Missteps on the Path of the Hero's Journey

How to Find Your Way Back Home When the Gods Hurl You Into the Depths of the Deep, Dark Sea

(Hero with a thousand faces - Illuminati Diffusion v 1.1)

I recently took a wrong turn in life.

It's not something I'm used to anymore. 

Maybe that sounds crazy to say, but I'm used to seeing the path forward clearly and then just going towards it and trusting it to work out.  It's hard to describe how I do it because it tends to sound a little mystical but it's not mystical at all.  It's just paying attention to the signposts along the road.  It's about getting a sense of the world and how it works and how I work in it.  It's a rightness and not-rightness that anyone can feel if they open themselves to it. 

Maybe the best way to think about it is how an old friend once told me about how he plays video games.  He was much better than me and always seemed to know what to do in the game.  I asked him how he knew where to go and why he never seemed lost?  And he said, "Haven't you figured it out yet?  You just go towards the light."

Game designers tend to highlight what they want you to do with light and it's a bit like that in life too.  If you get quiet in your mind and wave away distractions and look closely enough, the right path is usually illuminated. 

An interviewer once asked the famous Japanese baseball player Ichiro why he chose baseball and he said, "No, it was baseball that found me."

For me it's the same.  The things that are for me, find me.  If thoughts return to me again and again, they're worth thinking about.  If there doesn't come a time where something starts getting done then it didn't need doing.  If I'm supposed to do something it will make itself known to me in time and then I just do it. 

That's the trick really.  Letting the right things find us.  We tend to push the river and fight it and thrash hard against the rapids.  We want things that might not be good for us, like fame and power, without understanding the consequences of those desires.  It's not that any of these things are inherently bad.  It's just that we often don't understand the price we have to pay for them.  We can have anything we want in life, as long as we're willing to pay the price.  But we often don't understand that price going in. 

Even worse, we often impose our own will on the process.  We don't develop a co-creative and co-collaborative relationship with the Universe, which is about taking action but also about listening and receiving.  Without the listening and receiving part of the relationship with life, it's like we have a hundred brushes in our toolbox but we only use one.  We never unlock the richness of the whole tool-set. 

It may sound like all this is a matter of waiting around for things and hoping they'll come our way with no work.  But that's not it either.  It's about patience.  It's about allowing things to come in time versus pushing too hard.  You may want to throw a flying super kick in Kung Fu before you've mastered a single punch but that's not how it works.  It's a series of steps that go in order and a recognition of that order.  We learn to sit in the horse stance first before we throw a spinning jump kick and a lot of other things in between too.  And there is no skipping steps.

It's not just a matter of hard work or patience though.  We also have to set our intent and ask for what we want clearly, but first we have to know what we want.  That's another tricky bit.  We may think we know but often we haven't thought about it clearly enough.  We haven't gotten quiet and asked ourselves about our authentic desires and what matters to us.  Non-authentic desires cause us endless misery.  You know you picked wrong when you're constantly emotional and despairing and what you're doing every day makes you miserable.  But if the work is hard and you still love it and feel it and want it, despite the burning fires around you, then you're likely on the right path. 

Wanting to become a master baseball player was right for Ichiro but if I tried to make that a reality I'd bring only suffering to myself and those around me because it's not my true desire.  Learning to differentiate the things that are right for you and the things that are wrong is part of our work in life.  Too often we don't know what we want and gravity takes over.   We get the default look and feel, like the stock character in a video game we didn't bother to customize because we were too lazy.  We never made life our own, never asked the right questions. 

If we don't know what we want, then we end up with random things we never even realized we were asking for at the time.  In other words, we get what we want in life, even if we don't know what we're asking for.  Our unconscious drives us forward if we're not paying attention and we can find ourselves getting something that we would never consciously want because we asked for it without thinking at all.  

We also tend to think we know what we want, before we've actually developed the wisdom to understand what that is for us.  Maybe at our core we wanted calm and harmony in our days but instead we dreamed of power and so we secretly asked for chaos without realizing it.  The problem is we set our intent on something that's not truly aligned to who we are and so we got something that's not right for us. 

But it seems even this approach to life isn't perfect.  You can still take the wrong road on the Hero's Journey.  Like Odysseus, lost at sea, you can end up shipwrecked or in a haze in the land of the Lotus Eaters or tempted by the Sirens or stuck on an island with Circe.

The Odyssey is a great metaphor for the major wrong turns of life.  It was written to show ancient peoples the path of a great life.  The Lotus Eaters are what happens when you let drugs or alcohol go too far and get out of balance.  Circe is what it means to get stuck with the wrong partner, maybe in a horrific and unloving marriage that saps your energy and will to live and makes you make terrible decisions every day.  The Sirens are the temptation of an alluring and sexy partner who's absolutely crazy behind that external facade or just an unhealthy obsession with sex that's out of balance and leads to ruin.

(Source: Ulysses and the Sirens, by Léon Belly, 1867 - Wikimedia Commons)

Every time we take one of these wrong turns, we end up with problems that come from not knowing the rules.  The problems follow an orderly set of predetermined outcomes, all of it proceeding in smooth determinism from the first rule violation. 

Odysseus knew the rule that if he wanted to see the beauty of the Sirens and hear the sweetness of their madness inducing song, he needed to tie himself to the ship so he wouldn't jump overboard.  That's knowing yourself and your weaknesses, like stocking the house with only healthy snacks so you don't gorge on candy when your power inevitably gets weak.  He had everyone else on the ship plug their ears and swear not to take them out no matter what.  But some men in his crew didn't understand the rules and a few of them yanked their plugs free, imagining they were immune to the mesmerizing song, and so leapt to their deaths. 

No one is immune to the rules.

When Gravity Doesn't Exist and When the Light is a Trap

We're all perfectly capable of believing the wrong things, despite all the evidence in front of us. 

Just as Odysseus' men believed they'd be the only ones to hear the song and live, without taking the precautions he did, we can believe just about anything in life, even if it's outright and totally wrong. 

We're perfectly capable of believing that gravity doesn't exist, but if we walk out of a 100 story window, we'll learn that gravity has an undefeated record.  That may sound crazy, but we often do this with the simplest things, believing the wrong relationship is right for us, or that someone near us will change when they never will.  We believe we can stay in a bad situation and somehow it will get better but it won't 99.9% of the time. 

We believe our beliefs are our power but more often than not they're in our way.  They blind us to the real reality right in front of us, that we could see if we just opened our eyes and looked closely without the screen of our beliefs. 

When there is a delta between our beliefs and what actually happens, it's always our beliefs that were in error.  

And sometimes, even when we know all this, we can still get lost.  Sometimes the wrong turns are disguised.  Maybe the light that illuminated the next step in the journey was itself the trap this time?  It's like those anglerfish with the monstrous serrated teeth who use a glowing lure in the deep, dark sea to draw in prey so it can devour them with monstrous jaws. 

We got lured by what appeared to be a calm and comforting light guiding us home but found monsters waiting for us instead.  I once dated a beautiful and alluring woman who was utterly broken and damaged inside and she made my life miserable despite our passion and divine and lusty love making.  At the outset, she seemed like a dream, beautiful and calm and open minded but it was all a carefully designed illusion that I didn't see until I was hooked and for a time I was lost until I broke the cycle.

When things go wrong in life we have to start asking questions.  Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention to the signs?  Maybe I tried to impose my own will on the river because I really, really wanted something or thought I did and now I find myself off the path?

How did I get here?  What did I miss?  Why did I miss it?  Where am I going now?

When I get off lost in life, I get quiet, turn inward and ask those kinds of questions. 

Well, that's not totally true. 

First, I do what everyone does.  I panic. 

I get scared, angry, depressed, despondent.  Sometimes multiple times, in a fast running cycle.  It's like the Kubler Ross stages of grief on fast forward and a loop.  There's no escaping the emotions when something goes wrong and you find yourself wandering in the forest that you thought was an open clearing.  We like to think that there are gurus walking around with perfect serenity with a beatific smile on their face all the time where nothing ever bothers them but they don't really exist.  It's just another pleasant illusion like most pleasant illusions.  It's a nice story but that's all it is. Nobody is higher or lower in life. Nobody knows any special secrets. We’re all in the same leaky boat.

What I try to do though is get over my despair fast so I can make decisions again. Like Rudyard Kipling in the poem If I try to treat both triumph and disaster as imposters. 

They're both transient.  They're phantoms.  They can't last.  

When you stand with your armor shining and your finger raised in glory over your slaughtered enemy on the battlefield, you can count the seconds until that glory fades into darkness.  When tragedy strikes you can count on it passing too, unless it's the final tragedy of a fatal sickness or death. 

All things are fleeting in this world.  They're not ours, they're only borrowed for a time. 

As I turn inward and ask questions, I try not to blame anyone else (at least not for long).  I just try to find what I missed and how I ended up on an offramp when I expected to be on the open road.  Don't get me wrong.  Hell is other people.  Other people can make your life absolutely miserable.  You pick the wrong business partner and suddenly they're driving the business into the ground, or you pick the wrong lover and suddenly you're spending all your time trying to fix a broken dynamic that will never be right no matter what you do.  

The wrong kind of people, people with hideous personality disorders, or sociopaths, or children masquerading as adults can make your life a living nightmare.  They're a lot more common than you think.  Much of what happens in life is totally mad and we never stop to realize it.  The structures around us, the personal dynamics, are often bat shit crazy.  And yet we take it for granted that they're normal because we've often never seen anything else.  We have no other templates. 

Go listen to the lyrics of just about every "love" song ever written and you'll hear nothing but a litany of horrible, dysfunctional relationships, songs filled with desperation, accepting and giving of endless abuse, sacrifice for someone who hates the singer and mistreats them.  It's not love.  It just passes for love because peope don’t know any better.  Listen and you'll realize what we often take as normal is totally dysfunctional. 

Give it a try.  Listen to something like You Really Got a Hold on Me, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Great song. Horrible relationship.

“I don't like you, but I love you
Seems that I'm always thinkin' of you
Oh, oh, oh, you treat me badly, I love you madly”

When you live in an asylyum, you think it’s normal that everyone screams all the time, but it ain't normal.

Yet, in the end, none of that matters.  I can't control other people.  Instead, the best thing I can do is understand what it was inside me that attracted those people into my life.  Why did I let them in?  How did I miss them?  What's wrong that I need to fix so I never bring those kinds of folks back into my life in the future?

And it's at that point that I remember there aren't any mistakes or any wrong turns really. 

It just feels that way in the short term. 

As long as you're awake and aware, you can get back on the road.  The only really wrong turns are the fatal ones, sickness and death.  Other than that, the wrong turn is often the lesson you need, allowing you to see something inside yourself that you missed, that made you pick poorly, that made you push the river. 

Even many of our close to fatal mistakes can be turned around if we recognize in time.  I learned much of my willpower from my family and my grandfather was a great example.  He started smoking a pack a day in WWII and then one day after the birth of his last daughter he said, "I've got something to live for" and he just stopped.  No treatment program.  No special counseling.  No patch, because it didn't exist.  He just substituted it with gum to give his mouth something to do and that was it.  Now he’s 96 years young.

That's how it happens with real change.  We fight it and make excuses and try to secretly get out of changing and then all of a sudden we're just done and change happens in an instant. 

Unless you're dying of a fatal disease or dead, it's never over.  There's still time to get back on the path and maybe that's when you find the things you learned off the path are just what you needed all along.

There really are very few true mistakes in life if we can wake up in time to change them.

The Perfect Intelligence, the Cracked Glass and the Rules

There's a passage from Jed McKenna's Spiritual Warfare that I think of often:

“When you are asleep within the dream we call reality, it appears that there is chaos and randomness, as if anything could happen at any time. When you awaken within the dreamstate, when you open your eyes and begin to see it directly instead of imagining it from behind closed eyes, then you begin to understand how it really works; that there is a flawless, perfect intelligence governing every detail of the dreamscape of being, from the smallest to the largest. There is order, consistency, intelligence; there can be no violation or mistake.”

That's the way I observe it too.  The Universe is a perfect quantum machine.  It's not capable of mistakes or errors.  There's no glitching or pop-in or drawing errors.  You've never seen a person walk through a wall like in a video game or a tree suddenly appear in the distance that wasn't there because the quarks couldn't keep up with your observation.  The tree is always right where it should be, every time, as is everything else.  The sea rolls in and out perfectly, always, and nobody has ever seen it do otherwise and the same intelligence underlies everything we do and every step we take. 

Maybe you don't think of the sea as intelligence or perfection.  But the sea does its job day in and day out, never failing or faltering, never glitching or erroring out, over millions of years.  It makes no mistakes.  It's flawless.  If that's not perfection, what is?   Is it any wonder that ancient people worshipped the sea and the sun and stars as Gods?  They are Gods.  Flawless.  Perfect.  Complete. 

(Source: The Great Wave off Kanagawa but Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai, 1831, Edo period, Japan)

We tend to think of human intelligence as the most advanced in the world but we may be the least advanced.

We’re an intelligence that's prone to believing nonsense, going crazy, deluding itself, and acting with great certitude based on nothing but the flimsiest ideas and beliefs.  ChatGPT hallucinating nonsense ain’t got nothing on human delusional thinking. We’ve been confidently wrong and doing it proudly for millions of years.

Take this passage from The Invention of Science by David Wootton:

“Let us take for a moment a typical well-educated European in 1600…He believes in witchcraft and has perhaps read the Daemonologie (1597) by James VI of Scotland, the future James I of England, which paints an alarming and credulous picture of the threat posed by the devil’s agents. He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea – James had almost lost his life in such a storm…He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw…He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound…He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours – he has heard mention of Copernicus, but he does not imagine that he intended his sun-centred model of the cosmos to be taken literally.”

These may seem nuts now but people confidently believed them. How many of our beliefs will look absurd in 100 or 1000 years? Spoiler alert, almost all of them.

So maybe we’re not the premier intelligence on the planet. A squirrel may not seem intelligent but try to keep that squirrel out of your garden and you'll see its intelligence is utterly optimized to get into your garden.  We're the only cracks in the machine, the only flawed creations and that's for a reason.

We're designed that way. 

We're designed for errors, unlike the sea. 

Why? 

Because it's fun! 

There's no struggle in perfection, no winners and losers, no heroes and villains.  Everything just is.  Maybe the simplest explanation for reality is that the Universe got bored with perfection.  Perfect things are boring because they never change. 

But something that's capable of errors? 

That's exciting.

We watch pro sports not because the players are perfect, but because they've gotten so close to perfection and yet they still miss the big shot, or drop the ball at the worst time, or put it in the bunker and have to dig their way out.  We watch F1 racing because there's always the chance of a burning crash.  We love that adversity.  Life is nothing but a great big story, a drama played out again and again and again for all eternity.  It's the errors in us that make life exciting and alive.  We're imperfect things floating in the absolute perfection all around us.  We're the only thing capable of mistakes.

So when things go wrong, I don't think there's an error in the system, I think: 

What's the error in me? 

What's the mote in my eye?  What didn't I see or did I refuse to see going into it?  It's a wrongness in my understanding. 

When I make a misstep it's because I'm seeing through the dirty lens of my own flawed perception. 

When I'm seeing through that dirty glass the results are inevitable.  Mistakes.  Missteps.  Wrong turns.  It means I couldn't see what I was actually supposed to do and instead saw what I wanted to see, an echo of my mind.  As McKenna says, I didn't understand the rules. 

"When [things] don’t come as requested, it just means you didn’t understand the rule. But you can."

What do he and I mean by the rules?  These are the patterns that tend to play out again and again in life.

We can see the rule, understand the rule. We can clean the glass and see again.  We can see right, where we were seeing wrong.

Let's say you take up smoking when you're young, thinking it won't kill you.  There's an error in your understanding.  Because it will.  And even if you're one of the lucky ones who beats probability and doesn't die of lung cancer, you'll still get a stunted life.  You'll age faster and your skin will look like dehydrated rice paper as you get older.  Those are the rules of how smoking progresses over time. 

How do you understand these rules?  Simple.  Open your eyes and look around.  Look at any old person who's smoked for a long time and you'll see how much older they look at the same age as people who didn't.  You'll see how dry and worn down their skin looks.  It doesn't take much.  There's no belief needed, just observation.  Look and see.

Age brings perspective.  It lets you see how patterns play out over a long period of time.  You can see the end results and you can trace it back to the beginning decisions and say, that's not a path I want to get on. 

Actually, sometimes age brings perspective, if you let it and if you pay attention.  It doesn't for everyone.  Many people never grow up past the age of 12 or 13 and they end up walking around running the same patterns they did when they were kids.  They're just children walking around in adult costume bodies. 

There's nothing worse than running a pattern that you can't see and don't know is there.  It runs invisibly behind your eyes, pushing and pulling you to its will instead of your own.  It makes you an NPC in your own life, just running a script that someone else put there, whether that's the world, society, circumstances, your teachers, your parents, or an old lover. 

(Source: (Den of Geek) of games by Bandai Namco, Microsoft, 2K Games, Nintendo)

Breaking the script means growing up and becoming a real adult.  Not breaking those old scripts means you never see clearly and you're governed by those invisible forces.  It happened to some of my best friends along the path.  Like Odysseus, the further I get on my journey, the more men I lose to the missteps of life, because they never made it out and couldn't see the pattern. 

One of them started with soft drugs and progressed to hard drugs and died a junky who I never saw anymore. The rule there is hard drugs lead to the death of your friendships and your life cut short. 

Another one used more drugs than I've ever seen and somehow managed to make it to his 40s, maybe only because he ate vegetarian and didn't drink in addition to downing pills at an absurd rate.  When I got the call that he'd overdosed, I cried.  But I wasn't surprised at all.  We'd had multiple conversations over the years where I told him he'd die that way if he didn't stop.  Sometimes he understood but then he went right back to sleep walking through his life.  Again, drug abuse sends you to an early grave is the obvious rule here. 

My third friend died because he didn't care for his body, ate garbage and died of a heart attack much too early.  Not eating well and never working out are a path to dying young is the rule here.

In the end it's all probabilities.  But it's best to play the percentages.  Sometimes you get the nasty end of the percentages.  You can't tell a five year old who's dying of leukemia that she didn't eat right and made the wrong choices.  But outside of the nasty outliers of probability, like a life cut short too early from a bad genetic roll of the dice, most of us get to play the percentages if we want.  Eat healthy and workout, you'll likely live a long time.  Pop pills every day and eat shit and you probably won't.

Not all rules end in death. There are thousands of rules underneath everything if you look at them. 

A good one is that If you're in a horrible relationship, it's like being in a constant storm.  How can you ever make good decisions when you're surrounded by a poison cloud swirling around you?  The other person fills your mind with fear and anxiety and you can't succeed with that filling your head with lies and misery.  It's like trying to work with construction noise right next door all the time.  The only obvious rule is to get out or you'll spend your life in misery.  And if you choose to stay, the rule is endless suffering for you. 

Each path we chose leads to obvious things if you look closely and see it.

Once you're out, the next rule is how do you own your part in that horrible relationship?  How do you fix the things in you that attracted that person?  When you can do that, you can move on to a relationship that's happy, healthy and supportive.  The rules get simpler then.  If you wind up in another relationship that's much the same it means you didn't change everything you needed to change.  You didn't get the right perspective.  You still didn't have something stable and healthy to offer that other person because you need to have stability on offer to get stability.  Keep going until you find the one that's a true partnership.

Of course, it's one thing to understand the rules and it's another thing altogether to follow them.

The root of my mistake recently is that I thought they were the same thing.  A person can have tremendous self awareness and still do absolutely nothing at all with it.

There's self realization and there's self action.  They're radically different. 

Self realization is one step.  Self action is another.  I made the mistake of thinking one inevitably led to the next.  If you have realization then naturally you'd want to make the leap to doing the things you've learned.  But it doesn't work that way.  Each step is a new step. 

And the difficulty scales with each step we take.  It's hard to get to self realization but much, much harder to take action in the real world. It's like belts in Kung Fu.  The difference between going from white belt to yellow belt is small.  But the difference between brown belt and black is massive.  The leap from student to master is huge. 

The step between self realization and self action is a radical step.  It means seeing clearly and then taking action in the real world.  And the real world is scary.  There are real stakes and consequences.  You can get hurt badly or die or go broke.  That fear holds people back.  It's why many people never make that leap.  It's as if they're stuck halfway up the mountain and unable to go any further. 

But it's one thing to understand the rules and another to do them.  A person who never puts their self-awareness into action is like an alcoholic who has a moment of clarity that they need to stop drinking or they'll die, only to go right back to drinking.  It's as if they got stuck half way up the mountain and never kept going. 

Of course, there are real things to be afraid of in life.  If you're not careful, your missteps can become permanent.  You can get stuck on that mountain until you die, and you'll become a marker on the path for others, like green boots on the way to the top of Everest.  Don't become a cautionary tale, someone who almost made it to the end.

It's happened to others a trillion times and it can happen to you.  But when you find yourself suddenly stuck on the mountain, half way up and it seems too high, there's really only one thing to do.  Keep going.  Further.  Always further. 

Fear is the thing that holds us back.  It freezes us in our place.  It makes us timid when we should be bold.

Noli timere.  Don't be afraid.

That's the key.  Or rather, feel the fear and do it anyway.

The Long and Winding Road Home Again

As long as we're not taking stupid risks that can mean the last and final misstep, we need to keep going, keep finding our way back.  That was the key to Odysseus getting home.  No matter how many men he lost along the way, he kept going.  Tenacity means everything.  When we're overwhelmed with emotions and pressure, can we see through the storm and focus back to where we wanted to go in the first place? 

When Odysseus was almost home, Poseidon blew him back out to sea.  He could see the smoke stacks in the distance on the shore and cruelly the weather blew him far off course again.  But he still kept going and found his way home again, retracing his steps, learning from his arrogance and ignorance and not making the same mistakes twice.

Maybe that's the cardinal sin: 

Making the same mistakes again and again. 

Never learning our lessons.  Never questioning why things went wrong and what we can do about them.  

But even when you figure out what you did wrong, it's not enough.  Self awareness without self action is worthless.  It's like having a hammer in your toolbox but using your fist to pound nails.

Wake up as soon as you can when you're off your path.  Realize you're lost and do something about it. 

I read a survival guide once that said when things go wrong our tendency is to bury our heads in our hands in the hope things will get better.  But they won't get better.  Only positive action can save us.  That's true of extreme survivalism and it's true in work, life, business and love.

That's the real key. When you're lost in the forest, stop and focus.  Get your bearings.  Climb up to the highest point so you can see out over the trees.  Then get a plan together.  Some plan is better than no plan.  But once you have that plan, it's time to start hacking your way out of the dark forest.  Get it together and start slicing through the thicket so you can get back to the path as soon as possible with the least amount of time lost. 

In the end, nobody is coming to save us.  We have to do that for ourselves. 

And we do that by getting back up and going further. 

Always further.