What Jung calls “the path of individuation,” Joseph Campbell calls “the mythical Hero’s Journey.” Although you may encounter different numbers of stages of this journey, most often they are four: “calling,” “journey,” “enlightenment,” and “return.” David Gordon compares this fourfold structure of the process of returning to our spiritual roots, in his book The Mindful Dreaming, to the seasons in nature. The stage of the “calling” corresponds to autumn, the “journey” to our inner winter, “enlightenment” to our inner spring, and the “return” to summer.
The initial stage is the most difficult and the most important, because this is when a new hero appears on the stage of our inner life—our Soul. The awakening of the eternal part within us is experienced through the discovery that there is something within our own psyche that does not submit to our conscious control. We become depressed and unhappy without apparent cause, or our significant relationships fall apart. Such experiences may be incomprehensible to the ego and therefore frightening. Yet there is nothing to fear—the time has come for autumn to arrive.
Autumn is the time for releasing the ego’s strategies for obtaining gratification. This forces us “to let go of our impulse to flee from reality, of the mania for control, the urge to judge others, attachment and impatience—all lessons we learn during the Autumn and Winter of our lives. The dark forms of autumn and winter are connected with the dissolution of old forms… And although we usually try to stay on the surface, the soul of our Winter knows very well how important it is to learn to go with the flow.”
It is one thing to think of ourselves as broken, depressed failures. It is another to know that these “autumnal” experiences are part of the archetypal сценарий of the Hero’s calling—that this is precisely how the soul feels when it awakens in the body of a human being. One of the most difficult trials in this scenario is to bow our heads before forces greater than our small ego-will, without at the same time giving up the struggle for what matters to us. This also applies to our desire for “spring” to arrive as soon as possible. And spring comes only when we truly accept that we are not the “masters of the seasons.”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
