The Hero's Journey

 In his classic The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Pantheon, 1949) Joseph Campbell mapped out the 17 stages of the archetypal hero’s journey. Throughout mythology, literature, and film, the hero’s journey crosses all cultural and temporal boundaries, from the first Paleolithic camp fire to the surround sound multiplex. No matter the medium, the message is the same – we must journey beyond the boundaries of our ordinary life, risk it all, and, figuratively speaking, die to be reborn into our authentic nature. In the end, the hero’s stories are our story. Each of us is the hero of our own life.

            It turns out hero stories are not about extraordinary people – they’re about ordinary people unlocking extraordinary powers both within and around them. To the true-hearted hero, nature itself becomes an ally. The trick is awakening those latent powers and wielding them with wisdom. And we don’t have forever. This is it. As Campbell liked to say, “If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.”

            The only thing required to unlock these powers is the willingness to take the journey, to say the holy word “yes,” and to trust. When the hero commits, the whole of nature rises up as an ally.

            So you begin right where you are, and allies appear, the money works out, and doors open where there were only walls. This, says Campbell, is the first third of the journey – the departure. Then comes the initiation phase. You cross into the unknown and fall into the belly of the whale – think Jonah. This is a period of darkness and despair where none of the old rules apply. You’re powerless and stuck. Yet somehow you’re spit out of the other side and find yourself on the road of trials. Here you quest, struggle, and strive, usually with a band of fellow travelers, to eventually face the most powerful force in your world, what Campbell calls the atonement with the father. For Luke it’s Darth Vader. For Harry, Voldemort. In The Wizard of Oz it’s the wizard. And every time, when you muster the courage to confront the dragon, the monster, or the angry god, you realize two things – they weren’t as scary as you thought, and, you see yourself in them. You’re not that different.

            Boon or prize in hand, the challenge shifts. Now the hero, (that’s you), must begin the third and final phase of the hero’s journey, the return. Simply put, you must break away from the bliss of realization and choose, in the consciousness of service, to bring the prize home. This is often the most dangerous phase of the journey. You might collapse and need rescuing. You might succumb to your own ego and sabotage yourself – think Darth Vader. The successful hero moves finally into a state of deep reconciliation and, like a bodhisattva, has one foot in nirvana and one foot in the world. The spiritual realization that transformed you becomes the elixir that will transform the whole world.

            Then, returning home, one learns how to wield and integrate all of these insights into the ordinary world. In your heart, peace. In your mind, clarity. And in your gut a willingness to work for the healing of the world without anxiety or attachment to outcomes. And this, in the end, is the bliss that drew us out on the hero’s journey in the first place. 

[This piece first appeared in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2021 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Fear of Courage

Fear is not a weakness. Nor is it a childish indulgence. Fear plays an essential role in the unfolding of our lives. Fear keeps us from touching fire, swallowing razor blades, and kissing rattlesnakes. Fear in and of itself is not the problem. It’s the misapplication of fear that causes all the damage.

For the ancient Greeks courage was the most important of virtues, for without it, none of the other virtues are possible. How can we be compassionate without the courage to love? How can we be strong without the courage to push past the limits of our endurance? And how can we be smart without the courage to admit ignorance and press onward into new areas of learning and mastery?

            But courage is frightening. It asks us to risk everything.

I think we’re afraid of courage because courage asks us to abandon the supports we have worked so hard to construct. Courage asks us to sacrifice our safety and comfort. To be brave is to venture out beyond the reach of our protections, into an unknown field where none of the old rules apply and everything we know is irrelevant. To be courageous is to be vulnerable.

Courage begins with the willingness to let go. Courage and renunciation are two sides of one coin. Not only do we have to let go of our old support systems, we also have to let go of the idea that we are not enough. To be courageous we have to come to understand that there are qualities and strengths within us that have not yet been realized. Renouncing our old, limited, and limiting self-definition goes hand in hand with courage.

Courage is also an affirmation of the goodness of the universe. Fear, on the other hand, is often a misguided overreach of the ego feebly asserting its so-called power in an attempt to control everything. The fearful mind believes that we are not enough, and the universe is not enough either. Courage, on the other hand, means letting go of control and trusting that if the means are pure, the ends will take care of themselves. We must learn to use our egos, and not let our egos use us.

This then is the metaphysical foundation of courage – the view that all is one and that our lives are sacred expressions of the formless ground of being beyond all thoughts and forms. Debilitating fear is only possible when we have forgotten our original relationship with the divine. Again and again Jesus counsels his students to “fear not,” because anxiety and fear sever our delicate tether to the eternal. Coming out of fearfulness and into courage opens the portals to higher consciousness.

In the world’s hero journey tales the hero must face the monster again and again to be tested, and even more importantly, to have everything about them that is underdeveloped and inauthentic stripped away by the ferocity of the ordeal. While we may not literally be fighting monsters, the underlying truth remains. There are obstacles between us and the life we were born to live. Without cultivating the courage to face them, we rob ourselves and the wounded world of the healing elixir our transformation would bring both to our own lives and the lives of innumerable others, for when we heal ourselves we take an enormous step toward healing our families and communities. Instead of running away from fear, we should be running toward it. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Without courage we will never know who we really are. Only courage unlocks our sacred potential, latent within us and, for now, hidden behind a fog of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the willingness to act in spite of the fear – to feel the fear and do it anyway.  

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

From the Eagle's Nest

When a fledgling eagle gets a little too big for the nest, and the time has come for him to fly away and live on his own, he is understandably reluctant. Why would he want to leave? He has a soft, safe refuge from the frightening world. Through no effort of his own food arrives at his feet on a daily basis. There are few risks and ample rewards. But in her wisdom, the young eagle’s mother slowly begins to remove the soft, downy feathers from the nest, exposing the sharp and gnarled branches of the nest’s foundation. Soon the nest is no more comfortable and no more appealing than any other clump of branches, and the wider world suddenly seems much more interesting, much more possible. So too in our own lives, comfort is often the enemy of growth. It is our discomfort, our suffering that pushes us past stages of our life where we no longer belong. The problem is we don’t have eagle mothers. In fact, we work very hard to surround ourselves with soft, warm cocoons mistakenly believing that the purpose of life is to be comfortable. Fortunately, life has a way of shaking us loose even from the most carefully constructed cocoons.

Making peace with the inevitable disruptions of life is the work of every wise man and woman. The capacity to reframe loss as growth is a mark of our maturity. Coming to understand that suffering and dissatisfaction are soul-messages we ignore at our own peril is a vital part of our evolution from fearful, dependent beings into courageous, independent beings. The quality and depth of our life is directly proportional to our ability to recognize discomfort as a turn-signal – a call to a higher order of being.

Instead of honoring our uneasiness and heeding the call, we often take the opposite course. We self-medicate, we avoid, we deny, we slip beneath the undertow of the thought-stream, letting our endless excursions into the imagination seduce us into the lie that it’s o.k., at least we’re thinking about it. We gaze down from our lofty perch, seeing the wider world, but never daring to venture out into it.

Think back on those times in your life when you made the most dramatic changes, changes that resulted in new-found freedom, astonishing growth, the emergence of latent talents, the acquisition of new skills, and the realization of a deeper, more authentic joy. In almost every case were those necessary changes not preceded by periods of great uneasiness or worse? Like labor pains, did not your rebirth emerge at the end of process that was disorienting, painful and frightening?

When we look back and reflect on our suffering we often see a pattern. It turns out that life itself is our eagle mother. It relentlessly strips away the ephemeral comforts we thought would last forever and the tighter we grasped the more painful the inevitable separation. It is only when we look forward with eyes uplifted, wings outstretched, feeling for the subtle and invisible updraft that rises in response to our readiness that we finally come to understand that our highest good and our deepest joy were present all along – they were simply hidden from us by the fog of our own comfort.

On the hero’s journey of our lives we must leave the known world of childhood safety and enter the unknown, a place where none of the old rules apply and none of the old supports are in place. It is only in the great wide open that we feel our own latent strengths emerge. In the Wizard of Oz, the lion, the tin man, the scarecrow and Dorothy already had courage, a heart, a brain and the way home – they just had to have it scared out of them. When the wizard sent them to get the wicked witch’s broom he really knew what he was doing. It is only by running toward the thing we fear most, not away from it, that we die to our limited and limiting sense of self and realize our authentic nature. This is why the eagle mother pulls all of the down out of the nest – because she loves her chick so much and wants its life to be as magnificent as possible.

It is our nature to grow and expand, and growth requires the dissolution of earlier forms. As old forms crumble and fall away there is always a period of great uncertainty. What shape will the new forms take? Do I have the energy and the talent to manifest them, the graciousness to allow them, or the eyes to even see them? Uncertainty is a necessary condition. Expecting certainty is a disease of the ego, that part of us that wants to control every element, manage every turn and script every outcome. New forms emerge from a complex and untraceable confluence of streams of causation – suffice it to say that no single person or power is in charge. We’re all working together, mostly unawares, in the construction of this next now moment. And it is our collective suffering that conspires to co-create what’s next.

The wizard and the eagle mother do not give us our gifts. They merely help us create the conditions in which those gifts emerge from deep within our own nature. This is the sacred role of every teacher, mentor and guide – to see in their student the potential the student has not yet learned to see. And in the hero’s journey the mentor or guide always appears just when they are needed most, when the old way of being in the world is no longer working and a dizzying shift is underway. As the old Indian saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It is our task then not to find a teacher, or the right book, or the right philosophy or ideology to subscribe to. We are only to make ourselves ready. Readiness means openness, humility and willingness. When we surrender to the call of our own authentic life, the right people, the right books, the right opportunities start finding us. And when you begin to live the life your soul is asking for, you feel a joy welling up in you that lights the path ahead. You may not know what the next 10,000 steps are, but you know what the next step is, and you take it willingly, faithfully, knowing that by honoring your authentic nature you are honoring the sacred nature of reality itself and moving into a deep and harmonious accord with all that is. This is a satisfaction that the fearful and nest-bound never get to feel.

There is nothing wrong with being young and scared. You unwillingness to change and grow is not your fault. It’s built in. Falling out of the nest before you have your feathers is fatal. But there comes a time when the habit of comfort no longer serves our best interests. It is in an eagle’s nature to fly high above the world and see things others will never see. None of that can happen in the nest. When we learn how to take risks and test the boundaries of our nature we give a great gift to ourselves and to the world. The world needs you and the gifts only you can bring. And when we learn how to live lives of artful service, our own joy comes to fruition. We have only to find the courage to finally feel our own feathers rise on the wind, and with a heart full of gratitude for those who nurtured us, leap from the eagle’s nest.

Bring it Back

In 1983 at a talk called Explorations delivered at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Joseph Campbell revisited one of the central themes of his lifework. He claimed that the artist plays an essential role in the formation and maintenance of the psycho-spiritual health of the human race, and that artists far from being mere entertainers or decorators have a sacred duty to brave the depths of the unconscious and bring back treasures that inspire us all to realize the depth and beauty of our own lives. In other words, for Campbell, art is as important as the air we breathe. But unlike air, art does not fall out of the sky ready-made. We have to make it.

How does the artist minister to the psycho-spiritual health of humankind? By setting before us the archetypal symbols of our own awakening and drawing us into ever-deeper forms of self-knowledge.

It begins with a long apprenticeship. Every chance encounter, every tug of the heart, every starry sky, every word, sound and moment forms a sea in which the fledgling artist swims. The artist’s greatest skill is discernment – what to leave in and what to leave out. From nothing less than the entire sphere of human experience the artist begins to mold her vision of beauty. But she must first learn the techniques of her craft. She must find a teacher.

After mastering the vocabulary of her medium she reaches the first crisis. As her own unique voice begins to emerge the teacher becomes obsolete. She must break away. Art is so much more than mimicry. It is time to move on.

With her apprenticeship behind her and a growing body of high quality work taking shape, the young artist stands at a threshold. No matter her medium – paint, sculpture, dance, photography, film, poetry, prose or music – she must brave the hero’s journey into the underworld of the unconscious and face the dangers of madness, loneliness and poverty in order to reach the transcendent goal: nothing less than the realization of unity, integration and the resultant healing of the world.

According to Campbell, there are three main realization symbols: the heiros gamos, the atonement with the father and apotheosis. The heiros gamos or sacred marriage is the profound healing and integration of the animus and anima, the male and female energy found within each of us. This often takes the form of boy meets girl. There’s a reason there are so many love songs. On the surface they’re about finding someone to love. Deeper down, they’re about healing the rift between the conflicting energies of our own souls. The second realization symbol, the atonement with the father, is the satiation of the universal longing for the source. As Luke Skywalker goes searching for his father, we all want to know where we came from as a means of finally answering the primal question, what am I? If we knew what made us, we would know our own essence. This is why we love songs about the road and songs about home. It turns out take me home country roads isn’t really about West Virginia after all. And finally, apotheosis means realizing the divine nature of our own essence, as Buddha experienced under the bodhi tree when all his illusory mental constructs and so-called understandings faded away in the bright light of the realization that he was one with the universal consciousness from which we and all things come. All of us, whether we realize it yet or not, want what Buddha has, what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven, where we realize that in the depths of our own being we are one with the Father. Great art can give us these three gifts, sometimes all in one overwhelming moment.

It is the challenge of every authentic artist to bring these gifts out of the depths of their own understanding and re-present them to us in new and relevant forms. “The point is that what you have to bring,” said Campbell, “is something that the world lacks – that is why you went to get it. The daylight world doesn’t even know that it needs this gift you are bringing.” So this isn’t going to be easy. In fact, at this stage of the journey, the artist faces a perilous decision. As she struggles to create works of art should she stay true to her own private invention and vision, or should she speak in the pedestrian language of mass culture? Should she be an artiste or a hack?

Should she stand in the corner of an art gallery in Manhattan and caterwaul like Yoko Ono or should she go to Nashville and churn out the next formulaic hit? Should she paint what her soul sees or should she paint Thomas Kinkade fairy houses? If she’s true to herself she runs the risk that no one will care. Art for an audience of one (the artist) is a lonely life. At this point she may flee to a cabin in the woods to paint the masterpieces nobody wants in the hopes that some future generation will lionize her as they did Van Gogh. Or she may utilize her extensive skill to give the people what they want, thinking to herself, when I make enough money painting this commercial slop, then I’ll paint what I want. But that day never comes.

The third and most courageous alternative is to find a way to stay true to your depth vision and develop a vocabulary that hooks the public without pandering. Campbell calls this the pedagogical path. Here, you help your public connect with their deepest needs and initiate them into a process of realization by bringing your silent answers into alignment with their unspoken questions – the artist as teacher.

In the language of the hero’s journey, the hero must go into the underworld to retrieve the boon or the prize. In the first scenario, the artist who refuses to communicate and hides in the woods is guilty of what Campbell calls “the refusal of the return”. It’s a common pitfall, to dismissively condemn the untrained masses and blame them for your failure. In the second scenario, the artist returns but doesn’t deliver anything; they simply give the public more of what they already have which doesn’t help them at all. In the third scenario the hero returns with the boon and finds a way to deliver it to the masses in correct proportion to their ability to receive. This, says Campbell, requires great sensitivity and compassion on the part of the artist. Having the patience and skill to draw your audience in is a loving, ego-less act. It’s so much easier to hold your audience in contempt, take your toys and go home. Or become a soulless panderer. But the path with heart, the sacred opportunity, is to bring the treasure right into the marketplace and integrate us all in the process. If you are an artist, do you have the patience, loving-kindness and courage to do this? When it comes to transcendent wisdom, do you have the guts to go get it and the compassion to give it away? There is so much need for healing. Develop a voice, believe that there is something worth singing about and be that voice. Trust that you are the one we all need. Then without ego, grounded in the profound depth of humility, find the treasure and bring it back.