Excerpt
True and False Magic
Chapter 1The Life ForceMeet Your Life ForceThroughout my career, I would often find myself confronted with a certain type of patient. Usually, it would be a middle-aged guy who had gone to a school like Harvard.
He’d say something like, “I can’t control my temper, my wife says I’m an addict, I gamble, I just lost $92,000 in Las Vegas, I’m miserable,” etc. And then he would say, “If only I knew why I was here. If I only knew my mission, I’d be motivated and able to do all these things that are difficult for me. But I feel hopeless, because I don’t know how to find out what my mission is.”
First, I would tell him that he’s an ungrateful baby.
Now, I could look at him—or a patient who may appear to be even more depressed—on a purely symptomatic basis and come up with a diagnosis. But this wouldn’t enhance my relationship with him. If I believe everything has a cure, then people become an impersonal, scientific, logical problem to solve. And diagnosing becomes a dry, soulless, and ultimately less effective way to deal with life.
Instead, I would then explain to him that I can’t tell him his mission, and that the source of knowledge about his life purpose isn’t in his head. Your head can’t know it.
“Your Life Force,” I would say, “is the part that’s going to point you toward your mission in life and why you’re here. It’s not something you think; you have to feel it.”
And then he’d say, “Why can’t you just tell me what it is?”
“I can’t tell you because I don’t know. Everyone has to discover this for themselves. The discovery of this is not a singular conclusion; it’s a process.”
“Well, that’s very nice, but I have to start somewhere.”
Start with yourself. “This may seem far-fetched, but every human being has some energy inside them, some potential that will help them find their ultimate goal. But you can’t go right to the macro goal. It’s impossible. You can try, but you’d be kidding yourself.”
During a conversation like this, a typical shrink might ask, “What inspires you, what turns you on, what makes you think you know who you are? Because that will lead you out of this morass.” But I know this is bullshit. You can’t think yourself to a conclusion.
So instead, I would say, “Even though consciously you don’t have an idea of who you are or what would make your life meaningful, there’s a part of every human being that holds their potential. If they follow the rules, every person can find their way to this energy that everybody has, which has tremendous power. But you must start at the bottom. There’s a generic approach to the Life Force. You must function as if you have faith in that, even though you might not. God made every human being with an energy unique to that individual. The problem is that in our culture, we always think about the final, macro, outer expression of that. But you only get this by going through the discipline of connecting to the universal Life Force. You may not find it as exciting or as inspiring as you imagine, but the power starts at the bottom.”
When I know he’s willing, I offer the following: “You’re going to start by getting off your ass, turning the TV off, and walking around the block.”
This may sound like a pale response to something like depression, which could take someone’s life. And this is true. But people must start by getting in touch with their Life Force, which requires building a relationship with its three pyramidal tiers: You must build your relationship with your body, your relationship with other people, and your relationship with yourself. You start with the body. This never fails to bring someone’s Life Force up a notch.
Like so many others, this patient’s Life Force is trapped in entropy. He is not alone or unusual. There’s a generic, predictable set of rules and a dynamic to connect you to your Life Force, whether you like it or not. Doing this has nothing to do with your job or other facts of your life. It only concerns the three tiers of relationship: The more you work the relational pyramid, the stronger your Life Force will become.
The Qualities of the Life ForceHave you ever met someone with a high Life Force who didn’t know what to do with their life? Probably not. We tend to assign this quality of having your shit together to “a healthy ego,” but that’s wrong. This person is actually in touch with their Life Force. The Life Force is something that most people don’t understand, a force which exists and can’t be proven. It just is.
The Life Force is a profound and mysterious power responsible for intuition, creativity, identity, and recovery. By connecting with it, you’ll develop stronger instincts, though faith will be key to this transition. Opportunities to connect to the Life Force are always present, and it’s never too late to build that relationship. This connection must be nurtured on three levels: with your body, others, and yourself.
The Life Force is a cognitive organ: It’s a part of you, and you can relate to it. The relationships to your body, other people, and yourself weave together to form the Life Force in its most primal form. When you do this, the wisdom of What should I do next—do I want to be a doctor? tends to come, too.
The key to the Life Force is recuperation and recovery—in fact, you won’t really feel your Life Force until you break the Frame (see p. TK) by experiencing a crisis, or psychological death, and recover. Death and rebirth itself is a cosmic pattern that cannot be violated. Understanding this completely changes the meaning of failure and gives you a new definition of flow, which is the ability to subsume two opposite things at the same time.
The Life Force is the creative heart of the universe and every individual, a gift from God that interweaves energies and relationships. It embodies your unrealized potential and compels action toward discovering your purpose. To connect with it, you must work continuously on all three levels. As these connections strengthen, so does your sense of self and motivation. The Life Force is both eternal and present, providing intuition and wisdom beyond intellect. It allows you to create yourself anew, offering rebirth and renewal in an endless cycle of creation.
The Life Force holds the past, present, and future and exists within every human being. It is a humble, disciplined, and self-renewing power that enables you to align with reality, fight against destructive forces, and embrace creativity as an antidote to evil. Through it, you can achieve what once seemed impossible. The Life Force is deeply connected to everything, constantly creating something from nothing and helping you navigate the future—not by seeing it, but by feeling it.
You don’t have to believe this for it to work, but I can promise you that you’re not going to know anything until you get in touch with your Life Force. Your Life Force will give you an answer, but it won’t be a printout. You’ll still need to take action in the face of no proof. But this is where the process begins.
Patient Story: Losing EverythingHere’s a story that offers an extreme example of the power of the Life Force. A guy walked into my office who historically had run huge companies and led massive teams. He had made millions, maybe even billions, of dollars. When he came to me, his business was failing and his life was a mess: He was cheating on his wife, gambling, using drugs almost daily. And he was deeply cynical.
The problem wasn’t just that he had lost money. He had lost his identity, and he had no idea what to do. As is typical of people in that situation, he blamed his business failure and the chaos in his life on the world and didn’t want to take any responsibility for it himself.
I told him that the Life Force is real and he could have access to it, and he reacted as the average person does. He resisted.
I told him, “I can’t prove it until you do what I say. But I guarantee you if you do what I say, you will feel something.”
I didn’t think he would agree. But to my surprise, and I think out of desperation, he said, “Okay, I’ll try what you’re asking me to do. I’m going to force myself to have faith in this.”
I said, “Okay, but there’s one more thing. You have to measure your faith in the smallest possible increments—there’s a tool to do this. It’s a relational pyramid. It has to do with how you find and activate your Life Force. You must start at the very bottom. Once you do that—even on the smallest level—it will affect everybody around you.”
As with everyone, he started with his relationship with his body. He went to the doctor, he started to eat properly, and he started to exercise. I wasn’t asking much of him, since these are things he should have been doing anyway. But once he saw that these small changes were part of a larger structure, he started to shift out of seeing this as a way to get out from under a depression that might cause him to kill himself, to seeing this relational pyramid as something he would work on for the rest of his life.
