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128 pages

English

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Genius is not some inherited trait bestowed upon some and denied others, but merely a habit of mind and emotion.
All we ever know is our mind’s best going with the information at hand. Truth is an illusion.

Joseph Campbell’s Monomythic Journey is an adventure into the realm of the mind to mitigate the discomfort of an adaptive challenge. Psychological barriers must be overcome before creativity can flourish. We’ll explore the cage of Mythlock that blinds us to new possibilities. We’ll see how Scapegoatism hijacks the emotional harbingers of the creative process and vents them through anger upon any handy external entity. We’ll confront the Threshold Guardians of fear that bar the threshold crossing and, if confidence is lacking, a Magic Amulet can ease the passage.

Our first trial across the Garden's threshold is the Looking Glass. Here we confront the unleashed emotions of guilt, regret and anger. Our emotions must be groomed because within the Garden of the Goddess, the realm of the human mind, negative emotions can breed monsters of the mind. A negative response can transform the Goddess into a Hag. A negative attitude towards our own sensuality can transform the Goddess of promise into a Seductice tempting us into sin and depravity. The climax of the Adventure is an encounter with the Goddess in all her splendour. Everything becomes clear and an answer is manifest in all its beauty and simplicity. But the Goddess always promises more. Beyond the Goddess lies the Stairway to the Stars. This is 'Nirvana'.

But the greatest challenge of all is yet to come. The exciting, and innovative ideas hatched within the realm of the mind are as nothing until they have passed through the Crucible of Reality. The real test of our Monomythic Adventure comes with the Return, when we take the Boon, those powerful insights we discovered within the Garden, and put them to actual use in the world of every day.

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The arts

General officer

Self-help

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Arts

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Publié par	AuthorHouse
Date de parution	27 avril 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798823007191
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

Living Happily Ever After
The reward of the Monomythic Journey
WILLIAM OLDFIELD

AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 833-262-8899

© 2023 William Oldfield. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/27/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-0718-4 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0720-7 (hc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0719-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023907954

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Contents
Preface
Frustration to Inspiration
I. The Creative Act
II. Our Mythic Heritage
III. The Monomythic Journey
IV. The Magic Door
Barriers to Creativity
V. Mythlock
VI. Scapegoatism
VII. Threshold Guardians
VIII. The Magic Amulet
Beyond the Magic Door
IX. Rescue from Without
X. The Garden of the Goddess
XI. The Looking Glass
XII. The Hag
XIII. The Seductrice
XIV. Meeting with the Goddess
XV. Stairway to the Stars
The Crucible of Reality
XVI. The Challenge of the Return
XVII. The Cassandra Syndrome
XVIII. The Castles of Ism
XIX. The Illusion of Truth
XX. The Magic Flight
XXI. Escape from Mythlock
XXII. Masters of Two Worlds

Bibliography
Preface
We live in an era of massive change on a global scale. In the last one hundred years, there have been more significant changes than in the preceding two thousand years. My father remembers running down the lane of the family farm just to watch a car go by. Now we can see thousands of cars on the freeway going nowhere during rush hour. Our cities are now powered by electricity. Soon we will be able to book a personal holiday into space to witness our cities light up at night. Above all, the invention of the computer chip has been revolutionary. Refrigerators can tell us when our milk supply is running low. Cars can drive themselves while we sleep. Cell phones connect people from all corners of the world, and they have become computers in our pockets.
In the last hundred years, the capitalist economy has created enormous wealth. The changes are endless and amazing, but change is disruptive and not totally good or equally beneficial to all. Unrestricted capitalism has allowed CEOs to move their manufacturing to countries with low wages to return with phenomenally inexpensive goods and phenomenally high returns for their investors. Meanwhile, once thriving cities are now inhabited by vacant, deteriorating factories and the lives of thousands of families have been disrupted. Many factories remain and are still booming. Instead of thousands of workers, there are only a few staff greasing the wheels and tending the robots.
Automation is marvelous. Robots can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and don’t take breaks, get sick, or want holidays in the summer. Meanwhile, the lives of thousands who lost their jobs are disrupted. And on top of that, the inequitable distribution of wealth continues to rise. Currently, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the richest 5% of Americans own two-thirds of the wealth. The most expensive cars fill the roads of our cities while a huge number of people work two jobs just to feed their families. Most governments, so far, have failed to make the cultural or economic changes necessary to rectify these inequities.
There is one area of significant change that is affecting most of us but without any major downside. This is the area of increasing knowledge about the human animal. Science and scholarly research are laying bare more of the realities of how humans function.
We have decoded the human genome, “a complete set of nucleic acid sequences, encoded as DNA within 23 chromosome pairs in the cell nuclei and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria”. I don’t even know what that all means, but it is a complete layout of nature’s plan for the creation of a human being. This knowledge promises great strides for the future of medicine. More relevant to the topic of this book is our ever-growing insight into child development, the processes by which a child grows from infancy through adolescence to adulthood.
We are all born into an established culture. As children, we learn enormously complicated concepts in record time. Like sponges, we absorb ideas from our environment to adapt and survive. But this is not reasoned learning. These are ideas and concepts imprinted emotionally in our minds that become the unconscious knowledge that guides us in life. These emotionally ingrained ideas are the perceptual patterns that give meaning to the raw data of our senses. What we see is what we know. Any sensory data that doesn’t fit is ignored as noise. We don’t even see it. The meaning derived from these perceptual patterns creates the normal, natural, cultural world that we adapted to and inhabit. It is here that we feel most comfortable.
As long as the world confirms our unconscious knowledge, we feel comfortable and at home. If the world changes or our unconscious understanding is challenged, we feel uncomfortable and threatened. Our discomfort prompts our emotions to tell the computer in our head to find out what’s going on. The brain races off and analyses the situation in light of all our knowledge and experience. When the brain returns with an answer, the emotions evaluate it. If the answer does not feel right, the brain runs off to try again. But, if it does feel right, an understanding is gained, and the discomfort is dispelled. Truth need not be an attribute of this understanding. Elimination of our discomfort is the objective.
The degree of discomfort depends upon the impact the changes impose on our lives. If minor discomfort arises, we merely seek an understanding so that we can stop thinking about the problem. By contrast, if angst and worry are tearing us apart, the question to the brain is like a scream for help. In response, the brain moves quickly to find an answer to the angst and anguish.
Unfortunately, any answer will do in a storm: “It’s those Jews hoarding all the money. It’s those blacks and queers destroying our culture. It’s those immigrants stealing our jobs.” For some men, “it’s women that are the cause of all our problems.” Finally, we understand, and the angst and torment become anger instead. Righteous anger feels so much better than helpless angst. In this way, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and racism provide convenient scapegoats for our problem, so angry hatred can mitigate our pain.
As a result, in times of disruptive change, we see a significant increase in acts of violence and hatred against innocent people. If we reject all scapegoats, our brain continues looking for the source of the problem and, if no answers feel right, we find no rescue. Desperate to end the dilemma, the brain suggests a final answer: “End it all”. Sadly, in times of disruptive change, there is a significant increase in the number of suicides. Such toxic solutions are failures of adaptation. In our current world of rapid and disruptive change, the chaos we experience around us is a product of this failure.
An alternative appears if we reject both scapegoats and suicide as ways to dissipate our angst. It occurs to us that we could try just learning to live with the problem. But shallow tolerance is so stressful that it too has major downsides. Not only does prolonged angst destroy our physical health, but it also makes the achievement of happiness impossible. Since happiness is the primary goal of life, there is only one solution: find an answer within our mind that mitigates the discomfort. We must make an exploratory journey into our mind, a realm of all possibilities, for the answer.
Just such a brave venture into one’s inner self is the topic of this book. In mythology, this inner trip is called the “Monomythic Journey”. In some areas of study, it’s called the “Adaptative Response” and in others the “Creative Act”. At its core, the adventure involves the rewiring of our existing mental patterns to incorporate new perspectives. This intense rebuilding process makes the inner journey a personal quest for peace of mind. It is necessarily a highly emotional experience.
Many years ago, I experienced such a transformation through a revelatory variety of the adaptive response. It began with a dramatic emotional event instigated by a crisis in my life. While the crisis, rejection in love, may appear trivial in hindsight, at the time it was not. I was young and in love and believed everything was perfect. Then my world fell apart. She left me. Life became empty and meaningless. There was no hope because she was not coming back. Then, out of a long and painful struggle to extract myself from my depression, I experienced a magical moment. Suddenly I broke out of my dark perceptual cage and my whole life flashed before my eyes. I imaginatively relived, in the reality of human emotional response, pivotal events in my life that had shaped me into the person I’d become, and I saw how my actions precipitated my girlfriend’s departure. Suddenly I understood what had happened and liberated from despair, found