https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nF4vVVFyXjI
Yes, I agree with that and I think that’s a very good point that Anderson brought up and thank you for pointing that out. And that’s interesting because that has to do with the degree to which we, how should we take the hero’s journey within the martial arts and I know Rafe Kelly is again doing work on this explicitly. What you said brings out a really important point and that goes towards something I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on recently which is trying to build on the work of L.A. Paul and transformative experience and Agnes Callard in Aspiration, where you may think that there’s, if you’ll allow me, there’s sort of this way in which you can frame the hero’s journey. I’m going to defeat all of my opponents, I’m going to defeat all of my peers, right? But you could also think of the hero’s journey as an aspirational one, which is there’s a future self that I want to be and I’m not currently that self, right? This is a self that has perspectives and virtues and preferences that I don’t have. This is perhaps a wiser self or a more rational self or a more virtuous self and that’s a different hero’s journey because now the relationship is between your current self and your future self and it’s a very different thing because the skills you need to build are not just the skills of combat or the skills, let’s call them the skills of victory. You need to build up these important skills that take, like I’m this agent right now in this particular arena, this is who I am and this is how I see and understand the world and I want to be that person, if you’ll allow me to use space to refer to time, right? I want to be that person over there, a different person living in a different world. This is why people go into therapy, right? They want to be a different person living in a different world. So the skills of moving between worlds in this existential sense of a world are not the same skills as combat. They are not the same skills as combat. I agree with you. I think you can develop your skills of combat and be best in that sense but if you have not engaged in a lot of the processes that I talk about, the inactive analogy, the serious play, this is all in my series for people who want to take a deeper look at these ideas but if you don’t cultivate these skills, let’s call them the skills of transformation that transform you from one world to another, you can have your combat skills at a very high level and that doesn’t mean you’ve aspired very much at all, right? So I agree with you that if people are trying to incorporate the hero mythos into their martial practice, they should sit down and reflect which way do I want it? Do I want it this way? Like, you know, I just want to be able to defeat my contemporaries. Is that the hero’s journey I’m on? Or is the hero’s journey, right, I want to move to that person in that world? And then because then what you have to do is you have to do what we were talking about earlier, D’Andro, you have to think about cultivating all of these other things so you can develop the skills of transcendence and transframing, not just the skills of combat.