AWAKENING THE HERO:
Calling Forth Our Bliss Into Action
An Online Journey To Bring the Hero Myth Alive
Right Now, Right Where You Are
SESSION FOUR
HJ ESSAY on SoulAdventures & Ego Ordeals:
Finding the One Within the Other
Adventure –an unusual and exciting (typically felt as dangerous) experience or activity; a daring activity calling for enterprise and enthusiasm.
Ordeal – a challenging or painful experience, especially a protracted one.
Something that has come forth that was not expected, asked for or wanted.
Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature,
Nor do the children of men
As a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer
In the long run
Than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure,
Or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and
Behave like free spirits
In the presence of fate
Is strength undefeatable.
- Helen Keller
It is important that we can feel secure.
We all need to feel safe and protected to live in the world.
We all must learn to form meaningful attachments and experience enough solid ground in our lives in order to feel loved, accepted and adequately regarded and cared for.
We all need this important foundation of security woven into the fabric of our being. This essential grounding gives us the internal stability and fortitude necessary to venture out and to go far out into the world.
That being said - security is, indeed, mostly a superstition.
Like a fairy tale, an over-emphasis on being safe and secure speaks to a young and culturally reinforced place within us that wishes for something to be, that cannot really be. Or can only temporarily be. Or needed to be, back when we were young.
As children, we relied on the presence, care and support of others in order to feel secure. We depended on these external resources to help us feel stable enough on the inside. This stability allowed us to take meaningful risks and have life-giving explorations and adventures.
We are shaped by our cultural surroundings to value and seek security, sometimes above all else. Our educational and career endeavors are often focused primarily around gaining an opportunity for economic security. Getting married means “to have and to hold”, whichalso contributes to the collective ideal of being provided for, of coming together to sustain and be sustained as a family throughout a lifetime.
Security is something we strive for, sometimes obtain, andoften fail to retain.
In actuality, it is something thatcomes and goes from our lives, as life is to be lived on its own terms. If this is true, then we must be sobered by what Helen Keller says. That in this way of living life on life’s terms, avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
When we fail at our fundamental emotional and psychological developmental tasks of becoming attached and secure in childhood, we canbecome overly focused on securing external possessions as a substitute. Things like finances become the primary means for obtaining our security, beyond adequate food, shelter and love.
Money, of course, is that singular externalresource, necessary in almost all parts of the world for an exchange of basic goods, services and supplies for living. But it is not a valid substitute for internal resourcefulness, which is cultivated by our capacity for self-activation, venturing forth, and being resilient in the face of failure – or in our language – adventuring!
(For more, see the Chapter on ‘Starving Amid Abundance’ in the James Hollis book, What Matters Most.)
On the path of the soul’s heroic journey of awakening, saying yes to the way of adventure means also saying yes to the challenges of the ordeal, and vice versa. You cannot have one without the other. This becomes a fundamental truth once we cross the threshold into the hero’s journey, and the journey now takes us. We all must go beyond the safe and familiar to enter the realm of mythic adventure.
Paradoxically, in the realm of mythic adventure, safety becomes the final danger.
When we live in our ordinary lives amongstthe cultural procurements of our current post-modern world, we have never been surrounded by more abundance. To verify this, just take a walk through your nearby supermarkets. Supersized, indeed. How about our appliance and electronics stores? Wallmarts, Cabalas, Costcos, Sam’s Clubs – the list goes one.
Convenience, luxury, and ease can be our primary aims for the perception of a successful, modern way of life. Precisely because of this cultural backdrop, security in the end becomes our final danger.
Being “overfed” by the substitutes for an actual life we can call our own, we are no longer clear or lean enough to realize what it takes to bring forth our own vitality, meaning and purpose. The science fiction writer H.G. Wells spoke to this very thing about our modern ways of life quite poignantly and dramatically:
“But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident.
Always before these times the bulk of the people did not overeat themselves because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now if only one pitch his or her standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess.
You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your death bed.”
Those workingin the field of hospice care have learned a deep wisdom teachingfrom listening to those who time on earth is about to end. When a dying person looks back over the span of their life, their deepest regret will most often be for the venture that failed to be undertaken, not for the failed undertaking of a venture.
Those who cannot and do not say ‘yes’ to the adventure of living may manage to avoid certain ordeals, but they also create other ordeals through their process of avoiding. When we live in this manner, we become left to live out our lives in small ways, and become fated to a persistent“sameness”.
By playing it too safe, we are cast in roles created only for the management of the mundane. We tend to the necessity of daily chores and attend to the dreary tasks of life that maintain and preserve a narrow, flattenedexistence.
This is why we need to able to understand the danger of playing it too safe. By allowing our lives to be lived as a meaningfulbut uncertain journey, we create the potentiality fora vibrant life. We risk being enlivened bya spontaneity, surprise and wonder that can only be joined withand not controlled.
The Adventure Brings Forth the Ordeal
So this is the deal; we have say ‘yes’ to it. The essential intermingling of an adventure with an ordeal is the very thing that can bring forth the conditions by which we discover the deepest unrealized potential in ourselves.
It is also what creates a sense of largeness in life.
Excitement is what comes alive and is born from our fear, and so fear is what we must face in the unfolding of our excitement and enthusiasm for living.
If we don’t see ourselves as anactual player in the mythological field of opportunity, we will want to project our vitality onto a real or imagined superhero. We will perceive that they can do what we can’t and what we don’t want to do.
This is howwe project our own inner hero potential onto those larger-than-life figures outside of us. Of course, this is important for children to be able to do. They must be able to wish, dream and imagine, because they are too young to be able to go out and actually do what they dream.
But when we continue stay arrested in these childhood fantasies as adults, we don’t ever have to do the hard work of realizing what we have been born for. We will fail to do the necessary striving towards, developing and contributing to the world, by bringing forth these essential inner capacitiesto the needs of the world around us.
The Ordeal Brings Forth the Sense of Adventure
Subsequently, once we move past our initial emotional reactions to life circumstances and personal interactions that involve the ego’s ordeals, we can begin to search for and locate our authentic inner‘hero response’ to the challenge that has been placed in front of us.
We must awaken to the realization that the exact conditions needed to elicit our true potential from within us have now transpired, in ways that we may not yetbe able to appreciate or understand. We have to say yes to the ordeal, and learn to go with it.
When we can do this, the sense of a living adventure returns to us. We become motivated and inspired when we begin to follow the awakening life force energy emerging from within us. This begins to gradually open us to the possibility of the profound ‘discovery of the boon’ within the hero self, brought forth from the realm of mythic adventure found in the ordeals of daily life.
Joseph Campbell said that when we say yes to the ordeal, there is a deep sub-conscious recognition and acceptance that there is something worthy about a proper ordeal, especially when taken up within the spirit of adventure, that “drives the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those human fantasies that tend to tie it back”.
This is in essence an embodiment of the Buddhist sutra of one’s “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world”. The ego dies a little death, again and again; then the eternal shines through from within the trying circumstance of life’s vicissitudes.
Sometimes, only through the ordeal we are born anew,which in turn gives new life to those around us who can also partake of life in this way.
From the Ideal to the Real
Wetend to cling to what psychotherapists would call our “infantile fantasy wishes’.
These are primal constructs of our own making that are full of idealized values, beliefs, and images about ourselves and about others. We tend use them, as Campbell says in the paragraph above, as something to tie us back to what is old and familiar. They become usedas defensive maneuvers away from the mess of really working something through as part of a new experience that is raw and
undeveloped, something that needs our ongoing attention, our back and forth-ness, trial and error, etc.
Yet it is this mindful attention to the messes of life that create new re-organizations of our thinking and inspire the courage to try new behaviors that will forge new life. This is what it takes to move us forward through “the necessary rites and passages of meaningful adult living.”
As uncomfortable and unmanageable as ordeals can be, they also offer us a chance to feel a kind of “realness” within ourselves. Ordeals can give us a sense that “this is it, this is my life, and it is happening right now”. It shifts us from a sense of our lives being lived according to the constructs of the “map” and we now feel thrown into the actual territory. Below is a bold passage from an eastern mystic from the 15th century namedKabir. He speaks with passionate eloquence about this shift from measured conceptual thinking to the potency of lived experience:
“There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming there.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The sacred books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers sideways one day.
What Kabir speaks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something,
It is not true.”
From the Map To the Territory
Kabir encourages us to shift our devotion from the ‘childhood wishing’ of being rescued by heavenly forces from the trials of life on earth, to one of being strengthened by the adult ‘living through’ of life’s earthly experiences.
We can alsocling to mental concepts in the very same way we cling to our deepest childhood fantasies; we can get caught up in a fascination with abstract and theoretical positions. Thisprevents us from entering the necessary uncertainty and complexity of a genuine adventure, where we are harried as well as carried by the twists and turns of fate and destiny, as they play themselves out in our actual lives.
Kabir is also saying that we learn best only when we enter the territory of real life, experiencing things as they are. We are subjected to our own unique happenings and perspectives, however troubling and limiting they might be. Ultimately, we learn to own our experiences, and make our own choices, and take responsibility for them, living as only we can. These choices, for better and for worse, shape our fate and bring forth our destiny.
We gain the most from life when we are nourished and satisfied by learning from own lived experience, not from being pre-occupied by the thinking going on in our heads.
It is important not to confuse the menu with the meal.
The Adventure & Ordeal of the Ascent:
Cultivating the Masculine Principle Within
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
If You Want to Ascend, You Must
Say ‘Yes’ to the Effort of the Climb
If we have a desire to open, to thrust ourselves towardsour own largeness and towards the vast and ascendant possibility of a living bliss within us, then this will require significant energy, effort and work. It confronts the infantile fantasy that many of us cling to that there can be significant reward without any effort. It is a child’s wish that new life can come forth without having to contribute towards its happening. There is no such thing. This is perhaps more than a bit disappointing to awaken to, but accepting this reality grounds us in the task at hand.
There is an old saying, “children wish, adults do”. Only as young children do we have the right to be given to without having to respond back in return. It is natural for children to have the wish to be given to, especially as they don’t have the capacities to provide what is needed for their selves. But eventually, we allhave to grow up. As we mature, we grow into a desire to give of ourselves, and to give from our own sense of fullness. Adults contribute to making life happen. As we do, we are filled by the satisfaction of our own efforts. Children benefit as a result of an activated, grown-up life happening around them.
Life exchanges with life; there must always be a giving back and going forth in life, for life to continue it’s moving forward. Avoiding the exchange of effort, while trying to receive the outcome or reward that comes from (someone else’s) effort, conjures an unreality. It also fosters a sense of entitlement andwith it, unconscious demandson others. When this happens, caregiverseventually lose their desire to give, asthen can only do so primarily out of obligation.
To experience a sense of life’s adventure, we must be able to bear the effort it takes to grow upward and to go outward, to thrust ourselves into life. The motivation to make this effort must be inspired andignited within us. We need to cultivate the necessary courage, nerve and sustained focus to do so. We must be self-activating. As we venture forth, we will face both our limits and our potential within the tangible world of space and time.
How To Climb a Mountain
Make no mistake. This will be an exercise in staying vertical.
Yes, there will be a view, later, a wide swath of open sky,
but in the meantime: tree and stone. If you're lucky, a hawk will
coast overhead, scanning the forest floor. If you're lucky,
a set of wildflowers will keep you cheerful. Mostly, though,
a steady sweat, your heart fluttering indelicately, a solid ache
perforating your calves. This is called work, what you will come to know,
eventually and simply, as movement, as all the evidence you need to make
your way. Forget where you were. That story is no longer true.
Level your gaze to the trail you're on, and even the dark won't stop you.
-Maya Stein
In this poem, Maya Stein speaks of what it takes to climb towards a particular height, which is a metaphor for maturing, for ‘growing up’. This self-activating yang principle, in the form of outward effort, must be made and cannot be short-changed. Any short cuts here only lengthen the distance towards the boon of self-revelation.
Their will be a view, she says. You will be rewarded. But not immediately -later. There is little immediate gratification to be found on a soul’s journey. In fact, this journey of awakening will take up one’s lifetime. She is pointing us to the task at hand. Tree and stone. Groundedness. Facing what is in front of you.
Occasionally, we are rewarded with surprise and wonder – the appearance of a hawk flying overhead. We can’t feel entitled to this viewing. We are graced with it. It comes when it comes, and when it does, hopefully we are not too self-absorbed and can have enough attentiveness to see it, and have our inner experience.
Stein’s teaching is this: Our own efforts create movement in life. Conscious effort is what will moves our lives forward. Yet we are not doing it all by ourselves, and life doesn’t happen solely by our own efforts. The universe participates as well. But a certain ongoing effort needed to dissolve what has grown old, and what now holds us back.