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The Hero of Heroes: The Osiris Myth & Attention

Post author By Chris
Post date August 11, 2020

“Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life.”
James Clear

The Hero of Heroes

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with discovering what makes people win. I used to think what made someone good at one thing was different than what made them good at another, and while there is some truth to that, I’ve noticed that there are a few things that make people good at everything. It’s almost like a Pareto distribution of skills necessary for winning. There are a handful of skills and traits that we can learn which can help us get to the top of all the pyramids, so to speak.

While analyzing the “winners” of our society, I’ve noticed that they all possess certain trains to get to the top of their fields. What makes a successful professor is different from what makes a successful athlete is different from what makes a successful musician, or businessman, or mother, or soldier, or fashion designer…you get the idea. Each one of these people has developed themselves in the areas they need to in order to reach the top of their game.

Well, life is more than just one game, it’s a series of games.

So that poses the question, what are the traits and skills we need to develop to win the series of games?

In some ways, that’s different from what it takes to win one particular game, but in other ways, it’s also the same. That led to me looking for patterns, not only in successful people of my time but in the heroes of the myths of all cultures.

For generations, even predating written history, people have been trying to figure out this question and share their findings with the ones who inherit their world. They shared these ideas through stories of heroes that would display the traits and ways of being necessary for “winning.”

Let me give an example, Hercules is a kind, strong, brave, and persistent young man and because of that, the story ends well for him. When little boys are told the story of Hercules, they want to emulate his heroic qualities and be one themselves. Adults are happy to tell them this story because they know (on a subconscious level) that these lessons will help the children in winning the game of games, life. The same can be found in religious stories, ancient myths, and popular culture. The Avengers is a perfect example of this. Spider-man is my personal favorite.

So I started thinking, what if I analyzed what was common among all of these hero myths?

Will I find the skills needed for success everywhere?

I don’t think I know exactly what will make someone successful everywhere, but I have compiled some commonalities between the heroes in every story I’ve come across. This is a pretty big idea so I’m going to be going over each of them with their own blog post.

These series of posts will not be an exhaustive list of these traits and skills, but they are the ones that I’ve found to be most important. This post is going to focus on the power of attention.

Attention

This story has a similar arc to Disney’s famous The Lion King, one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ll be making various connections to The Lion King and it’s relevance to the modern world throughout the story.

This story is one of the oldest, but most elaborate and influential, myths of the Egyptian Gods. This is the Osiris Myth.

It begins with the god Osiris, the King of Egypt, ruling a fair and prosperous kingdom. Osiris is extremely wise and well-liked by his subjects. He’s harsh with his judgments but fair with his punishments.

Osiris is analogous to Mufasa in The Lion King. They are both a representation of The Wise King archetype.

Osiris was married to Isis, the Goddess of health, marriage, and fertility. They had a good marriage and Isis was lovingly devoted to Osiris. Osiris also had a brother named Set, the God of deserts, disorder, and violence.

Isis seems to be the ancient Egyptian representation of the anima. Set is analogous to Scar from The Lion King. Like Scar and Mufasa, Set’s relationship to Osiris represents “the hostile brothers” archetype.

Set was jealous of Osiris and his power. He wanted to be the King of Egypt. Osiris knew his bother had these feelings but chose not to acknowledge them. Instead, he was willfully blind to his brother’s hostility. Set used his brother’s voluntary ignorance against him and killed Osiris. Set chopped Osiris up into little pieces and spread his body parts across Egypt.

These different pieces ended up representing the different districts in ancient Egypt and were thought to be the origins of their old borders.

Mufasa was killed by Scar because Mufasa did not want to see the evil in his brother. He chose to be willfully ignorant. Just like in The Lion King, Set was able to kill Osirus because Osirus didn’t want to see the evil in Set. This is one of the biggest lessons I took from this story: Willful ignorance is strong enough to take down a good, powerful, and wise leader. Or maybe the ancient Egyptians were trying to say that only willful ignorance is strong enough to take down a wise, powerful, and good leader. Either way, willful ignorance is destructive and the forces working against us will use our ignorance to catch us off guard. Choosing to not see the evil will kill us, maybe when others may need us the most.

Of course, when a king dies it’s big news and it’s not long until Isis finds out. She’s furious and goes around to each district gathering Osiris’s parts. Eventually, she finds his phallus and impregnates herself. Once she’s pregnant, she leaves for the underworld where she can raise her baby, the hero, Horus the Younger, away from the disorder and violence of Set’s reign.

Horus the Younger is commonly depicted as a falcon-headed man because he represents attention. The agent of attention is born from the wise king and the anima. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Horus is raised in the underworld. To the modern person, the underworld has connotations of Hell or other terrible places but in ancient Egyptian mythology, the underworld was another dimension where the gods could watch the humans from afar. Horus, the agent of attention, is raised in a world separate from the one he will inherit. Similar to how children are raised in environments separate from “the real world.”

This is where the Osiris myth diverges from The Lion King a bit. In The Lion King, Simba (Horus analogous) “grows up” with Timon and Pumba singing Hakuna Matata, whereas Horus was raised in the underworld by Isis. Those are obviously different, but in some ways they are similar. Both of our heroes are learning the ways of the world in a safe haven away from the real burden of responsibility.

As Horus gets older, he learns the truth about his father. That Set usurped him and is running Egypt into the ground. Horus decides to return to Egypt, confront Set, and avenge his father.

This is like when Simba decides to leave Timone and Pumba to go take his rightful place as king. This is the quintessential coming of age story (at least for boys), a boy leaves his friends so he can go an answer the calling to be greater. Usually catalyzed by a woman, in Simba’s case, it’s Nala.

When Horus returns, Set tries to win Horus over the same way he did with Osiris. But Horus has something is father didn’t, the gift of true attention. With his attention, Horus could see Set for what he was, an agent of betrayal and malevolence. When Horus confronts Set, they have a great battle. Set tears out one of Horus’s eyes, but Horus ultimately defeats him in the end. Since gods cannot truly be killed, Horus banishes Set from the Kingdom.

This is one of my favorite parts of the story because it has so many of the lessons that make this story worthwhile. 1) Attention is the one thing that will give us a fighting chance against the forces of malevolence. 2) When we are confronting the forces of malevolence and disorder, we will get hurt in a serious way. 3) We’ll never truly destroy the forces that are working against us, we can only fight them off and make them leave temporarily.

Horus picks up his eye and returns to the underworld, where Isis had kept all the pieces of Osiris. Horus gives Osiris his eye, restores attention to the old corpus of wisdom, and together they both rule Egpyt into prosperity and peace.

The ancient Egyptians believed that the pharaoh represented the union between Osiris and Horus. A good ruler needs to have the wisdom of the past as well as attention to the present in order to lead the people into a prosperous future. I think it’s great that Horus knew that to do what’s best for Egypt, he needed to give attention to the wisdom of his dead father. There is powerful meaning to be found in the journey of giving the attention of the youth to the wisdom of the old that runs deep within the soul of every human being. There are so many myths that depict that exact journey. It is not solely attention nor wisdom that will lead us to freedom and prosperity, but the union of both in a way that allows us to recognize and overcome the forces working against us.

___

Attention is what’s needed to brings us to the top of every hierarchy and overcome the forces of evil, so to speak. This idea has been expressed through archetypal images and myths throughout history and cross-culturally.

I think the image on the back of the American dollar bill depicts this perfectly. Attention is the thing that is at the top of the pyramid, but it’s also more than that too. Attention transcends the rest of the pyramid, it’s almost as if the ones who are paying attention are no longer part of the rest of the pyramid. (I’ve noticed this to be true in my experiences as well.)

Attention is the thing that will take us to the top of every hierarchy and overcome the forces of evil, so to speak.

But why? Why does attention sit on top of the hierarchy?

I’m not sure if I’ve come up with the answer to this question, but one of the answers I’ve come up with is that with the power of attention we can plan for the unknown, create the future, avoid danger, and predict the future.

I believe this is a huge part of the reason why so many internet influencers (and the Kardashians) make so much money. When you harness people’s attention, you have the ultimate power. Our attention is the most powerful thing any of us has to offer. That’s why companies are willing to pay millions of dollars for advertisements and people will dedicate their lives to being famous. Attention is the real currency, everything else is illusory.

Paying attention to where we pay attention is critical for living a powerful and fulfilled life. When we pay attention to our minds, we can improve our mental health. When we pay attention to ur bodies, we can improve our physical health. When we pay attention to anything, we can improve it. What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets improved. Attention is the first step to all of that.

I recommend looking into mindfulness exercises and practices. Meditation is a fantastic way I try to train myself in paying attention to my mind and myself. There’s so much research today that grounds the value of paying attention to ourselves in hard science.

Pay attention to where you pay attention. It’s the most valuable thing we have to offer.

Education

The Brain vs. The Mind (Part 2)

Post author By Chris
Post date December 10, 2019
1 Comment on The Brain vs. The Mind (Part 2)

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton (1608 – 1674)

The Mind

The mind what makes us feel alive and aware. It gives us the faculty of consciousness and the ability to think. The mind provides us with judgement, perception, language and memory. People all throughout time have dedicated their entire lives to trying to understand the mind but there is no shortage of things we don’t understand. Some of the people that studied the mind in depth include but are not limited to: Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Peterson, and many, many more. The mind is a strange place that we know very little about, but we can use what little we do know to our advantage. For some, the mind is the enemy. Perhaps it’s the most formidable enemy we’ll ever meet, but learning a few things about our minds can turn it into our most valuable ally.

I’ll do a brief run through a few of the topics that are integral to understanding the mind. Each of these topics is extremely dense and you can spend your entire life learning about just one aspect, but knowing just a little bit can make a dramatic difference in our lifestyle.

Mental Faculties

Thought

Wikipedia puts it best when it comes to summarizing what thinking is – “Thinking is sometimes described as a “higher” cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is a part of cognitive psychology. It is also deeply connected with our capacity to make and use tools; to understand cause and effect; to recognize patterns of significance; to comprehend and disclose unique contexts of experience or activity; and to respond to the world in a meaningful way.”

There are many theories to how the mind works. One of my favorites are diffuse thinking vs. focused thinking:

Focused thinking is what we traditionally think of when we hear the word thinking. It’s effortful, deliberate, and concentrated. It’s what we use when we’re consciously trying to solve a problem. Focused thinking eliminates distractions and gets the job done through sheer will power. This type of thinking is made possible through the contributions made by the prefrontal cortex. Focused thinking is optimal when you have high energy and the solution to the problem is right outside your zone of proximal development.

On the other hand, diffuse thinking is less straightforward. Diffuse thinking is the kind of thinking that’s running in the background making connections without you consciously noticing. Diffuse thinking occurs when we’re doing mundane tasks or whenever our brain has the ability to “wonder off.” Unlike focused thinking, diffuse thinking occurs in all parts of the brain. The freedom the brian has to make random connections allows for more creative solutions to come about. Diffuse thinking is optimal for when you are presented with a problem that may need a creative solution that you can’t immediately see. Benjamin Franklin used to induce diffuse thinking with his special napping technique whenever he came across a problem that he didn’t know how to solve.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about another thinking dichotomy in his best selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In this book, he discusses the brain working in two gears but he calls them System 1 and System 2. It’s similar to focused thinking vs. diffuse thinking but with some nuances. The main idea is to use System 1 to get the easy things done, but to slow down and use System 2 when necessary. Many people tend to mix these up and make important decisions quickly resulting in many unnecessary problems. I recommend checking his book out!

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Memory

Memory refers to our ability to keep and retrieve information. The study of memory has been a meeting point of several different academic disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and biology. There are many different kinds of memory. I laid out working memory vs. long term memory in my last post, but there are a few others that are worth mentioning.

Long Term Memory

It’s an umbrella term and splits into two different kinds of long term memory – Declarative and Implicit Memory.

Declarative (Explicit) Memory is the conscious and intentional storage of facts, events, and concepts. This is the memory that’s consolidated during stage 3 of the sleep cycle. Declarative memory can also split into two types:

Episodic memory refers to our autobiographical memory of specific events. It’s basically our collection of how we remember our life events.

Semantic memory refers to our memory of words, concepts, numbers, or other general worldly knowledge that we may need to survive. This type of memory is dependent on culture and experience.

Implicit Memory is the unconscious and unintentional learning that affects our thoughts and behaviors. Implicit memory is the reason why priming is a popular marketing method advertisers use to sell their products.

Procedural Memory is the best example of implicit memory at work. Procedural memory is responsible for knowing how to do things and it’s consolidated during the REM stage in the sleep cycle. This part of our memory picks up on the motor skills necessary to make every day life easier. This is how we learn how to talk, walk, ride a bike, play an instrument, etc.

Retrieval

Part of what we consider to be our memory is our ability to access the information stored in our brains. The two main methods of retrieval are recall and recognition.

Recall

Recall refers to our ability to retrieve information from our long term memory with little or no cues.

Recognition

Recognition refers to our ability to retrieve information from our long term memory because of specific cues.

Imagination

“Scientists must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.”
Max Planck (1858 – 1947)

Scientists aren’t the only people who must have imagination, it’s necessary for everyone.

The imagination has been described as a subjective process that the mind uses to perceives the world and the activity of creating new situations, concepts, images, or any other qualia. Even when setting aside the make-believe games that children need to play, people use their imagination all the time. Whenever we think of possible future scenarios, see things from other people’s perspectives, or get lost in a daydream we are using our imagination. Imagination is crucial for problem solving, especially under restricted conditions, so there are many practical reasons to develop our imagination. I say imagination is the fuel for creativity, and our creativity is what separates us from animals. We should lean into our imaginative thoughts. Everything we have around us was first imagined in someone’s mind. Everything.

Developing our imagination is key to solving all of our world’s biggest problems. Climate change will be solved through imagination. The social and political conflicts around the world will end through new solutions that have not been implemented (or maybe even thought of) yet. Imagination solves problems. Imagination creates life.

Assimilation & Accommodation

Assimilation, according to Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, is using an existing schemata to make sense of a new situation. It’s the first step in learning something new! Whenever we encounter something new, we first try to relate the novel stimuli to something we already know in hopes of understanding it well enough to deal with it. For example, whenever I’m teaching my students how to solve algebraic inequalities, I show them how it’s similar to solving regular algebraic equations.

Accommodation is what we use when we don’t have the necessary schemas to perceive the new information. If the new information still doesn’t make sense even after applying our pre-existing schemas, then we modify existing schemas or create new ones to accommodate for that new information. This is how we learn new things. We build new knowledge on top of the knowledge we had before when we encounter new circumstances.

Identity

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
James Clear

Our identity is how we see ourselves and how we know who we are. Over the course of our lives we create this person based on our interpretations of our life events or our goals we set for ourselves. This is arguably the MOST powerful force that motivates us. Our habits and choices are based off what kind of person we see ourselves as.

What makes our identity such a powerful force?

Identity Defense is how we preserve who we think we are. This results in rejecting actions that don’t match with who we think we are and continuing actions that match who we think we are. We love being right and hate being wrong, and nothing is worse than being wrong about who we think we are. The kind of person that we see ourselves to be is the one thing that we like to think we know for sure. This is powerful in creating new habits and explains why starting new habits could be difficult. New habits may not be seen as something that would match up with our current view of ourselves so in order to be right about who we are, we reject the idea of doing those actions.

If we see ourselves as athletes, then we are more likely to do what athletes do.

If we see ourselves as musicians, then we are more likely to do what musicians do.

If we see ourselves as great students, then we are more likely to do what great students do.

If we see ourselves already as the people we desire to be, then taking on the new actions won’t feel so strange. Be the new person, everything else will follow.

The Self

Our identity is very much aligned with how we know ourselves. When we say I know myself, what does that actually mean? We have multiple ideas of our self and these ideas play into how we form our identity.

All of the multidimensional ways we describe ourselves is known as our Self-Concept. It transcends time and applies to our past, present, and future self. We have infinitely many ways in which we describe ourselves, but it’ll just cover a few of them here –

Let’s start with our Actual Self. This is who we are in reality; it includes all of our strengths, weaknesses, and how we know ourselves to act in the world. It’s tough to get an accurate read on who we are objectively, but with serious reflection and the right team of people around us we can find our actual limits and use that knowledge to our advantage.

The Ideal Self is the person who we strive to be. This is can be seen as analogous to Freud’s Superego. This is the version of ourselves that judges us when we make a mistake and praises us when we act in alignment with it. This is the self that most people identify with the most. It’s easy to mix up the actual self with the ideal self.

The Ought Self is the person who other people want us to be. Sometimes the person we think we should we is the person that other people think we should be. We should recognize when this is the case and act in accordance with our own commitment to our Ideal Self. I’m not saying we should never let other people influence how we act, I’m suggesting that it’s extremely beneficial to recognize the affect other people have on our sense of self and decide if it’s worth internalizing.

Our Self-Esteem is our evaluation of ourselves in relationship to our ideal self. The closer our actual self is to our ideal self, the higher our self-esteem. The further our actual self is to our ideal self, the lower our-self esteem. The best way to raise your self-esteem is to clearly define what your ideal self is and do actions that coincide with the your ideal self.

Self-esteem is not the same as Self-Efficacy, which is how capable we think we are at a given skill or situation.

Our self-efficacy is what drives the idea that we have to learn a certain way (like visual or auditory) or that we are only skilled in certain subjects (“I am a math person” or “I am an English person”). That isn’t true. Our self-efficacy can be improved and with those improvements comes a higher rate of learning in all domains of life, higher self confidence, and exciting opportunities!

We can improve our self-efficacy in three steps:

Making & accomplishing small attainable goals
Recognizing those small accomplishments as significant and the preferred method of progress, as opposed to working hard for one large accomplishment
Slowly increasing difficulty over time

If we don’t take care of our self-efficacy, it’ll be difficult to try new things and eventually one could slide into the realm of Learned Helplessness. This is one of the lowest forms of diminished self-efficacy. It comes about from being in consistently hopeless scenarios. Sometimes there are things we can’t do, and if we find ourselves in those situations enough then we’ll learn that there isn’t anything we can do anywhere.

Learned helplessness is serious, but can be avoided. Recovering from learned helplessness requires a shift in identity, recognizing our cognitive biases (specifically the negative ones we hold about ourselves), setting them aside, and focusing on raising our self-efficacy.

One noteworthy mention is Carl Jung’s definition of The Self. I reference this in my other post The Power of Failure. Jung believed that the Self was developed through individuation, which is the integration of your personality. The Self is the representation of the unification of our conscious and unconscious. It’s my understanding that the primary means of individuation is through circumambulation, which is also mentioned in The Power of Failure.

There are many ways to define ourselves, so no one way is objectively true. But one thing is certain, understanding how we see ourselves is crucial to improving and getting out of our own way.

Dramaturgy (Front Stage Self vs. Back Stage Self)

Front Stage Self

This is the self which we present to other people. The self we put out to fit the social norms.

Back Stage Self

This is the self that we are when we are not around other people. This self is the one that really runs the show. Most of the actions that define our lives and self-concept are driven by the back stage self.

Collapsing these two as much as possible will make success in any domain easier. We don’t have to completely merge them together, but an honest life keeps us confident and directly affects our self esteem and efficacy. Training the back stage self to be well polished and pristine like our front stage self will allow us to accomplish what we need to accomplish to reach our goals.

Cognitive Load

I like to think of cognitive load as our brain’s biological RAM or our mental gas tank. In the morning (if we’re well rested) we start off with our full processing capacity, but as the day goes on every little task and decision chips away at our cognitive load until we go to sleep. Not all activities require the same amount of cognitive processing. Multitasking or activities that require intense concentration use up our cognitive load the most. This is why I do the most difficult tasks first – just getting my lazy ass to do it is going to take tons of cognitive load, so to speak. I won’t have the physiological brain power necessary to do the difficult tasks well if I save them for the end of the day.

Maximize bandwidth by reducing cognitive load.

Scientifically Proven Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load

Apply Occam’s razor to everything
Minimize the number of decisions you make per day
Remove needless words
Do the most difficult tasks first
Collaborate
Use cognitive aids (e.g. checklists, calendars, notifications)

Top-down Processing vs. Bottom-up Processing

Examine the following sentence – Rocky loves to rock on his rcoking chair to rock music.

Noticing that the c and the o in rocking chair are reversed is a form of bottom-up processing, seeing each letter and concluding that it is supposed to say rocking. But knowing that rcoking and rocking are similar for all intents and purposes is a form of top-down processing because you have noticed that the word is rocking then noticing later that the letters are switched.

Top-down Processing

Our ability to perceive something and apply what we already know and expect to perceive details that match with our conclusions.

Bottom-up Processing

Our ability to perceive a collection of details as they come and conclude what something is as a result of those details.

How does it relate to studying?

When studying, we want to use bottom-up processing to fight against our top-down processing tendencies. It’s easy to review a topic and think we know all the small details because we are familiar with hearing the name of the chapter or section, but in reality, we need to practice our concepts from the small details up and practice working through everything to really make sure that we know our information.

To study through bottom-up processing, doing practice problems or answering free response questions will help identify any gaps in your knowledge when it comes to the concepts you are responsible for learning. This type of studying is also know as Active Recall.

How do both processes work for us and against us?

When studying, it’s easy to fall into the trap of top-down processing. If we study simply by looking over our notes or reading quick sections over the chapter, we’ll be at a loss when the test comes and that will have a negative impact on our grades.

However, this doesn’t mean that top-down processing doesn’t have it’s uses. Sometimes top-down can be great for trying to learn something new. Applying top-down processing to a new concept can help you try to see the bigger picture then fill in the smaller details later. This is something I like to call Knowledge Frames. Building knowledge frames is perfect for frontloading, or previewing new information in advanced in order to focus on reviewing rather accommodation or assimilation. When I was in EMT school, I used knowledge frames to learn the blood flow through the heart in less than 10 minutes!

Bottom-up processing is great for reviewing content and can prevent us from deluding ourselves from thinking that we understand something when we actually don’t. I have had plenty of experience using bottom-up processing while studying and taking tests I was grossly underprepared for.

That being said, bottom-up processing isn’t so great for learning new material. Using bottom-up can create an illusion of new concepts seeming more difficult than they actually are. Purely memorizing individual facts or ideas about a new concept without trying to find how they all fit together will make any class 10x harder than it should be.

Both have their place and being aware of their existence can give us more firepower when dealing with a new class of information. Experiment with both and find your own methods that can maximize your results.

We interact with the world on many different levels. When a snake lunges towards us, we jump back before we consciously realize that the snake is attacking us. Our bodies are interpreting the world at one level and our minds interpret the world on another. Understanding our minds, is understanding part of how we interact with the world around us which will help us in anything we pursue. This is why I consider understanding our brain and mind important and treat it as a metaskill and I highly recommend diving into the fields of psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and literature if you’re interested in doing so.

Despite this blog post and the much larger body of work other people much smarter than me have put together, there is no shortage of things we don’t understand about the mind.