A Call to Adventure & A Cry for Authenticity
“The theme of the Grail is the brining of life into what is known as ‘the wasteland’. The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer… It’s the world of people living inauthentic lives” Joseph Campbell
It’s not really a place or a time but a feeling. Often in mythology and indeed in life we hear the call to adventure. Whether it be a subtle whisper or a deafening roar it comes to us and insights us to action. The call will often lead us down a dark and fearsome path where none have gone before or at lest a path from which none have come back.
The wasteland is waiting. For it is the companion of the adventure. The call comes and offers us a challenging path while the wasteland comes and offers us security. Which ever choice we make will take us into the darkness. However, it is there in that same darkness that we will find the light. But will it be a light that we follow from within or from without?
Our parents, friends and advisors can act as the medium of our soul’s betrayal. That is the disguise that the wasteland so stealthily wears. It is often from those who we would most seek comfort and guidance that we find our path to doom. Moreover, the media and culture reinforce its presence in the images and slogans of success. The wasteland tells us what we should buy, who we should marry, what our bodies should look like, and what we should follow for a carrier.
But what are our films and popular literature telling us about the wasteland? In the Matrix we can see that Neo’s plight is apparent. Wearing the chains of bondage he adorns a collar and necktie as he wastes his life working 9-5 in a cubicle that doubles as a prison cell. His options are even more obvious. As Morpheus so clearly puts it “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill- the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember… all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” That truth is the awareness that we traded our souls for security and the reality he shows us is that barren landscape of living corpses surviving as Duracell batteries…‘the desert of the real’. His soul mate Trinity offers to him a glimpse at the destiny he is afraid to face but knows in his heart he finally must “The answer is out there, Neo, and it’s looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.”
What are these stories telling us about the symptoms and maladies of the wasteland? Again we look to a world that seems, on the surface at lest, to be just like the one we inhabit in the novel Fight Club. As the enigmatic anti-hero Tyler Durden tells us “I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” What Tyler is trying to awaken us to is the tragedy of our lives and what he reveals to us are the hollow symbols of success that we have mistaken for substance. “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.”
What are the Grail Legends trying to tell us about the wasteland? How might we face it? As the knights witnessed the divine chalice appear before them it was agreed that each should set forth to find the Grail that would restore life and vitality to the kingdom. The knights were to take on the adventure to behold it unveiled and as they set off in quest each man went into the dark and dangerous forest at the point he himself had chosen. No one could show them the way and it was up to each to find their own unique path. That forest was the forest of their fears and insecurities. Each one had personal monsters to slay before they reached the Holy Grail. This is to say that each man had to find out who they were and face what they had found. This was their call to adventure. But they each had a choice. Either they go forth and brave the parlous journey of self discovery or stay and be swallowed up by the encroaching wasteland and the living death that followed.
The call to adventure is the fire that glows in the heart and pushes us towards ourselves. It burns away who we thought we where and crystallizes who we are now becoming. This path is however neither easy nor clear. For what is to be discovered is nothing less than the true and genuine treasure that is intimately tied to your unique and individual spirit. There has never been anything like it before on this Earth…and there never will be again. Something so precious requires such an ordeal of monolithic magnitude. But proportionate to the pain and suffering endured on behalf of its culmination are the rewards and blessings.
The wasteland on the other hand is the beacon that bacons us away from the heart. It is that electric trap that tempts us towards a false heaven. It offers us an easy path towards certain fulfillment. But where we had thought to receive happiness we arrive only to discover that the price we paid for what we were told would be joy was nothing other than ourselves.
