 anthology here that I want to read you a little passage out of. It's about to get where we want to be if we led the idealistic self-help books. This guy actually is not only well, extremely well. He's psychologically very acute in his observations and I personally learned a lot of useful personal insightful information so I'd like to share some. This passage is called on the three metamorphosis is that he pushes all of his ideas to their extreme so when he's purporting new you become who you are. A, he's doing it selfishly. He's elaborating on his own found path towards that aim and B, he's doing it radically, haphazardly or haphazardly. He's trying to become the greatest person he can be given our one life so he's not just a fine mediocrity here just to give you guys an idea of what you're getting into but nonetheless it's uplifting and encouraging I think. Three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you. How the spirit becomes a camel and the camel a lion and the lion finally a child. There is much that is difficult for the spirit. Strong reverent spirit that would bear much. What is difficult? Asks the spirit that would bear much and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult? Oh heroes asks the spirit that would bear much. That I may take it upon myself and exalt in my strength. Is it not humbling oneself to wound one's haughtiness letting one's folly shine to mock one's wisdom or is it this parting from our cause when it triumphs climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter or is it this being sick and sending home and making friends with the death who never hear what you want or is it this stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth and not repulsing frogs cold frogs and hot toads or is it this loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself like the camel that burdened speeds into the desert. Thus the spirit speeds into the desert only as desert however the second metamorphosis occurs in here he seeks out his last master he wants to fight him in his last God the ultimate victory he wants to fight with the great dragon who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call Lord and God thou shalt is the name of the great dragon but the spirit of the lion says I will thou shalt lies in his way sparkling like gold an animal covered with scales and on every scale shines a golden thou shalt values thousands of years old shine on these scales and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons quote all value of all things shines on me all value has long been created and I am all created value verily there shall be no more there shall be no more I will thus speaks the dragon why is there a need in the spirit for the lion why is not the beast of burden which renounces is and is reverent enough to create new values that even that even the lion cannot do but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation that is within the power of the lion the creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred no even to duty for that my brothers the lion is needed to assume the right to new values that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much verily to him it is a praying a matter for a beast of prey he once loved thou shalt as most sacred now he must find illusion and caprice even in the most sacred that freedom from his love may become his prey the lion is needed for such prey but say my brothers what can the child do that even the lion could not why must praying why must the praying line still become a child the child is innocence forgetting a new beginning a game a self-propelled wheel of first movement a sacred yes for the game of creation my brothers a sacred yes is needed spirit now calls spirit now wills his own will and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world of the three metamorphoses of the spirit I have told you how the spirit became a camel and the camel a lion and the lion and finally a child what does that even mean a camel passage Nietzsche goes on to list several items that may be considered among the most difficult so we essentially to grow we must bear extreme burdens we must ask ourselves what is most difficult and try to do that to push ourselves well past our own boundaries and thereby create new strengths and surpass our old ones and form ourselves become more hardened able we all know how our own assumptions about our abilities prevent us from doing something that we actually were capable of all along that's of course rings true to me so the camel must invite these burdens willingly which is so why this guy isn't just thought of as a charlatan this Nietzsche character here because his ideas modern psycho psych psychology is absolutely permeated with his ideas such as willfully and that's a very important point is not against your will but according using your own your own desired act on your own terms confronting your fears essentially as he said shaking the hand of the ghost that's that brightens you what Nietzsche is saying is that before one can become over man which is his famous the over man being his highest ideal his Napoleon Caesar but even beyond them people he holds in high regard Gerta essentially his ideal his is Jesus really one must battle with fear love truth death confusion there's for knowledge and all the other aspects of human existence and the camel embraces these challenges in the name of duty and nobility but another way the camel does not run from life or distract itself which is two major things that I'm very guilty of doing distract yourself in by taking longer than you should are being absorbed in something which is okay but lacking time management to know when to put it down or maybe when to pick it up it greets the camel greets life head on that embraces the difficulties that it presents out of a sense of duty in doing so the camel is humbled and strengthened as he said I suppose I should have marked it clearly I wasn't prepared is it not or one's arrogance letting one's folly shine to mock one's wisdom and his quote the biggest errors is not having the courage for ones of one's convictions but in fact I quote this on my Instagram to show how humble I am a fact do it is to have the wisest way is to have an attack on one's convictions because then you're surely much less probable to much less likely to be confident when in reality through suffering these challenges does the camel gain the strength and resilience necessary to attain the next spiritual metamorphosis which of course is now the lion and Nietzsche chose the line because as much as the Nazis used his work to interpret the lion the figure this powerful beast with a huge just a magnificent he often uses the phrase blonde beast but it's found that he actually often more meant the lion than actual just the power and you know the stealthiness the cunning so to speak of that represents the lion and instead of actually talking about the Aryan you know won't even mention that but he uses the imagery of the lion as an example of power and perhaps the the emergence of our new self after we've taken on these burdens and transformed our psyche and become like if you've ever done something really really difficult and you've taken it on willingly or maybe at some point throughout the process you you just commit to it and so at least at some point willingly once you complete that especially if it's successfully but depends on how difficult the task was relative to your perception of it you come out of it not the same person you come out of it shoulders back you you're a little more maybe proud and arrogant would be the negative aspects that have grown in you but positive aspects would be your confidence your perhaps your more your ability to predict your own your own abilities you know to have a more truthful and honest understanding of who you are and what you're capable of and and also to have more confidence to be able to stick your neck out and really push the limits of your abilities more because that's I find a very true psychological insight is that the less you try and the more you fail of course seems like common sense which is it's an issue I have with people who say that Jordan Peterson's book and his advice is just common sense and therefore it's not really of any value I think the most things the most true things are they seem common-sensical because of the very reason that they are in accordance with our personal experience and what could be more true than things that agree with your personal experience maybe you just didn't articulate them so I think a little bit of respect is in order there but nonetheless it is useful for me to remember that the more has Einstein says you just get on your bike and keep pedaling forward so as to not fall over the more you're going to be pushing your limits and the less likely you are to be afraid to push those limits because the only way you grow as a person is in fact to carry a burden to push yourself and then by consequence you you exit the other side of that new person they know you were all the things you were you're now all the things you were before plus some so it's no doubt that useful philosophy to go through life Nietzsche goes on to describe how the camel ultimately enters the loneliest desert before becoming a lion the only that the lonely desert metaphor can be interpreted as the camel having sought out and invited the struggles society that has produced it finds itself questioning everything the value of its society of its pursuits that it had hitherto concept of different differentiating your oneself from your origins is part of what this is talking about you know we need the society we need our our family our friends our community our nation our species and the history the deep history involved in that to give us an initial sense of identity and something that really hold on to but you don't truly grow as a person and become an individual until you take on burdens and responsibilities test your limits creased your strengths and refine your skills at which point you can turn around intellectually or question the very pursuits that you've been told to question I honestly didn't intend it but this is referencing Jordan Pearson quite a bit I actually it's just that it's so in line because he was so influenced by Nietzsche and his idea of the society being the masculine father of patriarch in the the unhindered anarchic chaos of mother nature their yin and yang you know they're not one is not better than the other one is not worse than the other they're equal equally powerful ideas that are mutually needed to balance each other out and the idea of a stagnant state his idea of saving your father from the belly of the whale like Jonah or Pinocchio is grounded in the fact that the state is a very thing that defines where nature begins everything outside of that is chaos in nature and we are needed to update the state and it's a very crucial concept the fact that we rely on the state to develop and form us but it's up to us to once we've reached a form formative period and we've assimilated all the the best qualities of the state that we can then it's up to us to go out gather information for ourselves to individualize us and bring that information back to update the state so that the state it can be as cordons with reality as it can be because the you know I think his idea was that the Nazis were the extreme of a non-updated state so many people were scared to question the state that they were grown up in that the state just ran away on a incredibly negative feed to tyrannical feedback loop and it was blind it was overly orderly it had a clear set of defined values that it did not want broken so this idea of the lion is that one becomes so strong that you you relied on the state to grow and develop yourself but now you are a true individual and you need to you're at this point you are competent competent enough because you've pushed your limits enough to to essentially not define your own value not create your own values but be able to discern excuse me be able to actually distinguish discern your own values the values you out of the values that you were told to value in the highest team as a young youth you can now choose which ones ring more true to you based on your plethora of experience desert can be seen as a place of existential crisis for Nietzsche such universal virtues and absolute purpose do not exist is forced to confront the possibility and thus the camel becomes a lion so while Nietzsche was thought to believe that such universal virtues and you know absolute purposes don't exist that's where Jordan Peterson differs and Carl Jung very much so elaborated on Nietzsche's ideas as far as I understand they both thought that Nietzsche because he died when he was really young his fifties and they thought that he didn't didn't get a chance to develop and mature a lot of his profound and genius ideas but Peterson is so religion being encapsulating importance actually because of its ability to he thinks that it tells you how to act and perhaps religion is the most ancient state state organized structure cultural structure that we must continually update so it's a fine line between the sacredness of religion and its core ideas and the ability of people who of course own confident confident but competent and well too and that's really you just have to be confident enough experience to be able to update something as profound and crosses that there's so much room for us to grow and so many of us don't and so many of us don't pursue it to its ultimate ends and he thinks that if we did stay persistent and didn't just reach a plateau and get comfortable etc if we did honestly keep pursuing our goals and our self-development and who knows really life the experience of life could really be and to me that's that's in line with thinking about how brave and courageous and intelligent thoughtful and creative our ancestors must have been 200 150 10 000 years ago and also extrapolating out into the future what you know where where are we gonna take that trajectory and it's up to us it literally is each one of us every day i think i was watching blood diamond the other night i wish i remembered the exact quote but you know of course i'm perceiving everything through the lens of what i'm currently reading the philosophy i'm currently learning but it did ring true and it did align with it in a quite a few spots of that movie but the the reporter lady who's out there trying to you know prevent the mass genocide of these african people which are which is fueled by the um the the prophets created by these blood diamonds anyways her point was that you know was that when our when we get daunted by the fact that there's these huge looming um waves of of events and phenomena in the world and they seem to be overall negative you know there's there's so many bad things that happen every day there's also so many good things that happen every day there's so many people out there doing good things so i don't know i i butchered that one so this actually is not the quote i was talking about but it's one of them that i was referring to and is that uh leo leo in the movie says so you think because your intentions are good they'll spare you huh that the the village teacher who was a good intentioned guy said my heart always told me that people are inherently good my experience suggests otherwise but what about you mr rger and your long career as a journalist he was posing as a journalist would you say people are mostly good he says no they're just people they're just people the teacher says exactly it's what they do that makes them good or bad when of love even in a bad man can give meaning to a life none of us knows whose path will lead us to god as it's you know is anything really ever as black and white low resolution as all that people do negative things all the time but uh culture and the waves of historic events aren't they all but just a series of droplets of individual actions every day and they just somehow in a weird way form swells and ocean currents in tides that ebb and flow so back to back to the camels transition into a line when the camel discovers that universal truth and virtue may not exist it has two choices it can reject life as meaningless and probably commit suicide or something or can claim its own freedom and create its own meaning which is uh the overman the camel must obviously do the latter do you descend in the hell and chaos or do you ascend to do this the camel must destroy the largest barrier to truth or to true and true true freedom and virtue if by tradition and society this is what niches great dragon represents the camel had been a slave to the dragon inviting life's challenges but always living in accordance with the values imposed upon it from without the dragon of the thou shalt it can also be seen simply as representing everyone who would try to tell someone else how to live their life camel must reject this dragon of tradition and commands and um but it cannot but it cannot in its current duty loving form thus it must become a lion its trials have allowed it to attaining enough strength to become a lion you can't just do a couple push-ups and be a lion or just ask one girl out you gotta you have to live a boundary pushing life and just by definition that is what will create a lion the lion symbolizes courage tenacity disillusionment or even rage um unbridled passion only in this state is the spirit able to deliver the sacred the no and uh the sacred no represents the utter rejection of external control and traditional values everything imposed by other individual society churches governments families and all forms of propaganda must be denied in an empowered roar and that's uh that's an important part you can say no but is it gonna look like you mean it to the other person and that's the real key to um knowing i guess you're the lion is uh your conviction in certain things so you uh you want to have the courage of your convictions over man would be able to have the courage of convictions based on its really deep internal experience yet be open enough walking that line of yin and yang carefully enough between chaos and order that he would be open minded to be able to recognize when he's wrong so the third and final metamorphosis is is i think the refreshing concept of becoming a child because most i feel like most less lesser stories or or philosophers just it's very insightful isn't just a powerful as the open-mindedness the be represented by a child after this line delivers its sacred no sacred because it's the most meaningful to him to deliver it it's an unavoidable path to self-creation and manifestation and meaning famous reoccurring theme in each's work after this line is delivered the sacred no the spirit still must make one more transformation to become the over man that's becoming a child so what can a child do that even the lion could not do why must the praying lion still become a child this child is innocent and forgetting a new beginning a game a self-propelled wheel a first movement a sacred yes for the game of creation my brothers a sacred yes is needed the spirit now wills his own will and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world so Nietzsche holds that the lion must again transform in order to forget spirit has undergone much duress and turmoil in its transformations and but it must cleanse its mind of the past through the sacred yes the child affirms the moment affirms uncertainty affirms the flux of life the child becomes a self-propelled wheel just as life can be viewed in the same terms the child elects to roll with life ultimately for Nietzsche the pure creation arises from this state of play can achieve a child mind a mind immersed in the moment filled with wonder and playfulness his own will create his own virtue and thus create his own reality and undergoing this final metamorphosis the spirit overcomes itself conquers the world and reaches the state of liberation the overman so in understanding the overman real quick the important thing to notice that Nietzsche was like most philosophers a voracious truth seeker the objection the objection of uh i think that there are no universally good values and we can create our own values which of course could lead to a very chaotic anarchic road is a utilitarian or consequentialist reading of Nietzsche is you know the greatest good greatest common good which i'm no philosopher i'm no even i've taken one little introductory course in college so i don't understand any of the deep psychological underpinnings psychological that's fine weird slip logical underpinnings of the great philosophic schools of thought but i think i know enough now to reject the utilitarian view which is the greatest good for the most people because the at least you know my mom maybe you have a good argument for it is that it one of its ultimate conclusions could be that the greatest good would be for us all to be equal and mediocre equal in our mediocrity and i don't think that's a life worth living so for Nietzsche this objection would have been yet another example of mankind attempting to impose arbitrary moral standards onto a universe in which none objectively exist he was less interested in the imaginary moral constructs of mankind than discovering the actual truth of existence so yeah people might think that he was uh you know a cold in his theories of overcoming and and overcoming yourself and um praising at points dominations of other people who are less powerful than you that's of course grossly over simplifying his argument but you've put that in the context of one of his last known actions as an actual human being in the world was to go insane as he's trying to uh save a horse from being beaten in the last decade of his life which of course tells us that he had a lot of compassion a lot of compassion so the uh person i'm reading here says it's possible to see Nietzsche's child a playful being in touch with its own deep down nature as uncannily similar to a realized Taoist or Zen Buddhist there's a Zen saying that quote nothing is left to you at this moment maybe nirvana but to have a good laugh which is uh meant to refer to the moment after one has attained satori or enlightenment oh for the over man essentially to wrap it up pain is necessary for positive transformation and should be embraced it's true for me i haven't experienced enough pain i know that in order to liberate ourselves we must wage war against troll by an external authority um it's true and just that steel sharpened steel and when you have a good argument even if someone wins it makes you look like a fool if you're humble enough to be able to recognize that then maybe you could get rid of that dead bark burn it off that was clearly not working for you and make room a new perspective you just need that you had an incomplete set of ideas and you need to re fortify them yes and you will grow we must cultivate great courage strength and audacity in order to truly sever our puppet strings and lastly our goal should be to affirm life and dance with it