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

Return to
Home Page

Education Support Services
Thought of the Week Archives
October 2000

October 2, 2000

In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends to internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish -- right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead -- and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone's sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

Lewis Hyde

In the Hero's Journey, Trickster is the ever-present element of uncertainty and chaos. He is often the initiator of the call to adventure. Sometimes he guards the threshold and sometimes, if our life has stagnated because of micro-management or the entrenchment of security, he may even be our mentor. In psychology, the trickster is most likely the shadow, undermining the carefully constructed persona which shield us from the world, thereby forcing us to seek our true identity. Wherever Trickster is, he is both destroyer and creator. He knows that form, structure and security restrict our vision and limit us to what we already know. He can see them stifling our potentials by focusing our attention on a goal, an outcome, a standard, or a specific result. Then Trickster becomes that creative energy inside us which will not be content with the status quo. Ever seeking expression, he will stand at the corner of the house of cards we call security, light a cigarette, and casually lean against it, sending the whole structure tumbling down. He will shrug, as if to say, "Hey, I didn't know it was so fragile," and walk away laughing, leaving us to create new form out of the chaos, to exercise our minds in a way we never have before.

Reg Harris

October 9, 2000

My experience tells me that much of what I have read in texts from Plato to Freud is wrong. And more important than the texts themselves, what we've inherited from the Western European culture that embraced those texts is deeply confusing. The contest between pleasure and repression has been miscast. The split between body and mind, and its correlation with the contest between instinctual energy and civilization, derives from a past when the furniture of life was different from what it is today. Back when we spent less time shuffling symbols and more time using our muscles, the furniture of our universe was almost entirely physical. Now, however, we live in a world largely composed of symbols, or things that are not just things, but like the flowers in a gift bouquet, things that have now gained symbolic meaning in addition to their sheer physicality.

James Ogilvy

October 16, 2000

The inner self requires ample time to pass through each of the steps it takes to assimilate experiences, memories, former irritations or addictions into the not-yet formed behavior. Rushing headlong into some pre-conceived, intellectual notion of what we "should" be not only implies disrespect for the self, but we then wrongly assume to know what we need better than the inner self.

Marsha Sinetar

Comment

This, to me, seems an argument for a more open curriculum in schools, a less rigid "stage" process of learning. To assume that each of our students will assimilate experience and knowledge at the same rate is not only foolish, but disrespectful of the student and their needs. Standards and standardized tests reduce the process of human growth to a series of predictable, controllable "shoulds," which ignores the reality of the human experience and the individual Heroic Journey.

When I was in sales, we learned that we might have to approach a prospective client or customer at least three times (flyers, phone calls, and visits, etc.) before we could make a sale. We learned that the chances that the person would be in a position to be receptive to our message on a single visit were very low. We needed to keep letting them know about our message until their perception of their needs matched our presentation of a solution.

If the same is true of education, that true learning will occur when the students' perceived needs coincide with our presentation of a solution, then we may need to present something many times in many different ways. No pre-determined timetable can predict or account for this variable. In fact, predetermined schedules and outcomes may actually hinder the process, especially now, when students are bombarded with so many stimuli and decisions.

Agreed that there are logistical concerns that prevent us from "customizing" education, but the current movement toward standards and outcomes and validation-through-testing is dangerous in that it disrespects the child's individual Journey. Each child needs, as Sinetar writes, "ample time to pass through each of the steps it takes to assimilate experience, memories, former irritations or addictions into the not-yet formed behavior."

There is a great risk involved in learning, and we must acknowledge that. To agree to learn something which contradicts what one has believed means giving up the security of the known for the promise of the unknown. It also means admitting that a part of the structure of our own narrative story (personal myth) was wrong or ineffective and having the courage to adapt or replace it. This kind of "leap of faith" can only be accomplished in steps, even when the revelation is sudden. Adjustment and assimilation take time.

To acknowledge the truth in Sinetar's words is to acknowledge individual differences in growth, assimilation and understanding. To continue to function out of the mechanistic paradigm, which is not just outdated but pathogenic, is to disrespect the both individual and the learning process.

Reg Harris

October 23, 2000

If the shadow, whether individual, organizational, or collective, were only evil, we would have cause to ward it off, to keep it constantly at bay. Yet shadow...contains wisdom and a warning. When we recognize the shadow as a natural process, following us as Mara followed Buddha and Jung's dream specter followed him as he held the candle of consciousness, then we can begin to respect the multiple selves that lie within. The shadow offers us access to the unresolved issues of our past, the dispossessed feelings, attitudes, and emotions that can offer new vitality and a more comprehensive humanity, if recognized. We learn that we can be both this and that, tyrannical and empowering, just and unjust, altruistic and controlling, compassionate and cruel. The experience of one-dimensionality can give way to a creative polarity that provides the tension necessary for new learning and new approaches to living a more differentiated and psychologically richer life. The confrontation with shadow is the first tentative step we make toward reclaiming wholeness.

Alan Briskin

October 30, 2000

We want to think. We want to speculate. We want to fantasize. We want to figure it all out. We want to know the secrets of the universe. When we do all that, the fire [of attention to and experience in the present] stays banked; it's not getting any oxygen. Then we wonder why we're sick, mentally and physically. The burning is so clogged, there's nothing but debris coming off. And that debris doesn't just dirty us; it dirties everything....

...Watch yourself as you cling to feeling sorry for yourself, as you cling to your problems, as you cling to the "awful" state of your life. That's your drama. The truth is, we like our drama very much. People tell me that they want to be free of their troubles; but when we stew in our own juices we can maintain ourselves as the artificial center of the universe....the messiness of that incomplete burning can be tragic for me and for you.