The Dhira's Journey
We have tasted the Hero's Journey in countless movies. Is the 'Dhira's Journey' any different?
śreyaś ca preyaś ca manuṣyam etas tau samparītya vivinakti dhīraḥ.
śreyo hi dhīro’bhipreyaso vṛṇīte, preyo mando yoga-kṣemād vṛṇīte.
“The dull-witted person chooses the pleasant: he wants to pass the day somehow. He does not know where or how the good is. The dhira who is endowed with Viveka, the power of discrimination, chooses Shreyas or the ultimate good.1”
Everybody needs a hero myth. Our lives would be indeed dry as a bone if there were no hero myths. The beautiful thing about hero myths is that as the times we live in change, our hero myths also change.
During my twenties, my hero myth was circumscribed to imitating my successful cousin and climbing the career escalator and becoming a well-respected marketing professional in the FMCG industry.
Thankfully, life intervened in strange ways and I realized that I had discovered a hero myth that was 360 degrees different from the one I had embraced before.
This must be obvious and it bears repeating -Hero myth need not be written or called so to operate as a hero myth.
It is pregnant in our deepest aspirations, encoded in the way our eyes light up when we see something inspirational. It plays out in the recesses of our dreams. It plays out in those parts of our life where we burst out in life with throbbing intensity.
And that’s both a blessing and a curse.
If you are reading this, you would know what I am talking about. It’s hard to remain immune to the relentlessly invigorating beat of the stories floating in the digital ether and not be swayed by them.
Stories of entrepreneurs changing the world. Stories of belonging to a community and dreaming of a beautiful world our hearts know to be true. Stories of passions blooming like rare wildflowers in barren lands parched of moonshot dreams. Stories of redemption from the rut of the industrial middle-class upbringing.
As we get enamoured by the tunes of stories that sound music to our ears, our lips start humming them. Our limbs start moving to the exuberance of its rhythms. Our bodies start impersonating those storytellers desperately to recreate that feeling we felt when we first heard them.
Today, the world of technology celebrates its hero myths of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, <Insert Your Favourite Hero> with as much fervour as the world of Indian cinema which cannot narrate a new story without borrowing a pound of flesh from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.
Ramayana was set in a time period when the society was moving from clans into more civilized societies. The moment when Rama walked out of his town, he immediately stepped into the forest. And so Ramayana, when seen through this lens, told the story of a hero who existed in that period of transition.
However, when Krishna drove his chariot outside Hastinapura, during the times of Mahabharata, it must have been a long ride in the chariot to reach the forest. When you read how Indraprastha is described with mirror-like floors in Mahabharata, it is evident that we are talking about a different phase in time, when the society had further evolved to have a more organized, city-like societal structure.
And so Mahabharata, when seen through this lens, told the story of a Hero (or you could say Heroes) who existed in that particular time frame.
How do we understand heroism in the times we live in?
Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime exploring the parallels that wove the diverse religions and various myths in one singular thread. In fact, his passion for myth was so powerful that he would have loved to substitute ‘mythology’ for ‘religion’.
“My hope”, he wrote in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces”,
”is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the name of mutual human understanding.”
“The Hero with a Thousand Faces” was first published in 1949 in which Joseph Campbell combined psychology with comparative mythology to give a universal motif of adventure and transformation.
This framework became known as the "Hero's Journey" (alternatively, “Monomyth”), a popular tool for transforming self and its narrative. The framework explores a 12 -step journey of a "Hero" and works with external events and the internal landscape.
Pay attention to those words, we will come back to them later.
Hero’s Journey has had its long tail of fervent enthusiasts (like George Lucas who studied the works of Joseph Campbell religiously while writing the script of Star Wars) and critics who complained that Joseph Campbell cherry-picked stories that fit this structure, ignoring many that didn't.
Perhaps our response to the Hero’s Journey would be different if we understand that Joseph Campbell was interested more in the similarities of myths rather than differences.
But what if we instead take those differences seriously? Would a dhira’s journey be any different from that of a hero?
Is it possible to sketch out an indic idea of heroism?
How can one narrate the dhira’s journey without recounting the tale2 of Nachiketa - the young child of sage Gautama who angered his father so much with his questions that he gave him to death?
Nachiketa’s search was so intense that when he found that Yama was not at home, he waited for three days without food or water. We are getting ahead of the story. Allow me to start from the beginning.
When Sage Gautama decides to perform Sarva Dakshina, he knew that his karmic bank balance was depleting. His son, Nachiketa, could see through the gifts that his father was distributing. Those that were useless, worth only by a whisker to be moved from one hand to the other.
He confronted his father.
“What are you doing? Why are you giving old cows which don’t give any milk? These poor brahmins cannot manage to find themselves two meals a day. How are they going to feed these cows?”
At first, the father found it convenient to ignore the little voice of truth. But Nachiketa was so persistent that the father lost his cool.
“Be careful, I will give you away too!”
“To whom will you give me?”
It is said that the son asked the questions thrice to offer his self to the threefold beings - physical, causal and subtle beings.In anger, the father said, “I will give you to Death.”
Nachiketa waited patiently until the ceremony was over.
“I will go in search of death”.
“Where can he search for death?”, his father wondered and let him go.
“If you can find death, I will give you.”
The story goes on that when Nachiketa reached the abode of Yama, Lord Yama was not there and he met his wife.
The wife, seeing an innocent child blazing with tapas, calls the child inside.
“Unless Death invites me I will not come in. I will sit and wait outside.”
Seeing the child, the wife joyfully brings food for the child to eat and something to drink.
Nachiketa refuses.
“I will fast until Death comes.”
Three days pass with the wife’s concern that the little boy has not eaten anything, not drunk anything.
Death finally comes home.
“My father has given me to you.”
Death smiles,
“Aren’t you too young? I will come at the right time. I am moved by your intense tapas. Can I offer you three boons? What do you want?
“I have only one question. What happens when I die? Is death real or a figment of our imaginations? Please tell me the truth”
“You ask me difficult questions. I have never taken anyone. I simple change their old bodies and minds and give them new ones. There are a few who live so totally that they don’t need to repeat the old games. They discover the whole of existence. The droplet becomes the ocean.”
In that pregnant moment of wisdom, the Dhira was born
The Indian philosophical system, especially Upanishad, Yoga Sutra and the Mahabharata, views a Hero as “DhIra”. A DhIra experiences life fully while being anchored in a state of dhyAna. A DhIra is able to engage with life with great intensity and great tranquillity. This way of engaging with life's challenges frees the person from the cycles of life and death. The Journey of the “DhIra” as described in the Upanishads is similar to the processes of “returning to the source Consciousness” as defined in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali through word concepts like pratyAhAra and pratiprasava.
When you break down Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey to its essence, it is a three-step journey comprising separation, initiation and return.
Joseph Campbell calls it the nuclear unit of the monomyth.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (x); fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (y); the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Joseph Campbell's idea of heroism is an external journey happening inside the symbolic inner landscape. Indic idea of heroism emphasizes the inner journey. The inner journey is the journey.
This would become much more obvious if we reflect on and understand the essence of Agyatavas in Mahabharata.
In the Mahabharata, everyone, including the Kauravas, has heroic potential.
The only difference between the Kauravas and the Pandavas is that every time when they get pulled into the vortex of personal agenda, vendetta, and envy, Pandavas undergo tapas, while the Kauravas do not.
How can we map this process of tapas?
In indic thought, the individual is the fractal of the universe. And so to understand the process of self-transformation of the dhira, it is vital to understand the vital stages of the evolution of the universe.
Ainthiram (Tamil: ஐந்திறம்) is a Tamil text on architectural philosophy, grammar and cosmology attributed to the legendary Mayan. It describes the evolutionary stages thus:
We will explore this process of inner journey deeper in the coming weeks. This newsletter has been dormant for a while. I am hoping to bring this back to life.
Do share your reflections and resonances.
Excerpted from Commentary by Swami Krishnananda on Kathopanishad which talks of the virtues of a Dhira. Notice how ‘dhiro’ sounds pretty much like the primitive version of what could have evolved later as hero?
A retelling of the tale based on Swami Krishnananda’s commentary and Osho’s discourses on Nachiketa.
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