The Hero With A Thousand Faces: Part II

I must admit, my head was swimming a little bit when I first read this part of Campbell’s book. However, upon some rereading, I think the cosmogonic cycle finally became clear to me. 

What I found most interesting about the reading was the idea of the cycle of consciousness. Perhaps it’s just my interest in dreams as a symbol of somethingwithin our lives, but the thought of sleep being both restorative and informational was intriguing. As mentioned in the reading, our consciousness travels through three main stages while we sleep: waking experience, dream experience, and dreamless sleep. During the waking experience, we encounter life lessons, which we absorb through the dream experience stage. Finally, through a restful sleep, we enjoy and know all. Each and every day, we live through this cycle, continuously learning, absorbing, and enjoying. Despite being “unconscious” while we sleep, we remain conscious. 

I also found the section about how everything comes from nothing, form comes from formlessness. As Professor Hartley mentioned in his essay, we again see how oppositions come in to play here. Conscious vs. unconscious, everything vs. nothing, eternity vs. time. These concepts and things, while opposites, work in conjunction with one another. Without these opposites, one could never achieve perfect balance. But, upon finding this balance, there is an internal awakening. 

Now, while this is all rather conceptual, we use myths to make sense of these ideas. As we know, the hero’s journey is a universal story, present in most all cultures across all time. This kind of myth unites people through a common understanding, a common conceptualization of life and its events. As we interpret our own dreams, we translate them into stories and myths, making sense of the concepts presented to us in our “unconscious” states. As humans, it’s natural to live through certain similar events and understand certain concepts, again, opposites: life and death, father and mother, god and mortal, etc. 

While the myths created from this information can be textured and complicated, one could also argue that the creation of the folk story rises from a similar place. With the desire to better understand our own unconscious mind, we create stories to explain and show what we learned or saw during our dreams. Folk tales are typically more conversational or not as complicated as some myths, but this aids in a more universal understanding of concrete concepts. While we all have some sort of understanding that all humans experience some sort of deeper consciousness, it’s often easier to digest if we can show that or speak it into existence through tales or myths.