[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Hello Sunbug,

You bring such rich and robust points here, “Everyone has his/her/their journey.
And I can no more put my face on them than they can on me.”

I agree with you there> No one seemed to understand my personal journey in my own household, and some still think, I had lost my mind, when I thought I was following my bliss, but I didn’t think so on some issues, and on others, I might have. (In hindsight I can just laugh and take a comedic view of things). When things got tough, I kept Campbell’s words very close to my heart, “As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off”

That said, Joe Campbell’s hero/heroine cues for one’s hero path are all  here, and I think, for you too. You write, “Yet the irony remains that the individual quest and realization of the universal consciousness shared by ALL are not antithetical to each other. But the new take is somehow they are.”

The Hero Path

And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
— Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (p. 18)
Find more quotations at http://www.jcf.org/quotes
For me that has been the best guide

So, I think, “where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” is the line where the individual and the All seem to merge. And the individual hero does not exclude the collective hero, I think.

My personal take on Joe’s Hero path, is a “Road to the Land of Surprises”– what else?  And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god” That’s surprise number 1. where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Surprise number 2. And on and on.

Love

Shaahayda