How to liberate your dragon
I recently watched the new Star Wars flick, The Rise of Skywalker. It’s the final chapter of the sequel trilogy. I did enjoy the movie, though it started to show a cheesy sheen that reminded me of the prequel trilogy. Regardless, in spite of what twelve-year-old Andrew used to think, the value of the movies is not truly in the literal outer wrapping, it’s in the depth of the mythological basis upon which the stories rest. This newest Star Wars trilogy, like the original three movies, can be taken one of two ways: literally or understood as a metaphor.
Literally, the original Star Wars movies can be seen as a story of some dude who is supposed to collect moisture for a living getting told he is some sort of ancient mage-type character who learns how to control magic without becoming corrupted by the power. It features cool space ships, a villainous empire, impossible laser swords, and a bunch of weird aliens who are vaguely humanoid. The hero of the story, Luke Skywalker, is tempted by the dark side, but ultimately denies it, leaving the door open for daddy Vader to intervene, save his son, and put an end to the Empire forever. It’s a story that just makes one feel good. That is a literal interpretation.
Metaphorically, though… it’s no secret that Star Wars follows the mythological framework known as the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist, wrote a book called The Hero With A Thousand Faces, based on his research into all of the different stories and mythologies that he found around the world. Comparing them all, he came up with the idea of the Monomyth, or the Hero’s Journey. Basically, it’s the story arc that most stories follow, and from that arc, something of value about the human condition can be gleaned. While George Lucas was crafting the story of Star Wars, he studied the book, was in contact with Joseph Campbell, and received some instruction on how to write the script.
When I learned this in my early twenties, I decided that I was going to get myself a copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It was recommended by a bunch of writers who ‘knew’ stories. I even found this book, called The Writer’s Journey, which brought it more in line with the writer’s process. But all that didn’t really matter - I barely understood what the hell any of it meant when I first started.
I mean, sure, I kind of grasped the little graphic that showed the hero starting in the mundane world, traveling into the unknown, and returning with the boon. But how would one transfer knowledge of that idea into something created from his own hand?
One of the recurring themes when it comes to writing is that we need to ‘write what we know.’ Writers offer this sage advice to budding authors, commanding them not to draw on some imagined ideas, but to actually bring their own experience into the process of creation. But I had never experienced anything like what happens in the stories - I was still young and untested. I had not set off on my own journey of self-discovery.
Because that’s what the Hero’s Journey is all about - it’s about capital ‘S’ Self-discovery. It’s a path that is open to all of us, and that path is completely our own. No one else can live our lives for us - we have to do it ourselves. And what we are all unconsciously heading towards is a similar thing.
I’m going to bring up the one of the dirtiest three letter words in our current Western vocabulary - God. I used to hate the idea with a passion, mostly because my familiarity with the notion was tied up in the conventional literal interpretations of the Bible that so much of modern Christian thought is rife with. To most people, religious ideas involve the literal. There was a literal Garden of Eden out of which humans were cast, there was a literal snake, there is a literal red-arsed devil and an eternal hell. That is the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of God.
And then there is Eastern theology. One of my favourite philosophers, Alan Watts, said that in Western society, if someone went around saying that they were God, they would be thrown in the loony bin, because we don’t burn heretics at the stake any more. He said that if people did that in India, they would be told, ‘oh, it’s excellent that you finally found out.’
When I looked at guys like Ram Dass, who went to India in the 60s and 70s and found God there, I remember thinking that, ‘damn, dude must have done a lot of LSD.’ I mean, that was the easy way to dismiss the religious experience as some drug-addled fantasy. It was certainly a little more difficult to do than the way I used to dismiss Christianity. At least he seemed genuine about it. Many Christians I knew were inculcated with literal interpretations from an early age and the reasoning behind belief always came back to some circular logic, rather than an admission of a personal mystical experience of the divine.
Again, you were supposed to bow down to the Church’s authority. That personal mystical shit would have gotten you burned at the stake!
So, here I was, in my early twenties, a devoted atheist and a guy who wanted to figure out how and what to write. I was deeply unhappy, drinking my face off, and barely holding on to my sanity. I thought I was going to break, and then providence arrived in the form of a story told by a woman named Amber Lyon who had found relief by engaging in ayahuasca therapy in Peru.
The cosmology of the Shipibo tribe, a shaman from which actually gave me ayahuasca in Peru, is an animistic one. They believe that everything is alive and has a spirit, to some degree. Their traditions are mostly oral, and though I do not consider myself an expert (at all), it is my understanding the majority of their own transmission of the mystical does not come in the form of the written word, but rather in the direct experience of the divine through interaction with ayahuasca and other shamanic methodologies. Essentially, they say, ‘don’t take my word for it, have a drink.’
They certainly do that with desperate Westerners who come seeking answers, anyway.
It’s a pretty trite idea that the direct experience of God is something which is earth-shattering. It’s completely paradigm-shifting. The person who went into the experience does not come out of it the same. It was certainly the case with me. I mean, all of that stuff that I had been denying had suddenly hit me square in the face. It wanted me to change. And it gave me my very own prescription for how to effect that change.
The changes do not seem like much. I became a kinder person, more interested in the welfare of my friends and family. I became more interested in things that went beyond the usual mix of eating, sleeping, and perhaps a little physical companionship with the opposite sex. I gave up these attachments: I stopped drinking, I stopped carousing. I started to find out that the things that made me lastingly happy had nothing to do with simple pleasures, and everything to do with hard work upon projects with deep value to me. Like writing.
It’s said that art imitates life and life imitates art. Like many ideas with spiritual depth, there is a surface understanding and the understanding that comes with experiential knowledge, i.e. wisdom. As I continued to live my life after my experiences in Peru, I started to see the parallels that existed between my life and the framework of the Hero’s Journey. I started to think, ‘wait a minute, now I’m starting to get it. This has some deeper meaning.’
But it’s not a meaning that can be transmitted through words. I can’t truly express what the Hero’s Journey means beyond some rehashing of the same thing that Joseph Campbell wrote about (and who was definitely much more qualified to do so). But what I can say is that the meaning came through my own experience. I couldn’t define any meaning until I started to have meaning myself.
One of Campbell’s oft-quoted phrases is that life itself doesn’t have any meaning. We have meaning and we bring it to life. Again, this is easily dismissed as some quasi-mystical gobbledygook, but with out own life experience, we can start to understand what is meant to be communicated.
I think that what Alan Watts said about spirituality in the Western world is telling. He said that coming to a realization of self as God would have gotten us burned at the stake as heretics in the early days of our culture. Heresy is a belief or opinion completely at odds with the orthodox one. It is going against the grain. It is choosing one’s own path, one of rebellion.
If we look at Star Wars as a modern myth, something akin to a religious story, then we can start to understand why it developed here, in our Western culture. Campbell said that one of the purposes of myth is to provide clues to help us along our own paths. And here are just a few clues that I picked up.
One: the heroes of the story are called the Rebels. They are rebelling against the Empire, which is a stand-in for orthodoxy of opinion. What the neighbours think, made enormous. I note that in the latest movie, the final line that the Emperor says to Rey, when he thinks he is about to triumph is: “Let your death be the final word in the story of rebellion.”
Throughout the Star Wars tales, the heroes are guided by the Force, some unnameable power which is really just a stand in for God. Plenty of people are deemed nuts for claiming that they are communicating with God, so discernment is difficult. But it is something that we can learn (the Hindus have a name for this discernment - viveka). General Leia says, “Don’t tell me what things look like. Tell me what they are.” She refers to the illusory nature of apparent reality, the Hindu concept of maya or the work of Satan the Great Deceiver, depending on your particular mythological flavour. Finn says, “The Force brought us here. It’s real. I wasn’t sure then, but I am now.”
Finn speaks of the difficulty on the path, the doubts, the uncertainties. It very much can seem that everything that we go through in coming to our own nature is a crock of shit, that reality could not possibly have anything to do with the experience of the transcendent that is starting to bleed in at the edges. As the miracles within our own lives multiply, we start to think, ‘hold the Jesus phone, what the fuck is going on?’ (Well, maybe you wouldn’t put it so colourfully or blasphemously).
Is there an end to the road? What is the apotheosis of the Hero’s Journey? Well, if you look once more to Star Wars, the forces of the Sith are conquered. What is left is a happy ending. But everyone knows that happy endings are bullshit - they do not exist in real life!
I suppose it depends on how you define happiness. If we expect that it’s just a state of blissed-out reprieve that goes on forever, well, I think that we might have missed the point of the story. Joseph Campbell said that the happy ending is not to be read as a contradiction but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of mankind. What is the tragedy, then?
If I had to define the tragedy, I would just use a word: ignorance. There is no good and evil in this world, only ignorance and clarity. Even the most depraved psycho killers are only ever ignorant. Animals are plenty perverse in the way that some kill for sport and do things that, if a human engaged in them, we would call base and cruel. The transcendence is one of the purely animal life, into one that has a spiritual cast to it.
I used to think that people who believed in God were stupid. The truth is that I was ignorant about what God actually is, that I had simply bought into the Western traditional literal interpretation of deity and thought that that was it. In my mind, older cultures believed in God because they didn’t have science - that was the only reason. I thought I was secure in my ivory tower of rational thought, depressed though I was. And then came the wrecking ball of understanding.
If you pay attention to the myths, it’s always the little guy/gal and his friends against the hegemonic force. Luke Skywalker and his friends against the Empire. Jesus and his friends against the Jewish Establishment / Roman Empire. Theseus and Ariadne against King Minos, the minotaur, and the labyrinth. Frodo and his friends against Sauron and Mordor.
There are a couple of things I take from that - first, it is always important to have friends in the fight. We are never alone - we are only as strong as we are unified. “Alone, never have you been.” So sayeth Yoda! Second, it is always going to seem like you are swimming against the tide - again, see heresy reference above. But what tide?
All of this stuff happens internally. It’s why a metaphorical understanding is the one that has value. What we glean from a myth is always dictated by where we are in our own voyages towards self-understanding. In the early days, chances are it’s going to be literal. In the later days, if you are choosing to walk your path, if you are saying ‘yes’ to life, then you are going to start to get some meta understandings of what is going on.
As I proceeded down my own path, guided by my own heart and denying things that only seemed real, my own final moment came. My own mythological showdown with the Sith, I had two options before me: I could finally and totally give in to the idea of the transcendent as being the real deal, or I could fall back on my life of looking to popular opinion as to the nature of reality as the truth. But I had seen enough - I had decided that I could place all of my chips on something transcendent, despite all of the apparent odds against it.
I say sometimes that at that moment I made the last real choice that I ever had to make, and it’s true. I mean, choice still occurs, but it’s not guided by anything but that thing to which I sacrificed all that I was. There’s no uncertainty, even during periods of uncertainty (and there still are periods of uncertainty). Everything that I do is what I’m supposed to be doing because I’m doing it. I couldn’t really do anything but that. And that includes the full palette of human emotions, which includes, like I said, uncertainty.
I was speaking with someone I love yesterday about this very topic. I said to her, ‘you know, it’s just a ride. As far as I’m concerned, liberation (I said enlightenment, but same same) doesn’t mean anything besides being aware that it’s a ride.’ How much freer can you get than that understanding? Alan Watts once said that there is no such thing as a mistake, but the appearance of a mistake exists and it’s a necessary part of the process.
If spirituality is pursued as an end in itself, chances are we are never going to get to the ultimate realization we so desperately crave. Consider it a systemic failsafe, a demand that we find our own paths before we can actually understand what it means to be of service to something greater than us. I mean, just look at the Buddha - he lived as a sannyasi, a renunciate, for ages until he finally gave up on giving up.
It was at that moment that liberation arrived. He realized that he was fighting against himself. Kylo Ren, a part of the dyad of himself and Rey, sacrifices himself to save Rey. Jesus gave in to his sacrifice. Odin hung himself from Yggdrasil - there is always an element of sacrifice. But what is being sacrificed? What do we give up in order to transcend the tragedy?
All that shit that’s not us. It only seems like a sacrifice, but really it’s just casting off the unreal. The dark side only seems like it is an insurmountable force. It might have a million billion Death Star ships arrayed in the skies above the Sith homeworld, ready to seize control of the universe, but no matter what, it cannot beat the light side. As long as we cleave to the light, we can and will prevail.
If you think it’s fucked up to be comparing one’s self to the Buddha or to Jesus or to characters from a made up story, I would implore you to consider perhaps that each of those stories are made for each of us. It’s up to us to glean our own meaning. Like Qui-Gonn says to Rey in her final moments before liberation of the galaxy, “Every Jedi who ever lived, lives in you.”
So, what then? After the realization of Self, what comes next? Well, next comes the passing of the torch. Obi-Wan, the realized Jedi, is there at the beginning of Luke’s journey - he’s the one who gives him Anakin’s lightsaber and teaches him about the Force. According to Joseph Campbell, there is a return of ‘the boon’ to the community. Artists create art and teachers teach. Gurus guru. Mythmakers create myths. The affairs of the spirit flow back into the community, cloaked in something that secretly (and not-so-secretly) speaks to the human soul.
But the point is never to tell, to force a predetermined understanding upon someone else (and if it is, I would be wary of the source). All I’m trying to do with my writing is to share my own experience - take from it what you will. Campbell said that the purpose of a teacher is to show the student how to find the vitality within themselves. The trickster guru is a common trope. The actual root of the word education is the Latin educere. It means ‘to draw out.’
So maybe reflect on these ideas the next time you’re reading a book or watching a movie. And what do you know, my own debut novel, my first crack at communicating the incommunicable (it definitely follows the Hero’s Journey), The Yoga of Strength: Book One of The Yoga Trilogy, is on sale right between April 1 - 7 on the Amazon US and Amazon UK stores, and you can read it for free on Kindle Unlimited. You can get a copy here.
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments, I would love to hear them! There’s a box below just for that purpose.