The Hero's Journey of our own lives

In this video we are going to explore the archetypal narrative of the hero's journey, and how when we consider it purely from an archetypal dimension, it might mean something different to how we consider this in our mainstream narratives. But before we proceed, please don't forget to like, subscribe, and share your comments. And if you enjoy this video, do share it with others who may also find the content relevant.

This video has been inspired by something that happened in one of my individual programs. This week, as I was practicing are working with one of the women in the program. She shared with me the teaching that emerged from her practice for the week. And this is what she said, You are the hero of your own life. Your job is not to save the world.

This was a very potent teaching very timely, not just for herself in her life, but also for me in terms of what I was experiencing this past few days and couple of weeks. And that is how it is always in these archetypal invocations that the insights and teachings that emerge are not just relevant to the person, but also to everybody who are in their space and invoking or CO creating that expression along with them.

These past few weeks I have been, like so many people been troubled by what is going on in the world around me. The many, almost dystopian events that are happening the ways in which people are narrating or forming ideologies about these events, and the many seems to be intractable conflicts and positions that seem to fragment and divide people.

So I have been feeling somewhat helpless and powerless and paralyzed and the sense of what can I do in in what can I how can I contribute? What can I do? How can I express and behave in a way that could make any difference, or even live in a way that seems authentic in this sort of noise and chaos all around me. And this, of course, is not unique to me, I have heard this, the same feelings from several people in my group programs and also in this particular instance, from this woman in the individual program.

And so, when we consider the archetypal significance of this teaching, you are the hero of your own life, your job is not to save the world, it is worthy of careful consideration, because if we approach it in a very simplistic way, it can seem like an escapist and a self-indulgent intelligence or self-indulgent position, which is it is anything but that but that is only revealed when we are able to position this teaching in an archetypal domain. So in order to do this, I'm going to share with you a framework that I heard recently when I was listening to a philosophical podcast by the philosopher, Hilary Lawson, where he was talking about the sense of world and reality and he said and I hope I'm understanding him correctly, but my what I got from it is the way he was speaking about the world is that which we create with our narratives with language, that is the world and then there is this reality, which in my sense, is the primordial reality is the reality that is not created by language that cannot be brought in into language that primordial elemental movements of cataclysmic dissolution coming into being life and death. And everything in between that is of a very ancient and primordial movement that hasn't it's not human created, and often is not encapsulated in human descriptions and human narratives. So, when we consider the world, the, the reality, which in a archetypal sense is primordial, that is the archetypal domain.

So this hero's narrative or the heroic journey, or the hero's journey, is very much an archetypal narrative. And in this archetypal movement, the very simple version of it is the story of someone who leaves this world behind leaves the known narrated language reality described reality behind and must venture into the unknowable, the mysterious and therefore, the dangerous because something that we do not know. And which we haven't conquered by the narrative is Perforce dangerous. So they this, this person has to go into this realm of mystery of unknowable where they may meet these creatures that have nothing to do with this narrated reality.

So they make can be these dragons, or these creatures that cannot be described by anything that we already know. And he has to or he or she, or they, they have to encounter them, and they have to battle with them, and confront them battle with them, and somehow emerge from this cave, or the great waters or the oceans of mystery, somehow have to emerge triumphant, from having gained or having experience something that opens them up to hidden to unknown and unknown encountered mysteries or realities. And somehow, they then must return to the world having succeeded in the sense counter.

So this is the heroic journey. And of course, we have so many myths and epics and stories in almost every traditional culture that has some version, or the other of this kind of heroic journey. Now, what happened in my view, is when this heroic journey got plucked from this reality into the narrated world, of language, which is of course linear, and it is instrumental and there is cause and effect and there is self-interest and competition and all of these dynamics here. It became a narrative that was serving the philosophies, values, and principles of the world, which is, of course, absolutely inevitable. So now that hero's journey became about the people who have sufferings in their lives and who triumph over these sufferings and emerged successful or it could be people that have served the noble causes that which are determined as noble by that particular time by that particular community, then they are acknowledged and they are rewarded, and they are celebrated for this success or for achieving or for conquering all these barriers and sufferings.

And this heroic journey, of course, is very context dependent, because somebody who is a hero at one point in history may actually be a villain at another point simply because our values have changed or those philosophies have changed or what we consider to be worthwhile causes have changed. And so it very much is context dependent. It depends on what's in vogue, or it depends on what's the zeitgeist of the times that there is what is heroic, therefore, depends on the particular context.

So when we now come to the archetypal hero's journey, here, it is about the exploration of one's own consciousness. It is about descending into one's own primordiality. It is about self-inquiry, being the hero of one's own life. And what is that life in a in a primordial sense or in an archetypal sense, a life that is most aligned and most harmonious to reality is that which is aligned to that reality, that which participates in that reality and that which contributes to that reality, not necessarily only to this narrated world, which is narrated and made meaning often described by language, but to that larger movement of reality, which includes everything that is unknowable.

Another way of thinking about this and I find this a beautiful way, which again, I must say is coming from the philosopher, Hilary Lawson, is the notion of closure. So, he speaks about language as something that offers closure to us, we language defines it, categorizes, it, fixes, it, stabilizes it, that is why we language is so important for us, because we want the world to be understandable, we want the world to be defined and categorized and arranged and managed. So that we can predict what we can control and we have a sense of what to expect. Now, all of this does not apply in a primordial reality, where it is constantly changing, it is unpredictable, there can be cataclysmic events, there are endings, that the endings are inevitable, that death is inevitable, and death is unpredictable. So, this this is reality, which is much more mysterious, and elemental, and it has got this long arc because it goes into these ideas of geological deep time. This is a movement that is so ancient, that it is billions of years old, it has been there, it is the movement from which even form and manifestation and everything emerges.

So here in this domain of reality, what is about the world has no value here as lenses upon which to encounter this reality. So the first thing we must do, when we move is we have to relinquish the known, which actually is relinquishing in to borrow, again from Hilary Lawson, is relinquishing that desire for closure. The desire to define which is what to be, to know something is to know something is to close that loop of mystery. And so we have to relinquish that, when we come into our inquiry into the primordial indeed, for an archetypal tradition, relinquishing the known that desire for closure is the doorway to entering this mystery, therefore, the hero must come out of this world of the unknown, and have the ferocity and the courage to say, I don't know, I have no idea what I'm about to encounter, it is going to be something that is unimaginable, that I could not have ever imagined possible, that this reality was going to have nothing to do with what I have already known what I might have been prepared for in this world.

And that is, of course, terrifying, and fearful. And who can encounter this terror and fear which is inevitable, we cannot say we must relinquish terror and fear, because that is not going to be possible. The minute we say, I don't know. And then we say, well, I not only that, I don't know. But actually I will never know this, that it is never going to come into the realm of what I can analyze and describe and conquer with language, that indeed, what I'm actually allowing is that there is a huge part of reality that simply doesn't come into the closure oriented narratives of the world. Now, that position inevitably is terrifying. And so who is able to set out on this hero's journey to stand at the door of the primordial cave or the ocean and say, I'm ready to undertake this journey. It must be someone who is courageous, who is a warrior.

And so there is this warrior archetype, the hero, that is the warrior that is in Sanskrit is called Vira, which is, again, the warrior, someone who has that temperament that is ferocious, that is courageous that is determined that is prepared to encounter dangers that may even cost them their life. So inherent in the warrior is also this notion of sacrifice, sacrifice even our own life. But this is not a sacrifice of our life for something external to us, not a cause that is external, not an ideology or something that has been proposed by somebody else. But this is for the cause of our own primordiality of inquiring into our primordiality and our authenticity.

By the way, I am not saying that, you know, whatever the world has proposed as causes or valued narratives are unimportant, because this is not comparative. This is about the world. And the primordial reality, because when we look at things from the primordial reality, it is not a choice of one or the other, but it is the world. And so, I often say the word and is the most important word in an archetypal tradition, because it is about everythingness, it is possible to be in both these domains in equal measure. And when we are in those domains, you will, you will see, or we will experience that this narrated reality, how we approach the narrated reality becomes completely different.

So, in other words, the movement is from initially to leave the world and become this warrior, this heroic warrior who is ready with to sacrifice who has that temperament, the ferocity, the courage, the strength, and the tech skill or the technology. So a warrior is someone who has a certain skill and technology. So in many of these archetypal traditions, this was that ritual ceremony, which was dance, or even martial arts, in some traditions, the role of martial arts, the role of dance is to be that technology of inquiry. So it's the language of the world does not serve this inquiry. But it has its own language, which was the archetypal languages of dance that is ceremonial ritual. And of course archetypal. It's not dance as we do usually in the world, however beautiful that is, this is a completely other kind of language of dance.

There are many different languages of dance, the nature of the poetic, the nature of creativity, the nature of imagination, the nature of expression, the nature of dance, everything is different, in this archetypal domain, even though we have to use the same words, but it's so important to attend to the technology itself, because the dance here is about itself. And therefore, we find what is poetry, what is an archetype? What is consciousness, what is reality, and everything, through the technology itself, we find out about the nature of this primordial consciousness, because otherwise we will go into the same old ways of narrating and languaging something which cannot really be captured by language.

So here is this warrior, who is brave, who is courageous, who has who's ferocious, who's strong, and who is armed with this technology, the archery the dance, so the dancer/archer/poet/seer was this ancient constellation in so many traditions of this particular person setting out on this journey, and then, they are able to go into this inquiry into the primordial which is Who am I at that primordial elemental? depths? Who am I? Because it is that depth that we experienced the universal and the universal here is isn't just about being universal with other people, but universal at the level of Earth, soil, nature, all of life, how were what is that universality, at the level of every single life form, that sentience, which is the shared sentience, with Earth, with soil, with plants, with trees, with ants, with birds, with every form of life, without separating ourselves by saying, Well, I am human, and therefore, I am different from the tree in this way, and my life is somehow more valuable because I am more sentient, or I'm more intelligent, or I'm more evolved, or only I have consciousness, and therefore everything else is in art and is there to serve my survival.

So, this narrative that separates us even at that human level, which is the story from the world, must be relinquished in the primordial, so that we find that movement, which connects us, because it is a movement it is body led, it cannot be led by the lenses of the mind, again, which is language and narrative, but it is the movement which is body led, like dance, which allows us to find that expression, which can allow us to experience that connection.

And this, the necessity of direct experience is very central to the primordial domain, it is called anubhava in Sanskrit, which means direct experience. So the intelligence here is a direct body lead experience that brings to us intelligence at the sensation level of what is this universality? What is the taste of this connection? It's visceral. What is this? How does this experience unfold in the body? What is the sensation of this experience? And when we then come into the world, like the hero that returns to the world, with this, experience, this encounter with, with a world a domain, a consciousness that was totally unavailable, in this narrative of the world, when that hero returns, then they have something of that to offer, and how is it offered? It is offered through their action and expression of that intelligence, it is offered through how they are what are they in the beings, what are they doing, through their creative poetic expressions in the world is that that experience is offered for others when they are open to it, when they are looking for it when they are prepared to taste and glimpse. And perhaps it may then bring others invite others into their own self inquiry into their own hero's journey.

Because we all must undertake that journey ourselves. We all must be the hero in our own lives. We can't rely on someone else to do that journey and bring us back the information which we can simply consume. Because that doesn't, it doesn't work like that. It must be through that direct experience. All the person can do is to bring us a glimpse through their action and expression through the Bing, they can bring a glimpse of that, so that it can perhaps if we are open to it, it can be that call of the primordial something that awakens that longing in us that remembrance, it brings back that remembrance of our own primordiality. And it may bring us that tantalizing invitation to undertake this journey ourselves.

Let me share this with an experience from my own life. I was very fortunate when I was young to study with a teacher, who came from a very long dancer lineage where dance was more or less practiced in this traditional archetypal way, as part of Temple rituals. It's not that he spoke about dance. In this way, we didn't have talks where he tried to tell us about how the dance is archetypal, or how it is about the primordial. In fact, he never spoke about the dance at all. But there was something in the way in which the dance expressed in his body, through his consciousness in the way that he held the dance and in the way that he shared the dance that ignited this intelligence in me, it may have been because I was one of the more young ones around him, that maybe I had less filters, that there was something about being that young, because I do think that sometimes, when you're young, you have less filters for the primordial then as we grow older, and we accumulate more and more narratives and philosophies and ideologies, but something at that time really landed in me. But it has taken me the rest of my life, to unravel what that may have been. Because I my own life took the expected trajectory of dance. So I went, I became a professional dancer. I worked and lived all over the world where I had dance companies and I created works for dance festivals I taught, I had dance schools, I had taught dancing to hundreds of people all over the world, many of whom are professional dancers today.

Most of my colleagues today are incredibly talented and creative, professional dancers. But for me, somewhere along in my life, I began to realize that in what I was doing in the ways in which I was able to do what I was to do, I there was something that was missing, there was something that I experienced, there was something that I perceived, glimpsed, tasted, in that a transmission from my teacher to me, that was missing for me in the way in which I was able to express and offer the stance in the world. My exploration began about 20 years or so ago, into what is this dimension that I was missing, when I was you offering dance in the Available narratives of the world. And this has been my journey, it has been my hero's journey into my own consciousness, the self-inquiry and fit and figuring out or sensing how dance as an archetypal expression, as an intelligence of the primordial is the technology of self-inquiry into the primordial which is the same thing really, the inquiry into the primordial and self-inquiry is the same thing. And how dance is that inquiry. It all began with that tasting of my teachers, beingness, my teachers expression of the dance itself, it came from that direct experiencing of the dance by embodying that dance somehow, I was able to taste glimpse how dance could be that intelligence of the primordial even though it took me the rest of my life, to find even these words for it to find even a way of offering a to find a way of even signaling that as words and as language and of then reclaiming some of that archetypal A primordial domain of dance and repositioning dance as an expression of that primordial archetypal domain.

I'm not saying that dance, as a, as a performance, or as a profession as a performance oriented expression or as an expression of entertainment is not valuable. For me any dance is better than no dance. But here I am speaking of the equally valid and important role that dance has, as the language of the primordial, and the language of self-inquiry, especially when we must leave the language of the world, this language of narrative word, in order to encounter this is the technology that the hero needs in order to go into the journey of self-inquiry. So that is why there's direct experience that body led experience, through movement and expression, something becomes real, only when we express it. So that body-led expression of something that is poetic, that is imaginative and creative, from the primordial, not imaginative and creative, in the ideas or values of the world. So that direct experience is so important to reveal the intelligence of the primordial and when even just expressing it as my teacher was doing. All he needed to do was to express it, for me to be able to taste it. And to, to sense that glimpse of what the dance could be, and what the intelligence could be of something that is never conquered by words, something that is beyond words, and beyond that closure characteristic of words, something that cannot be defined and trapped by words, that is where infinity resides.

So when we consider that the Divine is infinite, that reality is infinite. That is where it resides, it is an experience, it is not a thought, it's not a word. Because none of that can, it's by its very nature, because it seeks to define and, and control and pin down, it cannot bring to us an experience of infinity. But a language that allows for the infinite that allows for things to not be closed. That brings to us the infinite possibilities as an embodied experience a direct experience. I think it was Thomas Moore, the scholar, the archetypal scholar, who once said that we are multi-dimensional beings that we actually have millions, or innumerable archetypes in our own consciousness, and that is why there are so many archetypes or deities there is this multiplicity in many traditional cultures have an infinite number of archetypes and deities, because that signals the infinitude of our own consciousness, and when we are able to encounter that and express and manifest that we are then able to also experience how reality can be that sentience of infinitude. Because we are part of that reality begins here, that infinity of reality begins in our own bodies, because how could it be that we are not an expression of that vast reality?

So the inquiry into our own infinitude, our own vastness, our own mystery that cannot be narrowed down or constrained the boundlessness that is within ourselves, the plurality that we are within ourselves is then how we experience that reality is also that infinity that plurality and that multiplicity and that vastness and that, that many the everythingness that that, that any that infinite possibilities, that is also reality. And so here is that union with reality At the union with nature, union with all of life, that connectedness that is at that elemental level of universality. So this is the coexistence of universality, everythingness, union, connection, all coexist in this amazingly multi-dimensional constellation.

And when we are then able to come into the world of language of narratives, from this experience, that changes, the narratives change, language changes, the world itself changes, and it becomes something that is more aligned, more harmonious, participating in the reality, not something that describes the reality, but something that is part of the movement of reality that expresses that reality in matching its poetic nature, the nature of reality as a poetic expression, not the poetry that we have defined, but the poetry that nature has taught us that reality has taught us. And there is this congruence of expression, action language between what we do and that congruence with reality. In other words, we become the reality itself, we become the movement of reality, and the separation between the world, our story, what we are doing, what we are describing what we are analyzing, all these separations simply dissolve. But this movement is something that is ongoing, it's not a permanent state of being.

That is why archetypal traditions were ritual invocations, because we must always the hero has to return, go through the same encounter, come back, but then it is, the return is always necessary. It's not that the hero has just to do this, and then that's it. Somehow they have gained this special knowledge. And then they never have to do this again, and they have got this expertise. Nobody is an expert. And that is also why this heroic temperament is necessary. Because we are always needing this heroic temperament in order to go through this ongoing movement of exploration, self-inquiry, returning, offering, creatively, and then going back into that inquiry again. So this is how the heroic narrative manifests in that interconnectedness of the primordial and the world. And in such a movement. The second part of that statement, you are not your job is not to save the world becomes potent and meaningful, because we are here to do our humble work of making sure that we align ourselves to that primordial reality. And in aligning in our inquiry, which is the expression which is that poetic offering, that is the inquiry, we will like my teacher did, we will offer that glimpse to perhaps we offer that glimpse to others, even though that is not what we are there to do.

We are not here to be doing this because we want to save other people. We are simply here to be doing this, because that is what we must do in order to align ourselves in order to that, who am I question to do to descend into our own authenticity and primordiality. And in that movement of descending, which is the expression, that movement itself brings the gift of intelligence to the world and to others, but that is not in our hands. We are not here to do that. But in doing our own work in doing our own Hero's Journey, we will offer that intelligence in the most humble way.

It may not manifest immediately around us. It may be that it takes another 50 years for that seed to grow. But we all we can do is to do that journey into our own authenticity. Because the minute we say that we aren't going to save the world from when looked at from The primordial archetypal perspective, we are then claiming an expertise. We're claiming that we are, we've got some special status or some special knowledge that is not really part of this movement of reality, and that we know what is good for everybody else. So it's important to when we look at these statements that we actually located from the primordial towards the world, from the inner to the outer, and not from leading from the world to the primordial. Because then that becomes a very different and not a possible thing. We can't go from the lenses of the world into the primordial but we can move in the world when we are informed by the direct experience of our authenticity, or our primordiality.