The Hero Within

How to Develop your Life Mission

through Service to Others

by Dale A. Johnson

Dedicated to a true hero:

Marta Hayden-Johnson

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the many people who assisted in the publication of this small book. I especially am grateful to Tom and Paula Eklund, founders and directors of Orphanage Outreach who gave me the opportunity to experience and observe the hero's journey with hundreds of the most amazing volunteers. I am most grateful for Tom helping me to articulate what I have known for many years but did have the words.

My thanks go to Sandra Eun, Steve and Laura who have proofed these pages and to my dear wife who makes me write plainly and directly so that someone other than myself can understand.

Published by

New Sinai Press

Cover Illustration by Gustave Dorè

other illustrations are by Dorè, pp. 23, 51, 63

Syrian Orthodox Gospel Miniatures, Church of 40 Martyrs, Mardin, Turkey, 12^th.c., digitized by Dale A. Johnson, pp. 31, 47

Table of Contents

Preface ................................................................. 6

Introduction.........................................................9

Phase One: The Separation.............................18

Stage 1: The Call.............................................23

Stage 2: The Crossing....................................31

Phase Two: The Initiation............................39

Stage 3: The Trials.......................................47

Stage 4: The Abyss........................................51

Phase three: the Transformation...................57

Stage 5: Enlightenment......................................63

Stage 6: Reconciliation......................................67

Phase four: The Return...................................71

Stage 7: Wisdom.................................................74

Resources for Heroes..........................................80

Preface

The structure of this book is a tapestry of several threads. First there is the structural thread of the definitions of the hero's journey identified by the late Joesph Campbell. Woven into this structure is content from my personal experiences with thousands of volunteers over the years who are my fellow travelers. Perhaps this is the weakest thread of all. But the thread that gives beauty and color is the story of Jacob found in the book of Genesis who best represents to me the Hero's Journey. Each stage begins with a continuation in the story of Jacob. This is followed by examples from the lives of Jesus and even Buddha. While vastly different in the way we theologically understand Jesus and Buddha, there still are profoundly similar features to their life stories that comment upon how we are to navigate the hero's journey. Finally, the texture or the warp and woolf of the fabric, is created by the examples from an organization known as Orphanage Outreach. My wife and I have been directly involved in serving this organization that serves orphaned and abandoned children in the Dominican Republic. They send thousands of volunteers to give of their time and love to educate these children and to provide them a healthy and safe environment. The basic philosophy of this organization is summarized at the end of this book in the section on resources for heroes. It is a philosophy built on Christian consciousness and years of trail and error. It can be trusted because many people have lived it.

I can think of no better way to experience the Hero's Journey than to volunteer a week or more of your life to this wonderful organization. There are other ways to travel the hero's path, but why look for a road when one is already before you. Check your internet for www.orphanage-outreach.org

Introduction

The reason for this book grew out of a set of experiences I have had with university students who come to the Dominican Republic to volunteer their time to serve orphaned and abandoned children. Each week I give dozens of students an orientation to their work in an orphanage called Good Samaritan in Esperanza, Dominican Republic. The orientation is three hours long and it is a form of indoctrination that promotes important values to these gifted and compassionate young people. The work has helped me to crystallize 15 years of work in third world environments where I have seen thousands of people volunteer with various NGO`s for short periods of time. I observed that these people search not only for themselves but discover a vision of life and service. Not to shock you but most come with hidden bigotries and even arrogance although they have good intentions. In a way these young people know they carry burdens that only humility can bear. The want to rid themselves of parochial attitudes and unconscious prejudice. Some volunteers are not even aware that this is the reason they have come to a strange and foreign land. They only know that they are restless and uncomfortable with the way they see the world

There are a small number of people who go to confirm what they already believe. They see only what they expect to see, learn what they already know, and leave satisfied that they are excellent people. Often they are people who are not interested in seeing the world in a different way. All they can do is “hit and run.” They come and convert a few people and leave feeling righteous. Unfortunately the people they have come to help often feel victimized, used, and not feeling good about themselves because they were told that they were poor and helpless.

It is my hope that this book will challenge this small minority of people who are not on the hero's journey to open themselves up to the greater will of God which is to serve rather than help, to allow themselves to become vulnerable and become new creatures in Christ. For the majority of people for whom this book is intended, that is people who have chosen to take the hero's journey, and are willing not to see the things they already see, and learn the things they already know, they are will be led to powerful experiences that transform their lives. Bigotries and prejudices will fall away and enlightenment will fill their being. This usually does not happen with mere tourists. It takes immersion in the culture and true interaction with people, ideas, and customs unlike their own. The tourist is an observer and stands outside the experience. The person who sets out on a hero's journey expects to enter the inner world of another human being. A measure of this difference is that many times volunteers are so busy interacting with their new world that they often do not take many pictures. The tourist separates himself from the world he or she is viewing and treats it as an exclusive experience. The volunteer treats it as an inclusive experience that is so intimate and known there is no reason to preserve the experience. The volunteer often encounters the new environment with strong ideas of coming to help and to have instant solutions to the problems they see. For example, one year when I was working in a region along the border of Iraq, in the village of Hassanah, the people of the village had requested aid for their weaving business. During the first Gulf War their market for purple goat hair cloth was destroyed. They turned to Europe and a Lutheran Group from Sweden responded to an urgent request for aid. First they sent an analyst who immediately decided that the looms in the village were too small and antiquated. Six months later very beautiful but expensive Swedish looms arrived. They even sent a technician who spent several months teaching the people how to operate the looms that were much larger and sophisticated than anything they had ever known. After a year, I returned to the village and found that the villages had taken apart the looms and combined parts with other parts of their own looms with which they were more familiar. When the Swedish people returned to the village to see how their project was going they were shocked to see their very expensive looms destroyed. After a few days of angry and accusatory talk the Swedes began to notice the genius in the recombinant effort by the villages. The looms could make various widths of cloth unlike the Swedish looms that could only make one width. The Swedes began to have their eyes opened to the depth of knowledge and skills of these people. They had been blind to these people when they were so busy trying to teach them how to use their machines. Their anger arose out of a bigotry and arrogance they had toward these people. When they discovered and admitted to their arrogance they were ashamed and apologized to the villagers and praised their work.

I have observed this process over and over again when I watch first world people interact with people of the so called third world. There seems to be four phases as defined by Joseph Campbell, the well known expert in mythology. They are as follows:

The first phase is separation. With this phase comes a self certainty which grows out of our relatively parochial world. We would not expect to have a view other than what we have experienced in the first years of our life. The reason we travel and experience other cultures is to open ourselves to other ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling. We ask the question “Are there other ways to see and experience the world that are as valid and perhaps even superior to our own.

It takes a great deal of humility and curiosity to become vulnerable to this new knowledge and experience. Often it is too easy to criticize people who are different from us. One often sees and hears utterly horrible comments from American and European tourists in third world countries. They will often laugh and mock strange customs and ideas with no idea of their value. They criticize a custom merely because it is not like theirs.

For example, tourists in third world areas will often complain about a main meal being served in the middle of the day. In a world where there is often not electricity and the night time is often a dangerous time to be trying to prepare food. It makes sense to have the biggest meal at noon and not at night. People from first world nations have the luxury of turning on a switch to get light at any time of night. When a person opens up to be curious and to ask why people do things the way they do, this is the beginning of wisdom and compassion.

For many years I was upset frequently because people did not seem to be able to stand in a line. Once I walked into a British fast food restaurant in the South Africa. It was in a town close to the border of Botswana. I was the only white person in the place. When the doors opened for the lunch trade everyone swarmed to the front. Not one person gave any attention to the lines on the floor or the instructions at the counter as to how to wait in line. Over the years I have come to realize this may not be such a bad way to operate. We wait in line because we assume there will be a tomorrow. But in a culture where war, disaster, famine can strike at any moment, the difference between life and death may depend on how fast you can get to the front of the crowd. I have seen this first hand in refugee camps chronically short of food. Those who did not crowd to the front saw their children eventually die.

The second phase is initiation. Often people will get angry and frustrated especially if they live in another culture for a period of time. They have expectations about the right way to do things. Here in the Dominican Republic, people often do not maintain new technology. These technologies are often given as gifts and when the donors check on the use of their gifts they often find that the gifts are abandoned or poorly maintained. For example when a water filtration system was given to an orphanage it was used until it quit working. Donors were angry when they learned of this mismanagement and poor treatment of their gift. They were even more angry when they discovered that pipes were rerouted around the filter. People asked why they did not get new filters. Well it costs too much. Then why did they not maintain the filter and back flush it every week. Why maintain it when it was cheaper to reroute the pipes the people reasoned. It was unfair to put the burden of maintenance on the orphanage operators. The donors thought the people would be grateful but they only saw it as an economic burden...and it was a burden! On the other hand, the water was necessary to assist in the health of the children. About half the children had parasites due to the bad water. So even though people were imposing on the orphanage who could not afford to maintain the system the protection of persons always trumps honor and respect for other ways of doing things.

Most of the time though, we should try to understand why people do things differently than the way we do them. Often it is for reasons that are just as good as any method or way we would do the same task. It is too easy to assume our way is better and slip into our cloak of self righteousness and superior feelings.

The third phase is enlightenment. If people can get past their anger or certainty about the rightness of their ideas they are forced to ask why people do things in ways that they do not understand. Most people do things that arise from very good reasons, especially if the reason is tested over a period of time. If we seek to know these reasons our minds are often opened to wonderful and new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. All of us carry prejudices and values that conflict with those we come into contact with in third world environments. Our trust in technology, the merits of democracy, or the valuation of people by material wealth. We do not think we are bigoted or arrogant until we come into contact with these other cultures. You may think that introducing infant formula will improve childhood nutrition. But what you fail to see is that the formula has to be delivered by a glass or plastic baby bottle that has to be boiled to keep sanitary, otherwise the infants will get sick. To boil the bottles, trees have to be cut down to make fires and ecological devastation occurs and people are killed in mud slides in the years that follow. Failure to properly boil bottles leads to a high rate of infant mortality. Technology in this case causes death and destruction when breast nursing would have been the best way to keep children alive.

Or we may think that democracy is the best way to organize a community. When I tried to form dairy cooperatives in southeast Turkey I thought I was doing something good. But after months of struggle teaching people about the merits of capitalism and how to buy and sell shares, the village gave all the shares to the tribal chieftain. My whole purpose in forming the cooperative was to avoid having all the money eventually end up in the pocket of the leader. But in this agrarian village they know that beneficent dictatorship works best. They trusted their leader.

In this tribal village in the Kurdish region I had set up a farm cooperative by my standards. I spent six months teaching people about the value having equal shares and voting to solve various problems. When the cooperative started to operate it all reverted back to the tribal chieftain who ended up controlling everything and pocketing all the profits. I was shocked. What I failed to understand was the psychology of the people who depended upon the commerce of compassion distributed by the chief. It was a world where everyone had their job and place. The cooperative disturbed and disrupted this system that had worked well for hundreds of years in this village.

I have seen materialistic attitudes invade and corrupt beautiful cultures and people. Western forms of marketing and advertising advanced into remote areas of the Middle East at the end of the 20^th century. Young people dreamed of leaving their tribal lands and live the life they saw on television.

One day I sat in a home in a remote region of Turkey with a family that owned thousands of acres of cotton. The last son of the family entered the room and kissed his father's hand and announced that he was leaving for Sweden. I asked why. He said he was leaving to become a manager of a pizza shop. His father began to weep. This was the last of his sons to leave for the West.

They left their ancestral lands and good and decent life for the lure of materialistic messages. They had grown up in a simple agrarian culture far away from the glare of television, mass marketing, and materialism until recent years. They had no resistance to the siren call of instant wealth and luxury. The beatific myth of consumerism and western pleasures left this father with no one to leave his farm.

When people recognize their own prejudice and realize there is more than one way to view the world it is the beginning of wisdom. We do not have to admit we are wrong. It is not a matter of being wrong but a question of growth and adding to a wider vision of the world.

The final phase that I have observed occurs when people return home and report their experiences. They share feelings of being misunderstood or even rejected. Others report that those who know them well see the changes in them. But it is not always something others can handle well. Mothers will still treat their daughters the way they knew them before. Fathers will often say they expected the growth and maturity and then propel them onward without reward or even encouragement. Friends and family with give them five minutes of their time to listen to their wonderful life changing experience and then change the subject.

Those who have passed through these phases often admit that the last phase is the most difficult. They either believe and accept what has happened to them or they begin to doubt the veracity of their experience and return to ways that are known and comfortable.

It is my hope that those who go in the hero's journey will not give up and gain deep insight through this book. It is my hope that knowing the way prepares one to better accept and understand the journey and when one returns home that person remains changed forever.

Separation

(from the known)

The story of Jacob and Esau is the story of a hero, at least for Jacob's part. We begin the story with the struggle at birth. Jacob and Esau fight to get out of the womb, or so it seems. Nevertheless, Esau is born first with Jacob trailing behind holding onto his brother's heel.

I have always preferred to read this story in a psychological way, particularly from a Jungian point of view. Jacob and Esau represent our masculine and feminine sides, our consciousness and unconsciousness respectively. We read the story of Jacob throughout the book of Genesis but very little is told about the life of Esau. So it is with our animus and anima. Every normal person is formed from these two sides. We possess a feminine and masculine side as well as a conscious and unconscious side to our personalities. Throughout life we seek to integrate these different sides. We probe the unconscious to discover repressed emotions and hidden desires. We embrace our feminine and masculine sides in order to become full human beings. This is the hero's journey. It is a dangerous but ultimately rewarding path to follow if we are humble and brave.

Jacob makes a deal with Esau to trade food for his birth-right. Esau, the hunter, comes to Jacob complaining of needing food. Jacob takes advantage of this moment and asks for Esau to sell him his birthright. Esau reasons that his birthright is of no use to him because he is about to die so he trades his birthright for food and drink. In much the same way our unconscious rises up in the form of fears and dreams. After all this is what Esau represents. He is the symbol, if not the actual fear, welling up in us. We can remember the moments when sexual or death fantasies rise up in our dreams or are triggered by a scary story or movie. We would do anything to smother the fear or satisfy the agony of desire. We battle with our conscious side and drown our fears in food, drink, excessive pleasure. We feed the devil in the hope he will go away.

Yet, in the story of Jacob, we see that a price is paid by Esau. He gives up his birthright. What we often do not recognize is that Jacob pays a price too. He now carries the burden of the birthright, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it. The weight of this burden leads him to deceive his aged father in order to get his blessing. He is so determined to get what is his, after all he purchased the birthright fair and square, that he lies to his father. He says that he is Esau. He and his mother (the big anima) conspire together to get Isaac's blessing. His mother dresses Jacob in Esau's skins, she feeds the old man spicy food so he cannot smell so well. Still Issac is not so sure it is Esau who comes near and asks for a blessing. He asks Jacob to bend down to kiss him. Only then does he think that he is Esau. He can smell the earthiness on the skins. He gives Jacob the blessing thinking he is Esau.

Our consciousness is forever reinventing itself. It is a defense mechanism to avoid the pain of reconciliation and wholesomeness we are destined to recover. We are made to be the whole and fully integrated beings. But we repress what we do not like and what we fear into our unconsciousness. We deny our anima or animus afraid that we would be to vulnerable or out of control. It prevents us from being fully integrated and whole. It is the cause of our suffering.

Jacob leaves his home and family. He leaves what is known for the adventure of the unknown. In a way it is a substitute for reconciliation with his brother, his unconscious side, his feminine, spiritual, and vulnerable inner being. The deceit and reinvention has led to a terrible division and separation from Esau. Esau almost immediately discovers the trick of Jacob and pleads with his father to give him the blessing. His father refuses several times. Finally he gives into Esau and gives him an alternate and somewhat horrible blessing. He tells him that he shall live by the sword and serve his brother. If this isn't repression, then I do not know what is. It is a picture of the unconscious anima being crushed into oblivion. Anger, revenge, hatred are seeds planted in the dark rage of Esau. It gives Jacob the perfect reason to leave. Esau plans to murder his brother. Jacob is told to leave and go to Laban, his uncle.

This is the story of every person's life. We are born into the world consisting of elements of both conscious and unconscious forces. We are made up of feminine and masculine traits in a psychological sense. Each of us has capacities for love, reason, willfulness, courage, and despair. Each trait has its place in the constellation of emotion and personality. Our task as human beings is to integrate all these powers of consciousness and unconsciousness into a fully authentic human being. The very power we are born with to integrate these powers is also the power to reinvent and substitute the false or invented self for the true self we are meant to be. The drive to pursue the hero's journey is also the power to pervert, to take deviant paths and side trails into the wilderness where we are not meant to be.

The story of Jacob is the story of return and reconciliation. It is a story of every authentic person.

Recently I had a conversation about return and reconciliation with a married couple who serve as Peace Corp members in the Dominican Republic. It was very difficult for the wife to leave her family. She felt that they needed her. It was not until she left home and to use her words, cut the emotional umbilical cord , that she understood that her need was a substitute for love. Not until she realized that they did not need her nor did she need them that she could really love them in the freedom and fullness by which real love is characterized. This was part of the hero's journey for this wonderful young lady who had to travel far from home to discover the true authentic nature of her home and herself.

Let us now begin the first stage of the hero's journey.

Stage 1

The Call:

Jacob journeys toward the land of Laban. He lies down to sleep and has a dream where he sees a ladder going to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. God speaks to him and gives him a promise. Jacob says among other things, this is the gate of heaven. He builds an altar and calls the place Bethel, the House of God.

Clearly this is Jacob's call in the same way a young person gets a vision of what he or she wants to be. It may be practical or impractical. No matter what, it is a calling. With boldness Jacob ventures forth.

Somehow you have heard the call about an opportunity to serve in a distant remote place. Or, that place may be in a neighborhood next door, a place you would have never gone unless you heard the Call. You have heard the Call. Have you considered how you heard that distant sound that no one hears but you? Others around you may wonder what you have heard. They may question if you heard correctly. They may have even tried to talk you out of following that call complaining that it is too dangerous, too far away, too unknown. But you know that there is nothing that can stop you. It is something you must do.

The Call invites us into the adventure, offers us the opportunity to face the unknown and gain something of physical or spiritual value. We may choose willingly to undertake the quest, or we may be dragged into it unwillingly.

The Call may come boldly as a "transformative crisis," a sudden, often traumatic change in our lives. Or it may quietly occur, with our first perception of it being a vague sense of discontent, imbalance or incongruity in our lives. Within this range the Call can take many forms:

· Something was taken from us and our quest is to reclaim it.

· Something is lacking in our life, and we must find what is missing.

· Something is not permitted to members of our society, and we must win these rights for our people.

On a psychological level, the Call might be an awareness of a shift in our spiritual or emotional "center of gravity." We discover that we have outgrown our roles.

Many people end the journey here at the point of the Call. They sense their fear of leaving the known. The sound of fear overpowers the song of compassion. In fact I believe that most people quit the journey at this point, satisfied to have heard the Call as if it can be a substitute for the journey itself. Unfortunately, the Call is recognition of our true self and to abandon the Call is self denial which strangely becomes a substitute for the true life we are meant to live. So many people abandon the journey before they even start. The true self is repressed and an inauthentic life replaces the an authentic response to the call.

Lives of quiet desperation are the subjects of so many plays, movies, and other art forms. It is the story of most people and it is the reason so many people relate to these stories. Tennessee Williams is perhaps one of the greatest playwrights of the last century who knew how to sound out this cry of failure to listen: A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tim Roof. To not follow one's call leads to a life of madness. It is a life of madness. Stanley Kowalski ends the play in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, listening to his own voice shouting out the name Stella, the Latin word for star, which metaphorically is a cry to the Call that has left him.

In John Steinbeck`s The Grapes of Wrath we observe a whole family, the Joads, who are thrown off their land by the bank and head west to California where the story ends in a flood and a dead baby. The baby is the metaphor of a lost dream. California was not a true call, it was a response to a negative circumstance. Instead of facing the challenges of the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, the family tumbles along route 66 like an uprooted weed blown by the wind.

For Hemingway many of his tales, especially in earlier years, centered around a character named Nicholas Adams, undoubtedly an incarnation of Hemingway himself. Just as Hemingway before him, Nick Adams grew up around the Michigan woods, went overseas to fight in the war, was severely wounded, and returned home. Earlier stories set in Michigan, such as "Indian Camp" and "The Three-Day Blow" show a young Nick to be an impressionable adolescent trying to find his path in a brutally violent and overwhelmingly confusing world. Like most of Hemingway's main characters, Nick on the surface appears tough and insensitive. However, "critical exploration has resulted in a widespread conclusion that the toughness stems not from insensitivity but from a strict moral code which functions as the characters' sole defense against the overwhelming chaos of the world. This moral defense was also what has kept him from hearing the Call to his real self.

Acknowledge the Hero Within

I believe that to hear the Call we have to be grateful for being alive and accept the gifts and graces that are available to us. It is this state of gratitude that often makes us aware that the hero we celebrate is not only the hero within but the many hero's who have made out life so far possible. It is this faith in something or someone other than ourselves that allows us to hear that distant Call.

Jacob heard the Call when he listened to a dream. He heard this voice from within the dream, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac, the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants...Behold I am with you and and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” What is remarkable is the response of Jacob. Jacob awoke from his sleep and listening to this inner voice said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” I do not think Jacob was acknowledging that the Lord was only in that place but he was acknowledging that the Lord, the Hero within, was also in his heart. It was this place where the hero resided. Then Jacob says, “and I did not know it.” How true! So many of us have heard the inner voice over and over again and we ignored it. Once we acknowledge it we are shocked and say to ourselves, “..and I did not know it.”

I do not believe that hearing the Call to separate from the known happens accidentally, nor even by power of personal desire. Hearing the Call to separate oneself from the known requires preparation. One must be in a state of being so that the clarion call pierces through the veil of the cacophonous noise of everyday life. This preparation most often comes through study and discipline. It creates conditions for quiet moments so that we can listen to our breath. Preparation usually comes by benefit of others who love us and have created conditions so that we can enter into a state of being so we can hear that distant call.

Buddha's Call

Gautama Buddha was born as Prince Siddhartha, in the lap of luxury. Exposed to an overdose of riches and comfort right from the beginning, the prince, while still relatively young, exhausted for himself in the fields of fleshly joy, thus becoming ripe for a higher, transcendent experience.

The young prince remained glued to his pleasure chambers and had no contact with grounded reality. His palace, and the sensual pleasures which it contained, were his only limiting worlds.

Once, after a particularly hectic schedule of sensual frenzy, Siddhartha was suddenly awakened from his blissful sleep, in the middle of the night. Surrounding him were the remnants of last night's debauchery and revelry. The sight of the shameless naked flesh and the overflowing wine pitchers jarred him into the unreality of his own reality. He felt suffocated in those very environs which had once given him what he thought were the pleasures of paradise. He immediately arose from his gold-gilded bed, descended the stairs and asked his favorite charioteer to take him to an open space where he could breathe more freely.

He had traveled only a few miles when he came across a sight which was totally new to him in terms of the distressing emotions it stirred up in the innermost depths of his heart.

Right in front of him was an old man, tottering on a stick, his physical frame entirely ravaged by the trials of time. Never having been exposed to such an image, Siddhartha asked his charioteer who that individual was, and why he was the way he was?

When he heard that the man had deteriorated due to his advancing age, the next natural question was whether he himself, Siddhartha, the prince of the mighty Shakya clan, and all those whom he loved would one day be exposed to the same degradation? Confronted with the truth, the reply completely shattered him, and he asked to be taken back to the comforting environs of the palace.

In the journey of the hero, a figure suddenly appears as a guide, marking a turning point in the biography. This symbolic figure is somehow profoundly familiar to the unconscious, but is unknown, and even frightening to the conscious self. Thereafter, even though the hero returns for a while to his familiar occupations, he finds them unfruitful. A continuing series of signs of increasing force will then become visible. According to Campbell, "The Four Signs," which appeared to the Buddha, are the most celebrated examples of the call to adventure in the literature of the world. These are signals from a higher domain, summons, which can no longer be denied.

Here it is also significant to note that being awakened in the midst of his blissful sleep was another call of destiny. Modern psychoanalysis has confirmed that when we are asleep, we travel to realms unavailable to our waking moments. These are the depths of our consciousness, which is but a part of the combined heritage of humanity. To quote the words of Jung, in a dream: "man is no longer a distinct individual but his mind widens out and merges into the mind of the humankind - not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of humankind, where we are all the same."

Jolted from his subliminal dream state, the immediate horror of his temporal circumstances made Siddhartha, the future Buddha, realize his own cutting off from this eternal dimension of life. Thus a feeling of rootlessness gripped him and he felt himself disjointed and lonely, even amongst the multitude of those who loved him. The hero's journey almost always begins with such a call.

According to Campbell, the moment the hero is ready for the destined adventure, the proper heralds, or callers to his destiny appear automatically, as if by divine design. We have already noticed the first such herald, namely the old man above. The Buddha later came across three more such signs: a sick man, a dead man and a monk.

His mind greatly agitated by the first three disturbing views, Buddha at last came upon his final call, when he laid his eyes upon the monk. The confident spiritual calm he perceived within the monk emboldened him to the fact that amidst the inevitability of suffering and distress, there was still ground for sufficient optimism, and salvation.

Thus the first stage of the mythological journey, which is the 'call to adventure,' which signifies that destiny has summoned the hero, and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the center of his society to a region outside and unknown.