Robert Campbell was a prominent American scholar of literature and comparative mythology. In his most famous book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell researched into the hero’s journey, “the one great story of mankind”. Campbell believed that humanity has an archetypal story that shaped its collective psyche and expressed through the myths and stories told throughout the ages of our cultural heritage. Campbell researched the primeval myths and stories of human cultures from around the world and found that from the story of the Buddha to that of Christ, from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece, there has been a basic structure, a meta-glyph, that was common to all mythologies . What is interesting about Campbell’s work is that he regarded the common structure that he found to be an expression of the path that each of us take as individuals in our personal journey through life. Campbell worked in the period that psychotherapy became an important field of study. Having the influential works of Freud and Jung in the background, Campbell took the symbolic significance of the Hero’s journey into the personal journey of each of us. He poetically described this when he wrote:
“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of Forty-Second street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change”
(Campbell, The hero with a thousand faces)
The common symbolism between the ancient myths, and our everyday psychological and emotional challenges still holds true today. I personally believe that in this time and date, many of us have the capacity and maturity to embark on our personal hero’s journey, which can be defined as the inner healing journey of the personality. Campbell has described the Hero’s journey as the process that each of us, if we consciously choose to do so, can do in order to evolve and heal ourselves.
Campbell mapped a number of common phases that appeared in all the world myths. The first phase that he mapped was making the shift of focus from the external world to the internal. This can be equated to the stage when the client is ready to shift his focus from telling about the external circumstances, that are believed to be the source of his difficulties into the inner world of feeling and sensation that arise in the face of the given circumstances. And so, in the words of Campbell, “the hero retreats from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside”.
Campbell found out that whether the chosen legend originates from the bible, the far reaches of the orient or the elaborate myths of the greeks, the adventure of the hero usually follows a similar nucleus pattern. This pattern follows the bellow structure:
Separating from the external world and entering into the inner/magical dimensions
Meeting with the inner or supernatural, often portrayed as a descent into the underworld
penetrating into some source of power, rebirth , resurrection
Life enhancing return to the world and integration of the new realization into normal reality
The above formula can be seen in Buddhist mythology. In the final journey to enlightenment of the Buddha: Siddharta Gautama sat for meditation under the Bodhi tree, determined to not get up from his meditation until he attained complete enlightenment. There appears Mara, leader of the demons in Buddhist mythology, who is associated with death, rebirth and desire. Mara tries to tempt the Buddha to become lost in the whole charade of external drama. Mara does this by presenting the Buddha with beautiful women that try to tempt the Buddha or vast armies of monsters that threaten to attack the Buddha. He attempts those and various other schemes to distract and make the Buddha move away from his center. Finally, Mara in his frustration roars at the Buddha, asking him, who would testify that Siddharta is worthy of attaining ultimate wisdom? The Buddha then reaches down with his fingers, touches the earth and replies to Mara, “the earth is my witness”. After that night the Buddha attained ultimate knowledge and from then on spent his life (with an initial push from the gods) giving his teachings to his fateful disciples and to humanity as a whole.
In the above example of the Buddha story there are a number of formative stages: the embarking to the journey, the meeting with the supernatural or the underworld, a rebirth/realization and return to the world to share the knowledge. According to Campbell these stages are correlative with any individual journey of the psyche to greater knowledge and health.
In Campbell’s analogy, the result of the successful journey is the unlocking and release of the flow of life energy into the body of the world. In the legends, this flow is to be represented as abundance of food, health or spiritual grace. According to Campbell:
"it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of re-attainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to be within the heart of the hero all the time"
(Campbell, The hero with a thousand faces)
This is an important point to be held in the mind and heart of the therapist. When a client comes to therapy there is usually some form of external problem, and a set of belief systems that are presented to the therapist. Next, there is a phase where the client shares the story and the therapist listens. When the client story receives sufficient space, the therapist can help the client to cultivate a more receptive and spacious engagement with the presented situation. There is an emphasis on finding the presence and inner resources of the client to be-with their situation. For a moment, not to reject the situation, just to calmly breathe into it. This helps the client to start to feel their own inherent health that exists inside their hearts and at the core of their being.
When this happens, there may be a shift in the inner narrative and rigid belief systems of the client. The core belief that the client might have carried on for years, that there is something which is lacking or inherently wrong with them, might not be so definite anymore. This is time for the therapist to support the client in verbalizing the limiting and often unconscious beliefs so that these can be mutually looked upon, and later to also formulate new beliefs that while being still in accordance with the client background and life context, now also express the view of inherent health.
Shifting the Narrative from Self-centered to Being-centered
According to CPP theory, human-beingness is composed of three territories referred to as Source, Being and Self. These territories are derived from the Buddhist concepts of bodhicitta, the already enlightened ground state; citta, the individual manifestation of the enlightened state through the existence in a human body; and atta, the structures that are created through conditioning and experiences.
Source is completely impersonal. It is the empty field in which all phenomena arise. Its nature is that of the eternal Tao, the nameless origin of all things. It is the unfathomable source fountain of all life. At the level of source there is no narrative. The to-and-fro movement between narrative and narrative-less experience is a fundamental movement in the therapeutic process. This movement can be linked to the scenario in which the client brings into the therapeutic space his suffering and current difficulties in life. These will inevitably contain the rigid self constellations that create a pattern of obsessive clinging or rejection of external objects. These external objects are merely external representations of the inner objects and personal material of the client. In western psychology this is referred to as the original splitting or the wounding at the level of being.
The challenge with these self constellations is that they are either unconscious, i.e. in the shadows out of the light of awareness, or the reactivity pattern has so much energy that one gets carried away by its force. In those moments it is hard to be in touch with the being core, in the same way that in a turbulent river it is hard to see the riverbed. It results in loss of sovereignty and freedom of choice. On the other hand, when one is able to see this dynamically moving energy with the light of awareness, it slows down the high velocity of the pattern, and the deeper nature of being starts to show itself. During the therapeutic process the therapist can cultivate a mutual field of awareness which may facilitate and help the client to rediscover their own inherent health in the midst of their unique and turbulent situation in life.
Similarly to the Hero’s journey, which Campbell distilled from the world myths and legends from around the world, our personal beneficial narrative is the worldview that becomes the path we use to interpret our given life circumstances in a way that has life enhancing quality. As Jung and others found, myths and legends are not merely stories told during the early stages of civilization. These stories articulate very accurately the movements of the human soul and the cosmos. The fact that the pattern exists in so many myths and stories, says something about its relevance to the inner journey.
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