Fearing to Believe, Fearing to Return

The last two decades of my life have been an almost continuous state of disbelieving and denying the transformative experience that has been happening to me.

Yet only by fully accepting, believing, and embracing this experience, owning it as part of my own life’s story and identity, can I be fully transformed by it.

This perfectly aligns with the final stage of the Hero’s Journey, whereby the hero with his boon of wisdom may actually not want to return to the ordinary world to share it with others for various reasons.

For myself though, it’s definitely this monstrous fear that this wisdom can’t be communicated to a conventional mindset because it will seem unbelievable. Thus I’ll be seen as a crazy “idiot” in turn, due to people misinterpreting the meaning of the message, seeing it as literal rather than metaphorical.

Even Gautama Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated

Refusal of the Return, Hero’s Journey

The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without.

Rescue From Without, Hero’s Journey

Why re-enter such a world? Why [share] 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 [others]. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into [bliss]. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of [distilling eternal truth] cannot be avoided.

The Crossing of the Return Threshold, Hero’s Journey

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