The hero's journey is a well-known archetypal tale in mythology in which the hero breaks out of tribal consciousness and the warm embrace of mother nature, and forges an identity for himself as a self-conscious individual. This he does by achieving some great deed which often involves overcoming a fearsome monster. By differentiating himself from the mass he blazes a trail for the whole of humanity to follow. This is what we have been doing as a species throughout the period of recorded history and it has brought us to where we are now.
But we have reached the point at which the next step must be taken. This next step requires becoming aware of the transcendent spiritual world and entering it as the authentic individual we have become. We have to build the reality of the spiritual world into ourselves and not just be passive to it. However, this is a daunting process that requires courage and sacrifice if it is to be done properly and we are to become fully conscious spiritual beings as opposed to the largely natural ones we are at present.
We have to go to the Father and accept the responsibility of our sonship. However, what we currently appear to be doing is returning to the Mother, a state in which the individual is subsumed and there is no proper judgement or discrimination for all are equally valuable whatever their personal qualities might be. There is no better and no worse and anything that attempts to break free of this levelling down is condemned for disturbing the peace. It is a withdrawal from the differentiated state to an undifferentiated union.
Leftism represents the return to the Mother. It is a refusal of spiritual responsibility and a retreat to an infantile environment in which the hero is feared and denied his chance to grow because that would imperil the whole. The leftist preoccupations with equality and the state indicate its dislike of the free individual who dares to stand alone. This may seem far-fetched when you take leftism on its own terms and as a purely political movement but when you look beneath the surface at underlying motivations another story emerges.
Of course, this is not the whole story. The hero can become arrogant and selfish, proud of his achievements and dismissive of those who cannot match him or who he thinks cannot do so. It is then that he needs to learn lessons of humility and loving kindness, and to understand that, while human beings are far from equal, that is no cause for looking down on anyone since we truly are all the sons of daughters of God, all with the potential to become godlike.
But we cannot do that unless we first become full individuals. The hero must learn compassion but when you try to clip his wings and drag him back into the mass you disrupt the progress of humanity and return it to childhood.
7 comments:
@William - I see your point that Leftism is against heroism, and heroism is nearly always a masculine trait: the risking of a man for the good of his community; often in a military context or the 'emergency services' - but also the self-sacrificing dedication of the creative genius.
By contrast the archetypal woman risks herself in childbirth; and sacrificies her self-gratification (but seldom her life - because that would be self-defeating) for her children.
But actually I think you are giving way too much credit to Leftism to suggest it is a return to the Mother, or a return to anything else!
Leftism is only truly *against* - never truly 'for' anything positive. For example, the current 'trans' focus on 'gender' 'changes' is anti-Mother, surely - as is the same-sex-marriage business? The pro-women channel of Leftism, that dominated for a generation or so, was never truly pro-women (quite the contrary - at most it was pro- single childless female social activists) but merely a temporary expedient for attacking the validity of men and the masculine.
We're using Mother in different senses. I'm using it to refer to the early stage of absorption in (Mother) Nature, the infant stage of humanity where we are not separate from life but not fully individualised either. We are enveloped in Nature. You are using it as the Mormon sense I think, though I'm not really familiar with that, to refer to a spiritual principle of real motherhood (albeit it would be embodied in a person for you).
I see the Left as a perversion of the maternal principle while the right responds more to the masculine principle. Obviously the ideal is to combine them both in their higher aspects. The Left is feminine in original impulse, (caring etc) but a distortion of real femininity just as feminism is a distortion of true femininity. That's how I see things anyway. A bit simplistic perhaps but fundamentally correct I think.
I see Bruces's point. The Left is purely reactive. It has no program of its own but infallibly opposes goodness in whatever form it manifests. I worked in the media for many years and initially could not understand the mindset of the people around me until I realized this. To try to find an ideology or consistent principle on the Left is pointless. You will forever end in contradiction and confusion. But it is true that the Left will invoke "caring" as its raison d'etre, but not the personal caring of a mother for a child. "It takes a village," as Hilary Clinton famously intoned. But the village is the state and its power is invested in controlling, not caring or nurturing.
I see Bruce’s point too and I don’t disagree with it, but that’s describing how the left is manifesting here and now and how it’s used by the dark forces, the adversary, to damage human beings. But many people who respond to it on a naïve level as good do so because they are responding to the feminine principle of caring, loving, being kind to everyone equally etc. Everything, in my opinion, tends to truth or love which can be seen as the masculine and feminine faces of God, and the right is truth while the left is love - ideally The fact that these things are corrupted, perverted and hopelessly degraded doesn’t alter the reality of the initial impulse behind them.
What I am saying in the post is that leftism pulls one back to the security of the womb. That's why it's popular in an era that denies the Fatherhood of God.
There are two articles that I found intersting that, dovetail in a plausible manner in the way of shedding some light on the complexity of the landscape you are nicely covering. One is on the one cosmos blog under the title, cosmos and meta cosmos and human and meta human and the other one is on ecosophia blog under the title, the spiritual ecology of initiation. The first covers the Jewish left, as the originator of the left movement and the second that covers the greatness of the human. It is a qualified heroism in the path of god away from the perverted ways of the national state or other modern fabricated labels, such as left or right or conservative and liberal etc driving out the true divine labels of distinction thus throwing the world in such babel mess. Thank you for your efforts to redirect the way to its proper channel that of our obligations to god and not to any other entities. Knowing is a god obligation before being a social or a cultural obligation that is why we read in the Koran the story of the one who asked god why have you gathered me blind since I have been
in full sight during my earth stay, god told him, it is your negligence that made you forgot to read our signs in you and in your cosmos or reading them away from us, and therefore we are forgetting you now. It is really a subtle, delicate wonderful existence that despises those that have forgotten their divine obligations ,only to throw themselves and the world in this turmoil. The two narrative that complete each other. Nothing left unrecorded and each nation or individual will read their books. We talk of the black hole that misses nothing and forget the creator of the black holes. It is reading the physics and forget reading the spirit that originated that physics is behind all the crises we are facing only to remember that nothing is carried out outside his watchful eye that determine the beginning and judge the end. Watch out blunderers, the law of reversal is displaying its anti movement everywhere across our ill treated universe. It is future shocks.
It is true that the signs of God are everywhere if one looks with a clear heart and mind. God does not shout at us but he does speak to us in the world, in our hearts and through scripture.
As an addition to my comments above, I would say that the Left does, as Bruce and Edwin both point out, represent rebellion against natural order, that is its driving force. It is therefore part of the same phenomenon as the rebellion of Man against God (atheism) and Woman against Man (so called gender equality). But psychologically I think it can be seen as an assertion of feminine values over and above masculine ones even if it is a corruption and a distortion of these values as they truly are from the spiritual or even true material perspective.
Obviously masculine values can over-dominate feminine ones too which they do on the right when that becomes deformed and neglects intuition, compassion, concern for the environment etc.
It is against divine order which nature, in all its diversity, represents only part of that order. The most important part is humans consciousness that appreciate nature and what is behind. The tragedy raises its head when we remain at the surface with only the measurable seen. Thank you William.
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