The Hero’s Journey

In the Simple Reality book we only have space to consider one archetype in detail so we continue with the already introduced warrior archetype common to all of humanity. Male or female, we can all relate to the warrior archetype because we are all striving to awaken, we are all on the Hero’s Journey.

The story of Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyamuni clan is archetypal and well known to all students of Buddhism. It was prophesied at his birth that he would become a world emperor or a Buddha (an “awakened one”). His father, a rajah or ruler was biased in favor of his son as his successor. His strategy was to reinforce his son’s false self by indulging his attachments to pleasure, power and material wealth. (The 40,000 dancing girls was probably symbolic.)

Riding with his charioteer on trips to the park, Siddhartha caught glimpses of sights he was protected from in the palace. He saw a sick man, an aging man and a dead man. Then he saw a monk and was told that this was a man “who has retired from the world.”

Stage one:  Siddhartha had reached the first stage of the hero’s journey, the call. Finding the life of materialism, pleasure and power unsatisfying, Siddhartha’s intuition calls him to a more profound adventure, albeit one that is unknown.

Stage two:  This is the opportunity that we all face every day, the choice between reaction and response, the choice between fear and compassion. What if we choose not to hear that call or refuse to choose response? Not a good idea! As Joseph Campbell warns, “All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.”

For the turning away of the simple shall slay them,
and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.
Proverbs, 1:24-27, 32

Christians who might think all this archetypal mythology stuff doesn’t apply to them might have run across this saying in the Latin texts of Christian mystics. Time Jesum transeuntem el non revertentem: “Dread the passage of Jesus, for he does not return.”

Jesus, the metaphorical embodiment of the call, or the opportunity to choose requires that we respond to our True self, a new identity which will not happen as long as we insist on staying in the old paradigm with the old identity. We can always answer the call but it is unlikely if we continue to identify with our false self survival strategy in which case, Jesus will not return, we have chosen to remain in hell.

Stage three:  The choice to cease identifying with the body, mind and emotions commits us to the meditation practice wherein we must find the courage to look at our suffering without flinching, without denial, without self-medicating. The goal is to become the observer which will watch the old identity fade away as we refuse to feed it with the energy of our reactions.

The choice involved in Stage three must be made with the awareness of the present moment and cannot be “other-directed” as Joseph Campbell makes clear. “This statement of what the need is and want is must come from you [self-reliance], not from the machine, and not from the government that’s teaching you, or not even from the clergy. It has to come from one’s own inside [heart-felt intuition], and the minute you let that drop and take what the dictation of the time is instead of the dictation of your own eternity [implicate order], you have capitulated to the devil [false self]. And you’re in hell [P-B].”

Once the choice is made to enter the present moment and to cease reliance on the five senses and our intellect for guidance, the connection is made to our inner wisdom and the implicate order. “… here he discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage.”  This is also the time when real-life helpers begin to show up at just the right time to assist with tasks that might otherwise overwhelm us.

Another way to language this is that we become free of the world of form, the fundamental illusion of P-B and even ourselves as form,  the ever troublesome “me.” Again, Joseph Campbell: “He was no longer caught, but released; for that which he now remembered himself to be is ever free. The force of the monster of phenomenality was dispelled, and he was rendered self-denying. Self-denying, he became divine—a spirit entitled to receive offerings—as is the world itself when known, not as final, but as a mere name and form of that which transcends, yet is immanent within all names and forms.”

Although not necessary for our purposes it is insightful to recognize the deeper psychological undercurrents in this process of taking on a new identity. Using Freudian language we begin by transcending the ego in attaining the paradigm of Oneness (at-one-ment). Any attachment to anthropomorphic super-humans like God (the superego) or belief in sin (repressed id) is also abandoned.  Religion itself becomes unnecessary. “In this way, the whole life is made into a support for meditation. One lives in the midst of a silent sermon all the time.”

Stage four:  Job is the most profound archetype found in the Bible. He is the transcendent hero. “For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence.”  Job had trusted his intuition, rejected the illusion of P-B and chose for himself a new identity.

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References available in Trilogy 2 – Who Am I?