The Monomyth, the timeless, universal story found within all the rich and varied mythologies of humanity. This is the hero's journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell, in his Hero of a Thousand Faces, in which he analyzed the major stages of the voyage, providing a grand synthesis and revealing the unity within humankind's incredible cultural and ethnic diversity.


 
 
master game

In the first stage of the journey, an ordinary citizen suddenly and unexpectedly receives, "the call." This unusually takes the form of an open invitation to embark on an adventurous quest into the unknown. As often as not, the person is quite comfortable with their life and is not particularly motivated to leave it all behind. In addition, society  at large provides us with every reason for staying with the known, for not rocking the boat, for accepting its beliefs as real, for regarding its morals as appropriate, and for seeing its limits as valid.

The call can come in many forms. For some, it appears as a dream or vision, or as a visit from an ancestor or supernatural being who gives instruction or offers new directions. For others, it might come as a new job opportunity on the one hand, or being fired from their present job on the other - the end of a relationship or the beginning of a new one.

Whatever form it takes, the hero is the man or woman who recognizes it for what it is and awakens from the conventional slumber of culture at large. The individual then begins to penetrate the mystery beyond the edges of the known, enabling them to grow beyond the boundaries of the old self.

As this amazing experience deepens. The second part of the journey begins. The state of initiation.
This period inevitably includes tests, trials, and tribulations, one of which usually involves the search for a teacher who can guide the initiate in the right direction. Sometimes the teacher may appear as an internal one, a spirit guide or inner guru. Just as often it may be a teacher in the outer world. A Zen master, Rinpoche, or master shaman. When the teacher if found, the time of discipline and training commences.

As the test continues, the law of karma has a way of speeding up, and the individual will often experience as increase in their personal problems. There are always failures in the beginning, and  sometimes one's life can unravel in truly spectacular ways, The hero must persevere, proceeding onward, toward the goal Heedless of their own well-being comfort of security, for this is also a time of purification in which certain negative aspects of the self must be faced and thrown off.

With the paying of these debts and the cleansing of the inner self, an additional factor usually enters the dynamic - help from the spirit world. This spiritual assistance provides the hero with supernatural power, protection, and support, and it s then that this individual is able to cross the threshold into the inner worlds where they're granted access to the zone of magnified power, and entrance into the true visionary realms.

Everything changes at this point. Transformed by their initiation and assisted by their guardian spirits, the Hero passes the tests, completes the quest, and achieves breakthroughs of life changing  proportions. The individual is utterly transfigured in the process reemerging with great skills, profound knowledge, and new abilities.

master game


In the third stage of the journey, the accomplished hero must  then return to society, bearing their newfound gifts of functioning as one who has become the master of the two worlds. the inner and the outer. As such, the hero can now operate as fully formed and fully animated human being - as a warrior, protector, messenger, teacher, ruler, healer, and mystic. In short, the hero, returns as the chief and a world redeemer.

At this point in the journey, the need to alleviate the confusion of the world and heal  the suffering of others becomes the hero's major concern.  To accomplish this, the hero must exercise compassionate thought, feeling, and action, transforming their newfound expertise and knowledge into wisdom. It is then that the authentically initiated and fully awakened hero becomes a sage.
Campbell has suggested that this mythic saga is universal, and that all of the worlds stories, from the classic literature to soap operas on afternoon television, are simply variations of this one great theme. He has also suggested that the monomyth is experienced to varying degrees by all of us as we pass through our lives ... that each of us is living out our own personal version of it. The inevitable conclusion: Each of us has the potential to become the hero in our own journey.


 
master game


The Spirit of Shamanism, by Roger Walsh, identifies the shaman as the world's premier mystic and culture hero. - as the world's premier mystic and culture hero - as the first in a long succession of cosmic explorers whose lifeway has stood for untold millennia as a monument to the untapped potentials within each of us. Walsh makes clear distinctions between the different types of heroes, pointing out that while there are similarities between the lifeway of a mystic and that of a warrior or ruler, there are also major differences, especially in relation to the different journey, goals, and games played by each.

Walsh used the world "game" with deliberation, distinguishing  between  trivial or frivolous games played for amusement, entertainment or distraction and those serious and significant life games that present us with challenges and objectives that contribute to our personal growth and to the greater good of society and the world around us. It is in response to these life games that our constellation of survival skills and abilities is formed and sharpened, enabling each of us to succeed in becoming who and what we are.
 Games-worth-playing.
master game

In the Master game by Robert DeRopp, a biochemist, DeRopp divides the life games that people play into two basic types; object games and meta games. Object games are those played to explore, master and acquire the things of the outer world, especially the physical foursome; money, power, sex and statu. Meta games are played to master the things of the inner world, intangibles such as knowledge, beauty, and the salvation of the soul.
master game
 DeRopp ranks the object games as hierarchically "lower" and describes them as more or less pathological in that the players who win, emerge with little that they can truly call their own. For example; a player of the Money Game may emerge as rich only to find himself embittered, unhappy and empty, at a loss to know what to do with all his wealth.





Those who play the Fame Game with the goal of becoming celebrities realize sooner or later that their fame is an illusion, a mere shadow designed to inflate their ego and keep it inflated, and that their public image ultimately has no relationship to the person they really are.
He defines the Military Game as the deadliest of all object games, in that it is played by various grades of trained killers, programmed to regard their craft as acceptable, even admirable, if those they kill believe in a different god or political system, they can thus be collectively referred to as the enemy.  History reveals that players of the Military Game can kill men, women, and children with boundless enthusiasm, destroying whole cities and devastating entire countries. In the process, sacrificing the lives of tens of thousand of young people for the glittering dream of glory or power, exerted through various forms of political coercion and blackmail, and the thousands and thousands of young people involved make little or no protest as they go to their deaths.  This fact has lead DeRopp to conclude that there is a criminal element fusing most object games because they harm both the player and the  society of which the players are a part.
master game






DeRopp places the biological game on which the human species depends, the Householder Game - in a sort of neutral  zone between the object and meta games. The aim of the player in the Householder Game is simply to raise a family and provide it with security and the necessities of life.  ALso found in this intermediate level are those non-players who are unable to find any game worth playing.
 They often becoming chronic outsiders who are alienated from society - many of whom turn out to be antisocial loners with  criminal tendencies.

DeRopp ranks the meta games "higher" in that they are played for intangibles and tend to be more subtle, yet even these games express both a positive and negative polarity. Those who play the Art Game, are ideally searching for some inner awareness that can be defined and expressed as beauty, Yet, many artists have no inner awareness at all, and may only be proficient at imitating those who do have it. Others may become known for producing something that lacks beauty entirely but is acceptable by virtue of being new or startling.

In the same manner, those who play the Science Game are ideally searching for knowledge and meaning, but many players are little more than technicians with advanced degrees who, like many who play the Art Game, are primarily interested in status and fame, In addition, as all who play the Science game discover sooner or later, projects that are truly original tend to be excluded by the array of committees that stand between the scientist and their funding, the more or less routine projects are usually given preference.

The Religion Game is a meta game that is ideally played for the salvation of the soul. DeRopp points out that this game had fairly well defined rules in the past, determined by a paid priesthood who make their livelihood by serving as intermediaries between the populace and various alternately wrathful or beneficent gods that they or their predecessors, invented. Unfortunately, some of the players begin to insist that their god was the only god, their truths the only thrush. So eager were these priests to keep the game entirely in their own hands, that they did not hesitate to torture and kill all whom they viewed as outsiders, exhorting their followers to slaughter unbelievers as a way of gaining supernatural favor and guaranteeing entry into a hypothetical blissful afterlife state called "heaven" or "paradise."


master game
Fortunately, there is another quite different element ot the Religion Game, All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who obviously did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort,  wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration; they played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those priestly con men who sold trips to heaven for hard cash  - in advance.

master game
These worthies were players of the Master Game that DeRopp places at the apex of all the meta games. This is the great game that has been played throughout time by the shamans and mystics, the saints and sages of all the world's cultures, who explored and mastered the inner world through the vehicle of their own mind and consciousness. The Master Game involves the quest for spiritual awakening, enlightenment, and liberation. The goal: to discover one's own true nature and to know from direct, empirical experience that this nature is both sacred and immortal.

Walsh writes: "Different traditions express this (game) in different ways, but the message is clearly the same. Christianity tells us that, "The kingdom of Heaven is within you", or in the words of saint Clement, "He who knows himself knows God", Buddhism says, "Look within, thou art Buddha" In Siddha Yoga the message is "God dwells within you as you" an in Islam, "He who knows himself, knows his Lord."

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 universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) 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, Loa tze and Platonic Socrates.

Among the Moslems, this teaching was promulgated by the Sufis, who praised in their poems the delights of reunion with the Friend. To all these players, it was obvious that the Religion Game as played by the paid priest, with its shabby  confidence tricks, promises, threats, persecutions and killings , was merely a hideous travesty of the real game --- the master game remains the most demanding and difficult of games in our society there are few who play.

Man's ordinary state of consciousness, his so called waking state,  is not the highest level 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.

master game


Hank Wesselman in Visionseeker states, he became a player through the vehicle of his own consciousness, a living link in a long chain of players that stretched back across time to when the Master Game first appeared long before the rise of our state - level societies more than 5,000 years ago.

I feel it was the shamans of antiquity who initially braved and explored the capabilities of the human body-mind-spirit complex. It is also possible that their courageous act of exploration and discovery within the inner worlds may have propelled the human species into the next stage of its evolution - the evolution of consciousness.

Today more and more Westerners are learning how to access the ordinarily hidden dimensions of reality to make contact with the inner sources of knowledge and power to facilitate healing and problem-solving. In the midst of a world obsessed with money, sex, power, and status, these heroes are quietly rediscovering the Master Game.

In the face of the truly awesome issues we face in out time runaway over population, and environmental degradation; political and social , and economic instability,; the rise of  epidemic diseases such as the HIV virus and AIDS; issues of humanitarian concern and social justice; the potentially devastating climatic shifts being generated by the green house warming, just to name a few, in the face of these issues, the old stories, beliefs and values and trends that collectively represent our cultural mythology aren't working as well anymore. It is clear what we must now create a new story, a new transmodern version of the monomyth.

Right at the core of this lurch toward the new is the Master Game. And there lies both the gateway and the key to the next stage of human evolution.

There is a great spiritual teacher wo lived in India long ago. His name was Guatama, but most refer to him as the Buddha, The great gate. In this man's teachings, each individual's potential for realization expresses itself into the world as two principal soul forces. One is called Manjusri .. this is the intellectual function of the mind. = our urge to know. Manjusri is the symbol for the spiritual seeker who walks the Universe alone. Guatama called the other soul force Avolokiteshvara , or Kwan Yin, the heart force, the emotional aspect of realization, it represents the self as the thing sought, Kwan Yin is the compassionate force within the self, the urge to be of service to everyone and everything around us. The experience of the two.. outward and, inward.. heart through the power of feeling and emotion and thought, in the middle between these two polarities is the mystic.. to symbolize complete realization in which both the Manjusri and Kwan Yin soul forces are in balance and harmony with the transcendent self.

    * * * * * * *         * * * * * * *             * * * * * * * *              * * * * * * * *          * * * * * * * *
master game

Bowl of Light
When we are born, each of us comes in from the great beyond with a bowl of light. This light nourishes us as we pass through life, but as we grow in experience and wisdom, things happen. SOmetimes we lie, sometimes we steal, and sometimes we injure others with our works or thoughts or deeds. When we engage in such negative behavior, it is as though we put a stone in our bowl, and with each occurrence, some of our light goes out. Slowly through time, our light gradually diminishes as we continue putting stones into our bowl, and then time may come when our light is almost gone. We finally wake up one day and discover what we rae doing. At that moment, we become aware that our bowl of light is filled with shit! Then, you simply turn the bowl over and your dump it out.. then start over.....


When we individuals, as holons, become aware of the biophysical -energetic program that exists within us,, each of us can use it as a map to navigate our way through the forest of illusion and across the plains of experience toward the next stage of our uniquely human evolution . when we awaken from the consensual slumber of culture-at-large and remember that we were once seeds of light, traveling among the stars, accompanied and protected by spiritual guardians, we become aware that we have truly fallen from grace  into a world of shadows, through our preoccupation with the gods of materialism - money, power, sex and status.

As we awaken, our life experiences can begin to manifest themselves inexorably from the world of the senses into the direct experience of spirit, a journey becomes possible for us only through the doorway of the heart. It is through our heart that we finally return to the garden, and once there, we discover that we can use it as a gateway through which we can personally experience the spiritual words of them selves.

This quest, this hero's journey, can only be discovered by each one of us operating alone. as we explore the world of sensory experience and investigate the limitless dimensions of our own mind, we come face to face with our strongest abilities and our highest qualities. We also discover our ignorance, our self-indulgence, and our egocentrism. When we recognize these personal demons to be the source of our suffering , despair and violence, we can look at ourselves with honesty and with truth, for we know quite clearly then that we had choices. And it is at this critical crossroads that we begin to sense the immense energy and universal intelligence working through each one of us

The Buddhist teacher, Joan Halifax recounts a conversation in which she once asked a Zen master the following question: "Going to the temple, you take the path; entering the temple, you leave the path. What does this mean?" Without a pause, the Roshi's response came, "Joan, the path is the temple."