B. IN MEDIA
The core premise of the Hero’s Journey is the individual separating from the tribe to create something new. The Matrix is an example of the individual (Neo) breaking out of the collective.
Other movies with this concept: Incident at Owl Creek, Heathers, The Breakfast Club, Fight Club, Gangs of New York, Wild Things, Fountainhead, West Side Story, Colors, Boyz n the Hood, Evita, Les Miserables.
TV series Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have teen characters dealing with this issue.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Lower Solar Plexus: tribal consciousness and individualization, & Root: survival.
Clearly set up different goals and stakes for both individualism and the gang.
Show the upside of gangs: sense of community, belonging, support, fun; and the downside of individuation: loneliness, criticism, persecution, self doubt.
Give your heroine three runs at the problem and have her set back, or victorious, against 1) history’s inertia, 2) the gang’s agenda, 3) her own desire to belong.
Help discover tools to overcome this common problem. Offer us new perspectives on transformation and growth of consciousness.
See more in the “Groupthink Stinks” chapter.
KARMA, CULTURE,
GENETIC MEMORY
Karma is a law of physics and a theory of metaphysics embraced by billions of humans. Physics is Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Metaphysics? Certainly there are repercussions for our actions, both internal and external, short-term and long-term. Yet some good goes unrewarded and some evil unpunished. Karma attempts to explain these seeming inequities with a very long view of cause and effect.
Oppressed? You were the oppressor 300 years ago and it’s payback time. A ruler? You learned to be a good one from many lifetimes suffering under bad ones. Broken heart? You broke hers last lifetime. Is Karma a Dweller? Just ask anyone who’s a minority via skin, accent, etc. According to reincarnation, that’s your problem because you chose to be born that way. Karma both unites us in the family of humanity and isolates us as captains of our own destiny.
Perhaps phobias such as arachnophobia, acrophobia, etc. are karmic species memories from the distant past when nature posed more danger. How they hold us back now makes for effective internal character obstacles. Some say we loathe lizards because of mammalian brain memories of dinosaur bullies… but paleobiology says that’s a bit of a stretch. Good for sci-fi, though, like reptilian aliens in the 80s TV series V and Alien Nation.
A. IN ACTION
Responsible teachers warn students on the Spiritual Path they’ll start drawing in Karma — their own, their family’s, their culture’s, etc., and they can expect illness, break ups, bankruptcies, even death as they consciously work on cleaning up and raising consciousness. Most disciplines prepare you for this, but it’s always hard — though eventually worth it as the negative Karma gets worked out and the positive Karma comes through.
Psychiatry now deals with whole families and bloodlines. You may think you’ve escaped your family, but a trip back for a holiday or funeral will reveal others with your looks, your quirks, your tendencies. Scary.
Some illustrate Karma bounceback by reading Old Testament accounts about Israelites wiping out entire peoples, then read from Nazi Germany Holocaust accounts, then news from today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You could do exactly the same thing for just about any other group, ethnicity, or race. None of us are innocent if you go far enough back… sometimes only a year or two.
B. IN MEDIA
In both Pride and Prejudice and the Bollywood romp Bride and Prejudice, family and societal Karma provide obstacles to true love. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels also trace this, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude. Frank Herbert’s Dune series deals with genetic memory, as does Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States where a scientist reverts back to a primate. Star Trek: The Next Generation did an episode where crew people turned into animals reflecting their races or personalities.
Though a staple of Eastern stories for thousands of years, Karma is just beginning to figure in Western stories long dominated by Judeo-Christian-Islamic views of only one earthly life. Karma is a plot driver in Dead Again and The Fountain. Mixing Christian and Eastern philosophies, What Dreams May Come portrays vivid Karmic results for taking one’s own life.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Root: Survival, & Lower Solar Plexus: separatism, tribalism. Sometimes Throat: attempted logic and balance, & occasionally Crown: higher spiritual forces.
Show us how the Karmic system works. What are the customs, the expectations, the limitations? In both Pride and Prejudice and Bride and Prejudice we are introduced to upper middle class wedding expectations; then we see what happens when customs and Karmic patterns are flaunted.
The Law of Grace supersedes the Law of Karma. Once you get the Lesson, you no longer have to pay the Karmic price. This tenet of the Wisdom Teachings is behind forgiveness, salvation, and the self sacrifice of all Redeemer Gods. Show how this works to free your character from the chains that once bound him.
Everything’s moving so fast these days, it needn’t take lifetimes to get payback. Show a heroine whose Karmic repercussions come ever more quickly until it’s “instant Karma.”
CONCLUSION
In order to change and grow, your characters must overcome inner obstacles, their Dwellers on the Threshold. Select a sliding scale, as between Loyalty and Obsession, and work your character along it. Too much reformation, however, leads to boring characters. In the TV series House, the Vicodin-addicted jerk Dr. House was without pain for a few episodes and became a nice guy… boring! The German philosopher Johann Goethe advised that you should beware when casting out your demons lest you cast out the best part of yourself.
Also keep in mind that how people view the Dwellers will affect their politics and policies. If it’s your own fault you’re homeless, you don’t deserve assistance (conservatives). If it’s cultural or societal, perhaps you do (liberals).
In Jacob’s Ladder chiropractor and psychopomp (helpful guide to the underworld) Danny Aiello teaches dying soldier Tim Robbins that your Dwellers are demons until you let go of them. Then they are angels who take you towards the Light. English philosopher M. Jagger advises, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.” Once we’ve learned what we needed to learn by battling our Dwellers, once we’ve stepped over our Dwellers, embraced them, become them, gone through them — we cross the Threshold into a totally different world.
3.
THE DARK FORCES
– IMPERSONAL
Laws of physics
Theories of other physics
Time
Duality
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water
Red in tooth and claw
A plague on both your houses
Techno trouble
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences. Whether fighting gravity to take flight, racing against time, hunting animals or escaping from them, battling diseases, or struggling to survive storms, humans thrill to stories of Us versus Nature. Unlike opposition from a Dweller on the Threshold, or from other intelligences, a Dark Force is a vastly different opponent. These impersonal Forces of Nature are only called Dark when they stand in opposition to our goals and desires. The Dark Forces can be especially frightening because there’s no way to reason with them, yet they are the essence of physical reality and must be dealt with all the time.
Myths offer exciting personifications of Nature: volcano goddesses such as Hawaiian Pele of the fiery red hair, sea gods such as Greek Poseidon, and the fierce jaguar gods of South America. Ingmar Bergman’s somber film The Seventh Seal portrays the Grim Reaper as a dark-clad, chess-playing humanoid during the Black Plague. In Terry Pratchet’s
highly amusing Discworld fantasy books, Death is an overworked executive who outsources his professional duties and worries excessively about his rebellious teenage daughter.
Though not as glamorous as the angry gods of myth and legend, impersonal Dark Force dangers can push along a story quite well. In Finding Nemo many of the bad things are just doing what they do: big fish eat little fish, jellyfish sting anything in their way. In The Perfect Storm, the men’s personal (Dweller) foibles get them into the storm, but they’re battling an impersonal Dark Force, not an angry sea god.
Though prayer may comfort the devotee, it’s not proven to affect objective reality and would seem neutralized where different people are praying or sacrificing for opposing results. Perhaps for this very reason, some of our greatest heroes and villains are those who control the Dark Forces, be it Gandalf or Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, Obi Wan or Darth Vader in Star Wars, Merlin, Moses, shamans, witches, or Harry Potter.
Dark Forces gone rogue supply the antagonist in many horror stories, be it hungry trees, killer bees, or raging storms.
Even if your story is totally realistic and centered on human interaction, you’ll still want some aspect of the Dark Forces in play: the ticking clock, the physical obstacle, faulty technology, etc. Let’s explore more of the Dark Forces and see how you can use them to create more dangerous dilemmas in your stories.
LAWS OF PHYSICS
Rivers run to the sea, the sun rises and sets, and the stars move across the heavens. Helium balloons escape from toddler’s hands, and peanut butter sticks to cat hair. The basic laws of physics confound our desires, sometimes in simple ways, sometimes quite dramatically.
Gravity, magnetism, the motion of the planets and stars follow laws, identified by 17th-century scientist Isaac Newton:
1. Inertia - a body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body in motion tends to stay in motion: snooze alarms, lousy jobs, bad relationships.
2. Force equals mass times acceleration: push harder to go faster, be it car chases, careers, or rockets.
3. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction: teenagers, reform movements, violence blowback.
A. IN ACTION
When your characters must deal with physical things to achieve their goal — and who doesn’t — they’re up against the Dark Forces. Gravity can be either amusing or annoying, just ask the baby in the high chair who’s dropped a toy ten times, or the babysitter who’s picked it up nine. Sunrise is a joy to some but a curse to the vampire who doesn’t close the coffin in time.
B. IN MEDIA
Wim Wenders’ feature Fitzcarroldo and documentary Burden of Dreams are about the challenge of building an opera house in the Amazon, including carrying a riverboat over a mountain. The physical challenge of running rapids in The River Wild reflected and heightened the personal drama. Martial arts and action-adventure movies use the laws of Nature as barriers to be physically mastered.
TV hero MacGyver applied mental skills and used the Dark Forces for good.
Magic seemingly circumvents the laws of physics. Jedi Knights do it. Willow in Buffy and the sisters in the Charmed series do it. Neo in The Matrix does what seems like magic, once he realizes his perception of the laws of physics is an illusion and learns how to use the real laws of that world.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Root: the basic physical stuff, & Throat: using intelligence to move stuff around.
Some things stick together; others don’t. Any physical problem can be solved with either duct tape or WD-40, right? Similarly, your characters can pull things together (make a raft or a kite to escape) or separate them (remove the fuse from the bomb, cut off the dragon’s wings).
Whether it’s building a house, climbing a cliff, or baking a cake, characters have to deal with the laws of physics. Of course, if they’re wizards or are in other dimensions, some laws might not apply. Change it if you will, but keep it consistent.
We’ve used force to overcome gravity, and sci-fi stories apply “inertial dampers” to keep ships and people from being shredded at high speeds. Fiction often leads the way where science follows. Explore some laws of physics past the next step and beyond. What’s after light speed?
THEORIES OF OTHER PHYSICS
Quantum mechanics, fractals, string theory, indeterminacy…
These concepts entered our consciousness with Einstein, Bose, Heisenberg, and others. They’ve also entered our stories, but too often with leaps of correspondence that make for fun fantasies, but very little reality.
A. IN ACTION
Hindu philosophy posited many of these theories thousands of years ago and crafted myths to illustrate them (Indra’s Net of Gems explains interconnectivity and holograms). Western science is just now catching up. Indeterminacy is mathematically proven but nearly impossible to illustrate. String theory is still controversial. Cosmic rays, radio waves, gamma rays, proton decay, radioactivity — these less obvious aspects of the physical world can seriously harm us (radiation poisoning), as well as help (radiation therapy). The math proposes Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up about 96% of the universe, but to date they’ve not been found. Alternate universes, worm holes, and time travel have been hallmarks of sci-fi for decades, yet still lie beyond proof and practical use.
B. IN MEDIA
The books The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Tao of Physics, and Quantum Leadership move us through observer-determinate dimensions of reality and apply it to our business and personal lives.
The Celestine Prophecies, What the Bleep Do We Know?, and The Secret speculate on how to do this with our own minds, as do the many teachings over thousands of years about using the power of attraction to realize your dreams.
Star Trek, Babylon 5, and the classic stories from mid-20th-century sci-fi and fantasy use Dark Force aspects to create challenges and opposition for their characters, shape-shifting, and chasing each other at warp speed through alternate dimensions.
Sliding Doors and Run, Lola, Run apply principles of string theory and multiple universes to otherwise ordinary people.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Throat: only understanding will solve the dilemmas of these Dark Forces.
Read Scientific American and other science journals for story ideas.
Scan world myths for stories that reflect these principles, such as the Hindu myths that seem to refer to nuclear explosions.
Have a scientist or geek in your story explain things for us. Physics on this quantum level is really really tiny, so have your logic well worked out on how it affects our regular world.
Stick to one or two odd-physics devices, such as multiple realities or time travel. More than two is hard for your audience to follow or to believe.
TIME
This Dark Force affects everything in the cosmos and has been personified as Father Time with his reaping scythe, the Greek Fate Atropos whose scissors cut the thread of life, and the Hindu god Shiva whose dance of destruction makes way for new life. The oldest traditions observe vast cycles of time and many cultures built temples to mark these cosmic passages, such as at Borobodur, Angkor Watt, Chichen-Itza, Stonehenge, etc.
Time’s Dark Force of entropy and the tendency to balance lead to stasis, which is not only peaceful, but boring and is one good reason to end your dramatic love story or madcap comedy just as the two opposing forces come together in resolution. After that, it’s likely to be deadly dull.
The human tendency to savor and cling to our own time is in direct conflict with the fact that time flows. This Dark Force is actually the foundation of all your plotlines and is embodied in the concept of “the ticking clock.”
A. IN ACTION
Anti-aging entrepreneurs applaud the steady stream of new customers. Projects have deadlines, trains have timetables, recipes have time-specific directions for whipping or heating. The military has an acronym for it, OBE - Overtaken By Events. Life would simply be impossible i
f not for the flow of time, yet it puzzles and troubles us so. Good news for you, since audiences will always be interested in a good bout with Time.
B. IN MEDIA
Enter the slow time of Faerie Land and you might not return for twenty years: blink once and your babies are grown; blink twice and your youth is gone.
Peter Pan and the Lost Boys don’t want to grow up, and Captain Hook runs from crocodile death, announced by a ticking clock. The entire fable is about holding back the hands of time, or not. Disney’s cartoon glosses over the deeper philosophy so poignantly played out in P.J. Hogan’s 2003 film.
In Richard Matheson’s love story Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve goes back sixty years to reunite with the younger version of an aging actress who begs him to return. The inciting incident in The First Wives Club is husbands putting aside their middle-aged wives for new ones.
Time is a major factor in Star Trek, Back to the Future, Time Rider, A Winter’s Tale, Portrait of Dorian Gray, Brigadoon, the Omega 13 in Galaxy Quest, the disappearance of Babylon 4, Jules Verne’s The Time Machine, Julian May’s Many-Colored Land novels, Dune, The Matrix, A Wrinkle in Time, World Enough and Time, and many more.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Ajna: control of time.
An Ajna focus character will have paranormal abilities and an omniscient sense of awareness, like the Kwisatz Haderach of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, who can be all places at once and go backwards and forwards in time.
Power of the Dark Side Page 5
