Intro guide to Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey. How knowledge of the Hero's Journey helps you in your own life.
You ARE the hero in your own life!
Excerps:
All Hero's Journey stories begin with a Call to Adventure. For Timmy’s Adventure in Walking, it’s the Desire to reach for a toy.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lives on a farm with an Aunt and Uncle, along with some farm hands. She is well loved. But she feels something is missing. There is Somewhere Over the Rainbow that is calling to her. She Desires to leave the farm.
Let me introduce you to Helen, an office manager. Helen is a wonderful person and a great employee. She is very loyal and rarely takes a day off. But as she sits at her desk, the boss man berates her in loud tones, so that her colleagues can hear. The boss man is blaming Helen for something that has gone wrong. Helen’s unhappiness spills over into her private life. Something needs to change. As the boss man continues to rant, she looks past him out the window. Across the street is a city park and she can hear children laugh and birds chirping. Helen Desires something better than her job. Helen may not know it yet, but it is a Call To Adventure.
Life is either a great Adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller
The Call to Adventure is a spiritual Call to move from the Ego to the Heart. And all Hero stories can be quantified this simply. The Hero often does not see this. The Brain attempts to control the Ego. The Brain wants to dominate our life. Fear and Desire dominate the Ego. The Heart is in balance within us physically as well as spiritually. All Hero Adventures demand that our spiritual center moves from the Ego to the Heart. The Heart, in this case, represents Spiritual Serenity.
The kingdom of God is within you.
Luke 17:21
Now I will introduce you to Larry. Larry is a middle-aged insurance executive. He is drunk at a company party. He is one of those happy drunks you might meet in life. Larry is loud and thinks he is funny. He has been this way since high school. He has been very successful as an insurance executive for many years, but drink is now getting in the way. At the company party, Larry falls down and needs to be helped up. He is laughing, thinking he is the life of the party. His boss tells him to go home. Larry’s wife is embarrassed. Larry is getting a Call to Adventure, but he doesn’t know it. Yet.
There are two Calls to Adventure: one born of Desire, and one born of Fear. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz Desires to leave the farm. Timmy, our crawling baby, Desires to walk and run. Helen, berated by her boss man, Desires for something better in her life. The other Call To Adventure is based on Fear; it is not an Adventure the Hero wants to go on.
Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol is happy in his own miserly way. But he is visited one night by the Ghost of his deceased business partner, Marley. It is a Call to Adventure, one that Scrooge would prefer not to take. He is Fearful of this Adventure.
Timmy is now four years old and running around the house, while Timmy’s Mother sits and reads the newspaper. Timmy’s Mother spies a column about a boy who recently drowned at a local lake. Timmy’s Mother talks to her family about it. The family readily agrees that Timmy needs to learn to swim. Mother asks Timmy if he’d like to learn to swim. Timmy answers with a resounding no. Timmy hates water. He doesn’t even like baths. He has no intentions of learning to swim. This is a Call to Adventure based on Fear. Nevertheless, Timmy’s Mother has decided she is going to make Timmy take this Hero’s Journey plunge in swimming.
There can be a Call to Adventure that is a mixture of both Fear and Desire. An example is Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamlet is happy. He is the Prince of Denmark. He has a stable home life with a Mother and Father. He has a wonderful woman, Ophelia, in his life. But things change abruptly; his Father is murdered, and his Mother remarries in short order: “the funeral’s bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables…” In this Call To Adventure, there is Desire to find the truth of his Father’s murder, and Fear of what he might find.
Years earlier, Helen had found that she was pregnant with her first child. She was excited, but it was a mixture of both Fear and Desire. The Desire to have a child, and the Fear of the unknown; am I ready? Will I be a good Mother? Many Adventures we take might combine both elements of Fear and Desire. You can say the following with both Fear and Desire: Oh my gosh, I’m pregnant!
Adventure may be psychological and personal, as it is for Hamlet and Scrooge. The Adventure may be physical, requiring a long journey far from home, as it is for Ulysses, Jason and the Argonauts, and Dorothy who must travel all the way to Oz. They all find after their long journeys they had Serenity in their Hearts all along. It is a two-foot journey from the Ego to the Heart. And once we achieve the Serenity of the Heart we can harness our Fear and Desire.
I use the term 'Serenity' to capture the thought of an equitable balance within one's own heart. Other words you can use are 'spirit,' 'peace' or 'tranquility.' You are certainly welcome to come up with your word or words to describe the concept of being Spiritually well centered.
We can calculate the Call to Adventure this way: if the Hero chooses the Adventure, it is born of Desire. If the Adventure is forced onto the Hero, it is born out of Fear.
While the great stories often focus on one Adventure at a time, our own Adventures are many and sometimes simultaneous. We learn to walk, we learn to run. We learn to swim, we are learning at school. We might be finishing up an accomplishment of walking - a Desired Adventure - or start a new project – swimming – that is fraught with danger and Fear (the beginning of an Adventure not of our choosing). As an adult, we may be starting a relationship with a new partner and at the same time we are starting a new job. We may be Mentoring other people, even our own children. In these cases we are starting several Hero’s Journey’s all at once, we also participate in other people’s Hero’s Journey’s as well.
One man in his time plays many parts.
William Shakespeare
It sounds like we are juggling a lot, but these are normal paths to take. A baby becomes a child and a child becoming an adult is achieving numerous Holy Grails simultaneously. And so are you.