Jonathan Young

Joseph Campbell is the world’s best-known mythologist and he’s the main articulator of what is usually called “The Hero’s Journey”. It is an initiatory adventure, it is the transformative experience that prepares a person for a role of some importance in society. His work builds on an earlier study done by Dutch Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and that was called “Rights of Passage”. The hero’s journey or the initiatory adventure is a series of stages and experiences that change a person lift their horizon, shift their consciousness into a larger perspective on themselves and what they can do for others.

The first part of the journey is the call we begin in a familiar place, home, school, work wherever we are used to being and something happens. It’s often bad news, it’s some kind of tragedy or setback disappointment and that gets our attention. We had life figured out and our road is blocked somehow this ends up very good news but it doesn’t feel like it at the moment, it feels like a terrible setback. This is sometimes called “The Herald”. The Herald gets our attention, drags us into some new experience, and drags us across some kind of threshold, the threshold crossing is in itself a very difficult experience because we are confused, we are out of control, we are thrown into something that is not familiar. Once we get there sometimes called the land of wonderers or the mystery lodge. Once we get to this other place we begin to have a difficult series of experiences, trials, tests, and tribulations. We meet allies, we are guided by mentors. There is magical assistance, there are special tools, and tasks that will change us forever, and through this ordeal, we are made into who we can be so that we can be the hero, the seeker, the central character of our own drama. it is in the end personal mythology that is a story is living itself out through us and by this we can make the highest contribution that our life will allow.

The familiar world is ordinary. It is what we are accustomed to. It is nothing special and a person might feel they are nothing special and yet the call comes something gets our attention either it is a problem that hurts us-a personal problem or a problem in society that makes us feel bad and like we should do something and so we are called or it is just fascination perhaps a creative calling we love images or we love music or a spiritual calling we’re very drawn to a certain teaching, something is compelling and we are tempted to leave the familiar and do something that seems foolish at first because we all know how ordinary life works and some will say, “why are you going off to this odd place? why are you taking this course of study? why are you leaving us to go do this thing we do not understand” and at that point, the seeker often cannot really explain herself it just seems compelling as it develops this task, this calling, this special story that is unfolding begins to change the seeker in very subtle ways and over time   

well when she comes back for a visit sometime later, her friends say, “you’re different, we don’t know quite how but you’re not quite the same”. In there where the change is happening, the shift in consciousness is happening. It is often very difficult to explain and really doesn’t need to be explained because the boon, the elixir, the healing, the gift will manifest Itself by itself. The call may not involve a decision, it may simply come upon a person. It might be a personal tragedy, it might be something in society that happens that gets a person’s attention. We are not entirely in charge of this story. It is living us, it comes to us and it does come and people usually have this experience not everyone chooses to respond. Joseph Campbell wrote in some detail about the refusal of the call where something presents itself. The Herald arrives here, you should do this or you should develop an interest in this or you should develop this skill and a person says,” No, I don’t want to that’s too hard or you can’t make enough money doing that or that that isn’t important enough I have something else in mind” and it usually persists for a while but a person is free to decline the call. Sometimes the call comes in a very unfortunate form a terrible addiction, a depression, loss of some kind that just tears life out from under us. Somehow that dark night of the soul lets us be free of our attachments. The things we thought were important. It makes us go back to square one and ask philosophical questions. When we’re doing well the big questions don’t matter, it’s when we’re failing, stumbling, afraid, sad that we become more philosophical and say, “What is life all about, what am I supposed to be doing” so in the end people often look back and are thankful for their addiction, are thankful that they fell into a terrible depression because it made them start thinking and ultimately change their lives not only to get something that is more suitable for themselves but to get into a position to be of help to others.

When we are on the right path it seems like doors open, when there aren’t doors there, help seems to come when we didn’t expect any help, didn’t even think we needed it and things open up in mysterious ways that is one of the clues that we are in the right place also there is a deep satisfaction to it Joseph Campbell called it “Bliss”. It’s a word from Eastern mythology but it is a profound feeling of being in the right place doing the right thing and it is not just for ourselves although I want to say the seeker gets the main benefit but then there is a sense of service to it others get in on the blessing,

An early stage is the threshold crossing where we go from the familiar to the mysterious. It is early in the adventure but one of the most dangerous moments after all we are going from the familiar to the unknown, from the practical to the mysterious, from the sane to who knows what? another kind of consciousness that is in the end likely to be for the better but we’re not sure because it is so unfamiliar. Seldom does the seeker go alone usually there are friends involved there are others, It sounds like the hero’s journey is very solitary but there’s company all along the way even in the early stages so with a friend or two or sometimes a whole class of people or a whole tour group of some kind. There is some bridge to cross, it is a rickety bridge and the chasm is deep that is the threshold crossing itself is quite dicey, quite dangerous. We don’t go from well normal sea to being a mystery and back again without some risk.

It might be a pilgrimage. You might go to Mecca or the Amazon rainforest. You might go to India and find an ashram or you might go across town and find a good therapist or a good teacher who shows you wonders beyond your imagining. It is not really a geographical journey although sometimes travel helps. Really, it’s the inner process that is going to be the changing experience and that may not involve going to another city. It may not involve leaving one’s room.

It is terribly important that we are able to receive help. If we knew how to do this it wouldn’t have the transformative power that it does. It is something we don’t know how to do so we get a prolonged experience of feeling stupid and out of control that’s awful it really messes up our ego but actually relativizing the ego is part of what needs to happen so we need to find guides actually they will find us. We just need to be receptive when they arrive we need to find companions and teachers, mentors. A mentor is an older teacher, knows a thing or two. Has been down the road away further than we have. A mentor is not a parent. Parent-like but

not one’s own parents by definition it’s an extra parent. The story is the story of Odysseus going off to war, knowing he would be gone a very long while, worried about his son Telemachus who was going to be a king himself one day and he was going to be without a father for a long period of time and so king Odysseus arranges for a family friend named Mentor or Mentus depending on the translation to come by and look in on the boy. Well, there’s more to the story but this is where we get our name from. Mentoring is the extra parent who teaches us things that we don’t know and probably our parents don’t know. Parents the best intended parents do not know everything. We need to find additional teachers. Sometimes a traveler needs to track down a mentor often the mentor appears is just nearby and notices and offers something this is when we must be receptive, must get over our ego, must admit to ourselves that we need all the help we can get, and be and that’s this is where many travelers lose the uh opportunity because “Oh no I’m, I got it, I’m good, no that’s fine” that’s, that’s-the, that’s the phrase to watch out for, that is the language to avoid. Say “Oh well what do you, do you have advice for me” Be receptive to teachers at all times. It might be some homeless guy down by the bus stop. It could come from anywhere. We need to grab because the, the thing is we’re, we’re taking a trip. We have no map, we have no compass, we have not been this way before. We have to pay attention to every clue we can get. Especially if we happen to stumble upon someone who’s been on the journey before us and they can show us a thing or two.

Ego is not a nasty word, it’s simply the familiar identity, it’s the part that goes by our name. And so we get in a rut, we have our way of doing things and that’s who we are and that’s what our life is like. We need to get over that, we need to get over the rigidity of habit. Ego is simply habit, it’s doing what we know how to do, we need to let go of that, get beyond that and it is awkward. It’s going back to being a beginner “beginner’s mind” it’s called and let ourselves be open to new things. That’s not looking cool, nothing good is happening while we’re looking cool. Looking cool is when we already know how to do it. That’s not the learning process, that’s the showing-off process and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt your journey but it, it, well it does hurt your journey if you get stuck there otherwise it’s just um irrelevant. Most people put a fair amount of energy. Trying to look good to others. That’s not our deepest self, that’s not our best stuff, that’s not our greatest wisdom. And if we put all our marbles there if we put all of our focus on that. We will not explore the depths behind that, the wonders that a person really can be. We will not know ourselves very well. We will be by definition superficial. Now I don’t go to the other extreme and say “Well ignore what other people”. Think of us I want to get along with other people, I just don’t want that to be my primary sense of identity. I want to go find the rest of this great gift of uh human endowment. I’m a psychologist so I tend to use language that puts it in a psychological perspective. There is the conscious and the conscious is ego and it is familiar, it is accessible, it’s our operating system, it’s how we get through the day. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just not very much. It’s not a very large part of what we are. Carl Jung and other depth psychologists have these models that explain or at least guess at vast resources beyond that the hero’s journey is to a degree a journey into this place of mystery, it’s also a place of great energies and gifts. It is confusing though. It is like having a really bizarre but intense dream and knowing something important is going on here but I don’t know what it is and we might take time to write this all down. It’s a good time to go to a therapist or somebody that might know a little more about dreams but we’re aware there is far more going on than we really know about and that is the journey going toward that being receptive to those unconscious mysteries and beginning to take them in, take them in as part of our identity including is a lot of emphasis on inclusion including things that are confusing or troubling parts of ourselves that might seem well. Carl Jung’s term was shadow. Things that go bump in the night, things we’d rather other people didn’t know about us. Ultimately Yung said the gold would be found in the shadow. Some of our best stuff, some of our greatest wisdom, some of our best creativity, the spark of the Divine who knows will be found in the part of ourselves. We don’t like the part of ourselves we think is unattractive. Well, it is kind of messy, it’s not the tidy good-looking side of ourselves. It’s the unvarnished raw stuff but there’s a lot of power there to go toward that and claim, it is part of this journey to higher consciousness, Now when we use a lovely phrase like higher consciousness, it sounds like moving toward the light and in broad strokes it is but the steps often involve going into the dark places, the damp places, the places that don’t smell quite right where we start to figure out what we’ve got here and what else it can be. Usually, the shadow perspective involves not understanding something. It doesn’t look very good to us because we don’t know what it is and we shy away from it. If we move toward that and claim it somehow we’ll see is all there for good reasons. It will all play out and be useful in our story.

The Shadow is the big scary monster that is in the beginning and middle of every story by the end it’s not usually a monster anymore. It’s still there we do not vanquish the monster we do not eradicate the dragon. We form some kind of a partnership with it, we learn to write it, we put it to work, we serve it maybe it knows better than we do but in the end, there’s inclusion and a constructive partnership instead of the conflict that existed earlier in the story.

It is very important to notice that we have company on the journey. We have allies and companions. We are not alone. We need to be able to work in a team. In fact, one of the ways that ego gets smashed in the processes we usually try to do on our own and fail spectacularly and realize “I need, I need a team here, I need some help!”. There are some parts of this I’m not very good at. I need different kinds of people which means I’ve got to learn to put up with people who are unlike me and they have to learn to put up with me and all of my quirks because they’ll need the thing that I bring to the adventure. Because the tests are great. The ordeals are incredible so we face dragons and monsters. We face our own terrors which is really, what those elements in the stories represent- our deep fear, fear of madness, fear of death, fear of being out of control and we will go through levels of panic that we have never imagined before and that’s when we’re doing it right. Fortunately, we do have companions and we have guides and there is a great deal of help, for one thing, there is all the lore left behind by the many travelers who went this way before, it’s called “Mythology”. It’s around, it can be found, it can be studied. It is often translated into modern novels and movies, we can study those not just as entertainment but as road maps to lands we have not traveled.

The ordeals are horrific. Dragons, you want dragons, you want mind-bending madness, you want sorrow like you would die of the ordeals, are terrible and you read the old stories of people’s liver being pecked out in various horror stories and this is what we have to go through after all it is essentially a journey through madness. But it is not the end of the story and this is where support is really helpful close friends, teachers, guides, therapists, clergy whatever you can find help wherever you can find it. Someone who says, “Yes this is awful” but you are a strong person and your story is going to make sense, it will not be like this forever. If you can find someone who’s gone through say a terrible addiction and recovered maybe for years and recovered found their way step by step out of it, one day at a time out of it and they can tell you, “Yes it feels like there is no life outside of drinking or outside of the drug you’re attached to”. There is, I will tell you there is a life after this if you will stay with the program and go as I have gone.

The center point of the descent and it is more of a descent than an ascent. The center point of the descent is experiencing our own death. It’s ego death but it really feels like we’re dying that is our sense of ourselves or sense of our lives has fallen apart we don’t know how to live. It is terribly important to avoid the temptation of suicide at this point. It’s not that we’re to die now, it’s that we’re to pull ourselves up and pull ourselves into a different form that is appropriate to where we are going, not where we have come from so we become quite a different person. The coming home, the coming back from this huge adventure is just as long and lengthy and challenging and arduous as getting there so we’re only halfway through the adventure when we have this death and rebirth experience. We need well, Freud called it working through. We need to consolidate all the things we have learned. We need to practice how to be this new person so there’s a lot of stumbling and error and, and distress left in the story as we gradually work our way back and find form for our new interests and our new energies. After all, we are to make a contribution that is what Joseph Campbell called “Sharing the Boon” the elixir, the healing, the teaching whatever it is we’ve gained it’s not just for me, it’s for everybody. Now it’s not that I, you know announce I am now the great world teacher or something. It’s that I find some way to pass it around. I don’t cheat myself. I, the seeker always gains the greatest benefit but I am defined some way to give it and that’s going to have a lot of trial and error so I will feel like a fool many times over on the return. It’s not like, I have reached cosmic consciousness and make no mistakes now. I’m still a human being and there is going to be lots of frustration in this part of the story as well but at least now I have a glimpse of where I’m going and that makes a huge difference. I have a sense of meaning, I have a sense of story, I have a sense that I’m going to be able to make a contribution, and even with many frustrations, it is so much easier if you have some idea that it’s all in a good cause. There are so many ways to look at the idea of service. There is always some kind of sharing. It might be on a large scale, might be on a small scale. It might be that we sponsor one other person with an addiction that might be our contribution so it’s not that it needs to be a big deal. And we’re trying to move past ego a little here so it’s not like being important. It’s just trying to let others in on the good news,

Tales of the hero’s journey are like maps to guide us through the dark nights. This initiatory lore gives us detailed instructions on how the journey is accomplished. We should not leave home without a map. We should study this stuff. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel besides it’s going to get very tough. It’s really helpful to have some idea “how this journey goes”. It is available, it’s in the stories. Now the stories may seem very, very old. They may have happened in ancient Greece or India. They are about every life the initiatory adventure is available to every life and it doesn’t change that much. You can go back to the Bhagwat Gita and some story from thousands of years ago and see how it can apply to this time and this life right now because human beings are human beings. The human life is the human life and the journey is more the same over the ages than different.

Part of the journey is called “The Apotheosis”. This is when the seeker’s ego disintegrates. Usually, there is panic at this point. It is not the end of the story in fact, that is a good sign that the old is falling away making room for the new. In The Matrix, Neo is totally confused about what’s going on, there seems to be some other reality, how can that be? Is he just going crazy? Finally, his teacher suggests he take one capsule or another. If he takes one he will know this new truth, if he takes the other he’ll forget and go back to the comfort of a simple life which do we take? do we keep looking into the mystery for all its confusion and panic, for all the ways we fall apart? or do we go back to comfort? It’s a huge moral choice, we are free to go back just take the capsule.

The ultimate Boon is when the seeker discovers what they are looking for. Usually, we don’t know until we find it. The great scientist discovers something new, an artist finds a way to tell a story or make a picture. The uh person in service finds a way to help that didn’t exist before, they, a new angle and then we see it and we realize “I’ve got something here that’s useful” and we can develop it and there is this moment of discovery. It’s exciting, it’s thrilling and we might have one or two friends. They are also on the journey and can kind of understand how important it is. Most people will say “Yeah so what”.

Don’t expect too much social support, this is an unusual choice to take this intense inner journey. There are a few friends that will understand but choose who you share with so that you respect the process while it is fragile. Later you can tell everyone. Count on much finger-wagging when you make these choices. These people mean well, they care about you they don’t want to lose you and they know this thing that you’re getting interested in is beyond their grasp that you’re going off into a world that they don’t understand and they don’t see a practical value for. Well, they might be right about the practical value part may not lead to a good-paying job but it will be the thing that makes life worthwhile and if you have a deep sense of fulfillment in life you can also make some money and do the practical life. The practical life is not the hard part. Studying the mysteries is the hard part. 

The abyss, the night sea journey, the dark knight of the soul is when things fall apart. When we feel like we’ve lost our way. Well, we are off the path in terms of the familiar path, in terms of the known path but we’re all on our way and as the familiar landmarks fall away, we begin to make discoveries. You can’t learn without getting away from what you already know. So the abyss is the gateway to a treasure house. It just doesn’t feel like it yet.

Atonement is reconciliation with a father-energy. This is a huge psychological task. Almost all seekers have a terrible father hunger. You may have had a fine father or you may have had an absent father, anyway the father plays his role. There is a wound that is left, it’s a cultural thing and everyone has a huge father issue. Sometimes we start looking for a father-like God and that’s a fine image for a while usually, it dissolves into something more mysterious and less anthropomorphic. Finally, there is an end to the split, the division, and whatever that was. That thing that was projected outward, the thing we were seeking, we are now one with hence the phrase “at one meant atonement”, there is a merging. One very simple way to think of this is the division between mind and body. We are basically living life from the mind and for some people, the body is quite a stranger. They might abuse it, they might even be insensitive, literally insensitive, not feel much. Usually, as consciousness shifts there is a merging of these things that had been quite split at one time. There is a unity of mind and, and thought and purpose and physical sensation and emotional reactions. It isn’t all In conflict with each other. It functions as one. 

There is a moment in the story sometimes called the “Magic Flight”. When we are very near what we sought. The Grail is almost within sight, the beloved is nearly rescued and then some opposition enters the story and we have a huge distraction that may be a giant adventure on its own, right, Odysseus is heading home after the war and gets blown off course and that story is longer than the story of the war. So we have to be ready for these distractions. They are additional lessons, they might be additional fears we have to face or own, they may be uh problems of vanity or pride or control that we have to get over. After all, we are being entrusted with some great gift something of great value to ourselves and others and it’s important that we are to some degree purified before allowed to bring that back to the collective.

Some see the dragon as despair and encounter with our own fears. A feeling of being defeated or overwhelmed by life’s tasks or the ordeals of the initiatory journey. This is not a one-time thing. The dragon is resilient. It will come back from the dead again and again, each test tends to be slightly different. It’s not just a repetition. We’re learning different skills and we’re learning more about ourselves. It is sometimes cast as a warrior story where we’re in a kind of battle. I think that’s rather archaic I doubt if we’re doing it in the form of real conflict. It’s more like the scientists working endlessly to try to solve some problem or a student trying to learn something and losing and getting confused and feeling defeated and doing it again and again and again finally getting it. So yes, it’s not a one-time thing. It’s that we have to confront this again and again because it’s not in the end an external dragon. It’s our dragon, it’s my deepest fear, it’s my feeling of being vulnerable and it’s not that I overcome that or conquer it. I deal with it, I find that I can be vulnerable, I could be less than brilliant and still proceed and do some good things. There’s a, there is a radical self-acceptance involved in facing the dragon. And in the end, I’m riding that dragon into the sunset. I have made peace with that part of myself and can travel fast. Our lives take place in an exterior world but the experience is internal. Ultimately this is a journey within. There is a phrase in the scriptures where we develop the ability to listen to the still small voice within. We need a contemplative life, an ability to reflect on things, and have a rich inner life that is the greatest reward of being human. Well, we want some success, we want love, we want creative expression in the world. I’m not discounting the importance of the outside world. I’m saying the center point needs to be within and the guidance will come from within. The higher self which Carl Yung called “The archetype of the self” is encountered in dreams or prayer, in meditation, and in reflection. It’s very much coming from within and our story will unfold from that place. Now I’m a psychologist so I tend to call it the unconscious. But there are a lot of languages that can be used to describe this mysterious place, what it is not is how much a stock is worth on the stock exchange. how much we impress somebody out in the world. Those might be okay. Mostly they’re irrelevant to our becoming as a human-being and gaining some of the higher consciousness that is possible to lonely seekers like ourselves.

Interesting that George Lucas very inspired by Joseph Campbell chose a term intentionally vague when he called it “The Force”. Most people would say it’s the Holy Spirit, it’s the spark of the Divine, it’s the guiding genius that is unfolding inside of a human life. Wherever it is, we’re going to encounter it personally deep within in dreams, in fantasy, in reflection, in meditation, in creative, activity, in in yoga, in very subtle ways and that is frustrating to a beginner that we don’t get a nice clear Neon bright answer or nice clear directional arrows. it’s a very subtle thing where we’re moving a little to the right, no-no that doesn’t feel quite right, no it’s a little over yes, this is a little better and we’re constantly realigning with the energies because it’s a process of following invisible guides and entering invisible worlds. The world of the imagination, the world of mythic consciousness, the world of the unconscious call. What we may, we are always guessing, it is always subtle but it is ultimately enormously rewarding.

One good secret is to slow down. Our first reactions are often wrong, they’re often defensive. They are made to try to make us look better or something like that. They are not our best values or our deepest wisdom. Slow down, take some time if possible sleep on it. There’s an old bit of advice some parents would say “Oh honey sleep on it” That was very good advice. It’s not just to be a little more rested, it’s also to give it a little more time, it is also to allow the dream life to work it over a little bit, and in the morning it looks different. Now we’re in a very fast-paced world. Sometimes you cannot take that much time but often it is possible to delay a response and take a little more time. In fact, the rush is itself a bit of an egotistical hangup, what, I have to have instant decisions to look smart or something? Looking smart isn’t the point, getting the best answer is the point so if I have to look like a bit of a duff, a little slow, or something because I need to go think about something. Well, looks are not the important thing here if I can tap into a deeper and quieter usually it’s a quieter wisdom if I can quiet myself down, I can probably get to better ideas. This brings me to the notion of meditation to have some formal sitting, it can be keeping a journal. It can be taking a quiet nature walk. It doesn’t need to be something that requires a lot of formal training. We know how to quiet ourselves, take a little time, and face the confusion that is not to try for too quick an answer. Let it drift for a little while. Let ourselves ponder things a little while longer that is often a way to deepen the process.

The colonization that was inflicted on older cultures was devastating because in many of these places, there was a unity of consciousness, there was an oneness with the earth, the split had not occurred. And with all the wisdom of the colonial Powers great harm was done, that’s history taking that personally. There are ways in which we inflict something like colonization on ourselves where the ego consciousness. Which is the part that’s trying to look good to others and be in control and make some money. And that’s not all bad but it’s not the deepest part of ourselves when that practical part of ourselves that control-oriented part of our thinking starts cannibalizing the raw material of the inner reaches. When the control impulse brings a colonial attitude toward the treasures of the unconscious great harm can be done. It is similar to what was done to native peoples all over the world. Where an original beauty, an original homeness is lost in the service of a really superficial idea really in the service of getting some short-term gains. We need to fight that. We need to resist the insult to the mysteries that the colonial impulse brings and respect them in their own right and that’s the shift of consciousness that is so radical and misunderstood by most of our friends to say “I actually, respect being confused when I’m confused I’m probably learning when I’m somewhat a drift I’m probably making new-discoveries when I’m totally in command I’m probably doing something repetitive. It is probably no growth at all” so there’s an enormous counterintuitive aspect to this whole business and of course, there will be misunderstanding. People will say, “What kind of a model are you following? where did you get your MBA?” this doesn’t make any sense and I don’t want to take too much time trying to explain it to people that aren’t interested makes sense to me. A person might be in business and notice that the unconscious is artistic and say, “Oh, I should learn to focus on this so that I can make better products that will bring bigger profits”. Well, it might work for a while but the person might really, be called to an artistic career that isn’t about making more profits or more products and they might lose the opportunity to develop great gifts if they merely think in terms of exploiting them. Sure, we need to make a living but that doesn’t have to saturate every thought. We also need to create and express ourselves. We also need to connect with others and have love and companionship family and friendship. We need to serve these many values and not collapse them all into one simple getting ahead Matrix and just because the collective, the community at large tends to collapse everything into very simple projects doesn’t mean I have to.

There are certain shared values. I’d like to have a nice car, I’d like to have more money in the bank, I’d like to have uh more status. I don’t really, think there’s anything wrong with wanting those things as long as they aren’t the only design I can find in myself. I’m a little concerned if somebody attends a workshop and says I’ve been meditating on my deepest innermost soul and I’ve decided I really, want a Mercedes, thinking I don’t think you found your deepest-deepest innermost soul, there Mercedes is a very nice car, I wish you well on that. But I think your innermost soul probably wants something a little bit more spiritual than that or artistic or humanitarian. I think the a different kind of value so if we, after all you watch television if you drive down the street and look at billboards, it’s coming in all the time it takes active resistance to depart from what’s called “Shared Consciousness”, the ordinary assumed reality which is saturated with advertising. If we’re going to get to the more sublime values to the great beauty that is possible in the human animal, we’re going to have to make some space for it and leave some of that aside at least from time to time.

The call comes in many forms. It might be Delight, it might be that doing certain things just turns you on so totally you can hardly wait for the chance to get to them again uh that may not be your job, and it may not be how you make your money. So it’s the weekends, it’s the evenings, it’s when you can get to it but with time it might be possible to reorganize our lives a little and have more time for those things. Set our goals in practical terms a little lower so there’s more time for the mysteries. Bliss may come as Delight as Rapture, it may come as trouble, it may come because I see the suffering of the world and I just feel a great need to do something about it. It might come as a personal crisis, a divorce, a bankruptcy, a health crisis something terrible and I’ve got to do something about this. And I might have to reorganize my priorities and my energies in ways, I would never have done had this terrible thing not happened and I’ve certainly heard stories from people who had catastrophic, who had to flee a country in war, who had to go through terrible things and then they and they, they, they look back with strange fondness with gratitude and say “I’m sure glad I had that heart attack, I would have lived my life in a rut until my dying day if I didn’t have that health crisis that made me think about what is life all about anyway”. 

Joseph Campbell said that these mythic stories help draw us into accord with nature. This is a crucial part of the whole puzzle. We are animals, we are creatures. We live embodied lives care of the flesh, this is where yoga comes in or some kind of practice that draws us into the wisdom of the body. The things we know in our Senus that we may not know mentally yet very often, if you’re faced with confusion and go for a run or just a brisk walk, go out and move the bones, we will know more. It’s not just the shift in endorphins, there is some increased consciousness that comes from the body itself so one of the keys is to make sure we are open in that direction. Another is to quiet ourselves to have ways of quieting ourselves. One key thing is to receive help. Ask for help but sometimes help comes when we haven’t even asked, don’t say, “I’m doing fine, I know what I’m up to”, say “Oh well, did you have some advice?” No, doesn’t mean you have to follow everybody’s advice but listen to it. We don’t know everything and it’s a real problem thinking we already know after all. This is a transformative journey. It’s about learning things we don’t know in fact, it’s about learning things that we don’t even know exist, we don’t even know we don’t know these things, so it’s quite a stretch. There are people around us that know more than we do. It’s hard to do that, we have to get over saving face. We have to admit we don’t know. We have to admit we’re stupid. It is a profound encounter with feeling stupid. The whole journey is going to be an encounter with ignorance. It really, sucks we don’t like going there at all. One of the things ritual will do for us is help us gain access to Invisible worlds. We can say that in spiritual terms or psychological terms. It helps us gain access to the unseen realms within, so much wisdom is in the unconscious but it’s unconscious participating in a ritual and there are certain other activities that help with this uh can help us have some idea about our deeper feelings, about things, about ideas that we have already constellated or started to form but have not really, risen to the surface yet. Some of the other things that will do that would be journal keeping or some kind of expressive writing uh personal contemplative activities or artistic activities. These will help us realize or help these things float to the surface. Help us enter invisible worlds, and be the richer for it.

One of the great rewards of getting slightly past what we already know is to stumble into the invisible world. As a psychologist, I’ll just call it the unconscious that there is wisdom. There is knowing, there is beauty at hand, within us available tapping into something larger than we are going beyond ordinary knowing into something we will vaguely call wisdom. This can be done any human being can have this experience, it is not rocket science. It does take a little shift of values, a certain amount of attention, a little practical doing but mainly it’s a cosmic moral choice “Am I going to invest something in this strange and subtle activity that doesn’t make sense to a lot of my friends?” That is the choice that will open up the doors to the light.

We have very few fragments of ancient rituals left. There were coming-of-age rituals in most of the cultures that we have descended from. They still survive the Jewish, Bar Mitzvah-Bat Mitzvah. There is some semblance in a few and in some places, they are being recreated or rediscovered. I did some work in Canada with the First Nations People and the coming of age ceremonies for the girls did not involve a vision quest. It was not the journey out into the wilderness and the survival. it involved making a broom and learning from a grandmother figure, not one’s own grandmother but another grandmother, a mentor how to make a broom? and it was supervised and then there was a presentation ceremony where they all looked at each other’s brooms and saw they could do this thing and it was a symbolic thing and of course, it had to do with being able to keep order in life. I mean these these images mean something but it was just a broom and it wasn’t a broom that was going to be used, it was going to be hung on the wall as an object of art so we had an intergenerational process at some point in our past. Now well, we have teachers uh that will sometimes have enough time to show a little guidance usually selectively not every student gets the full attention of a teacher a bit of a pity with large classrooms and that kind of thing. A lot of us went to therapists and that was our initiatory experience and that was our elder and they took us into wild places and we were changed and became adults in the process. It is good for us to study the hero’s journey at this point in history. It is about initiation that means growing up. It is about claiming our adult powers. It is about the gifts of maturity. The whole journey is the journey toward psychological integration or psychological maturity. The powers of the warrior or the elder, the power of the teacher that is the adult, and these rituals, the stories, these processes, these challenges help a person claim what is already there, their potential, their resources, their unique gifts. It is worth our attention we could assemble rituals that would help we can simply read the old stories that alone would give us great guidance into how we might claim our treasures.

Joseph Campbell said that all the world’s religions began in a cave in Siberia. He was referring to the origins of Shamanism and Shamanism predated most organized religions and familiar spiritual systems and this was an approach to an invisible world. It took place through rituals, sometimes through altered consciousness chemicals, drugs, and things. But it had to do with an awareness that there was more than the practical world and the Shaman was a guide to that and sometimes its go-between, he could go off into if you will other worlds and come back with insights and guidance but that is a role of a temporary teacher. Ultimately the seeker was able to navigate these shifts and they are shifts of consciousness. If there are psychedelic drugs or some other kind of mind-altering procedure, they are usually very temporary, they are perhaps to show where the bridge is and then the task is to cross the bridge without altering the chemistry and it can be done. We have much to learn from the teachers in the Amazon jungle and elsewhere in parts of the world that we may not think of as, as advanced as we are. But they are more advanced in consciousness in many cases, not that we need to take their drugs but we need to learn where they’re going and try to get there in our own way. It is a bit colonial to borrow the traditions of other people but we can visit and see in, in terms of of using other people’s practices like mirrors, and say “How is something like that done in my people? what traditions did my people do years ago that might be reclaimed? I come from a Celtic background so one can go back to those traditions and perhaps go out on the moors and drum or uh go wild in the moonlight and lunas or something. I’m not saying we should always do what our own, people have done but ultimately the point is to find some practice that works and allows us to alter our attention and take in more than what we thought was the entirety of reality. Something as simple as frenzy dancing can alter your chemistry. Joseph Campbell said that he had experience as a runner, he was a competitive runner uh that were something like a Mystic has. So yes there is brain chemistry involved whether one takes mushrooms or does other forms of practice that will give you the opening of the doorway. The doors of perception into the greater realities. It is very much worth the trouble.

To reclaim some of the beauty of established religion. The ideas are good. They were well-intentioned, they had to do with approaching the sacred and developing procedures for approaching the sacred to have mystical experience, to have atonement with the divine. These are important personal, emotional mystical experiences. The problem is you can’t do it instantly uh impatience is, is uh dangerous because the divine is intense so you would go crazy, you, you would fall apart if you slid immediately into higher consciousness, it would be too much so you also develop systems of limits to slow the process so you’re simultaneously going toward what you desire and not going too fast. The problem is over time the slowing part can grow stronger and stronger, that is fears set-in to where there’s very little progress at all, it becomes a calcified system. Sometimes a reformer comes in goes back to earlier practices and brings the life back into it. We should be very respectful of other cultures, read their stories, study their rituals but they don’t belong to us, we might be able to adapt something from that into our own uh cultural way of looking at things. We have to realize that each people have their own way of coming to the great mysteries and answers and we can learn from all of them really. Joseph Campbell was very strong on emphasizing the problem of the tribal answer that is the local answer may be a way into the higher consciousness but it is only one way among many. It is tempting to think if something works for you to think “I found it”. Well, you found one way you didn’t necessarily find the only way or even the best way and it is interesting to see people who were at it for a very long time they’ll say you know what I was so incredibly sure of at 30 was fine but I found something at 47 that put that in the shade so we can share our enthusiasms with a little humility I think.

The initiatory adventure which Joseph Campbell called the “Heroes Journey” is one pattern of spiritual questing there are many others, there are many other kinds of stories. There are stories for different stages of life so it’s not like there’s one answer or one method, there are many. There are different kinds of people and we’re different at different stages so we need to stay open and not find the one thing. Although in a way it’s all one that is its leading us to higher consciousness but there are many paths. Certain forms and patterns emerge spontaneously in different places because the human mind is the human mind. We are very very attracted to round things for example so you have labyrinths and round buildings and uh round dugouts and things in various parts of the world because it means something to us emotionally, we may not even be able to put a name to it. I would call it wholeness or completeness or something is kind of implied by the round shape. Carl Yung thought that doing activities in the form of a mandala, making art in a circular pattern actually had a beneficial integrating impact act on a person doing that kind of thing so we can see that the human being has a lot in common with our ancestors, our cousins in different corners of the world, the stories in many cases are very similar certainly rituals bear a lot in common but this has to do with brain chemistry. It has to do with how we are one with nature, what we are doing in ritual and mythic practice is getting into accord with nature. Well, nature has patterns. We are discovering the same patterns at whatever historical period or whatever location we may doing our, we may be doing our seeking.

For some people, depression can be a guide. If we can study it and try to see what it is saying? what it is trying to tell us? and not just medicated but be somewhat receptive and see what it’s all about and what it’s about is you’re not living in your own body, you’re not living in your own emotions, you’re not living in your own story. You’re living for somebody else or you’re living as somebody else, somebody you think you should be, look around. See if there’s another life waiting. That would be more fulfilling and people who make those choices often find much of the depression fall away.

Depression has a number of threads. Certainly, trauma is a big aspect of it. That is having rough childhood experiences the psychoanalysts were right about that. We have much to learn about that fortunately there is treatment that really helps. Depression is also biochemical it can be the state of a certain person’s chemistry that they will be more inclined to depression that isn’t the final outcome of it but it is a factor that needs to be considered. Certainly, integration of mind, body, spirit, emotion is an enormous antidote to the worst ravages of depression. Depression is a real thing, it is not a moral error. It is a huge challenge for the people that have real struggles with it.

One thing about addiction is that it Is anesthetic. If a person is drinking well, we know alcohol is an anesthetic. Most drugs of choice recreational drugs are anesthetic or some of them are even used in medical practice for the very reason to numb so that a person can do surgery or something like that. Why would we not want to feel? feeling is one of the great gifts of being human unless what we feel hurts. Addiction is often an attempt to kill pain. The answer is to find ways to tolerate and work through the pain. If we don’t kill it each time, the chance of getting stronger or wiser about it emerges. If we will allow ourselves to face the pain we can find out how to cope with it. If we just turn it off we don’t get any wiser. One form of pain is loneliness that we have not connected with others well or we do not have a spiritual system that helps us with our existential loneliness, the sorrow of that overwhelms some people. So to reduce the addiction we need to work out our life with other people and find our God.

There are the theological notions of the God out there. There are the psychological notions that God is a projection of our deepest longing and what do we long for? We long for purpose, for a sense of meaning, for a sense of belonging, for good work to do, for a good feeling about ourselves in our lives, and those are things we can face and take on wisely one at a time.

I think we’re here to fulfill a personal destiny. I’m not sure it’s preset before we get here. It might be something we have to invent. I do think there is a story going on. I am contributing to the story but it is larger than I am so the story is not so much our creation as something that is creating us. The work is finding out what kind of story we’re in. what kind of character I am to play and then play it as well as I can.

Heaven or Nirvana, living a life of delight, living in the radiance. In my mind is finding very fulfilling activities, finding ways to connect with other people that go into the true beauty of the human experience, finding ways to be on the planet as an animal with animals, finding ways to create to express the inner mysteries those are the activities that lead to heaven in my mind. Ultimately, it involves radical self-acceptance as I get a little older I’m less and less interested in self-improvement, I’m more interested in living with what I’ve got and using it really, well. I tend to think eternity is now and heaven is how you live not some afterlife. I’m a little wary of the political implications of having people put off life to something after they’re dead so I think heaven can be gained now. It’s all about what kind of consciousness one lives in. The hero’s journey is the initiatory process toward enlightenment if you will, toward the culmination of what the development process is all about. The integration of the different resources we have as human beings and I think a sublime quality, a true inner beauty can emerge from it. Some people would call that heaven on earth, I call it the radiance. I think religion is not something to be debated as yes or no, right or wrong, is there a heaven, isn’t there a heaven, is there a God, isn’t there a God. I think these are matters of preference and style. It’s like saying “Which one do you like? do you like a world that has  a heaven?” Fine, it’s a matter of taste you like a world that has a God, maybe one with a big white beard fine, why not? Would you rather that it’s invisible like the force and something mysterious is uh.. existing in the center of the atom that animates all life fine, I don’t think science is going to answer these questions or needs to. I think they are poetic questions and have to do with how we enjoy and savor the mystery. They’re never going to be final answers.

Let’s see what Jean-Paul Sartre said, hell is other people. That is hell is not getting along with other people, hell would be get, hell is being afraid of other people to just draw on existential thinking. Hell is being uncomfortable in your own skin. Hell is not being a comfortable animal. I like cats, cats will flop down on the ground and be one with the earth and be in total bliss. I want to be as comfortable on this planet as my cat is. Hell is probably a result of trauma in which we got so afraid of being ourselves, being around others, afraid of punishment, afraid of danger that we are weary and paranoid then we’re afraid of people all the time and it usually takes the form of anger but anger is thin it’s, it’s sorrow it’s a sad loneliness and the fear that keeps us from solving it by moving toward other people constructively and lovingly. That would be the worst hell I think we can come up with as human beings. Hell is being trapped in our own separateness, in our fantasy of not being connected to others. In our fears that keep us from reaching toward others and forming relationships and community. Hell is that awful loneliness ultimately, it is separation from ourselves. It is being so divided within that we don’t even know what our body is feeling that can all be fixed, that is a project that one can come to terms with.

There has been some very interesting research that shows that we are much more peaceful than we used to be, that there’s a very steady movement in reduction of violence between people fewer wars, fewer deaths by conflict. The planet gets more crowded, studies on animals show that if you crowd animals together their benign aspects lower and their defensive aspects rise. So we have a great challenge ahead of us on how to live on this planet and not kill the planet and not kill each other. It would be nice to think that the progress in human consciousness could help and I think there are signs that it is helping but it is truly too soon to know.