I need to leave school.

I'm never going to learn anything.

I'm not going to university.

I said, I want to play drums.

I've learned to play drums in the attic.

And that's my world and totally naive.

So Dad sends me off to London with a drum kit.

So I went to London.

And all of it came true.

Of course, I'm not sitting here, I've got to be rich,

and I've got to be famous.

But I have to be doing something I love to do.

And I have so much passion.

And I didn't even know what that was really all about,

but I do now.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>How do we find our bliss?

This is what everybody is asking.

>>The first thing is, ask yourself,

what am I passionate about?

What are the things I love doing?

What are the activities when I engage them

it feels like hours go by in minutes?

That's one big clue about what your bliss is.

>>What I say is, find out what you most love to do.

And then do more of that thing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Ask yourself right now, what was it

that made me different as a child?

What set me apart?

What caused me to cry at night in my pillow

because I didn't fit in with the in crowd?

That is probably precisely where the door to your bliss

is going to open.

Go back and find it.

>>Let's say you never had to think about money

and you never had to think about time.

You had all the money in the world and all the time

in the word.

How would you express yourself?

And how would that benefit the ecosystem,

the larger web of being?

>>We have to find a way of reflecting

on those experiences we've had that engaged us

and where we became lost and totally absorbed in them.

So for some people, a way to do that

might be to write these things down.

Others don't think like that.

They don't like to use words all the time.

So maybe collect some images, cut some images from magazines,

collect music that's always inspired you, but some way

to bypass that outer barrier to your own sense of energy.

>>It's not about being successful.

It's not about feeding your family.

Write some bad poetry.

Do something that gives you that moment.

>>You can write in a journal.

Because writing in a journal is a conversation

you have with yourself.

You can get to know your gifts, your talents,

your weaknesses your hopes, your dreams, your lessons.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Joseph Campbell always gave the same advice to his students

graduating Sarah Lawrence.

Don't do what Daddy says.

Because Daddy has one interest in mind for you, and that's

your security.

And if you bargain away your life for security now,

you will never find your bliss.

>>I started skating because my older brother was into it.

And I enjoyed it, but I didn't take it

that seriously until the first time I went to the skate park

and I saw these guys literally flying out empty swimming

pools.

I got so excited that that was even possible,

as a person to be flying in the air

with a skateboard in your hand.

Once I saw what was possible and what

you could do with this thing that I have come to enjoy,

I had to keep going.

I mean, I just wanted to fly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>I think it's really important to do

things that make you happy.

And I know that sounds very obvious,

and some of the viewers might say, well, now

let's hold hands and sing "Kumbaya."

But when you look at every great inventor, every great business

person, every great scientist, you

look at these people who have gotten

to the so-called mountaintop, and almost every single one

of them to a person didn't do it for the money.

They did it because they were chasing their bliss.

>>If you're following your dream and you're doing what you love,

it's not always going to be a financial success,

but it will be a personal success because you are still

doing this thing that you love doing,

and what's more important?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>I would describe my discovery of surfing exposure.

I was just watching surfers and watching what they were doing

and what surfing was all about and the routes that they

were taking and the ways they were doing it.

I think I knew subconsciously before I knew consciously.

I think I knew that I was going to do something in surfing.

I knew that surfing was going to be a big part of my life,

so I wanted to absorb all the information I could.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Just because you don't know what the call on your life

is right now doesn't mean play ostrich

and stick your head in the sand and say, well,

just because I don't know, I guess

I shouldn't move towards anything.

The very fact that you're looking for your bliss

means that you are in the process

of getting to your bliss.

Part of life and part of the whole journey is exploration.

>>Human resources are often very, very deep.

We don't know they're there.

And we don't know they're there often because we

don't look for them.

We don't take the journey.

Some people found them, and many people have not found them.

And because they've not found their talents,

they think they don't have any.

I believe passionately that we all have deep talents.

Go looking.

Try things you've never done before.

If there are things you wish you had done but you never did,

well, why didn't you?

Go and do it.

Try it.

If you always go the same route to work,

take some different route.

If there are people you never speak to, go and speak to them.

At least put yourself out there.

But don't anticipate what you'll find.

>>Put yourself in uncomfortable situations at least

every seven days.

If at least every seven days people aren't laughing at you

or scratching their heads, wondering

why you're dreaming so big or doing what you're doing or have

such a fierce resolve to achieving your goals,

then I don't think you're stretching enough.

And ultimately, we grow the most through the things

that stretch us the most.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>In my personal journey, I was bright enough,

I got into the best university, but a part of me

need the journey.

I was interested in the West.

So I jumped at the next opportunity

to get a scholarship and then get

on the boat and my slow boat to the West.

And I took 14 days.

I landed in Portland, Oregon and to be a foreign student.

I stretched myself.

I arrived, I know very little English, I go to a class called

English for Foreign Students.

I learn English, and I embraced the Western culture.

I stretched myself.

So suddenly, I see a part of me which I never knew was there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>One of Joe's most beloved quotes about bliss

is that when you follow your bliss,

the universe will open doors where there were only walls.

It's a wonderful image.

And in fact, a lot of people's experience is so like this.

You feel like you're beating your head against a brick wall.

And then suddenly you shift just a tad, and low and behold,

there's a passage that opens up.

>>When you truly step forth and trust your bliss,

unseen forces have the power to rearrange things to accommodate

your step of faith.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>I took that Robert McKee course,

and I thought, well, that's not that hard.

And I wrote a screenplay.

And I sent it to a friend of mine,

who was somebody's assistant, who left it on his desk.

And some other agent wandered by and picked it up and read it

and said, oh, this is good.

And so then my friend went, oh, shit.

And he ran to his boss.

And he said, you should read this,

because that guy over there, who is a junior agent liked it,

and his boss was a senior agent, and then I got a phone call.

And it was fantastic.

It was the greatest thing ever.

And so it seems like I sold the first screenplay I ever wrote.

But truth is, I kept writing till I got lucky.

If I stopped writing, I would never have gotten lucky.

There was no luck coming to my house,

going, hey, here's a book deal.

Hey, we want to buy that screenplay

that you haven't written.

You just keep doing it, and eventually you're

likely to get lucky.

>>Why do most people not follow their bliss?

One word-- fear, right?

We're literally overwhelmed by fear,

and primarily we're overwhelmed by the fear of what

other people will think of us.

Campbell says that "what will they think of me?"

must be put aside for bliss.

One of the biggest inhibitors to following our bliss

is, what will they think of me?

Am I going to look like an idiot if I follow my bliss

and I fail?

Am I going to look like a fool?

All these different questions come into our mind.

>>Your friends and family, who can

be very well-meaning but really will collude with you

to create a story that is hard for you to get out of.

For example, don't do music.

You won't be a musician.

There's no point in trying to be a dancer, because you'll never

make a living doing that.

I think that's the first step to the journey.

They're the demons we often have to face down.

>>We are each our own greatest inhibitors.

And so people can say, oh, yeah, this guy's

holding me back or this situation.

But really, you're holding yourself back.

You're deciding, hey, I don't want

to look bad in front of those guys,

or, I don't want those guys to say some bad things about me,

so I'm not going to do that.

Who made that decision?

You.

I am not going to do that means you've decided.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>There's a poem of Rumi, the great mystical poet

from the Middle East in the 12th century who said,

I want to sing like birds saying,

not worrying who listens or what they think."

But if you can do that, then you can achieve the impossible.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>For me, one of the most formative times,

the first probably most formative time,

was when I dropped out of law school.

All of my friends at the time told me, at least

stay through the first year.

And I couldn't make it through the first semester.

I was literally nauseous at the idea of completing this.

I burned my resume.

I had no desire to live within the corporate world

in any sense.

And in the same 24-hour period of time,

ended my relationship of five years

and dropped out of law school.

It was an incredibly gut-wrenching,

soul-wrenching time.

Moved back in with Mom.

There were several months where I just lay in bed and slept

and read.

And it wasn't a pretty process.

But the only thing I knew I wanted to do

was to coach a Little League baseball team.

The little bit of instinct that I had,

the little bit of bliss I half in my life at that time

was to work with these kids.

And I had no idea what would come out of it.

And then three, six months later,

I had an idea that, wow, there's an amazing opportunity

to serve families and sports.

The internet was just getting going.

This was 1998.

And I had a vision of what I could

do to serve these families and created a company

that there's no way I could have imagined when I dropped out

of law school-- no possible way.

But as it turns out, I started this business.

We won the business plan competition at UCLA.

We raised $5 million.

I hired the CEO of Adidas to be our CEO.

And we hired the law firm that I would

have wanted to work for before I graduated from law school.

So there's this beautiful sense of this is it.

This is what happens when we follow our bliss.

Magical things happen that we couldn't

have imagined when we're going through the tough point

of making the decision to take the leap, to go for it,

and to make the difference in our lives.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>There are two roads in life, the red road

and the black road.

The red road is the tough road, because it's narrow.

It's winding.

It's full of storms.

It's full of obstacles.

The black road is easy.

It's straight, and it's wide.

It doesn't offer any challenges.

The storyteller never says, you have to travel this road,

or you have traveled this road.

They end up telling you the story of the red black road

by saying this.

The choice is yours.

Always the choice is yours.

>>Living this spontaneous life with my father, the bond

and the passions that my father shared with me,

we got on a plane at 7:00 in the morning out

of Santa Monica airport, flying towards big bear

where I had won a ski race the day before.

We're returning to Big Bear to collect my trophy.

On the way, we enter a storm, and we crash headlong

right into this rugged mountain, 8,200 feet.

That's the level we crashed.

I woke up.

Our bodies were sprawled in this 45-degree icy chute.

It was a blizzard.

It was hard to find everybody.

It took me about a half hour, 45 minutes

to piece everybody where they were.

My dad's girlfriend Sondra was still alive.

My dad was hunched over, and it was

unclear whether he was dead or just so knocked out

that he was sort of like comatose or something.

I just told myself that he was knocked out.

At a certain point, I had to admit

that he wasn't able to help me anymore, that I was on my own.

Sondra and I took shelter under a wing.

Many things happened.

Eventually, we started down this initial icy chute.

She slipped and was killed.

An hour later, I came across her body.

I covered her with twigs and leaves and stuff,

even though I knew she was dead pretty much.

But her eyes were open, so it was confusing for me

at that age.

I was 11.

And then I continued down in varied terrain,

and all kinds of things happened.

I got stuck in snow.

I had to get through a little creek, gulches, and broken rock

and ice.

And I just wanted it to go away.

More than anything in the world, I wanted that pain to go away.

Now, had I not gone in there and seen

that thing, that thing I feared the most,

I would not have learned to sort of find

the gem and the treasure of pain,

those answers that were there for me.

And had I not faced that pain, had I not gone

and stared in the eyes of the thing I feared most

that what I wanted to run through most,

I would not be here now with this book, which is really,

besides having a kid, the most satisfying experience

of my life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Campbell talks about the fact that when

we go on the Hero's Journey, there's a dragon we must slay.

Now, a dragon is the most challenging, fierce creature

that can ever be created in mythology.

>>Joe Campbell describes the dragon

as being a beast covered with scales.

And on every scale, it says either "thou shalt"

or "thou shalt not."

So this beast is a construction of all

of the rules, regulations, social obligations,

cultural accretions that have made

you feel that you either have to or can't do certain things.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Slaying the dragon to me is the most interesting.

It's the final moment.

It's the time when you are faced with the scariest thing you've

been faced with.

And you get to take everything you've learned

and knock this guy out.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>If you were to ask me, what's the one thing that keeps people

from their mountaintops?

What's the one thing that keeps people small

rather than allowing them to present

their genius to the world?

It's their fears.

Or as Joseph Campbell says, it's their dragons.

>>Fear is anything that gets in you.

It's a beast.

It's a monster.

>>Fear is, you know, what we face every day.

We fear that we're going to be rejected,

that we're going to be-- no one's going to return our phone

call, that no one's going to like what we made

or what we did or what we said.

>>Fear that is unfaced has a tendency to creep.

It moves through your experiences.

It starts to toxify your perceptions.

You become scared.

>>Love is what we're born with, and fear is what we learn.

And I think there's a great truth in that.

>>I remember when I decided I wanted to do full loop ramp.

And I had this idea.

I knew it was physically possible.

I mean, you do it with Hot Wheels.

You can do it with a skateboard, right?

And so I presented the idea to my sponsor at the time,

and I said, hey, I think I can do this.

And they said, that sounds awesome.

Let's build a ramp.

And I designed the ramp.

And all this was on paper, and it was my idea.

And I'll never forget driving up and seeing it,

and this wave of fear just crashed over me,

like oh, my-- what did I--?

Are you serious?

Like I made a loop?

I'm really going to--?

And I'm the only one that's even volunteering to do it.

And at that point, I felt like there was so much at stake

to not do it.

Because at the time, no one was building extravagant ramps.

No one really had money to do that kind of thing.

And there it was, and I just had to sort of internalize

and say, OK, you keep telling yourself this is possible.

This is the time.

We gotta make this happen.

And little by little, I figured it out,

but I took some heavy, heavy hits that day.

Actually, now we own one for our Huckjam tour

that we can do on tour every single night.

But the first time, that was just frightening.

But I had to really step back and go, OK, you can do this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Fear is a very interesting thing.

First of all, we need to realize that fear is an inherent part

of the human experience.

But it's not about getting rid of fear.

Where's it going to go?

There's nowhere for it to go.

The issue is to have courage, to move forward

in spite of the fear you feel.

>>The courage is not a lack of fear.

The courage is dealing with your fear.

Nobody would ever be described as courageous who

didn't confront their own fear.

That's not courage at all.

It's just doing something that you

find relatively unchallenging.

>>Courage is when you know what to do and you do it.

And lack of courage is when you know what to do

and you don't do it.

>>Courage is the ability to get up after you fall

and try again, exploring the unknown

and trying stuff that maybe people have thought

was impossible.

>>It's just like a muscle.

If you want to get strong or you want to run a triathlon

or run a marathon or do whatever you want to do physically,

you know you need to train.

You need to get stronger.

Courage is exactly the same thing.

Think of it like courage gym.

You've got to consistently go up your fears

and go one step past them, one step past them.

And you'll find that your comfort zone

expands each time you do that.

Things that used to freak you out

won't freak you out as much.

And now you have the tools.

You have the strength, literally,

to lift more in your life as you face your fears more and more

authentically.

>>There is some power monsters get by being

dark and in the closet.

And there is some diminishment by facing them, facing

them head on.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>So Joseph Campbell talks about slaying dragons.

And what do most of us do in our lives,

whether it's a difficult assignment at work,

whether it's a difficult conversation we know

we should have with a loved one, whether it's

something we're resisting?

We leave and run in the opposite direction.

Rather than running away, we should go closer to it.

Because once we can see our fears, the death of fear

becomes certain.

>>Do the things that scare you.

Courage is what comes afterward.

It is OK to be scared.

That shouldn't stop you.

It's a healthy warning, but it shouldn't stop you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Ogre, dragon that hoards, all of these stories

talk in those terms for several reasons.

On the one hand, we could call it projection

in a psychological sense.

So we project out and we create an antagonist

that we have to slay.

But what's actually happening is we're

dealing with the energies inside ourselves.

>>What is outside is, in fact, a reflection

of what's inside, that, in fact, you've

sort of chosen your monsters.

>>Of course, in Star Wars, which was pretty much entirely based

on Campbell's paradigm, Luke Skywalker

has to go into the cave, where he does battle

with Darth Vader, where finally, he cuts off Darth Vader's head.

And the head rolls to his feet.

And Darth Vader's helmet opens up,

and what does he see, but his own face.

He thinks that there's evil outside of him.

>>When the struggle between good and evil

is understood to be going on inside of us,

it can be very beneficial.

This is part of a personal transformation,

overcoming our negative aspects, emphasizing our good ones.

But what often happens, of course,

we want to feel that we are good,

so we don't find the negative within ourselves.

We're going to find it somewhere out there.

>>The great obstacle for most of us, really, is ourself.

If we can overcome that basic fear

about what we might achieve, and we take that risk,

I think all kinds of things open up.

In Campbell's terms, we can all be heroes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The hero encounters these obstacles, and flails at them.

And that's how we react when we find ourselves in a situation

where we have that kind of cognitive dissonance.

How do I get out of it?

Well, first thing is, you have to surrender.

You have to stop fighting it.

>>So slaying the dragon is really

coming to terms with that inner part of yourself that you think

is bigger than you.

And in doing that, then you grow a bigger sense of yourself.

However, I think that it's loving

your dragon that's the much more efficient thing to do.

And it also feels a lot better.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>When you do that, then frequently whatever

the dragon was hiding, hoarding, they

step away and give it to you.

They give it to you.

Because what are you fighting?

You're fighting yourself.

When you stop fighting yourself, then you're

no longer engaged in the fight, and you're

open to what might come to you.

>>There's always a gift in battling demons and overcoming

them.

Because that's what a soul's journey is about.

It's about facing fear and growing beyond it.

And as we overcome our fears, we gain power.

>>If we look at our lives, the best, most rewarding moments

have come after a struggle.

>>As such, what we do with our lives

is what makes us heroes or not.

And there is grace in knowing that.

There is a gift in believing that.

>>Every minus is half of a plus waiting

for a stroke of vertical awareness.

In other words, on one level, it's negative.

Yeah, you had your divorce, yeah,

you had that health challenge, yeah, you got fired.

OK, we're not arguing that was not troublesome.

But what awareness can you add to it

so you get a far bigger picture that helps you master it?

>>At a certain point in the hero's journey,

it's going to become about you loving and accepting yourself

as you are.

That's a powerful moment, because that lines

you up directly with the universe.

Now there's no more war going on inside yourself.

And as that gap heals between your unlovable self

and your ability to love that unlovable self,

you gain an awesome power in life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The way we think of time is as linear.

I'm born, I'm going to go through these things,

and I'm going to die.

The Hero's Journey tells us no.

You're going to go here, you're going to have this adventure,

and you're to come back.

And guess what?

You're going to be right back where you were.

And now you're going to go over here and have this adventure,

and you come back.

You're going to go here, you're going to have this adventure,

and you're going to come back.

And guess what?

You're going to be right back where you were.

And now you're going to go over here and have this adventure,

and you come back.

And guess what?

You're right here.

What did you bring back?

>>What the hero brings back is a story.

Gilgamesh, for example, the Gilgamesh epic, he went out

and he looked for the plant of immortality.

He went through all kinds of trials with the feminine,

with the monster, and so on.

But he finally swam to the bottom of the sea

and got the plant of immortality.

And he came up on the shore and put it down.

While he was bathing, the snake, serpent,

came and got the plant of immortality.

But he went home to Uruk anyway.

And he had this story to tell.

For Gilgamesh, there was no concrete, objective thing,

widget to give to the community, no gold, no treasure,

and so on.

The story of getting the treasure is the treasure.

And so the giving of the story is the invitation

for other people to make the same journey.

That's why it's a circle and never ends.

>>I love that idea that there's a circle,

and the circle needs to be closed.

And the way to close the circle is

to come back, return with something different

than you started with and to share that.

And that to me is like a perfect Hero's Journey.

>>That's the ultimate end to the Hero's Journey's.

It's not slaying the dragon.

It's not beating the bad guy.

It's giving back the essence of that journey.

>>What's life about?

How can I make a difference?

And who can I make a difference to and for?

And then it gets real easy.

Hey, can I get a shirt?

Oh, yeah, here's a shirt.

Hey, can I get a board?

Yeah, here's a board.

Oh, my friend's got an autistic son,

and he's trying to make a movie and he doesn't have the money.

What can we do to finish the movie?

Oh, all of a sudden we're doing things

that we are going to do anyway, but then all of a sudden we

can make money for him and make him finish the movie.

And then all of a sudden, it's like, well,

let's do that again.

That was great.

>>When I found this success in skating that I never

dreamed possible, the first thing I wanted to do

is try to help kids get a facility.

And that was the first thing I did.

I started a foundation for public skate parks.

To date, we've helped build about 500 skate parks.

It's my passion.

It's what I would love to do, is to provide facilities

for these kids who deserve a chance.

>>I love talking to young writers about writing.

There's a scholarship I fund, which

is a screenwriting scholarship at Wesleyan,

where I went to college.

We owe it to everybody who wants to be

what we are when they grow up.

>>They say if you speak to somebody

at the level of the mind, then you'll speak to their mind.

If you speak from your heart, you'll speak to their heart.

But if you speak through your life,

and your life is the story, then you'll change lives.

And that's what mythical beings do.

And it's why stories are great, because my story right now,

which is also my truth, may have an effect on you.

And therefore, I am taking the internal,

I'm making it external, and through that, I'm

sharing experience.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>No matter how long get to live,

life is ultimately very short.

And before all of us know, we're going to be dust.

And the street sweeper gets buried next to the CEO.

And all that really matters at the end of the day

is how big we showed up and how courageous we were.

And I think when we are on our death beds, what

fills our heart with the greatest regret

is not all the risks we took and not

all the opportunities we seized and not all the times we

went out on a limb and looked silly.

What fills our heart with regret at the end of our lives

are all the risks we didn't take and all the opportunities

we didn't seize.

>>And it's really all you gotta do to get to the next step.

I believe we all have it in us to think to ourselves,

I can't give up.

>>That choice to not give up is a story you're telling yourself

that makes you feel immortal.

It makes you feel like you can overcome anything.

It makes you feel transcendent.

And that's all we got.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]