“Life is a journey, and we are all travelers. Every event in our daily lives is part of a continuum of change and development. Time and space are a process. Every individual event enhances change and development… Only by responding to the changes within the whole process can great success be achieved. This is the key to success.”(I Ching, p.443)
Among the powerful metaphors primal peoples might teach around the evening fire is one we might call the hero’s journey. This phrase seems to have emerged in modern times, from the work of mythologist, Joseph Campbell. But the concept is as old as humankind.
Among the mythological stories of gods and goddesses they enjoyed, they also made it a habit to recall grand tales of superior humans who managed impossible tasks in the face of insurmountable odds in their quest to actualize the highest of their human potentials – which sometimes seemed, in hindsight, to be divine, or at least divinely inspired.
The concept of god is, in man cultures, nothing more or less than a metaphor, a model for perfect human being. “Hinduism [especially] encourages persons of this nature to think of God as the noblest instance of what they find in the sensible world. This means thinking of God as the supreme person, for persons are nature’s noblest crown.”(Smith, 47) In this sense, the perfect person would be like all people put together.
Many primal cultures nurture this conception of human ideals in their young, and this serves the ‘storytelling around the fire’ conception of learning well, as the morals to such stories become utensils in the toolbox with which to solve human problems. For all the good reasons we have to learn from ancient wisdom cultures, this is among the best – because they offer solutions to problems we still face today, perhaps now more urgently than ever. And his hero’s journey conception of humans living up to their highest potentials can be a sound guide for human action in every life.
It can function as a guiding principle for making choices and decisions along the somewhat predictable journey that is life. For while your path may be unique, the journey itself is astonishingly regular.
The hero’s journey formula has (for better or worse) proliferated in our time by way of the work moviemakers (notably George Lucas, who created the Star Wars trilogy, and Disney executive, Christopher Vogel, who wrote a book called the Writer’s Journey, that became the standard for the industry). It is a useful template for filmmakers, to be sure, providing a formula that helps simplify complex stories. For this mythic storytelling construct begins with the premise that "all stories consist of a few familiar patterns and common structural elements found universally in all great myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies."(Vogel, p.3) According to believers, this "pattern…lies behind every story ever told."(Vogler, p.14) As Aristotle would say, the form is always the same, it is only the content that is different.
Ancient philosophers might add that this pattern exist in every human life as well, for the patterns of challenge and advance that they hero predictably travels will show themselves, in one form or another, in every life, heroic or otherwise. Arguably, primal people were onto something in preparing their young to face this need to prove themselves throughout the course of their lives, and thus earn character and honor by teaching their young at an early age to expect to face such trials through their lives.
The Greeks held the four cardinal virtues as one unified virtue, the same quality of character in all cases, but showing up differently in the face of changing circumstances. Every journey will invariably include temptation, danger, injustice and ignorance, to which temperance, courage, justice and wisdom are the hero’s proper response. And even then, having learned from the Taoist roots of the idea of the golden mean, they understood that it was possible to take any virtue too far, and so even the hero had to learn the balance between too little and too much of these. With regard to courage, for instance, one should certainly avoid its deficiency (cowardice), but likewise one must avoid its excess (foolhardiness). And so on in all of life’s challenges. There are no rules or commandments that dictate the right thing to do -
We are all, potentially, the heroes of our own lives, though little in our world – save perhaps great literature and movies -- helps our young to aspire to such honor in their own right. As Aristotle would make clear in what we today call ‘virtue ethics’, codes and principles may be useful tools, but they are just general rules of thumb that need to be applied to particular circumstances, which are seldom black and white. Even those that seem the most iron clad (‘Do not kill!) admit of exceptions (self-defense). And so a truly virtuous person will not simply follow any particular set of commandments, but will be continuously and deliberately thinking through what the right thing to do is in any given circumstance. Because there are many paths to the same summit, and only we can determine which is best for us.
As we’ll see, they knew enough in ancient times to worry that explicit codes of ethics make it too easy to simply fake being a good person. Many can go through the motions, as wolves in sheep’s clothing, without understanding why or having developed any of the qualities of character that a true hero learns in the course of applying principles to action. This is why theoretical wisdom is not sufficient; we must also have practical wisdom that comes of applying theory to practice. As Aristotle suggests, the only way to be a good person is to be a good person.
The hero’s journey is, in all cases, about “a life lived in self-discovery”, for the hero’s challenge is always, as it was for Luke Skywalker, to find “within himself the resources of character to meet his destiny.”(p. xiv, ‘The Power of Myth’) It is, essentially, a twelve stage map of the emotional journey taken from ignorance to wisdom, from weakness to strength, from despair to hope, or from any troubled beginning to any worthy end.
Against the background of this story structure are universal patterns of personality, archetypical characters who represent various aspects of the complete human personality, recurring patterns of behavior and relationships through which the familiar power conflicts which are inherent in any human life are played out.(Vogel, p.33)
By this view, all stories are simply "the same story, retold endlessly in infinite variation," just as each life follows the same pattern, with infinite variation in detail - like a fractal. This construct might fruitfully be applied here, for the hero’s journey shows the fractal nature of human life – for while the pattern stays the same, in the sense that a single life is a single journey, still, each day, each relationship, each new challenge in life is itself a sort of mini quest - similar in pattern to the entire journey, but infinitely complex and unique to the individual in calling for the qualities of character that every hero needs.
In any case, for each individual, “The call is to confront reality, to master the self,” and “those who dare to hear and follow that secret call soon learn the dangers and difficulties of its lonely journey,“ as well as its surprising rewards.[p.4]
Monoimus, a gnostic scholar, recommended that we: “Abandon the search for God and the creation... Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.’ Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate… If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.” (Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, p.xx.)
As the sages of the Upanishads would put it, “True knowledge of the Self does not lead to salvation: it is salvation.”(p.16) The means are available to us for actualizing our heavenly potentials here on earth, by finding “the kingdom within.”
The Kingdom of God is within you, said Jesus.
“All the sutras and sastras are no more than communications of this fact; all the sages, ancient as well as modern, have exhausted their ingenuity and imagination to no other purpose than to point the way to this.”(Suzuki, p. 47)[1]
As Zen scholars have put it, “If thou wishest to search out the deep things of God, search out the depths of thine own spirit”…‘The way to ascend onto God is to descend into one’s self’.”(Hugo in Suzuki, p. 43)
Idealism is unrealistic, we are told. Maybe so, but I shudder to think what the world would be like without the influence of such great idealists as Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tze, Socrates, and the rest.
No matter how much larger than life history has inflated these great souls to seem, they were just human beings like the rest of us, perhaps the only difference being that no one managed to discourage them from their ideals, and we are all considerably better off for their strength. They were driven to follow an ideal of moral excellence, a path that most of us, perhaps just as capable, allow ourselves to give up on. They stand out in history as a few of among many examples of what human beings, at their best, can accomplish. And it shouldn’t surprise us that they all seem to be saying much the same thing, despite the differences in all their eloquent voices - a variation on the theme that we must listen inward and look to our own hearts. We remember these great teachers because they are true guides who helped us to follow our own inner voices, to focus the meaning of what we want and need to remember, the truth of what we know in our hearts about what matters, and they help us to remember to choose the path of excellence over the path of least resistance. The psychology deep within the works of these great teachers is grounded in an ethic of human perfectibility. These and many like them have reminded us now and again throughout history of our power to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, the freedom and responsibility of our will to actualize our higher potentials. These ideals exist as targets, if they exist at all, and as Aristotle long ago noted, there are many ways to miss a target, but there is only one way to hit it.
Still, there are a thousand ways to do a good thing well, and that path toward actualizing our chosen potentials is unique for each of us. “We all have to find our unique ways of taking our own cognitive journeys on our landscapes.” (OI, Martinez, et.al., 101)
As Nietzsche put it, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, the only way, it does not exist.”
[1] And, lest we cast this ancient insight as a dead ideal, as I’m writing a bit of synchronicity brings a Michael Buble song on the radio. The lyrics are: “Get it in your head, Hollywood is dead. You can find it in yourself. Keep on loving what is true, and the world will come to you. You can find it in yourself.”J
Among the powerful metaphors primal peoples might teach around the evening fire is one we might call the hero’s journey. This phrase seems to have emerged in modern times, from the work of mythologist, Joseph Campbell. But the concept is as old as humankind.
Among the mythological stories of gods and goddesses they enjoyed, they also made it a habit to recall grand tales of superior humans who managed impossible tasks in the face of insurmountable odds in their quest to actualize the highest of their human potentials – which sometimes seemed, in hindsight, to be divine, or at least divinely inspired.
The concept of god is, in man cultures, nothing more or less than a metaphor, a model for perfect human being. “Hinduism [especially] encourages persons of this nature to think of God as the noblest instance of what they find in the sensible world. This means thinking of God as the supreme person, for persons are nature’s noblest crown.”(Smith, 47) In this sense, the perfect person would be like all people put together.
Many primal cultures nurture this conception of human ideals in their young, and this serves the ‘storytelling around the fire’ conception of learning well, as the morals to such stories become utensils in the toolbox with which to solve human problems. For all the good reasons we have to learn from ancient wisdom cultures, this is among the best – because they offer solutions to problems we still face today, perhaps now more urgently than ever. And his hero’s journey conception of humans living up to their highest potentials can be a sound guide for human action in every life.
It can function as a guiding principle for making choices and decisions along the somewhat predictable journey that is life. For while your path may be unique, the journey itself is astonishingly regular.
The hero’s journey formula has (for better or worse) proliferated in our time by way of the work moviemakers (notably George Lucas, who created the Star Wars trilogy, and Disney executive, Christopher Vogel, who wrote a book called the Writer’s Journey, that became the standard for the industry). It is a useful template for filmmakers, to be sure, providing a formula that helps simplify complex stories. For this mythic storytelling construct begins with the premise that "all stories consist of a few familiar patterns and common structural elements found universally in all great myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies."(Vogel, p.3) According to believers, this "pattern…lies behind every story ever told."(Vogler, p.14) As Aristotle would say, the form is always the same, it is only the content that is different.
Ancient philosophers might add that this pattern exist in every human life as well, for the patterns of challenge and advance that they hero predictably travels will show themselves, in one form or another, in every life, heroic or otherwise. Arguably, primal people were onto something in preparing their young to face this need to prove themselves throughout the course of their lives, and thus earn character and honor by teaching their young at an early age to expect to face such trials through their lives.
The Greeks held the four cardinal virtues as one unified virtue, the same quality of character in all cases, but showing up differently in the face of changing circumstances. Every journey will invariably include temptation, danger, injustice and ignorance, to which temperance, courage, justice and wisdom are the hero’s proper response. And even then, having learned from the Taoist roots of the idea of the golden mean, they understood that it was possible to take any virtue too far, and so even the hero had to learn the balance between too little and too much of these. With regard to courage, for instance, one should certainly avoid its deficiency (cowardice), but likewise one must avoid its excess (foolhardiness). And so on in all of life’s challenges. There are no rules or commandments that dictate the right thing to do -
We are all, potentially, the heroes of our own lives, though little in our world – save perhaps great literature and movies -- helps our young to aspire to such honor in their own right. As Aristotle would make clear in what we today call ‘virtue ethics’, codes and principles may be useful tools, but they are just general rules of thumb that need to be applied to particular circumstances, which are seldom black and white. Even those that seem the most iron clad (‘Do not kill!) admit of exceptions (self-defense). And so a truly virtuous person will not simply follow any particular set of commandments, but will be continuously and deliberately thinking through what the right thing to do is in any given circumstance. Because there are many paths to the same summit, and only we can determine which is best for us.
As we’ll see, they knew enough in ancient times to worry that explicit codes of ethics make it too easy to simply fake being a good person. Many can go through the motions, as wolves in sheep’s clothing, without understanding why or having developed any of the qualities of character that a true hero learns in the course of applying principles to action. This is why theoretical wisdom is not sufficient; we must also have practical wisdom that comes of applying theory to practice. As Aristotle suggests, the only way to be a good person is to be a good person.
The hero’s journey is, in all cases, about “a life lived in self-discovery”, for the hero’s challenge is always, as it was for Luke Skywalker, to find “within himself the resources of character to meet his destiny.”(p. xiv, ‘The Power of Myth’) It is, essentially, a twelve stage map of the emotional journey taken from ignorance to wisdom, from weakness to strength, from despair to hope, or from any troubled beginning to any worthy end.
Against the background of this story structure are universal patterns of personality, archetypical characters who represent various aspects of the complete human personality, recurring patterns of behavior and relationships through which the familiar power conflicts which are inherent in any human life are played out.(Vogel, p.33)
By this view, all stories are simply "the same story, retold endlessly in infinite variation," just as each life follows the same pattern, with infinite variation in detail - like a fractal. This construct might fruitfully be applied here, for the hero’s journey shows the fractal nature of human life – for while the pattern stays the same, in the sense that a single life is a single journey, still, each day, each relationship, each new challenge in life is itself a sort of mini quest - similar in pattern to the entire journey, but infinitely complex and unique to the individual in calling for the qualities of character that every hero needs.
In any case, for each individual, “The call is to confront reality, to master the self,” and “those who dare to hear and follow that secret call soon learn the dangers and difficulties of its lonely journey,“ as well as its surprising rewards.[p.4]
Monoimus, a gnostic scholar, recommended that we: “Abandon the search for God and the creation... Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.’ Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate… If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.” (Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, p.xx.)
As the sages of the Upanishads would put it, “True knowledge of the Self does not lead to salvation: it is salvation.”(p.16) The means are available to us for actualizing our heavenly potentials here on earth, by finding “the kingdom within.”
The Kingdom of God is within you, said Jesus.
“All the sutras and sastras are no more than communications of this fact; all the sages, ancient as well as modern, have exhausted their ingenuity and imagination to no other purpose than to point the way to this.”(Suzuki, p. 47)[1]
As Zen scholars have put it, “If thou wishest to search out the deep things of God, search out the depths of thine own spirit”…‘The way to ascend onto God is to descend into one’s self’.”(Hugo in Suzuki, p. 43)
Idealism is unrealistic, we are told. Maybe so, but I shudder to think what the world would be like without the influence of such great idealists as Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tze, Socrates, and the rest.
No matter how much larger than life history has inflated these great souls to seem, they were just human beings like the rest of us, perhaps the only difference being that no one managed to discourage them from their ideals, and we are all considerably better off for their strength. They were driven to follow an ideal of moral excellence, a path that most of us, perhaps just as capable, allow ourselves to give up on. They stand out in history as a few of among many examples of what human beings, at their best, can accomplish. And it shouldn’t surprise us that they all seem to be saying much the same thing, despite the differences in all their eloquent voices - a variation on the theme that we must listen inward and look to our own hearts. We remember these great teachers because they are true guides who helped us to follow our own inner voices, to focus the meaning of what we want and need to remember, the truth of what we know in our hearts about what matters, and they help us to remember to choose the path of excellence over the path of least resistance. The psychology deep within the works of these great teachers is grounded in an ethic of human perfectibility. These and many like them have reminded us now and again throughout history of our power to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, the freedom and responsibility of our will to actualize our higher potentials. These ideals exist as targets, if they exist at all, and as Aristotle long ago noted, there are many ways to miss a target, but there is only one way to hit it.
Still, there are a thousand ways to do a good thing well, and that path toward actualizing our chosen potentials is unique for each of us. “We all have to find our unique ways of taking our own cognitive journeys on our landscapes.” (OI, Martinez, et.al., 101)
As Nietzsche put it, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, the only way, it does not exist.”
[1] And, lest we cast this ancient insight as a dead ideal, as I’m writing a bit of synchronicity brings a Michael Buble song on the radio. The lyrics are: “Get it in your head, Hollywood is dead. You can find it in yourself. Keep on loving what is true, and the world will come to you. You can find it in yourself.”J