Shedding Outdated Skin: Building the Bridge from Man to Overman

“We are all architects of this bridge to some extent. Some of us are aware of it, but most of us are not. Most of us are cluttered and stuck in stopgap ideologies. We’re clustered and bottlenecked before the crossroads. Unable to self-actualize. Unable to self-overcome. Unable to see how everything is connected to everything else. Like pre-enlightened Rumis, we’re incapable of seeing that the door to our prison is wide open. And always has been.” ~ Gary Z McGee


Source:  The Mind Unleashed

by Gary Z McGee
June 14, 2018

 

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”~Friedrich Nietzsche

If you would be alive –if you would choose to live an examined life, a fulfilled life, a self-actualized life, a life well-lived– then don’t fearfully choose the safe road, what Jung called“The Road of Death.” Choose instead the courage to face the trials and tribulations of an adventurous road, a road full of danger and risk.

On the bridge from Man to Overman, there is no place for half-assed lifestyles and herd instincts. There’s no place for fear-based perspectives and cowardly excuses. There’s no place for play-it-safers and goodie-two-shoes clinging to comfort and light. The bridge is too narrow for narrow-mindedness. It’s too shadowy for those who have not reconciled their own shadows. It’s too full of dark nights for anyone who hasn’t experienced a Dark Night of the Soul. It’s too painfully real for those who have not overcome the Matrix and embraced the Desert of the Real.

The bridge is only for courageous self-actualizers and heroic self-overcomers. If your intent is not self-actualization and self-overcoming, then simply get out of the way. Don’t block those with a full heart just because your heart is empty. Better yet: fill your heart with courage. Join the ranks of healthy progressive evolution. “I teach you the Overman,” writes Nietzsche. “Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

 

Taking the leap of courage:

“Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.” ~Niels Bohr

Can you feel the constriction of your comfort zone? Like a heavy life-jacket weighing you down? Like a too-safe straight-jacket keeping you out of harms way?

Can you feel the warm glow of contentedness quietly stagnating you? Causing you to feel like you’ve made it somehow? Can you feel the secure pressure of the status quo keeping you in line? Causing you to blindly accept, to myopically believe that you’ve somehow got it all figured out?

Taking a leap of courage is daring yourself to escape these feelings. It’s encouraging yourself to step outside your comfort zone. It’s having the audacity to think rather than believe, to take things into consideration rather than rely on conviction. It’s inspiring yourself to be heroic despite fear.

Look, I get it. Inside the comfort zone everything is safe and warm, solved and unriddled. But there’s also no adventure there. There’s no risk. There’s no challenge. There is everything in there to help you heal, it’s a great place to lick your wounds, but there’s nothing there to help you grow.

Healthy growth, the kind of growth that builds resilience and robustness, can only be achieved outside the comfort zone. There’s got to be risk. Like Nietzsche said, “Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.”

Inside the comfort zone there’s placation, pacification and pity. There’s everything that keeps us appeased and satisfied. There’s God with his shiny promises and glossy platitudes keeping us pampered and coddled and giving us that warm fuzzy feeling. But there’s no growth. There’s no questions. There’s no humor. There’s no furthering of evolution.

Outside of the comfort zone God is dead. Or, at least, God is a garden. A vast and vital garden filled with the compost of every man-made God to ever have existed, rotting like deified fertilizer for the future fertilization of ever-improved and ever-updated Gods.

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