The Hero's Journey
Joseph Campbell, mythologist and thinker, describes the Hero's Journey that we all embark on during our lives, the first aspect of which is the 'Call to Adventure'. We spend years building a life that is safe and comfortable and secure, and at some point in time we develop a yearning, a desire, or sense that there is something more, something else.
It is a call to move into a different domain, to move onto the next stage. It often involves leaving behind that which is most comfortable and familiar, and stepping into the unknown. Many people have an imagination of how they would like their lives to be, and oftentimes it does not fit well with the reality they have constructed for themselves over the years. Being unpleasant to compare them, they get busy. They attend to the music of the busy outer world so that they don't have to listen to the inner music that was composed as the score for their future destiny.
But this call, this inner music, refuses to fade, and the call is repeated again and again in different forms. By the time an individual reaches the teen years, they have had a calling at least once. A mistake, a chance meeting, an overheard comment, may reveal an entry into another world, a world where an individual is exposed to something that is at once unknown and yet strangely familiar.
Refusing
There exists the choice of refusing to answer the call. And the number of reasons is as numerous as the number of those who have refused. Joseph Campbell points out that when this occurs, the adventure is turned into its negative form. The person becomes a victim to be saved, with boredom and hard work dominating. His flowering world degenerates into a wasteland of dry stones and any house built will be a house of death. All he does is create new problems for himself while he moves slowly towards his disintegration.
Paying attention
The calls become more and more urgent, if you will, over time. An excellent example of this is seen in the movie 'The Matrix'. Here, Neo, the main character, is a computer whiz who also works as a hacker. He is searching for something although he is unsure of what that is. Initially someone begins to communicate with him through his computer and he responds. Then he is invited to go to a nightclub. Again easy to respond to. He is offered a meeting with someone who can give him what he wants. Again he agrees. In the car on the way to the meeting he is held at gunpoint and decides he wants out because it is getting to be too much. When he opens the door, one of the women says to him, "You have been down that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be..."
At this point he has to make a decision. Resume the life he has been leading, searching, unfulfilled, wanting... or continue in the adventure and have the life he knows is really his. And eventually it gets to a life or death situation. He chooses to put his life on the line to save another.
Where are you?
And in a sense it becomes that for all of us. When you consider that life depends on death for it's perpetuation, those things that die become 'nutrition' for new life, Joseph Campbell suggests that the resolution of this paradox is one of the functions of the myths of the world. It is a useful way for humans to assimilate this knowledge and live with death. So to become who you really are, you have to stop being what you were. There is a death and rebirth, an ending of a particular way of being in order that you can begin to live life anew, to walk your unique and individual path so that you begin to make your dreams a reality.
If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours
Henry David Thoreau
Are you ready to answer the call?
Are you willing to do what it takes to re-establish that connection between who you really are and your rightful place in the universe?
Joseph Campbell, mythologist and thinker, describes the Hero's Journey that we all embark on during our lives, the first aspect of which is the 'Call to Adventure'. We spend years building a life that is safe and comfortable and secure, and at some point in time we develop a yearning, a desire, or sense that there is something more, something else.
It is a call to move into a different domain, to move onto the next stage. It often involves leaving behind that which is most comfortable and familiar, and stepping into the unknown. Many people have an imagination of how they would like their lives to be, and oftentimes it does not fit well with the reality they have constructed for themselves over the years. Being unpleasant to compare them, they get busy. They attend to the music of the busy outer world so that they don't have to listen to the inner music that was composed as the score for their future destiny.
But this call, this inner music, refuses to fade, and the call is repeated again and again in different forms. By the time an individual reaches the teen years, they have had a calling at least once. A mistake, a chance meeting, an overheard comment, may reveal an entry into another world, a world where an individual is exposed to something that is at once unknown and yet strangely familiar.
Refusing
There exists the choice of refusing to answer the call. And the number of reasons is as numerous as the number of those who have refused. Joseph Campbell points out that when this occurs, the adventure is turned into its negative form. The person becomes a victim to be saved, with boredom and hard work dominating. His flowering world degenerates into a wasteland of dry stones and any house built will be a house of death. All he does is create new problems for himself while he moves slowly towards his disintegration.
Paying attention
The calls become more and more urgent, if you will, over time. An excellent example of this is seen in the movie 'The Matrix'. Here, Neo, the main character, is a computer whiz who also works as a hacker. He is searching for something although he is unsure of what that is. Initially someone begins to communicate with him through his computer and he responds. Then he is invited to go to a nightclub. Again easy to respond to. He is offered a meeting with someone who can give him what he wants. Again he agrees. In the car on the way to the meeting he is held at gunpoint and decides he wants out because it is getting to be too much. When he opens the door, one of the women says to him, "You have been down that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be..."
At this point he has to make a decision. Resume the life he has been leading, searching, unfulfilled, wanting... or continue in the adventure and have the life he knows is really his. And eventually it gets to a life or death situation. He chooses to put his life on the line to save another.
Where are you?
And in a sense it becomes that for all of us. When you consider that life depends on death for it's perpetuation, those things that die become 'nutrition' for new life, Joseph Campbell suggests that the resolution of this paradox is one of the functions of the myths of the world. It is a useful way for humans to assimilate this knowledge and live with death. So to become who you really are, you have to stop being what you were. There is a death and rebirth, an ending of a particular way of being in order that you can begin to live life anew, to walk your unique and individual path so that you begin to make your dreams a reality.
If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours
Henry David Thoreau
Are you ready to answer the call?
Are you willing to do what it takes to re-establish that connection between who you really are and your rightful place in the universe?