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.