Last night we watched the new live-action version of Mulan. There has been a lot of criticism of the show for various reasons that I don’t want to get into here. It wasn’t perfect, but Disney knows how to put on a show.
What I do want to talk about is Chi. One of the big plot elements which took a little while to figure out is that Mulan has super powers. But in her world, super powers are kind of normal. People are surprised and impressed, but sometimes not that surprised or impressed.
Anyway, a big part of the new version is that Mulan needs to let her old, afraid self die before she can truly master her powers and let her Chi flow freely. Then, she takes her place as a world influencer.
Coming to terms with super powers is a classic element of a Hero’s Journey. Let me copy a version of my favorite Hero’s Journey diagram here so you know what I am talking about.
The Hero’s Journey model was a theory of Joseph Campbell. It comes from an analysis of various myths, rituals, and hero stories from a bunch of different societies. People have always been interested in heroes and powers. But here is a point I think many people might not understand:
The hero’s journey is about becoming an adult.
The hero’s journey is a coming-of-age story, and the power is about the power of being an adult who contributes to the shaping of society. Young children grow up completely dependent on their parents. They are subject to the powers that shape their community, but have little influence on their own world.
Here is a fascinating little interview in which Joseph Campbell talks about killing the “psyhology of dependency” to “break through to adulthood”.
Ok, so Mulan has Chi. Do you?
One of the challenges of living in a modern society is that we have become infantilized. We do not kill the psychology of dependency and become adults, because our consciousness is to expansive. Our world is to big to be adults in it.
Wait, what? Why would an expansive consciousness infantilize someone?
The world we live in now (and by live in, I mean the world we are conscious of — that we get our news from) is so big that we can’t have power over it. Hate Donald Trump? Too bad, your vote doesn’t count. Think the world is being corrupted by child-molesting globalists? Your opinion doesn’t matter.
The problem is that we are conscious of a world we can’t change. So we have to imagine that there are some people with super powers (like Mulan) who have the Chi and can influence the big world.
But that exludes us, the normal people. We don’t have Chi so we aren’t heroes. We will always be subject to, but not the masters of our universe. And this means that we will always be children.
So, what do we do about it?Well, every single one of us (assuming you are an adult human being) needs to grow up and find our Chi. That is, stop fantasizing about super powers and kill the psychology of dependency.
But in some cases, becoming an adult might require a certain kind of meditation. It requires reigning in our consciousness to a level where we can see our power. For most human beings, our power is not in changing the history of a nation. Our power is in building a world for ourselves and our family.
But if your consciousness resides in the Big World, you cannot build a Small World. And if you cannot build worlds, you are not a God, a Hero, or even an Adult. Therefore, like Mulan, if you are to become an adult you must leave behind a deception. Unlike Mulan, your deception is probably not about cross-dressing. Your deception is your worldview. Your deception is the ideology that tells you that the only power worth having is power in the Big World.
Your Chi is the influence you have over your family and your local community. Find your Chi.
