The Daily Stoic - Resistance: Defining the Enemy - An Excerpt from Steven Pressfield’s “The War Of Art”

Episode Date: August 28, 2022

Today’s episode features an excerpt from Steven Pressfield’s book “The War Of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles” (get a signed copy from The Painted Porch). Provided by Black Irish Entertainment LLC.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. of life. Thank you. For listening. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion-forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. First read 15 years ago now, I've read it dozens of times. It's by the one and only Stephen Pressfield. One of the most influential writers in my life,

and a great dude, he was actually just out here at the Painted Port. We did a Fuller podcast interview, which I will run very soon here, if not already. But I wanted to bring you some excerpts from that book, because Stephen was nice enough to let us run it here on the podcast. If you haven't read the War of Art, you are missing out. It's about breaking through, winning your inner creative battles. And it sold millions of copies for a reason. It works. It's the best. And this excerpt was published by recorded books on brilliance audio. They were nice enough, again, to give us this excerpt. We carry the

war of art in the Paine de Port. You can pick this book up on Audible, iBooks, anywhere, audio books are sold. I'll link to it in today's episode. But in this excerpt, we're going to talk about, I think the most powerful concept in Stephen Pressfield's work, the resistance, the force that gets in between us and where we want to go, what we need to do. He talks about how we have a higher self and a lower self in our interview. And that resistance is what prevents us from transcending the lower self and getting to the higher self. The Stokes talk about this. They call this acrasia, it's a sort of a civil war within us. The battle between the lower and the higher self.

And that's what you're going to hear about in today's episode. Again, if you haven't read the War of Art, you have to. If you have, this is a great time to revisit the book as I was saying I love to do. And it's always a good time to take some insights and get some advice from the one and only Stephen Pressfield who I just got a text is back at the bookstore.

I'm gonna walk downstairs and talk to him now. So this is all very fitting. I can't wait for you to hear it. We've got some sign copies of the War of Art also at thepaintedportch.com. I'm going to become. We come into this world with a specific personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some idea we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we are already and become it.

If we were born to paint, it's our job to become a painter. If we were born to raise and nurture children, it's our job to become a mother. If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice in the world, it's our job to realize it and get down to business. We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone in the cold void of starry space with nothing and no one to hold onto.

Of course, this is exactly what happens. But here's the trick. We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead, we are tapped into an unquenchable, und depletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends, but we find friends too, in places we never thought to look, and they're better friends, true friends, and we're better and trueer to them.

The Unlived Life. Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance. Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice? Dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless? To run for office, crusade for the planet

campaign for a world peace or to preserve the environment. Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be. Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts adventure? Then you know what resistance is. This is from John Lee Hooker song, Boogie Chillin. One night I was laying down, I heard Papa talking to Mama, I heard Papa say to let that boy Boogie-Wooogie, because it's in him, and it's got to come out.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield the resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than what we are and were born to be. If you believe in God and I do, you must declare resistance evil for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when he endowed each of us with our own unique genius. Genius is a Latin word. The Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and

inviolable, which watches over us guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius and artist paints with hers. Everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul's seat, the vessel that holds our being in potential, our stars beacon and polaris. Every sun casts a shadow, and geniuses shadow is resistance. As powerful as is our souls call it a realization, so potent are the forces of resistance arrayed against us. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet,

more powerful and a locomotive harder to kick than crack cocaine. We're not alone if we've been mowed down by resistance. Millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us, and here's the biggest bitch. than crack cocaine. We're not alone if we've been mowed down by resistance. Millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us, and here's the biggest bitch. We don't even know what hit us. I never did.

From age 24 to 32, resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again 13 times, and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face. Have you heard this story? Woman learns she has cancer six months to live. Within days, she quits her job, resumes the dream of writing text-mex songs she gave up to raise a family, or starts studying classical Greek or moves to the inner city and devotes herself to attending babies with AIDS. Women's friends think she's crazy. She herself has never been happier.

There's a post-script. Women's cancer goes into remission. Is that what it takes? Do we have to stare death in the face to make a stand-up and confront resistance? Does resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence? How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts,

develop tumors and erosies to come to pain killers, up to its existence. How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and erosies, succumbed to painkillers gossip and compulsive cell phone use, simply because we don't do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius is calling us to. Resistance defeats us. If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every day's and benigned soul woke up with the power to take the first step towards pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery

and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom. Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraine, headaches, road rage, and dandruff. Look in your own heart. Unless I'm crazy, right now, a still small voice is piping up,

telling you as it has 10,000 times the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it, no one has to tell you. And unless I'm crazy, you're no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday, or will be tomorrow. You think resistance isn't real, resistance will bury you. You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At 18, he took his inheritance, 700 cronon, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts, and later to the School of Architecture.

Ever see one of his paintings, neither of I. Resistance beat him. Call it over statement, but I'll say it anyway. It was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas. What I know, there's a secret that real writers, or anyone in any creative endeavor, knows that want to be writers don't, and the secret is this. It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance. The part one resistance defining the enemy. The enemy is a very good teacher, a Dalai Lama. Let me start with Resistance's greatest hits.

The following is a list in no particular order of those activities that most commonly elicit resistance. One, the pursuit of any calling and writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional. 2. The launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise for profit or otherwise. 3. Any diet or health regimen. 4. Any program of spiritual advancement.

5. Any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals? 6. Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction? 7. Education of every kind 8. Any act of political, moral or ethical courage, including the decision to change for the better some unworthy pattern of thought or conduct in ourselves. 9. The undertaking of any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others. 10. Any act that entails commitment of the heart. The decision to get married, to have a child, to weather a rocky patch in a relationship. And 11. The taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity. In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth,

health, or integrity, or express another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit resistance. Now, what are the characteristics of resistance? First off, resistance is invisible. Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled, but it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work in potential. It's a repelling force, it's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work. Resistance is internal.

Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We located in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids, peripheral opponents, as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within. Resistance is insidious. Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will purge your fabricate, falsify, seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is prodient. It will assume any form if that's what it takes to deceive you.

It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a 9mm in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal then double cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of crap. Resistance is implacable. Resistance is like the alien or the terminator or the shark and jaws. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction programmed from the factory with one object only to prevent us from doing our work. Resistance is implacable, intractable, indifitigable. Reduce it to a single cell and that cell will continue to attack. This is resistance's nature. It's all it knows.

all it knows. Let's continue our look at characteristics of resistance with resistance is impersonal. Resistance is not out to get you personally. It does know who you are and doesn't care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively, though it feels malevolent. Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as the stars.

When we marshal our forces to combat resistance, we must remember this. Resistance is infallible. Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, resistance will unfailingly point to true north. Meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this, we can use it as a compass, we can navigate by resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb, the more important a call or action is to our souls evolution, the more

resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. Resistance is universal. We're wrong if we think we're the only one struggling with resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences resistance. Resistance never sleeps. Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance even when he was 75. In other words, fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought a new every day. The next thing I'd like to talk about is resistance plays for keeps.

Resistance's goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being. Our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give, and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death. Resistance is fueled by fear. Resistance has no strength of its own. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death. Resistance is fueled by fear. Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us.

We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear, and we conquer resistance. Next, resistance only opposes in one direction. Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station, morally, ethically or spiritually. So if you're in Calcutta working with the Mother Teresa Foundation, and you're thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing, relax.

Resistance will give you a free pass. Next, resistance is most powerful at the finish line. Odysseus almost got home years before his actual homecoming. Ethico was in sight, close enough that the sailors could see the smoke of their family's fires on shore. Odysseus was so certain he was safe he actually laid down for a snooze. It was then that his men believing there was gold in an oxide sack among their commander's possessions snatched this prize and cut it open. The bag contained the adverse winds which King Aolus had bottled up for Odysseus when the

wanderer had touched earlier at his blessed Isle. The winds burst forth now and one man blow, driving Odysseus' ships back across every league of ocean they had with such difficulty traversed, making him endure further trials and sufferings before at last and alone he reached home for good. The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button, it marshals one last assault and slams us where everything it's got. The professional must be alert for this counterattack. Be wary at the end. Don't open that bag of wind. And the final characteristic is resistance recruits allies.

Resistance by definition is self-sabotage, but there's a parallel parallel that must also be guarded against sabotaged by others. When a writer or any budding entrepreneur or artist begins to overcome her resistance, in other words when she actually starts to write, she may find that those close to her begin acting strange. They may become moody or sullen. They may get sick. They may accuse the awakening writer of changing, of not being the person she was. The closer these people are to the awakening writer, the more bizarrely they will act, and the more emotion they will put behind their actions.

They are trying to sabotage her. The reason is that they are struggling consciously or unconsciously against their own resistance. The awakening writer's success becomes a reproach to them. If she can beat these demons, why can't they? Often couples or close friends, even entire families will enter in a tacit compacts whereby each individual pledges unconsciously to remain mired in the same slew in which she and all her cronies have become so comfortable. The highest treason a crab can commit is to leap for the rim of the bucket.

The awakening artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others. Once you make your break, you can't turn around for your buddy who catches his trouser leg on the barbed wire. The best thing you can do for that friend, and tell you this himself if he's really your friend, is to get over the wall and keep motating. The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where

each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling

parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. Now, let's consider the next aspect of resistance symptoms. The first is resistance and procrastination. Procrastination is the most common manifestation of resistance

because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves, I'm never going to write my symphony. Instead, we say, I am going to write my symphony. I'm just going to start tomorrow. Then there's resistance and procrastination part two. The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can be a good example of the most Then there's resistance and procrastination part two. The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit.

We don't just put off our lives today. We put them off to our deathbed. Never forget, this very moment we can change our lives. There never was a moment and never will be when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work. Resistance and sex. Sometimes resistance takes the form of sex or an obsessive preoccupation with sex. Why sex?

Because sex provides immediate and powerful gratification. When someone sleeps with us, we feel validated and approved of, even loved. Resistance gets a big kick out of that. It knows it has distracted us with a cheap, easy fix and kept us from doing our work. Of course, not all sex is a manifestation of resistance. In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterwards. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust, but resistance. It goes without saying that this principle applies to drug, shopping, masturbation, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the consumption of all products containing fat, sugar, salt, or chocolate. Resistance and trouble. We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the

bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of Motley and the novellas of Joseph Conrad. Ill health is a form of trouble, as our alcoholism and drug addiction, pronus to accidents, all neurosis including compulsive screwing up, and such seemingly benign foibles as jealousy, chronic lateness, and the blasting of rap music at 110 dB from your smoked glass 95 Supra. Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of resistance.

Cruelty to others is a form of resistance as is the willing endurance of cruelty from others. The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work. Here's another symptom, resistance and self-dramatization. Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of resistance. Why put in years of work designing a new software interface when you can get just as much attention

by bringing home a boyfriend to a prison record? Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids' fuel, the tanks, the grown-ups, arm, and the phasers, the whole star-ship lurches from one spine tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up. Dad gets drunk, mom gets sick, Janie shows up for church with an Oakland Raiders tattoo. It's more fun than a movie, and it works.

Nobody gets a damn thing done. Sometimes I think of resistance as a sort of evil twin to Santa Claus, who makes his rounds house to house, making sure that everything's taken care of. When he comes to a house that's hooked on self-dramatization, his ready cheeks glow and he giddy ups away behind his eight tiny reindeer. He knows there'll be no work done in that house. Next, resistance and self-medication. Do you regularly ingest any substance controlled or otherwise, whose aim is the alleviation of depression, anxiety, etc.?

I offer the following experience. I once worked as a writer for a big New York ad agency. Our boss used to tell us, invent a disease. Come up with a disease, he said, and we can sell the cure. Attention deficit disorder, seasonal affect disorder, social anxiety disorder. These aren't diseases. They're marketing employees. Doctors didn't discover them. Copyrighters did. Marketing departments did. Drug companies did. Depression and anxiety may be real, but they can also be resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our souls call, we are being good Americans and exemplary

consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of resistance and commerce. Resistance and victimhood. Doctors estimate that 70 to 80% of their business is non-health-related.

People aren't sick, they're self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face. As Jerry Seinfeld observed of his 20 years of dating, quote, that's a lot of acting fascinated. The acquisition of a condition lends significance to one's existence. An illness across to bear, some people go from condition to condition. They cure one and another pops up to take its place. Condition becomes a work of art in itself. A shadow version of the real creative act the victim is avoiding by expending so much care cultivating his condition.

A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or contribution made out of one's experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent and not-so-silent threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness, meltdown, mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don't do it if you're doing it, stop. Resistance and the choice of a mate. Sometimes, if we're not conscious of our own resistance, we'll pick as a mate someone who has or is successfully overcoming resistance. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's easier to endow our partner with the power that we, in fact, possess but are afraid to act upon. Maybe it's less threatening to believe that our beloved spouse is worthy to live out his or her unlived life while we are not.

Or maybe we're hoping to use our mate as a model. Maybe we believe, or wish we could, that some of our spouse's power will rub off on us if we just hang around it long enough. This is how resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it's colorful, Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we're the supporting partner, shouldn't we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life rather than hitchhike on our spouse's coattails? And if we're the support-ed partner, shouldn't we step out from the glow of our loved ones' adoration and instead encourage him to let his own light shine? Resistance and this book. When I began this book, Resistance almost beat me. This is the form it took.

It told me, the voice in my head, that is, that I was a writer of fiction, not nonfiction, and that I shouldn't be exposing these concepts of resistance literally and overtly. Rather, I should incorporate them metaphorically into a novel. That's a pretty damn subtle and convincing argument. The rationalization that resistance presented me with was that I should write, say, a war piece

in which the principles of resistance were expressed as the fear a warrior feels. Resistance also told me I shouldn't seek to instruct or put myself forward as a purveyor of wisdom that this was vain, egotistical, possibly even corrupt, and that it would work harm to me in the end. That scared me. It made a lot of sense.

What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead. I was developing symptoms. As soon as I sat down and began, I was okay. Resistance and unhappiness. What does resistance feel like? First, unhappiness. We feel like hell.

A low-grade misery pervades everything. We're bored, we're restless, we can't get no satisfaction. There's guilt, but we can't put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed, we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We're disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves. Uneleviated resistance mounts to a pitch that becomes unendurable. At this point, vice is kick-in. Dope, adultery, web surfing. Beyond that, resistance becomes clinical. Depression, aggression, dysfunction,

then actual crime and physical self-destruction. Sounds like life, I know. It isn't. It's resistance. What makes it tricky is that we live in a consumer culture that's acutely aware of this unhappiness and has masked all its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it by selling us a product, a drug, a distraction. As John Lennon once wrote, Well, you think you're so clever and classless and free,

but you're all bleepin' peasants as far as I can see. As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We over throw the programming of advertising movies, video games, magazines, TV and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable

income to the bottom line of BS incorporated, but only by doing our work. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Dio Stoke to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks.

Are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoke.com slash M and calendar. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

in Apple podcasts.