The Hero’s Journey (Your Life) Basic Lesson #9 by Danielle Sainte-Marie In Lesson Eight we learned we are all born into a System and that this is constantly working to imprint us and make us slaves to its designs; it wishes to crush individuality completely. We also learned that it is this very System that can also produce great individuality in those that awake while in it and decide to think for their selves to live a life authentically as possible. Without the System there would be no need for heroes at all, for there would be nothing to fight against. We also learned that there are at least two breaks from home for the hero, whether it is in mythology or in real life, and that these breaks are: 1. Physical (the hero must physically leave home). 2. Psychological (the hero must then individuate from the System and from her or his parents’ egos [wants, needs, and desires] that were inflicted onto the hero when young). Without both breaks, the hero will not accomplish their final task, whatever it may be. Many people stop at the first break from home because they never realize that leaving home was only a beginning and that there is far more work to be done. At this point in the hero’s journey, the hero will now often return home in a physical sense (although it is not limited to just the physical). The hero will then see their old environment with new eyes, where she or he recognizes the System now as it worked in their family environment. They will now come to see, own and/or operate in their past with a new sort of recognition and/or understanding. In effect, their innocence has died. This takes place in the film The Matrix, when Neo re-enters the Matrix Program for the first time after being liberated from it. He is being taken to see the Oracle, and as he is riding in the back seat of the car with Trinity, he points to a place to his left and says, “Hmmm…” Trinity asks, “What is it?” Neo responds, “I used to eat there…they had really good noodles.” Trinity just smiles because Neo says this while realizing that the place he frequented for food was an illusion of a Systemic program created by machines, and that the noodles he had been enjoying didn’t actually exist. In fact, he realizes that there was no guarantee that what he thought tasted like noodles was actually what noodles tasted like, because machines and not humans designed the taste of them. In Star Wars, The Return of the Jedi, Episode VI, Luke returns to Tatooine (his old home) to rescue Han Solo and Princess Leia from Jabba the Hut. Now, this is interesting because in Episode IV, Han Solo saves Luke at the end of the film, and in the restored version, Jabba the Hut is about to capture Han as they blasted off from Mos Eisley on Tatooine, and you get the feeling at that time that Luke would have been fairly useless in a fight against Jabba and his cronies. But now, Luke is a Jedi Knight and returns back to the very lair of corruption, thievery and brutality, and this time he does so with new eyes. You can even see in his gaze now that he has a different look about him. He looks confident, wiser, and no longer the scared, naïve young man from Episode IV. He rescues Han and Leia with a cunning plan, and we see now that Luke has returned home as a new being: he is a Jedi Knight with a steely gaze and no longer just a farmer with wistful, far-away eyes that longed for adventure. He has been to the outer boundaries and has seen things that most others have not. In Under the Same Moon, Carlitos finds his father, who is working at Wal-Mart, and he confronts him about why he left the family all those years ago. Carlitos (which means “Little Carlos,”) is already growing into becoming Carlos, a young man. He has been on a tough journey and he realizes his father could have found him if he had tried harder, for here Carlitos, a young boy, had managed to come find his father. This is a return to home for Carlitos that is represented by the form of his father. He now sees that he cannot rely on his father for anything, and Carlitos realizes he must make his own way, as he is stronger than his dad, and more in love with the idea of being in a “family.” In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we get the negative side of the return home. The heroine in the novel is Esther Greenwood, and she has to overcome a life of pain and feeling like “nothing really matters at all,” in order to find a way to live. But, she cannot individuate from the System, she feels, without killing herself to get out of it and so when she returns home she does so with new eyes as well…but they are eyes that only see more despair, loneliness, emptiness, and pain. Thus, her return home becomes negative and she nearly succeeds at her suicide attempt by overdosing on a massive amount of sleeping pills. The way we relate our own lives to this aspect of the hero’s journey is actually quite interesting, because many of us do return home after having been “out there,” and we see our old home in new ways, which is what originally prompted the saying, “You can’t go home again.” This is said because home never feels the same upon the hero’s return. Have you ever returned home with “new eyes?” What did you see? Did you get caught up in the negative side of it all and feel weaker and more inflicted upon, or did you return home stronger, wiser, and able to see how your environment and/or parents helped create the rich story that has become your life? The psychological way you return home dictates the way that your journey will progress. In Lesson #10 we will talk about the common obstacles of the hero’s journey and how mythology can help guide us through them!
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 15:52:59 +0000
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