The Hero's Journey: A resource for educators, teachers, and students

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January 1998

January 4

[These four quotes are from Tim O'Brien's wonderful book on Vietnam, The Things They Carried. I used the book in a 12th grade classed called Search for Meaning in which we explored storytelling as a process of searching for meaning in experience. Students loved the book, and it offered many opportunities to bring in outside material on history, psychology and philosophy. -- RH]

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (p. 179-180)

But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. (p. 255)

~
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. (p. 260)
~
That's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk. They sometimes say things like, "Roger that." Or they say, "Timmy, stop crying," which is what Linda said to me after she was dead. (p. 261)

Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried

January 11

Mystical experience is the direct, unmediated experience of what Bede Griffiths beautifully describes as "the presence of an almost unfathomable mystery . . . which seems to be drawing me to itself." This mystery is beyond name and beyond form; no name or form, no dogma, philosophy, or set of rituals can ever express it fully. It always transcends anything that can be said of it and remains always unstained by any of our human attempts to limit or exploit it...

...When we are touched by the mystic grace and allow ourselves to enter its field without fear, we see that we are all parts of a whole, elements of an universal harmony, unique, essential and sacred notes in a divine music that everyone and everything is playing together...

Andrew Harvey
The Essential Mystics: The Soul's Journey into Truth
Introduction, pages x and xi

January 18

Two thoughts on the psychological "shadow" and reflections on the shadow and the Hero's Journey.

Creation of the shadow

Each of us is like Dorian Gray. We seek to present a beautiful, innocent face to the world; a kind, courteous demeanor; a youthful, intelligent image. And so, unknowingly but inevitably, we push away those qualities that do not fit the image, that do not enhance our self-esteem and make us stand proud but, instead, bring us shame and make us feel small. We shove into the dark cavern of the unconscious those feelings that make us uneasy--hatred, rage, jealousy, greed, competition, lust, shame--and those behaviors that are deemed wrong by the culture--addiction, laziness, aggression, dependency--thereby creating what could be called shadow content. Like Dorian's painting, these qualities ultimately take on a life of their own, forming an invisible twin that lives just behind our life, or just beside it, but as distinct from the one we know as a stranger.

This stranger, known in psychology as the shadow, is us, yet is not us. Hidden from our awareness, the shadow is not a part of our conscious self-image. So it seems to appear abruptly, out of nowhere, in a range of behaviors from off-color jokes to devastating abuses. When it emerges, it feels like an unwanted visitor, leaving us ashamed, even mortified.

Connie Zweig, Ph.D. and Steve Wolf, Ph. D,
Romancing the Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of the Soul

Affects of the shadow

Although...the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such [by the subject]...the cause of the emotion [projection of the shadow onto others] appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person...

It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of the projection is to isolate the subject from his environment [because] instead of a real relationship to it there is not only an illusory one. Projections change the world into a replica of one's own unknown face...they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d'incompleture and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions.

...[the subject of the projections engages] in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

by Reg Harris

In life, one type of Hero's Journey is the Journey to bring the shadow to awareness to reduce its ability to sabotage our lives. The call to adventure comes when the discrepancy between reality and our perceived reality (colored and distorted by our own projections) becomes intolerable. Jung likens the veil of illusions spun by our projections to a cocoon.

If we accept the call, we begin the journey to assimilate the shadow energies and integrate our life. At the end of the difficult journey, we will, like the butterfly, emerge from the cocoon to a life of flight and beauty, where we can join the winds of life in a dance of discovery and growth. We will have learned to change our self-destructive behavior and live a more self-directed life, a life of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. We will have freed the fountain of our own loving and creative energies.

If we reject the call, the cocoon, to use Jung's words, "will completely envelop" us. We will continue to project our own unconscious fears, inadequacies and self-hatreds onto others and the world. As our perception becomes ever more divorced from reality, our bitterness, anger, defensiveness and isolation will grow--eventually consuming us and destroying our lives.

The great writers knew the shadow, even if they didn't call it that directly. Joseph Conrad wrote about it in The Heart of Darkness as did Shakespeare in Hamlet, MacBeth and many other plays. Hemingway battled his own shadows through his writing, much as Santiago battled the great fish in The Old Man and the Sea. We see the shadow at work in Death of a Salesman, with the two sons, Happy and Biff, symbolically in the roles of the call accepted and the call refused. There are hundreds of other examples because the shadow manifests itself symbolically in virtually all great works of literature and film.

Relating to literature in terms of recognizing and living with (controlling?) one's shadow energies can open a new relevancy in literature and give our students some life-long benefits from the fiction.

January 25

In his valuable book, The Unfolding Self, Ralph Metzner discusses 12 metaphors for the transformative experience. In his introduction, he discusses the importance of myths, legends, and folktales and the function of symbols and metaphors in the transformative experience.

"Likewise, myths, legends, and folktales are important sources of transformational metaphors and symbols. They often contain metaphoric accounts of transformative experiences. They are like the stories told by explorers to would-be future voyagers, describing in symbolic form major features of the interior landscapes traversed by the consciousness voyager. Sometimes in a cautionary mode, sometimes in an inspirational mode, they allude metaphorically to the interior conflicts to be resolved, hardship to be endured, obstacles to be overcome, rewards to be won, tools to be used, allies to be found, visions to be seen.

Symbols and metaphors, then, function in the psyche as links between states and levels of consciousness, bridging different domains of reality. They serve to elucidate the structures and functions of consciousness while we are undergoing both ordinary and extraordinary transformations. Many of the deepest, most powerful archetypal symbols, are not necessarily articulated verbally. They may be numbers, shapes, colors, natural phenomena, plants, or animals, and they may be expressed in a great variety of cultural forms, including painting, sculpture, architecture) song, dance, ritual, movement, gesture. These primordial, or archetypal, images are found in virtually all cultures and during all ages, thus representing a kind of universal language.

Perhaps the most important function of symbols is to induce or catalyze changes in our perception, feeling, or thinking. For example, a Buddhist monk meditating on a symbolic figure will experience specific definite changes in his consciousness, intentionally induced or facilitated by that symbolic image. In Jungian psychotherapy the patient is often encouraged, in a process known as active imagination, to extend and develop the meanings associated with images encountered in dreams. Jung repeatedly emphasized the active, dynamic nature of symbols and their ability to work within us--even on us--without our conscious recognition."