Maps of Meaning, Lesson 8: The Adversary Within You

Lesson #8 – The Adversary: Understanding The Heroic Process Through Its Antagonist

(Note: If you’d like to read along with me, you can get Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on amazon.)

The Hostile Brothers

Maps of Meaning builds and builds to the final chapter, “The Hostile Brothers.” It is within this section that we come to understand the heroic individual through the conceptualization of its opposite, the adversary.

Understanding that the world is made of information, and that our protective structures of culture are made up of past heroic endeavor, our societal schemas must be continually updated to follow pace with our ever-changing environment.

All we have is a result of past heroic endeavor, but the only way to maintain the positive aspect of what we have and continually advance (and not just advance, but simply, keep alive) our protective structures of society is to continually update them through heroic (read: voluntary, creative exploration of the unknown in search of benevolence) endeavor.

The hero is the one who searches, explores, learns, masters, and improves. The hero is the one who looks at the insufficiencies of his or herself and the world – and struggles uphill to rectify these shortcomings, and in so doing, takes the positive aspect of the unknown and chaos and upgrades his or her society.

The adversary, on the other hand, is the one who looks away.

The adversary is the process, which is codified in drama, myth, and religion, that speeds up the degradation of all that is good through willful ignorance. While the hero makes friends with what he does not know, the adversary proudly claims that all worthwhile information is already known. The adversary – driven by pride, grounded in outdated ignorance – flees from the positive aspect of the Feminine (mother nature, chaos, unknown) and clings to identification with what is (at the cost of what could be).

The hero searches for insufficiency and confronts it head on. The adversary builds walls and lies around its insufficiency in the claim that such weakness does not exist. (Therefore, furthering that weakness until it becomes self-consuming (all the while bringing others down along with it)).

Remember all is “Process”

Its best to understand the mythic “Hostile Brothers” – Christ and Satan, Cain and Abel, Scar and Mustafa, Osiris and Seth, Batman and Joker – not so much as individuals, but as representation of a process.

This is useful because the “hostile brothers” – the process of humbly and voluntary confronting the unknown (the hero) and pridefully claiming to know all (the adversary) – exist within each of us. This is the line that runs through every human soul. We are capable of both processes. We enact both patterns in our lives daily.

Myth uses these characterizations of these processes to shine a light on our own insufficiency (and complexity). Though understanding that these are processes - habits and actions we undertake both consciously and unconsciously - we develop the ability to CONSCIOUSLY CHOOSE how we will respond to experience.

How To Apply These Ideas Today

Are you embodying the process of the hero or the adversary? Are you humbly admitting your ignorance and voluntarily pursuing difficult things in search of its rectification? Or are you sweeping problems under the rug and looking away from the difficult?

The hero searches for insufficiency. The adversary pretends its not there.

In your health, marriage, profession, relationships, finances, and passions, are you looking with a critical eye or are you looking away?

Just being conscious of this idea, and simply asking myself the question, “What am I looking away from?”, I have found great clarity in my path and mission.

I wish the same for you. Ask yourself the same question and pay attention to what bubbles up in the surface of your mind.

Therein lies your work!

Further Reading:

My new book is focused on this topic of looking rather than looking away, of embodying this process in every area of your life, both on and off the mat. To get a deeper understanding of this idea, check out: Jiu Jitsu and Resistance: An Antidote to Modern Struggle.

Should you read it, I deeply appreciate the support, and I hope that this framework provides you the tools to live your best life and win the battle against Resistance.

Further Listening:

My dear friend Pete and I discuss this topic, and the necessity for reading, in our most recent episode of the “All Good Things” Podcast.