A HYPOTHESIS OF EVERYTHING part 1: You Are Here CHAPTER 1: Your Psyche and the Hero of your Story

CHAPTER 1

Your Psyche and the Hero of Your Story

In this chapter, the 7-dimensional hierarchy model will be the context of distinguishing your “hero core” or “imago Dei,” as applied to the story of your psyche. This chapter has an intention to it. I desire that by the end, you view your life with more clarity and are empowered to embrace your trauma as access to personal confidence and a life that you love.

From the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh to every Disney movie, it is clear that the most common and critical element in every story is redemption. Even if the moment of redemption seems dark and resigned, every storyteller must satisfy the listener with a reason to hear their tale.

Confrontation precedes redemption. In most stories, it is the protagonist or hero bearing the burden of the warrior battling against that which represents despair or doom.

Have you ever wondered why many of our fictional and mythological heroes are orphans or are dramatically alienated from their families?  Lilo and Nani’s parents died in a car accident, leaving Nani to care for her wild and rebellious little sister before Stitch showed up. Superman lost his birth parents and his home, his people, and his planet as he was jettisoned in a capsule toward his new home – earth. Young Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents being shot to death outside a theater. 11-year-old Katniss Everdeen’s father was killed in a coal mine explosion. After falling into a deep depression, her mother became useless, leaving Katniss to care for her mother and her younger sister, Prim. James and Lily, the parents of infant Harry Potter, were killed by Lord Voldemort trying to protect Harry from the same fate. Max Da Costa, the sacrificial savior in the sci-fi action movie, ELYSIUM, grew up as a troubled foster child with no parents. Merideth Quill, mother of Peter AKA “Starlord” in the film GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, died of brain cancer when Peter was only eight years old. Peter’s profound grief in losing his mother inspired his final victory over his estranged immortal father, who placed the cancer tumor inside Merideth’s head. The STAR WARS stories are full of sacrificial parents. Leah killed herself so that her passing into the force would save her son-turned-dark-side, Ben. Both Rey Palpatine and Din Djarin, the Mandalorian, were hidden by their parents before they were attacked and killed.

The storyteller is compelled to present a hero that is acquainted with our deepest sorrows. What can be more brutal for a child than the loss of their parents? We require a hero that has endured crushing grief. We demand that our hero knows what it’s like to be rejected and alone, abandoned of any sense of belonging. We don’t want a hero that is strong and smart, and attractive. We want the Hobbit orphan, Frodo, that is not appealing to the eyes nor intelligent or powerful but has a heart of gold and determination to match. We want Harry Potter, who is small for his age, with messed up hair and those trademark round spectacles. Shrek, Shrek 2, Shrek the Third, Shrek the Halls, Shrek Forever After, Shrek the Musical, Scared Shrekless, Shrek 5… yes, we obviously identify with this big loveable green ogre and his true love, Fiona.  We want Forky from TOY STORY 4. Bonnie made Forky on her first day of kindergarten out of a spork, popsicle stick, mismatched googly eyes, and a red bendy pipe-cleaner for arms. Forky is convinced that he’s nothing more than trash until Woody explains why he’s Bonnie’s favorite toy.

Why do we want this? It’s because we long to know that even from the darkest depths of our anguish and despair can arise a broken yet victorious hero.

In the comic strip on Earth Day 1971, Pogo announced, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Don’t you think that it’s time to meet our hero instead? 

Who is your favorite hero? While you’re thinking about it, I’ll tell you about one of mine. Most of my heroes are real people, as described in the beginning chapter “Burundi and the Life of Riley.” Still, one of my favorite fictional heroes is Alita in the 2019 movie ALITA BATTLE ANGEL.

What makes your hero uniquely qualified? I’ll give you an example. At the beginning of ALITA BATTLE ANGEL, a doctor named Ido was scavenging through heaps of trash to find cyborg parts. He used them as prosthetics for potential clients. A unique object caught his eye in the debris. He uncovered it to discover a partial human girl’s body that included a head, shoulders, and a chest cavity containing an artificial heart. That’s it—no arms nor legs. Using a portable scanner, Dr. Ido determined that there was brain activity. He carried the barely salvageable scrap back to his clinic. Dr. Ido had already built a cyborg body that he intended to use for his paraplegic daughter that was previously killed. He fitted the body to the remnant he found in the junkyard and brought the girl to life. She had no memory of anything, including her name. Ido named her after his deceased daughter, Alita. As the story unfolded, Alita began to notice that she was driven to be some kind of warrior.

What made Alita uniquely qualified was that she had nothing to lose. She had no memory of the past to limit her, and her passion to be extraordinary, motivated her to get up every time she was knocked down – which was a lot.

What are the biggest problems your hero faces? For Alita, it was the gap between the innocent ignorance of her memory loss and the mighty battle angel in her DNA. Of course, she was also teased and mocked for being mostly a cyborg.

What is the percentage of your hero’s likely success? In our favorite stories, it is ZERO percent that the hero will succeed. That’s why we love the story so much. It is the impossibility of success that keeps us turning the pages or sitting on the edge of our seats. That theme is consistent in all of the blockbusters and best sellers. It’s Aladdin, a common street thief who fell in love with Princess Jasmine without any possibility of a relationship with her because he was not a prince. It’s the unlikely boy, Arthur, that takes a turn at pulling the sword from the stone to become king. It’s all of the orphaned and broken superheroes in comic books and movies. It’s the favorite son, Joseph, whose own brothers threw him into a pit to die but then decided to sell him into slavery. Joseph ended up as a prisoner in Pharaoh’s dungeon but eventually rose to power in the Egyptian empire by interpreting dreams.

Consider that you are the hero of your story and that your chance of having a fulfilling and successful life is slim to none. Now THAT is an exciting story!

In this Hypothesis of Everything, I believe that there are seven dimensions. By definition, a dimension is measurable, or its impact can be quantified as applied to the sixth and seventh dimensions of consciousness. Spoiler alert: Chapter 3 will dig deeper into this seven-dimensional model, but it is necessary to give a brief description here for this chapter’s context.

The First Dimension is a line – X – that has only length, no width, nor depth.

The Second Dimension introduces an intersecting line – XY – a plane. There are height and width but no depth. This is the dimension of everything visible.

The Third Dimension is another intersecting line to create depth – XYZ – a cube. This dimension is most natural for us to understand. It is the physical realm in which we and everything else exists. 

The Fourth Dimension is Time. For the physical realm to have movement, it requires time to arrive from one point in space to another. Time is the realm of the living. Before we are alive and after we are alive, there is no experience of time. While there is abundant evidence of the past before our existence, time is still the realm of only the living. The unique aspect of time is that it is linear and moves only forward.

Some physicists suggest that the fifth dimension is frequency or vibration. I agree with them. Included in frequency are rhythm, patterns, energy, light, sound, and brain waves. Specifically, for this model, the Fifth Dimension is Language / Imagination.

Imagination is distinct from thoughts. We are thinking all of the time. We “have” thoughts, yet imagining is something creative. Imagination is a voluntary thought to create images in our minds. All images exist in language. Even if the image itself is unique enough not to have a label, we can give it a description. Language authors and manipulates all of the other dimensions. In the third dimension, things exist, but they do not become real until they are given a name. Not only does a name assign reality, but it also provides us with the power to manipulate it or use it. With language, great pyramids are built. With language, Great Walls of China are erected. With language, the Berlin Wall was torn down. Language elects presidents and ruins economies. Language wages war and declares peace. Language unites in marriage and gives our covenants and contracts existence. Language defines our beliefs. Language seeks out the cures for diseases. Language kills reputations and ignites genocides. In our stories and myths of creation, there is first, language – “and God said….” Language is the dimension of order and chaos.

There is a portal between the fifth and sixth dimensions. This portal is motivation/inspiration to ACT upon our language or imagination, even if it’s language given to us by others. It doesn’t always feel like a choice either. Fear is a powerful motivator, but there is no meaning of the sixth dimension inside of “instinct and survival.”

The portal is also where language finds agreement and becomes real. Reality is language plus agreement. That’s why we have dictionaries and reference sources. But sometimes, the agreement can change.

For example, before 2006, there were nine planets in our solar system. All of the textbooks and exams required us to acknowledge that there were nine planets. It was REAL. And then, the agreement of the definition of the word “planet” changed, and Pluto dropped out. Reality changed because the agreement changed.

The sixth and seventh dimensions are dimensions of consciousness measured by their effects.

The Sixth Dimension is Responsibility. Responsibility takes language and translates it into intentional results. Responsibility is uniquely human. It is the dimension of meaning.

Love/Truth is the Seventh Dimension. The consistent pitfall of this dimension is that we understand it or know it fully. While “love” and “truth” have entirely different definitions, they both have everything to do with connecting. Meaning, significance, and individuality fades or disappears into love/truth when we get close to this dimension. We see glimpses and reflections of it and participate in it every day as we experience connections that feel like both love and truth. It manifests in the effects of gratitude, contribution, fun, play, peace, art, music, beauty, etc. Psychologists give it the label “positive emotion,” but I believe that it is something more. It springs forth from a source deep within us that sometimes feels lost or smothered. I’m convinced that the source is the intertwined double helix of love and truth, like the DNA in our psyche’s nucleus. It is the seventh dimension belonging to every human. It is the dimension of the divine and, in this case, the essential hero inside of you.

YOUR PSYCHE

The human cell is a brilliant model to illustrate and symbolize the human psyche. Let’s take a look.

Imagine an illustration of a healthy cell.  It has a thin membrane that is soft, flexible, and semipermeable. The organelles and nucleus are vital and functional. Nutrients can enter easily, and waste products can exit.

Now imagine the membrane of an unhealthy cell. It looks thicker and hard and rigid. Only some nutrients can enter and most waste products are blocked from exiting.

In the illustration of the healthy psyche, there is first, the semipermeable membrane. It selectively absorbs what is necessary to thrive and endure. Critical to the cell’s existence is also an external environment conducive to its survival as it interacts and cooperates with other cells for the health of that environment. Just like us in our multiple communities.

It seems that the human psyche is quite fragile and malleable. Here’s an example. In a world where individual identity is paramount, definitions of words are changing, and even the slightest hint of offense is met with a violent tantrum of resentment and anger. Whatever size your psyche is, it can fill up quickly with information and emotions. Suppose you don’t maintain a process of pushing waste out of your psyche. The results can be catastrophic. Those things can rot, fester, and infect you and everyone else close to you. A swift, fatal demise is inevitable. Think about it. In what context or environment does YOUR psyche dwell?

As with the human cell that houses organelles, there seems to be four in your psyche essential to life. The first one is your dreams and positive memories. The second is others in your life, and it’s not exclusive to other humans. Pets and sentient beings valuable to you are included. The third is your physical, emotional, and mental health. Sexuality and spirituality are connected, responding to the effects of fear in oddly identical ways. Combined, it is the fourth essence of life.

The nucleus is the brain and heart of the cell. The DNA double helix inside your nucleus represents the Love/Truth imago Dei or the origin of your story’s hero. 

In the area on the left, there’s another oval with teeth in it. Above it is angry eyes. It’s not bad or mean; it’s just aggressive and wants to consume like PacMan eating dots.

I call this the “Fear Protein”. Unlike the nucleus containing your core hero’s intertwined love/truth DNA, fear is initially foreign to you and not part of you from birth. Developmentally, it invaded your world when the protective word for your survival, “no”, was also used to defy you and your intentions. You figured out that you could use “no” to defy others as well. Here is where the fear protein set up business with a limitless inventory of entitlement.

WAIT A MINUTE!  WHAT? But I’m entitled to be entitled. No?

Oxford dictionary defines the adjective “entitled” as “feeling that you have a right to the good things in life without necessarily having to work for them.”

Dictionary.com says, “having a right or legitimate claim to something.”

Merriam-Webster: “having a right to certain benefits or privileges.”

Cambridge Dictionary: “feeling that you have the right to do or have what you want without having to work for it or deserve it, just because of who you are.”

Elements of fear are entitlement, equity or fair/not fair, and morality judging good and bad. But they all can be melted down into the first one; entitlement. Your sense of equity or fairness is a function of entitlement. You may think you are benevolent in your idea of equity for all, but if you look closer, it’s still all about you and what makes you feel better or more righteous. Entitlement is a vicious killer of your psyche and your fear protein’s primary weapon to wreak havoc and chaos.

Although most of the planet’s spiritual identity is based on some sense of morality, I believe that the source of morality is fear. English is an odd language. Morality is knowing the difference between good and bad and creating subjective values accordingly. The word “moral” invokes only positive sentiments and similar to “virtuous”, “righteous”, and “upstanding”. All of these words are included in the language of sufficiency. So are “successful”, “abundant”, “powerful”, and “rich”. All efforts of sufficiency are projected against the empty backdrop of lack and insufficiency. Fear is always the context.

Morality gives you an entitled license to judge, assess, validate, and condemn with steadfast positionalism – especially toward yourself. Morality is the structure for assigning labels and classes to people and all subsequent prejudice and racism. It’s also where your sense of looking good and pee-your-pants fear of looking bad comes from. Morality is one of the most insidious, perverse, and dark elements of fear.

The core conversations of fear are “Something is wrong here.” and “I’m not ‘blank’ enough.” I’m not old enough. I’m not young enough. I’m not big enough. I’m not thin enough. I’m not rich enough. I’m not pretty enough. I’m not strong enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not popular enough. etc.

By its nature, the egocentric appetite of the fear protein wants to consume your psyche. It starts with the four organelles previously mentioned: dreams/positive memories, others, your health, and your spirituality/sexuality.

The fear protein has already killed off your dreams for the future and suffocated your positive memories leaving only despair and regrets to taunt you and haunt you. Inside of your identity’s traumatic past, you have systematically obliterated your most precious relationships or are in the process of doing so – even to your pets. Your health is taking a blow because life is much smaller now and filled with little more than anxiety and stress. You have stepped into a bear trap that restricts any possibility of actions that support body health. With only negative memories left and no one to fight on your behalf, why should you be healthy anyway? Of all of the new things that you feel that you deserve in life, a positive self-image is not one of them.

Your spirituality and sexuality are connected, and both become blurry under the influence of the fear protein. The blurriness harbors an exaggerated hypersensitivity with the primal tendency of fight or flight to any disagreement or perceived condemnation. You train others to fear you and avoid any conversation about your spirituality or sexuality and possibly even politics. You force them to relate to you as someone they never knew you to be before. Your fear identity perverts your spirit and your sexual nature. And you wonder why people avoid you like a zombie that wants to eat their brain, yet you claim that it’s them that marginalized you.

The ultimate purpose of the fear protein is to kill the hero of your story. This is when you contemplate how useless or unfair life is or turned out to be. Ending it all is probably the best option. You might even follow through and attempt suicide. But you’re ALIVE today, so something is still protecting the sanctity of soul. Your core hero isn’t dead quite yet.

The shell of your psyche thickens and hardens. It rejects any positive external stimuli, and anything less than positive stimuli is received as something personally annoying. Nothing meaningful can get out of your shell except useless or malicious speech and actions. The fear protein intends to create your own living hell and destroy everything you touch.

Symptoms of fear include selfishness, resentment, bitterness, hatred, betrayal, regret, superstition, anxiety, greed/corruption, a victim mentality, revenge, suspicion, contempt, boredom, judging/assessing, shame/guilt, addiction, and fearful anger. Emotions like anger, sadness, and grief happen frequently and call us to action or change. Fearful anger is merely a temper tantrum designed to validate yourself and expand your sense of entitlement.

Useless speech is the predominant outcome. This includes complaining, gossiping, lying, making excuses, blaming, exaggerating, and sarcasm. Every symptom of fear finds solace in useless speech.

Fear, its elements, the core conversations, symptoms, and the outcomes make up your identity. It’s what you usually see in the mirror and it’s never pretty. How ironic that the ugliness of the fear context still avoids looking bad at all costs.

As the walls of your psyche continue to thicken, the inevitable result is depression, narcissism, mental illness, or suicide.

Fortunately, professionals in dealing with matters of the psyche understand that fear can be treated and the thick shell can be softened. Fear responds to light. It wants to run into the shadows and darkness and hide in shame, but its position is weakened when exposed. Therapists dedicate their profession to helping their patients experience the security of truth and authentically wrestle with their symptoms. When confronted with authority, fear will often stop and submit. Parents can interrupt the trajectory of a child’s fear-identity by a spanking or imposed isolation or even a glance of acknowledgment. A trained priest will use authority to exorcise a demon out of a possessed victim or command the fear-identity to cooperate. The military has no use for your identity and uses authority to compel submission.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs reports that veterans are substantially more likely to die by suicide than non-veterans. The reasonable notion is that negative traumatic memories cause this. I think that it’s more than that. The release of the full force of the suppressed identity back into the psyche away from the structured discipline of the military, coupled with traumatic memories, creates a judge, jury, and executioner scenario. The core hero doesn’t stand a chance in hell.

Prescribing drugs is another common solution. I believe that artificially manipulating serotonin with medication is risky. Still, it’s better to have a numb patient that isn’t killing themselves. The road to healing can begin.

But turning to chemicals to subdue the fear identity’s ravaging nature is much greater than only drugs prescribed by doctors. We are taught by example from an early age to rely on things we can consume to make us feel relaxed or more alert or a little more numb to our pain. Naturally, chemical addiction in many forms is a culturally facilitated solution to assist in managing survival.

So, where is the good news? I don’t know that there is any. Your identity is big and ugly and intends to destroy your life. Your core hero is small in comparison, like the story of young David against a giant Goliath that seems to grow bigger and more powerful every day.

In other words, your story is right on track. There is very little chance that your hero will be the champion in your life and lead you happiness. Yes, you have an intriguing story. It’s full of scandal and drama and betrayal and resentment and death and destruction. That road is wide and everybody is traveling on it. But that’s not what you want your future to be. It’s not the story of your life that you want others to tell after you’re gone. How do I know? I know because you are thinking of your hero from the beginning of this chapter. You ARE the hero of your story and you are uniquely qualified to win against all the odds.

When trauma happens, your identity hides for a few seconds while your core hero manages it like a pro. And then, your identity shows back up to complain about it and blame others. The point is that your hero is the first on the scene, not your identity. The lesson to learn is that each trauma is an opportunity for love and truth to take over. Notice it or remember when it happened. You had a type of power not usually packaged into your identity. Love and truth were heroically at work. 

We witnessed this on a societal level with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning, every nation on the planet was in trauma response mode. The collective hero in us rose to occasion with decisive actions. The goodness of humanity was singing from the balconies and open windows to calm the neighbors, and generous citizens gave extraordinary contributions to care for employees hit hardest by the loss of business. Beer manufacturers set aside part of their operations to make hand sanitizer to give to first responders. Thoughtful people posted patterns and instructions online for thousands of citizens to cut and sew masks to send to front-line workers in hospitals, fire stations, and emergency clinics.

The biggest question is, “why can’t we be like this all of the time?” The answer is because our collective identity craves complaining, blaming, suspicion, equity, and playing the victim. Our national psyche looks a lot like our own and is on full display in every news media.

Trauma summons the hero. In our favorite stories and myths, it is the crisis or the series of crises that calls the hero to spring into action. Think about it. Clark Kent has a job at the Daily Planet for a reason. The media is always the first to know when something terrible is happening. It is the tragedies that pop the buttons on Clark Kent’s white dress shirt to expose Superman. When your fear identity engages useless speech to deflect or transfer trauma, you lose the opportunity to overcome it and find meaning in the responsibility of embracing it. All that remains is the shame and blame and self-pity you see in the mirror.

Your fear identity is perfectly satisfied with mediocre and boring. But life doesn’t give you that – it traumatizes you with the death of loved ones, loss, betrayal, resentment, shame, and bitterness. There are significant problems to solve. Your fear identity convinces you that it has everything under control, but look at the results? Are your addictions designed to help you win at life? Is your anxiety providing forward movement on any level? Is your all-consuming egocentric mindset connecting you with positive people or finding love?

You’re killing your hero, and my guess is that if you’re still listening or reading, you want something different. Beginning the process of unleashing your hero and forging a pathway to a life of consistent confidence and contentment is simple but not easy. It requires grace and determination.

Here are 15 hero exercises:

1. Look people in the eyes when you say, “Thank you.”
2. Practice smiling with your ENTIRE FACE. 
3. Look up.Practice lifting your head as you look up. You’ll experience immediate results in your attitude and positive outlook on life. And look up more often as you are walking.
4. Open doors for peoplewithout expecting gratitude or acknowledgment.
5. Breathe deeply five times and then relax. Repeat as desired.
6. Eliminate useless speech – complaining, gossiping, making excuses, lying, exaggerating, and being sarcastic. Notice that you might have a lot less to say than usual.
7. Enjoy beauty in ordinary things.
8. Explore your self-expression – whatever you love to do or want to love to do.
9. Celebrate small moments.
10. Notice your hygiene.
11. Move your body at least 20 minutes every day.
12. Spend time in the sunlight if your situation, location, and weather permits it.
13. Give yourself adequate time to sleep.
14. Practice leaving things in better shape than you found them.
15. “Stop saying things that make you weak.” Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Now notice how the fear identity’s core conversations of “Something is wrong here” and “I’m not good enough” show up when you see a list like this. These are NOT the fifteen commandments of being your hero. But be deliberate to practice a few of them and add more when you can.

Your body is designed to naturally release hormones that make you feel confident, happy, and loving. Your fear identity has no room for that. However, you still recognize and experience pleasant emotions when you participate in what I call “elements of connection”. Contribution, mercy, music, community, beauty, fun, and gratitude, which is practicing speaking the truth, are just a few. Elements of connection point you to something higher or more profound or encompassing. Your hero is attracted to them and becomes more present and powerful as you add them more frequently to your life.  Here is a list of 100 common elements of connection that often feels like love:

Accepting	Contentment	Happiness	Peace
Accomplishment	Contribution	Honor	Pets
Acknowledgement	Cooking/sewing/hobbies	Humor	Prayer / worship
Admiration	Courage	Innocence	Presence / Being present
Adoration	Creativity	Integrity	Productivity
Adventure	Dancing	Intimacy	Reading
Art	Decorating	Invitation	Relatedness
Attention	Discipline	Joy	Respect
Authenticity	Eating/Drinking	Kindness	Responsibility
Beauty	Elegance	Laughing	Romance
Belonging	Embracing	Leadership	Sacrifice
Breathing deeply	Empowering	Learning	Satisfaction
Caring	Empathy	Leisure / Relaxation	Security
Celebration	Encouragement	Light/Brilliance	Self Expression
Cleanliness	Enthusiasm	Illumination	Service / ing
Commitment	Exercise	Listening	Sharing
Communicating	Fantasy	Meditation	Shopping
Community	Fellowship	Mercy	Simplicity
Compassion	Flirting	Music	Success
Completion	Forgiveness	Nature/outdoors	Teaching
Compliments / ing	Freedom	Order / organization	Touch
Compromise	Fun/Playing	Participation	Truth-telling/hearing
Confession	Giving / Gifting	Partnership	Unity
Confidence	Graciousness	Passion	Vision/Purpose
Contemplation	Gratitude	Patience	Vulnerability

 You’ll find some that you can adopt and use for yourself, but I encourage you to create your own list that best fits your hero.

Life isn’t about a destination or a series of destinations. Life is about the journey and shared experiences with other travelers on the path. You get only one path and one chance to walk that path, and it doesn’t last forever. By default, your fear identity is in control and will take you to the end. And people will put whatever they remember about your identity on your tombstone. Or you can choose to be the hero of your story instead.

The greatest struggle is the choice because your fear identity is the one that’s choosing, and it doesn’t want to let go. But don’t worry, the fear protein will always be around. You’ll wake up with it and go to sleep with it. Egocentric entitlement, equity, and survival will forever haunt your dreams, and every minute you spend in front of a mirror.

Your identity will never give you a life that you love, but your hero can. Take action. Make some declarations and talk to people that are close to you about your new intentions. BE the “happily ever after” of your story. Your friends will cheer, and some may be moved to tears to see how triumphant your hero is against the background of absolutely zero chance that you would ever find a life you love. Even though you’re not doing it for them – you’re doing it for yourself and your health. Still, everyone loves a good story of trauma, failure, struggle, redemption, and happiness.