From Section IV of The F-Model of Dreaming:

IV. FIRE

Although every “No” against the dragon named Thou Shalt marks a change in course, or in momentum, spirit likewise requires a “sacred Yes,” the affirmation of creation. Negation will not suffice alone. So, spirit must become a child. “Innocence and forgetting, a new

beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement” (Nietzsche, p139). I know why the Bodhistvas smile. I also forget, sometimes. On purpose?

Hillel the Elder said—and I paraphrase—“If I am not looking out for me, then who is looking out for me? And yet, if I am only looking out for myself, what exactly is my ‘self?’ And if I don’t take responsibility for myself now, then when will I?” Only one thing will remain, when everything else gives way...even as the forms reshuffle.

Chapter 10:

Fortitude

An oxymoronic motto of Emperor Augustus was festina lente: "hurry slowly." This is intended to encourage proceeding swiftly, but with calm and caution. We can never be sure how much effort will be required, or exactly how many trials are still ahead, even as we can view our goal approaching. Remember, in a labyrinth you may seem near the center, in a sense, except there may still be multiple convoluted paths, and insurmountable walls which must be circumvented, before the circuit has been completed. We may even see the prize, almost within grasp. “Often in primitive tales when a satisfactory ending seems imminent, the whole thing blows up” (von Franz, p189). I am a fan of the long Game. Play as if you were built to last.

THAT WHICH REMAINS AMIDST CHANGE. A biologist minoring in physics named Matt Meselson constructed the first density gradient centrifuge. With this technology, in 1958 Meselson (along with Franklin Stahl) proved that bacteria pass a whole genetic-molecule from a parent to a new bacterium, in a manner such that each original molecule replicates (by splitting in half, then reconfiguring as two copies). This was a fundamental discovery. We knew that bacterium would fission, but before this, that something essential passes along

through the generations had not been demonstrated— a finer thread of reality had to be spun. This intact molecule—that which persists even between generations— was the DNA molecule, and the mode of replication evidenced via this spinning experiment supported the “semiconservative” hypothesis of double helix synthesis, put forth by Watson and Crick, five years prior.

As examples of perseverance endured (as a form of punishment, in their case), there were the Danaids. Dispelled to the underworld for murdering their husbands, “at the river’s edge they filled forever jars riddled with holes, so that the water poured away and they must return to fill them again, and again see them drained dry” (Hamilton, p282). But some things really do have to be repeated, day after day, year after year. Whether the necessary actions are punishment or choice...who decides? Who benefits if the actor chooses well?

What if I said to my Self: I Will Work at this thing here, until...until I succeed; how would this approach affect my chances of manifesting that intent into reality? “Life itself confided this secret to me: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself’” (Nietzsche, p227). And if I fall, do I shatter like the Eggman? Or, do I roll and rebound? “The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds. You higher men here, have you not all failed?” (Nietzsche, p404). Life, in the little Time allotted to us each, has all the adventure we could manage, waiting right around the bend— if we would want it. You can feel it pulling. The territorial imperative "Shapes your way and mine to patterns larger and more immortal than ourselves” (Ardey, p154).

SERIOUS DREAM THREATS. Using Revonsuo and Valli’s Dream Threat Scale (DTC, 2000), analyzing a sample of 212 recurrent dreams, Zadra, et al., (2006) found that the average dreamer experienced “serious” or worse threat 65% of the time in their reports, although significant affiliates or resources were also victimized. When threatened, dreamers reacted by fleeing 39% of the time, or by fighting (34%), or “both” (5%). In over 20% of these dreams it was impossible to respond to the threatening situation. In only 2% of these recurrent dreams was the dreamer judged as choosing not to do anything about the threat, and in nearly three- quarters, the dreamer did not “suffer a loss,” and those they did sustain were minor and rarely serious.

The threatening recurrent dreams in the Zadra study resolved with a “happy ending” in 17% of reports, and in only 19% were the threats “realistic and thus probable.” A quarter of the threats came in the form of being chased, more than twice the rate typical of non-recurring, every-day dreams, but direct “aggression and violence...were twice as likely to occur in every day dream reports.” Although the study confirmed most of the “threat rehearsal” propositions originally put forth by Revonsuo (2000), the authors saw something else, because “the dreamer rarely succeeded in escaping the threat despite the actions taken to defend against it” (Zadra). This failure to escape the dream threats in a substantial proportion of

recurrent dreams (which were treated as prototypical threat simulation exemplars by Revonsuo) was taken as a partial disconfirmation, or worse, evidence for something else entirely, by Zadra, et al.,: “the experience of repeated failures in one’s dreams could contribute to the person developing a belief that he or she does not have the requisite abilities to deal with threats arising in real life; a counter- adaptive and harmful possibility not unlike learned-helplessness.” I already addressed this issue— although we might hypothesize such a learned-helplessness response to stress as a result of experiencing typical dream threats (which we do not successfully resolve in most dreams), the fact is, the Failure function of dreaming does not appear to result in learned-helplessness (in mentally healthy individuals), and, Failure is well-matched with another feature of the Dream Generating System (the “cure” for Failures, which we will get to shortly).

Malcolm-Smith and Solms also threatened Revonsuo’s Threat Simulation Theory (TST, 2000), in an article that reported results from their own study designed to test its propositions (2004). Using the most recent dream (MRD) method developed by Domhoff (1996), 401 dreams were selected from students at the University of Cape Town (301 female, median age of total group was 20-years old), and raters decided “whether each dream contained physical threats, whether it contained realistic life threats, whether the dreamer escaped the threat, and, if so, whether the escape was realistic” (Malcolm-Smith). Only three-percent of MRDs were judged to have “realistic escapes from realistic life threats,” meanwhile, 63% of the same participants reported having a “real-life threatening experience” (Malcolm-Smith). Well, I guess that sums it up, real-life is experienced as 23-times more threatening than dreaming is. Or...are we seeing observer bias embedded in the operational definitions?

On a more apples-for-apples comparison of daytime to dream threat, 39 Finnish university students kept a waking and a dream diary for 2-weeks and were also asked to select from a list any threatening events experienced in the past (Valli, 2008). “Current Dream Threats” were far more common than “Current Real Threats,” with dreams containing more aggressions and misfortunes, and dream threats resembling threats from the participants’ distant past, more so than any threatening-events recorded in the two-week diary period. In actuality, there is no clear-cut way to compare this sort of thing, being that dreamtime can draw on material from all sorts of real and imagined happenings, from all throughout one’s life. But generally, of course dreaming contains more threats, of various types, than does typical waking life (for most people, most of the time).

THE ANIMAL IN MAN. In the Fourth Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the conscientious-scientists tell how “Fear is the original and basic feeling of man; from fear everything is explicable; original sin and original virtue...For the fear of wild animals, that was bred in man the longest of all— including the animal he harbors inside himself” (Nietzsche, p414). Friedrich, through the voice of

Zarathustra, reverses this truth: “For fear— that is our exception. But courage and adventure and pleasure in the uncertain, in the undared— courage seems to me man’s whole prehistory” (p415). From a man best remembered as the eternal pessimist, we received also words of encouragement.

BRAVE? Mice specially bred to contain an allele (a variant of a gene) linked with behavioral abnormalities exhibited a "decreased fear response and an increase in defensive aggression, in the absence of any measured cognitive deficits (Chen, 1994). That was in mice with one of these low-fear alleles, and another one more typical of a “sensible” mouse. "Unlike the heterozygote" mice with only one no- fear gene, "the homozygote displayed abnormal behavior in all paradigms tested.”

Apparently, over the course of our evolution, the dream generating system found it sound to have us rehearse with hearse-seriousness the defense of our ground. But projecting too much defense can be offensive. A guy I knew used to say: “There's a thin line between brave and stupid.” Wise words indeed. An act is not brave if the person conducting said behavior does so without fear. Being fearless is not brave. In fact, not having the sense to know how bad an idea may be is more than lacking in bravery, it is ignorance manifest. Without a respect for danger, for the care that must be taken in execution, an act is inconsequential. An appreciation for resistance against oneself, and a willingness to sacrifice time and other resources in a campaign to surmount this resistance, that is bravery.

Bravery requires Willpower. Resistance, by definition, is a blockade or a tension working against your intentions. This results in a conflict between your objectives and the objects in the way of achieving them. Conflict. Consciousness. Contrast. Tension— a divergence from homeostasis, away from an ideal state of biological balance (really only achieved at death, if then). “The psychoanalytic study of ego functions has shown that one does not merely have more or less of a conflict. The means of conflict resolution, and their relative success, are perhaps of greater importance” (Levine, 1969, p50). It’s not what problems you have or how large they are, even. That stuff does matter, but what is really crucial to outcomes is how resourceful we are in dealing with perceived or chosen obstacles.

And yet, extreme outcomes requires extreme, herculean efforts. Great achievement requires ludicrous levels of effort. And let us not confuse good fortune alone for achievement. A man who wins a fortune by way of gambling or inheritance—if he has not developed his character into one capable of managing the blessing—will either not retain the wealth or will remain unable to duplicate this chance occurrence. To develop a high level of achievement in most arenas, usually, one must set their intention on a specific outcome and focus only on information useful toward those ends...while simultaneously avoiding dangers, pruning out useless information (noise), and maintaining habits which ensure the body-mind will have adequate fuel and opportunities to keep on keeping on. More challenging goals—those requiring multiple obstacle hurdles and uncomfortable

growing pains—and those outcomes which lack clear paths, require long-term perseverance. A personality construct known as “grit” may measure this quality. With grittiness, human fortitude can turn the sharpest, rocky obstacles into marbles. Boulders can be reduced to ball-bearings. Grit is fortitude. Fortitude is strength of mind.

RESISTANCE. In The War of Art (2002), Steven Pressfield assured all creative-types in pursuit of completing an artistic work that they will face Resistance. “Genius’s shadow is Resistance.” Pressfield describes this “protean” force as “implacable, intractable,” and “it will assume any form.” Its “goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill.” As with all shadowy figures, there is a light behind this blind monster. Resistance marshals against our calling, whatever it is our soul wants to build. “Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North,” and in this way, Resistance makes plain exactly what it is we most want to do. Our secret benefactor, Resistance not only clarifies what it is our Will desires, it also improves our strength like ankle weights. She is a worthy combatant, one that will sweep us off the ground if we let our guard down for a moment. Similarly, the Dream Generating System attacks our aspirations and reminds us that ease is for the already-departed. Dreams depict scenarios which, in tone, match our wished achievements. Instead of disguising our wishes behind cloaks, dreams merely throw a thousand-pound ball-and-chain on each ankle. And wrist. And around the neck. Not surprisingly, what makes for a sense of ease, and what tasks we have set in our hearts, develop and evolve as we age. And Resistance is there with us, the whole journey.

Speaking on those memories which are hard to reach in a psychoanalytic context, Freud said that one of the rules in his system “is that whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance” (1900, p555). Freud thought that dreams—as fulfillments of animal-like wishes—were possible during sleep because "during the night the resistance loses some of its power, though we know it does not lose the whole of it, since we have shown the part it plays in the formation of dreams as a distorting agent." And there, is where I think Sigmund was most wrong, in his belief that dreaming involves diminished “resistance” to our efforts, compared with waking life. Resistance is, in fact, dreaming’s specialty. How does one overcome resistance?

IS BEING CLEVER ENOUGH? Lewis Terman reported back in 1915 that, of 1000 school children tested with the “Stanford revision” of the Binet-Simon intelligence measure, a “mental-delay of two years or more” (compared to age- matched norms)—AKA “school retardation”—was “three times as common as acceleration of two years or more.” Starting from an early age, most kids are average (of course), a good chunk of the whole are “school retarded,” and only a few are “exceptional children.” Terman opined— “Are children of genius usually

defective or queer?”—meaning—are they “especially likely to be one-sided, nervous, delicate, morally abnormal, socially unadaptable, or otherwise peculiar.” Based on their teachers’ responses, it would seem that these children were generally well-adjusted and healthy.

What Terman did suggest was that “Bright children...are almost always under- promoted. They are rarely given tasks which call forth their best ability, and as a result they run the risk of falling into life-long habits of submaximum efficiency.” And while it was Terman’s conclusion that “There is probably little ground for the common fear of over-pressure in the training of such children,” he did feel that “the subnormals are more in danger of over-pressure; the supernormals of under- pressure.” I think everyone missed the memo. Then again, do we need teachers to activate our own innate greatness? Don’t some people seem to win (or keep on going, regardless) no matter what situation they find themselves? What is it within which maximizes “the translation of ability into accomplishment?” (Duckworth, 2007).

THE GRITTY. The psychological construct “Grit” has been defined as: perseverance plus “consistency of interest,” and it has been argued that Grit predicts “accomplishment over and above personality and IQ” (Duckworth, 2007). Eighth-grade students participated in a study comparing self-discipline with grade- outcomes (Duckworth, 2005). Discipline was measured at the start of the school year, including “self-report, parent report, teacher report, and monetary choice questionnaires.” Self-discipline scores were highly correlated to final grades, twice as much as were IQ scores. Discipline accounted for final grades better than “high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework,” and appeared to have a bigger impact than time spent watching television. “These findings suggest a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline.” In one study it was found that, “while conscientiousness and IQ adequately accounted for school grades, higher perseverance was associated with higher life-course accomplishment,” supporting a three-factor model of achievement, combining: “IQ, conscientiousness, and effortful persistence, each with distinct mechanisms” (Abuhassàn, 2015).

Grit, as a trait-construct, has been criticized for vagueness and for actually representing several other, long-validated traits (e.g., “self-control”). Self-control and Grit overlap, but Duckworth disambiguated the two, writing that self-control involves acting in accord with all of one’s goals, “despite momentarily more- alluring alternatives,” but Grit, as more of a central-motivator, “entails having and working assiduously toward a single challenging superordinate goal through thick and thin, on a timescale of years or even decades” (2014). I don’t care if it were decided that, as a valid operational construct, Grit didn’t exist. I would still believe.

ARTIFACTS. What we do leaves an impression on Eternity. Do you intend to leave behind beautiful artifacts, or are you half-consciously weaving anti-facts to remain in your wake? “To search for the hypokeimenon is to search for that substance which persists in a thing going through change— to search for The Underlying Thing” (Cantley). From A.C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel of Eternity (1951): “The plateau was scarred by meteors; it was also coated inches- deep with the cosmic dust that is always filtering down upon the surface of any world where there are no winds to disturb it. Yet the dust and the meteor scratches ended quite abruptly in a wide circle enclosing the little pyramid, as though an invisible wall was protecting it from the ravages of time and the slow but ceaseless bombardment from space.” Would you want your story to endure far into the future, perhaps to be rediscovered by those who can benefit from it, or would you quietly disappear into the nothing?

CHOOSE YOUR OWN...Battle. Paradise. Fight. Startup. Love. Mess. Hate. Path. Story. But understand this— certain tools and ideas should be kept sharp and clean, and accessible in your tool box, no matter where you go, or what you do. Faith in your mission is one idea to hold onto. And a huge sack of Grit, you’ll want to tote that around, too, or else you’ll end up carrying a sack of re-gret, or some other sack.

If you accept each moment’s challenge, I believe you can get through every moment, and arrive into the next— increasingly growing in wholeness, in health, and in fairness. There is no need to seek out evil (it will find you), but don’t be surprised if you end up elsewhere than you had departed to. “In the unconscious all archetypes are contaminated with one another” (von Franz, p14)— is this why the seemingly wrong “typical theme” seems to be activated occasionally (or often) in dreams, when trying to compare their thematic relevance to waking concerns? Perhaps there is one wide-arching theme, and it is “only when the conscious mind looks at it is one motif selected” as its current dream representative. Somehow, something gets through from the substrata up to our perceptual consciousness.

PARADISE. The Aurelian Walls were fortification against the “other.” Physical space may be partitioned and organized, and gates and bridges can span through walls and over moats. Partitions may be gated, made selectively permeable. And what of the dimension called “time”— are there gates or bridges connecting now from when? Or, are we forever locked out of The Garden, fated in levantine separation from nature in this afraid, cruel world?

Before betting the farm that it is desirable to shed humanity of its animal skins, we should put the die down and step-back from the post-modern craps-table. “Genuine new ideas are a dime a dozen” (Byrne, 2003). Sticking to something that has been time and space proven is rare. Like baby pigeons in the winter rare. It is not about how new or how classic a task is; what matters is whether you are a slave

to, or a willing participant with, every morphing moment. How may we control the uncontrollable?

PTS-DECISIONS. What are the outcome differences between feeling like we choose to engage in battle, vs. feeling like a victim forced into reaction? Restated— are we creatures of circumstance, or are circumstances creatures of men, just features in the theater of the mind? Everyone experiences stress, a divergence from homeostasis. Most demands are manageable. We get a little hungry. We have to work a bit into uncomfortable exhaustion, before we can retire under the comforters. There are also things like rush-hour traffic and Mexican babies in movie theaters— no commentary needed. But real, primal, gruesome contests with reality? An unexpected fight; being burglarized; losing a loved one or filing bankruptcy; a huge lie finally recognized...sooner or later major stress is coming. If two men are shot at close range, why might one move on, more resolved to be a hero and exemplar of self-determination, while the other man may freeze whenever reminded of that terrible moment?

One predictive factor for development of PTSD after trauma exposure is low- IQ (Koenen, 2007). (That sounds bad, so we could infer, and say instead, that higher-IQ probably has a protective effect against developing PTSD.) Can’t do much about traits, though. What else acts as a buffer against extreme stressors? This: Decide that this is your story. It is better to make this decision sooner than later. Suffering from PTSD is what it feels like—chronically—when the story has happened to you, rather than if you were orator of your own narrative. Veterans with PTSD exhibited reduced connectivity between the amygdala and hippocampus and reduced “anticorrelation” between the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (Sripada, 2014). The fear regions had become disconnected from the story-coherency fields.

There are characteristics which seem protective against extreme stressors within particular vocations: Firefighters who exhibited high resilience[2] were less likely to develop PTSD when exposed to the same level of traumatic stress as their cohorts who scored as having less resilience (Lee, 2014). Gender may also have a mediating influence on how stress is resolved: Comparing Danish students, Dr. Ask Elkit reported that the majority of adolescents had experienced a traumatic event, but the girls were twice as likely as the boys to develop PTSD after exposure (2002). There is the possibility that traumas experienced by those adolescent girls were qualitatively different from traumatic events experienced by male students, but this does not eliminate the biological underpinnings which attract certain situations and funnel particular outcomes. For us all, however, merely growing and developing is bound to be stressful. Children are afforded special protection in society because they are more vulnerable to the general malaise of nature and other people. Children are limited in their self-direction, being under supervision by guardians, and too young to enjoy certain societal privileges (and responsibilities).

As a young-adult, one is then, suddenly, expected to fend for one’s self. Being tossed out the nest is surprising, if inevitable. And it doesn’t get any easier until we get tougher.

Modern civilians usually only hear about the horrors of war. Funny thing about being in war is—despite what we might believe—how well it seems to adjust many men’s minds to life afterwards. Combat had a significantly positive affect on veterans’ self-reported well-being years later, compared to veterans who did not experience combat, and this was not accounted for by the general dispositional optimism of the men studied (Lee, 2017; Nelson, 2015). Is it combat and extreme competition that causes a stress disorder afterwards, or is psychological outcome principally moderated by an individual’s perception of control during a high-stress event? That’s a reasonable question to ask when finding out that most combat veterans seem to adjust quite well to civilian life. After all, even many civilians have a hard time with civilian life.

IS MORE MORE BETTER? Ever wonder: “Has the proliferation of choice uniformly made life easier and better?” (Vohs, 2014). Willpower is depleted when we simply (consciously) regulate our actions. Refraining to rush in when the fools do may save us from falling into the boobytrap, but nevertheless, tampering our urges does cost volitional energy. Willpower especially burns away when we make an “effortful choice.”

The depleting effect occurs “at the time of choosing, regardless of whether the chosen action is to be implemented immediately or at some unspecified future time” (Vohs). Even if you make an effortful choice today to do something a week from now, the juice in your Willpower tank will dip. If a person made enjoyable decisions, this had a lighter effect than if “making a few aversive decisions,” but, if “many decisions had to be made, the process was depleting regardless” of type. When one has to, or chooses to, make many decisions in a relatively short time- span, their ability to make further decisions becomes severely impeded. In fact, a person may become so passive from the effects of decision-making that they cannot continue to make choices. At the point of volitional exhaustion, a person may either cease acting altogether or revert to purely automatic, unconscious behavioral responses. Only make the best and most important decisions, delegate all the light stuff to competent others.