Music as mystical Journey: A call from the Soul and beyond

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Towards the Sacred Union: The Mystical Journey of the Soul

He and his wife Teresa live in the Sierra foothills in Northern California. I find it hard to realize the stage of the infinite as a finite being, and look forward to it, wherever I may land on that continuum. What's important to me is the knowledge brought by all the Manifestations that it exists, that the soul is ever-progressing and eternal, and of course this means has a specific purpose both in this world and the next, to my way of understanding. Finding that purpose is where reason the Rational Soul takes over, hopefully.

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The Four Stages on Our Mystical Journey

Your email address will solely be used for delivering the latest articles to you and absolutely nothing else. The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the official views of the Baha'i Faith The official website of the Baha'i Faith is: Continue with Facebook or. To put you in touch with a Baha'i in your area who can answer your questions, we would like to kindly ask for a few details about yourself: But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond the woman , surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.

In this step the hero must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in his life. In many myths and stories this is the father, or a father figure who has life and death power. This is the center point of the journey. All the previous steps have been moving into this place, all that follow will move out from it. Although this step is most frequently symbolized by an encounter with a male entity, it does not have to be a male; just someone or thing with incredible power. But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.

One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic pollen charms or power of intercession he is protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one's faith must be centered elsewhere Spider Woman, Blessed Mother ; and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis—only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same.

The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands—and the two are atoned.

This is the point of realization in which a greater understanding is achieved. Armed with this new knowledge and perception, the hero is resolved and ready for the more difficult part of the adventure. The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what the hero went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to prepare and purify the hero for this step, since in many myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.

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What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. Its guardians dare release it only to the duly proven.

Having found bliss and enlightenment in the other world, the hero may not want to return to the ordinary world to bestow the boon onto his fellow man. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet or the ten thousand worlds. But the responsibility has been frequently refused. Even Gautama Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated, and saints are reported to have died while in the supernal ecstasy.

Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being. Sometimes the hero must escape with the boon, if it is something that the gods have been jealously guarding. It can be just as adventurous and dangerous returning from the journey as it was to go on it. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.

This flight may be complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion. Just as the hero may need guides and assistants to set out on the quest, often he or she must have powerful guides and rescuers to bring them back to everyday life, especially if the person has been wounded or weakened by the experience. That is to say, the world may have to come and get him.

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. He would be only there. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the door. The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life, and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world. Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.

Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided" The hero returns to the world of common day and must accept it as real.

This step is usually represented by a transcendental hero like Jesus or Gautama Buddha. For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and spiritual. The person has become comfortable and competent in both the inner and outer worlds. The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest.

The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity.

Mastery leads to freedom from the fear of death, which in turn is the freedom to live. Be sure that nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form. The monomyth concept has been popular in American literary studies and writing guides since at least the s. Vogler's memo was later developed into the late s book, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. George Lucas ' Star Wars was notably classified as monomyth almost as soon as it came out.

A Fire in the Mind Larsen and Larsen, , pages on this topic. In this interview, Lucas states that in the early s after completing his early film, American Graffiti , "it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with A Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classical motifs" p.

Chapter Five—The Journey Was Worth It!—Betrothal and Spiritual Marriage

Yeats , [27] C. Lewis , [28] and J. Tolkien , [29] Seamus Heaney [30] and Stephen King , [31] among many others. The abuse and psychological trauma Jane receives from the Reeds as a child cause her to develop two central goals for her to complete her heroine journey: A need to love and be loved and her need for liberty. Reed for treating her poorly as a child, obtaining the freedom of her mind. As Jane grows throughout the novel she also becomes unwilling to sacrifice one of her goals for the other. When Rochester, the temptress in her journey, asks her to stay with him as her mistress she refuses as it would jeopardize the freedom she struggled to obtain.

She instead returns after Rochester's wife passes away, when she becomes free to marry him and able to achieve both of her goals and complete her role in the Hero's Journey. Since Jane is able to marry Rochester as an equal and through her own means this makes Jane one of the most satisfying and fulfilling heroines in literature and in the heroine's journey.

Use of the frame tale puts both the story teller and reader into the novel as characters, which explores a main aspect of the hero's journey due to it being a process of tradition where literature is written and read. Psyche's place within the hero's journey is fascinating and complex as it revolves around her characteristics of being a beautiful woman and the conflict that arises from it. Psyche's beauty causes her to become ostracized from society as no male suitors will ask to marry her as they feel unworthy of her seemingly divine beauty and kind nature.

Due to this, Psyche's call to adventure is involuntary as her beauty enrages the goddess Venus, which results in Psyche being banished from her home. Psyche is given four seemingly impossible tasks by Venus in order to get her husband Cupid back: The Sorting of the seeds, the fleecing of the golden rams, collecting a crystal jar full of the water of death, and retrieving a beauty creme from Hades. Yet, Psyche is able to achieve each task and complete her ultimate goal of becoming eternal and going to Mt. Olympus to be with her husband Cupid finishing her heroine's journey.

According to Northup , mainstream scholarship of comparative mythology since Campbell has moved away from "highly general and universal" categories in general. Consentino , who remarks "It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a Joseph Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor. Others have found the categories Campbell works with so vague as to be meaningless, and lacking the support required of scholarly argument: Crespi , writing in response to Campbell's filmed presentation of his model, characterized it as "unsatisfying from a social science perspective.

Campbell's ethnocentrism will raise objections, and his analytic level is so abstract and devoid of ethnographic context that myth loses the very meanings supposed to be embedded in the 'hero. The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism They present this as an American reaction to the Campbellian monomyth. The "American Monomyth" storyline is: A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

The monomyth has also been criticized for focusing on the masculine journey. The Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend , by Valerie Estelle Frankel, both set out what they consider the steps of the female hero's journey, which is different from Campbell's monomyth. While Frank Herbert 's Dune on the surface appears to follow the monomyth, this was in fact to subvert it and take a critical view, as the author said in , "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: Much better [to] rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.

Science fiction author David Brin in a Salon article criticized the monomyth template as supportive of "despotism and tyranny", indicating that he thinks modern popular fiction should strive to depart from it in order to support more progressivist values. In narratology and comparative mythology , others have proposed narrative patterns such as psychoanalyst Otto Rank in and anthropologist Lord Raglan in Both have lists of different cross-cultural traits often found in the accounts of heroes, including mythical heroes. Poet Robert Bly , Michael J. Meade , and others involved in the men's movement have also applied and expanded the concepts of the hero's journey and the monomyth as a metaphor for personal spiritual and psychological growth, particularly in the mythopoetic men's movement.

Characteristic of the mythopoetic men's movement is a tendency to retell fairy tales and engage in their exegesis as a tool for personal insight. Using frequent references to archetypes as drawn from Jungian analytical psychology , the movement focuses on issues of gender role , gender identity and wellness for modern men. Among its most famous advocates were the poet Robert Bly , whose book Iron John: The mythopoetic men's movement spawned a variety of groups and workshops, led by authors such as Bly and Robert L.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see The Hero's Journey disambiguation.

The road of trials The meeting with the goddess Woman as temptress Atonement with the father Apotheosis The ultimate boon. Trial and quest Death Descent into the underworld. The road of trials The vision quest The meeting with the goddess The boon. Tests, allies and enemies Approach to the inmost cave The ordeal Reward.

Refusal of the return The magic flight Rescue from without The crossing of the return threshold Master of two worlds Freedom to live. Resurrection and rebirth Ascension, apotheosis, and atonement. The magic flight The return threshold The master of two worlds. The road back The resurrection Return with the elixir. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

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History Through Literature Project. University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original on 18 January In Quest of the Hero". In Quest of the Hero. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. Princeton University Press, And then and too the trivials! Say no more about it! Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality. Foreword by John Collier. The myth is obviously related to what one might call the monomyth of paradise regained that has been articulated and transformed in a variety of ways since the early European explorations.

Qabalah of 50 Gates.