What Is a Hero?
Life’s Aims and Games
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
—Carl Jung
Shamans stand at the head of a long lineage of extraordinary individuals who have lived, excelled, or loved so well that ordinary mortals have regarded them with awe or jealousy or both. These are humankind’s heroes, the healers, helpers, saints, or sages who exemplify our untapped potentials. Their lives have been immortalized in song, legend, and myth. Ordinary mortals have wondered and puzzled about them, venerated or even worshipped them, and often felt that they must be more than merely human, even when the heroes themselves made no such claims.
“Are you a God?” they asked the Buddha. “No,” he replied.
“Are you an angel, then?” “No.”
“Then what are you?”
Replied the Buddha, “I am awake.”344
We now have accounts of the heroes of diverse times and cultures and can therefore discern the common contours of their lives. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, did just this in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.44 Campbell identified life themes and stages and mapped these as “the hero’s journey.” While there are variations according to culture, historical period, and type of hero, the general contours and crises display common themes.
Shamans may be our earliest heroes, because the stages of their quest—their challenges, training, and triumphs—demonstrate these themes. Therefore, let us step back and examine the common characteristics of humankind’s greatest heroes from different centuries and cultures. From this panoramic perspective we can then identify universal goals, training, tests, and traps, as well as unique features of the shaman’s path.
TYPES OF HEROES
But first, we need to supplement Joseph Campbell’s scheme. For Campbell’s map, brilliant as it is, does not distinguish well between different types of heroes. He collected diverse accounts (legends, myths, biographies) of all types of heroes—such as warriors, healers, saints, and gods—and distilled the adventures and stages of life that all heroes pass through. Campbell’s genius lay in recognizing the unity behind diversity, the common thread that runs through these many lives, and in unifying them into a single grand story.
But this grand unification comes at a price and that price is the obscuring of differences. For while it is true that there are similarities between the journey of a saint and a warrior, there are also major differences, and Campbell tends to elevate them all to the same transcendent status.408
What Campbell gave us is a brilliant horizontal map that traces the development and life stages of the composite hero. To this we can add a vertical map of the different levels on which life’s aims and games are played. The vertical map enables us to distinguish among different types of heroes, to separate saints from warriors and sages from power seekers. We then have a scheme that allows us to recognize the universal—the stages common to all heroes—while at the same time acknowledging the particular—the different types and levels of life goals, games, and heroes. Different types of heroes reflect different types of games. We therefore need to examine the different types of games that people in general, and heroes in particular, can play in order to decide just what type of hero the shaman is.
The word “game” is a little tricky since it is often used to imply something trivial or frivolous. However, it can also refer to something far more significant; namely, choosing to confront meaningful challenges that test and hone our abilities as we strive for cherished goals. It is in this sense that the word is being used here.
Without meaningful games we languish in boredom and meaninglessness. In his book The Master Game, Robert DeRopp claims: “What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem, but games worth playing.” Therefore, he advises, “Seek, above all, for a game worth playing….Having found the game, play it with intensity—play as if your life and sanity depended on it (they do depend on it).”68
But there are games and there are games. Some are constructive, while others are ultimately destructive to both the individual and society, no matter how initially satisfying. Robert DeRopp offers incisive analyses of various games and points out that
life games reflect life aims and the games men choose to play indicate not only their type, but also their level of inner development….We can divide life games into “object” games and “meta” games. Object games can be thought of as games for the attainment of material things, primarily money and the objects which money can buy. Meta games are played for intangibles such as knowledge or the “salvation of the soul.”64
Object games aim for the concrete things of the world, especially for “the physical foursome” of money, power, sex, and status. Meta-games, on the other hand, are more subtle and aim for intangibles such as truth, beauty, or knowledge.
At the summit of these meta-games DeRopp places the Master Game: the quest for enlightenment, salvation, or awakening. This is the game played by sages across cultures and centuries. It is the game of exploring and mastering not the outer but the inner world of one’s own mind and consciousness. Its ultimate goal is no less than to recognize and dissolve into one’s true nature and to delight in the greatest of all possible discoveries: the ecstatic realization that this nature is inseparable from the Divine.
Different traditions express this in different ways but the message is clearly the same. In the great monotheistic traditions we find:
The kingdom of heaven is within you. (Jesus, Christianity)
Those who know themselves know their Lord. (Mohammad, Islam)
He is in all, and all is in Him. (Judaism)
Centuries earlier, similar words were already pouring from ecstatic Chinese practitioners:
Those who know completely their own nature, know heaven. (Mencius, Confucianism)280
In the depths of the soul, one sees the Divine, the One. (The Chinese Book of Changes)
Indian traditions also offer the same gift, the recognition that
Atman [individual consciousness] and Brahman [universal consciousness] are one. (Hinduism)
Look within, you are the Buddha. (Buddhism)392
But this raises a painfully obvious question: Why do most of us sleepwalk through life oblivious of our true nature? DeRopp explains that the basic idea underlying all the great religions
is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness…to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego. To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers; Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates.64
This emergence, reunion, and enlightenment are the aims of the Master Game. But although it has been taught for centuries by sages of all traditions, it remains much misunderstood and as DeRopp points out:
It still remains the most demanding and difficult of games, and in our society there are few who play. Contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world, concerns himself with outer, not inner space. But the Master Game is played entirely in the inner world, a vast and complex territory about which men know very little. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion; namely, that man’s ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of “waking sleep.”68
This then is the Master Game, perhaps the most profound and misunderstood of all games. How does this relate to shamanism? What I want to suggest is that, at their best, shamans were the earliest forerunners of the Master Game player. Alternately, one could say that shamans played the Master Game to the extent and depth they could in the ways allowed by their cultures and times. They were the first to systematically explore and cultivate their inner world and to use their insights and images for the benefit of their people.
To say that shamans were among our earliest Master Game players is not to claim, as some people do, that their techniques, experiences, and states of consciousness were identical to those of the saints and sages who followed them thousands of years later. No, the Master Game has evolved over millennia, sparking, molding, and reflecting the evolution of human consciousness.
Later we will examine how this game evolved. For now it is enough to suggest that some early shamans were, as Ken Wilber put it, “the true Heroes of the times, and their individual and daring explorations in transcendence could only have had a truly evolutionary impact on consciousness at large.”408
Having decided that shamans at their best were, and are, Master Game players, we can now examine the common features of this game and the ways it plays out in the stages of the hero’s journey. Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces traces the development of the composite hero: the warrior, ruler, and lover, as much as the Master Game-playing shaman, saint, or sage. Since we are concerned with the latter group, this account draws deeply and gratefully on Campbell’s, but also differs from it in several ways.
The Master Game commonly progresses through five major stages. These are:
1) The hero’s early conventional life
2) The call to adventure and awakening
3) Discipline and training
4) Culmination of the quest, and
5) The final phase of return and contribution to society.
Conventional Slumber
The normal adjustment of the average, common-sense, well-adjusted man implies a continued successful rejection of much of the depths of human nature.
—Abraham Maslow 225
At first the hero slumbers unreflectively within the conventions of society like the rest of us. To a large extent, the culture’s conventional beliefs are accepted as reality, its morals deemed appropriate, its limits seen as natural. This is the developmental stage of conventionality, where most of us languish unquestioningly throughout our lives.
Conventionality is an essential stage on life’s journey, but it can be a stopping point or a stepping-stone. Since our culture rarely recognizes further possibilities, most people settle here and die here. But if there is one point on which Master Game players agree, it is that though conventionality may be a necessary stage of life, it is definitely not the highest.
In fact, the conventional way of being and state of mind are considered as suboptimal, clouded, and inauthentic. In Asia, this clouded state is described as maya, illusion, or like a dream. In the West, existentialists describe it as automation conformity, everydayness, or inauthenticity, while psychologists label it as a shared hypnosis, a collective trance, or “the psychopathology of the average.” Whatever its name, the painful implication is that most of us sleepwalk through life, ignorant of our potentials, and unaware of our trance because we are born into it, we all share it, and because we live in the biggest cult of all: cult-ure.
The hero’s task is to go beyond these conventional limitations. This task involves more than simply reacting against social norms in blind countercultural defiance. Rather, it requires facing the inner fears and outer social sanctions that constrain and cripple our capacities, growing beyond conventional developmental stages, and realizing the fullness of our potential. This requires recognizing and awakening from the collective trance that is the source and sustainer of conventional beliefs and limits. Only in this way can the hero effectively help others to awaken.
One aspect of this awakening is “detribalization.”213 This is the process by which a person matures from a limited tribal perspective to a more universal one.e Such a person no longer wholly looks at life through his or her limiting and distorting biases, but rather begins to recognize, question, and correct them. In fact, this correction of cultural biases is one of the hero’s great gifts. However, before this can succeed, many other tasks must be accomplished, and the first of these is to respond to “the call.”
THE CALL TO ADVENTURE AND AWAKENING
At some point the hero’s conventional slumber is challenged by a crisis, an existential confrontation that calls previous beliefs and ways of life into question. The call can come from within or without. Outer physical crises may take the form of sickness, as with some shamans; a confrontation with sickness in others, as with the Buddha; or suddenly staring death in the face.
An inner call may take the form of a powerful dream or vision, as with some shamans, or of a deep heartfelt response to a new teacher or teaching. It may also emerge more subtly as “divine discontent”: a growing dissatisfaction with the pleasures of the world or a gnawing question about the meaning of life. No matter how this challenge arises, it reveals the limits of conventional thinking and living, and urges the hero beyond them. In our culture, this may appear as an existential or midlife crisis. Tragically, the deeper causes and questions of the crisis are rarely recognized, its potentials rarely fulfilled, and one of life’s great opportunities is then missed.
As Jesus said, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Indeed, few choose to even recognize the call. And no wonder! For those who hear the call now face a terrible dilemma. They must choose whether to answer the call and venture into the unknown realms of life to which it beckons, or deny the call and retreat into their familiar cocoon. If the call is denied then there is little choice but to repress the message and its far-reaching implications. Only by such repression can non-heroes fall again into the seductive, anesthetic comforts of conventional unawareness, suppress the sublime, and sink into what the philosopher Kierkegaard so aptly called “tranquilization by the trivial.” The result is a life of unconsciousness and conformity, which existentialists call inauthentic living and alienation.
But the call never really goes away. It lurks forever in the unconscious, alienated and repressed, but periodically sending into awareness bubbles of vague dissatisfaction and disease that demand still more defenses and distraction.f No wonder that a potential shaman who refuses the call is said to be at risk of sickness or insanity.
If the call is answered, then the hero’s life must be reoriented and reordered. For if the purpose of the life has changed, then so too must one’s priorities. What fosters growth is valued, what hinders it is discarded, and much that previously seemed valuable can now seem irrelevant. Renunciation may appear natural and appropriate. For if one is leaving family and home in order to find a teacher, possessions may seem more like hindrances than valuables. Indeed, the Latin term for baggage was impedimenta, from which we derive our word impediments. Many great spiritual heroes—Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Shankara—have been penniless wanderers who relinquished everything in their single-minded quest for awakening.
DISCIPLINE AND TRAINING
For the next phase a teacher is essential, and so the search for one begins. Then as DeRopp points out:
The would-be player of the Master Game encounters at the outset one of the most difficult tests in his career. He must find a teacher who is neither a fool nor fraud and convince that teacher that he, the would-be pupil, is worth teaching. His future development depends largely on the skill with which he performs this task.64
Sometimes the teacher may be internal. The hero may find an inner guide, guru, or spirit, and this is particularly common among shamans. Even then, an external teacher is invaluable.
The teacher’s job is to assess the would-be hero and then tailor a training program to fit his or her personality and development stage. This program will inevitably include at least some of the seven central practices and may involve physical, spiritual, and social disciplines, some of them of extraordinary severity. Physical disciplines develop will and disrupt the ordinary physiology and state of mind, thereby opening the mind to new possibilities. These disciplines include fasting, sleep deprivation, physical exertion, or exposure to extremes of heat or cold. Spiritual practices may involve meditation, yoga, ritual, or prayer, often combined with periods of quiet and solitude. Social disciplines may include compassionate service to cultivate generosity or menial tasks to instill humility.
The intensity with which some students have practiced these disciplines is remarkable. Prolonged starvation, exposure to arctic conditions, and days without sleep have been common fare for the more ascetic Master Game players. Indeed, extreme but unsuccessful players have sometimes starved and frozen themselves to death.
Whatever the method, the aim is the same. It is to work with body, heart, and mind so as to reduce the compulsions of greed and fear, to strengthen capacities such as will and wisdom, and to cultivate emotions such as love and compassion. In short, it is to develop the seven essential qualities of heart and mind.
THE CULMINATION OF THE QUEST
The study of virtue and vice must be accompanied by an inquiry into what is false and true of existence in general and must be carried by constant practice throughout a long period…at last in a flash, understanding of each blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its power to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light.
—Plato 288
For successful players, years of discipline culminate in life-changing breakthroughs. These may take the form of visions, insights, or experiences of death and rebirth. There may be a sense of dissolving into the Absolute, a union with Spirit, God, or the Tao. The potential experiences are numerous and the names many: salvation and satori, enlightenment and liberation, moksha and wu, fana and Ruach Hakodesh, death and rebirth, to name but a few. But whatever the name, the result is similar: a realization of one’s deeper nature and a resultant self-transformation. For Master Game players, such breakthroughs represent their life goal.
RETURN AND CONTRIBUTION
The holy man goes to the lone tipi and fasts and prays. Or he goes into the hills in solitude. When he returns to men, he teaches them what the Great Mystery has bidden him to tell.
—Sioux Indian 61
With the great quest complete, the seeker has become a knower, the student a sage, the pupil a potential teacher. But there is one more phase before the journey is complete: return and contribution. With one’s own questions answered, the world’s confusion begs for clarification; with one’s own suffering relieved, the pain and sorrow of the world cry for healing. The desire to contribute becomes compelling, and the direction of the journey now reverses. Whereas one had formerly turned away from society and into one’s self, now the hero turns back to society and out into the world.
There are numerous metaphors for this return. In Plato’s parable, after escaping from the cave, the hero reenters it to help others make their escape. In the famous “Ten Oxherding Pictures” of Zen, which portray in exquisite images the stages of spiritual life, in the tenth and final picture, the enlightened one “enters the marketplace with help bestowing hands.” In shamanism, novices first tame their spirits and then use them for the benefit of their tribe. For Christian mystics, this return is the final stage of the “spiritual marriage” with God—the stage of “fruitfulness of the soul.” After the mystic has united with God, this spiritual marriage bears fruit for humankind as the mystic reenters the world to heal and help. In doing so, the mystic
accepts the pains and duties in the place of the raptures of love; and becomes a source, a “parent” of fresh spiritual life….This forms that rare and final stage in the evolution of the great mystics, in which they return to the world which they forsook; and live, as it were, as centers of transcendental energy….Hence something equivalent to the solitude of the wilderness is an essential part of mystical education. But, having established that communion, re-ordered their inner lives upon transcendent levels—being united with their Source not merely in temporary ecstasies, but in virtue of a permanent condition of the soul, they were impelled to abandon their solitude; and resumed, in some way, their contact with the world in order to become the medium whereby that Life flowed out to other men. To go up alone into the mountain and come back as an ambassador to the world has ever been the method of humanity’s best friends.375
This fruitfulness of the soul is the final stage of the Master Game player’s life cycle, a cycle that the historian Arnold Toynbee called “withdrawal and return.”371 These heroes withdraw from society to wrestle with the fundamental questions of life, find insights and inspiration within their own depths, and then return to help, heal, and teach.
This is one form of the hero’s journey. It is a journey that has been played out over countless years in countless cultures. Its greatest players, the saints and sages, have been said to represent the fullest flowering of humanity and to have given the greatest gifts to society. So at least said the historian Toynbee, the philosophers Bergson, Schopenhauer, and Nietzche, as well as the psychologists James, Maslow, and Wilber.
Of course the spiritual hero’s journey can be, and usually is, played out less fully and dramatically. Many set out on the path but few attain the greatest heights. Nor do the “stages of the soul”246 always constitute a single great circle of withdrawal and return. Rather, the journey may consist of a series of circles like a spiral in which one returns again and again, but each time to a higher vantage point.
Fortunately, the hero’s journey is not limited to saints and sages. It is available to us all to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the sincerity and intensity with which we undertake it.
Let us return to the earliest heroes—the shamans—and see to what extent their lives correspond to this universal template.