The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell evaluated stories within various mythologies to discover the underlying commonalities that bind us to narratives. In so many of the most central stories we repeat a particular pattern where we follow a hero out of their ordinary world and into a magical one. They find mentors and allies and acquire magical aid to overcome their enemies and obstacles. They learn and grow and falter and plead until they make their way into the inner most cave and defeat the dragon and return with the elixir.

While these are stories of personified symbolism to explain the complicated relation of life within the world, we often find ourselves seeking to narrate our own lives just the same. By changing these elements with their counterparts in reality we find that we often due commit to heroic journeys in our everyday lives.

Feeling confined in our comfort zones, we seek adventures or are thrust into them. While we don’t go out to slay monsters, we do seek new careers and schools, take on new skills or hobbies, or take risks to find love and friendship. We find mentors in our teachers, bosses (the good ones at least), and parents. With allies at our side, we face traffic, scheduling conflicts, financial disasters, and criminal victimization. After we successfully defeat the inner demons, or achieve the promotion, or finish our first real live performance, we return to our old world changed and bring something new to share with those we love.

Chaotic Heroism isn’t just some popup religious foundation. It is a promise to seek change and growth, to find community, and to bring back the treasures that we can all celebrate. We should be living a life truly deserving of the dreams we have for it, but that is so hard to do alone. Instead of fighting with all of the simple struggles, why don’t we gather and journey together.

A Philosophy for Chaos

We all have different perspectives and they are all valid. Even among systems that try to create a very specific image of the cosmos and the mystical powers that bind it, find themselves subdivided into various sects that believe slightly differently from one another. In Judaism, many are actually atheistic and continue the rituals purely out of tradition. Christianity is almost famous these days in America for how many different denominations there are. It is so popular that even churches that describe themselves as nondenominational or absent of a central theology utilize Christian structures and themes. This is clearly a deeply rooted human element and to presume a spiritual practice can exist without splintering is naive. For this reason, it is to be understood that these are a particular perspective pulled from various sources to elevate the human spirit to live a heroic life and that there is no requirement to believe anything outside the confines of science. Instead, we do as Socrates once did and ask questions until we find ourselves with interesting answers.

Chaos itself is not worshipped here, unlike the gods of Order in most religious practices. For the symbolism it is easiest to consider a dualistic cosmos. Here in the physical universe we all know and share, we exist within Order. An array of complex physical laws that bind how everything coexists through time. With the exception of the quantum mechanics that may or may not play into an ethereal element, everything has a direct implication of cause and effect that creates a concept called Determinism.

As the name implies, Determinism is a belief that the universe is effectively just dominoes tumbling into one another with no outsider affecting the outcome. Depending on how the first domino fell, the rest are going to fall in a particular way and there is nothing that can be done to change that, including human choice. In a sense, it means that we have no free will, as any choice is in fact an illusion as we are compelled to make that choice based on our past experiences. This is the only notion that is commonly held by science that is going to be outright rejected.

Where Order has its binding laws that allow for continuity, Chaos does not. To imagine Chaos, try to think of a dream. A realm in which anything can change instantly, including a sequence of events. In one moment, you can be swimming in a purple ocean and the next you could be giving a dissertation to your ex-partner. Nothing is bound, which means that anything can happen. This is a realm of unlimited potential. A place where the mind can fabricate reality around it like an omnipotent being. If such a realm were to exist, and we had a connection to it through something we may call a soul, this would be a reasonable explanation for free will. With a connection to an ethereal consciousness, we would have the slightest capacity to alter the course of the dominoes.

From here we can find meaning for our lives in the pursuit of a grand adventure into the wild world of Order. A place where everything you do will continue to affect the world and others can gather together to ease the burdens of discovery. As we cry for the hardship away from omnipotence, we cherish the success over the trials of the mundane. When you can do anything you want just by thinking it, there is a loss of meaning to do anything at all. When it can take everything you have to just get up in the morning, there is a bounty of meaning in everything you do.