The Hero’s Journey: Discover Your Own Personal Myth
What is truly important in life? The answer certainly depends on your situation. Psychologist Abraham Maslow really got to the center of this question and proposed a “hierarchy of needs.” When you don’t have water, food, shelter, and clothing, those needs are more important than any others. Once those basic needs are met, one could argue you don’t truly need anything else. So rather than call them needs, we could think of them as “conditional needs.” We might ask: “Having satisfied our true needs, what else do we need in order to live the best possible life?” Maslow offered an answer that ends in “self-actualization.” Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell asserts that to truly achieve our best life, we must dig a little deeper and undertake “The Hero’s Journey.” Let’s dive in and investigate the question — “How can we live the most meaningful and fulfilling life?”
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
To merely survive, Maslow observed, we must meet our physiological needs — things like air, food, water, shelter, clothing to protect us from the elements. Once these are met today, we look to ensure they will be met tomorrow. We try to make sure we will continue to be physically safe and free from bodily harm. When we have met our need for physical safety, we begin to pursue psychological needs — we want to have a feeling of belonging. We want to love and be loved. After we establish some healthy personal relationships, we develop our self-esteem and our standing in the community, seeking the respect of others. Having achieved all this, we may still feel something is missing. So, according to Maslow, we pursue our need for self-actualization. We seek to develop a more complex morality and express our creativity for its own sake. How can we self-actualize? Perhaps through undertaking “The Hero’s Journey.”
The Hero’s Journey
Following in the footsteps of Edward Taylor’s work in the late 1800s and the Freudian analysis of myth offered by Otto Rank, Joseph Campbell dedicated his life to the field of comparative mythology, seeking universal truths in ancient stories from diverse cultures. Campbell developed the theory of the universal myth, or monomyth, common to all cultures: The Hero’s Journey. In this universal story, repeated in countless variations the hero begins in the ordinary life. Here, the hero has met his basic Maslowvian needs — he has food and shelter, he is safe, he has relationships in his community and a reasonably esteemed role. The hero is happy, but something is missing.
The hero hears a call to action — something beckons to him to leave the safety of home. At first, he will refuse, but then, aided by a mentor he will realize he must follow his destiny and set out for adventure. He will face trials and tests and challenges, and in the process, he will experience profound self-development. Though he may initially resist, he will eventually return to the ordinary world to share his gifts with others.
Discover Your Own Personal Myth
Before developing his groundbreaking theories of the collective unconscious and the archetypes, Carl Jung was an accomplished psychologist, but he was not satisfied, despite having climbed Maslow’s pyramid. He wanted to discover his own unique special gift.
To do so, he sought to activate his imagination. He began by drawing spontaneously, with no plan or goal in mind, to see what would arise. He recalled that as a child, he had enjoyed playing with stones, building castles. Believing it would help him access something deep within, he returned to this creative endeavor, spending hours finding and stacking small stones. This spontaneous creativity would help him access his unconscious. Sure enough, he began to have all kinds of dreams and wild fantasies, which he dutifully recorded. He would return to analyze these dreams, making associations between his carefully developed conscious knowledge of current psychological theory and his unconscious flights of fancy.
In the process, Jung recognized a bifurcation in his unconscious thought. Some dreams were small dreams, autobiographical, and personal to him, while others were big dreams. For Jung, the big dreams were a window into “the collective unconscious.” He posited a shared unconscious populated with archetypes that we can all access. For each of us, particular archetypes will resonate more than others and seem more important and profound, guiding us towards our best selves.
Play Like Your Life Depends On It
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell asks “ You might ask yourself this question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit?” We certainly hope none of our readers ever face such a catastrophe! But the question is worth asking because it can lead us to a more meaningful, passionately engaged life. For some, the answer might simply be their religion, but for others, a personal myth, a true passion would be all that could sustain them.
To discover our true highest purpose in life, we must engage in creative play and see what arises. When we investigate the thoughts that arise when our mind is relaxed, we will see some of them are transcendent and universal. We can use these ideas as a guide for further exploration and discover what unique and special thing we can create and offer to the world. If you would like to explore these ideas, psychologist and author Jean Bolen discuss these ideas further, getting into specific archetypes and what they reveal in two of her books — Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women and Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves.
Explore The Good Life With Rascal
Please join us as we continue on our conceptual journey to the heart of the art of the good life. You can follow our articles here on Medium if you have an account, or simply bookmark our Medium page or follow us on Facebook.
We’ll tell you about the most popular course in the history of Yale, Psychology and the Good Life, and how you can take it for free. Find out how you can add years to your life in our article on the benefits of yoga and let us tell you about what meditation can do to make you more productive and less stressed. Consider our musings on the Midas myth and the common themes of behavioral economist Tibor Scitovsky and the myth of Eros and Psyche. Want to get inspired? We’ve got an article on defining your life project. For insight into the struggle between happiness and perfection, check out our article on satisficers vs maximizers and Bruce Lee’s theory of the top dog and the underdog. We also consider some more abstract topics, like John Maynard Keynes thoughts on the art of life, or non-being and its place at the root of luxury, or the conceptual art color the blackest black, Vantablack. If you are a gourmet, you might want to check out these fine dining restaurants in Bali that could be contenders for a Michelin star. Enjoy!
