I'm very serious about this race between education and catastrophe. I'm very serious about the connection between critical thinking and consciousness. I'm very serious about dim sum and laughter and not taking this whole thing so very seriously.
We use “The Hero’s Journey” module in many of our programmes that focus on individual transformation. It’s based on Joseph Campell’s work on the monomyth, or the idea that there is a common archetypal structure to our hero mythologies, across world cultures and millenia. Using the lens of the monomyth we can examine stages and elements in our own journey of discovery, development and bold action.
In 1949, Campell, an autodidactic with an incredible journey of his own, published his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It launched comparative mythology as a field of study and has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists, including George Lucas in his Star Wars Trilogy. In fact, in 1986-87, over the final two summers of his life, Lucas hosted a six-part conversation between Joseph Campell and journalist Bill Moyers at his Skywalker Ranch in California around his core ideas and the ongoing role of mythology in scoeity. Aired in 1988 as Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth the insightful talks are available below on google video and highly recommended.
I found a track that I’d never heard before, from my favorite band. It’s that little bit extra when you thought you’d taken everything long ago. “Gagging Order” by Radiohead.
I recently trained at Solution 2009 in Vienna, co-delivering with my old friends from Emersense and some great new additions, forming as deep and diverse a learning platform as I’ve been a part of. My first session for the conference was meant to be a paradigm shift in understanding. It aimed to provide a guided tour to some of the big questions in existence, to the world outside of ourselves- something like this…
Only bigger… I wanted the participants to realise that their story was far larger, far more connected that they had possibly imagined. That their story was truly universal and loaded with everything that implies. The vast structure and interconnection that we are part of can seem so vague and unspecific. I wanted to get beyond that to a glimpse of a place that moves beyond the rational understanding of what is, and into the awe of what we are apart of- and even simply- what we are. Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, expresses it perfectly in his journey of realisation- offered as reflections at the close of the “Beyond Belief” conference in ’06.
(Start at 4:05)
And from this perspective, with these different kind of eyes, I attempted to bring the audience to reexamine our world- and indeed ourselves. Astrophysicist George Smoot gave a TED talk that had struck me powerfully, pulling back the veil to reveal the design in the universe, for those of us with the inclination to see it. I borrowed heavily from his models and presentations, although I expanded into our planet, our history and our singular moment of existence.
It is a hard-line to walk between George as Scientist and Neil as Storyteller, and I probably hit too full an explanation before moving into introspective reflection and the later half of the session. Yet for me this is not just a tool to inspire awe, it is some of the greatest truth we can know. It is not just a metaphorical story, but a literal one, more intricate and complicated than can be imagined. And it is because of the fragility of our imaginings that I wanted to bring this content to the rather unsuspecting audience. It was because we were about to engage in deep self-discovery, that it seemed even more important to be well rooted in the real; to see our story as part of what we know the greater story to be, to see our conception of self in the context of the structure of our greater identity, to see our subjective limits and absolutes in view of true universals.
As Ibn Arabi writes, “Perfect knowledge of Reality involves seeing with both eyes, the eye of reason and the eye of imagination”.
