Turning Pro

by Steven Pressfield

"There is a second self inside you — an inner, shadow Self. This self doesn't care about you. It doesn't love you. It has its own agenda, and it will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are. This shadow self is called, in the Kabbalistic lexicon, the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara, Steve, is what you would call Resistance."

In the Kabbalistic view of the world, the soul (neshama in Hebrew) is the source of all wisdom and goodness. The neshama seeks constantly to communicate to us — to our consciousness on the physical plane. The soul is trying to guide us, sustain us, restore us. But there is a force operating in opposition to the neshama. This entity, the yetzer hara, is a self-sustaining and cunning intelligence whose sole aim is to block us from accessing the neshama and to block the neshama from communicating to us.

Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self.

Art (or, more exactly, the struggle to produce art) teaches us that.

The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the Self, and the stakes are our lives.

I will gladly shell out $24.95 or $9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes to read or see or listen to the 24-karat treasure that you have refined from your pain and your vision and your imagination. I need it. We all do. We're struggling here in the trenches. That beauty, that wisdom, those thrills and chills, even that mindless escape on a rainy October afternoon — I want it. Put me down for it. The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns. You are that hero.