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This idea
of Joseph Campbells the Hero’s Journey,
The primary
protagonist in these stories
is a hero, but they normally are
warriors.
And I think that this is important because
in our culture there
there is an emasculation that is going on with the masculine [Animus],
And I just don’t mean in males.
In Depth Psychology there’s the feminine and masculine in every person as far as their
complete psyche,
and so,
it seems like
one of the major
issues that we have
is that
we’re not allowed to toughen up. We’re not allowed to face things as they are.
We have insurance to make sure that if something happens to our car:
That’s taken care of.
We’ve got medical insurance, as though somehow that means that we’re never going to get
sick.
Um...You’re not allowed to discipline your children. [Pause]
There are so many different things that are happening in our culture.
And so,
I really feel the time that we’re in,
that understanding your particular, individual
mission in life;
Which I believe is the Hero’s Journey,
Requires
an introduction to warriorship.
It requires us
to access
energies
that we have probably have never even considered before,
or we think that
the only way a person can be truly spiritual is if they are a priest of some type of organization,
or if someone
Is going to be a warrior,
The few people who are actually fighters,
they have to have been born with that certain physiological trait that makes then want to
go train in a particular martial art,
whether it’s MMA , whether it’s...ah...
Being a soldier in the Army-
Anything like that-we have these misconceptions that
the Hero’s Journey requires
something of us that only a few
people have the prerequisites to accomplish.
I would say, once again, those are our limitations as
modern men and women,
and how we deal with
everything as factual and
everything as temporal
as opposed to the power of metaphor, which I think this is what Joseph Campbell is trying
to release.
Without this, without this type of
Direct,
Tough talk,
not sugar coating it:
You have
to be able to take a punch,
you have to be able to
deal with your fear,
and stay in the battle.
That’s all there is to it,
and yet, everything in our culture is pushing us
towards Barney voices, (if your old enough) Mr. Roger voices, or Captain Kangaroo, and
you have to...
Ah...
You have to qualify everything,
“Well I didn’t mean that,”
“But what I’m saying is.”
You know, it’s none of that.
It just is what it is.
If you’re gonna...If you’re gonna...If you’re going to go fight,
you fight.
You don’t sit there and make rules, and figure out...
...Ah...what the Geneva Convention is talking about.
When...when...
The spirit world and this world converge on you and demand that you take
accountability for your physical and spiritual life...
It’s a battle.
Our society has rendered
the warrior in us impotent.
Instead of dealing
with the spiritual functions of the warrior,
we have adapted,
what would be virtues,
into maladaptive behaviors.
These behaviors range from
road rage,
the high levels of divorce,
because now we’re attacking our spouse...
It would be drug and alcohol abuse, child abuse…
There...There’s a number of social ills
where the warrior in us
completely lashes out
and gets nowhere.
The good thing about
these types of maladaptive behaviors is that they actually show
where the warrior’s gold is in each one of us.
The warrior in us is actually pointing to
this idea
that
our soul is dying,
and there are principalities and spiritual forces that are arrayed against it,
and that it needs to become a warrior and overcome those.
But, see now, you’re dealing with metaphor,
or
we call it a metaphor,
but it actually is substantially real…
The unconscious, the spirit world, whatever you want to call it.
The death of the soul, even while our physical body is intact,
is serious. It has serious ramifications,
and it is something that needs to be dealt with.
Our motivations for living
seem to be based completely on reactions.
Reactions of what the outside is telling us, what the outside culture is telling us, who
we are and what we are.
And the idea of metaphor, or this spiritual world I keep referring to,
is that from this inner depth
we gain knowledge of who we are,
and what we are,
and that informs our decision making processes,
that informs our purpose,
and so therefore we don’t need the external world to tell us who we are,
and so we effect
the outer world, our community, our friends.
The expansion of our consciousness can only happen
when we tear down the walls of our ego
from the inside out.
This
is the beauty of the Hero’s Journey and metaphor.
There’s a good chance that the authority figures in your life, or the gatekeepers
are actually
projections of your inability
to wrestle with the fact that you are supposed to be an adult and not be
a dependent.
The authority figures in your life, whether you despise or love them,
Are, in all actuality, the very gatekeepers that you must overcome.
The great thing about becoming a warrior is that,
though, it seems that fate is acting against you,
and it seems that you are all alone,
it’s quite the opposite.
What’s happening is that...
...you...
Your culture that you’re in
has a limited
conscious construction of what it is,
and therefore, it
tries to keep everyone within that culture in that limited prescription.
And so what happens is all of the other potentialities,
numerous potentialities...
...Um...Are restricted,
or they are...
They’re, cut-off, and this is why there is this kind of schizophrenic or neurotic
function of the American citizen.
And so where do all of those unconscious forces go?
Well,
the spirit world takes them
and is “Dreamimg” them [The Australian aboriginal concept of Dreaming].
It’s the actual people who are trying to keep everything in its safe and homogenized
form,
are the very people that are unconsciously calling the warrior to action.
So the beauty of it is...is though it seems that they are against you, and you are against
them,
they’ve actually called you
to go on the hero’s quest
to find the magic that can heal them of their fears,
so they can expand,
and they can become free
of the fears that torment them.