THE POWER OF MYTH

Well, there are two types of deeds. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life.

The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message.

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society. This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a going and a returning.

But the structure and something of the spiritual sense of this adventure can be seen already anticipated in the puberty or initiation rituals of early tribal societies, through which a child is compelled to give up its childhood and become an adult-to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a responsible adult. This is a fundamental psycho- logical transformation that everyone has to undergo. We are in childhood in a condition of dependency under someone’s pro- tection and supervision for some fourteen to twenty-one years -and if you’re going on for your Ph.D., this may continue to perhaps thirty-five. You are in no way a self-responsible, free agent, but an obedient dependent, expecting and receiving pun- ishments and rewards. To evolve out of this position of psycho logical immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey-leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.

Furthermore, we have not even risked the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.

-JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Every one is a hero in birth,where he undergoes a tremendous psychological as well as physical transformation, from the condition of a little water creature living in a realm of amniotic fluid into a mammal which ultimately will be standing.Thats an enormous transformation.

Kali of India,who with her right hand bestows boons and her left hand holds a raised sword. Kali gives birth to all beings of the universe,yet her tongue is lolling long and red to lick up their living blood. She wears a necklace of skull,her kilt is of severed arms and legs. She is black time,both the life and the death of all beings, the womb and tomb of the world:the primal,one and only, ultimate reality of nature of whom the gods themselves are but the functioning agents.The great goddess is a metaphysical symbol.She is black which is not opposite of white.She is symbol:the arch personification of power of space time,and matter , within whose bound all beings arise and die.

If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”

In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

What’s my ego?

What you think you want, what you will believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you’re certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself.

Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There’s no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.

Jung had a patient who came to him because she felt herself to be alone in the world, on the rocks, and when she drew a picture for him of how she felt, there she was on the shore of a dismal sea, caught in rocks from the waist down. The wind was blowing, and her hair was blowing, and all the gold, all the joy of life, was locked away from her in the rocks. The next picture that she drew, however, followed something that he had said to her. A flash of lightning strikes the rocks, and a golden disk is being lifted out. There is no more gold locked within the rocks. There are golden patches now on the surface. In the course of the conferences that followed, these patches of gold were identified. They were her friends. She wasn’t alone. She had locked herself in her own little room and life, yet she had friends. Her recognition of these followed only after the killing of her dragon.

Unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we are not going to save the world but to save ourselves.But in doing that, you save the world.

You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death. The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx has something to say of this, too. The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the breast, neck, and face of a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land, and to lift the plague, the hero has to answer the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane.

The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time-childhood, maturity, age, and death. When without fear you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure-fearlessness and achievement.

I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian braves riding into battle against the rain of bullets of Custer’s men. “What a wonderful day to die!” There was no hanging on there in life. That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.