Who is Pan, and why do you need to overcome him?

Pan is the ancient Greek god of the wilderness. He is half-goat, half-man, symbolizing humanity's primitive aspect. He's actually an older figure than the biblical devil, but it's very probable that the devil-as-a-goat figure originated from him since susceptibility to animalistic forces clearly opposes the good order of civilization and, therefore, appears demonic.

Pan is a god who does whatever he wants, singing, playing music, and dancing in forests and rural landscapes. He also likes to scare wanderers randomly, which is where the word "panic" comes from.

This primitive nature of Pan—the symbol that he carries—is not suitable for life in human civilizations anymore, but still, he persists and hasn't vanished. At least in children and adolescents we don't want him to be gone yet, as he is not only the symbol for animalistic intuition, which was the best survival method for the archaic human in the wilderness, but also the symbol of future potential. Pan, as a god of futility who does whatever he wants, never makes any long-term decisions, and also doesn't partake in the ruling of the cosmos on Mount Olympus with Zeus, Poseidon, and co. He always keeps his options open, which is exactly how you want children to be, so that they may explore and experiment.

At some point, it gets a bit ugly, though.

Sometimes a boy becomes a young man, and still hasn't overcome Pan. Society can somehow forgive it since there's still some time for him to grow, but after a certain age, it's not cute to be Pan anymore. It's just disgusting.

Peter Pan, for example, always stayed a boy. He never wanted to make any sacrifices, and wanted to stay in the magical land of childhood forever. He even kidnapped other children and forced them to stay children with him. In his deepest depths, he obviously knew what he was doing—his resentment against himself grew—but in order to keep the lie afloat, he had to feed it by pulling others down as well. How sad a story.

Pan is tempting. It's liberating to believe that you can be everything and achieve everything. Death is forgotten, and hedonism pursued. The future becomes unimportant, and the present becomes a magical fairy tale. Until, of course, a big pile of unattended problems eats you from the inside.

Overcoming Pan is a different way of saying: Making a sacrifice. To make a sacrifice means to choose one path over the other. Without the acceptance of your mortality and without the acceptance of your limited power, a sacrifice cannot occur. Otherwise, there's no justification for the suffering a sacrifice entails.

You simply can't be everything, and can't achieve everything. It's amazing to see a 7-year-old child believe that, but it's sad when this is the underlying problem that fuels the depression of a grown man who has only aged with his body. Usually, this kind of depression leads to extensive drug abuse in an attempt to self-medicate. It's clear how this happens. The real problem—that no sacrifices are being made—leads to depression. If the drug (or NETFLIX / INSTAGRAM) wasn't easy to access, the depression would be felt so intensely that the individual would find it necessary to do something as a prevention against suicide.

That's how low the lowest of this pantheism is. Suicide. A depression so deep that only non-existence seems to be the redemption. Pantheism is about seeing God everywhere, right? Like literally, that every single thing IS God. In such a case, even Hitler would be God, which would mean that it would be virtuous to serve as a loyal Nazi-soldier. Obviously stupid. If everything is God, morality can't exist. Good and bad would lose their meaning.

The only way out is to realize that you will only walk one path in life anyway, and that making no decision is a decision as well. To overcome Pan—to sacrifice properly—therefore means to pick the best possible path over all other paths. It would be asinine not to do that.

Again, please let me emphasize this point:

No matter what you do, you will sacrifice all other paths for the one path that will be the journey of your life, and so it would be stupid not to sacrifice for the best possible path!

If you don't decide to sacrifice for the best possible path, you will necessarily decide to sacrifice for a less good, mediocre, or miserable path.

Two problems with that whole thing:

1. You don't know if your vision of the "best possible path" is legit.

2. Even if you might sacrifice for the best possible path, your life might still become miserable.

Let's unpack those two problems.

1 — The first one is very simple. You're searching for an easy fix to what is probably the most demanding responsibility of every living human: Figuring out what is good and what is bad. You're told many things, from the day you were born until the day your beliefs are being questioned in moments like these. These beliefs might be complete horse shit. You simply don't know. However, let's say you manage to have some intellectual freedom and can visualize a maximally positive path for the future, but then, as new data enters your mind, you realize that a different path would be a better decision. What do you do in such a case? It's so obvious that it's weird to even ask the question, but the answer is obviously that you change course. This doesn't mean that you weren't going hardcore on the path you were on before, and just because the future might hold additional course corrections for you, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't put 100% effort into the new path you have entered. This is called risk-taking, and without it you will never get anything done. You won't get closer to the truly perfect path—the ideal path.

2 — Let's say you're all in on your authentic journey, but everything goes wrong. It's a possibility. Many humans are living tragic lives. Truly sad lives, full of immense suffering. What do you say to those people? What do you say to your own suffering? The answer is: Nothing. No matter how horrible your life is, or will become, there's nothing worse that you can do than choosing a bad path over a good path. It's very simple. Yes, you decided to improve, but everything is shit. Now what? Are you going to decide to make it all even worse? Isn't it wisest to continue the hero's journey? It obviously is.

All of these words to describe what Maester Aemon so quickly and beautifully conveyed to Jon Snow when he became Lord Commander of the Night's Watch:

If all that is therefore settled, it could still be quite confusing. Walking the most positive path possible, and making the sacrifice that this entails, is obviously not about visualizing your entire life at once. It won't work anyway. It's much more about visualizing one random point in the future that is as positive as it gets, and then crafting a plan to get there. Implementing the plan is the sacrifice. Failing to make a sacrifice means sacrificing for a vision that isn't the most positive one. Don't pick something that isn't as positive as possible.

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