Initiation of the Hero - Theory of Learning Part II

There are two types of mountains. On one hand, the mountain you ascend physically, and on the other hand, the one you climb with the mind. The first helps you look better, be healthier and happier. The second helps you look better, be healthier and happier.

Both need indeed, the voluntary use of energy, an investment. But most importantly, when you are on top of the mountain. You get vision. You see!?

For me, this is a huge advantage of places with mountains. People learn first the process of climbing mountains, step by step, and secondly that the result is, to get vision. A sensation of having a glimpse beyond our limitations!

Welcome to the second part of my Learning Theory. In the first essay, I handled the fundamental nature of suffering and the emerging result of it- getting conscious. Today we are going to link this suffering to a more natural level of experience. We are going to explore the hero’s journey. Let’s play with the idea of the hero, to unpack what we can learn.

Part I

1) Emerging Hero

A hero is born out of a story of exceptional suffering. The basic idea is- the more suffering the more potential for being a hero. And everyone seems to look up to heroes, look up to our ideals which those heroes embody. It is looking up to a potential future. But also in reverse, a life without a hero would be a life without an ideal. Thus you can’t strive to embody that hero. You can't grow. But as we are now in the state of perceived but accepted suffering there is a big potential to leverage it, to transform the suffering into a hero story.

2) Questions

In life, you can ask a lot of questions. But what are the most important ones? Behind the hero story there is a question of relief, it's the question which has the greatest meaning. When you observe a state, or manifestation of suffering the question occurs in your mind. How can you solve this state of suffering? This question may have the potential of an answer included in it. It is a question to form a new piece of knowledge that can be gained through exploration. But it's not just that, not just the state of suffering, not just that question, but the exploration of your values. It is a question of who you want to be. It's about you identifying- standing and pushing for a desired state.

3) Orientation

In the first article of the series, we explored the constructive process of learning through conscious goal setting and bargaining with our future. Now, taken to a natural level of experience, we embody the hero. Our suffering, the resulting values, and with our question in mind, we stand for something. We are now oriented to find out. And that's great because then we know what to do and why we do it. We’re on a mission, a path for our developed self.

By voluntarily sacrificing our present to the future we humans can run through our own hero journey. By doing that we get oriented to find new pieces of knowledge. New patterns to shine a light on. Patterns of us, our cultures and the world. So the hero’s journey is a story about learning and growing. It is as if the hero’s journey and learning are synonyms. It’s the universal education story, we all live through, all the time. We are all, always in it- and also- all-in, in it.

What will we find out?

Imagine a game scene where you are in a first-person perspective. The Environment gets only rendered in the direction you look. Through the suffering, we have now indeed rendered the world in front of us. Different Objects, different conversations, a different set of patterns of meaning popping up. Nowadays- very important to mention- also your social-media feed gets rendered through your goal. And if you are unaware, unconscious of your goals, look at your feed. It will tell you! Just go and ask yourself, why do I get this recommendation?

In reverse, through this rendering mechanism we also get a sense of what may not be rendered in front of us.?

This is also why I'm personally a big fan of acquiring a broad set of knowledge. Getting a grip on everything so you can approximate where you are missing out. Train your intuition to have at least some grip to know where you could look. But let's get back to the hero’s journey and see how we can do that. In part two we explore the attitude through the journey more deeply.

Part II

From template to template the exact stages come in different numbers and vary a bit. In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's journey is a common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis and comes home changed or transformed.

In this article, I'm not going to describe the later steps in detail. But as we are now oriented towards our goal, I want to lay out the moral and aesthetic attitude through such a journey. To do so, let's inspect the difference between the two mountains I mentioned in the beginning and then attribute meaning to the ideas of the first part!

From Body to Mind through aesthetic and moral experience

Epistemologists deal with questions about knowledge and how we can attain it. They have thought that articulated knowledge of patterns comes from abstracted experience. In the world, you see patterns like structures, behaviors, processes. The way you learn- is that if you see patterns more often you get more of a grip on them. You soon learn to articulate the pattern. You will often find metaphors which give you the possibility to articulate the pattern and act out fully aware of it. In a normal sense someone would think of this process as a sort of potential which transforms from the “unknown unknown” to the unknown, the partly known, and possibly knowable for everyone, through articulation. It is often given birth to through comedy, music, visual, physical and even newer art forms like memes or satisfying videos.

This source of knowledge, this potential, initially comes from the embodied experience. The goal is to re-act out that experience. To shine it back to the world. Everything you can see and experience can also be represented in your world of ideas. This even makes the metaphor of hiking on the mountain, and it’s relation to the hero’s journey possible.?

What you can do is to see the world through the lens of your challenge and therefore see pieces of meanings- represented to you through metaphors. The metaphors are often hard to catch because they are embedded in our unconscious. But if you get aware of them you can see them everywhere. In an art piece, a situation, by looking at nature. You will find them for any hero’s journey you would be driven to, and you can do so, because your mind is built to represent the dimension of time, to have the possibility to learn and adapt through time. To bring the experiences from the embodied- physical and situational dimension into the possibly lasting time dimension doing that through aesthetic and moral experience, where you change your worldview through interweaving actions and ideas with one another.?

Given that duality, let's specify three important dimensions.?

1) Act out and communicate your hero’s journey, as truthfully as you can

Why? You pay a big price for not doing so. If you lie you get feedback based on false assumptions. It's like training an artificial neural network with wrong or mislabeled data. You will get your abstractions wrong and your brain might not get a reliable neural network helping you through time. It’s very important to tell the truth to others. Say what you think. Because first, it might be right. And second, you might want to train your own and other neural networks truthfully.?

Telling people that you are on the hero’s journey is telling them you’re on the path of manifesting your potential. It is literally a cinema for others who don't climb on the mountain. What’s different is the timeframe of those hikes. Hiking on a physical mountain is like a part of a series on netflix. But the movie, -your movie- could be a great story.?

We remember- nobody on earth would watch movies where the hero wins everytime. What people really love about hero movies is when the characters face hardship, but finally get more knowledge and vision, more strength to overcome the challenge. Rarely someone would just watch the end. Through such movies, you get to embody those characters and thus gain the possibility to be part of their true development.

2) Questions to see patterns through time

The power of the hero is that he can integrate and adapt patterns through time. With the thought of metaphors and what they mean to you in a situation, you will continually find pieces fitting to your individual path. You can take the ideas from the world to get new reference points that provide new viewpoints, which will shine a new light on your past, your current and future situations.

What you can also do, to trigger these thoughts more often, is to have a serious conversation with your being. It’s like a ritual where you tell your brain the biggest problem you have and then tell the brain also, that it should search for solutions, and send you a let’s say “notification” when the solution is available. It is like outsourcing the problem to your brain, so you don’t need to bother about it. Do this for your biggest problem and you can get amazing insights. Good places to do so are in nature as it has a rich potential of metaphors you can explore. I always thought that with a tree you can explain everything. In nature, you can find literally any pattern in the perceived world and apply it to a problem in your world of ideas. At this point, having a problem is important so that you have a reference frame that orients the thought. So the problem and the metaphor transform the meaning.

Also art galleries, and boredom I find quite awesome to get inspired. It seems to be the biggest price we pay for being constantly engaged by our screens. It is that we lose touch to those metaphors and also to our being, our intuition. We are hardly ever engaged with ourselves, we may not even trust those metaphors when we encounter them, nor take them seriously in the first place.

3) Bargaining mechanisms

Still, the version of going on an ideated mountain has some different time-driven mechanisms to it. If you climb a really high mountain, you need to split the mountain down into smaller steps.? And as our goal is to invest into our future, what is the time frame going to look like?? ?Since the span of a hero’s journey can be everything from 3 months to a year, or even ten years. How do we deal with that??

Example. Somehow we humans built a hammer, an embodied tool. But as we have made progress through time and technology we can now make even better hammers. And we can make them so good that they are never finished. We can continually?add and upgrade pieces of it, which extends the timeframe of potential goals and is therefore important to think of and have in mind.

On the strategic side, the time or mind dimension, there is an intuition going along with it because you can only approximate into the future what your hammer will look like. What we want to make sure when pursuing a long journey, is that we really value it. There needs to be something deeply intrinsic in place so we don't fall off,? or give up.?

Tactically on the body dimension it's important to have some substeps and sub-complexities to the finished hammer. By piecing the journey into small steps we don’t get overwhelmed and fall prey to distraction. If you want to do something, but don’t do it, then continually differentiate the task down till it’s small enough where you are realistically going to follow through.

Personally, I discovered, if you tend to be more generalistic, it's important to act out the specific, because if you focus too much on the mind dimension you can lose touch since the strategic side holds too much complexity to communicate and get feedback on. You can’t communicate a whole network, there is simply too much going on. So we remember, the way is from body to mind. The tactical part of acting out is important for learning and continuing your journey. If you don’t act, you don’t get feedback you can learn from to continually readjust your path. It’s important to always keep up the experience flow from the bottom up.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. -Alan Watts

I believe the healthy interaction of the strategic and tactical world opens the greatest possible range for experience. To pick up patterns, take them on the journey of the most abstract and re-digest them back into manifestation.

Summary

Given the constant of suffering, we humans continually develop consciousness. Exceptional suffering can lead to people voluntarily starting their journey, getting oriented to slay the dragon- and bring back the loot- with its pieces of knowledge, the patterns attributed to it!?

Going through the hero's journey is the most fundamental way to learn. On your path you will be provided with amazing stories to tell and you will be engaged in life. Doing that, you get to actively choose which reward you want to distribute to the community. To act out your true identity and be part of the overall equation.?

So what is the next heroic step? If you want to learn, I encourage you to look forward to the next big mountain and climb it!

Closing thought

Personally, I suffered through the education system for a long time. Uninspired teachers and outdated structures led me to build the dream of building the greatest education website www.infosnack.at. I didn't really expect that, but starting the project I found patterns jumping at me everywhere. I'm stacking patterns of meanings on top of one another and the platform connects them all together. This is so amazing, and why I am also writing this essay- as the philosophy behind the education website. It is sort of, "the abstract network you cannot communicate". The platform infosnack acts out as the specific manifestation of this learning theory, framing a wonderful hero's journey to get inspired!

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Special Thanks to:

• Ginevra Pfeiffer for the amazing illustrations https://www.instagram.com/jeeviarts_/
• Jordan Peterson for a ton of inspiration with his lecture series "Maps of Meaning" on Youtube
• David Christian for the huge inspiration coming along with "The Big History Project" and the "Complex Problem Solving" course on Coursera
• Everyone helping me reviewing and giving feedback! - Credits to @Dominic Ledinger, @Tarik Mete, @Dominik Hejzak, @Patricia von Papstein - Thx!