Your article stirs up a lot of thought about what it means to be a hero and participant in a hero’s journey. As I see it, the monomyth describes an ideal or a formula for the hero’s journey, which is helpful for writing books, plays, and movie scripts. However, a human life is more complex than what we find in the monomythic formula and we often find several journeys within one lifetime, especially for those prone to adventure, such as soldiers, travelers, and sports participants. For someone setting out to kayak down a raging river, for example, we can track the adventure from the call to go, buying equipment, overcoming financial and job-related obstacles, getting on the river, meeting all sorts of dangers and obstacles, getting advice from experienced teachers, facing one’s fears, calling upon some hidden mental asset, and on and on until the adventure comes to an end. And then the same person can repeat a similar experience in another river or ocean.
What I find so magnificent about myth has to do with the way that it so often turns the attention away from the outer story so that we can take a good look at what we are and how our thoughts are shaped and the way they affect us. In this way, myth acts as metaphor, and each myth is a spiritual journey as much as it is a physical one.
Last year I wrote a book about the Buddha story as a metaphor. Siddhartha's journey is something that people can be inspired by. We can contrast this with the story of Jesus, which is very similar to that of Siddhartha, but the main difference is that people cannot relate to it very well, because it is not a hero's journey; it does not put the reader into the seat of the participant. While we can all aspire to be a Buddha, it is not okay to become the Christ. The Jesus story is convoluted, inconsistent, and has chunks of history missing. It is also copied in large part from other sources and cobbled together even though it has some key elements of the hero's journey. The Buddha story, though, has the entire formula of the hero's journey that ends not only with Siddhartha's transformation, but also a blueprint for our own transformation or awakening.
You wrote: “This monomyth is what we want our life to be like. We strive to be heroic in roughly that way…” But this is a superficial assessment at best. (I am not saying you see things superficially because it’s obvious to anyone who has read your writings that you are not.) A person looking, striving, to be a hero is missing the point. It is only when we have gone through the journey do we recognize its import and value in our sense of transcendence (not quite an accurate word, though).
I wouldn’t equate successful movie stars or business people with the heroes of the heroic journey, because the hero’s journey is a personal one that leads to a sense of change, growth, understanding, and realization. We have seen plenty, if not most, movie stars and business magnates simply fall into the pit of materialism. Some commit suicide and way too many are carried away by their out of control egos. Tom Cruise is perhaps one of the best examples; his journey left him without any compassion or humility, and instead of freeing his mind his mindset is mired in cultish thinking and abuse of others.
Thus, material (outer) success is not at all the marker of the hero’s journey. There have been several novelists who have given us not only the hero’s journey, but the sense of a spiritual success without focus on any material success. One that comes to mind is Somerset Maugham and his book The Razor’s Edge. In fact, in this novel, a protagonist with all the worldly benefits and riches most people would want gives up his life for spiritual enrichment and he is not materially rich by the end of his journey.
The hero’s journey is personal when it is our own journey. When it is the hero’s journey of myth or art, it is there to share with the world. Still even the personal hero’s journeys is in some sense universal in the way they work to turn the attention from the outer to the inner, from the objective to the subjective, so that in the end there is an epiphany or realization about oneself in relation to all else. And perhaps the “all else” becomes known as inseparable from the self.
Although he is often under attack by so many academics and religious leaders, the ultimate guide to the hero’s journey is still Joseph Campbell, because he understood myth and the journey from the psychological perspective that most people simply will not or cannot grasp. Listening to him over and over, and reading his books over the decades, it has become obvious to me that he was unequalled in his field for understanding what is so often overlooked or misunderstood. Without the metaphorical insight, the hero’s journey is no more than just an adventure or a series of incidents, like a legend or a folk tale. And the reason why so many movies fail is because the writer does not grasp the formula well enough to adhere to the hero’s journey, its value changes, and its psychological implications. Without a spiritual transformation, the hero’s journey cannot exist.
Lastly, we cannot create the hero’s journey for ourselves; it simply develops on its own by way of our own desire, experiences, suffering, overcoming adversity, facing oneself, success, and transformation.
