🌄 The Hero’s Journey vs. the Ultimate Hero’s Journey

Innerstand the Difference & Choose Your Own Path Wisely

SOL LUCKMAN

The Hero’s Journey was made famous by one of the most influential thinkers from last century and a personal hero of mine: mythologist Joseph Campbell.

In his voluminous and highly inspiring writings on this archetypal human journey, he tended to envision it as a circular one of self-discovery in which a flawed or simply normal person becomes the protagonist of his or her own mythic adventure tale involving various stages, helpers, obstacles, and challenges.

As Campbell depicted it, the classic Hero’s Journey ends with the new and improved hero returning to his or her starting point bearing treasures or other gifts to enrich the larger community. As such the Hero’s Journey, though ostensibly about individuals, ends up being a kind of collectivist tale about the human species.

The Ultimate Hero’s Journey, on the other hand, is a one-way solo ticket out of here, an alchemical transformation of the highest order permitting individuals to transcend the Matrix itself.

While such a feat can be undertaken in pairs or even groups, as in the lighting of the Fire from Within allegedly (according to Carlos Castaneda) achieved by the shaman Don Juan Matus and his Sorcerers’ Party, more often it appears to be a solitary pursuit—usually the province of lone alchemists and hermetic men and women.

What typically gets passed down to those of us left behind after intrepid psychonauts have flown this earthly chicken coop is like an alchemical residue of confusing and often contradictory dogma, theories, techniques, and terminology.

We hear about Tibetan monks creating the “Rainbow Body” through lengthy “meditation on love” (whatever that is), and other monks in the Dzogchen tradition transcending death by turning into “great clear light” by way of Dream Yoga (whatever that is), while Taoist sages mysteriously aspire to the “jade body” (whatever that is), to cite only a few mystery-riddled examples among dozens if not hundreds.

But in a world where, as the poets of rock ‘n’ roll aptly sang, “there’s too much confusion,” there’s also actually a good bit of mental clarity to be had thanks to one simple realization.

By seeing all these mystical phenomena not as unrelated examples of hokum or hocus-pocus, but as merely culturally and historically nuanced methods of similar ways of activating a universal inner human “technology” of transcendence, our sight begins to clear as the smoke of myth and legend slowly dissipates.

At some point we might even reach a titillating, breathtaking conclusion: based on all the threads of evidence, a tiny minority of people everywhere have been getting out of here alive—by hook or crook, one way or another—for as long as our species has stumbled around this bewildering construct.

📝 Adapted from OUT THROUGH THE IN DOOR.

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.