Welcome to the Maze

Now how do we get out of it?

An incredible sound healer named Kenneth Alexander is doing a free livestream at 12pmPT TODAY—here is the link. Find a quiet place to listen, and not while you’re driving! He did these during COVID and they were amazing.

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Some of you may know that I have a book coming out at the end of the month with psychiatrist Phil Stutz—author of Lessons for Living, co-author of The Tools and Coming Alive, and the subject of the Netflix documentary Stutz. It’s called True & False Magic and for Stutz fans, it’s going to scratch an itch. (And for the uninitiated, it’s a wonderful introduction—I wrote a bit more about it here, in “True and False Magic”) One of the wonderful things about Phil is that he takes big heady concepts and grounds them into simple tools that are easy to action: While The Tools focuses on five meta tools for unlocking creativity and getting unstuck—this puts those five tools in context, and includes many, many more.

Martin Parr, “Venice,” MoMA Store, $395

Essentially, it’s Stutz’s larger philosophical and spiritual model structured around the three domains that we don’t get to avoid: The need for constant work, pain, and uncertainty. In short, if you want to co-create with higher forces, if you want to get in flow with the universe, if you want to leash your Part X, then there’s no exoneration from engaging with these three domains. Every day. For the rest of your life.

Part X is the term Stutz uses to describe the shadow, though his conception of it is slightly different than Carl Jung’s—he conceives it as a type of counter-force. In his view, Part X gives you problems you don’t need, and then solutions to those problems that only make those problems worse. Part X is that voice in your head that convinces you that you don’t need to engage with the three domains after all and that the Realm of Illusion is real. The Realm of Illusion is the “snapshot realm,” the space of If/Then that is like quicksand: If you get the role/big job, if you make a lot of money, if you go to the right school, if you have a lot of followers on Instagram, then you’re done, you’ll be absolved from dealing with pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work.

These themes are all delineated in True & False Magic, along with the meta concept of Universe 1 and Universe 2—but I’ll save that for another newsletter. :)

Today, I want to talk about Stutz’s concept of the Maze, which was a big unlock for me as we worked on the book: In fact, I think significant parts of our culture are caught in a variation of the Maze. It’s not a big part of the book, but it’s a crystalline example of where we get stuck—and become unable and sometimes unwilling to move forward during times when we feel we’ve been wronged, or we feel the world isn’t fair.

Here’s a brief explanation: “We enter the Maze when our feelings are hurt, or when we feel we’ve been mistreated, and we can’t let go of the situation. As a result, there’s no forward motion. We obsess and ruminate: We want to get even, get paid, get an apology.” Here’s more from True & False Magic: “While physical pain resolves itself—a black eye will be better in a week—emotional pain is different. Emotional pain is the only kind of pain that can get worse as time goes on because your ego holds onto it. Part X says, You must get recompense. Nope. Fairness is the booby prize that’s worth nothing. But the Maze convinces you otherwise. The Maze appears when someone has injured you or treated you unfairly or owes you something and won’t give it to you. You become fixated on them, and you think that if you can only get them to admit they’ve been unfair and get them to pay you back, you’ll be free. But you know how that ends. The only way to get out of the Maze is not to win. The only way you can get out of it is to say, I don’t have enough time to waste on this shit, so I have to let the other guy win. The moment you do this in your mind, you can move forward.”

God, it’s hard to do. Can you relate? I have wasted so many hours trying to win arguments in my head, feeling furious, convinced that things aren’t “fair,” wanting to be vindicated by the world at large, hoping for apologies that never came, and so on…and worse, sometimes you get the apology you’ve been obsessing about and it still doesn’t satisfy. In fact, sometimes it feels better to feel wronged…and to stay in the Maze.

Here’s a bit more: “Everyone gets stuck in the Maze at some point. We all know people from childhood who are stuck in the Maze—when you see them again after thirty years, nothing has changed. They’ll usually have some story to tell you about why. This is one reason it can be hard to maintain friendships over time: The Maze takes people away and prevents them from growing. They’re stuck in the Maze and they’re boring. They’ve collected all these trophies of narcissistic injuries where they feel they’ve been wronged, a trophy wall of booby prizes. The more you work on yourself and pull yourself out of the Maze, the more Part X will shrink. It’s not a miracle, but things start to slow down a little so you feel more capable of seeing it happen and catching yourself before you’re stuck.”

Many of us are stuck in the Maze—both in our personal labyrinths and also the larger collective one. I think part of contending with the meta political Part X that has our culture here in America by the throat is to take Phil’s advice and to say: I don’t have enough time to waste on this shit, so I have to let the other guy win. I’m not suggesting that we all roll over in the face of bullies (and in some ways, the judicial system is the appropriate place for the Maze to play out), but I think we need to shift our mindset from engaging in grievances and outrage emotionally to pursuing putting ourselves in forward motion. We need to imagine and then realize a positive vision of the future. Getting stuck in the Maze will not help.

As Stutz also says, the antidote to evil is not goodness—the antidote to evil is creativity. He doesn’t mean creativity in the context of painting a canvas or writing a book—he means creativity in the context of generating forward motion in your life. And we can’t do that when we’re stuck in the Maze. It feels like there’s a lot of evil in the world right now, and the only response is creativity.

True & False Magic will be out in two weeks—but please consider ordering it today.

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