APPENDIX D - Paths to Discovery

Here are questions you can answer and other things you can do to help you understand the ideas in each chapter and apply them to your own life. Many of the questions and activities are also suitable for use in workshops and group discussions.

Chapter I — Questions
1. Make a list of questions you have about your life and human nature in general.

2. Have you ever had times of discovering new knowledge, new ideas not taught to you by others or that you read in books, but that you came up with on your own? What were those ideas? Have they stood the test of time? What happened that caused you to think them up?

3. Would you rather go to a play or a lecture on the same topic? Compare what you experience and how you feel as a member of the audience of each. Which do you get more out of? Which do you remember longer and more accurately?

4. Are you more apt to tell a story or give a logical explanation to make your point? In what situations are you most likely to do each?

Chapter II — Story
1. What is your favorite story? Why does it appeal to you?

2. What is the story’s question and answer? How do they relate to the questions in your own life?

3. Are the obstacles in your life similar to those the protagonist faces in your favorite story? What do they have in common? Can you find all three types of obstacles?

4. What are the secondary questions and answers provided by the obstacles and their resolution and how do they relate to the main question and answer?

5. The next time you are an audience for a story, no matter if you read it, see it on television or as a movie or stage play, or hear it told, try to spot the story elements mentioned in this chapter. They should all be there. Do this repeatedly until you can reliably see story structure clearly and quickly.

6. Usually we see stories from the inside. We enter into the world of the characters. The idea here is to become able at any time to step outside the story and see it as a carefully constructed dramatic device designed to manipulate the mind of the audience, to be able to see how all the parts of the story are put together and how they work to transmit information while giving the audience a meaningful experience.

Chapter III — Moral
1. Referring back to the story you chose as your favorite in the questions for chapter two, reexamine that story. What main moral did the storyteller intend for it to demonstrate? What minor morals? Do you agree with these morals; do you think they are true? Are they demonstrated in other stories you like?

2. In the story you examined in the previous question, can you discover any morals demonstrated that the storyteller probably did not intend?

3. How could these stories have been rewritten to demonstrate morals opposite to the ones you found? Would you still find the stories credible? Would you like them as much?

4. What is the moral package of your favorite character? Try to give as complete a description of it as you can. Now do the same for a character you dislike. In each, note which morals you think are true and which are not.

5. Think of three people who know you well but that do not know each other. For each one, write the description of you as a character and your moral package as each would perceive you and your moral package.

6. State five morals from your moral package that you have never thought about before, read about, or heard mentioned.

7. Think of some object in your life, your car or your computer, for example, that you treat as a character. What does it do that makes you see it as a character? What is its moral package?

8. Look up from this book. Wherever you are, whatever you can see, try to see it for what it is rather than what it symbolizes, is like, is one of, or is known as. Try to let it be itself only; do not bring words to it. As you look, try to let what you see be enough. Keep your mind quiet inside. Can you keep what you see from becoming either a character or a moral demonstration? How long can you maintain that perception without your mind jumping off to something else?

9. Write a short, original story. Choose what main and secondary morals it will demonstrate. Select a question and answer for each moral and obstacles that will set up credible demonstrations for them. Pick characters, each with a unique moral package, for whom the questions are important. Make your story dramatically coherent and bring it to a satisfying climax and conclusion. Be imaginative but stay on track.

When you are done, read it aloud into a tape recorder and play it back and listen to your story being told. Are you satisfied with it? If not, fix it until you are. Then read it to others. Are their myths moved by your story? How do you feel about your reality now that you have created another?

Chapter IV — Role
1. What are your roles in life? How do they support or conflict with each other?

2. Are there any roles you play in which you do not accept the moral package normally associated with that role?

3. What roles do you play in your imagination? If circumstances permitted, would you play them in life?

4. Are there roles your near and dear would like you to play that you resist? Why do you avoid these roles? What would your world have to be like to make these roles attractive to you? What would your moral package have to be like?

5. What roles have you resisted but ended up in? Are there any of these you have come to enjoy? What changed?

6. Which of your roles is closest to your perception of who you are? How did it get that position? If you could no longer play that role, who would you be?

7. With someone who knows you well, trade roles. You be him for a while and he is you. How does the world look from his position in it? How does it feel to be him? Does his identity make sense to you? Does each of you recognize yourselves as portrayed by the other?

Chapter V — Myth
1. How much do you see your behavior as affected by the stories you are audience for? How much do you see other people’s behavior affected that way?

2. What moral questions are central to your life?

3. Try to see your life in story form. If you were told that same myth about someone else, would it hold your attention? If someone asked you to tell him your myth, what would you say?

4. What are the six earliest moral demonstrations you can remember in your life? How old were you at the time?

5. How much does language define meaning in your life? Are you comfortable with important morals that cannot be stated in words?

6. What character do you play when no one else is around?

7. What contradictory morals do you hold?

8. What holds your attention and how does it relate to your myth?

9. If you got no feedback from other people, how would you decide what to do next?

10. Describe the nature of the world you live in. What sort of place is it? Now describe the world of someone you know well who is quite unlike yourself. What sort of place is that world?

Chapter VI — Group Myth
1. Of what groups are you a member? What is the myth of each? How much do the morals of each group myth coincide with your own?

2. What instances in your life can you recall in which your common sense at the time was proved wrong? What was the source of your mistaken ideas?

3. Who are your friends? Why these people? How did you make friends with them?

4. What roles do you play in each group? Is there one role you play more often than not?

5. What other group roles can you name besides those mentioned in this chapter?

6. In each group you belong to list someone in each role present in that group.

7. What sacrifices do your groups ask or require?

8. What rewards do your groups offer?

9. How much of your time is spent on group activities?

10. How much of some group’s standards of behavior do you follow when no one is watching?

11. Do you accept group myths wholeheartedly or with reservations? Why?

12. In your family, what group roles did you play as a child? Do you still play those today?

Chapter VII — Free Will and Instinct
1. What do you do habitually? How did you come to have these habits? Are there any you would like to change? Are there any you would be afraid to change?

2. What human instincts can you think of besides those mentioned in this chapter?

3. Are you ever lonely? What situations are most apt to make you feel lonely? How do you cope with loneliness?

4. How often do you make a conscious choice among viable alternatives instead of just doing the obvious normal next thing?

5. Are you attracted to doing something you have never done before or do you like to stick to the familiar?

Chapter VIII — Alpha
1. Who is alpha to you? What is it about these people that makes you see them as alpha? What secondary alpha characteristics does each possess? How does each affect your myth?

2. Who sees you as alpha? Do they see you as having secondary alpha characteristics? Which ones? How do you affect their myths?

3. What do you do to appear more alpha? Is it effective?

4. What are you willing to sacrifice to be more alpha? To appear more alpha?

5. Who are your heroes? Why do they seem more heroic than anyone else? How are the morals they demonstrated similar to yours?

6. The groups of which you are a member have heroes. Are they your personal heroes also? Why or why not?

7. Under what conditions and to whom are you most apt to be altruistic?

8. Are you dramatically satisfied by your myth? Is your life sufficiently stimulating, interesting, exciting, and progressing, or does it seem slow, repetitive or stuck, or is it moving too fast? What rate of mythic progression would be optimum? What could you do to improve your mythic progression?

9. How much are you alpha to yourself and how much does authority in your life come from others?

10. What will you do to win a dominance struggle? What will you not do?

11. What reasons would you give as to why you have a right (or do not have a right) to be alpha?
12. Under what conditions do you haze others and under what conditions do others haze you?
How do you respond to being hazed? How do others respond to your hazing?

13. When are you most alpha? How do you know?

14. What have you done to become more alpha? How did you do it?

15. Do you play the alpha game? What tests of alpha do you play to? Do you enjoy it? Do you ever find it burdensome? How much does it structure your life? What would you do without it?

16. What are your groups doing to get ahead? How much of the group’s resources and efforts are spent on making the group look good or surpassing similar groups?

17. What people, what things, what actions, what relationships, what ideas do you respect? Why? Do you respect yourself and your life? Why or why not? What are the limits of your respect?

18. Are you more apt to respect someone for his social position, his status in the group, or for his accomplishments and potential?

19. Have you ever avoided an alpha position? Why?

20. What power do you have? How did you get it? What power would you like to have? Why don’t you have it?

21. What is magical in your life? What is the most magical experience you have had? Is there enough magic in your life, too much, or not enough?

22. Where has power replaced magic in your life? Are you happy with the change or would you like the magic back?

23. Do you usually win or lose alpha confrontations? Why?

24. What specifically do you gain when you win a dominance struggle or an alpha confrontation?

Chapter IX — Beginnings
1. How big is your circle of friends? Is it a reasonable size for a tribe?

2. How many people do you know who all know each other and are all friends with each other, who see each other casually, outside of the context of work, school, or some other formal organization? How does the size of this group of friends compare with the size of an extended family group?

3. In the community where you live, what percentage of the people are One of Us rather than One of Them?

4. You are walking along the street and here comes a stranger, someone you have never seen before. You are asked to look at this person and decide how likely you two, if introduced and given time together, could become close friends. What information you could see about the other person would influence your answer?

5. Using what you now know about story structure, do you think there are animals you have had first-hand experience with, maybe dogs or cats, organize their thoughts in story form, with actions by characters yielding (nonverbal) moral demonstrations?

6. Do you create characters where rationally none exist to bring order, causality, and understanding to a chaotic world?

7. Do you think your group is better than the average group out there? Why? Why might they be better?

8. Where on a scale of happiness to unhappiness are you most productive?

9. How tribal are you? Are you strongly committed to a particular set of groups and stay with them for the long term, or do you drift about from one to the other or perhaps spend the major part of your life alone, not tied to any group?

Chapter X—Mythic Logic
1. Do you think of yourself as logical? At what times are you most irrational? Is there a logic to your irrationality?

2. Are you more comfortable with rational logic or intuitive response? Why?

3. How much of your knowledge has come from alphas and how much from experience? What have you learned from experience that you believe is true even though alphas say it is false?

4. How often do you accept something you are told solely because of that person’s credentials?

5. Do you believe everything happens for a purpose? Where did the purpose come from?

6. How much and in what ways do you see physical objects as characters you interact with?

7. How much confidence do you have in your version of reality?

8. Can you allow events to be either meaningless or of unknown meaning?

9. Do you experience your life metaphorically or directly?

10. In what areas of life are you most and least alpha?

11. What would you be like (besides lonely) if you were not a member of any group?

12. Go through an entire day without making assumptions about anyone you see but do not know. How was your day different?

13. How many ways has your mind used mythic logic today?

Chapter XI — Religion
1. Are you a member of an organized religion? If so, how would your life be different if you were not? If not, what would be the effects on you of being a member?

2. If not for answers from an established source, how would you deal with mythically important questions whose answers lie beyond your experience?

3. Do you believe there are nonphysical beings that affect your life? If so, how did you come to that belief and how do these beings affect your myth?

4. Are you comfortable with the idea that many mythically important events are random or at least appear so barring a more detailed physical understanding of the phenomenon?

5. How much do you accept something as true merely because a generally recognized alpha said so? Do you believe might makes right?

6. For most people, is the prime benefit of religion social or spiritual? For you?

7. Does religion bring into your life more magic or more power?

8. How much is your myth based on faith and how much on experience?

Chapter XII — Death
1. What do you think will happen to you when you die? How does that affect how you live?

2. Will you be forgotten after your death? In what ways yes and in what ways no?

3. When you die, do you want there to be a funeral? Why or why not?

4. Do you go to funerals? Why or why not? What is it about a funeral that makes you feel this way?

5. Have you ever had serious grief about someone’s death? What was the grief like? How did your emotional state progress to its present condition? How do you feel about the death now?

6. How has the death of someone close changed you? Have you become different in ways you did not foresee?

Chapter XIII — Justice
1. On what assumptions are your standards of justice based?

2. What should be done to prevent injustice?

3. How much is an action a crime because of actual damage as opposed to being a crime because of counter-demonstration of the group myth’s morals? Which does the group treat more harshly?

4. What transgressions against your own moral package do you allow yourself? Are you more lenient with your own misdeeds or those of others?

5. At what point would the group’s restrictions on your actions alienate you enough for you to stop believing in the group myth?

6. Are your standards of justice rigid or do they vary with the situation? What factors in the situation cause your standards to shift?

7. Where do you draw the line between right and wrong on one hand and different preferences and tastes on the other?

Chapter XIV — Beauty
1. What do you find to be beautiful? How does being in the presence of beauty make you feel?

2. If you were to change something plain or ugly into something beautiful, how would you make it different? What relation would those changes have to your mythic ideals?

3. Is there anything you find to be beautiful that most people call ugly? How do you explain the different aesthetic judgment?

4. Do you make an effort to be beautiful or to surround yourself with beauty? Do such efforts enhance your status with other people?

5. How much is your perception of beauty dependent on knowing your alphas see it the same way?

Chapter XV — Play
1. Do you play? How much, with whom, when, and where? What is your favorite form of play?

2. Do you ever put off playing or stop yourself from playing?

3. How important is play in your life?

4. When you look back on your past, do you tend to remember times of work or of play? Which ones do you remember?

5. Would you rather play games or watch games being played?

6. What games appeal to you? How do the morals they favor compare with the moral ideals of your myth?

7. What kind of parties do you like best? What was the best party you ever went to? What made it so?

8. How dependent are you on alcohol or other drugs to enjoy a party? What would it take for you to enjoy the party equally without them?

9. Have you ever gone to a party a stranger and come away as the life of the party, the belle of the ball? How did you make that happen? Have you ever seen anyone else do it? How did that person do it?

10. Can you figure out the myth of a stranger just by observation? The next time you are at a party, try it. Develop your skill.

11. Are you a party animal or a wallflower? What is your style at parties? Do you dive right in, or are you more cautious? How is it you are this way? Do you ever wish you were different? How much effort would you be willing to make to change?

12. Which phase of the party do you prefer? The quiet beginning, the active middle, or the mellow end? Why?

13. Do you like to stay for the whole party or do you prefer to make an entrance, stay a short time, and leave well before the party winds down? Why?

14. Have you ever hosted a party? How well did the party succeed? What was the myth of your party? What did you do to make the party myth happen? If it were your job to host an ideal party on a reasonable budget for your circle of friends, what would you do to make it happen?

Chapter XVI — Love and Other Emotions
1. How does the world seem different when you love and are loved?

2. People with what type of myth are you most apt to be intimate with? Are you more at ease being intimate with friends or strangers? How about family members?

3. What situations seem to you to be most conducive to intimacy?

4. What stimuli are most apt to get an emotional reaction from you? Are you more reactive to the stimulus itself or to what it symbolizes?

5. What do you fear? Are the objects of your fear really all that risky, or do they symbolize greater dangers you dare not face?

6. Why do people worry so much about things that rational logic makes clear are insignificant? How much do you worry? Does worrying add meaning to your life?

7. Do you ever worry about or fear that you are taking more of an alpha position than you deserve, that your bluff will be revealed?

8. What contradictions do you live with? Do they make you feel guilty?

9. What was the angriest you ever got? What about the situation got such a rise out of you?

10. What gives you pleasure that other people pass by?

11. Is boredom an issue in your life? Do you have fears that stop your life from being less boring? What are those fears?

12. Do you laugh easily? What strikes you as funny? Did you laugh more as a child than you do now? Why?

13. How do you deal with stress? Some people get angry. Others cry. Many people seek comfort, as in eating food they crave. There are people who cope by laughing. Another strategy is to seek intimacy. Others withdraw or become passive. Still others seek psychoactive drugs. What do you do? Why?

Chapter XVII — Sex
1. Watch your feelings about how alpha you are the next time you have sex. Do you feel more or less alpha before, during, or after sex?

2. Think back to the last time you were more alpha than normal to some group of people. Did anyone there seem more sexually attracted to you than normal?

3. If you were going to try to seduce someone, what secondary alpha characteristics would you adopt? Would you try to appear beautiful, strong, smart, powerful, rich, entertaining, or what? Would it help you to be a mythic source for that person? How would you seduce someone without appearing alpha?

4. What would be your ideal date (the event, not the person)? How much of what you have mentioned would increase your apparent alphaness? What would be the best date you can imagine that would not include alpha enhancement?

5. When are you most sexually aroused—when you are succeeding in life or when things are not going your way? How about when you are relatively popular or times when you are less so?

6. When you are in a fancy restaurant, do you accept the fantasy and feel more alpha, or do you see the place for what it is and stay about the same?

7. Do you enjoy dirty jokes? In what situations do you like them the best? When are you least apt to like them? When and to whom would you be most or least apt to tell one?

8. In what situations are you most apt to disapprove of other people having sex? What sexual relationships are you most likely to disapprove of?

9. When you were a child, what was the myth of your family? What is your family myth today? In what ways are these myths like and unlike how you imagine other family myths to be?

Chapter XVIII — Music
1. Listen to some piece of music you like and have heard many times. Notice the effect on you of each note and group of notes. Can you hear how they are like the flow of obstacles in a story?

2. In the music of question 1, what morals are demonstrated? The morals of music are basically nonverbal, but do your best to describe them in words. How do they compare with the morals of your myth?

3. On a piano, play a simple melody that has no chords, just one note at a time. Listen carefully to how each note sounds. Now play the melody much slower, with a few seconds of silence between each note. Notice how different each note sounds. Why do you think this is so?

4. Find part of a movie video that has no sound except for background music. Watch it. Now watch it again with the sound turned off. With the sound off, does it still hold your attention? Do you see anything you did not with the sound on? Did you miss seeing anything you saw with the sound on? How did the sound or lack of it affect your emotional response to the movie?

5. What kind of dancing do you like to do? To watch? What are the morals demonstrated by each? Do you accept those morals? What about the morals of dances you dislike?

Chapter XIX — Clothes
1. What are all the roles in your life that involve clothes you wear for no other role? Are those clothes necessary for the roles or could you play them in other garments? Do you wear those particular clothes more for their effect on other people or on yourself?

2. When you make an effort not to be seen naked, is it more because you don’t want to be seen or you think they don’t want to see you? Under what circumstances would you be comfortable naked in the presence of other people? Why?

3. What conclusions are you most likely to draw about a stranger based on what he has on? How reliable have those conclusions been?

4. Does fashion, being in style, matter to you? On yourself, or on others? How do you feel different when you know you are wearing the latest style?

5. Suppose you talked to a woman at a party. Are you more likely to remember her name, whether she liked you, what you said, what she said, whether you liked her, what her face looked like, what clothes she was wearing, or what she was doing. Rank these in order of most likely to remember to least likely. Try to figure out what causes your memory to favor one over the other.

6. When you think of your physical self, do you think of your clothes as part of you, or do you think of your naked body enclosed in clothes?

7. What to you is the sexiest outfit anyone could wear?

8. How much is your self image as an alpha based on what you are wearing?

9. How do you choose what to wear? Are there clothes that you would be afraid to wear? Do you ever buy clothes you never wear? Why do you buy them and why don’t you wear them?

10. Are you charming? Who finds you to be charming? Why? What are you doing when people think you are charming?

11. Who is the most charming man you know? The most charming woman? Do you think of charm as most apt to be exhibited by a man or a woman?

Chapter XX — Meaning
1. List five things that are meaningless in your life. Now think about each one. Examine each one carefully enough until it has meaning for you. What changed?

2. You are probably now inside a room somewhere. Look around at everything. Notice how the room feels, how you feel, who you are and what kind of place this is. Now look around and see everything just for what it is, not what it symbolizes. Don’t let your mind make anything into a metaphor for something else. How are you and the room both different?

3. Find some event from your past that annoys you still. Forgive, truly forgive, the slight and its perpetrator. What route to forgiveness did you take? How is your myth different for having done so?

4. I gave you an answer to the question of the meaning of life. Now it’s your turn. If you haven’t got an answer, come up with one. Make it true and one you believe in.

5. What morals would you have demonstrated in the optimum myth?

6. What group myth would help you have the best personal myth? What group has that myth? Try to find a group with that myth or one close to it. Join the group and see what happens.

7. What mythic material do you accept as optimum because someone told you so as opposed to that you accept as optimum based on your own experience, observations, or thoughts?

Chapter XXI — Happiness
1. What does happiness feel like to you? When are you most apt to be happy? Are you a basically happy person who has to deal with occasional interruptions by negative feelings, a basically neutral-emotioned person not much moved by either happiness or unhappiness, or a basically unhappy person who now and then has moments of happiness, or what? Are you as happy as you would like to be? What do you see as standing between you and happiness you want?

2. When you have times of happiness, what causes them? What brings them to an end? Do you feel you have any control of your happiness?

3. Imagine yourself in your present situation but happy all the time. Would you be willing to live that way?

4. How would you organize your life, your values, and your priorities without the help of the alpha game?

5. What parts of your myth are not working well? What would it take for you to fix them? Would you try to change your situation, your role, your actions, your moral package, or what?

6. You read about the technique of Talk Five Minutes. Now find someone who can help you and do it. Try answering this question. What can I do to be happier?

7. Do you get information from within yourself? Do you have original thoughts? How often do you take action based on your original ideas? How much do you trust your own wisdom versus the group’s?