Cuan Scott wrote: smelly wrote:
It is not an accident that you must be cast out to be born again.
Joe Campbell's 'Call to adventure' perhaps..
I think this is the way for some of us hardheads.
I have been reading some analysis of the Hero's Journey by James Hillman I think is very interesting and similar to my experience.
Hillman has done more for archetypal psychology than anyone since Jung.
I am reading his stuff now.
He has some good youtube vids up too.
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
We come back with gifts dragged up from the deep.
If we could only have an organized way to collect and analyze these underworld journeys in a conscious way.
So many books written on it.
Maybe I'm supposed to help with that.
Boy would we maybe see some patterns.
I definitely feel to help people make this underworld connection and get to exploring using their own experience as a guide.
Ken Wilbur has mapped a lot out here that makes it safer maybe for the Western mind to spelunk with.
Hillman has a view of the Hero's Journey.
...
James Hillman
Hillman often railed at the negative effects he saw flowing from the hero archetype, which he saw as ego enshrined as narrow self-interest, both individually and collectively. For Hillman, the “heroic ego” was often a source of evil and mischief. Noting that heroes slay dragons, and earlier generations of Jungians wrote of dragons as “the mother,” Hillman claimed that heroes like Hercules in Greek mythology were emblematic of the modern world’s subjugation of women, “the feminine,” and “mother nature.” On another occasion he said, “Killing the dragon in the hero myth is nothing less than killing the imagination.”
Yet a recently published collection of Hillman’s work (Mythic Figures, 2012) includes a chapter on Joseph Campbell, compiled from talks he gave in 2004 in which he spoke at length of the positive hero. He put his earlier negative comments in context:
“A mistake in my attacks on the hero has been to locate this archetypal figure within our secular history after the gods had all been banished. When the gods have fled or were declared dead, the hero serves only the secular ego. The force that prompts action, kills dragons, and leads progress becomes the Western ‘strong ego’ – capitalist entrepreneur, colonial ruler, property developer, a tough guy with heroic ambitions on the road to success.”
When Hillman used terms like “soul” and “the gods,” his concern was religious, but not in the way of the literal truths of most organized religions. For Hillman, such literalism was the enemy of soul. He spoke only and always of the truth of the psyche because it precedes every other kind of truth: “Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to ‘happen’ at all.” (Revisioning Psychology, 1977).
This understanding of the true hero in service to a Power greater ego prompted Hillman to revise his understanding of the “Father/Dragon/Ogre/King” the hero slays:
“A civilization requires the Ogre to be slain. Who is the Ogre? The reactionary aspect of the senex who promotes fear, poverty, and imprisonment; who tempts the young and devours them to increase his own importance. The Ogre is the paranoid King who must have an enemy. He is the deceitful, suspicious, illegitimate King whose Nobles of the Court [have] committed themselves to the enclosed asylum of security where they nourish their world-devouring megalomania.”
I think the Hero in our Dark Age is the Magician and Trickster. We are talking to our ancestors and the Archetypes in Psyche.
We are not out there slaying mental dragons and gods much anymore. They have retreated and been deeply buried.
I think I have been contacted by them though or I made contact with them and they have been working with me.
I have more work to do to describe the map I am seeing come into focus integrating myth and archetypal psychology.
I feel not many are connecting these threads and almost no new ager goes this deep.
They have the same problem as the religious, fear of and avoidance of evil.
We can't avoid this, we must wrestle with IT inside ourselves first.
Hillman is part of it with Henry Corbin and Jung.
I really appreciate their life's work and don't pretend I understand it very well yet.
In another life, I may have taken their career path.
I am not some pagan shaman with closed eyes to history, far from it.
I am partly using scientific method to get through the input data and my intuition for most of it.
Using intuition I feel I have given myself the equivalent master level education in a few topics.
The Logos becomes exponentially complicated, so we have to keep it simple.
...
As a matter of fact, when I met the Dragons I did not kill them.
I let them cut my head off.
I yielded.
They said I had been vouched safe through the Gateway.
I sat at their feet and made friends with them of a sort.
...
Yet stronger than the Ogre, said Hillman, is the myth of the Hero – not this or that particular hero, but the heroic pattern itself that Joseph Campbell restored for our times, which renews culture “by revivifying the archetypal imagination displayed by peoples the world over…The panoply of materials that Campbell catalogued shows that the hero wears a thousand faces and cannot be reduced to the modern ego. Especially important in recognizing him is recognizing the heroic liberating function of myth – that it speaks truth to power, even the Ogre’s power.”
We know from history and the nightly news how much suffering the decay of empires involve as paranoid kings strive desperately to hold on to power. We also have the examples of James Hillman and Joseph Campbell, who spent their lives pointing toward soul, psyche, and the language of myth and imagination. That is where we must look to find the larger truth – the hero brings the gift of renewal as surely as spring returns after the darkest time of the year.
Hillman ultimately came to feel Campbell was correct about the Hero with a Thousand Faces, great book!
Most secular folks would dismiss all of this because they have not the imagination.
The religious of today can't see it, its heretical.
You need to grow new limbs long atrophied to connect to the Underworld.
Somehow I am going to continue to speak this into the world, but more so, live it out loud and check the Ogre.
I will check that Ogre wherever I find it, it is the one I shall kill, wherever I find one of its snake heads.
Then I will eat the snake heads.
I am coming for the head of that Ogre after I get through these snake heads.
ENOUGH!!!
Maybe we all will take that up and become and let the Hero with a Thousand Faces add ours to the mix!!!
I say yes yes yes to all of it.
IT is our inheritance as Human Beings and I shall claim IT by living in response to IT, not trying to possess or fear IT, but to just go with the flow of IT.
The Hero is the Paraclete that Jesus said he would send to us and something fucking did.
The Hero within raises us into the finest Quality and Beauty.
It's making me cry right now writing about it.
The Paraclete makes my heart swoon.
It is our Golden aspect.
The Highest within presently wrapped by the snake.
The Paraclete is the Sage.
It is all so beautifully connected and whole.
How could anyone kill themselves, when they could know this on Earth now.
It breaks my heart.
All the confusion breaks my heart.
But I know we have to abide the good and evil.
We are and can be free in spirit.
by 
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» The scariest character in all fiction
» Uanon's Majikal Misery Tour "it's all smiles on the magic school bus"
» What Music Are You Listening To ?
» Livin Your Best Life
» Baudrillardian hauntology - what are some haunting truths to our reality?