In the world of X-Men, super heroes, victims and persecutors, who really are the true heroes? Are our heroes the visible, physical strength based archetypes, or something else?
In a crowd of people if the archetypical hero sees a person falling into a body of water and in distress, they would likely have a knee-jerk animal response to saving that person. And if that knee-jerk reaction is purely from an instinct – is that heroism to risk your own life because of a chemical reaction in your body? Is that true heroism?
Most people who perform physical acts of heroism do not take the credit for it. Their comments are generally “I did not have a choice or I just had to do it – there was no time to think”.
Taking nothing away from these physical acts, they still save somebody’s life, save the family from a loss or created motivation in other peoples eyes. Yet if the act is not true thought or thinking driven given birth to by choice and understanding, how can we call that true heroism? Isn’t it then just programmed responses?
I’d rather point to a story from long long ago to give an idea of true heroism. Before records were demolished and histories got corrupted – the race of people which were our forefathers, had a high social system, incredible engineering abilities and a philosophy way beyond our imagination in the 21st-century.
They had the power of the third eye and also created what we know today as language (there’s your NLP link). And the language that we now know evolved through hieroglyphs. Yet the difference from the words that we speak today is also the knowledge and wisdom of a picture, sound and abstract communication style long lost.
It was known that to wield a word, create a picture and utter meaningful sounds had the creative power of the universe woven into each of those arts. That was true power.
Our original forefathers saw that the mass populous had to have this power and wisdom that they performed. It is difficult to think of a genre of people, so gracious that they would put others, perhaps weaker and less able, before themselves.
Yet in providing this incredible ability to create and destroy through pictures, sounds and language itself – they would be at the effect of the unconscious use of these powers. The very language that they gave away, would eventually be the end of their line.
The masses in the ignorance felt that they had something which they could use to gain influence, but like children let loose in the playground, they had no idea how to use those powers with the wisdom and knowledge of our forefathers.
Our forefathers therefore gave up everything to give us something that they knew in the future along time into the future would become the next evolution and generations of where they were. No-one would see this heroism (almost no one), and it may take thousands of years for this heroism to be acknowledged, if ever at all.
For me that is heroism at the macrocosm. Yes heroism for you and I today, can be as simple as changing a habit.
When you are I change a habit we are literally killing our inherited ignorance. Habits are the hard wired robotic DNA produced tendencies, but run our everyday lives for us. When we exercise choice we challenge the very hard wiring that is the illusion of who we are.
And to some degree challenging the illusion will feel like death. We literally feel like we are killing ourselves when we stop listening to the voice in our head, the emotional dramas that try and chain us, or the chemical imbalances that drive us to medications.
To challenge those ‘patterns’ is heroism of the highest order, and everybody wins. That is not martyrdom, it is not the sacrifice where you deny yourself to gain access to the larder of life later. This is evolution of the past to the present. It is genesis in the truest sense. You become the creator of your own perceptions and therefore take back control of the system.
When you look at an NLP Practitioner and see what they are doing, for the most part they are challenging you and themselves to destroy old habits. Habits of eating, drinking, old stuck memories, and even phobias are part of the habit system. When your intention is set to change a habit you become a hero in your own movie.
Terry Elston
NLP Trainer