• It was quite some time ago now that Moses ascended the mountain, and returned with a set of rules that changed the world.

    Don’t steal.
    Don’t fuck your friend’s woman.
    Don’t talk shit about God.

    If we strip any modern cynicism we may have about such religious doctrine, what I think we see is that his commandments represent something extraordinary. They are higher truths, seen in a transcendent moment, that can then be encoded, and remembered when one returns to “ordinary reality”. And thus act as a pathway back up, slowly, toward the higher truth.

    His commandments (or Gods depending upon whom you attribute authorship to) changed the world. They enabled our ancestors of the time to divert themselves away from the chief problems (sins) of the time, and live a more wholesome life.

    But times have changed.

    The great sins of our times are not what they were. My great challenge is not to refrain from the irresistible urge to steal my neighbours donkey. Moses’ commandments have done their job. We have new problems that we must learn to overcome.

    I believe that one of the great modern sins, for which we need new commandments, is that of distraction, specifically digital distraction.

    So here are 6 commandments for a new digital age.

    1.  Thou shalt not be a digital narcissist

    The wonders of the world are not a backdrop for your Instagram selfies. The privilege to travel the world is not supposed to be used as a means for enhancing your social media profile.

    I visited Stonehenge recently. One of the world’s most important megalithic sites—an absolute wonder of ancient engineering and astronomical observation. It’s formation perfectly aligns with the setting sun at Winter Solstice, and the rising sun at Summer Solstice. We know that people from all over the British Isles travelled to Stonehenge to participate in the most important ceremonies of the age. This majestic site oozes significance.

    And yet as I stood marvelling at its nature, breathing in the power of the place, I was distracted by the people around me. They would pose for selfies, seeing these great stones in the little pixelated screens of their iPhones, and then turn and walk away without actually looking at the stones!

    The unprecedented power of the social platforms we have been given access to, are not best used as stages for our own digital narcissism. The fulfilment does not come from the performance you manufacture, crafted from carefully posed selfies in front of Notre Dame, but of the spiritual substance that you draw in as you walk its hallowed nave.

    You can communicate to untold numbers of fellow humans from this platform. Share what can change us. Not what makes you feel more special.

    2.  Thou shalt not incessantly pull the lever on the smart-phone slot machine

    Let me just check again…

    Even though it’s only been 17 seconds since I last checked Facebook, …maybe there’s something good there now. The elusive comment that makes my day worth living. The fiftieth “like” that will banish the cloud of meaninglessness from my mind. Or maybe I’ve got a new whatsapp message that will prove that I am actually loved after all.

    So we keep pulling the lever on the digital slot machine, hoping for a jackpot. Pulling out our phone, and going through a patterned cycle of checks. If you pay attention, you may see that you have an ingrained loop. Mine goes something like this.

    1. co.uk/sport to check if there’s some new football news.
    2. co.uk/sport, just in case they have news the bbc doesn’t.
    3. twitter to see what latest outrage has been committed by the politically correct gestapo.
    4. youtube to see if there’s a new Jordan Peterson upload, or ultimate fail video.
    5. Nothing? Start the cycle again. After all, it’s been at least 2 minutes since I checked BBC sport.

    What’s your cycle? When you’re checking out of the present, and open up your internet browser, or pickup your phone, where’s the first place you go?

    It’s the new addiction. Hunting the little dopamine hit that is injected into our neurochemistry when we find some interesting new article we can feel smart from pretending to read. The little oxytocin boost from 3 more likes on our Stonehenge selfie.

    I watch over people’s shoulder on the Amsterdam metro, circling through their own digital loops.

    Facebook. Whatsapp. Instagram. LinkedIn. Repeat.

    And then even if they give up and return the phone to their handbag, I can measure it in minutes before they whip it out again and start again from the beginning.

    As a friend used say “there’s no cheese down that tube”. You will not find what you seek. The sense of achievement that the dopamine urge tempts you with. The feeling of social inclusion that the oxytocin craving promises.

    Each pull of the lever increases the urge to pull it again next time.

    Put down the phone. Raise your eyes. Soften your clench. Notice the world around you.

    3.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s social media profile

    It doesn’t do any good my friend.

    We’re wired to seek the top of the social hierarchy. We want to “master our craft” and be “seen for our gifts”.

    Jordan Peterson brilliantly describes the sad state of affairs we now find ourselves in, in the digital age. Before the internet, it wasn’t so hard to be top of your tree. Being the best yogi in the village isn’t so hard. Being a regional expert on post-structuralism intersectional theory is attainable. The competition is relatively thin. The rewards of reaching the top within your grasp.

    Now we live in a world where we’re connected to almost every other competent human alive. The hierarchy now no longer tops out at the borders of the village or town. No matter how good you think you might be at your particular craft, opening up YouTube and having a quick search will reveal the prodigy that does stuff that you couldn’t even imagine, and has the 2 million views that proves it.

    Feeling insecure about the state of your work? The longing for the dopamine will take you onto your Facebook feed, where you will discover posts from your friends that depict the amazing client they just signed, or the workshop they just crushed. You’ll see all your friends having an amazing time…without you.

    The promise of dopamine has provided the opposite. You feel even worse that when you started. No problem. Just open up the next app in your cycle. Maybe there…

    No. The goal is self-realization. Emphasis on self. Not “having what she’s got”, not “better than him”. Self improvement. Or in the wise words of Dr. Peterson, compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.

    This is much more easily achieved when you’re not constantly snooping on the successes of others through their social media profiles.

    4.  Thou shalt not perpetuate political outrage

    No matter which side of the fence you find yourself on—the social justice crew, working to level the playing field, or the secret intellectual web that is trying to keep back the tides of madness—don’t stir up the shit any further.

    Incessant outrage about the state of the world, penned in 140 characters does little to move the conversation forward, and will more likely simply irritate you and derail the more important work that you should actually be doing.

    Making yourself righteous by pushing off the wrongness of the “other side” is not noble. It’s shit stirring. It’s dehumanization. It doesn’t help us weave this unprecedented complexity into a human story that makes sense to us.

    But spouting your passionate condemnation of the madness of this leader, or that policy does help with something big. It helps give you the feeling that you have something important to say. It helps you feel like you’re making a difference. You’re not. But it covers over the hole in your true desire to make a difference.

    So instead, go make a real difference.

    5.  Thou shalt not sell your attention to the highest bidder

    You may think, that you are the valued customer of Facebook or Instagram.  In fact, you are not. You are the product. The customers are the advertisers, who are offered your attention by the platform.

    Attention is precious. And every time you mindlessly lose yours in the never ending scroll of the news feed, you have sold yours to the highest bidder.

    In 1997, IBM’s super computer Deep Blue achieved a world first. It beat the world’s best chess player Gary Kasparov. It was a triumph of Artificial Intelligence over the human mind.

    What you may not know is that the Facebook Newsfeed, and YouTube’s recommended videos are also run by A.I. And power of this A.I. is hundreds of times more powerful than the computer that beat Kasparov. The Social Media A.I. has one objective only, to capture your attention for as long as possible.

    So, every time you log onto Facebook, you’re playing attention chess against an some of the most powerful A.I. ever invented. And you don’t even realise it.

    Your attention  is so much more valuable than its commodification for online advertisers. What could you use it for?

    6.  Thou shalt befriend airplane mode

    Every phone has one. It’s designed for—as the name implies—use on airplanes. It turns off your Wi-Fi and phone signal. It stops all contact with the outside world.

    We’ve never lived in such a connected world. Your ability to disconnect is what sets you apart from the masses. This is Cal Newport’s “deep work”—the space where free from distraction, you focus on the work that really matters to you, and create something meaningful.

    When you sit down to do something important, tune out the world around you. Looking at your phone because your mum just whatsapp’d you to ask about the summer vacation plans does not help you do the deep work.

    Try this. When you go to bed, put your phone on airplane mode. And don’t take it off until you’ve done at least an hour of focussed work the next morning. If you’re used to checking your messages as soon as you open your bleary ideas, this may feel uncomfortable. It’s your reliance on outside stimulation. The good stuff comes from inside. Give it a chance to speak before you connect with the entire planet.

    What’s really needed is the deep work

    The work that comes from deep inside you. The stuff that only you can create. The stuff that is the product of deep, focussed and dedicated hard graft.

    And the entire interconnected world is available to receive it, if you create it.

    The great sin that has arisen to counter-act this interconnected freedom is distraction. In that moment, when your work really requires you to sit in the uncomfortable paradox, the problem that you don’t yet know how to solve—it’s so much easier to just pick up your phone and relieve the pressure.

    Just this once. I’ll rest for a moment.

    And then you surface some indeterminate time later, infected by the successes and outrages of everyone else, dulled by the passive surfing on a tiny screen, robbed of the moment of tension that had within it, the creative seeds for something new, something deep.

    Choose differently.

    The world desperately wants the deep work, to help us steer through the addictive distractions of a digital world.

    Ewan Townhead

    , ,

  • I’m in the “business of transformation”. If you’re reading this, I’ll assume you are too. The transformational professional seeks to create an experience for someone that allows them to change, not on the surface, not in their “efficiency”, but in the very structure of their being.

    This is becoming big business.

    As the new marketplace of coaches, purpose guides, cacao yogis, and unicorn shamans grows ever busier, I want to address the economics of transformation—how we as professionals sell this elusive outcome.

    Because there are plenty of snake-oil peddlers out there—plenty of “discover your purpose in 30 days” or “heal your soul wounds with these 6 easy steps”. If you listen carefully, you’ll discern the subtle scream for attention between their words.

    It is not this prevalence of this naïveté that I want to address however. I want to talk about the genuine problem of selling this “merchandise”. For transformation is a tricky product to package. And an even trickier effect to measure.

    You can’t measure it in hours. It’s not a tactical exercise. There is no clear “problem” that we’re seeking to solve in the next 90 minutes of our coaching session. I can’t put “hours in one end” and “get transformation out of the other.” It doesn’t work like that.

    Cultivating the mysterious

    The transformational process is mysterious, and unpredictable. It is by definition, surprising—the results of a genuine metamorphosis cannot be accurately discerned from the prior state. Transformation brings together the existential dilemmas that bind us, lights a fire under our ass, burns away the old, and creates the new from its ashes. It draws us down into the deepest questions we hold.

    Who are you?

    What is being asked of you?

    These are not questions that can be fully lived into and unfolded, within the confines of a “two-day intensive”. The goal cannot be achieved in this time frame. In fact, the goal cannot even be achieved in a year, or ten.

    Because the goal is not something that is “achieved”. It is of a different categorical nature.

    The goal is the cultivation an unknown future potential, whose seed can be planted, nurtured, and encouraged. But the result is not within the control of our conceptual minds, or pragmatic hands. It cannot be promised by the practitioner.

    What can be achieved in the creation of a space—an existential garden—where Being itself can grow, from the deep substructures of our archetypal nature, up into the luminous heights of our divine potential.

    The great Chaos of Nature gives no guarantees. The process is an alchemical meeting between two human beings, between a coach and a client, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the known and the unknown, between the past of identity and the future of our potentials.

    Nut nevertheless, it is an experience—a product—that must be sold, in the marketplace. This is new.

    The Merchant and the Seeker

    The enlightened master in the mountains—the seeker of the spiritual path— is not generally close friends with the merchant in the marketplace. It is an estranged relationship, as it has been for centuries past.

    The purity of the spiritual path has hitherto rejected the profit of trade— “the dharma should be free” they have cried through the halls of the temples. The substance of the spiritual path cannot be turned into a commodity that is sold.

    Equally, the marketable needs of the commons do not stretch to such abstract and unquantifiable notions as “awakening” or “self-realization”, The merchants and traders have ignored the spiritual technologies, favouring more “saleable” and “immediate” goods that can reliable turn a profit.

    It is only in the last half century that these archetypal postures, have begun to rub shoulders, and have had to contend with their apparently oppositional moral outlook.

    And it is only now, in the new bazaar of work that the information age has birthed, that it has gone beyond the possible integration of these opposites, into the necessary integration of them—the necessity to integrate them to such an extent that it underlies the way we actually go about our day, and enact our work.

    This integration work entails an honest and oftentimes humbling admission of our biases, and caricaturing of “the other”. I have found, both in myself and many of the people I work with, a preferencing of the spiritual, and a suspicion of the mercantile. The spiritual is “high”, “luminous” and “worthy”. The mercantile is “shallow”, “manipulative” and “greedy”.

    But to the extent that we deny the intrinsic and necessary truth of the mercantile perspective, we banish said truth to the shadows. The repression of this posture creates a “shadow merchant” that we see everywhere out in the world, and not at all in ourselves.

    “Capitalism” and its exponents then becomes a dark spectre over our world, manipulatively siphoning off wealth and exploiting anything and anyone they can extract profit from. This is a problem.

    The Good Merchant

    There is a “good merchant” that is revealed when the “shadow merchant” has been faced, and reabsorbed. This archetypal posture is based on the ethics of trade. And to be an “agent of change”, to “give your gifts to the world”, to “live your purpose”, you must understand and embody this posture.

    The ethics of trade are based on a very simple truth—voluntary and honourable exchange enriches society.

    When we both walk away from an exchange, feeling like we got a good deal, it enriches both of us with goodness.

    This is the brilliant insight of the merchant. Slowly, though each incremental exchange between honest people, society at large becomes enriched, and we all benefit.

    This is true whether the exchange be material, informational, or transformational. It is true when I work with a client.

    “I feel so grateful. I get to work with someone who inspires me. We have fascinating discussions about the nature of work, and the ways in which he is called to his deepest expression. It fulfils me more than anything, to see another human being grow into who they are, and touch the communities around them. And for this I get paid so handsomely that I can dedicate myself to this work with all my vitality. Fuck yeah.”

    “Wow. I worked with him for a year, and he helped me transform the entire way I approach my work. I’m clearer than ever about what I’m here to do. I signed my dream client. I’m super productive, and my wife just told me she’s never felt more in love with me. What a bargain.”

    The world is literally a richer place after this exchange has taken place.

    I have more than when I started. More money. More understanding of the transformational journey. More gratitude for life. More pride at the work of my fellow human.

    He has more than when we started. More clarity about his work. More energy and juju. More creative production. More income. More love. More embodiment of his purpose here in life.

    The transformation that has occurred will ripple out into the future—in both our lives—in ways neither of us can predict or track.

    This kind of trade is hard to put a price on. But value it we must.

    The price of change

    A life transformed. What is this worth?

    €1,000?
    $10,000?

    There is no one number. The price is determined by the context—it is the figure that energetically charges the container with commitment and devotion, on both sides.

    A close friend of mine coaches CEOs. He is very skilled. He changes people’s lives deeply. To work with him for a year costs $100,000. I mentioned this to my mother once, and she felt really quite uncomfortable about the whole affair. It looked greedy, and ugly to her. But this is because the context is foreign to her.

    The CEO pays $100,000 because that’s the number that symbolizes commitment to him—investment in a demanding process. The fee for coaching is in one important respect the “promise to do the deep work required”. This is why “free coaching” rarely works. There’s not enough at stake. There isn’t enough energetic commitment, and so the whole project deflates and falls flat.

    The CEO’s $100k is like my €10k. Or another’s €1k. It’s a big investment—whatever “big” means to me. It’s a stretch. I know that to get the return, I really need to show up and access a different level of being and functioning. The size of the number is symbolic of the level of significance it holds for me. It’s a “big” moment.

    When I pay a “big amount” at a “big moment” in life, “big things” happen.

    I paid my first coach $4,000. It felt like a ridiculous sum at the time. I freaked—the—fuck—out. But now I can look back at the change that occurred, and see what an absolute bargain it was.

    $10k to the CEO, or €1,000 to me is a figure that can just be thrown at something. And if it doesn’t work out? No biggie.

    Money is the way we “charge” the transformational container with energy. It’s not about the actual figure. It’s about the contextual figure that represents both the size of the game we want to play, and the nature of the arena in which we’re playing.

    The new way

    It is a tricky business. To hold in one hand, the integrity of a process of awakening that cannot be measured by material means, or “replicated at scale”—and in the other, the goodness of trade, and the necessity to offer our products in the marketplace at a price that makes the transformation itself possible.

    But it is this integration that we must each contend with as transformational professionals, walking the line between self-gratifying greed and selflessly inept charity, between impractical spiritual depth and well-packaged superficiality.

    We must come to understand the world of the merchant and the seeker to such a degree that we can embody their essentials truths, and weave them together so as to seed the transformation we are devoted to in the first place.

    This is new. The new way. To hold the ethical precepts of both the merchant and the seeker—the marketer and the mystic—in such a way as the economics of transformation make it available to those who need it, and profit those who offer it.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,

  • Ever since I can remember noticing my feelings and moods, I had “black spots”—hours or even days when I would “disappear” into a dark and unpleasant hole. My life would appear pointless. My happiness but a memory.

    I remember lying wrapped in my duvet at home as a teenager, unable to move, unable to consider doing anything. Even the thought of suicide seemed pointless.

    As I got older I learned about “depression”, this apparent affliction of the mind that plagued unfortunate folk and which modern medicine had little cure for.

    I never liked the word. I never thought of myself of suffering from its disease. I still don’t. Because I think the medical model is the wrong context for its definition.

    But as I’ve grown older I have come to realise that am indeed predisposed to a tendency for “blackness”. It can strike as if from nowhere and lay me out. The duration and regularity has reduced. The understanding of its nature increased. But its presence endures.

    2018 was a dark year for me.  One of the toughest in memory, and yet one where I seemed to remain “awake” in a way I had not in previous dark episodes. And so I sought answers to the question of the nature of this blackness.

    It was during a long and extended depression that the Quaker teacher and author Parker Palmer turned to help from a therapist. These words, uttered to him by that therapist, had a dramatic effect on me when I heard them.

    “Parker, you seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down onto ground on which it is safe to stand?”

    Was this a clue as to the nature of depression? It grabbed my attention. I thought about it a great deal. At the very least it gave me an alternative to the “imbalance in brain chemistry” explanation for my plight.

    It is only with the light of retrospect that I see what I went through more clearly—an underworld journey of depression.

    Down into the depths of the dark

    I am being pushed down.

    I go under, into the dark beneath of dreams and demons where I am placed face-to-face with that which I most fear—the great dragon—an initiation from which I must emerge changed.

    It is not a happy place. I am not a happy man within in. It hurts. It dissolves my crutches. It submerges me in everything I have set up my life to avoid.

    The pain is not optional. It is the ground of the underworld journey. The resistance seemingly inevitable—the understandable reaction to such an un-consensual plunge into the dark. My incompetence in the face of it all is the very reason the journey is necessary.

    I am being remoulded.

    7 Strategies to enlighten the dark path

    My challenges last year were such that my old strategies fell woefully short. I had to learn new ways to walk this journey, for that is exactly what it is—an archetypal quest that takes us down into the dark, which asks you to face what most scares you, yet simultaneously gives you what you most need, and then propels you back up through the integration of your experiences, back into the world—changed and remoulded.

    Some of the things I learned were philosophical—changes in frame that enabled me to see my plight in a light that gave me hope and trust.

    But many were practical—behaviours and practices that enabled me to walk the dark road without being crushed by the enemies of the psyche.

    So, here, in no particular order, are seven practical strategies that I learned to use.

    If you too find yourself enveloped by the darkness of depression, I hope they bring light into the darkness, and make it the sacred journey it actually is, rather than the tumbling down into the abyss of despair that it so easily manifests as.

    1.  Smile.

    Literally.

    Make your face smile, then hold it, longer than feels “authentic”. Have your emotions as you do so. It can be quite the trip.

    I remember riding my bike through Amsterdam past the museums. I set my target at the lights, 100 meters ahead. “Smile all the way there” I said to myself.

    By the time I arrived, I’d indeed been on quite a ride. I’d felt like an idiot 3 times. I’d wanted to reach out my hand and smack the tourists as I swept past. I’d giggled at the absurdity of it all. I’d felt like a fraud. And then I arrived. And I was happier.

    This is the trip. You do get happier.

    The nervous system follows the body.

    It’s not necessarily enduring. It’s not necessarily “authentic”. It’s not even necessarily fun.

    But it disrupts the insidious assumption that life is shit, and you don’t know what to do to fix it. Smiling fucks with your default depressive mode.

    And more often than you might think, after clamping on the stupid fucking smile, you look up at the sky, notice the birds are singing, and feel grateful to be alive.

    2.  Set yourself goals (yes, it works).

    Never underestimate the power of doing. Goals align your actions. Actions create results. Results make you feel better.

    At the very least, you occupy yourself and have less time to commiserate with yourself about how fucked life is.

    There’s a secret about the human mind that psychologists discovered last century. It’s not the attainment of your goals that gives you “positive emotion” (makes you feel good), it’s setting meaningful goals, and watching yourself progress toward them.

    We can endure the most miserable pain if we can see progress being made—that there is light at the end of the dark tunnel.

    A word of caution: there can be a danger with the big and audacious goals—the “I’m going to change the world” variety. You say something outrageous, people applaud, you get the initial dopamine hit of “possibility”. And then it’s all followed by the miserable confirmation that you’re definitely incapable of improving your life, when you inevitably fall short of your crazy dream.

    So small is usually the place to start. You’ve got to feel moved by a goal. But it doesn’t have to be hairy and audacious.

    “Go for a walk outside twice a week.”

    “Buy some new slippers.”

    Only set goals that carry meaning for you (when you imagine their completion it feels good), and that you’re fairly confident you can achieve (this is not about ambition, it’s about small degrees of progress.)

    Set 3 goals for the next month. Write them out on a big bit of paper with empty tick boxes next to them and pin them on your notice board.

    Sometimes I cried when I ticked off goals. “I can do this.” I said to myself as I saw that slow and humbling progress toward the light.

    3.  Move—you’re on a journey.

    Your body. In any way. Roll your shoulders. Shake off the stiffness. Dancing to 80s disco can work very well.

    Bodywork. Breathing. Walking in nature.

    You’re on a journey. The descent into the underworld is a journey older than Adam. Even though yours may be metaphoric rather than physical—the archetypal pattern is the same. You are moving from one place in life to another, through the darkness that depression forces you to confront.

    And while it may be more of a symbolic or psychological  journey—your body does not know this. It needs to feel that it is moving—that you are moving—that you are walking the path.

    So walk. Move. Walk around your living room with the curtains drawn. Walk in the woods. Travel to another city and walk its streets.

    You need to give your earthly self the physical journey it is wired to undertake. We are made to walk the land.

    4.  Confess—you’re inadequate.

    You can’t correct the spiritual course of your life—you can’t face that which the journey requires of you—without confessing your inadequacy.

    Your suffering is in part a function of your incompetence. You don’t know how to do this. This is by design. It’s not something to be ashamed of (though you will inevitably feel it is).

    The one that emerges from the underworld is the one that has faced the dragon and been changed as a consequence. That you do not know how to face the dragon is the point. You are incompetent in the face of this new challenge. And the compulsory first step is to confess your failures, your fears, your shame.

    You must speak it out. You must name your pain.

    To a friend.

    To yourself.

    To God.

    This is the vulnerability that underlies the courageous act.

    “I’m scared. I don’t know if I can make it. My whole life feels like a sham.”

    This is part of the dragon you must meet.

    Shame cannot exist with words wrapped around it. Darkness cannot exist within the light.

    You must confess. It is the truth that reveals the path of reconsolidation and re-alignment of what is most important.

    5.  Treasure and guard your insights

    There were long stretches of time, months sometimes, when I could see almost no light—no hope and positivity. The creative visionary capacity that I had come to rely on in my life was “off line” and nothing I did turned it back on.

    And so the moments when the clouds parted, and I had meaningful insights were stark in contrast to the seemingly eternal darkness. The moment, walking in the forest, when the sun shone through the clouds and I saw that my core practice was “being present to the moment”.

    It was in these rare moments of insights that I would fight back against the fog that wanted to swirl back in and block my view. I would turn on the voice recorder on my phone and diligently speak out what I was seeing, knowing that the break in the darkness would be brief.

    I would write down my insight, with as much precision as I could manage, and pin it to the board above my desk. I wrote it down, so it wouldn’t slip away like a forgotten dream.

    It felt like the “conscious me” was leaving clues for the “submerged me”.

    This is the power of words—the treasures of insight. Capture them, so they can lead you along the path that you lose sight of in the darkness that follows.

    6.  Play, play, play.

    I played Pandemic Legacy (the best board game ever made) with my family. I worked my way through a lot of PlayStation games. I goofed around with my step kids.

    My mum (in her infinite wisdom) told me I needed to play more. She sent me an email of 20 things I could do that would be fun. And I (in my infinite rebellion) did none of them, but took the hint, and made sure I had some fun in my own way.

    Without some pleasure—the colour of life—reality becomes grey, and then black.

    I remember sitting in my home office with the blinds down, reading existential poetry and feeling like it was all over. My fiancée Suuske called up to me.

    “Babe. Just come downstairs. I’m making dinner and I’ve put the PlayStation on for you.”

    I cried. And I did go downstairs. And I forgot how black the world was while I killed ghosts and found lost treasure playing The Witcher 3 (which is without doubt one of the best video games ever made).

    7.  Basic love.

    Eat food.

    Have baths and showers.

    Put on clean clothes.

    Tidy the kitchen.

    Go outside.

    Sometimes it was all I could manage to haul myself out of the malaise and get in the shower.

    The crushing weight of life was far too much to bear. I couldn’t handle the thought of what I had to do. I didn’t want today, let alone tomorrow and the rest of my life. But the next 10 minutes? That feels possible.

    “A shower. I can do that.”

    I shrink the future down into the smallest chunk I can manage. I pull off my clothes, step under the stream and wash away the dirt.

    And then as I’m drying myself it’s a little bit easier to go and make some food afterwards. And then it’s a little bit easier to get out my journal. And then it’s a little bit easier to face the rest of the day.

    It’s an underworld journey

    You are being taken down—pushed down—into the underworld.

    It’s not a malfunction to be medicated. It’s an existential initiation to pass through.

    It’s a journey into the darkness you do not know how to face.

    It’s the unknown territory that must be navigated with as much willingness as you can muster.

    Can you hear it? It is the cry of the Great Mother.

    “Come down! I want a word with you.”

    She demands that you face the demons that plague you—enlighten the dark places that terrifies you—so the repressed power they contain is returned to you in enlightened conscious form.

    I’m lying in my bed, gripped by a fear so deep I can’t get out from under it. “Oh fuuuuck. I think I might have gotten it wrong. There is no grand plan. No archetypal meaning.

    Our stories and philosophies are built on air. It’s all just a baseless construct—arbitrary ideas that we humans have woven into a story that distracts us from the truth—we’re just a random biological accident.

    It’s all a mirage—life is pointless. It has no point—no ultimate destination. I have no point.”

    With the light of retrospect, it makes perfect sense. If there is anything that characterises my nature, it’s the belief that we are here for a reason—that we are the conscious unwinding of the divine seed in the great pattern of God.

    In the depths of my despair, I had to content with the exact opposite of this faith. And not just think about it, but feel it, in every cell of my body.

    I had to face the dark truth of that possibility, and slay its treacherous intent. And as a consequence, I can now see the way we do construct baseless and arbitrary ideas to distract us from the anxious feeling of pointlessness and meaninglessness.

    But this behaviour is not the deep truth, it’s the affliction that hides the deep truth.

    The deep truth is that we are here for a reason.

    There is a deep pattern to life.

    We are the children of God.

    And we matter so much more deeply than we dare believe.

    Ewan Townhead

    , , , ,

  • I learned a new skill last year.

    In fact, to call it a skill does perhaps not do it full justice. For it is in actuality, a capacity for a fundamental orientation toward life. One that much to my shame, I had hitherto forsaken.

    In common parlance this capacity would be called “goal setting”.

    I had ridiculed this skill for many years. It was “a function of the old way”, I said. The deeper path is of spontaneous emergence. The one where you “surrender to what happens”.

    I had tried many times to persuade myself, through the words of wise others, of the necessity and utility of “goals”. I read the right books. I bought the best software programs. I listened to the advocacy of the high performers. But none of it stuck.

    It all seemed so shallow.

    I didn’t want to capitulate my revolutionary liberty to the banalities of the mainstream world of achievement.

    And so I didn’t. My intellectual antibodies kept the necessity of goal setting at bay, and I was free to frolic about my life with ignorant abandon.

    The weight of expectation

    I have never lacked ambition. In fact, I would say I have more often suffered from the opposite problem—my aspirations are so large that I stumble under their weight. They press down on me impelling me to bend or, at worst, collapse.

    To combat this affliction, I had developed a functional alternative. I didn’t set goals. I set “intentions”.

    “I have an intention of making €50k this year from my work.”

    And then I would leave it alone, and “see what emerged”. I would abandon it as some implicit background notion—one that I hoped would magically attract the wealth that I so desired. This is where the “deep work” occurs, I told myself.

    If come the end of the year, I have earned this figure. Wow! It happened. The universe really does provide for those who trust in it!

    And if I don’t? No sweat. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

    The convenience of passivity

    My “intention” is not a goal. It is a passive hope. Which is not to say it is not valuable.

    By framing the “intention”—verbalising it—it becomes (somewhat) more likely that the possibility will become actuality. I subconsciously refer to its achievement, and I perhaps behave differently.

    The problem however, is one of responsibility.

    Because whether the “intention” is reached or not, I am not really responsible. The outcome is “the will of the universe” or whatever other pretty dress I want to put over the convenience of my passivity.

    For me, the truth lurking in the dark under this spiritual costume, is fear.

    I’m afraid.

    I’m afraid that I can’t arrive at the destination—the goal. The demoralising conclusions I know I must draw were I to fail in my quest seem too large a price for my fragile pride to bear.

    So I don’t take the risk. I use “intentions” and outsource my responsibility to some mystical other.

    What are you aiming at?

    You’re pointed toward something. Your life, if it continues in this vein, will arrive at a natural conclusion, the consequence of your orientation.

    We are spatial beings. We have a front and a back. It’s built into the very structure of our beings.

    And so, you are pointed at something. Your posture orients you toward something.

    It may or may not be something you have chosen.

    It may or may not be something you actually want.

    The conscious choosing of an aim, and the voluntary acceptance of responsibility for attaining it are cornerstones of the masculine orientation to the world.

    They are not the prevue of men. They are the necessity of any human being who seeks to manifest the dreams they hold.

    They are not optional.

    They cannot be replaced with “intentions”—with “seeing what emerges”.

    However, all of this says nothing of the actual result.

    You cannot control the result

    The larger the goal—the further it lies from the present moment, and your current capability—the more the mystery of life will bend and break your assumptions of what is possible, or indeed, whether the goal was correct in the first place.

    The largest aims are for lands well beyond the horizon of what we can see.

    They are far away across the territory of life, and can be gleaned only in imagination and the tricky articulation of the mysterious whispers that exist under the surface of the psyche.

    Your mission, is to envision that goal—that future life—with as much authentic detail as you are able. And then accept responsibility for its achievement.

    This is the great masculine secret—that the voluntary bearing of the cross, the acceptance of the burden of responsibility, creates the future.

    Its secret is simple in concept, and infinitely challenging in practice.

    It goes like this…

    1. Set your goal in life—a goal that moves your very core.
    2. Accept sacred responsibility for your journey toward it.
    3. Struggle toward it with as much courageous vulnerability as you can muster.

    And then see what emerges.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,

  • Don’t keep your mouth shut

    If you don’t speak, it won’t go well for you.

    It’s a risk – saying it loud. The thought inside that just won’t go away, not matter how much you try to dismiss it.

    “Hey man. I know you’re telling me you’re committed to this new venture. But sorry, I just don’t think you are. Your words don’t ring true to me. I think you’re kidding yourself.”

    Because maybe you’re wrong.

    Maybe he’ll be pissed at you, and attack, verbally or emotionally.

    Maybe he’ll be really hurt and feel betrayed by you.

    Maybe you’ll feel rejected, and it will sting and you won’t know how to make it better.

    Maybe you’re totally off the mark, and you end up looking like an ass.

    It’s a risk.

    But it’s not like it’s not a risk to not say it.

    If you keep your mouth shut, the effects are not benign. If you don’t give voice to the unspoken words inside, they’ll start to eat away at you.

    Every time he talks about his new venture (that you don’t believe in), you won’t be able to participate. You won’t actually be with him. You’ll stay silent or politely say what you’re expected to. Or you’ll quietly judge him for lying to himself.

    And each time you turn down the chance to speak the truth, the trust you have in yourself is eroded a little more.

    That vital relationship between thought and action becomes a little more estranged. Your conviction becomes a little bit more flaccid.

    The truth is created through words

    The truth is formed by speaking, it’s created through words. We’re narrative creatures. We always tell ourselves a story about what’s happening – what the world is. We can’t not do this.

    There’s no such things as truth before language. Things just are. It is the split between the territory of existence, and our maps we make of that same existence, that creates simultaneously the possibility for truth and for its opposite.

    And so we live in two worlds.

    We live in the world of babbling streams, and rustling leaves. The world of fleshy touch and sweaty odours. The world of rock, brick and tower. We live in the territory.

    And we live in the world of the ideas of those things. The shape of the names. The interpretations of the notions. The grammar of thought. The hierarchy of abstractions. We live according to the map.

    And because we straddle these two worlds, we can contradict ourselves.

    I can say things that are untrue. I can give words to a world I do not actually live in. I can mistake the name for the thing itself. I can mistakenly believe that the thing is more authentic before I name it.

    It is a central function of life to mediate between this paradox.

    And thus the alignment between the map I hold and the territory I walk, can skew, and I will find that “the world doesn’t make sense”.

    The slide down into hell

    The truth is not simply what is provable or objective. It’s what we collectively believe. And so as he tells himself he’s committed, and you stay silent, it perpetuates his story.

    His truth becomes the dominant narrative.

    And you both start to believe it.

    You must have been wrong. Your sense was off. Because look, he keeps talking about how great his new venture is, and you keep not saying anything to contradict him.

    Each layer of apparent enthusiasm he utters further buries that thing you thought was true.

    And if you were wrong in this instance, then maybe all those other “inner feelings” you have are wrong too?

    In fact, maybe all that inner world you experience is wrong – all those things you believe, or love, or dream of one day creating – maybe all that is untrue too.

    The trip down this slippery slope is shorter, and more frequent that we like to believe.

    At the bottom of the slope is nihilism.

    Nihilism is a philosophical belief that nothing has any intrinsic meaning or underlying truth. Nihilism is not just a conceptual idea though, it’s a place. I’ve been there.

    In the pit of nihilism, it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t say. It makes no difference.

    Because there is no truth.

    There’s no deeper code. No deeper meaning. It’s all flat, empty, pointless. It doesn’t matter what you do. Because there is no point.

    The pit of nihilism has become a very popular residence in today’s world. A lot of people slid down into it, and don’t know how to get out.

    To get out you have to believe in a higher order. You have to believe in universal rules. Things that cannot be broken. Truths that cannot be deconstructed.

    You have to believe in Gods that cannot be killed.

    One of these I learned from watching Jordan Peterson’s (incredible) biblical lecture series. It goes like this…

    When you speak the truth, it is good.

    Creating divine order

    It may not feel good. The receiver of your truthful speech may not like it. You may not garner the results you were hoping for.

    The receiver may be a lover, a friend, a client. It may be you. It may be “the world”. Regardless of who it is, when you speak it, and when it is indeed true, then your act is good.

    It has furthered the human project. The naming of the nameless. The existential intimacy that comes from bringing the map and the territory a little closer together. Participating in a moment that is a little more filled with the light of consciousness.

    But “good” in the highest sense may not equate to “good” in the immediate sense.

    You might damage a friendship. You might traumatise your lover. You might lose a client. You might antagonize the world. You might reveal to yourself a contradiction that you’ve protected yourself from for decades.

    It’s a risk.

    But never forget. It’s not a risk to not speak.

    It’s risk either way.

    One leads down the slippery slope into the pit of nihilism, meaninglessness and misery.

    The other leads through the gauntlet of the world into the higher orders of consciousness and integration.

    You must choose constantly.

    Ewan Townhead

    , ,

  • When I was seven, I stole the cloak from Damien Kelly’s batman figure. I was jealous. My batman didn’t have a cloak. It was second hand and by the time the previous owner had passed it off, the cloak had disappeared. I remember him crying with the teacher, snot pouring down his face.

    I stole different things as an adult – women’s hearts, men’s dignity. I just took what I wanted and ignored the pain it caused. I justified it to myself, I told myself I deserved what I wanted.

    At some point I had to look at this ugly part of myself – the narcissistic me that would steal or manipulate to get what he wanted. It hurt. Because when I really looked, and named it, I had to admit that I wasn’t who I told myself I was.

    I told myself I was a good man, a conscious man. I had high ethics. Integrity. I meditated for God’s sake. People who meditate are good, they don’t steal.

    I think there’s always some part of you that knows. Something lurking below the surface, that knows you contradict yourself, that knows you’re not who you claim to be.

    But better not to look if you can help it. It’s much easier that way. Then you don’t have to acknowledge that the story you tell about yourself actually doesn’t work. You don’t have to unpick the narratives, include the new data, and find a new story that fits.

    Easier to ignore it all. Let it remain in the dark.

    Just keep facing the other way, don’t look at the shadow you cast.

    The Shadow is the dark that follows you

    The shadow is the darkness that follows you. It is the shape that is made from the places where light cannot go – where you do not want to look.

    Robert Bly likens it to a great bag that you carry around behind you, and inside it are all manner of things that you don’t want to acknowledge.

    Some of the contents may even belong to someone else! Your father perhaps or your great grandmother. But you carry it all around with you nonetheless, and wonder why on earth life feels so very heavy.

    The original benefit of this is that it kept you safe when you were too small to deal with the dark. Children are delicate.

    As an adult the benefit is different.

    You get to remain ignorant.

    You can’t outrun your shadow

    Have you ever watched a small child playing, trying to run away from its shadow? No matter what direction it moves in, no matter how fast it shuffles along, no matter how determinedly it tries to escape, the shadow remains.

    It’s right there, behind you. Always. In the place you don’t want to look.

    You can fool yourself into thinking you no longer possess it. This is achieved by removing the light source.

    The child experiences this when the sun disappears behind a cloud, and its shadow is miraculously removed.

    For you, this deception is achieved by removing the source of light that illuminates your own psyche, that is, the light of conscious awareness.

    This can be achieved in all number of ways. In fact, the world has never contained a greater variety of ways in which to turn off the light of consciousness.

    I am particularly partial to cheesecake and “ultimate fail videos” on YouTube. They work particularly well in combination. If I eat enough of the rich fatty cheesecake, I seem to lose the ability to stop the never-ending, dopamine stimulating cycle of video clips, each showing another way in which someone makes an ass of themselves. And I can watch, smug in the unconscious knowledge that I am in fact not the biggest failure on the planet.

    You will have your own particular tastes. Perhaps you turn off the light of consciousness by working too hard. Or drinking too much. Or fucking too much. Or reading stacks of spiritual philosophy that assures you that you are in fact “perfect just as the universe made you”.

    But you cannot outrun your shadow. Because as the child finds, when the sun reappears, the shadow reappears along with it. It was there all along, waiting for the light to reveal its presence.

    Look where you least want to look

    When you consciously and deliberately turn the light of awareness toward the dark corners and the shadowy recesses of yourself, you walk the path of the hero – you voluntarily face what is most dangerous, and are transformed by the event.

    This is an old idea.

    “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” – Carl Jung

    So where do you look? You look where you least want to look. The shadow is conspicuous by its unwillingness to be seen.

    When I find something I don’t want to look at, I’ve noticed that my mind has this habit of going all cloudy. I try to look and I just see fog. “What did you ask me again?” I say, for it is as if my memory of where I was has been completely wiped.

    Shame is a dead giveaway. Shame is the manhole cover that separates the sewers of your past, from the cleanliness of your present. Going down there is messy as fuck.

    Or you could just send notes to all your ex-lovers and ask them what your most blind to. That will work too.

    Name what you find there

    In Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, Ged the story’s protagonist runs from his shadow. He travels across the entire known world trying to escape its malevolent intent as it seeks to hunt him down and destroy him.

    But it is only when he faces the shadow and he names it that the pursuit and the battle come to an end. And its name?  Ged. His own name.

    As you look far off into the distance, you will see two figures. One is the strong and beautiful form of your higher self. The one that you become when you walk the path of consciousness. The other is harder to see, it’s obscured, vague. This is your shadow self. The one you become when you hide from the light of consciousness.

    To become the first, you must name the dark. You must name what you find when you look into the murky corners of yourself.

    “I’m afraid that my ambitions are made from hubris, and that I am in truth, ordinary.”

    When I name this, and learn to consistently name it when it is present, I am illuminating what was hidden in the dark. I see the little boy who never felt recognized for his abilities. I see the youth, who used hubris to cover his insecurity.

    Now I’ve named them I can choose another route. I take them by the hand.

    “It’s ok. I’ve got you. We’ll do this together.”

    By naming what is hidden, you bring it into the light.

    Reclaim what was hidden to you

    The shadowy corner is illuminated.

    The dirty shame is purified.

    The trapped vitality is released.

    You reclaim what was hidden, and you integrate its power back into yourself. You become more whole. You enable capacities that were held in a karmic trust fund, waiting for you to reach your maturity.

    For this is the archetypal test. Are you courageous enough to look where you least want to look, meet what you find there, and to take it into yourself?

    The journey is what makes you worthy of reclaiming the treasure.

    Ewan Townhead

    , ,

  • “Follow your passion, and you’ll discover your purpose.” They say.

    Once you discover it, you can live the dream!

    I first read about the idea of “life purpose” in David Deida’s Way of the Superior Man. An incredible book that showed me, rather uncompromisingly, just how un-superior I actually was at the age of 24.

    Since then, the concept of ‘purpose’ has spread far and wide. You can read about it in a thousand blog posts. I’ve written about it.

    The idea goes something like this…

    You have a life purpose. And you’ve either discovered it (in which case you just execute it and live out the dream) or you haven’t (in which case, keep reading those ‘seven steps to discovering your purpose’ blogs until you do).

    It’s as if purpose is a thing, an object, which can therefore be lost or found, like a magic key.

    I don’t find this characterization helpful, so I want to try a different tack.

    Let’s go back to basics.

    Purpose means aim

    Purpose at its root simply means aim. Like you aim an arrow at a target. Or a horse at a gap in a hedge.

    You can aim at anything, it’s a universal human capacity. You point yourself at something, and then you have aim (purpose).

    You look at the hill over yonder, and decide you’d like to climb it. You turn your body until it’s pointed at the top of the hill. Now you’re aimed at it. And now you have a purpose: to climb the hill.

    We can have more sophisticated aims. But the mechanics are the same each time.

    1. You picture an objective you want to reach.
    2. You orient yourself toward that objective.

    Most of our objectives aren’t physical locations any longer. They’re not hill tops or distant lands beyond the horizon, they’re abstract ideas.

    “Write a book.”

    “Attract 1,000 more people to my mailing list.”

    “Master multiple orgasms.”

    You can’t literally see these objectives. They’re not physical locations you can look at. They are conceptual locations that you see in your mind’s eye – the ‘place’ in the future when you have what you imagined. If you close your eyes, you’ll find you can picture it quite distinctly.

    And once you can see your objective, then you can point your life at it.

    It’s all pointless

    What we often mean when we say “I need to discover my purpose” is that we don’t know what our life is aiming at.

    To be without purpose is to be aimless – you don’t know what your objective is – meandering through repetitive days, with no end in sight.

    This (understandably) leads to nihilism – feelings of existential pointlessness.

    “What am I trying for anyway? Life has no point. Might as well eat another tub of ice-cream, or load up Pornhub.”

    If you have no aim, then by definition, it is pointless. There’s no point – no sharp end – that indicates which direction you’re heading in.

    We’re designed to aim ourselves toward something. It’s why we have a front and a back. The front points forward, toward what we’re aimed at.

    If you feel aimless, then it’s probably because you’re not aimed at anything. This could be true in an immediate sense (I’ve got 3 hours before my meeting, and I don’t know what to do) or in an existential sense (oh god! What am I doing with my life!?).

    The solution either way is to define your objective, and aim yourself at it.

    Writing it down is often best. Make it tight.

    “Write 3 pages on the nature of nihilism.”

    “Start a new career as an orgasm coach – have my first client in no more than 2 months.”

    Aiming yourself at something is what gives you purpose.

    Visualising your objective

    I recently had the distinct pleasure of attending a workshop with Jordan Peterson (if you don’t know who that is – wake up). In fact, several of the ideas he presented during the day have been woven into this piece, but there’s one that really stuck with me.

    When we say we have a “vision for the future” or we want to “visualise our objective”, that’s not poetic licence, that’s how it actually works – technically.

    If you hold up your finger in front of your face, and look directly at it, you’ll be able to see it in great detail. It is “high definition”. You can see wrinkles, hairs, subtle textures.

    But if you keep your eyes on that same point in space, and gradually move your finger to the side, its definition will decrease, until at the periphery of your vision, you can’t see it at all (unless it moves).

    This is how our physical vision functions. This is also how our conceptual vision functions.

    When you focus on something, everything that is not that something gets blurry. The more detail it has, the blurrier everything else becomes.

    The lesson? Focus on your objective. “See” it with as much detail as possible.

    Since it’s not a physical objective you can literally stare at, you’re going to need to use your imagination, and the power of language.

    Picture it. Describe it. Write it down.

    The more significant the objective, the more detail (words) you’ll need.

    A small objective needs a tight sentence.

    A ten-year vision requires pages and pages.

    Both give you purpose.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,

  • My father just left on a train. He’s been visiting me, and now he’s going back to where he lives in England.

    And all of a sudden, it reminds me of the time when I was a child. When he left, moved away, and never came back.

    It still hurts, all these years later. I hide my tears behind my sunglasses.

    My father is the one who taught me to feel deeply. He was a therapist and encouraged feelings. He taught me to show my pain when I was hurt.

    Then I was sent out into the world – “the world” at the age of five, being Lowfield Primary School. And there I discovered, much to my shock, that showing I was hurt didn’t work the same way.

    When I showed I was hurt at school, people withdrew from me. Or even worse, they teased me. I learned a new lesson.

    Don’t show that you’re hurt. Don’t show that you’re in pain.

    It makes people uncomfortable.

    People don’t know what to do around people in pain. It confronts them with the reminder that in fact pain does exist, and they in fact carry it, but don’t want to feel it.

    If you show me your pain, then there it is. It’s between us in the space, in us. And we can no longer deny the existence of it.

    That’s how we work. If we’re in connection with someone, we feel what they feel. This isn’t just therapeutic theory, it’s neurological fact.

    And so when you feel pain, I feel pain too. And if I’m someone that tries to avoid pain as much as possible, then I’m not going to be particularly appreciative of what you’ve just done.

    “Thanks so much. You’ve just made me feel the pain I don’t want.”

    Dealing with the feeling of pain

    From this point I have a variety of options.

    I can freeze up, and numb myself. I don’t know what else to do, it’s all too much, and so as the overwhelm takes over I find myself finally relaxing.

    The pain dissipates, along with my awareness of you, and my body, and what’s happening around me.

    I go into a kind of peaceful daze. This is the body’s fall back option when pain is too high. It’s the same system that kicks in when an antelope gets scragged by a lion and goes limp.

    Or I can run.

    I don’t like what you’ve made me feel. It’s way too uncomfortable. You’re weird, or dangerous. So I’ll disconnect.

    The running away may not be as dramatic as it sounds. It may be a subtle severing of the connection we had, and a polite announcement that I must be “moving along now”.

    Or I can attack you.

    I can take my pain, the pain you’ve made me feel, and I can throw it back at you.

    “Oh are you going to cry about it? What a pussy.”

    It makes me feel in control again, and I become focussed on your pain, and making sure you won’t hurt me like that ever again!

    Or I can take a breath.

    And do something we’re not really wired to do. I can face the pain.

    Pain is a doorway

    Who wants to feel pain? Who wants to voluntarily open up their body-mind and welcome in the feeling of being hurt?

    Why would anyone prefer that?

    “Ok, I can either hit you with this giant fucking hammer. Or I can not. What would you prefer?”

    Why would you choose the hammer? Why would you choose the pain?

    Because to choose its opposite – to choose the suppression of your felt experience – is to choose to supress the moment itself.

    To choose to feel pain is to choose your human experience. For in the pain is the very reason that you resist life. In the pain is the secret design specifications for your greatest gifts.

    What hurts you is a doorway, if you dare to open it, that leads you down into your deeper nature.

    To be worthy of wielding your greatest gift is the result of facing your deepest pain.

    And who knows when that pain will visit on you. And when that opportunity will be gifted to you. When that doorway opens for a moment.

    In a chance conversation with a stranger.

    In the innocent reading of a passage in a book.

    In the vulnerable confession to a client.

    On a train platform. Watching my father ride away once more.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,

  • There’s an idea I’ve been fascinated for years now. It’s one of those things that has endured through different businesses and phases of my life.

    It is the idea that there is a new kind of professional role being formed in society at large – a kind of entrepreneur who is soul driven in some sense. A role where one’s professional work, is not seen as distinct from their spiritual path of awakening. It’s why I called my previous brand The Realized Entrepreneur.

    At the end of last year, I started writing about an archetypal way of modelling this character. I suggested that this new professional could be seen as the integration of three intrinsic archetypes – the artist, the merchant and the seeker.

    I then suggested the intersection of these was the hero.

    Honestly? I’m not convinced I’ve got the mapping quite right. But after a few months exploring some different writing avenues, I’m returning to this map in search of answers. Specifically, a topic that’s gnawed at me for years, that is, how on earth do art and marketing fit together?

    Temperamentally, I usually love creating new stuff, and desperately resist marketing it. And I know I’m not the only one that is like this.

    Is that because marketing is for shallow schmucks who can’t create interesting enough stuff that people naturally pay attention to?  Or is this my precious pretensions restricting me from actually publishing myself?

    Can the artist and the merchant work together?

    The Artist

    The artist is principally concerned with creativity. His objective is to create something original, something that provokes a deeper experience of the world, or elegantly solves the most complex of problems.

    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so the artist creates things that they themselves find beautiful. They create to meet their own taste.

    They are driven by the creative impulse. And creativity, as Seth Godin so eloquently defines it, is the tension between “this might work” and “this might not work”. If you know it will work, or you know it will not, it’s not creative. If it’s pre-determined it’s not art.

    Art is not painting, it is not poetry, it is not design. It is what is created when we venture beyond the border of what we know, and allow the mysterious forces there to guide our hand as we create something that intrigues us. The artist knows that he does not truly control this creative process. 

    And so the artist is one who is furthest away from the mainstream. They are by definition at the fringe, for it is only at the fringe that you will find the boundary between the known and the unknown.

    The Merchant

    The merchant is principally concerned with trade. Her objective is to relationally connect with other people and swap what they each possess, and improve the lives of everyone involved.

    The merchant operates in a relational space, connecting those who need something, with those who can supply it.

    The marketplace is a full and bustling arena that determines what is good and needed. And so the merchant seeks to understand what is in short supply, what is in high demand, and how to best make trades that fill people’s needs.

    The merchant trades in value. She seeks out objects or goods, that she believes will be of value to those she can reach.

    The merchant believes that what they have to offer is valuable – that it would help others – and so they feel no shame in promoting their wares to others. For in fact, to withhold their wares would be to violate their chief objective and belief: that consensual trade is good.

    And so the merchant is one who connects people, allowing them to relationally exchange for their mutual benefit. They are by definition in the midst of things, for it is from the middle that the different sides can be connected in mutual exchange.

    A philosophical clash of values

    From the perspective of the artist, the work of the merchant is ugly.

    The artist looks at the trading that makes up the merchant’s nature and sees only presumption, and manipulation. The merchant seems to increases the shallowness of life which the artist seeks to deepen.

    The artist never presumes to know the needs or will of another. This is the antithesis of their work. To presume the mind of another and to create something for them – to meet their need – is not art. This would be to prostitute their creative talents for money or mutual exchange. In other words, to “sell out”, which to the artist is an aesthetic crime. And the merchant has made an entire career from selling out!

    Thus the artist condemns the merchant as ugly, shallow and greedy.

    The merchant is equally distaining of the artist. She looks at the artist as a narcissist. How does it help anyone to make such weird and odd things to satisfy one’s own personal whims? It seems to the merchant like a naïve and wasteful use of time.

    The merchant thus judges the artist as useless. For art does not help people with their needs, it is an indulgent luxury. What people need, are things they want to come back to day after day, things they will consistently trade for.

    The creation of art is unpredictable. The productive output of an artist is unpredictable, and the value of the art produced is unpredictable. The merchant is concerned with mutual benefit, about meeting the needs of others, and so from her perspective this creative unpredictability looks unproductive and selfish.

    Separation is no longer adequate

    While it has historically possible – perhaps even necessary – for these two archetypes to stay separate and pure, today’s world cannot sustain their separation.

    The artist needs the merchant. Because it is only the merchant who can be impartial as to the value of what the artist creates. The artist is so caught up in his creations that he finds it hard to step out of himself and effectively offer his art to those that would benefit.

    The merchant is guided by value exchange, and value is determined not by her own subjective opinions, but by the intersubjective consensus of the marketplace. If her customers thank her for a particular offering and return wanting more, then she trusts it is valuable. Her judgement of worth is intersubjective. Whereas the artist judges subjectively – whether he himself is impressed or moved by his creations.

    The merchant also needs the artist. Because left to her own devices, the merchant will simply rely on offering what the marketplace asks for. She will have no motivation to look deeper under the surface at what new innovation is required. As Henry Ford famously said (actually he didn’t, but he should have done because it’s a wonderful quote) “If I’d have asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.”

    The needs of the market change. Things move on. And without the innovation of the artist, the merchant will continue to peddle popular and proven goods, being increasingly left behind, as evolution pushes the edges of what people need.

    These two opponents need one another.

    Without the merchant, the artist becomes increasingly obsessed with his own creative explorations, becoming out of touch with society at large, and not providing things that help and move people.

    Without the artist, the merchant becomes increasingly shallow, providing value that is popular, losing touch with the leading edge, and not risking new things that will change society.

    The necessity for integration

    The challenge for many of us, is that we must play both roles ourselves. Or at the very least, I would suggest we need to integrate these archetypal orientations in such a way that they are not at odds in our own psyche.

    The larger and more idealistic hypothesis is that it is the integration of these archetypes that will lead to the resolution of so many philosophical conflicts in our world.

    I’ll leave that grand idea for another day, and simply say that I believe it is imperative that we at least understand the intrinsic perspectives of these archetypes.

    As a native artist, my unconscious tendency is to fall into snobby distain for merchant activities.  If I’m not careful, marketing begins to  look rather ugly and uncouth, and I instinctively begin to distance myself from it.

    But unshared art is useless. Literally.

    The unconscious biases may be different for you (although I suspect many of you who read my work tend toward the creative and artistic). Nevertheless, the principle is the same – to progressively understand and embody these archetypes, allowing them to integrate and create a new kind of professionalism, a new kind of work.

    I would even suggest that bringing one’s art to the marketplace is one of the great evolutionary requests of this new world. It is a least one that burns brightly in my heart.

    For never before has art been so accepted in the marketplace, or more needed. But to bring our creative work to market means resolving philosophical conflicts that have deep roots.

    Playing favourites is not adequate any longer.

    Integrating these historically opposed worlds is what will contribute the creation of a new one.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • You want to make it don’t you? That thing that’s been nagging at you for weeks or years.

    It feels big. It’s tugging at your sleeve. It won’t leave you alone, although you do your very best to ignore it.

    “Create me!” It says, so innocently. As if it were the simplest thing in the world.

    But simple it is not!

    The stakes are high. Your sense of self is on the line. Your level of self-worth will be appraised. Because this thing is not just a cool idea, or a part of your career strategy, it’s the thing your soul wants you to create.

    I know you know what it is. And if what I’m saying is starting to irritate you, then you definitely know what it is.

    So what are you waiting for?

    You’re waiting until you feel stronger.

    You’re waiting until providence arrives to help you.

    You’re waiting until you have more of a cushion to fall back on.

    You’re waiting until you feel ready.

    Because there’s this point in the future, when things will be different. Right?

    You’ll be braver, or more prepared. You’ll have more experience. Or maybe a bunch of people will ask you to make it, so you’ll know it will work. You’ll have evidence that it will work! You’ll feel inspired!

    Better to wait until then, when you’re ready.

    None of this is actually true. But it’s the only story your mind can spin that will protect you from the truth. It’s the only way it can spare you the humiliation of admitting that actually, you’re scared.

    Who wants to admit they’re afraid, and bottling it!?

    No, much better to justify the whole thing to yourself.

    You’re not ready

    God. You’re so tired of believing it all. And believe it you do.

    You believe it in the moment you load up Facebook, or pour another glass or wine, or turn on the TV, rather than turning toward your soul, and at least hearing what it wants.

    “You’re not ready.” The fear whispers.

    You believe it when you notice you feel jealous about everyone else who seems to be so on mission.

    “It’s fine. You’re not ready to be like them anyhow.”

    You believe it when you just diligently get on with your tasks, and go through the motions.

    “Yes, better to just stick to what you’re good at. You’re not ready yet. Just wait.”

    He’s so sure of himself. He is adamant about the risks at hand. He seems so strong. He has so much authority. It’s no wonder you’ve followed his advice.

    But it’s not working. Under his leadership, you’re suffering. He promises much. Much never delivers.

    Go gently. But go.

    So, what are you waiting for sweetheart?

    I know. It’s fucking scary. That’s a good sign. It means you were right, and this is indeed the call of your soul.

    But you’ve got to be brave. Ok?

    Don’t push yourself too hard. That will only get good old fear freaking out again. You need to look after him too.

    Take it easy. Go gently. But go!

    Otherwise you’ll be waiting until it’s safe. And it will never be safe.

    What’s the first step? The first tiny step. The smallest step you can imagine.

    If you can’t do even that, just write down what it would be.

    “If I were to follow the call of my soul, the first small step would be…”

    Pin it on your refrigerator. And keep looking at it. Breathe. Don’t forget to breathe.

    That’s it. That’s your first step. You just took it.

    Say “well done.” Say it out loud.

    Then take the next step tomorrow. Or next week. Just make sure you keep moving.

    The speed at which you progress is not the point. Moving is. This is how we feel good about ourselves. This is what tells us we’re doing the right thing.

    Look with honest eyes, at what it is you are called to create. And then watch yourself as you move slowly toward it.

    That is the feeling of being on purpose.

    Ewan Townhead

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