The Anti-Hero’s Journey Home From Hell
In the thirteenth century, the hero’s journey shifted, and it began to become something that, now, I think is much more appropriately called the anti-hero’s journey. And I think everyone knows that modern dramas and cinemas are about anti-heroes. If you think about the big movies, you have James Bond who’s a killer, works for the government, you know, the CIA kind of thing. Is this the kind of hero, or is this the kind of person that’s the demon that you want to get away from? Or The Terminator, or various other kinds of absurdist existentialist anti-heroes that have been the main fodder of cinema in the period at least from the fifties, sixties on until now.
So what we need to understand is that the journey, the original hero’s journey, was the journey to transcend the ego. And the initiation was the meeting with the guru who would give you the understanding of that path, and then you would deal with the obstacles that you had to face until you went through ego death. That’s the major achievement of the journey. And after ego death, the one who returns is not the one who left on the journey—and that’s a very important point, because if you’re the same one who began the journey then you haven’t been on the journey.
But the anti-hero’s journey is the journey of the ego to try to fulfill itself on an ego level. And if we understand the anti-hero’s journey, the anti-hero in its more sattvic version—back to Tristan and Isolde, and you know, the various Knights of the Round Table who broke their dharma and had to deal with the not finding the Holy Grail and all of the various defeats that they faced in the many of the quests that that whole mythological system is about, was at least a heroic attempt to support the feeling of love. But that love was no longer a love for God, it was a romantic love. And so the anti-hero “heroically” broke the dharma of the society in order to go for a kind of fulfilment of its ego that turned out to be illusory, and was willing—in the early phases, back in those days of Tristan—to suffer death and eternal damnation in hell, all for the sake of love.
So there was a sattvic kind of beauty to that determination to give up God for a phenomenal plane connection that one felt more an emotional fulfilment from, because one could no longer connect to God—that connection and the possibility of that real hero’s journey had already been lost to the human consciousness. And so the sattvic version of it gradually came down into a rajasic version and of different kind of quests, of samurai and others, that was on an ethical plane, and often required a tragic sacrifice of one’s life for a community, or that kind of a giving of oneself for the sake of others, so there was still something heroic about it. But then you get into the tamasic versions and it’s all about, simply, the ego proving its “might makes right”, and that it can overcome the system, or overcome a counter-system, but it is part of an egoic collective system that it never separates from.
So the modern (and more the postmodern) ideological frame of reference in which people are born—at least in the West, and now of course it’s globalized—is that the ego is made into an artificial hero, a pseudo-hero, because the ego doesn’t really become heroic, but it’s given its golden spoon, it’s given its inflated grades in school, or it’s given its scholarships, or it’s given its whatever so that it can be a little professor or a little judo black belt, or something like that, and the ego is able to go through a kind of a candy version of attaining some kind of status and prestige, but never goes through the rite of passage of ego death, and tries to maintain a life as an ego never separating from the biological family system, or its role in that system, but perpetuating it into biological adulthood, that never reaches psychological adulthood.
And so, I would say that if we were going to draw this circle again we have to start with the refusal to separate, and the pseudo-hero’s journey that turns out not to bring happiness. And even though the pseudo-hero—in the postmodern period everyone reads an Advaita book, or a book of mysticism, or a book of new age spirituality, and knows about chakras, and knows about all of this—so it’s not like they are ignorant and need to be initiated, but whatever they learn, even if they visit actual ashrams and teachers and all of that, it’s a pseudo-initiation that they go through. But a pseudo-initiation that they believe is a real initiation—the ego deceives itself into thinking, “Yes I’ve done it!”—they go through therapy and they say “Oh I’ve worked through all my childhood issues, I’m done with that now”—and they believe that.
And so, the ego—its artistry of self-deception is able to fool the ego until it gets into such deep water in life with all of its splits, that it can no longer manage its fragmentation, and then the turning point is a karmic event in which its pseudo-heroism blows up and it collapses. And it’s that collapse that actually begins the journey—you have to hit bottom. It’s like the twelve-step program, that’s how people usually begin a journey of inner development now, it’s about a failure to be able to go through life with the props, the addictions, the promiscuity, and the other ways that people use to support the ego, because they have no inner strength, no integrity, no capacity internally to live as adults responsibly, except with the help of all of those comforts. And they’re still living in accord with a collectivist model of what one is supposed to do in life, and it’s always about some superficial achievement, not about the inner journey of ego death.
And so, many people can ride high for a long time before that karmic event hits—at least they used to be able to—that is no longer the case. So now we’re in another phase of it since the pandemic, where the entire society has gone through a karmic event—now it’s collective because we’ve reached the end of the era of the ego itself, so even that journey is now over, it’s passé, it’s past history. Now, there’s a journey of a fragmented, scared, undeveloped, ego, that no longer has support from society and all those things. It’s under lockdown, and it never developed a capacity for critical thinking or for understanding what it needs to do in situations of adversity—it’s never had to flee from one country to another, you know? There are refugees certainly doing that, but in the comfortable West, no, that was never the case. And so, nobody can believe it’s happening here. “It can’t be happening here! We make it happen elsewhere.” That was the whole purpose of imperialism, to make others have to deal with a hero’s journey of escape from the imperialist armies that were invading like the demons, and destroying life, bringing the nothing, destroying the Shire, bringing Mordor to the world—that kind of an approach—but now the chickens have come home to roost, and it’s a very different situation that the residents of Mordor and its provinces, that include the Shire, are no longer able to deal with because there are no heroes. And there hasn’t been a need to be heroes because everyone is taught that Big Brother is taking care of you.
So now we’re in a situation where a karmic event catastrophically causes the bottom to fall out of one’s individual life, as well as on a collective level, so that the capacity for getting the kind of magical help that one thought one could get externally is no longer there. And now, people are having to start developing their inner resources, to deal with adversity—and soon with food shortages, and with other kinds of difficulties that are not imaginary, but that are Real 1 coming back to bite you because you took it for granted, and you never really dealt with the forces of nature as they can display themselves in all of their wrathfulness, when the egos have all turned rotten in relation to the natural source of our lives.
And it’s this willingness to give up our power, our heroism, and our responsibility for sustaining a culture that would not allow tyranny and militarism and corruption and degradation of the kind that has now taken over the world, because we have forsaken the duty of that heroic sustenance of society, it is now imploding on everyone, and everyone’s weakened infantile ego that’s never had to grow up into psychological adulthood, is not able to tolerate and deal with the kind of pressures that they are now under.
So, it’s this kind of a karmic event that for some people hits in a very personal way, and destroys their life, and for others it hits in a way that comes more gradually from the whole shift in social relations and the loss of options to travel, and to deal with life in a very superficial way, and that now people have to face their loneliness, they have to face their inability to know what to do with themselves when the ordinary means of dispersion of life energies is not available.
And so, we are now dealing with the aftermath of a karmic event collectively, along with karmic events that are happening to people personally in much more massively distributed ways. And now a real initiation is required, it’s no longer an option, “Do I want to go on the hero’s journey or not?” It’s either you go on that journey or you die—you don’t make it, the lower death drive will take you. And you can’t just tread water and say “maybe tomorrow” because every day that you stay in the ego, the ego weakens—it gets more negative, it gets more self-hating, it gets more sociopathic, and it begins to act out in ways that cause it to be rejected, and thrown out of situations that it’s in, or arrested and sent into some concentration camp, or that kind of a thing.
So, the ego today has to go through a real initiation that is motivated very often by fear, not just that “I’m separating and looking for my own path and trying to find my bliss” and all of that. No, no: it’s happening from an entirely different kind of motivation—because people are in a state of collapse and implosion. And the pseudo-hero façade is not able to be kept up.
So it’s in this context now, where the anti-hero has to go through a real initiation to begin the journey, not of some heroic façade or pursuit that is external, and that brings about success and creativity and, you know, achievement as an artist, or a scientist, or a philosopher, or any of that—no—those options and channels are even no longer available for most. Now it has to be you find that core of strength, like Satprem found in the concentration camp, when you’re broken, when there’s nothing left to hold on to you find that core within you, or else you don’t, and you die.
But it’s that core that comes, not out of some blissful following your heart into Oz and the Emerald City—no, now you’re going to have to go down into the dregs of the ego’s subconscious horror and fight the real demons that have never been encountered fully before, because you could pacify them with various addictive processes and various processes of shock absorbers that could keep you going with money, and with drugs, and with alcohol, and with various other forms of amusement.
And as all of that drops away and one finds oneself having to face not only the loneliness, but the horror of not having cared for oneself, not having grown, not having developed strength and capacity to think, perseverance, and ability to deal with difficulty, and lack of food, and lack of shelter perhaps for many, and lack of many other kinds of support—and have to find their way in a world of strangers, and be a stranger in a strange land. Now we’re returning to those very ancient levels of the hero’s journey and that ancient future is forcing us to call up reserves of spiritual virtue and strength that we had not had to call on for a long time, and that has atrophied. And we have to, now, discover powers within us that we always thought were only Hollywood movie fake versions that were just for play, and now we have to test our courage for real.
So, the initiation has to bring us beyond—we don’t go into the belly of the whale as I was saying to someone before—we have to deal with the wailing of the belly. And we have to deal with our own ability because we haven’t developed that strength in the hara—even to commit harakiri, let alone to use that strength of the hara to be able to gut it out in difficult moments, but now are having to go all the way to ego death because nothing short of that will give us the strength that we need; it’s not in the ego.