Game of Life: The Fifth Flower

The Game of Life: The Fifth Flower THE ART OF PLANTING THE RIGHT SEEDS AND CHOOSING THE RIGHT SOIL

Asger Rosendal Thorn

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Table of Contents PROLOGUE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE – Love CHAPTER TWO – Happiness CHAPTER THREE – Success CHAPTER FOUR – Innovation CHAPTER FIVE – Intelligence CHAPTER SIX – Practice CHAPTER SEVEN – Temperament CHAPTER EIGHT – The Future of Education EPILOGUE

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Prologue LIFE IS A GAME, and so it ought to be played. Too many people stop playing, because the challenges in the Game of Life is too difficult to manage.

This is why, Jane McGonigal says that

Âťreality is brokenÂŤ1. Seth Priebatsch tells us that we can mend it by building a game layer on top of the world 2. This is finally possible, because of the powerful tools that are the internet and social medias.

I have had some very awful player-experiences in the game of life. Yet, what at first seemed to be a nightmare turned out to be an amazing adventure. The shift in my life happened through what seems to be a series of extraordinary coincidences. Without knowing it, I have been building a magical upside-down pyramid from the top and down. It is beginning to make sense, and my life has changed dramatically over the last year. Finally I have begun my heroic journey.

It is time for all people to attain the four legendary artifacts: These are the Map of Possibilities, the Compass of Guidance, the Sword of Courage and the Shield of Endurance. It is like a treasure hunt. This book attempts to provide the treasure map with a great red cross in the middle. This book is a tribute to 1 2

http://realityisbroken.org/ http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html

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ideas, emotions, words and actions. Ideas are the basic building block of our identity; of consciousness. We steal ideas unwillingly all the time. Ideas and emotions melt into dreams. Dreams become beliefs that governs our words and actions. These become your character that you play throughout the entire Game of Life. Every character needs to enhance his natural skills. You can learn everything, because we are all heroes. We just haven’t found out about it yet.

This book is about how I – in amazingly short time – expanded my view upon the love, happiness, success, innovation, intelligence, practice, temperament, the immense power of games, social networks and how we must revolutionize education. I want to share my beliefs. I am inviting everyone to take part in a heroic journey.

The adventure is just about to begin.

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This is for you,

Joy

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Introduction IT ALL STARTS with an idea. Let’s call her Mary. Mary is an idea and her name means star of the sea. Mary does not know the beauty of her name, because no other ideas have ever told her about it. She lives on top of the tallest mountain, drinks from a mountain spring, and she eats the fruits of the forest. You should not feel sorry for Mary, even though she does not know any other ideas. She is never lonely. Her life has always been like this. And it does not bother her. She does not know, what it means to be happy or unhappy. A lonely idea is not hungry or thirsty; never cold or ill. Mary simply is.

William is also an idea. William’s name means the protector.

No one told William about his name either. He lives on yet another mountain, drinks from yet another mountain spring and eats the fruits of yet another forest. You shouldn’t feel sorry for William either. He never met any ideas, who could show him how to worry. Actually – William and Mary are not even aware of the fact that they are ideas. They don’t know that they live in our minds. The mountains and forests are merely mental scenery; simply part of our imaginations. William and Mary are actors in a mental play. They don’t know that they are just reflections of words on a piece of paper. In a sense, these words are a stage, 6

and you are the audience. As with any play, the audience always knows more than the characters. In this first act William and Mary are going to meet each other. William and Mary will soon learn to reflect about their own existence. Mary and William will soon begin to think about their feelings. They will soon learn to dream. *** TWO IDEAS MEET. This is the beginning of everything. When two ideas meet they unite and form a supercharged idea. We call this a dream. Dreams are super-charged ideas, because they are powered by emotions. Dreams are the combination of ideas and emotions. Those super-charged ideas become our beliefs. Our beliefs are super-charged dreams, because they do not only contain our ideas and our emotions; they also control our words and our actions. Beliefs are powered by dreams. They make us who we are. Our beliefs define reality and the quality of every instance of our lives. Beliefs are the filter through which we interpret everything. However, we ought to not focus initially on those beliefs. Instead we must focus on their fuel. We must talk about our dreams. Some people say that dreaming is building. It is about shaping the future – with building blocks of ideas and emotions. The mortar is words and actions. We are constantly building and expanding the great castle of consciousness. This book is about ideas, emotions, words and actions. These are the 7

four basic elements of reality as we know it. Each of these elements are represented in this book by what I call the four legendary artifacts. This is the Map of Possibilities, the Compass of Guidance, the Sword of Courage and the Shield of Endurance.

The ideas, emotions, words and actions are the smallest possible building blocks of conscious reality. Ideas and emotions unite and become our dreams. Dreams require ideas and emotions; the map and the compass. To make dreams come true, we must equip it with a sword and a shield. This is the beginning of any good adventure. A dream is shared. The sleeping heroes will soon be awakened. *** I have dreamed about The Fifth Flower. It grows on the tallest mountain of our amazing mental repertoire of magical scenery.

We can only fly up here through our imagination. The air is very thin, and only a few people have made it to the top. No one ever climbed it on their own, because the mountain is so tremendously tall. Even the clouds envy this marvelous mountain. The Fifth Flower grows in a magical cave – near the very peak of the mountain, from where you can almost touch the stars. As you can imagine, it takes special powers to reach the mountain top. As a matter of fact, the only way up is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants are enormous creatures that only exist through our dreams. We don’t really know, where they 8

come from. The only thing we really know about them is that dreams are their fuel. By the way – giants don’t like attention too much, and this is exactly why they pretend to be mountains. The Fifth Flower grows in the mouth of the giant-king, whose name is Porphyrion. The earth and forests are his skin and flesh; the air and the wind is his breath; the water, lakes and rivers are his blood; fire and lightning are the pounding of his ancient heart.

Once every thousand year Porphyrion gets bored. Time passes rather slow for giants. At this time Porphyrion will usually reach down to lift up living creatures to play with. From two different corners of the world, he picked up two ideas. They are called Mary and William. They fell immediately in love. Mary and William felt they had always belonged together. Porphyrion liked the two ideas, so he allowed them to stay together and live on his head. It was on one condition; Mary and William had to promise Porphyrion that their kind would never enter the great cave.

They had to promise that they would never enter his mouth. So they did. For many years to come they would respect this sacred promise without question. They never even asked Porphyrion about the cave, because they somehow knew that he would refuse to reveal anything to them. So, it remained a secret for many years to come.

Mary and William lived on Porphyrion’s head for a hundred years. William and Mary didn’t feel a day older. It was only their bodies that were beginning to tire after a long good life. They had 9

many new ideas in the family. A hundred years have passed and it was the day of birth for the hundredth of the new ideas in the family. Life had always been beautiful. The entire family had lived in harmony with each other and with nature. They had always respected Porphyrion’s wish. Never did they enter the cave. However – they had begun to tell stories about it. The ideas helped each other create magical fantasies about what might be hidden in Porphyrion’s cave. The idea who was born today would soon rewrite all these fantastic stories. His name is Morpheus.

It had been inevitable. Morpheus’ name means king of the dreams. No one knew this; not even his mother. Morpheus was still a very young idea, but much unlike any others. He knew from the minute he was born that he wanted to enter the mouth of Porphyrion. It seemed an easy challenge, because it was not guarded. He wondered, why no one had done it yet. To disobey the one single rule was unimaginable for the rest of the family.

They all accepted it as something universally true – that no one could enter the cave. It was impossible. Everyone took this for granted as a law of nature; until this day.

Morpheus stood facing the enormous black entrance to the Mouth of Porphyrion. It seemed to lead into a long dark tunnel.

His back was turned to the forest. Very soon the sunlight of the outside world would be left behind. He took the first step into the cave. He began to walk, and he realized that is was a perfectly straight tunnel. It was narrowing and almost like a tube. It was 10

unlike any other cave. Was this really a good plan? It should be noted that Morpheus was the first idea to experience genuine curiosity. He had one second of doubt. Then he started to walk resolutely; meanwhile he listened to his own footsteps. He kept on staring directly into the darkness. The light behind him became fainter and fainter, while the black cave had soon absorbed his senses. He could no longer see his own hands and was spellbound by the seemingly infinite tunnel. He turned around for a second to cast a glimpse back towards the outside world. It was nothing more than a tiny white spot. It resembled a lonely star on a pitch-black horizon. Once again he had a nervous thought, but only for the briefest of moments. He reminded himself that turning back was not an option. He was determined.

He had an urge to explore. He took yet another few steps.

Suddenly the star was in front of him. He wondered whether he had confused the direction, but then again – it was a straight tunnel. No way, his eyes and senses could have tricked him. He had not lost his sense of direction. He kept on walking through the absolute darkness. The air was humid. It was hot, and it was quiet. The only sound still hearable, was his footsteps carefully placed on the solid rock. His gaze was fixed upon the new star that was now in front of him. It was on the opposite side of the horizon. Now he started to feel something. Something was taking hold of his being and he had no choice but to walk faster and faster. Soon he was running, and the light was getting brighter. A 11

strange noise was arising and growing louder; it was like the ringing of a thousand bells in a distant storm of rain and thunder.

It became more powerful with every breath he took. He felt the rain streaming down his face, as he ran against gusts of wind that seemed to be coming from nowhere. Flashes of the bright light and tremendous thunder made the whole experience dreamlike; surreal. Suddenly there was no ground underneath his feet. He was falling. He fell for an eternity. Then it stopped.

Morpheus was standing in a beautiful garden. He was still inside the mountain. Brilliant beams of sunlight slipped through cracks in the top of the dungeon. It was quiet. Everything was calm. It was in excellent contrast to the nightmare-like corridor, which he had already forgotten. The sound of streaming water could be heard, although it had no visible source. There was a lake. In the middle of the lake was a small island. The light fell perfectly on the island. Five amazing flowers were growing on the island. Actually it was four flowers growing separately, and these flowers seemed to meet in mid-air where they would entangle.

They were growing into one. The four flowers grew all over the room, and they were so beautiful; their colors were very strong.

There was a deep blue, a shimmering green, a burning red and a shining yellow. The colors dominated the ground beneath Morpheus’ feet. On the island in the middle of the room, these luminous flowers grew into each other, and they formed an

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enormous white flower. This flower was reaching towards the cracks in the roof; it was growing towards the light.

Looking at this flower was absolutely mesmerizing. Even from a distance Morpheus could see that its stalk was thicker than any other flower he had ever seen. It seemed to be vibrating like the string of a giant harp; producing the most soothing quiet music.

He jumped into the water. It was warm and calm. He swam to the island. He was drawn by the flowers; it was a strange force that was pulling him closer. Right in front of him was the five flowers, yet he understood so little. It would very soon change. He touched the flowers one by one. The first flower that he touched was blue like the most marvelous sapphire. Touching it filled his head with overwhelming thoughts; he was thinking so fast that he got dizzy and had to step back. His mind was about to explode.

He immediately turned to the second flower, which was green like an emerald. He touched it, and it filled his heart with intense happiness and sadness all at once. He could not contain it.

Neither could he let go; he was no longer in control of his body.

All the emotions in the world streamed through his heart and drained his energy within seconds. Heavy thoughts and emotions dragged

him

downwards.

Morpheus

felt

tremendously

encumbered. It was an unbearable burden. It was like the air had turned solid and although it was still transparent, it was now heavy like stone. The air would not be moved. He was unable to stay upright and fell to his knees. Overwhelmed by fear and 13

desperation, he fell all the way to the ground. Was this the end?

He could not concentrate, think or feel anything. He did not even notice that his right hand had slipped into the water. His every impulse was disturbed by the noise of a thousand screams that stormed through his mind and heart. He was paralyzed. He did not at first notice that his fingers had touched upon a strange surface. A thought then appeared to him; like a shooting star.

That was it. He needed nothing more. He suddenly knew what was in the water. He suddenly understood everything. He realized that there was still hope. With a final effort he locked his fingers, and he pulled up his arm. From the water he drew the Sword of Courage. It was a magical ancient sword, and he immediately knew all about its tremendous powers.

How could he know the name of this magical and legendary sword? Touching the flowers had made him a wizard and a sage.

He suddenly knew these things. He had attained all knowledge and all wisdom. He could understand everything – even before it happened. He could see clearly everything of the past, and visualize

all

possible

futures.

Everything

was

clear

in

overwhelming detail. It was almost impossible for his young frail body to contain. Morpheus knew that he had just enough power to cut off a few leaves from the last flowers. Their names came to him – they were called the red ruby and the yellow topaz. He also saw that the leaves of the flowers would glide down and land on his tongue. He had only to make one slash with his sword and 14

leave his mouth wide open. The leaf of the ruby would grant him strength; the leaf of the topaz would grant him endurance. His dreams was so powerful. He swung the sword, and all his prophesies then became true. He had seen it in his dream, and that is why it happened.

Now he was capable of climbing the white flower. He laid his hands on the thick stalk. He saw that his hands had grown. The White Flower was hot like the sun, yet he had the power to withstand it. Touching the flowers had made him mature in all respects. And not only physically; his mind, heart, body and spirit had grown. As he climbed the white flower, Morpheus understood that he was the first of all heroes. This realization resonated through his very being. Morpheus realized that he could do anything by the power of his dreams. The first thing he did was to dream himself out of the cave. It happened. Morpheus dreamt about himself telling the story about The Fifth Flower. He knew everything that would happen. The story was passed on.

Morpheus told his people that The Fifth Flower is the essence of everything. He told the family that they could summon the flower by the power of their dreams. It was an endless source of energy. They just had to remember this one thing; The Fifth Flower will only grow, when the other flowers – the sapphire, the emerald, the ruby and the topaz – are planted in a perfect circle.

Having told his family this, Morpheus went to live in another world. No one saw him ever since. Some people say that he lives 15

between the worlds in the void, where he is fighting fabulous monsters for amusement and sport. That might be true. I imagine him underneath a great oak tree, playing chess in the evening sun with Master Yoda in the mountains of Himalaya.

The amazing story of The Fifth Flower was to undergo many changes. As the story about The Fifth Flower was passed on through generations it was soon given a thousand different names. After some thousands of years the real name of the story was soon forgotten. People had spread all across the world and they still kept on telling the same story; every time with a different name. Cultures were formed and people started to think, feel, talk and act as though they were no longer family.

Brothers and sisters alike were fighting. One day a brother wanted to kill his sister. He claimed that she was a liar; that his story was true, and that her story was not. Therefore she had to die. The sister managed to escape, but she would live in exile, banished from the land as a misbeliever. Everyone started to claim that their version of the story was the original. There could only be one true story. There were many wars. The story of The Fifth Flower had become a puzzle in a billion pieces. Everyone was holding a few pieces of the original story. Holding all the pieces together would show the people the common origin of everything. Morpheus had seen all this in his dreams. In the year 2012 the puzzle would begin to make sense. People would start to learn that everything is one.

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*** A CONCRETE METAPHOR is the container of many abstract ideas. This book is a series of concrete metaphors that attempts to illustrate many abstract and hopefully powerful ideas. The main idea and my dream is The Fifth Flower, which is love in its highest reachable form. Love cannot be described perfectly in words. I believe that love is the sum of all positive energies in the universe. This is a good and simple definition, but somewhat vague and not perfectly useful. It would take an infinity to describe love deeply and thoroughly. Naturally, this book does not pretend to be an exhaustive presentation of love in all its different shapes. It is an attempt to propose a useful definition of a very specific form of love. It is about love as the ultimate skill; of heroic love. Of course love is many other things, but I do not mind simple definitions as long as they are useful. Love is a skill; it is something that must be learned. At the moment it is mostly arbitrary. Practicing love nowadays happens almost coincidently.

It requires vast amounts of luck in other words. I want to make heroic love an available and accessible skill for everyone to learn (this is the grounds for a new social learning network that I will talk about comprehensively in chapter 8).

The Fifth Flower is a beautiful journey. It is a magical adventure. It is the beginning of our quest to understand love.

Before we can set out on this journey, we must realize and accept something of vital importance. This is the Path of a Hero. Only a 17

hero may take on this epic quest and set out on this legendary journey. In order to become a hero, one must first prepare. We must find and attain the four legendary artifacts – The Map of Possibilities, the Compass of Guidance, the Sword of Courage and finally the Shield of Endurance.

As you read this book, you will meet some strange concepts and untraditional metaphors. The following glossary is a compilation of reoccurring concepts that requires an implied understanding. It is a list of my definitions; it is ideas that I find useful. The list is to be used as a reference throughout the reading of this book and throughout the entire heroic journey, which ought to be the game of our lives.

• THE LAW OF HEROIC LOVE: A semi-scientific set of principles that suggests a vital interrelatedness between love, happiness, success, innovation, intelligence, practice and temperament. In this book the words are used within the following meaning: LOVE: The process of external transference of positive thoughts and emotions by means of words and actions.

HAPPINESS: The momentary internal emergence of positive thought and emotions caused from either external stimulation or internal synthesis.

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SUCCESS: The external transference of innovation by means of words and actions.

INNOVATION: The internal emergence of original ideas and emotions that have value.

INTELLIGENCE: The ability to think, feel, talk and act in ways that cause the emergence of innovation or transference of success.

PRACTICE: The over-time strengthening of specific neural connections in the brain by exercising either your mental, emotional, social or physical capacities.

TEMPERAMENT: The indicator for determining your current level of strength in the neural connections representing mental, emotional, social and physical power.

• REALITY: A product of ideas, emotions, words and actions that emerged from human evolution and the development of our universal consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS: The enormous castle that is build from the sum of all people’s ideas and emotions (bricks) and our words and actions (mortar).

IMAGINATION: The deep sea of forgotten memories and experiences that underlies all people’s mental and emotional processes.

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ATTENTION: A multitude of mental and emotional forces that makes us aware of certain parts of reality as well as determining our individual level of focus.

FOCUS: The state in which individual mental and emotional forces have been aligned and united in order to increase the efficiency of practice.

• THE FIFTH FLOWER: A metaphor for the deepest understanding of love, which is –of course– unreachable.

The first step towards this understanding is taking the heroic path.

HEROIC PATH: The acceptance of heroic love as a skill that everyone can – and ought to – learn.

HEROIC

LOVE:

Intense, stable and unifying

transference of positive ideas and emotions by means of words and actions.

HEROISM: The holistic and unifying approach to the practice of both mental, emotional, social and physical powers.

• SEEDS: Powerful ideas that may invoke new beliefs in other people.

• GAMIFICATION: Improvement of motivational design.

• THE FOUR LEGENDARY ARTIFACTS: A metaphor for the four artifacts that are acquired through heroic practice.

These are comprehensively examined in chapter 8:

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THE MAP OF POSSIBILITIES: Symbolizing the development of fundamental mental power.

THE COMPASS OF GUIDIANCE: Symbolizing the development of fundamental emotional power.

THE SWORD OF COURAGE: Symbolizing the development of fundamental social power.

THE SHIELD OF ENDURANCE: Symbolizing the development of fundamental physical power. • JEDI MASTERS: People that have successfully planted powerful ideas in my mind. Jedi masters have had profound influence on my ideas, emotions, words and actions.

Alright. Now we may begin. My name is Asger Rosendal Thorn. I am twenty-three years old, and I believe passionately that I am one of the most privileged and lucky individuals in the universe.

Think of all the stars in the universe. Imagine that they are now potatoes. I am the lucky one. I feel that it is appropriate for me to briefly write about my personal life. It has been an amazing journey. I am only twenty-three years old and already learning to love. It is an unmatched privilege. Just like virtually any aspect of my life. It has been both a fairytale and a nightmare. As you will learn and hopefully experience – I am in quite a debt to the universe.

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THE FAIRYTALE I have always lived in Denmark and I did not travel much.

Currently I live in the north-west part of Copenhagen, which means that the government pays me about $1000 simply for having a post address here and for studying. I have previously studied law, and now I have turned my attention towards education. As I am writing this book I have felt truly alive for about one year. Over that time my view upon love, happiness and success has dramatically changed and intensified tremendously.

Time has passed incredibly fast. In September 2011 I started a blog called Human Irrationality3, and to this date I have written 37 posts about anything from philosophy, society and psychology to food, personal photography and music reviews. This was something quite new to me, since I used to spend all my time – about 6-10 hour a day (I’m not kidding) – escaping from reality by playing computer games. My blog is an open diary, and it never pretended to be more than amateur writings. It was late in that September a mysterious person wrote to me on Facebook after having viewed my blog. He recommended that I ought to read a book called the Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. He said that I should read it for inspiration and material for my writing, as much as for my own pleasure. The main message of Ernest Becker’s book concerns heroism. He argues that the greatest problem of society today is that we have a confusion about 3

http:/asgerthorn.blogspot.com

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heroism. This was the beginning of my journey to understand heroism. I just didn’t know it yet. It was the beginning of my new life. Before I could thank him, he had erased his Facebookprofile. I wrote to our common friend – but I never got a reply. I went to Google, but failed in finding him. The entire episode is still bothering me. I believe that ideas are the strongest force in our conscious reality and that they can explain virtually anything.

But what about this incident? The only thing I haven’t yet been able to fit into my rationalized world-view is this mysterious messenger – was it just some lucky coincidence? Anyway, whether this man is mortal or not, I sure owe him a token of my gratitude (so, if you happen to know any mysterious strangers, please let me know). Anyway – last week my blog reached 10.000 page-views. That is 30 people viewing my blog on average each day. I have visitors from primarily Denmark and United States, but also Holland, Russia, UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France and Hong Kong. Writing on human irrationality was nothing extraordinary, but it marked a new beginning. It was the first chapter in the story of my new life. I got back into singing, dancing and martial arts – all things I hadn’t been doing since my mid-teens. I lost 20 pounds of excess weight while getting into eating better foods and running. For many years my main source of nutrition was white bread, sugary substances and alcoholic beverages. I taught myself about mnemonic devices and memorized a hundred decimals of pi in only a few days. I used to 23

find the mathematical subjects in school awfully boring.

Skateboards became my new primary means of transportation, even though I had never been skating before. I dropped out of law school. Never did I have a good reason for being there in the first place. For the first time in my life I went hiking and canoeing.

I

started

beat-boxing

and

I

couch-surfed

in

Amsterdam. I read about psychology, philosophy, existentialism and progressive education – from the classic works of Plato and Aristotle to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Søren Kierkegaard. I discovered and immediately got absorbed by www.ted.com, where I viewed and got inspired by something close to two hundred amazing TED talks. It provoked my interest in especially happiness, success and innovation. I fell immediately in love with Jedi Masters such as Ken Robinson, Adora Svitak, Simon Sinek, Matthieu Ricard, Salman Kahn, Jane McGonigal, Seth Priebatch, Dan Pink, Richard St. John and many others. I have been socializing and seeing more interesting people in a single year, than I did in my entire past life. The old version of me would always fall asleep at parties. I used to work in solitude as a bicycle courier – currently I am a substitute teacher at Copenhagen Euro School, and I enjoy working with kids more than anything else.

Being at my school is like having two hundred little sisters and brothers, who mostly haven’t lost their imagination and curiosity yet. Recently I met an amazing man in Copenhagen, who is now

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training me in the arts of Hero Training. His name is Karim Maktabi.

Karim Maktabi4 is probably most well-described as the Master Yoda of real life. He is an expert of making people think, feel, talk and act as if they were Padawan Luke Skywalker, James Bond, Indiana Jones or Superman. Maktabi has developed an educational program that he calls »Hero Training« provided by the Danish Hero School 5 . It was developed over the past few decades while Maktabi was teaching, traveling and training in different corners of the world. He is intense, brilliant, idealistic, authentic, an old-fashioned ninja and a master of all the senses.

He taught me that hero training is the ultimate fundamental education. In that sense, it is a unifying and effective preparation for reality. It is about the conditioning and maturing of entire embodied beings. It activates people’s natural capacities for innovation, success, happiness and – as I would like to add – the capability of heroic love. I use »heroic« as a synonym for unifying. Being a hero means that you are aware of the fact that everything is part of our training. A hero must constantly train to be a better version of himself. The ultimate hero is capable of summoning positive thoughts and emotions and of transferring these to others through words and actions. The ultimate hero can do this at any given moment, and it is in that sense clearly an 4 5

http://helteskolen.dk/helteskolen/om-heltetraenerne http://helteskolen.dk/

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ideal state. However – while the ultimate hero is an ideal state, being a hero is a dynamic process of personal development. It is life-long learning, but in somewhat more exciting and motivating – in other words – gamified terms (I will return to the concept of gamification in chapter 8). As much as the principles behind hero training is complex, idealistic and in my opinion spectacularly ingenious, the actual hero training is very down-to-earth. It is perhaps one of the most important principles of hero training that it must always result in immediately observable positive effects.

Smaller kids (3-6 years of age) practice a module called The Outer Hero, which is primary training in navigating in the external world. Kids of 7-12 years of age practice the module called The Inner Hero, which is the primary challenge of navigating in the internal world. Being 13 is the average age for beginning to practice the module called The Whole Hero, which is combining your new powers and finally become a mature hero.

Hero training is about exercising all aesthetic forms of expression. It is about learning how to sing, dance and fight – literally and symbolically. Preferably all at once. It is practice of the external as well as the internal competencies – of the mental, emotional, social and physical powers. When all the four elements are mastered and controlled at once, then we are being heroic. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Heroism is a core-element in this book.

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I am a teacher and a hero trainer. I am a student of everything. My life is a blessing and a fairytale. But it was not always like that.

THE NIGHTMARE My transformation through dream, nightmare and awakening happened to me in less than 23 years. For the first 18 years I was blissfully asleep until my quiet dreams were interrupted by stormy nightmares. Over the next four years I was introduced to reality. I was desperately trying to dull my senses, because I feared all that they could reveal to me. I managed to appear seemingly untouched outwardly. On the surface everything seemed fine. It was like raging currents underneath perfectly calm waters. The year 2011 was the year of my heroic awakening.

My entire aesthetic system, which is my external as well as my internal senses, were demolished and the rebuilding of the new me was about to begin. They say that a bad habit requires one hundred days for it to be absorbed by a new and preferably good one. According to my estimations I consisted mainly of (just about 99%) bad habits. That was before everything changed. My family had considered me autistic. My friends saw me as alcoholic. My girlfriend regarded me as unreliable. No one could imagine that I should ever learn to love myself again. But in the summer of 2011 everything changed. After several months of notvery-heroic desperation and anxiety I went to Roskilde Music 27

Festival in Denmark, I emptied a bottle of rum and got caught physically with the wrong girl. Unbelievably my girlfriend at the time didn’t leave me instantly as I would have expected, and as I had somehow hoped. After all I was not good enough for her – or so I felt. Yet, she stayed by my side for a hundred days. She helped me face my demons. She was the reason that I could reboot without another crucial failure. She helped me install new programs after the formatting of my hard drive. Never again would I be shameful, regretful or feel bad about myself. Even though I had done irreparable damage to our relationship, she stayed with me just long enough for me to learn the most important lesson of my life. I learned to fight like a warrior instead of continually despairing like a victim. Later I learned that I had been practicing a positive self-image for a hundred days. Perhaps this altered my brain physically. My new habit might

have

been

strengthening

specific

positive

neural

connections. In any case, I was helped in developing a positive self-image. I haven’t had one for more about five years. Putting your trust in other people, in spite of all they have done. I can think of no greater act of love. At the same time I learned my first lesson about heroic love. I learned that you must love yourself in order to love others – but what does it mean to love oneself? I had to work this out. This time – however – I had renewed strength.

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I was indeed very lucky to experience this transformation early in my life. I am very lucky even to experience it. Regrettably many people is not this lucky. No one deserves a turbulent ride through fire and flames. For some people it’s a one-way ticket to hell. For me it was obviously a sufficient, but I don’t feel that it was a necessary journey. I tell you all this, because I believe in authenticity. I want you to know that these words come from a human being. This book could be written by anyone. I am not an individual with any extraordinary capacities or any special weaknesses. I am no sinner and no saint, I just am – and finally enjoying it because I am learning. I am improving my heroic skills. It is never too late. Allow me to repeat that just to make it absolutely clear: it is never too late. Anyone can accomplish amazing wonders, it is just a matter of sharing powerful beliefs. I am not born with a lucky gene-pool. I sincerely believe in the power of planting the right seeds; of sharing ideas and causing new powerful and positive beliefs. My change was due to fortunate external events. I do not believe that you need to hate yourself in order to learn how to love yourself. Quite on the contrary – I believe passionately that there is a smarter path. If we learn about this path, it may have positive consequences that by far would exceed the limits of our imagination, perception and understanding. I believe in what I call The Law of Heroic Love.

29

THE LAW OF HEROIC LOVE I want to become a master of heroic love. I also wish for all others that the mastering and training of this discipline becomes universally accessible. Heroic training is for everyone; we must all learn to become masters of heroic love. This will happen in our lifetime. And I am convinced that it will make the entire industrial

revolution look like a minor and somewhat

insignificant historical event in comparison.

I have always wanted more and I am no longer afraid to admit it. Thinking love, feeling love, expressing love is not quite enough for me. I want to be able to actually do love. Any force of interruption has got to be eliminated. I want to be able to love as much as possible – intensely and stable. Increasing the total amount of positive thoughts and emotions in the universe is my heroic quest. I believe that this quest starts with a deeper understanding of the seven powerful ideas that sets the framework for this book. We must examine closely and rewrite our

ideas

about

love,

happiness,

success,

innovation,

intelligence, practice and temperament. These ideas together form The Law of Heroic Love:

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: The Law of Heroic Love discovered. + 1 Mental Power

30

Law of Heroic Love:

HEROIC LOVE MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

HEROIC HAPPINESS MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

HEROIC SUCCESS MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

HEROIC INNOVATION MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

HEROIC POWER MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

HEROIC PRACTICE MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

HEROIC TEMPERAMENT MENTAL EMOTIONAL SOCIAL PHYSICAL

31

The Law of Universal Love consists of the seven seeds. Seeds are ideas that together from a dream. This dream had grown into my own personal belief. All the seven seeds consist of the four basic elements – the mental, emotional, social and a physical element.

It is directly parallel to the classical elements: water, fire, air and earth. The Law of Heroic Love addresses a fundamental problem in the vague way we usually define the different concepts. From understanding heroic temperament as the first stage to the mastering of heroic love as the highest reachable stage.

Throughout this book I am going to introduce to you a number of Jedi Masters. Jedi Masters of this book are people who have profoundly changed the way I think, feel, talk and act. I refer to authors as Jedi Masters if they have planted powerful ideas in my consciousness. All these ideas in unison are, in a sense, the very heart of this book.

Ken Robinson, who is leading the global learning revolution – and likely the most influential writers of our time – writes that it is of vital importance that »we learn to be creative«6. I believe that we must learn to be heroic. This must happen in order to increase the total amount of happiness and love in the universe.

Heroism includes creativity, as you will learn through the reading of this book. The purpose of this book is to spread the heroic principles to a larger audience. I don’t mean to say that I have already, or that I ever will reach my personal utopia. In a way 6

Out of Our Minds, Ken Robinson.

32

though, I feel that writing this book takes me another step closer.

Since reaching utopia is an impossible paradox, getting closer is the process that in my opinion should be the center of all attention.

I believe that heroic love is the ultimate skill. Education ought to be about mastering this skill. We must learn to summon positive thoughts and emotions by means of words and actions.

This is a very high-level heroic challenge. The purpose of this book is to rebalance the challenges in the game of life. It is about bringing the fun into learning; and bringing the fun into life. Life is a game and so it ought to be played. Yet, way too often people are struggling with challenges that are way above their individual player-level. Applying for a job would be estimated to a level 5-20 heroic challenge dependant on the awesomeness of the job (level 100 is maximum difficulty). You will need at least 5% mental power, 5% emotional power, 5% social power and 5% physical power to execute most operation in life that is more difficult than –say– brushing your teeth, which we may view as a level 3 heroic challenge.

Mental power is

about

thinking

and

seeing

possibilities. Emotional power is about making a decision after an emotional cost-benefit analysis. Social power is about courage and about daring to speak your opinion in front of other people. Physical power is about endurance and patience – your ability to actually drag yourself out of bed in the morning.

You get out of bed in the morning because you 1) realize it as a 33

possibility, 2) expect it to be emotionally rewarding, 3) you dare explore the overwhelming reality – reaching for the sword underneath your pillow – and finally 4) the fact that it is 11am and your are two hours late for work is merely a minor setback.

When your boss starts to spit flames, this is when you know that your shield will save you. Working can be a very high-level heroic challenge. This is especially if your boss is a dangerously incompetent leader.

This book is about the importance of dreams as well as it is a tribute to ideas and imagination. The more we dream, the more doors are becoming unlocked towards our always-distant destination. I have learned that the journey is our destination, and a dream is like a stallion. If we dream big enough the stallion may transform into Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon-spaceship. We must defy the impossible. Then we shall travel at the speed of light. I mean this both literally and metaphorically. Science is clever and with the great creativity of today everything is becoming possible. I am fascinated by our tools. Especially the internet. This is why chapter 8 is about my ideas for a new social learning network. »We have three billion new minds coming online – to do that which we must do«, as Peter Diamandis tells us at TED in 20127. Science of today is magic of tomorrow.

I have always wished for others what I wish for myself. Yet I am aware that people have different needs. However; I do believe 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDHET3aCI2U&feature=youtu.be&t=2m55s

34

we all share one ultimate and universal need. It is the need for love. We must identify and strive towards the ultimate perfection.

Not in the hope of reaching an ultimate goal, but because we want to take part in the ultimate process. We must begin our heroic journey. In order to spread the message of heroic love I thought to myself why not write a semi-scientific book about love? I would have little to no competition. After all, the vast majority of all written work about love is either poetic of spiritual. And however unromantic it may sound, I believe that we desperately need for a systematic approach towards love. I believe we ought to rethink our idea about love. It is not God’s will – or the result of any other arbitrary force – that we experience so much anti-love in the form of transference of negative thoughts and emotions. Unhappiness, crimes and wars are products of our own ignorance. Love is a strange miracle that is real for no obvious reasons, anti-love is not. We may locate the reasons for anti-love and eliminate them. Love is a somewhat controllable discipline we must master in order to counterbalance anti-love. The Law of Heroic Love is about improving society and revolutionizing our current system of education. We need to unify all our powerful ideas about love. We must express the ultimate idea and utilize the powerful tools at hand – the social medias in particular. We ought to learn about heroic love through a new social learning network (see chapter 8 about the future of education).

35

I chose writing as my instrument because it has always been my favorite medium of aesthetic expression. Writing is my favorite tool and to this day my most powerful weapon against the demons of ignorance. My greatest fear is not being able to love because of my own lack of knowledge. In that sense, I write to diminish my own ignorance and to enhance my capacity for loving. Nevertheless – I naturally write in a sincere and heartfelt hope that what has proven to hold immense value for me might also be valuable to others.

What is the meaning of life? My left hemisphere desires and seeks a purpose while my right hemisphere tells me there isn’t one. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. I call it cognitive and emotional dissonance, and I believe it is a disease we all suffer from to some extent. If there is a meaning of life, we must assume that some force created life for a purpose. To me, this force can only be referred to as the universe. In other words it is a force that exceeds the limit of our perception and understanding. At least at our current level of scientific progress.

And since we cannot answer this question, I have decided to believe that the universe simply left us with a blank spot. The meaning of life is ____.

I like to look upon life as a game or an empty cup. It is meaningless and without a predetermined purpose until you pour some kind of meaning into it – until you dream up your own purpose. Until we make our own adventure. We decide if there 36

exists magic or not. Our imagination is the essence of reality. My purpose is that I wish to understand love completely. That is quite a challenge – yet I will never stop trying to achieve this. I will not rest until the world is in perfect resonance; until we have achieved universal love. So, will I ever rest then? Does this lead me towards heroic immortality or eternal damnation? That must ultimately be a choice between the path of heroic love or arbitrary anti-love. It is a matter of choice, consequence and dreams. About our trained natural capacity for designing our own adventure in our minds and thereby making it a reality.

The more people learn to activate their natural capacity for heroic love, the more often shall we observe the decrease in antiloving. Anti-love is the transference of unhappiness, whereas love is the transference of happiness - but what is happiness? That is another vital question, which is probably a level 20 heroic challenge. Such questions were hard for me to cope with. I would not have done it without the powerful ideas of the many brilliant people that I have meet, read and listened to. I will always honor my Jedi Masters. I want to thank Ken Robinson, David Keirsey, Howard Gardner and Karim Maktabi for contributing greatly to my understanding of the diversity, dynamism and distinctiveness of human intelligence, of passion, innovation and heroism. Also I should thank Malcolm Gladwell and Ricard St. John for expanding my view of success and the greatly underestimated importance of practice. Matthieu Ricard and Dan Gilbert receives 37

my sincere gratitude for widening my perspective on happiness and its mental, emotional and neuroscientific interrelatedness.

Simon Sinek receives my thanks for showing me the Golden Circle8. Jane McGonigal and Seth Priebatsch made me realize the importance of games and game-terminology in relation to motivation. Young Jedi Master Adora Svitak made me want to fight for children’s right to a high-quality education. The ideas of all these Jedi Masters form my own unifying idea. It is my dream; my belief. It is the Law of Heroic Love. A guide for mastering heroic love – life’s most important skill.

It is the ultimate

challenge. The question remains – will you accept this challenge? If so, then you may read on.

In the following chapters I will explore Love (Chapter 1), Happiness (Chapter 2), Success (Chapter 3), Innovation (Chapter 4),

Intelligence

(Chapter

5),

Practice

(Chapter

6)

and

Temperament (Chapter 7). I devoted the final chapter to a project of turning the heroic principles into a gamified social learning network (Chapter 8). I believe that the components in the Law of Heroic Love form a chain of interdependent conditions. The Law of Heroic Love is a tool that might wield the potential activate our natural capacity for heroic love.

I start by asking the fundamental questions: What is love?

What makes intense and stable love possible? In order to answer these questions we have to dive deep into our understanding of 8

http://www.startwithwhy.com/About.aspx?n=1

38

love as an idea. I believe that the secret to growing The Fifth Flower lies in the art of planting the right seeds and choosing the right soil. I will investigate both the seeds and the soil. I shall examine

their

interconnectedness

and

interdependence.

Throughout this heroic journey keep in mind that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This book is like magical floating pyramid. We build the top layer first – the 7th layer is love. From here we move backwards with the power or our imagination to build the Heroic Path. The 6th layer is happiness, the 5th is success, the 4th is innovation, the 3rd is intelligence, the 2nd is practice and the 1st layer is temperament. In this way, we are gradually building the heroic fundament.

NEW QUEST AVAILABLE: Our Hero Awakens Objectives: A gang of pages block the road to the South.

Travel to the Castle of Consciousness in the Valley of Gamification and slay the pages blocking the passage. • Read The Fifth Flowers. (37/141 pages slain).

Do you wish to accept this quest?

39

CHAPTER ONE

Love »Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.« HEROIC LOVE is life’s most important skill. To me, love is The Force and I am a Padawan. Throughout my journey I have met many Jedi Masters. Jedi Masters are people who wield and share powerful ideas. I believe that ideas are seeds, and I have been looking for the most potent of all seeds. Ideas are also like drawings on a map – uniting many powerful ideas is like making a detailed high quality Map. For long I have been looking for these ideas, so that I can add more detail to my map of consciousness. I believe that I have finally produced a map that is worth sharing. As mentioned, in the course of this book I will introduce you to a number of Jedi Masters. All of them have introduced me to very powerful ideas. They have been drawing and adding new detail to my Map, and the pieces is finally coming together. The first Jedi Master that I would like to present to you is Matthieu Ricard.

40

Matthieu Ricard is the French molecular biologist that turned Buddhist monk. He tells us that happiness is life’s most important skill9. Viewing happiness as a skill is a potent idea – yet happiness is merely one of many components in the greater scheme of things. Happiness is the key component of heroic love.

This is because heroic love is the transference of happiness – but what is happiness really? I define happiness as the emergence of positive thoughts and emotions as a reaction to either external experiences or mental synthesis. Mental synthesis is a process of recreating specific emotions by the power of thought (I will return to mental synthesis more comprehensively in the following chapter). Now, if love is the transference of happiness, then love must mean the transference of positive thoughts and emotions by means of words and actions. In this sense, I find that it must be love that is life’s most important skill. I believe that love exists in five distinct forms; these are the five flowers.

When all the different forces of love are united and resonating it means growing the Fifth Flower.

The four forms of love is mental love, emotional love, social love and physical love. Finally there is the Fifth Flower, which is heroic love. »Heroic« means unifying, and the Fifth Flower is in that sense a reference to the unifying transference of positive thoughts and emotions by means of words and actions. Heroic love is about mastering the transference of happiness. Being able 9

http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/index.php/publications/happiness/

41

to love yourself is what I call heroic happiness. It is the mastering of the emergence of positive thoughts and emotions. You must love yourself in order to love others is really just another way of saying that you need to master heroic happiness in order to even begin to master heroic love. I find that emergence is always a prerequisite for transference. With no matter, what is there to transfer?

Love is not necessarily an intense emotion. There goes a Chinese saying: »Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he will not starve for a lifetime.« In both cases we are dealing with heroic love. Give a man a fish, and he will experience positive thoughts and emotions for a day. Teach him to fish, and he may experience positive thoughts and emotions for a lifetime. This last action is love of high intensity and high stability. When we teach all people about heroic love, then we shall experience love of great intensity and stability. This is my dream about achieving a perfect society, in which all people is in a state of universal love. This means that everybody is not just wishing love – which is internal – but also actually transferring happiness to others. This is the external aspect of love, which I believe cannot be over-emphasized. If everyone learned to master heroic love it would mean the end of all unhappiness.

Unhappiness is the emergence of negative thoughts and emotions. Anti-loving is the transference of unhappiness. Antilove is hatred, crimes and wars. It is depression, destruction, 42

darkness and chaos. Heroic love is the weight we need on the opposite side of the scale. We need all people to master heroic love – this is the ultimate purpose and the ultimate challenge. It takes vast amounts of effort to achieve this. The training must soon begin and everyone must be invited.

The Fifth Flower is the ultimate journey. Growing the Fifth Flower means practicing the skill of heroic love. The Fifth Flower can only grow when the other four flowers grow in resonance. It is when one drink equally form all flowers of love. The Fifth Flower is resting upon four grand pillars. These are the pillar of mental love, the pillar of emotional love, the pillar of social love and the pillar of physical love.

THE PILLAR OF MENTAL LOVE Mental love is love as an idea. Standing on the shoulders of giants such as Plato and René Descartes’, we may view ideas as eternal and the essence of reality, hence more real than people and things10. Our thoughts is the fundament of our feelings and our consciousness. In the light of recent neuroscientific research, we can assume that science has finally come to accept something of hitherto unmatched importance – the many hunches of the great philosophers were right from the very beginning. Our idea about love is the fundament of our heroic training. We need to focus our imagination, direct our attention and our thoughts 10

Dr. David Keirsey, Please Understand Me II: Page 337.

43

towards the principles behind heroic love. The idea of love is the first of the potent seeds we must plant in our consciousness. Love is the also the compass showing us the ultimate course. We all want ourselves and others to be happy. After all – is love and happiness not what determines the quality of every moment of our lives?

THE PILLAR OF EMOTIONAL LOVE Emotional love is love as a feeling. The feeling of love is the common way of thinking about love. It is well-known since we – as human being – have a natural capacity and tendency towards being loving. Feeling love is commonly used to describe the sensation of intense positive emotional reactions. We will naturally express our love as long as we are free of constraints.

We can love as long as we don’t experience mental and emotional dissonance. There are basically only two fundamental emotions – negative or positive. You can either experience love or anti-love.

Love means the transference of positive thoughts and emotions while anti-love means the transference of negative thoughts and emotions.

As mentioned,

speaking

of love

hold no immediate

implication of intensity or stability. Both ideas and emotions of love are internal and yet clearly distinct. A commonly used metaphor for the distinction between thinking and feeling love is that love as a feeling is connected to the heart, while the thoughts 44

are connected to the brain. This metaphor is useful but somewhat flawed. The experience of both internal kinds of love are really just making our brain activity respond in different ways.

However unromantic it may sound, we do not feel with our hearts. Emotions are fleeting neurochemical processes in our brain and nervous system. It is interesting, though, that emotions are equally responsive to external events as they are to our thoughts.

Dan Gilbert is another of my Jedi Masters. He spoke about this at TED in 2004, asking Why are we happy?11. He called the phenomenon »the ability to synthesize happiness«. This process is a reference to the neurochemical processes that is our ability to synthesize and recreate all emotions at any given time.

Controlling your own thoughts is a skill. I call it heroic consciousness. It requires vast amounts of focused practice. This must be taken into consideration, so that we don’t become impatient with ourselves. Mathieu Ricard mentions it too in this TED Talk – also from 2004 – that there are people, whom he calls “olympic champions” of mind training12. The influence of our thoughts on our emotions may also explain why placebos are so effective13.

11

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness.html 13 Just as proposed by Chiren Boumaaza, in his Theory of Everything: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPEdDcs_8ZQ&ob=av3e 12

45

Sometimes we tend to call it love, when we experience different kinds of sensory stimulation. This is a commonly accepted phenomenon, since it can seem more intuitive. If someone expresses love for you in either words or actions, then you will most likely react with a mirrored positive emotion. This is not feeling love – it is feeling happiness as a product of love.

Remember, happiness is about internal emergence, whereas love it about external transference. What really happens in our brains is that mirror-neurons are reacting and physiologically altering the brain. In that sense nothing is external. Everything is just an internal mirroring of the emotions of others. We feel what others feel (empathy-neurons) and we feel what we think (mental synthesis). This is as true for any positive thoughts and emotions.

THE PILLAR OF SOCIAL LOVE Social love is love as a word. This is the aesthetic media in which we transfer thoughts and emotions through vibrations in the air.

It is expressions of love that connects us to others. In this way we experience a connection. Since this is a very unromantic book about love I ought to tell you that actually this connection is merely neurochemical processes. It is our individual neurons connecting to the neurons of others. Reality is not external. It is useful to distinguish between internal and external – yet your consciousness emerges exclusively from internal interpretation.

Also what we call external, would have no force whatsoever 46

without the internal fundamental elements. Transference is external and depends on an object – thought or emotion – that has already emerged internally.

When we say »I love you« to our lover, parent or child it is not always true. I love you means in a sense that I am transferring positive thoughts and emotions to you. Expressing universal love for mankind corresponds with the Buddhists way of defining love as wanting others to be happy. However – wanting for others to be happy is merely an idea, while actually making other people happy is an action and/or word that causes a positive effect. It is not enough to express love in words and action. Love is not love unless it causes a positive effect.

For instance, beating your child had been made illegal in most countries because it is clearly anti-love. You can’t punish and love at the same time, since punishment is anti-love. Physical punishment is bad, but so is verbal punishment. If you make people think or feel negatively, then it is not love. It is paradoxical and a fatal misconception if we have the deceit to convince ourselves that punishment of any kind is for people’s own good. Unless – of course – that you believe in the way on anti-love. I do not believe that the transference of negative thoughts and emotions will ever have a positive effect. Not in the long-term, and especially not in the short-term. Love is the only way, and that is why we must learn to master heroic love.

47

Heroic Love depends of attaining four legendary artifacts.

We must attain the Map of Intellect, the Compass of Wisdom, the Sword of Strength and the Shield of Endurance. The Map is our ideas that shows us possibility. The Compass is our emotions, that guide us through darkness. The Swords is our words, that helps us overcome great challenges. The final artifact is the Shield that is our actions. Only by attaining all four artifacts may we navigate towards the greatest treasures, strike with great precision, battle even the most powerful foes and finally fight until we achieve our epic win. I will return to the gamification of education in chapter 8 – for now, let’s go look for the legendary Shield of Endurance.

THE PILLAR OF PHYSICAL LOVE The last stage is love as an action. This is the ultimate challenge.

To be able to love is one thing, but to sustain a steady flow of love and to keep it intense – that is a whole different matter. This requires a privileged external situation and vast amounts of both mental, emotional, social and physical practice.

Also it is interesting to notice that if you are very differently developed from the person that you love, then your love may becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. However; there is much to learn from a lover that if different from you. And it will never be boring. Your opposite type will challenge you, and if you get tired from the fight it will be because of its intensity over 48

anything else. On the other hand – if you are with someone, who is much like you the challenges will be easier and progression more gradual. In this case the danger is that you might bore each other in the long run.

MASTERING HEROIC LOVE Heroic love is love that unites the idea, the feeling, the word and the action of love. Ideas can synthesize feeling and ideas can be turned into words. Authentic feelings and words can be turned into heroic actions. If all these four components are not in balance, there will be no acts of heroic love. The process looks like this: Ideas → feelings/words → actions. Acting love repeatedly will eventually become a habit. Making a habit of love means continually generating Heroic Love.

The ultimate challenge is this: to continually generate heroic love out of authentic feelings and words that originates from a deep understanding of love as an idea. It also requires knowledge about the general prerequisites for heroic love. It requires a tremendous amount of

practice in the heroic

consciousness-skill as well. As we shall learn later in Chapter 6, you need to repeatedly act for a hundred days in order for your action to become a habit. And you need to sustain that habit and train for statistically 10,000 hours before you achieve virtuosity.

However, much less time may be required, if your focus is trained.

This applies to virtually any skill. Heroic Loving is no exception.

49

Mastering heroic love and sustaining it as a habit requires vast amounts of heroic happiness. How do we master the difficult discipline of Heroic Happiness?

50

CHAPTER TWO

Happiness »Happiness is a skill, emotional balance is a skill, compassion and altruism are skills, and like any skill they need to be developed. That’s what education is about.« – Matthieu Ricard Happiness is a skill, but I never saw it on any school’s curriculum. That is one of the first things I believe that we must change – and the sooner, the better. Happiness is not a secondary preoccupation in life. It is the primary element of love, and it deserves our primary attention.

As with Love, I argue that we can potentially experience five different types of happiness. There is mental happiness, social happiness, emotional happiness, physical happiness and finally heroic happiness. Heroic happiness is the combination of the idea, a word, a feeling and action of happiness. All these in unison forms the habit of happiness, which may eventually lead to excellence in mastering heroic happiness. This means that we can – at any given moment – enter a genuine state of happiness.

This might sound strange. It surely can’t be that simple? To just deliberately trigger a chain-reaction in the brain, and then instantly entering a state of happiness? While I do not pretend that it is easy, I do, however, believe that it actually is fairly 51

simple. With practice, I believe that we may learn to control our own state of being by actively altering our thoughts and thereby our feeling, words and finally we may manipulate our environment through our actions. While we may never control all these elements completely, we can certainly master this to a useful degree; we may learn to let these elements work much more in our favor.

Heroic happiness is closely related to heroic love, since – as already pointed out – you need to love yourself in order to love others. You need to be capable of generating happiness inside yourself before you can transfer happiness to others. Happiness becomes transferrable after its internal emergence. In that sense, heroic happiness is the mastering of what is normally referred to as loving yourself. This, we may call self-love – as opposed to self-hatred. Self-hatred is the worst kind of anti-love, since it is the root cause of »all crimes, all hatred and all wars«. This statement was written by A. S. Neill, who I believe was right, when he once claimed that self-hatred is only “cured” – or counterbalanced as I might propose – by love14.

A. S. Neill was the founder of the Summerhill School in Suffolk, England. He is the oldest of my Jedi Masters, and he founded Summerhill on the basic principle of »Freedom, not License«. The School was founded in 1921 with the belief that a school should be made to fit the child, rather than the other way 14

http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/index.html

52

around. I admire Summerhill greatly for completely disapproving all kinds of anti-loving and banishing in from a learning environment. The maturation of the students of Summerhill is perhaps in some cases very time-consuming, because of a lack of external stimulation – however – it is never unhealthy or antiloving. Summerhill succeeded incredibly early in the history of progressive education in eliminating all the vital mistakes that is made by most public schools everywhere. To name the worst, I find that authority and taboos are always anti-loving. Yet, they inhabit the environment at virtually any school still today.

Authority and taboos only cause fear and repression, which will inevitably lead to unhappiness. Unhappiness is the essence and fuel of all anti-loving.

Fortunately we can learn to love ourselves; as we may learn to love other. We must become masters of heroic happiness. In this was we may give the children of our society the amount of love that they need for developing their own skill in heroic happiness.

When we run out of love for ourselves, we run out of patience with our children. We must have infinite patience with children, because we should never give or even show them any anti-love.

To never show children anti-love will require that we ourselves have a high level of mastery in heroic happiness.

There are four pillars of happiness upon which heroic happiness is resting at a very delicate balance. There are the pillar of mental happiness, the pillar of emotional happiness, the 53

pillar of social happiness and finally the pillar of physical happiness.

THE PILLAR OF MENTAL HAPPINESS Mental happiness is happiness as an idea. Our idea of what happiness is differs much from one individual to the other.

Actually we all have very distinct thoughts on the subject, and some people might be offended, if one attempts to expand their thoughts and ideas about happiness. They will tell you that happiness cannot be defined, and then go on to propose a few pocket-philosophical and vague definition by themselves. I do not believe that any idea can exist without a definition. It is always a matter of what definition is used under varying circumstances; it is always a matter of varying quality and usefulness of a specific definition.

In his TED talk from 2004, Matthieu Ricard quoted Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say that »all the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague, so that each of them could define their own terms.« – However, what did some of the great thinkers say?

Aristotle said that happiness is »the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence«. Mahatma Gandhi said that »happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony«. Margaret Lee Runbeck wrote that »happiness is not a station to arrive at, but a manner 54

of travelingÂŤ. Today some dictionaries have adapted the Buddhist way of distinguishing between 1) a state of well-being and contentment and 2) a pleasurable or satisfying experience.

To sum up, we may say that happiness is the fuel for love and therefore the ultimate aim and end of human existence.

Happiness is the ultimate experience; Love is the ultimate medium of transference. Love means ultimately the transferemce of positive experiences to others. Runbeck captures the vital point that the journey is our destination. In that sense, we must keep on travelling, which means that we must keep on growing and practicing our level of mastery in heroic happiness. Gandhi almost gets it right, but he does not explicitly mentions the emotion of happiness. It is most likely implicitly contained in his statement, but we still have no really universally useful definition.

I propose this definition: Happiness is a momentary experience or expression of either positive thoughts, positive feelings,

positive

words

or

positive

actions.

All

these

components-ideas of happiness leads us to the unifying concept of heroic happiness. Heroic happiness is the mastering and controlling of our positive emotions, as well as the power of your words and actions, by initially thinking positive thoughts. This is sort of an extension of the pseudoscientific belief called Law of

55

Attraction15. The Law of Attraction fails to mention, what it takes to actually make positive thought possible. The Law of Attraction is also unnecessarily mystifying the whole concept. There is no magic. Since thoughts become words, and words become actions, we are only to insert “positive” or “negative” as a prefixed variable, and it will accompany all the components in the equation all the way through. Positive thoughts will eventually become a positive habit, and thereby a positively adjusted destiny. The happy journey starts with positive thoughts – not because of magic, but because of biology in the brain and pure logical reasoning.

Yet we must never forget that positive thinking is a skill that requires vast amount of practice, as well as a deep understanding of our consciousness, our imagination and our different levels of attention. I will return to this problem in Chapter 6.

THE PILLAR OF EMOTIONAL HAPPINESS Emotional happiness is happiness as a feeling. As we have learned by now, emotions are fleeting neurochemical processes in the brain. While love is the ultimate transference medium, happiness is the ultimate positive emotion of varying intensity and stability. Happiness is the element that is exchanged between people by means of love. Happiness is primarily an individual state, while love is primarily the link between all people. It must 15

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_attraction

56

be noted that feeling self-love is in this sense merely the sensation of happiness. Making others feel happy is called loving, and if it is mastered and to a certain degree controlled, we may call it heroic love. Making yourself happy – intensely and stable – that is heroic happiness.

We have to understand the difference between momentary and continuous experiences and expressions of happiness. To me sensation is the momentary aesthetic impression; it is the momentary emergence or expression of thoughts, emotions, words or action.

The continuous transference of positive

thoughts and emotions on the other hand is heroism. Heroism in this sense, means the sustaining of any flow of positive experience or expression. »Heroic x« means a persevering and unifying flow of x.

The immediate momentary sensation of happiness is what Buddhists refer to as pleasure. It may arise from external stimulation, such as a beautiful sunset or some delicious chocolate-cake. However, it may also emerge from mental synthesis. As mentioned in the previous chapter, we have the unique ability as human beings to call into our minds that which is not momentarily present. In other words, we may recreate any feelings by the power of thought. We may generate positive emotions that are even greater than what we have actually experienced – simply by means of synthesis. We can visit places of the past or imagine different futures, and while doing so, we 57

are able to sense everything on the journey. This only depends on the power of our imagination – which of course relies upon how well our imagination has been stimulated and trained. We may design mental images of color, smell, taste, sound and feelings that are all accompanied by corresponding emotions. Just try to think of the taste and smell of a juicy apple. If you have trained your mind to become powerful enough, you may cheat your emotions into believing that you are eating that imaginary apple.

You imagination may even improve this apple to add features to it unlike those of ordinary apples. You can make it extra crispy, juicy, taste and anything you desire. Your brain activity can sometimes even respond more intensely to internal thoughts and emotional synthesis than to external stimulation. I call this the miracle of our minds.

THE PILLAR OF SOCIAL HAPPINESS Social happiness is happiness as a word. This chapter is all about social happiness; about attempting to transfer my thoughts into your brain. I am right now in a process of trying to manipulate your thoughts, and if you have read this, I have already succeeded to some degree. The aesthetic medium is words. Thoughts are the element of transference.

Einstein once said that »if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough«. It is of vital importance for our development as human beings that our words can be integrated 58

into systematic structures. Our language is developed by means of analogy. We combine abstract words with a corresponding concrete sensory images of visual, audible, smell, feeling or taste.

If we have no sensory image to represent a word, it simply cannot be learned. It cannot become part of our consciousness, since words cannot meaningfully exist in isolation. Words are what determines the development of our brain and of the increasing understanding of our own consciousness. Learning to become happy relies on our deep understanding of the ideas, emotions, words and actions of happiness.

THE PILLAR OF PHYSICAL HAPPINESS Physical happiness is happiness as an action. Once we have learned to understand happiness as an idea, a word and as an emotion, we may start to actively take control of our actions. This is naturally highly desirable, since we must always move forward.

We must always advance to the next stage – either violently or gradually. There is no way back in terms of human evolution or the progress of civilization. This is not meant in a pessimistic tone. I believe that it is a blessing, although it sometimes feels like a curse. When we have no understanding of ourselves and of the world whatsoever, all of our actions are bound to be arbitrary acts of impulses. This can be frustrating, as we might feel out of control and inferior. However – until we achieve a deeper understanding

of

our

consciousness, 59

we

are

completely

powerless. Actions of happiness are all actions that have positive consequence to the acting individual. Acts of love are all actions that have positive consequence or outcome to the unity of all conscious people. In order to execute acts of happiness, one must first have accumulated enough positive ideas, words and feelings to transform these into real actions. In that sense, positive actions need positive ideas, emotions and words as fuel.

A dangerous rationalization is, when we ask ourselves or others implicitly or explicitly how come you are not happy? You have everything – a job, house, a wife, food for you and your children. These external circumstances are merely a secondary part of what makes of capable of actually causing the emergence of positive thoughts and emotions. What we normally think of as the basic needs and the fundament of our existence is merely basic help-conditions. They will only provide the training grounds – not the skill of happiness itself. There are many other prerequisites for mastering the difficult discipline of heroic happiness.

MASTERING HEROIC HAPPINESS Heroic Happiness is happiness that unites the idea, the feeling, the word and the action of happiness. Ideas can synthesize emotions and ideas can be transformed into words. Authentic feelings and words can be transformed into actions that transfer positive thoughts and emotions. If all these four components are 60

not in some kind of balance, there will be no acts of heroic happiness. The process looks like this: Ideas → feelings/words →

actions.

Actions

of

happiness

can,

if

repeated

for

approximately a hundred days, eventually become a habit.

Making a habit of happiness means continually generating positive thoughts and emotions inside yourself as an individual.

The ultimate challenge is this: to continually generate heroic actions of happiness out of positive ideas, feelings and words that originates from a deep understanding of happiness. It also requires knowledge about the general prerequisites for happiness.

It requires a tremendous amount of

practice in the heroic

consciousness-skill as well. As we shall learn later in chapter 6, you will need to repeatedly act for a hundred days in order for your action to become a habit. And you need to sustain that habit and train for statistically 10.000 hours before you achieve virtuosity. If you become a master of heroic consciousness, it may – however – become possible to achieve virtuosity in much less time. This applies to virtually any skill. Heroic Happiness is no exception.

Mastering Heroic Happiness and sustaining it as a habit for approximately 10.000 hours requires vast amounts of positive ideas, words and feelings. How do we master the difficult discipline of Heroic Happiness? I believe that we need to regard ourselves as successful in order to generate positive ideas, words, feelings and actions. This means that we must successfully have 61

transferred something of value to others. We must believe that we are worth something to others. We cannot exist without social validation. We need proof that we have valuable skill. Our positive self-images depends on our intelligent abilities and how well we transfer positive thoughts and emotions to others.

We have examined the 7th and the 6th level of the pyramid of heroic love. The 5th level is heroic success. The following question is pursued in the next chapter; what is heroic success?

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CHAPTER THREE

Success »It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most

likely

to

be

given

the

kinds

of

special

opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” « – Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success Success is achieved when innovation has emerged and its value has been transferred. This happens when you have internally seen and designed – with imagination, attention and thoughts – and externally produced an original idea that has value. The creative idea can be original to the individual or to society as a whole, as it can have individual value or social value. Ken Robinson writes in his amazing book Out of Our Minds that »the first step is imagination, the capacity that we all have to see something in the mind’s eye. Creativity is then using that imagination to solve problems – call it applied imagination.

Then innovation is putting that creativity into practice as applied creativity.« In this sense, imagination is seeing, 63

creativity is thinking, innovation is producing and finally success becomes the final output, when value is transferred. So, without imagination, we will have no creativity, no innovation and thereby no success, happiness or love. In such a case we would have ultimate failure. Fortunately, reality does not operate in such absolute terms.

As Malcolm Gladwell points out, success and failure both have very strong feedback mechanisms. A little success or failure may very well start an avalanche of either more success or more failure – of imagination, creativity and innovation or lack of it all the same. This is what you might call an accumulative advantage or disadvantage. As in the other chapters we must distinguish sharply between the internal emergence and the external transference of what we vaguely define as »success«. I think we can all agree that success is diverse, distinct and dynamic.

However; let’s attempt to broaden our understanding and expand our ideas about success in order to systematize our approach to the following questions: how do we achieve success? What are the fundamental components of heroic success?

As it is also the case with heroic happiness, the external conditions for success are only the tip of an iceberg of the many conditions that are required to enter a state of genuine heroic success. Since success is such a vague term, I use the term heroic success to describe transference of positive thoughts and emotions. Most frequently our idea about success relates to the 64

short-term feeling of success – that is when something fortunate happens to us – or sometimes to mere monetary success. As we are about to learn, it is much more beneficial and helpful to take on a broader perspective. We ought to define success in more distinctive terms.

I find it useful to operate with five distinct types of success.

Heroic success is also a difficult discipline that rest on four pillars. There are the pillar mental success, the pillar emotional success, the pillar of social success and the pillar of physical success. On top of these four pillar one may learn to master heroic success.

THE PILLAR OF MENTAL SUCCESS Mental success is success as an idea. It is what we think about success. It is what we believe is the origin of success. It is what we think will trigger a event of success. But how do we define success?

I define success as the momentary transference of original idea that have value by means of words and actions. The experience of success can be individual (internal) or social (external). The idea and the feeling of success is completely individual, yet dependant and interrelated to social success as words about or actions of success. Internal success is, in that sense, either mental or emotional innovation, and it is a core element of our individual consciousness. External success is a 65

medium of transference that connects and transfers innovation to others. Words and actions are vessels for internal ideas and feelings. What we call external is therefore merely a secondary part of our consciousness. External words and actions are the glue that connects all people in our global consciousness. In that sense, nothing that has been conceived is external. We have only one reality, and that is our own. However; we share consciousness through external mediums of transference – through words and actions.

On a neural level these mediums of transference are called empathy- and mirror-neurons. We have special neurochemical processes that allow us to feel and think what others feel and think. When we are interacting, the neurons in our brain is always mirroring the neurons of others. We are constantly in a process of interpreting the neural activity of others, and we could not exist without this social interaction. In isolation any human being would stop its development instantly. We would be in a limbo; a state of existential suspension. We would not have developed a consciousness weren’t it for the social interaction and validation.

Our words and our actions of love, happiness and success is mediums that continuously expands our world view. They are external experiences that expand our global consciousness. As Plato said, ideas are eternal and the essence of reality; hence more real than people and things. This means that ideas and 66

emotions are the primary part of our global consciousness.

Words and actions are secondary, but without them we would have no consciousness. Reality is a product of consciousness.

Consciousness is an organic and dynamic process that can only continue to exists, as we interact with our world and other people. All the individual components of our consciousness need to be in balance for our consciousness to resonate and expand. If we cannot execute positive actions or words, then we are incapable of connecting to other human beings. This means immediate suspension of our individual development, which is most commonly causes by contradictory thoughts and emotions.

If our thoughts and emotions are out of balance, we might experience what in psychology is refer to as cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive

dissonance is naturally

best

understood

in

neurological terms. Our left hemisphere is responsible for our linear thinking mode. Our right hemisphere is responsible for our holistic thinking mode. This idea were granted to me by Jedi Master Bachir Boumaaza, who wrote in his video God is in the Neurons16 from 2011 about the linear thinking mode that: ÂťThe left cerebral hemisphere is largely responsible for creating a coherent belief system, in order to maintain a sense of continuity towards our lives. New

16

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPEdDcs_8ZQ

67

experiences get folded into the pre-existing belief system. When they don’t fit, they are simply denied.« About our holistic thinking mode, Boumaaza wrote: »Counter-balancing

this

is

the

right

cerebral

hemisphere, which has the opposite tendency. Whereas the left hemisphere tries to preserve the model, the right hemisphere is constantly challenging the status quo. When the discrepant anomalies become too large, the right hemisphere forces a revision in our world view. However, when our beliefs are too strong, the right hemisphere may succeed in overriding our denial.« The video is part of Athene’s Theory of Everything17 from 2011, which is a viral video of Bachir Boumaaza’s personal research into neuroscience. It has a million views and get loads of positive feedback and response. It is very interesting that a World of Warcraft-gamer – primarily known for being the greatest troll18 on the internet – is making this kind of semi-scientific collaboration via YouTube. Yet, I find that the quality of 17

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o From Wikipedia: In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or offtopic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary [3] intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion 18

68

Boumaaza video to be great due to its excellent presentation and simple form. I also find Boumaaza’s kamikaze-style fascinating, as he compares himself to and consider himself a successor of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. I believe that Boumaaza’s model will make him a pioneer in the new age of user-rated science that will eventually replace doctorates, Ph.D.’s and other often somewhat arbitrary university degrees.

We must assume that university degrees are meant to represent and symbolize a kind of external success. It is a stamp of approval that ought to mean: You have created something of value to others. In that sense, a degree ought to represents effectuated innovation. For instance, to be awarded a master’s degree you are supposed to make a scientific contribution – this means that you are expected to produce something new. It means to apply scientific creativity, in a sense. As I intend to argue in the following chapter, innovation is the use of imagination – of being creative and to produce an original idea that has value.

The last part is interesting. Innovation must have value to either yourself as an individual (internally) or others in a social context (externally). I like to call the internal emergence of value innovation, whereas the external transference of value is success.

Too often this seems to be an arbitrary factor, when it comes to education. Whether or not an individual get an A+ in school or get awarded a doctorate at some fancy university, this is not a guarantee for neither internal innovation, external success or the 69

emergence or transference of value of any kind. I believe that we will find just as many masters of heroic innovation and success among non-academics, as we do in a group of only university professors. The average professor do not currently create more external value than does the average individual. Our system of assessment in schools and universities will sometimes be an indicator for approximately how long an individual has studied a specific subject. However; while we are vaguely informed somewhat about the invested amount of practice, we are told absolutely nothing about focus and value. Assessment of education today tells nothing about whether or not the practice has resulted in the emergence or transference of something that has value. I will return to this problem in chapter 8, in which I will discuss the gamification of education through improved motivational design and a new social learning network called Project Navi (working title).

THE PILLAR OF EMOTIONAL SUCCESS Emotional success is success as a feeling. This is the individual internal sensation of success. There is no specific successemotion, but we may say that the feeling of success is the experience of positive emotion as a reaction to internal thoughts or external events.

Feeling love means emotionally reacting to the transference of positive emotion of varying intensity and stability. Feeling 70

happiness means individually experiencing the emergence of positive thoughts and emotion of varying intensity and stability.

Feeling success is a further narrowing down of individually experiencing positive emotions to positive emotions that arise as a result of the transference of innovation. It should be noted that an event may either cause a positive emotional reaction or a negative emotional reaction. The intensity and the stability of either positive or negative emotions may vary, but generally there is only two principal emotions. These are the positive and the negative emotion; it can have varying stability and intensity. We may experience happiness or unhappiness of varying intensity and stability. Of course the emotional experience of happiness can be narrowed down and refers to in highly specific terms. For instance, we may experience a very a specific pleasurable sensation while eating a strawberry covered in chocolate. If we feel this while someone is placing the chocolate-covered strawberry in our mouth, then we experience love as a feeling.

We experience the transference of positive emotion of varying intensity and stability – which is the transference of happiness.

Feeling success means emotionally reacting to the external transference of positive emotion. This is distinct from feeling innovation, which means reacting to the internal individually emergence of positive thoughts and emotions. Consider this example:

71

If you were to dived into the sea of imagination and return with an idea, you might want to build a house. This takes designing (creativity) and building (innovation) a house, which can cause the emergence of positive thoughts and emotions.

When the house is produced and you feel satisfied it is innovation as an emotional reaction. If someone else then decide to move into the house – be it either family, friends or strangers – and they thereby expresses gratitude in either words or actions, then you can experience positive thoughts and emotions as a reaction to the transference of innovation. This is what it means to experience success. This is an emotional reaction towards success. Happiness and innovation is internal emergence of positive emotions of varying stability/intensity. Love and success is external transference of positive emotions of varying stability/intensity.

THE PILLAR OF SOCIAL SUCCESS Social success is success as a word. This book is all about socializing positive thoughts and emotions – by which I mean the transference of positive ideas and emotions. Words and actions are the medium of thoughts and emotions. Ideas are the principal element of our consciousness, while words are merely the vessel of ideas and emotions. This is what Plato meant, when he called ideas more real than people and things. Reality only exists internally – that is in our consciousness – but reality is 72

profoundly dependant on mediums of transference. Without words and actions our consciousness would immediately dissolve. External concrete reality is actually a secondary reality that makes the internal abstract reality possible to understand.

Ideas, emotions, words and actions are interdependent and a shortage of any single component would mean the collapse of the entire system; everything is one.

In a sense, human beings are bricks in the great castle of consciousness. The bricks are our internal sense of identity, and our words and actions are the mortar that binds us all together.

Some people call it oneness – but I find this to be another vague and typically spiritual word. To speak in more precise terms, we could say that consciousness is universal. Consciousness is an expanding castle currently build from 7.013 billion bricks of ideas and feelings and a whole lot of mortar in the shape of words and actions. The birth of new people – the rise of new minds – means building the castle towers even taller. Consciousness is a momentary expression of an ever-changing unity with no center19. It is dynamic, organic and therefore constantly growing and expanding. Consciousness is the expanding universe.

THE PILLAR OF PHYSICAL SUCCESS Physical success is success as an action. An action of success is any physical transference of valuable innovation. Actions of 19

Boumaaza.

73

success are – like action of love – about external transference of positive thoughts and emotions. Actions of innovation are – like actions of happiness – concerns the internal emergence of positive thoughts and emotions. Action means the production of anything that’s externally conceivable. Acting is the 3rd level of any skill. It is the hardest part – the master level of all skills.

Have I actually learnt to do it? Learning to take action requires understanding of ideas, control of our feelings and words. Then action becomes possible. Words are always actions, and actions can take shape as written words.

The most basic principle of rhetoric is to speak directly to people’s feelings. Jedi Master Simon Sinek told us at TED in 2009 that »People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.« 20 . He talks about how great leaders inspire action. The biology and neuroscience behind rhetoric is that our motives are connected to our current belief system. Beliefs reside in our left hemisphere and more precisely in the oldest part of our brain; in the limbic brain that governs emotion, behavior, motivation and long term memory. Rational thought is governed by our left hemisphere from the frontal lobe. In Freudian terms the limbic system is the id, whereas the frontal lobe would be the superego.

In evolutionary terms, consciousness emanated with the development of the capacity for ideas in the brain. However; ideas would mean nothing in isolation. For a dynamic reality to 20

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/04/how_great_leade/

74

emanate, the ideas had to reach into the old brain, manipulate feelings and behavior, and as a consequence allowing us to communicate with words. Our map would be nothing without a compass, and our hero would be nothing without his sword and shield. That is what I call the 1st and 2nd level, which finally will lead to the 3rd level, which is taking action.

If you want to motivate people into taking action, the only way is by directly addressing their limbic brain - their feelings.

Rhetoric is about helping people beat the 1st stage of ideas and to make them share your feelings and beliefs. It is vital to accompany people all the way to and partway through the 2nd stage. Only then may they alter their patterns of action. The guideline is this: Never tell people what to do – always tell them why they should do it.

What?

How? Why ?

MASTERING HEROIC SUCCESS The discipline of Heroic Success unites success as an idea, a feeling, a word and an action. Initially it requires a deep

75

understanding about success as an idea, which means knowledge of the prerequisites for Heroic Success.

A master of heroic success understands the idea of success and has satisfied the conditions for success as an emotion and a word. He is therefore capable of performing actions of success with a high level of intensity and stability. Heroic success depends on your mastery in the skill heroic innovation that is the heart of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Innovation »Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.« – Ken Robinson Ken Robinson is an expert on creativity, innovation and intelligence. He has a very high level of social power, by which I mean

that

his

transference-skills

and

his

interpersonal

intelligence is obviously highly developed. He has attained a very sharp Sword of Courage. His ideas are powerful and convincing, he is a brilliant speaker and he never stops. Ken Robinson certainly earns the right to be a hero as well as one of my greatest Jedi Master. He has had profound impact on our global consciousness by modifying the way millions of people think about

education,

creativity,

innovation

and

intelligence.

Intelligence will be pursued in chapter five, now let’s tune our primary attention in to the concept of innovation.

Innovation means producing original ideas that has value.

Creativity means designing and developing original ideas that have value. Ideas are fish in the sea of imagination. Original ideas are rare fish that requires a special enhanced fishing-rod.

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This magical fishing-rod of ideas is naturally a trained and wellstimulated imagination.

When I was younger I used to play a lot of computer games. I loved Nintendo and played endless hours of Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda. I slept less than I played best game of all-time, Ocarina of Time, back in 1998. Later in my life gaming became an obsessive escape from reality, but it started out as a completely harmless activity. I always preferred to play adventure and fantasy role-playing games. The thing that fascinated me most was certainly magic. I preferred magical fantasy worlds over the concrete external so-called reality; actually I think I still do. Not to imply that I dislike the external world; it is just not where I mostly reside. Like all philosophers I live in the world of ideas, and sometimes I visit reality. This might sound strangely detached, but I do not mean to sound arrogant. I simply have my head in the clouds. The reason for this is extraordinarily simple: we continually do, what we do best; we do best, what we have been doing for the longest period of time. Eventually I will have trained my concrete abilities to compensate for this character-trait. All this makes best sense on a neural level.

As

already

mentioned,

we

strengthen

specific

neural

connections every time we practice our five senses either internally or externally. Due to the fact that these processes have too many factors to possibly control, we will naturally develop 78

stronger neural connection representing either our internal or external sensory activity. Even before we are born, we start practicing our internal and external senses. From the first time we hear and feel the heartbeat of our mother, we start practicing and strengthening our neural connections. Every conscious moment is part of our training, and there is nothing we can do to change that fact. For a while I have been wondering; when exactly do the training start?

The

first

human

brain

waves

can

be

measured

at

approximately the 6th week of pregnancy. In between the 24th and the 28th week, it is commonly acknowledged that consciousness with its highly elaborate content has emerged. I believe that it is from this point and on, we are being drawn towards the five flowers. At this time we start practicing our internal senses, the mind’s eye and our emotions. We also begin to practice or external senses – our hearing and feeling at first. After birth we train our sight, smell and taste as well. The interesting thing is that most people have a tendency towards practicing their external senses in a predominant way. Jedi Master David Keirsey21 notices that about 80 percent of all people are concrete communicators. 20 percent of us are abstract communicators.

He focuses on what is observable and leaves the guesswork to the rest of us. I believe that this observable inclination in human

21

http://www.keirsey.com/4temps/overview_temperaments.asp

79

behavior can be traced back to neural stimulation probably even before birth.

If you mainly practice your external senses, your words and actions, then you are bound to become a concrete communicator.

This is one, who can be observed to speak mostly about concrete phenomena. Not that you can’t talk or think abstractly; this just becomes secondary and selective. Thinking in abstraction becomes an active redirection of attention. Your attentionautopilot becomes automatically aware of concrete phenomena.

Abstraction becomes a secondary preoccupation. This is unless it is trained to counterbalance your concrete attention-autopilot.

This works both ways, and it makes perfect sense that there are fewer people with an abstract autopilot of attention. Even though ideas are the essence of reality, they are still not as visible as most concrete phenomena.

Special circumstances is normally required for an individual to enter the world of ideas early in childhood. I don’t know what made me inclined to think and talk in abstract terms – perhaps it was simply due to my excessive gaming. Could gaming be training our abstract attention-autopilot? Jedi Master Jane McGonigal would be very pleased to see my theory verified 22.

She believes that games trains our urgent optimism, our social fabric, engages us in blissful productivity and gives us a chance

22

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

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of epic win. I will return to the gamification of our external transference mediums through social networking in chapter 8.

It should be noted that the ideal state is always balance. It is neither best to be concrete or abstract, since both personalities have special strengths and weaknesses. Practicing your concrete external and abstract internal neural connections equally will unlock the achievement heroic consciousness. Innovation consist – as do the other components in the Law of Heroic Love – of five different elements. There are the pillar of mental innovation, the pillar of emotional innovation, the pillar of social innovation and the pillar of physical innovation. Finally these four pillars support the developments of the specific neural connections that represent the heroic innovation.

THE PILLAR OF MENTAL INNOVATION Mental innovation is innovation as an idea. It can seem similar to the idea of success, however, there is a vital difference. Success is the external transference of positive experiences to others, whereas innovation is the internal emergence of positive experiences. You have to experience the emergence of a positive emotion, before it can become transferred to others. When a creative idea becomes valuable to you, it is innovation.

Innovation is the fuel of success.

The cup of happiness or innovation, which is somewhat more specific, has to overflow. This has to happen before you can 81

transfer happiness or to others. Remember that happiness is any positive emotion, while innovation is specific positive emotions that have emerged as a result of the production of an original idea that has value. Love is the transference of any positive emotion. In this sense, any positive emotion have to emerge internally before it can be transferred externally. This is the art of heroic

love

and

the

ultimate

challenge.

Understanding

innovation as an idea, is a vital part of this challenge.

THE PILLAR OF EMOTIONAL INNOVATION Emotional innovation is innovation as a feeling. It is the emergence of positive emotions as a reaction to innovation. As mentioned – innovation means to produce an original idea that has value. Creativity means diving into the sea of imagination to retrieve a rare fish, which is original ideas. Catching rare fish requires a special fishing-rod, which is trained and wellstimulated imagination. Remember that a vivid imagination is simply a matter of practicing special neural connections.

For instance, we can experience a positive emotional reaction while we are being creative (while using our intelligence), and we may experience positive emotion, when we produce creative ideas. We may once again experience positive emotion as a reaction to the transference of value to others. The latter is success as a feeling, while the positive emotional reaction to the production of creative ideas may be called innovation as a feeling.

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The essential distinction is between emergence and transference.

Innovation is an emerging element like happiness. Happiness is an umbrella term and so are innovation, but innovation is somewhat more narrow. Love and success is mediums of transference. If there are no positive emotion transferred, it can never be called authentic love or success.

THE PILLAR OF SOCIAL INNOVATION Social innovation is innovation as a word. When we use words to produce an original idea that has value, then we may speak of innovative words. I write this book hoping that my words are innovative. If I succeed in causing the emergence of positive emotion internally – that is inside myself – then I have created something of internal value. This is sufficient for me to call my words innovative words, since they already have value to myself.

Yet – I also hope that this book will transfer value (positive thoughts and emotions) to others. That will be words of success.

If I caused no original value to emerge whatsoever, then I would have completely wasted my time.

It should be noted that in order to make money, the only safe road is to serve others something of value. This is probably the most essential of Jedi Master Richard St John’s 8 keys to success23. Serving others means transference of value, which is vital. Innovation is therefore rarely profitable until it is made 23

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_st_john_s_8_secrets_of_success.html

83

transferable. This might explain, why so many talented musicians never get the amount of attention their talent really deserves. This is a matter of Social Power, which is one of my gamified intelligence types that I will analyze and explain more comprehensively in Chapter Five.

THE PILLAR OF PHYSICAL INNOVATION Physical innovation is innovation as an action. This is the last step in the practice of Heroic Innovation. This means the physical – or digital – production and emergence of a creative idea. The physical level is the 3rd level, while feelings and words are the 2nd and ideas is the 1st level.

Initially I thought about this book. That was at the 1st level – which can involve both imagination and creativity and internal innovation. Then I talked about my ideas, and that meant the emergence of both positive optimistic emotions and negative nervous emotions – I felt overwhelmed by the potential of my idea. This was the 2nd level. Now I am writing a book. I’m 23 years old and I have already made it to the 3rd level. I feel a bit proud of myself, while perfectly aware that there is still a long way to mastering the next levels: I have beaten the tutorial of Heroic Consciousness as well as stage 1: Heroic Intelligence and almost stage 2: Heroic Innovation. Now – I must turn my attention towards stage 3: Heroic Success, and later the time will

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come for stage 4: Heroic Happiness. Someday, I intend to beat the final stage 5. I will be a master of Heroic Love.

MASTERING HEROIC INNOVATION Heroic Innovation is innovation that unites the idea, the feeling, the word and the action of innovation. The process are composed of three stages. It looks like this: Ideas → feelings/words → actions.

Heroic Innovation is an emergence-skill just like Heroic Happiness. This skill-type is opposed to transference-skills such as Heroic Success and Heroic Love. These two types of skills are all about controlling positive experiences. Like any skill, Heroic Innovation requires vast amount of practice in specific innovative fields. These are what I call the different aesthetic means of expression: there are 5 external senses and their 5 internal counterparts. Closely related to aesthetic expression is the five different types of Intelligence. Most innovation requires excellence in at least one type of intelligence. Actually I find the word intelligence rather boring. That is why I use a gamified term as a substitute – intelligence is Powers.

I operate with five distinct Powers. There are Mental Power, Emotional Power, Social Power, Physical Power and finally Heroic Power. In order to master the emergence-skill of Heroic Innovation one must first achieve excellence in one or more

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Powers. Heroic Power is the most effective road to Heroic Innovation and ultimately the path towards Heroic Love.

I use to be sad that there were no magic in my external world.

I now believe that it is possible to create miracles both internally and externally. We can manipulate reality, if we make use of our amazing natural capacities – it is time to summon the Five Powers.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Intelligence »Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to

create

the

circumstances

where

they

show

themselves. « – Ken Robinson Intelligence is Powers. I use the word Powers, because the Law of Universal Love has a gamified counterpart. It is the Law of Epic Win. This proposes two new questions – what does gamification mean? And what is an Epic Win? Jedi Master Jesse Schnell of the Google-alliance tell us that gamification means improving motivational design 24 . This is closely connected to Einstein’s mantra »If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.« This means that the best gamification requires the deepest understanding. Only the very best of words will do. If we want as many people as possible to understand intelligence and learning, then we have to translate the problem into motivating and exciting gameterminology without compromising value. Is that even possible?

Of course it is – we simply have to be creative.

24

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PkUgCiHuH8

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Karim Maktabi, who is currently teaching me the art of Hero Training, tells us that learning must be exciting. This is the essence of games as well as it should be the essence of learning.

Learning must be pleasurable. That is why Jesse Schnell talks about The Pleasure Revolution, which will be led by games 25 .

Bringing pleasure into learning and play into work means freedom to practice your passion. This is the first part of the revolution. Furthermore, we need to be met by high expectations.

Therefore, play must not replace work; they must be complimentary factors. Right now society prize much work and little play. I believe we ought to prize balance.

Jedi Master Adora Svitak talks about this matter at the IdeaCity Conference in 201026. She was only 13-years old at that time, and she is the world’s youngest teacher and a published author at the age of 7. She made a great impression on me saying that »when expectations are low, trust me, we [kids] will sink to them.« I believe this works both ways. High expectations are vital to the learning process. We need »Freedom – not license« as proposed and practices by A. S. Neill at Summerhill 27 (see Chapter Two about happiness). This is just another way of advocating balance between work and play. Work must be play, and play must be work. Neither will function in isolation, and they will be highly inefficient whenever they are out of balance.

25

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PkUgCiHuH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-usx5krd6w 27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School 26

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Jedi Master Salman Khan founded the Khan Academy and has made profound impact on learning. Salman Khan is largely responsible for speeding up the process of what is generally known as flipping the classroom in schools 28 . In short, this means that lectures are given at home through video material and “homework� is done at school. I believe that this is a vital step towards the future of education. School should be a place of doing, not mere listening. Listening is the least effective way of learning, and completely useless when it is not even voluntary. I believe that the ultimate learning process is: 1) Meaningful to the learner. This means that the idea must connect with a feeling through a purpose. A forced learning process is extremely slow and superficial. 2) Learning must be aesthetic. The more senses that are involved, the better. Listening to abstract facts is by far the most inefficient, because it connects with only one sense, which is hearing. Video lectures provide audio visual stimulation, and is thereby only exceeded by real life demonstration and interactive learning that integrates use of the whole body.

Teaching others is ultimately the best way of learning. I have an idea for a social learning network that will be founded on these basic principles. I will return to this idea and discuss it comprehensively in Chapter 10.

One of the most powerful Jedi Master I have met is Sir Ken Robinson. He writes that intelligence is Âťdiverse, dynamic and 28

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

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distinct29. Intelligence is diverse, because we think and feel in so many different ways. We think and feel with all our senses, both internally and externally. Howard Gaardner was among the first to effectively address this through his theory of multiple intelligences. His theory has since its introduction in 1983 made a profound impact on schools worldwide, because it was socially transferable. The theory has proven to hold much social potential, and most teachers today is aware of the different aesthetic processes of learning. The multiple intelligence has been attempted to made simple – a kind of gamification has taken place, in a sense – and it is my experience that many kids know about it. Or at least they know that it is possible to be word smart (linguistic), logic smart (logical-mathematical), music smart, body smart (kinesthetic), picture smart (spatial), nature smart (naturalistic), people smart (interpersonal) and self smart (intrapersonal). The primary strength in Howard Gaardners work is that he focuses primarily on sensory modalities rather than a specific general ability. The common conception of a fixed IQ is in great contrast to what we know about intelligence today.

Our abilities are wonderfully diverse, as we can relate to abstract ideas and feelings through all aesthetic medias of expression.

Intelligence is dynamic, because it is always in a continual process of development. Virtually nothing is de-learned.

Everything can be recreated through mind training or even 29

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

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hypnosis. All thoughts and emotions are stored either in our consciousness or sub-consciousness. Neuroscience tells us that learning is always possible in any field, and it is only a matter of focused practice. The fact that the brain is an organic structure makes it possible for us to constantly re-wire it, as Jedi Master Michael Merzenich expresses it30. Everything we do is part of our neurological development. This feature of our conscious development is called brain plasticity. We are constantly strengthening neurological connections. Positive as well as negative ideas and feelings are stored in the brain. When we are exposed to words or action our mirror-neurons copy them immediately and transforms then into corresponding thoughts and emotions. Whereas negative emotions slows any learning process, positive emotions will speed it up incredibly. This is why punishment never makes people change. Punishment is hate; it is anti-love. Punishment is the transference of negative ideas and emotions. Consequence is not the same as punishment.

Punishment is negative consequence. Reward is positive consequence. Applying negative consequence is like fighting fire with fire. You ought to always extinguish fire with water. Antilove must be counterbalanced with love. A child who appears to be anti-loving is always the unhappy child, the uninspired child – or both. All kids are crying for love and stimulation. That is positive words and actions, excitement and empowerment. The 30

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html

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more, the better. Anti-love only enforces the already existing anti-love – it turns into the ancient old vicious circle. The only way to make people change their behavior into positive actions is by planting positive seeds; by planting positive words and feelings, by means of love. This is true for kids as well as adults.

Make people feel positive emotions – only then shall we observe positive change in human behavior. You will make no one think or

feel

positively

by

planting

negative

words

in

their

consciousness. Authority means fear and punishment. It means anti-love, and we ought to rid our schools of it. The only way to make people learn effectively is to give them endless amounts of love. It is also a principle of infinite patience among teachers. A problem child is our problem. It means that we are failing at giving the child either love or stimulation. We can always love, or at least cease from giving the child any anti-love. If we as teachers run out of ideas for stimulation and challenges, then the child deserves a new teacher in order to not hinder his or hers personal (neurological) development. The curious, imaginative child should always be rewarded with endless love. We ought to prize imagination and creativity – not squander it.

Finally intelligence is distinct. By this Ken Robinson means that we have natural aptitude for very different things. This is connected to our own individual passion, which Ken Robinson elaborates on in his book The Element: How Finding Your Passions Changes Everything. However – it seems to me that 92

Ken Robinson finds that our passions is a prefixed natural talent, which we ought to find and pursue. Dr. David Keirsey also seems to

suggest

that

people

are

born

into

a

certain

fixed

»temperament« that determines our future to some degree.

While passion and temperament are two useful terms for drawing our attention towards an urgent problem, they don’t solve the problem in its entirety. We are different, we have different natural aptitudes, but – we are not all predestined from birth into a specific function in society. This might be a statistic guideline, but we must take a hidden background variable into consideration: We do best, what we have been doing for the longest period of time.

When you have ordered one piece of »consciousness«, it does not come with different personality bundles called either the Artisan, the Guardian, the Idealist or the Rational temperament.

No force has created some pre-determined individual destiny, in which you were always meant to be a rocket scientist or a visual designer. These temperaments are merely an indicator for what kind of neural connections in our brain that are strongest at one given moment. Temperament indicate balance or imbalance.

Keisey’s observations are meaningful to the point that people statistically exceeds in the specific kinds of intellectual activity, which they have always been good at – and therefore have practiced the most. Twenty years of ineffective practice in Artisan-specific activities such as crafting or entertaining, might 93

make you a mediocre Artisan in Keirsey’s Temperament Sortertest.

Meanwhile

a

hundred

days

of

efficient

conscious

counterbalancing training in scienctific activities might suddenly turn you into a Rationalist. Preferably both, which means being a Hero. It means to counterbalance a strong neural connection, by strengthening its opposites equally. We can all be heroes – I believe we just need to realize it.

So, as you can imagine I believe that we can learn to do virtually anything. We can accomplish far more than we ourselves can imagine – therefore we need to unite our imaginations to dream and design the ultimate training. This is learning to master the difficult discipline of Heroic Love. The next step is to understand our wonderfully diverse, dynamic and distinct intelligences. While Howard Gardner proposed eight types of intelligence (possible with room for more specific ones), I intent to unify the multiple intelligence theory in more universally meaningful terms. As you remember, I call intelligences Powers and I operate with four pillars supporting the last one. There is the Pillar of Mental Power, the Pillar of Emotional Power, the Pillar of Social Power, the Pillar of Physical Power. Finally there is the unifying concept of Heroic Power.

We

must

understand

ourselves

and

our

own

extraordinary capacities in order to achieve happiness. We must rewrite our definition of intelligence if we are to master Heroic Love.

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THE PILLAR OF MENTAL POWER Mental Power is the emergence of ideas. It determines the power of our ideas. It is about how abstract we are capable of thinking.

Mental Power is connected to primarily linguistic and logicalmathematical. Secondarily it relates to spatial and musical intelligence. David Keirsey calls it our capacity to perform strategic operations. Mental Power is primarily about languages and mathematic. Mental Power is governed by the new part of our brain. Mental power is governed by the outer layers of our frontal lobes in the left hemisphere. Like all powers – it is a multitude of certain neural connection that can be strengthened by practice.

Mental Power is the fuel for our ideas. It determines how deep we may dive into the sea of imagination. It determines the magnitude of our dreams and ambitions. In that sense, Mental Power is our Map – it tells us, where we can go. The more we explore, the more we may expand the map. But I do not mean a mental map of knowledge – I mean of a generally expanding world view. It is a mental map of an expanding consciousness.

Mental Power is the essence of all the others powers – it is the gift of human consciousness. Mental Power is the capacity of building the future. I once felt that there were no magic in this world. I was wrong. Mental Power is our magical capacity for manipulating the forces of reality. Dreams are our spells.

Master Yoda might be a fictional character – but The Force is 95

real. In Star Wars Episode IV Yoda is known for saying these following immortal words about the Force: »Its energy surrounds us, and binds us […] Luminous being are we, not this crude matter.« The Force originates in Mental Power.

THE PILLAR OF EMOTIONAL POWER Emotional Power is the power of our feelings. By utilizing ideas, we may learn to control our emotions. We may learn to emphasize positive emotions and reject negative emotions.

Emotional Power is like our Compass – it directs us towards the greatest treasures. Emotional Power and the control of our feelings is not a matter of psychological repression, because you are actively registering the negative emotions. We are listening to our emotions and nut shutting ours ears. In this case emotions will not be stored deep in your unconscious, but will be like beautiful shooting stars guiding us through darkness. This is what Matthieu Ricard refers to as Mind Training 31 . It might sound strange, but remember that emotions are not in our heart.

Emotions are governed by our limbic brain, that is also responsible for behavior. Mind training directly draws upon the principles of brain plasticity. You are constantly capable of practicing the art of Mind Training – and the principles are simple. The main one is this: You cannot experience both a negative and a positive emotion at the same time. Consequently, 31

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMf9k8IyHQU

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some Buddhist monks – or “olympic champions of mind training”, as Matthieu Ricard call them humorously – invented the concept of antidotes for negative emotions. A negative emotional emotion may be absorbed by a mental synthesis of positive counter-emotion. This gets really interesting, as the monks of different levels of meditation were places in brain scanners and exposes to sensory inputs. A study from 2004 suggests that mental training »may induce short-term and longterm neural changes.« 32 It suggests that monks, who have meditated for 10.000 hours have significantly different brain structure than the novice monks. This means excessive control of their emotional reactions. As the study shows, it clearly requires a powerful well-trained imagination and vast amounts of practice.

It is perhaps made more clear through an example: A person skips the queue in the local supermarket. Normally this would cause most people to respond with negative thoughts and emotions of low intensity. In some cases people will react with negative words. There are only two possible scenarios – either the person has a good reason for skipping the queue or he has no reason. Consequently we may choose to view him as an anti-social nuisance or we may use our imagination and choose to construct a different story. This person might be in a rush because his wife is pregnant. It is unlikely, but that is beside the point. The point is that it is a powerful skill to reject negative 32

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC526201/?rendertype=abstract

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emotional influence. Giving this man a gentle smile would probably be the greatest challenge – yet the most profitable for the total amount of happiness in the universe. I know this could sound strange and culturally unusual. However – if our goal is to sustain and transfer positive thoughts and emotions to others then we ought to try and resolve such a situation with patience, humor and positive words and actions. Whenever we desire it, we may change the trivial scenes of our day-to-day lives of into fantastic social experiences. In any case, we should start by practicing not letting such events have a negative influence on our individual emotional state. We can learn to synthesize happiness in any given situation. This will absorb and dissolve negative emotions – simply by the power of thought. Remember it takes practice, and deep understanding of our consciousness.

Emotional Power is about emergence. Mental Power is the catalyst in the training of our capacity for synthesizing internal happiness. Emotional Power is the fuel. And we need happiness in order to do anything. Happiness is the fuel of all positive forces. Controlling this is highly desirable.

Whereas Mental Power is the catalyst that summons synthesized (magical) positive emotions, Emotional Power is the fuel that increases the intensity and stability of our positive emotions. The more we practice and master Emotional Power, the longer are we able to sustain strong positive emotions. This is a fundamental requirement for learning the transference-skills of 98

Social Power and Physical Power. Mental Power and Emotional Power are emergence-skills that fuels the transference. We need both an element and a medium for it to be transferred.

Emotional

Power

is

primarily

associated

with

the

intrapersonal intelligence. David Keirsey identifies this as a natural aptitude for diplomatic operations. Having trained your Emotional Power predominantly would thus place you in the Idealist temperament. Having a well trained Emotional Power will according to Keirsey make you (statistically) inclined to favor diplomatic

operations

most

and

tactical

(Social

Power)

operations the least. Emotional Power is about empathy and reading people’s thoughts and emotions. It is vital to master Mental Power to some degree in order to unleash the full potential of Emotional Power.

THE PILLAR OF SOCIAL POWER Social Power is the about transference of positive experiences through words. It draws upon a strong basis in either Emotional Power and/or Mental Power. Without no ideas or feelings, there will be nothing for any words to transfer. We have a Map and a Compass – Social Power is our Sword. We can use it to rally our allies and fight great challenges. Remember that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This means that the more diverse your intellectual training is, the more powerful and potent is both the emergence- and the transference-skills. We 99

need both the Map, the Compass, the Sword and eventually the Shield, which is Physical Power.

For instance, 10% in Mental Power, 10% in Emotional Power, 10% in Social Power and 10% in Physical power would be more externally powerful than 90% in Mental Power and a zero percent in all the rest. Your most powerful transference-skill determines the maximum capacity for transference. You might feel and see the most extraordinary inner images that evokes the most powerful internal emotions – yet if you have developed little or no transference-skills it will be impossible to share with others. A 90% mental capacity and zero in the rest would probably be a severe case of autism. While not being good at communicating, you are still capable of beating a supercomputer in chess.

David Keirsey relates the Social Power to tactical operations.

It is about what works, about improvisation and a genuine feel for interaction. In the Chapter about gamification (Chapter 9) I will attempt to unify all these aspects of Social Power into new exciting terminology.

THE PILLAR OF PHYSICAL POWER Physical Power is the our actions. It is also our endurance and our Shield. With our Map, our Compass and our Shield, we may storm forward – we may strike with great force and great precision – yet without the Shield, we may easily be shaken. We 100

may lose balance. The Shield is our final artifact. The Map is our catalyst, showing us possibilities. The Compass is guiding us through the overwhelming darkness of the mind. The Sword allows us to strike with great force and intensity. The Shield is adding stability to our Heroic Power. When all these are united, we may finally begin to master Heroic Love.

THE PILLAR OF HEROIC POWER This brings us to the ultimate unifying intelligence: Heroic Power. Ideas generate dreams, and dreams are spells of possibility. Feelings are our mana, the fuel for casting spells.

Words are the materialization of our spells – our spells become part of everybody’s reality. When our words and actions becomes habits, we have attained a high level of endurance. Remaining strong for a longs period of time means endurance. We may now sustain the channeling of our spells for a long time. At this point, we have learned to control all the Four Classical Elements: Water, Fire, Air and Earth.

Controlling

the

four

elements

means

balancing

your

temperament as well as retrieving the Four Artifacts: The Map, the Compass, the Sword and the Shield. This is the beginning of our Heroic Journey. As with anything in this world, this journey is a long one. By now, you would have the fundamental understanding of our extraordinary human capacities. Yet – it requires vast amounts of practice to ever accomplish this. The 101

following chapter is about the vital importance of practice and focus. It asks the vital questions: How much practice is needed to acquire virtuosity? What is attention and focus – how is it controlled?

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CHAPTER SIX

Practice »Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good. « – Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success Life is an abstract concept. It is a product of reality, which emanated with the awakening of our global consciousness. We would have no life and no reality, without a shared consciousness. In isolation – without no exchange of words and actions between human beings – consciousness would not be able to exists. Ideas are the essence of reality. Our consciousness is a product of evolution and the development in our brain, which is constantly changing. Planting the right seeds is about planting powerful ideas. Consciousness is constantly expanding with the universe, because human beings will keep on pushing the limits of our perceptions and understanding until the end of days. We can’t help it. It is deep within our nature – this urge for a deeper understanding of ourselves and reality. We have no choice, but to construct an identity from the current ideas available in our minds. But mostly our ideas are paradoxical and impossible to grasp. We have a flawed paradigm of identity, as noted by Chiren

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Boumaaza (aka Athene) in God is in the Neurons 33 . By constructing our identity from events of the past and by fixing ourselves on specific desired futures, we forget what we really are. From a scientific point of view we may see ourselves as »a momentary expression of an ever-changing unity with no centre«.

In this new world view, failures of the past would simply be mere errors that were to be evaluated. As we register errors, our techniques were to be improved. Thomas Edison commented on this by saying: »I have not failed. I’ve just found 10.000 ways that won’t work.«. Ken Robinson is quoted for putting it differently: »If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original«. It is of vital importance that we learn to accept errors. This will be made possible, when we assume a more healthy conception of identity. Besides, I believe that we ought to banish the word failure from any serious discussion. It is a moral judgment that often have devastating consequences to the learning process. Getting an F in school makes people feel like bad persons. We should instead focus on being descriptive, encouraging and empowering. This is also a vital point in Ken Robinsons learning revolution 34 . Judging anyone is anti-love. It is hate and we ought to think twice whenever we make use of negative anti-loving words and actions.

33 34

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPEdDcs_8ZQ http://jamesmichie.com/blog/2012/02/sir-ken-robinson-leading-a-learning-revolution/

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I define practice as the strengthening of specific neural connections. Because this is really what it is. Everything we do is practice. When we are being pessimistic, we train our brain into becoming more negatively adjusted. Our attention-autopilot can be either positive or negative, internal or external and it is always a matter of neural activity and exercise. If we conceive ourselves as reserved and pessimistic, we ought to know that we have likely been sluggishly practicing our internal and negative autopilot. The good thing is that focus practice is a hundred times more effective than random practice. Aristotle said that »we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit«. What he meant was that everyone can train to become excellent. We have to train our mind as well as our muscle.

Another saying is that it takes a hundred days to form a habit. I believe that this is an average general rule and that we can do it much faster. Jedi Master Malcolm Gladwell introduces us to the 10.000 hour-rule 35 . He studied a whole bunch of successful talented people – including the Beatles, Mozart and Bill Gates – and concluded that statistically it takes 10.000 hours to become a master of any skill. I believe that with Heroic Practice, we may increase our performance in practice vastly. I am certain that virtuosity can be achieved 10 x faster if we learn to focus our attention. Practicing with 100% attention, would mean a drastic increase in performance. That is what is the essence of mastering 35

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

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Heroic practice. It is the balance between Mental Practice, Emotional Practice, Social Practice and Physical Practice.

PILLAR OF MENTAL PRACTICE Mental practice if practice of ideas. It is about beginning to think differently. We live in an extremely chaotic world, yet we try to establish order. Life is meaningless, yet we seek to purpose.

Reality is complex, yet we seek understanding. We want success and love, but we need creativity, innovation and happiness – while most of us do not truly understand any of these ideas.

Everything is a paradox and we are constantly split in two camps.

Our two hemispheres are fighting each other far more often than they seem to be co-operating. Is it our curse or is it our blessing?

Way too many people feel cursed, and we ought to redeem this curse. I believe we have an urgent need to share the same Map – we ought to share our powerful ideas. The internet and social media are amazing for this purpose. Never before have we had greater chances for making universal love possible. People tend to forget that we make history every day. What is trivial today may be legendary tomorrow.

Practice requires focus – and focus requires practice. There you go, another paradox. However, this might be not be an impossible equations through our new world view. If we live independently from the past, which is no longer part of us – but merely a report of our previous brain activity – then we can 106

immediately choose to actively start practicing focus. It is a decision that we are capable of making, as soon as we start to realize the extraordinary power of ideas.

PILLAR OF EMOTIONAL PRACTICE Emotional practice is practicing our feelings. It is about taking control of feelings in order to amplify the positive emotions and not be influences unnecessarily (irrationally) by negative emotions. We are practicing our emotions unknowingly at all times. The challenge is to practice controlling emotions actively and focused. This skill draws on mastery of Mental Practice. With no strong ideas, it will be impossible to actively train you mind and your feelings.

PILLAR OF SOCIAL PRACTICE Social practice is practicing words. If you wield powerful ideas and master your emotions, then it is possible to practice your words extremely focused. With focus comes less errors it seem – it is a more direct form of practice. Sluggish practice means many errors and corrections, whereas focused practice means no interruption and a strong sense of possibility and direction. With a highly detailed Map and a powerful magical Compass (strong internal powers) practice of any transference-skill becomes more efficient. I may be possible – yet no very efficient to learn how to fight with a Sword with no sight and no hearing, using only you 107

intuition. It may also be difficult to learn if you senses are in dissonance and guiding you in opposite directions. However – if you train you internal senses so they are aligned, in balance and resonating – then using the Sword will come easy to you.

Hypnosis can remove cognitive dissonance and make us capable of incredible things. We can also practice and learn this skill ourselves. Practicing words is part of the 2nd stage – transfering positive energy through action is the final stage.

PILLAR OF PHYSICAL PRACTICE Physical practice is about practicing action. It is the hardest part.

As mentioned, we train our ideas, our feelings, our words and our actions all the time – just without thinking consciously about it. If we want to focus our practice and make it a hundred times more efficient, we must learn about Physical Practice and its prerequisites. It is the 3rd stage, and hence the toughest challenge. To master Physical Practice draws upon your Mental Practice, your Emotional Practice and

your Social Practice.

Focused practice is only achieved Physically if the fundamental skills are trained in advance.

Life is a game, and we are the players. Progressing is only possible if the challenges we meet are balanced to our individual Power levels. Most challenges we meet are awfully imbalanced.

We are being continually forced into the greatest challenges of life with virtually no fundament. Writing a simple job application 108

can be a tremendous challenge if you have low endurance, no Shield and therefore low Physical Power. This imbalance – however – does not mean that you are not a potential mastermind, jazz musician or General of the national army.

MASTERING HEROIC PRACTICE It is said that we use only 10 percent of our brains capacity. This might even be an exaggeration. Take hypnosis for instance – it is possible for some people to retrieve the most deeply hidden memories and experiences when their attention is sufficiently focused.

Life is a game – it ought to be played. Life is not a duty, it is a gift. This does not mean that you should respond with gratitude.

This is the wrong challenge to give yourself. The first challenge must this: Dare to do something new until it feels natural. Doing something new means exploring the sleeping parts of your brain.

This is what Ken Robinson refers to as finding your element. He means that we should start by discovering our neural connections that have once been exercised, but is now asleep. It is about balancing the challenges to your individual player level. I believe that finding the right challenges will be made a lot easier through a new social learning network. I will return to this idea in Chapter 9.

The key to learning Heroic Practice lies in understanding how our brain works. It is about focus and attention. We ought to 109

discover our own current level of neurological development. We must examine closely what artifacts (Map, Compass, Sword and Shield) we have already acquired and which ones we still need to attain. Some people might have a really detailed Map – which would mean a high level of Mental Power – yet very underdeveloped Social Power and/or Physical Power; hence no Sword and Shield. This case means no well-developed transference skills. This does not exclude one from being a master of Emotional Power – but with only emergence-skills one will feel like something vital is missing. Which would in that case be true. We need Heroic Power, which means a unifying balance between all our neurological capacities.

The final part in the Law of Universal Love is discovering your personality type. Personality types appears in a thousand different shapes though out history – they are called Creatures, Humors, Temperaments, Elements and many other names.

Common for all these designations is that they refer to the balance of neural activity and the strengths and weakness’ of neural connections. Knowing your own starting point and what neural connections are the strongest and which are not – that is the key to learning focused practice. It is the key to start mastering the immensely difficult discipline of Heroic Love. In order to achieve this, we have to plant the right seeds. This will allow the growth of the Five Flowers. Our training and the Heroic Adventure is almost about to begin.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Temperament »If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.« – Aristotle For thousands of years the great thinkers of humanity has found it useful to divide people into four distinct personality types. Ken Robinson write in his book The Element, that being in your element is a metaphor for »the point at with natural talent meets personal passion«. I wonder why he does not explicitly talk about the fact that there are four different classical elements. There are fire, water, air and earth. The elements are closely related to the four humors, which are the choleric, the phlegmatic, the sanguine and the melancholic.

We can trace this back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, from where the four humors later would spread all over the world. The Greek physician Hippocrates turned the ancient four humors theory into a medical theory. About a hundred years earlier we meet Ezekiel’s four living creatures: Man, Eagle, Lion and Ox. Later we meet Plato’s four characters and Aristotle’s four sources of happiness; Galen’s four temperaments; Paracelcus’ four totem spirits; Adickes’ four world views; Spränger’s four mistaken goals, Kretschmer’s four character styles; Fromm’s four 111

orientations; Myers Jungian types and recently David Keirsey’s four temperaments. An overview of the historical development can be found at Wikipedia (footnote)36.

We see strong counterparts for the four temperaments in virtually all different philosophical and religious traditions – including Taoism, Hinduism and Sufism. Similarities can be found in the Enneagram of Personalities and it is said that both The Freemasons and Knights Templers have trained their people under strong influence of the four temperaments theory.

This book is called the Five Flowers. We ought to associate our temperament with something colorful, potent and capable of growing when it is nurtured. Each flower shares name with gemstones, because of their immense value. The Five Flowers are is the greatest treasures we may find. There are the Blue Sapphire, the Green Emerald, the Red Ruby, the Yellow Topaz and finally the White Crystal.

At birth you start drinking the extracts from the Five Flowers.

Since it is virtually impossible to equally stimulate all the senses of a newborn baby, almost all people will develop an imbalance in neurochemical processes very early in childhood. Minor imbalances are hardly noticeable, while major imbalances are given various diagnoses. This in simply due to the fact that when a sense is exercised, the neurochemical connections between the two 36

hemispheres

that

governs

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the

specific

sense

are

strengthened. This might be exactly what Hippocrates looked for, when dissecting bodies and measuring humors. Every time our thoughts, feelings or senses are stimulated either internally or externally we exercise and strengthen a certain connection in the brain. This makes us better at exactly the activities we engage in.

The strengthening of a neural connection is sustained for exactly as long as we keep engaging ourselves in any activity.

I believe that we can exercise our senses both internally and externally. In that sense, we have ten exercisable senses. There are internal seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling, and there are external seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling.

The primary exercise of our senses is conscious. As I will return to in Chapter 8 our consciousness consist of imagination, attention and thoughts. We have two mental tracks of conscious attention – primary and secondary attention. On top of our attention is our thoughts. I believe that we can either speak or think, while we still utilize our primary and secondary attention.

Secondary attention can be split in two or three mental tracks – maybe more. For instance, you may be reading this book using your external seeing in the track of your primary attention, while generating internal images as a response to metaphors with your internal seeing in the track of your secondary attention. A percentage of your secondary attention may also be drawn or disturbed by external sensory elements, either taking your attention or splitting it in different tracks.

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Underneath these dual layers of consciousness is the sea of imagination. In the sea of imagination lies all our unconscious motives

and

all

our

inactive

memories

and

repressed

experiences. By means of fantasizing – that is the use of our mind’s eye – we may dive into this ocean of forgotten memories and return with ideas. In the act of diving into our imagination we use our internal seeing for diving as well as our internal hearing for retrieving ideas. Using our imagination require us to direct our primary attention inwards and towards either the past or the future.

The extracts from the Blue Sapphire, and the Green Emerald pulls us towards favoring our internal senses, while the Red Ruby and the Yellow Topaz draws our attention outwards. The Green Emerald and the Red Ruby makes us hot-tempered, while the Blue Sapphire and the Yellow Topaz makes us calm, cool and easy-going. In terms of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter we would call the Blue and the Green for primarily abstract communicators as opposed to the Red and the Yellow that are primarily concrete communicators.

THE BLUE SAPPHIRE The Blue Sapphire favors the idea. Ideas are the essence of reality; hence more real than people and things. Ideas are the most complex part of our brain, and they are the origin of

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everything. Ideas are the force that makes our global consciousness and the universe continuously expand.

Dr. David Keirsey has observed people for more than fifteen years, and he names this dominant inclination the Rational temperament. He seemingly views it as something fixed, while I see it as a starting point for further neurological development.

He reports that the Rationals are scarce, comprising as little as approximately 5 to 10 percent of the population37. This means that 5 to 10 percent of the world population has at least acquired a Map. If you have a dominant inclination towards favoring ideas, the internal world, rational reasoning and strategic operations, then The Green Emerald is your starting point. Statistically your natural aptitude will be either as a coordinator or an engineer.

According to David Keirsey you are most likely to prefer arranging and constructing. Arranging is either mobilizing or entailing. Constructing is either devising or designing. Since Mental Power is your most well developed neural connection, working with systems comes easy for you. All these roles would be what Ken Robison would view as your element. However – I do not believe in this prefixed destiny. These roles are merely involving activities that your brain is used to performing. We like to perform, when we perform well. Nothing would stop us from developing our Emotional Power, Social Power or Physical Power 37

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just as much as the Mental Power – even though this power has a head start. It is never too late, since focused practice is a hundred times more time-efficient than sporadic and interrupted practice.

Mozart wrote his first symphony as a teenager. Yet it was not until his early twenties that he wrote his first masterpiece. This is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s examples of the 10.000 hour-rule38.

However – what if Mozart never really practiced efficiently? No one knows whether or not Mozart wasted endless hours of practice due to negative mental or emotional disturbance.

Perhaps Mozart was depressed – but still practicing because it was the only thing he was good at? In any case the 10.000 hourrule seems to be a general and very likely a mere statistical guideline. If you attain absolute cognitive and emotional resonance, I believe that a hundred days of intensely focused practice is enough to achieve virtuosity in virtually any field. Of course this is only the case provided that your performance level is maximized and that there is sufficient available stimulation. In the case of absolute mental and emotional resonance – and thereby with a 100 % utilization of your brains capacity – you might be able to grasp the most abstract ideas and develop your brain at a magnificent rate provided that the right tools are available. In the complete absence of words – even the most powerful consciousness would not be able to learn how to read.

38

Example from Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.

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I believe that if you can hypnotize a person into absolute focus, then it must also be possible to train yourself to achieve and master this sort of state. Absolute focus is what we may call mental and emotional resonance – it is a state in with all conscious forces are unified and pointed in the same direction. A powerful idea may very well be the seed that makes this flower grow. The reason why we say that kids are faster learners is because they have a lesser amount of cognitive and emotional dissonance. Initially we learn at absolute peak performance as babies. This is only until we learn contradictory ideas and emotions. Ken Robinsons says that we are »educated out of creativity«. This sounds like we are de-learning an ability in school. This is actually not the case. There is only learning and not learning – nothing is de-learned, but merely stored in the sea of imagination.

The great problem of society today is not just a confusion about heroism. The problem is that we are introduces to vast amounts of contradictory idea and emotions. This causes the beginning of our cognitive and emotional dissonance. It is a global epidemic that decreases our mental and emotional performance. This means a dramatic decrease in our learning capacity, memory and attention. It gets worse and worse as we grow up, since we are introduced to more and more contradictory ideas and emotions. This dissonance devours our imagination, it disturbs our attention and our thoughts. As Ken Robinson points 117

out

in

his

RSA-animate

video

Changing

Educational

Paradigms39, we lose the capability of divergent thinking as we become educated. We lose our power of imagination, attention and association. This talent is naturally high in kids and that is why Ken Robinson says that »schools kill creativity«40. I would argue that this is merely a product of the emergence of cognitive and emotional dissonance. There is a direct proportionality with the decrease in learning capacity. Dissonance decreases our mental and our emotional level of performance, which is naturally high in all human beings.

I have a curious idea: We become conscious even before we are born. Our very first conscious experience may be the one that determines our temperament. Imagine this scenario – two twins become conscious on a Monday and a Tuesday in the 25st week of pregnancy. Little Peter – the future name of the boy – suddenly becomes conscious and his first experience is the rhythm in the voice of his mother. The next thing he notices – even though he yet has no concrete thoughts – it the warmth of his mother’s body temperature. Peter’s brain now recognizes these positive emotions and feel very comfortable with his external senses. Peter’s sister, Lily, was conscious for the first time in her life on the following Tuesday. At that time her mother was in the traffic late for a meeting. Lily’s first experience was the 39 40

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

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pounding heart of her nervous mother. Ten years later the doctor puts Peter on Ritalin® and Lily on Zoloft®.

Peter never

developed his internal powers sufficiently, because he favored the external ones. He can’t sit still in school, so he is diagnosed with ADHD. Lily is introvert and depressive because she has continually favored her internal world after the traumatizing episode ten year earlier.

This example is rather harsh, but I believe it illustrates my point. We need to be aware of our temperament in order to identify our special challenges. We need to identify our neurological strengths and weaknesses knowing that they can all be developed through heroic practice. Cognitive and emotional resonance is the ultimate component of Heroic Practice. With complete resonance in our ideas and feelings, we may learn anything at extraordinary little time. When energies and forces are shooting out from a single point in all directions, then the impact is hardly noticeable. But if we align all these forces – first individually, and then socially – we may accelerate the progress of civilization more than we can ever imagine.

THE GREEN EMERALD The Green Emerald favors the feeling. Even though the Mental Power is fundamental and ideas are the essence of reality, we would be nothing without emotions. Purely and exclusively rational beings are disembodied. Beings with no body and no 119

capacity for taking action would not have taken part in the human evolution. The human race would not have been superior to the animals weren’t it for our emotional capacity. It is feelings that define the balance between positive and negative. Feelings navigate us – they are our Compass. With only a Map, we would have no sense of direction. We couldn’t tell yes from no. We would never be able to ask ourselves why or why not, because there is reason for neither. Without an emotional response to our rationalization and evaluation of experience we would be navigating blindly. We would move in all directions at once and immediately evaporate. We would cease to exists.

As a byproduct of the human evolution and the development of a conscious brain, we were equipped with this rusty Compass.

What is the reason why the human race were able to move – at least somewhat – in the same direction. Civilizations always keeps moving forward towards the next revolution, and it is because of this fantastic emotional Compass. We now need to unite our maps and the parts of all our compasses in order to make a perfect map of conscious reality and then assemble a superior Compass that will determine our best possible course.

Dr. David Keirsey uses the same terminology as Plato and calls this personality type the Idealist temperament. Keirsey reports that the Idealist are relatively rare, making up no more

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than 15 to 20 percent of the population41. This means that 15 to 20 percent of the world population has at least acquired a Compass. The next step is to find and retrieve the Sword.

THE RED RUBY The Red Ruby is the flower of words. While the Blue Sapphire symbolizes the Map of Intellect, and the Green Emerald symbolizes the Compass of Wisdom – now – the Red Ruby symbolizes the Sword of Strength. These are the first three legendary artifacts, which we must attain in order to set out on our heroic journey.

Most people attains the Sword of Strength early in life and never loses it. This means that we dare to speak our opinion. If we do not dare to speak about our thoughts and emotions, it is likely that we have no Sword. We have yet to venture out on a Heroic Quest for finding it.

Sometimes we acquire similar

swords – but of a lesser quality. It may be to heavy or too light.

This means that we might speak too much and too fast – or too little and too slow. This can mean that we fail to ever enthrall people’s attention. A sharp and balanced sword means a talented rhetorician. Yet – a speaker is nothing without at least some valuable ideas and emotions to communicate. If we have no grasp of a concept abstractly, then we will never be able to explain it concrete and simply. Talented rhetoricians are actors. Usually, 41

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the people who get the best grades in school are the best actors.

Acting requires a sharp and balanced Sword of Strength. Finally our hero must acquire the Shield of Endurance in order to sustain high intensity and stability in his Heroic Quest.

Keirsey reports that these individual tendencies – he call it the Artisan temperament – is common, and that about 35 percent of the world population has acquired a fairly decent Sword42.

THE YELLOW TOPAZ The Yellow Topaz is the flower of actions. It symbolizes the fourth legendary artifact – the Shield of Endurance. With the Shield we may stand firm as a rock. Through even the greatest challenges we shall never falter.

We find the Shield of Endurance by practicing the emergence and transference of positive emotions. If we create something of value to ourselves and then successfully transfer it to others, we will have completed the first objective in the Heroic Quest for finding the Shield of Endurance. We must remember that this quest represent a 3rd level-challenge. It requires a detailed Map (powerful ideas), a high quality Compass (understanding and control of our emotions), a sharp and balanced Sword (words and courage from a positive self-image) and finally we can go look for the Shield of Endurance.

42

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Keirsey reports that 35 to 45 % of the population has acquired a fairly decent Shield43. He call this the Guardian temperament.

This does not mean that we have 35 to 45 % people, who can actually utilize the full potential of their Shield yet. Most of the Guardians lack one, two or even all three of the other artifacts.

This means that action is made difficult, even though a lot of people have already trained their endurance. What use is endurance if you never have developed the courage, the selfimage, the creativity and the ideas to actually start a process of transference? We need all the artifacts in order to make the wheels turn. We must travel to all the corners of the world, and acquire the great treasures of the Five Flowers. We must do this in a correct order – and this order is different dependant on your individual starting point.

The time has come. This is the ultimate Heroic Path. It is an Epic Quest that will lead us all to finding the sacred White Crystal. The quest is called Finding the Fifth Flower. Will you accept it?

THE WHITE FLOWER The White Flower is The Fifth Flower. It is the center of the Universe. It means balance of all forces of conscious reality. It means resonance in the symphony of life. To acquire the Fifth Flower is the ultimate heroic quest. It takes vast amounts of 43

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focused practice of utilization of all our powers. By reading this far you have unlocked this quest. Life ought to be a game, and that game has only just begun. Your objectives are: • Discover your predominant Element: water, fire, air, earth or void (Being in the void means + 10 to all attributes) • Learn about The Fifth Flower. (COMPLETED) • Acquire the Map of Possibilities • Acquire the Compass of Guidance • Acquire the Sword of Courage • Acquire the Shield of Endurance • Read Chapter Eight: The Future of Education FLOWER

Sapphire

Emerald

Ruby

Topaz

Crystal

POWER

Mental

Emotional

Social

Physical

The Force

FAVOR

Ideas

Feelings

Words

Actions

Heroism

ELEMENT

Water

Fire

Air

Earth

Void

ARTIFACT

Map

Compass

Sword

Shield

Ocarina

ATTRIBUTE Intelligence

Wisdom

Strength Endurance

EXP

Your quest will not be an easy one, my friend. Yet – one day we shall all be Jedi Masters of Heroic Love. Study this book whenever you lose track. A last piece of advice: If your element is wet, go for the other wet element. If your element is dry, go for the other dry element. From wet to dry is always Air ↔ Earth.

May the force be with you.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Future of Education »Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life« – Immanuel Kant ALL PEOPLE have extraordinary natural – and heroic – capacities. I believe that this capacity is extremely potent in everybody.

I

believe

in

minor

genetic

advantages

and

disadvantages, but generally they are without much significance compared to our ideas and emotions. When our dreams become influenced by the dreams of others our world view becomes altered. A belief is a billion times more powerful and potent, than the positive or negative impact of either a good or a bad external circumstances, for instance: a bad hair-day. I can personally assure you about that.

If you have a profound belief in your own heroic capacities, then your physical appearance and the genetically determined shape of your brain becomes completely irrelevant factors. As Bruce H. Lipton writes in his Biology of Belief from 2008 – no one is »born with a gene for unhappiness«44. This is a ridicules as it sounds. Neither are we born with a gene making it

44

Biology of Belief

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impossible for us to become heroes. The only real challenge is to give everybody the opportunity to feel proud about themselves.

We feel proud, when we know that we are actually good at something. This means that we know the current level of our individual talents. It means that we know exactly how capable of creativity and innovation we are as individuals. The entire point of this book is that everyone can become masters of everything.

It is simply a matter of the right approach. I believe that we may master creativity and heroism in any field. We just need to recognize the heroic principles and organize high quality training through the social medias. We need to have proof of our accomplishments.

What we need is dynamic interactive stats on our individual progress in real life. We need a social network that organizes masters and apprentices; Jedi and Padawans of real life should meet and exchange valuable skills. Masters offer training, produce challenges and promote students of specific skills to the next level. The apprentices will then rate masters, and they will have a natural interest in being taught by masters with much experience and high rating.

Imagine yourself being handed the black belt in Karate. You have worked for years to achieve this. You have been bleeding and sweating to attain this symbolic piece of clothing. In all social context the black belt is associated with hard work (which is actually the literal meaning of Âťkong fuÂŤ). It makes people 126

instantly believe in your self-discipline. It shows people that you have worked for hundreds of hours in the Dojo with other masters of martial art. The black belt is probably worth more than most the grades you got in school, when you are at a job interview. Grades are arbitrary and often a moral judgment, as Ken Robinson and Seth Priebatsch notices. Grades and university degrees are an example of bad gamification45. The black belt – on the contrary –

is an example of well designed game

mechanics of real life. Just like the insignias of the army or in a scout-corpse, the black belt a brilliant example of great motivational design. I want to make an equivalent of the black belt for any learnable skill. I want learners all over the world to be awarded for their achievements. We need to design achievements that will make people say »cool« on the corner of the street. You won’t get the same amount of street credit, by boasting at the local bar with your 9th grade arithmetic paper.

This ought to change. We need well-designed achievementunlocks for all types of learning; the fundamental categories is mental, emotional, social and physical training. Training of any kind ought to be rewarded. We also need to systematize the challenges of everyday life in order to balance the game to the individual player-level. I believe this is finally possible through a new social learning network.

45

Seth Priebatsch, YouTube.

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In this chapter I will introduce the key-features of a new social learning network, which I believe could spread the heroic principles and completely revolutionize education. I have designed this learning network, because I want a place for kids to go find the masters that they deserve. All people are potential heroes, and so they have a right to high quality education. At the moment we are educating people into unhappiness, because our focus is too narrow. The universities today produces people with fairly decent mental powers, but seemingly with very low emotional, social and physical competencies. Business reports this issue all the time; a lot of people have little to no insight into themselves or into others. This causes the majority of all people to be generally incompetent in anything but simple standard operations. This is although they might have a very well-trained and highly stimulated singular power. A social power of 1% will render even your 90% of mental power useless, since you have no clue about how to communicate.

A basic mastery of rhetoric is crucial to everybody, especially teachers and learners alike. Not being able to communicate is like trying to stabilize the Eiffel tower on three pillars – or even less.

Even the smallest tower can fall on three legs. This means that with no mastery of words and actions you will face even the simplest of every-day operations as impossible challenges. You might misinterpret the exact degree of honesty demanded, when the love of your life ask you to be honest – and you respond 128

»well, you do look a bit fat in that dress.«. This minor lack of emotional and social power, might cost you everything. It might make you eventually commit suicide – why no learn a little rhetoric, before it should come this far?

Rhetoric is sometimes taught as a primarily verbal discipline.

This can be fatally inefficient, because any good rhetoric combines words and actions on a fundament of powerful ideas and emotions. That is why I view rhetoric as the skill, where intelligent communication meets intelligent acting. The word intelligent actually imply that rhetoric also needs to have a strong base in mental and emotional powers. Aristotle (384-322BC) wrote in his famous work Rhetoric about the well-known concepts of Logos, Pathos and Ethos. As mentioned earlier, we must reach for people feelings by our words. Logos is the rational part of rhetoric – does it make sense logically? Pathos is manipulation of the mind by transferring positive or negative emotional experiences. Ethos is you general appeal to the audience, as a speaker. In this sense, logos is dependant of our mental power; pathos depends on our emotional power; ethos depends on our social power.

Cicero (106-43 BC) wrote about the five stages: Inventio, dispotio, elocutio, memoria and finally actio. These stages are also directly parallel to the Law of Heroic Love. Inventio is searching for ideas, diving into the sea of imagination – it is the mental stage, where our map of ideas shows us the posibilities.

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Dispotio is the emotional stage. The compass is used to decide upon structure. Elocutio is about articulating the words, it is transference that requires the Sword of Courage – it is the social stage. Memoria and actio is the lasts stages; it is the physical and the heroic stage, where we use endurance and patience to memorize and the sum of all our powers to finally perform convincingly. Rhetoric, therefore, cannot be learned if it is trained isolated. Rhetoric is a true heroic discipline. Actually all disciplines are learned most efficiently with a heroic approach. A good rhetoric required a basic fundament in both mental, emotional, social and physical powers. I believe that this fundament will make virtually any learning process a hundred times more efficient and rewarding.

One of my professors at the Copenhagen Faculty of Law told me once that »the more knowledge, the better the lawyer.« I agree that knowledge is the basis for all talent, so of course this is also true in the case of lawyers. However; if this knowledge does not eventually make the lawyer realize that emotional, social and physical competencies are of equally vital importance to the further understanding of society and its laws, then this mantra is no longer as true. Knowledge is useless in isolation. A good lawyer is also a mentally and emotionally intelligent and a socially convincing communicator that is capable of physically integrating his body in his work. Mastery in any profession is helped tremendously – and requires to a certain extent – that 130

we train our ability in many aesthetic means of expression; both internally and externally. This is why I find a doctorate somewhat arbitrary, because it only tells us about mental development. And not even in a very accurate manner. The lack of emotional, social and physical competencies will – however – usually reveal itself in the job interview. This might explain why we experience that so many people – even those, who have graduated from the most fancy of universities – still aren’t capable of getting an interesting job. This is such a shame, and we must somehow revolutionize education in order to break the current hierarchy of intelligences that favors mental capacity.

Luckily nothing is lost. I believe that the lack of emotional, social and physical competencies can be restored in less than a hundred days. I am a perfect example of this. We just need to accept our Heroic Destiny. I believe that we can all be amazingly heroic in no time.

Education ought to look upon all skills as equally important.

No specific skill will be a guarantee towards a rich life; neither spiritually or economically. Only the diversity of our skill ought to be celebrated. This is why, I believe that the only demand we ought to present to people is that we train our diversity. I believe that that all anti-love, all wars, crimes and all hatred is a product of imbalance in the relationship between our individual level of development in mental, emotional, social and physical power.

Education is the road to brotherhood, respect and universal love; 131

but only if we take on a broader perspective and define education differently. Education is the efficient and effective training of both our mental, emotional, social and physical capacity. This is what I call heroic education – or with a more intuitive word – hero training. It is my life to always improve myself as a hero trainer, and to make people adapt to the heroic principles. Like any revolution it must happen from the bottom and up. It must be all the sleeping Padawans out there, who shall spread the message. Padawans can’t currently find the Jedi’s; this is because we need a new tool.

Everything build by humans are tools. All revolutions were powered by the developing of new tools. In our times, we have witnessed the creating of impressive and incredibly powerful tools. My favorite ones are without a doubt TED, YouTube and Facebook.

The

internet

is

connecting

us

mentally

and

emotionally through new amazing social medias. The only thing we lack is an efficient social network that connects us physically.

Couchsurfing.org is actually very interesting for this exact reason. Meeting people from all over the world and surfing couches is becoming increasingly popular. When you have hosted a lot of people, you get a lot of feedback. The hosts with most guests and best feedback is naturally the most popular. These host gets loads of requests. The system will quickly terminate bad hosts. That is exactly what we need to transfer to education. We need to form a global teaching-network. It ought to be about 132

training any skills in real life with people, who claim to be able to teach.

Jane McGonigal has created the site SuperBetter.com, which focuses on encouraging people to self-development of their mental, emotional, social and physical resilience 46 . It is a wonderful project that uses many great game dynamics. Yet it fails at vital points. The people playing SuperBetter must create their own challenges or accept certain predesigned ones. The problem is that the challenges have no permanent evaluation.

SuperBetter lacks external approval. SuperBetter is a powerful dream, yet it lacks the last crucial stages. All learning and personal improvement need to take place in real life. All learning requires a good master. All learning processes are started from the planting of powerful dreams. A good master will plant the right seeds in the right soil. SuperBetter fails to locate the masters and focuses only on the apprentice. It is still mostly by chance, when people find the inspiration they need for progressing to the next level. We have the capacity for being masters of everything. All the seeds are actually already there, but their growth can only be initiated by the right master. The Padawan is nothing without his Jedi Master.

46

SuperBetter Link

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THE NAVI PROJECT Share your skills – master everything. I want all people to be realistic about their own skills. Ninety nine out of every hundred people are either under- or overrating their own skills in different fields. The lack of valuable skills is actually not a problem in society today. Quite on the contrary it is merely a tremendous human resource on standby. This resource is only waiting to get activated. Activating people’s standby-skills and heroic potential will make room for incredible amounts of heroic love. Everything will flourish. We may very soon make a paradise on earth. The reason for most of the anti-love on the other hand – the bad economy, wars, crimes, hatred etc. – is that we underrate or overrate ourselves. The fact that we overrate ourselves can be expensive to society and our emotional reserves. However, underrating the individual capacities of ourselves and our children is likely the most destructive phenomena of all time.

Through the entire history of education we have underrated children. This have made us underrate ourselves. We have incredibly low expectation of ourselves and our potential. This is probably what causes the mass exodus to online games, as quoted by Jane McGonigal at TED47. People generally think so low about themselves today that we have and estimated number of 1,5 billion people, who in a decade will play computer games to

47

Jane McGonigal, TED.

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escape from the unrewarding and overwhelming reality48. And it can’t surprise anyone. Reality is broken – why not just escape from it? It has been a problem for a thousand of years, yet we are currently standing at the peak of the mountain. The view is rather interesting; it is a tremendous turning point in the history of education. I believe that the tools at hand today may create the greatest evolution of all times. This revolution is about making the three billion new people – who are coming online over the next decade – educated into being heroes.

Simon Sinek spoke at TED about the Law of Diffusion of Innovation 49 . As commonly known, it is usually said that approximately 2,5 % of the population are innovators. Allow me to translate – through all times, we have always had about 2,5% heroes among us. This is a product of chance. It seems to tell us that it is in the nature of society to lets 2,5 % of its people become heroic. An important point however, is that this happens completely at random. Right now, being a hero is solely a question of being luckier than the rest of the seven billion people on our earth. And I do not mean luckier in terms of being born with some sort of successful gene pool; I mean lucky as in being in the right place at the right time.

48 49

Jane McGonigal, TED. Simon Sinek, TED.

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This is exactly what Malcolm Gladwell told us in Outliers50.

People are lucky enough to be put in a situation, where they quite randomly are allowed to practice for 10,000 hours. I believe that we can both eliminate the random-factor in heroism and increase the efficiency of the 10,000 hour-rule. The key to the perfect system of education is efficient training. This requires a systematic approach to the organizing and rating of teachers worldwide. We need to combine the principles of gamification with education; the mechanisms that makes Facebook, YouTube and Twitter so popular must be united in a social learning network.

The key features are these: We must introduce active learning; everyone must be teaching. We need to focus on interconnected skills. We also need user-rating of skills and trainers. We ened dynamic stats based upon the numbers of hours trained and the skill-specific challenges completed. We also need followers.

People should sign-up for a profile, from which they can track their own progress, browse skills and trainers by location, experience, rating and fame. It all must be in the framework of the heroic principles.

EVERYONE MUST BE TEACHING The best way of learning is teaching. This is also the first step in Ken Robinson learning revolution; we must go from passive to 50

Malcolm Gladwell.

136

active students51. This will also require for students to be divided by interest (and not by age). In this way teaching will become far easier, compared to having a class of students, in which only 1050% have a genuine interest in the subjects as in the ordinary public schools.

On a network like The Navi Project everyone would be naturally encouraged and empowered to training by teaching others. People would be motivated by the user-rating, which is a gamified system for giving feedback on the value of your teaching. If a lot of people gives you good feedback, then you have a perfect proof to yourself and others that you are a good teacher in a specific skill. This is the black belt of everything.

SKILLS Skills is a good word, because it may let to change world view. All skills are equally valuable, and most skills are connected and dependant on other skill. Ken Robinson want us to move from narrow subjects to interconnected disciplines. I believe skills is a better term. Skills implies that one must be cool at something, which again implies that a person have not only practices for a long time – he is also capable of performing. If you can’t perform, then you don’t have skills. If you have skills, then you are a hero.

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Ken Robinson, leading a learning revolution. Youtube Link.

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Skills can be anything. The basic categories are the mental, emotional, social and physical powers. Browsing skills should be by specific skill names or tags. Standard tags could for instance be Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences52: There are verbal smart (linguistic), logic smart(logical-mathematical), self smart (intrapersonal), people smart (interpersonal), music smart, picture smart (spatial), nature smart (naturalistic) and body smart (kinesthetic).

The trainers must also rate their own skills and challenges in advance; this is to create a balanced level of expectation between master and student.

USER-RATED SKILL TRAINERS The first key feature of Project Navi (working title) is the userrated teachers/skill-trainers. User-rating is the reason why people have uploaded more content to YouTube than there is time in the history of human evolution. Getting a load of approval by the community is the ultimate achievement. Getting good ratings is a simple way to achieving this. This is a very powerful game mechanic as well as the reason for the success of all the social medias.

DYNAMIC INTERACTIVE STATS

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Howard Gardner.

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Project Navi (working title) provides specific user-generated statistics about skills and trainers. A profile will show, what skill you teach and train. It will show, for how long – for how many hours – you have been teaching and training. It will also show how well you teach and train; masters give students challenges and approval when they are completed. In return students will rate the masters. Both master and student will get experience from meeting and bumping together their Project Navi-apps.

Challenges are user-generated, and the number of people having completed and rated a challenge will determine the quality of the challenge. Users may upload achievement-badges or use the standard badge for completing either a mental, emotional, social or physical challenge. This is another important game dynamic; people must get aesthetic feedback on their achievements. A physical object; a medal or a token is the ultimate aesthetic feedback if it represent an achievement of value. Aesthetic feedback may also be a badge, a title, a level-up on Project Navi. Salman Khan notices something rather interesting at TED; kids, who are learning math through the Khan Academy, will move in great masses towards the coolest looking badge53. This is whether it is rewarded for calculus or algebra.

Another cool feature is the skill tree. A system created by the users that form system of prerequisites for learning a specific 53

Salman Khan, Let’s use video to reinvent education.

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skill or accepting a challenge. A high level parkour-challenge of jumping down form a wall that is 6 feet tall, might require that you locate a parkour-master, who can give you some basic challenges first. The parkour roll would definitely be a basic level 1-challenge of parkour54. The challenge could be called Save Your Head, and it would unlock many new challenges in the discipline of parkour. The parkour roll of the parkour-skill might have a variant called ninja roll of the skill Ninja Training. The same trainer may even decide to offer training in both skills, since they are so closely related. The ninja and the parkour community may even agree upon letting both rolls directly unlock further training in the two skills.

The dynamic stats are going to replace all our arbitrary systems of assessment; from vocational programs, standard curriculum vitae to grades in school and university degrees. This is another important part of Ken Robinsons learning revolution; we must move from judgment to description. This is a distinction between good and bad motivational design; Project Navi. must be descriptive before we can call it a well-gamified education network.

FOLLOWERS As the good trainers get rated, experience and fame people may choose to follow you. You can follow a trainer to keep in contact 54

Ryan Doyle, YouTube

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with him. There are four parameters that determined, who your want to follow: location, experience, rating and fame.

Trainers will primarily be browsed and followed by location.

What trainers are training nearby? This is due to the obvious limits of actually being able to meet in real life. Experience is number of hours trained – both in the specific skill and in general. Is the trainer a noob, novice, apprentice, journeyman, expert or a master of a skill? Noob-trainers have had less than 10 hours of teaching and training in a specific skill or general power.

Novice-trainers have had less than 50 hours of teaching and training in a skill or general power. Apprentice is less than a 100 hours. A journeyman-trainer will have trained for less than 250 hours. Expert is less than 500 hours. The master have trained and teached for 500+ hour.

Rating is the personal evaluation of the students that have been training by a specific master. Fame is the number of followers.

ABUSE – WHAT ABOUT TROLLING? I believe that Project Navi will become a self-correcting system.

Trolls will of course be able to harass people, just as we meet people trolling on YouTube. Yet the transparency of the site will make it difficult to advance only by cheating.

Assuming that a troll would organize people to approve of some training that wasn’t actually happening. The minimum 141

requirement for becoming a master of a certain skill is by getting a hundred different people to approve of your progress over a minimum of a hundred days. You can only advance one level a day. You have to meet with another user of Project Navi to level up; you can only level up when you bump Project Navi-apps and the same user can only give you one level. This means that you have to meet physically with a hundred other Project Navi-users over the course of a hundred different days. Cheating your way to becoming a master would of course be reportable by the other users.

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Epilogue The purpose of this book and the new social learning network is to organize the game of life; to make it much more fun for everyone to play. This is what Immanuel Kant would refer to as the essence of wisdom. Wisdom has always been a privileges only available to a select few. These days are over; it is time to expand the segment of innovators. We must awaken the sleeping heroes.

The first step is to change our current world view. We must adapt to the idea of the coming revolutions. It will come either gradually or violently; voluntarily or forced. I believe that the tools at hand today will make possible the most effective and powerful revolution of history. The idea we ought to integrate in our belief system is that of heroic love as the ultimate purpose.

Planting the right seed and choosing the right soil is all about accepting the fact that humans are extraordinary being. We have tremendous natural capacities.

We ought to focus on possibilities; we ought to always keep our mind open. Since the universe is expanding, we must always be willing to expand the Map of Possibilities. The Compass of Guidance will lead the way, when we accept that universal and heroic love is the ultimate purpose. This is what we must strive for. The road to heroic love is the Path of the Hero; we must accept that we cannot learn to love unless we redefine intelligence. Mental, emotional, social and physical competencies 143

are or equal importance – we ought to treat them accordingly. If we are to learn about heroic love, we must change our educational paradigm55. We must take on a holistic world view and begin to treat the root-causes of the problems in society today; not just the symptoms. All problems are products of antilove that can be counterbalanced with love. We ought to all become Jedi Masters of Love. The heroic journey will be made available to everyone.

Now equip the legendary artifacts – the Map of Possibilities, the Compass of Guidance, the Sword of Courage and the Shield of Endurance. In the game of life, we are just about to battle the first fabulous monster. It guards the Gate of the Void. In the void we will acquire a magical instrument; the Ocarina of Time.

While we play a heroic tune, we shall witness a new tomorrow.

Everything is one. We are The Fifth Flower.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

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