Our Lost Atlantis

One of the most important things I've learned in life is the philosophy of interconnectedness--everything is connected to everything else. Our lives are complex systems that overlap and affect each other in strange ways. Isolating any one of them for explanation or understanding can only backfire because its sub-systems will respond in unanticipated ways. This isn't to say that we aren't responsible for our own choices and the consequences of those choices, but we have to truly step back and see the forest for the trees.

Understanding interconnectedness allows us to fully embrace our questions of self, purpose, and meaning. Cultural anthropologist, Joseph Campbell, reminded us that bliss is a deep sense of knowing where the body and soul want to go---to follow it---and not let anyone throw you off. "Doors will open," he said, "where you never thought there would be doors and where there wouldn't be doors for anyone else."

In contemplating our questions of self which form the backbone of our creative journeys as heroes, Richard Taylor offered, "Sometimes the simplest and most obvious distinctions give rise to the most profound intellectual difficulties, and things most commonplace in our daily experience drive home to us the depth of our ignorance." In other words, we justify the phenomenon of many things distant or external to us, yet a phenomenon inside---such as the psyche and human spirit---can present a daunting mystery.

Who are you? The answer lies with you (and only you) as you step out into the rain and open your umbrella for others to take shelter. It requires you to embrace a responsibility to seek out answers--to suffering and injustice---and to do so within a complex arena of morals, values, laws, and socio-cultural politics. You will be uncomfortable because you must look inward, be vulnerable, and question your own beliefs in answering a seemingly basic question. This kind of self-awareness will bring with it a certain loneliness and anxiety over a lost sense of direction, but you will also experience a certain freedom in letting go and the answer will soon follow.

In his most famous book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell left us with a strong message that affirms our responsibility as modern heroes. Written in 1949 as a seminal work of comparative mythology, it remains a transcendent and relative comment on our need to be artists for salvation:

"Inventions and the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope but there is no such society as the gods once supported. Ideals of the social unit are not those of the hier-atic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay.

One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there is now darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring light again the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot---indeed must not---wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, and rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding."

Campbell reminds us that it is not our society's responsibility to save the hero, but, rather, it is up to each one of us to carry the weight at all times--not just when the load seems lighter.

Copyright © by Brian A. Kinnaird

References and Recommended Reading:

Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces, 2ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

Taylor, R. (1963). Metaphysics. Prentice Hall. New Jersey.