(This article is the second of a series on the challenge of recognizing and navigating stages in the Hero's Journey.)

The Call: Ringing up the Curtain

In his seminal book on the hero’s journey, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), mythologist Joseph Campbell described the first stage of the journey, the Call, writing that,

…the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration…which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for passing of a threshold is at hand (p. 51).

While Campbell’s book focuses on the spiritual or transcendent hero, his words have much to say about the journeys we take in our everyday lives.

Campbell recognized that the foundation of our experience and growth in the world is the process of transformation. Transformation begins, as Campbell writes, when we have outgrown our “familiar life horizon,” when the story we have become outgrows the story that we are living. One day we realize that our old ways of understanding and being no longer fit either the world that has evolved around us or the person that has evolved within us, and we are called to change.

The End that is the Beginning

At its essence, then, the Call signifies death and rebirth, the death of our old self or life and the rebirth of the new. The death of the old is a key aspect of the Call that is often overlooked. We tend to think of the Call only as a call to rebirth, toward a new journey, but the Call also signifies the end of a previous journey. In other words, the Call is the end that allows the beginning.

This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Call to comprehend: the Call is simultaneously the beginning and the end, and we must embrace both. In one of my favorite journey quotes, William Bridges expressed this concept eloquently:

Transition does not require that you reject or deny the importance of your old life, just that you let go of it. …honor the old life for all that it did for you. It got you this far. It brought you everything you have. But now—although it may be some time before you are comfortable actually doing so—it is time for you to let go of it. Your old life is over (2001, p. 16).

However, accepting that our old life is over is not always easy. The revelation the Call brings can be disorienting and threatening. It can challenge our self-concept, our sense of who we are in the world, or it can threaten the life and relationships that have provided security and stability. We are, often quite literally, shaken out of our life, forced in a sense to float outside, looking back as an observer, trying to understand what is happening.

Understanding, in this sense, is not to understand the facts of the Call—that is usually impossible from the vantage point of someone caught up in the adventure. Understanding the Call is more like trying to orient ourselves to the changed situation. We try to make some sense of what is happening and who we are becoming. In explicating that story, as we sort through the confusion of our disrupted “former” life, we will begin to see the possibilities open to us in our “future” life, the life that is unfolding.

Even if we feel wounded or injured by the experience, the Call can reveal the road to healing. In The Search for the Beloved (1987), Dr. Jean Houston describes the call as a “wounding” and explains that we must “die to one story to be reborn to a larger one…[the story] revealed by the wounding” (p. 104). We must answer the question, “‘What or who is trying to be born in you from that wound’ (p. 108).

The Self within the self

Often the first step to discovering the self that is unfolding is to discover the self that is. This means taking a careful look at who we are beneath the roles, defenses and facades we have built over the years as we tried to cope with life. In Awakening the Hero Within, Dr. Carol Pearson writes,

Always the call is to function at a higher or deeper level, to find a way to live that has more significance and depth, to find out who you are beyond the social persona that you and your environment have jointly created (1991, p. 126).

In other words, before we can become someone new and realize the potentials awaiting us, we must first become who we really are—not the persona we present to others or to ourselves—but who we really are (see “Gestalt’s Paradoxical Theory of Change”).

This process is challenging and painful, and it often requires the help of close friends, family or a professional mentor. However, only when we are grounded in the reality of who we are will we be ready to answer the Call and to explore and unfold the potentials of who we can become.

Becoming the hero of our own story

In our next post, we’ll look at what triggers the call, what happens when, as Campbell says, “the call rings up the curtain” to the next chapter in our lives. We’ll examine four conditions that can awaken a call and make us aware that “the time for passing a threshold is at hand.” Finally, we’ll explore what Gestalt psychologist Paul Rebillot means when he says we the hero in us recognizes “the impulse to something greater.”

References

Bridges, W. (2001). The way of transition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing.

Campbell, J.  (1949). The hero with a thousand faces (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

Houston, J. (1987). The Search for the Beloved. NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.

Pearson,C. (1991). Awakening the Heroes Within. NY: HarperCollins.

Copyright © 2014 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form, including posting on the Internet, without written permission from the author. Any such unauthorized use is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For permission, contact Reg Harris.

(This article is the first of a series on the challenge of recognizing and navigating stages in the Hero’s Journey. My July post will deal with recognizing your Call and when you are slipping into the Call Refused.)

The Challenge of Knowing

The questions I am most often asked in regard to the Hero’s Journey relate to recognizing and accepting the call and to knowing that we are on a journey. These are difficult questions to answer because the answers depend on so many factors: the situation in our lives, the context or culture in which we are taking or will take the journey, the options or potentials available to us, and the coherence between the story we are (or have become) and the story we are living.

The situation is made even more complicated by the manipulative nature of our modern culture, where seemingly every human need—including our innate need to take journeys—has become a resource for commercial exploitation. In a world that’s driven by consumption and the virtual reality of technology, it’s often difficult to distinguish between a journey that is organic, originating from our natural inclination to grow, and a “journey” that is marketed to us to exploit our quest for identity and purpose.

Is there a “True” Journey

But there is a more philosophical complication to “finding” and following “our” journey, and it is perhaps the most important consideration of all. When we say “I’m on my journey,” we’re implying that there is a journey out there and we must discover and follow it. However, to say that we “take” a journey is to fall into a language trap. We can’t “take” something unless that something already exists, so when we want to “take” a journey, the language we must use tricks us into believing that there is a "true" journey awaiting us, and we must find it.

This thinking can cause us all kinds of problems. For example, thinking that there is a given journey waiting for us adds a layer of question or doubt to our decision-making and disrupts the process of living authentically: Will this Call lead me to the Journey I “should” take? Is this my “true” journey? How can I know if I’m on the “right” journey?

Trying to decide if we are on the “right” journey or whether a particular journey is the journey we were born to can tie us in knots and make creative, effective action impossible.

The fact is that there is no “true” journey waiting for us. We don’t really “take” a journey: we “unfold” a journey. Our journeys open up organically through a dialogue between us and our world. We act and the world responds by giving us feedback, which opens to us new potentials for action. We evaluate the feedback, explore the potentials and make a new decision, and our journey unfolds.

“Storying” experience make the journey

This perspective discloses two important truths about journeys. First, journeys aren’t plotted. They’re not a screenplay which already exists, “out there,” and in which we simply act out a role. Second, our journeys are never really over.

We write our journeys as we go, and we can’t know where they will lead because we haven’t lived them yet. We may envision one goal at the beginning of a journey, but we won’t really know if that’s where we’ll be at the end. The truth is that only when an experience is “over” can it become a journey, and it becomes a journey through story. It’s through the story we tell that our experience truly becomes a journey because it’s through story that we process an experience and give it meaning. And it is meaning which makes a journey a journey.

While we are engaged in the experience, there is no story, no journey to be taken. There is only us, in the moment, trying to make the best decisions we can. It’s only when the disruption that sent us on the journey has been resolved that the journey can take form, find meaning, and it does this through story. As Dan McAdams writes in The Stories We Live By (1993), “To make meaning in life is to create dynamic narratives that render sensible and coherent the seeming chaos of human existence” (p. 166).

This brings us to the second truth about journeys: they are never over. Because journeys become journeys through the story we tell about them to give them meaning, they are constantly evolving and changing as we retell and reshape the story to have relevance to the live we are living today. Tim O’Brien explained this powerfully in his Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried (1990):

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story (p. 40).

In a very real sense, then, the story becomes the "true" journey. And, because our story must evolve over time so that it is "true" for us in ou lives at this moment, our "true" journeys will evolve, as well. Three decades before O'Brien wrote about Vietnam, existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who lived through an earlier war, made a similar point about the difference between living an experience and turning it into a meaningful journey (Nausea, 1964):

But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the oppo­site sense. You seem to start at the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Marommes.” And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, [giving] to words the pomp and value of a beginning.

So when we shape our journeys through story, we don't start with the beginning of the adventure. We must begin at the end because the story must bring us logically and finally to where we are at this moment in time. In a very real sense, then, the present creates the journey we have already taken. It dictates the details we choose in telling about the journe and how we shape those details so that the journey has a meaning that is coherent with when and where we are now.

How story liberates our journeys

Sartre and O’Brien bring us to the most important point about our journeys: a single experience polysemous. It has many potential meanings, and they can all be “true.” Thus, because our journeys take shape and meaning through the stories we tell about them, about what they mean in the present, our journeys can change. It is this polysemy of experience that liberates us. It allows us to reinterpret an experience by reframing the story we tell about it so that we change its meaning in our present life―changing our present life, as well.

Thus, the “end” of the journey changes because the journey has a different, more current meaning. Because of this, we can redeem even the most devastating of experiences by re-storying them, by changing the end to which the journey leads. Again, quoting O’Brien,

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 (1990, pp. 179-80).

O’Brien’s words bring to mind an important point about our journeys and the stories we tell about them: A story is not a story until it is told, and it can’t be told without someone to hear it. We may be able to re-story our journeys on our own, but more often than not we need a compassionate, understanding audience.

Our audience can be family or friends, a counselor or therapist, but the audience must be there, open, non-judgmental and receptive. Our audience will help us reinterpret and reshape our story. They will help find other potential meanings in the story, and they will help us develop those meanings in ways that allow us to redeem what we thought was lost. They will help us bring our journey into the present and shape it in a way that will enrich our future.

So, how do I recognize my journey?

The concept of reframing meaning to revise our lives brings us full circle, back to the question that began our short journey here: How can we recognize our calls and know that we are on the "right" journeys?

The first step is to think in terms of “unfolding” our journeys rather than “taking” our journeys. When we realize that life is not scripted, that there is no journey awaiting us, we free ourselves from the pressure of “finding” our proper journey—as if such a thing existed. We open ourselves to see life as it is so that we can respond spontaneously, creatively and authentically. The journey is really hermeneutic, interpretive, an ongoing process of engaging, interpreting feedback, adjusting our understanding and re-engaging.

Next week: Three keys to understanding the journey

The second step in understanding our journeys is to step back and reflect, which is what I will discuss next week when I cover three concepts or conditions that can inform us about our place in our journeys: coherence, resonance and synchronicity. For now, though, I will close with one last thought from O'Brien: "But this too is true: stories can save us."

Copyright © 2013 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form, including posting on the Internet, without written permission from the author. Any such unauthorized use is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For permission, contact Reg Harris.

The Track that is Waiting

Joseph Campbell is, perhaps, most famous for his advice “follow your bliss.” In his interviews with Bill Moyers (1985-1986), Campbell said, “…if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living” (Campbell, 1988, p. 120).

The idea that we should follow our bliss and realize our potentials resonates deeply for most of us. We want our lives to have meaning and purpose. However, finding our bliss is not always easy, especially in a technological, consumer-oriented world were we are bombarded with messages about what we should have, be, and do. It’s very difficult to filter out the environmental static so that we can hear the melody of our own song.

The Marga Path

So, given that we live in a world filled with distractions, marketing, and other psychological manipulations, how do we follow Campbell’s advice, how do we find our bliss? How do we define and pursue our own personal myth and know what is real and true in our lives? While there is no simple answer to this question, Campbell, in his writing and his lectures, offered us advice on how to get started. In a discussion of marga, the Hindu path to liberation, he suggested that,

“…the way to find your own myth is to find those traditional symbols that speak to you, to use them, you might say, as bases for meditation. …Let the symbols play upon the imagination, act upon the imagination, and bring your own imagination into play in relation to these [symbols] and then you will be experiencing the marga or the power of these symbols to open things up for you” (Campbell, 2011).

I think it’s important that we look at the wording Campbell chooses. He said “let the symbols play” on your imagination and “bring your imagination into play” in relation to the symbols. In other words, the symbols speak to us and we speak to the symbols in a dialogical, hermeneutic process.

First you find symbols that resonate for you or that, at some level, have "felt" rather than intellectual meaning. Then you explore those symbols and allow them to germinate in your mind. Finally, you let your imagination play with the symbols, manipulating them, exploring different relationships and order. This process opens a "dialog" between you and the symbols, and through that dialogue, new meaning emerges. That revealed meaning, the message of the symbols, will give you clues to your own mythology, the meaning of your own journey and the source of your bliss.

In her book Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, Christina Baldwin describes the process in terms of writing:

When we take up the pilgrimage, consciousness emerges in an on-going, intimate dialog within the self. Once awakened, we are aware of and intrigued by the processes of our own minds. Some people speak of becoming conscious as a moment of mental fusion, or a reflecting capacity — like a mirror swinging out from the mind, able to look back on itself (1990, p. 8).

Self Mirrored in Symbols

The key metaphor here is, I think, the “mirror swinging out from the mind, able to look back on itself.” I read somewhere long ago that if we want to truly see where we are, we have to go somewhere else and look back. I think that this process of looking back at ourselves to see where we are, whether through writing or symbols, is what Campbell means. In an interview with Michael Toms (1988), Campbell spoke of the yidam (a meditational or protective deity in Eastern philosophy) as a symbolic figure that “has no concrete reality except as a carrier, a mirror of your own psychological potentials” (p. 93).

The symbol becomes a mirror in which we can explore our own mythology. By using the symbols we can step away from our lives for a moment and look back at where we have been. Through that process, we can discover the subconscious myths that are currently informing and shaping our lives. By finding, exploring and working with resonating symbols, we can begin the process of defining and realizing our potentials. From there, from the knowledge of who we are and who we can be, we can discover the path by which will allow us, as Campbell encouraged, to follow our bliss.

References

Baldwin, C. (1990). Life's Companion: Journaly Writing as a Spiritual Quest. New York: Bantam.

Campbell, J. (1988). The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday.

Campbell, J. (2011). Personal Myth [CD]. San Anselmo, CA: Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Toms, M. (1988). An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms. (Maher, J. and D. Briggs, eds.) Burdett, NY: Larson Publications.

Two ways of seeing the world

by Reg Harris

Life in a polar world

Our lives are filled with polar systems: good and bad, right and wrong, rich and poor, light and dark, conservative and liberal, being and nonbeing. Maintaining our mental health often rests on how well we can reconcile these poles and find a middle ground from which to live and function in our world. Many a hero's journey begins because someone's life has swung out of balance and is dominated by one pole, which forces him or her to disown or disavow its complimentary, balancing opposite. The tension created by this conflict triggers a journey toward reconciliation and growth.

Mythologies are replete with tales which illustrate polar conflicts. These myths usually involve two relatives or siblings: Gaea and Uranus (Greek), Apollo and Dionysus (Greek), Shiva and Shakti (Hindu), Cain and Abel (Judeo-Christian), Monster Slayer and Born for Water (Navajo), and Ahriman and Orhmazd (good and evil Persian twin gods). While these myths may be set in different times and different cultures, the theme they present is always the same: balance in life is necessary, and that the two poles, while apparently in opposition, are really an expression of one reality.

Polar myths are fascinating and fun, but in this post I want to turn to a more abstract expression of this theme: mythos and logos. Mythos and logos are, essentially, two ways of experiencing and understanding the world. Mythos is holistic, artistic, evaluative and intuitive. Logos is analytical, scientific, intellectual and practical. In mythos, life unfolds in a web of relationships, where ambiguity and relativity are normal. In logos, life progresses through cause and effect, where certainty and the absolute are the norms. Mythos seeks to reveal meaning; logos seeks to expand knowledge.

The need to reconcile poles

Both modes of understanding are essential in our lives.We don't-and can't-do away with one pole or the other because they define each other, like yin and yang, and because the tension/cooperation between them animates life. As psychologist Carl Jung wrote several decades ago, "Just as all energy proceeds from opposition, so the psyche too possesses its inner polarity, this being the indispensable prerequisite for its aliveness" (1963, p. 346). Thus, to cling to one at the expense of the other not only distorts our view of ourselves and our world, but eventually leads to stagnation and illness.

Like all polarities, mythos and logos are just two faces of one reality, and we must be able to hold and balance both to maintain our well being. Writing about religious fundamentalism, Helen Freeman made this point clearly: “Both mythos and logos were essential and inextricably linked. Meaning without practical grounding becomes abstract and unlivable. Practicalities without a core of meaning become disorientated and grindingly mundane” (2002, p. 31).

Logos is science, the language of our rational brain. It expresses life rationally and objectively through observation. Logos dominates our modern culture to the point of diminishing our experience of being human. We see evidence of this in our obsession with technology, the standardization of education, the destruction of the environment in the name of progress or capitalism, and our compulsive consumption, to name just a few examples.

Mythos (myth) on the other hand, refers to the essence of our experience: the meaning and significance of life. In The cry for myth, existential psychologist Rollo May wrote that in myth, “the whole person speaks to us, not just to our brain” (May, 1991, p. 26). Myth explores elements in the human experience that are timeless and constant. More importantly, because it can contain emotion and meaning, which logos cannot, mythos—in its forms of myth, narrative, and story—is our framework for organizing experience and maintaining a sense of self. As Brian Polkinghorne explains,

…we achieve our personal identities and self concept through the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story. We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives. Self, then, is not a static thing nor a substance, but a configuring of personal events into a historical unity which includes not only what one has been but also anticipations of what one will be. (1988, p. 150)

The Tao, the source beyond duality. It can be felt but not conceived, intuited but not categorized, divined but not explained (Chuang-tzu).

Mythos, truth and meaning

Myth, narrative, and story (mythos) are our tools for ordering experience and giving it meaning. They have this power because the narrative, poetic or mystical perspective can accommodate relationships, emotions and meaning that are destroyed by the analysis and factual description of logos. This is, in part, why Vietnam War writer Tim O’Brien wrote, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (1998, p. 203), and why historian and philosopher A. K. Coomaraswamy believed that “myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words” (1943, p. 33).

Mythic thought is also the process by which we resolve psychological conflicts and keep our souls alive (May, 1991). It does this by carrying us through the process of acknowledging, understanding and resolving the contradictions in our lives. Through myth, we can step outside the perspective of our own struggling narrative and, through that expanded perspective, build a new meaning for our own story, a meaning that can contain poles not as conflicting opposities, but as two ways of understanding one whole.

As part of this mythic process, our psyches create unifying symbols, often expressed in myth, that help us reconcile the polar elements within us, guiding us toward harmony and wholeness (Feinstein & Krippner, 1997). As philosopher Alan Watts wrote (1963),

“…the language of myth and poetry is integrative, for the language of the image is organic language. Thus it expresses a point of view in which the dark side of things has its place, or rather, in which the light and the dark are transcended through being seen in terms of a dynamic unity.” (p. 15)

Restoring a balance

Today, in a world that is dominated by the manifestations of logos, we must make an effort to draw on the balancing power of mythos to ground our lives. Both are necessary to fully experience life. We must cultivate mythos in its various manifestations—myth, narrative, archetypes, symbols—to maintain our psychological health and to build the meanings that are critical to a sense of purpose and fullness in life. We must also exercise logos to provide the practical grounding that allows us to live and function in the modern technological world. Reconciling and balancing these poles is essential to continued growth and greater wisdom.

References

Coomaraswamy, A. K. (1943). Hinduism and Buddhism. New York: Philosophical Library.

Feinstein, D. & Krippner, S. (1997). They mythic path. New York: G. P. Putnam.

Freeman, Helen. (2002). "Facing Fundamentalism." European Judaism. 35(1), 31.

Jung, C. G.  (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage.

May, R.  (1991). The cry for myth. London: W.W. Norton and Company.

O'Brien, T.  (1990). The things they carried. New York: Penguin.

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Watts, A. (1963). The two hands of God: Myths of polarity. New York: Collier.

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I've posted a number of new articles to the Hero's Journey Library. Five are excerpts from the teacher's guide, while three others focus specifically on ways to teach the hero's journey. Scroll down to see the lists. I welcome your comments.