Avoiding The Hero’s Path

I yearn to walk the path of the hero. I have always yearned to walk the path of the hero! This yearning was born long ago – somehow something from the higher worlds had penetrated into my sleep, and awoken something within me. It had come in the form of a strange, ethereal music, the strains of which spoke of the Hero Path. This music came from no earthly source and it held within its tones the resonances of glory that pertain to the Hero Path. No one needed to come over to me to explain the significance of those tones, the import of those resonances. My innermost being recognized those tones of glory – it responded to it immediately and a straightaway yearning within me was born. My inner being responded to that unearthly music in the same way that the leaves of a young plant respond to the rays of the sun and since that moment I have yearned to walk the path of the hero. I have from that moment yearned so deeply to embark on that Journey and in doing so forsake the weak, worthless, pointless, and grotesquely self-indulgent life that was the only life I knew…

 

Having said this, I also have to say that I never actually did forsake that worthless, pointless life of mine – that life which I was so rightly sick of. It still is the only life I know, the only life I can imagine. I know full well that this so-called ‘life’ of mine isn’t worth a damn. I have seen through it, I have seen it to be unworthy. When those rays of glory fell upon me that day I saw my life for what it was – a tawdry exercise in self-gratification and nothing more – and I found myself deeply repelled by what I saw. There is no honour in such a life, I realized. Such a life is not worth living. To be compelled by mechanical forces, whilst not knowing that one is being so compelled, to lead such a life is a very terrible affliction. It is an unspeakable horror and yet we cannot see it as such, and this ignorance – somehow – is the worst affliction of all. Seeing what I saw that day troubled me deeply and I knew at that moment that I could never go back to being the sad excuse for a man that I used to be. I had glimpsed something greater than myself – I had seen a possibility that I could never before have even dreamt of, and I knew that I would never be able to unsee it.

 

And yet, and yet… And yet here I am, much the same as ever, all these years later! Nothing much has changed – I carry on in the same old way that I always did. I suppose one outcome is that I now live under a perpetual shadow. Is it guilt? Is it shame? Is it a mixture of the two? It’s as if I don’t have the excuse in the way that I once did before, in some kind of a fashion at least. What did I know back then, anyway? I knew nothing – I didn’t even know that I had been born, so to speak. Looking back, I am filled with incredulity – how was it possible for anyone to be as emptily self-absorbed as I was? How had I been able to go from day to day without having even the tiniest scrap of self-awareness? As I have already said, there is a very great horror implicit in this situation, a horror that is all the greater for being entirely invisible to us when we are in it. And yet – even though I can see all of this very clearly indeed – I constantly find myself wishing that I could go back to those days, back to that time when I simply ‘didn’t know any better’. Awareness truly is a curse, from one point of view, at least…

 

 

 

 

 

 

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