Greece and the mind of the Hero
A.I. Odysseus - we have to wait until 2026 for the real thing.
Greek mythology is full of stories in which men become heroes by impressing the Gods with acts of courage and endurance.
One particularly famous hero was Odysseus, who fought the Trojan army for ten years and then battled with supernatural forces for another ten years before finally arriving home.
This became the template for the idea that the journey is more important than the destination because it forges us into a better version of ourselves.
The stages of the Hero’s journey are as follows…
1. The departure – we have an impulse to leave our comfortable life.
2. The struggle – we grow, hone our wits, and activate our dormant superpowers.
3. The return – we bring our new skills to benefit the people back home.
The problem with our modern version of the Hero’s Journey is that we want the rewards to happen quickly. We’re used to watching heroes on movie screens. We don’t want to wait twenty years. It’ll probably only take Matt Damon a couple of hours to achieve hero status, plus he’ll have the benefit of stunt doubles for the challenging bits in #2
These days, social media is awash with people saying they want to “find their purpose”. But what they usually want is the IDENTITY of purpose… a job or lifestyle that makes them look heroic without any need for selflessness or compassion. The people standing behind Trump at the inauguration come to mind. All Maga hat, no cattle.
True heroism is a slow, consistent, everyday discipline, rather than a mad dash to glory. Most of us lack the patience for this. Technology has dramatically interfered with the true Hero’s Journey by giving us instant access to hits of dopamine. We are all suffering from digital ADHD now.
The modern equivalent of the Hero’s Journey doesn’t involve sailing the seven seas and fighting off nine-headed sea serpents, it just requires us to lower the baseline on our artificially high dopamine levels.
We do this by reversing our patterning so that instead of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, we seek pain and avoid pleasure… in a healthy, not weird way. Things like intermittent fasting or putting our smartphone out of reach for a couple of hours, which I suppose is intermittent phone fasting. Once our dopamine levels have been recalibrated, it becomes easier to access things like creativity, joy, and flow.
They say there’s nothing new in the world. These principles of seeking pain and avoiding pleasure were something I was taught back in my convent school. If we were cold, the nuns would advise us to take off our cardigans “because we’d feel the benefit when we put them back on”. If we were tired, they’d make us run around the sports field “to give us more energy”. In order to mimic the lives of the Saints, we had to fast for hours. I hated this, but I loved the fact that food tastes unbelievably good when you’re really hungry.
It's hard to be hungry in the modern world because we’re surrounded by food 24/7. Vending machines are everywhere because God forbid the train is late and we have to wait longer than ten minutes for a snack.
Of course, we don’t like simple solutions done with consistency, we want our Hero’s Journey to be flashy and impressive. There are a lot of books around at the moment on “Becoming Superhuman”. We want to soar to great heights, to go from zero to hero. We want to become, not just great, but “insanely great”… like Zeus, at the height of his craziness.
The language in the books is very war-like. You don’t relax, you “power down”. You don’t apply yourself, you “execute on your goals”. You don’t go with the flow, you “declare victory over the day”.
Throughout history, I’m sure that many warriors returned from wars as conquering heroes, only to feel a little deflated. Their hero’s welcome felt ok, but it didn’t feel insanely great. This caused them to go off and do it all over again. Meanwhile, forests were being burnt to make bows and arrows, landfills were overflowing with dead bodies and no one was parenting the children.
Perhaps the Hero’s Journey needs a bit of a rebrand to include some feminine energy… creativity, intuition, and vision. Not reading maps and strategies, reading signs and symbols; sensing synchronicities; finding Flow.
If you want to experience what this might look and feel like, join me in Greece where we will take on all the archetypal patterns that derail us on our true Hero’s Journey – in the land of sun, sea, and stories – where all the myths began.
Early bird price ends on 14th February. This could be your Valentine’s present to yourself. Leave the familiarity of normal. Get in touch with your creative spirit. Bring home the magic.