Joseph Campbell’s hero
As soon as we enter the material world, break through
from eternity into the Mother’s womb, the world of time, we live in a reality
of continuous change and transformation, of never-ending cycles of death and
resurrection, coming and going.
Myths tell the stories of how the heroes of all time
have gone before us; they are like accompanying lights in the darkness; we don’t have to risk the adventure alone.
We are all adventurers, heroes in our own right. We
all move, and go through transformations all the time. So does the world around
us, nature, our universe.
Birth is a good example of a hero’s journey we all
go through; we depart from the oceanic symbiotic life in the womb, called by
the forces of nature, on our first (?) adventure. The initiation is there,
ordeals, trials, but so is the impulse to move forward into the world, where we
“return”, born anew, into a new form to participate in the world, literally
regenerating our society.
Keyphases of the Hero’s Journey.
We experience many of these transformations, more or
less dramatic or traumatic, throughout our lives. To accomplish any major
change in our life we go through the typical key phases of the hero’s journey:
- First: the departure from home, from the familiar and known. This is
the phase of separation or detachment from our past and our identity. Here
we hear the calling to change, to a withdrawal or retreat from the world
of secondary effects, to venture past personal or local limitations.
- Then the “deed” itself, in its many forms; the initiation
into a new form. The being thrown into the deep, put
to the test, going through the ordeals to prove one’s willingness and
readiness to transform. All deeds are designed to
dissolve, transcend and transmute the past or former identification(s).
- All
this in order to finally return in a new quality,
a new capacity, a new role. The hero is (re)born into a new experience of
the world, a new way or level of consciousness, a wider identity, a next
Optimally the hero brings
something back to his society, or to the world; some kind of gift, or
knowledge/wisdom or a boon of a higher order like redemption or liberation from
some kind of hold.
And
of course these transformations, hero’s journeys, are happening on all levels,
in all dimensions of existence. We experience them in day-to-day life; the big
steps we all take from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. From being
dependent of your parents to being self-supportive, from being single to being
married to being parents, maybe to being a single parent. Changes of schools in
a sense, going
in and out of jobs, social functions, activities. And
of course the stages of physical and spiritual aging. The cycle of life… and
death, over and over again.
But
we see these transformations too in our communities, societies, world- and
universe wide. We see these transformations in nature – micro and macro-cosmos.
From the beginning of time humans suspected even the
cosmos itself goes through cycles of death and rebirth.
Perspectives.
We can view all these changes and transformations,
these renewing and vitalizing cycles, from different perspectives.
The myth then becomes a story with different layers.
We can look at the hero’s actions as real, historical deeds. The function of
the myth however, is to invite us to look beyond and to perceive the hero and
his deeds as symbolic.
The first symbolic layer would be to look at myths
the way Jung did, and view the action of the heroes in myths as representing
patterns or archetypes of human behavior.
- The psychological perspective.
Most myths give symbolic
expression to unconscious desires, fears and tensions that underlie the
conscious patterns of human behavior.
We can recognize the
psychological dimensions of our journey, the adventure we are undertaking to
venture into the darkness of our unconscious to explore what remained hidden
from our consciousness. This psychological journey is a true hero’s adventure –
for instance with Jung on the path of individuation. Departure
from the conscious, known world, into the abyss indeed. Always with an
inner calling to seek within for a primary truth we
cannot seem to find in the secondary world around us. There, when all the
shadows and dragons are confronted and ego is unmasked as “just” ego, a meeting
takes place between ego and Self. Ego consciousness is
thus enriched and in optima forma expands to realize Self (= ego death).
Closely linked is in my view the spiritual
perspective. The calling then comes from deeper within, an innate homesickness
compelling us to seek “home” in a noumenal reality
beyond our phenomenological one. This perspective brings us, once deeply in the
abyss, by means of a mystical marriage with the mother, or an
atonement with the father, to the knowledge/realization of the oneness
with all, our true home.
The idea is then to return to the world with
awakened consciousness: “the aim is not to see, but to realize that one is that essence; then one is free to
wander as that essence in the world”.
God is a thought, a reference to “something” that
transcends thought.
Myth creates a field of reference, an image of that
what cannot be known or understood.
This spiritual perspective brings us almost
seamlessly to its cosmic counterpart.
This is a deeper (the deepest?) layer to many myths, a layer that tells of the dynamics of the
cosmos itself; the creation of our universe, life on the material plane and
ultimately its destruction/dissolution back into the unmanifest
darkness.
When we explore from this
perspective we may get a glimpse of the unknown invisible eternal beyond the
known visible temporal.
- The metaphysical, “cosmogonic”
perspective. Now we try to grasp the “largest” story, the dynamics of the
primary universe. Here we witness the key phases of the heroes adventure
from a different point of view:
Home, the “place” of
departure is now the unmanifest, the void, eternity,
the imperishable, God beyond all words and concepts, symbols even.
The calling comes from
within, the expression of God to break though the Axis Mundi,
Navel of the World, into time, into duality.
The One splits into the
many/manifold. This is the phase of emanations; the
manifestation of the immanent divine principle that incarnates in the world. Or in other words; the coming of the forms of the universe
out of the void. But it is, as in the heroes adventure
also a death to the former unity, a fall from
Initiation then is life in
form, in time, in duality. The deeds of the hero, his trials and ordeals, the
various life roles through which the hero may enact his work or destiny are
movements of consciousness. The first task of the hero is to experience
consciously the antecedent stages of the cosmogonic
cycle, to realize the cause and/or origin of himself and his world; to perceive the oneness beyond the multiplicity. His
second then, is to return from that abyss to the plane of contemporary life,
there to serve as a human transformer of demiurgic potentials: the phase of transformation.
The “return” in this
perspective is a return to the father, into the oneness and wholeness, a dissolution of the world of forms back into its source,
the nonmanifest, the void.
From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and
redemptive image which is hidden within all of us, only waiting to be known and
rendered into life.
God assumes the life of man
and man releases the God within himself; at the midpoint of the cross they are united.
In all this, the function of myths, of the gods
notably, is to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves to the
greater/higher dimensions beyond. Myth directs the mind and heart, by means of
profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and
surrounds all existence. Or said in another way; myth
conducts us beyond our objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality
is left behind.
The cosmogonic cycle is also presented as the passage of universal consciousness
from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through
dream, to the full day of waking; then back again through dream to the timeless
dark. For me the analogy with sleep-dream and waking consciousness is slightly
different. Where are we (consciousness) when we are in deep sleep, do we
actually jump out of existence when we are not conscious? Is not enlightenment
at the end of the consciousness-scale? In my idea the cycle would indeed origin
in darkness, go through dream into waking, but then it would go on into the
light of full awakening. In the non-dual consciousness, light equals dark and
the cycle would start anew. I could even envision a never-ending movement,
maybe Escher-style.
The hero today.
Man, in his life-form is necessarily
only a fraction and distortion of the total image of
Myth are
clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life, and in that sense a
living inspiration for the individual.
History shows that in the ages of the myths, all
meaning was in the group (better chances for survival). Rites of initiation
were important because they taught members the lessons of the essential oneness
of the individual and his group. Myths then gave an individual an image of his
group as an imperishable living unit, showing him that, although generations of
individuals pass, the sustaining timeless form remains. The individual is called upon to identify with the super-individual (hero,
“total” human) and he discovers himself enhanced, enriched and supported. This
man experiences his potential, his place in the larger order of thing. This, of
course, has a validating, vitalizing function.
Now, it seems, all meaning is in the self-expressive
individual. The group is no longer a carrier of mythological content, but
rather an economic-political organization. Furthermore
it has become more difficult to experience ourselves to be a member of a group.
Boundaries have become vague; families, communities, societies are not as
clearly defined as they were. Our commitments have changed. The tendency is to
larger units (no longer Dutch or even European we become world citizens),
identification with such a large and diverse group doesn’t
come with rites and myths.
There is no hiding place for the gods,
The hero of today, it seems to me, can only move
through the phases of his adventure and face his destiny if he is willing to
depart from his identifications with the little self, the limited, fearful,
greedy victim of his life. His calling is to return home, to seek atonement
with the Father and finally fully meet the “Thou” in himself.
In my view the time has
come to turn to and within ourselves, and start to learn to act as responsible
mature human beings in the broadest sense.
When Man is willing to accept the Thou within himself, his perspective changes, the Ego psychology
transforms: his world becomes spiritually significant too. Man will finally
recognize the Thou in all of creation, he will see His image in all aspects and
segments of the hologram. This is also the
The hero returns awakened, renewed, literally
revitalized and thus revitalizing. He can finally, in daily
life, identify with his higher Self, the response-able, full of
potential, abundant, creative. When we take into account how utterly important
it is what we think[2],
how consciousness literally creates our material world, we glimpse the
significance of such a change in perspective. It makes me wonder if such a man
or woman would be like a modern Bodhisattva, a living myth, inspired to see the
world enlightened. In any way, it seems Man has a way to come to full human
maturity through the conditions of contemporary life!
The future of myth?
And
maybe Joseph Campbell was right to be optimistic about our potential to survive
on this planet. In his interviews with Bill Moyers[3] he makes an interesting point when he describes how vitally
important our myths have been in creating our reality. We Westerners,
for instance, are
“stuck” with the myth of the Fall from the Garden of Eden, which as a myth has
been fixed into a concept that actually separated Man from Nature and Man from
his God and Nature from God. We and our planet still
suffer from that, and from many other glitches of interpretation. Our bible based religions never adapted their myths to the needs
of the people worshipping. Now it proves to be amazingly difficult to
transform, in this case, the deep-rooted “paradigm” of separateness into a all-is-related (all-is-one) one.
It makes you wonder about the dangers of myth
though. Maybe we are better off now without group myths, and should turn inward
to find our own, personal myths instead. Or create
planet-myths as
But
the idea to go personal with myth is
interesting and in my vision certainly a way to explore. Andrew Harvey, among
many others, writes about this in his book “The Direct Path”, in which he
suggests to the individual to become free of all restricting social, political ànd religious systems that constrain him, and find his own
truth through his personal experience of God. This man grew
up in a multi-racial, multi-myth environment in
I recognize the need for a personal myth, including
rites and rituals.
Maybe the breathwork Stan Grof developed gives people a save environment to find one
too. The purposeful exploration of the unconscious in a more or less controlled
(group) situation[4],
the drawing of mandalas, the focus on bodywork vs.
“therapeutic” evaluation. Yes, probably.
For me it has become important to move away from
concepts and limiting “shoulds” in order to find my
own truth through personal experience.
The exploration of Eastern traditions seems to help
us Westerners too. We clearly see, by living example, how reality is indeed influenced by our religions, our myths. How
wonderful that we can openly and deeply compare cultures and histories and, in
a way, choose from all there is what suits us best. Unfortunately there does
not seem to be one religion or tradition that “has it all” for everybody. This
is not a question of good or bad, or any moral judgment, but our relationship
with God has just become such a personal, and extremely sensitive issue that we
do not feel “right” anymore with myths that don’t fit.
Is it fair to say that we should indeed let go of the idea of a concept that
will cover the “one truth” for all, and concentrate instead on the (individual)
experience of this truth?
From there, from a position/perspective of being
transformed from within, we might reunite in groups, in humanity?
Another kind of myth with potential is certainly the myth coming
out of