The conscious mind is a thing that is constantly in the process of emerging.  The Gaia Mind emerged from the primordial chaos and has grown in diversity and complexity ever since.  From this ancient mother emerged the collective human consciousness.  At first closely tied to its Gaian mother--as chronicalled in  early mythology--the human consciousness gradually asserted itself as an independent mind, its own self regulating system. Similarly the individual mind shows the same pattern of emerging from its collective parent.

One of the most enduring mythic themes--the myth of the hero--seems to track this development of consciousness.  The hero leaves or is forced out of his home, often due to a conflict with his parents, must endure difficult, alien cicumstances, and perform heroic feats.  In the process he undergoes a transformative experience and returns to his home to lead his people--and in the more spiritual cases, to bring them to a higher state of awareness.  The pattern of emerging from the parent consciousness, being challenged then transformed by the process, and then returning to the source is the fundamental path of the mind.

The hero myth has been popularized by the work of Joseph Campbell.  But Campbell's was only one interpretation.  The first major interpretor of the hero myth was Otto Rank, the Viennese psychoanalyst and student of Sigmund Freud.  According to Rank, the hero is the child of distinguished parents, his origin is preceded by difficulties, there is a prophecy cautioning against his birth, and ususally threatening danger to the father.  He is surrendered to the water, in a box, then is saved by animals or lowly people.  After he has grown up, he finds his parents, takes his revenge on his father and achieves rank and honors.

The next study of the hero myth came from English folklorist, Lord Raglan, a student of the anthropologist James Frazer.  Raglan lists a pattern of the hero's life that includes twenty-two elements, covering the hero's whole life.  As with Rank, Raglan's hero is born to parents of high standing; the father a king and the mother a royal virgin.  The hero is also reputed to be the son of a god.  At birth an attempt is made to kill the hero, usually by the father, but he is spirited away and reared by foster parents in a far country.  On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom.  After a victory over the king, a giant dragon, or wild beast, he marries a princess--often the daughter of his predecessor --and becomes king.  Later he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and is driven from the throne and city, after which he meets with a mysterious death, often at the top of a hill.

The third major interpretation of the hero myth, and the most widely known, came from Joseph Campbell, who brought a Jungian influence to the subject.  For Jung, heroism involved relations with the unconscious. Heroism meant separation not only from parents and anti-social instincts but from the unconscious.  Independence from the unconscious for Jung and Campbell meant the formation of consciousness.  In the first half of life, the object of interest of this developing consciousness was the external world; but in the second half of life interest turned to the Jungian unconscious.  The goal of this exploration was to achieve a balance between consciousness of the external world and consciousness of the unconscious.  The aim of the second half of life was to supplement, not abandon, the achievement of the first half.

 Just as Rank confined heroism to the first half of life, so Campbell restricted it to the second half.  Rank's scheme began with the hero's birth; Campbell's began with his adventure.  Campbell's hero leaves his home for strange, new worlds where he encounters a supreme female god and a supreme male god.  The hero has sex with the goddess and marries her, then kills and eats the god.  Transformed by his experiences, the hero must break free of this new world and return home, something that proves harder than leaving home.  When the hero returns home, in Campbell's interpretation, he has tamed the unconscious and can do the same for others.  

In spite of their differences, all of the interpretations of the hero myth follow the same pattern; the hero leaves the ordinary world, is transformed, and then returns triumphant to his world.  In Campbell's interpretation, the hero's departure from the ordinary world was a search for the uncoscious.  Having managed to break free of the secure, everyday world to go off to a dangerous new one, the hero re-encounters the unconscious, achieves a transcendence of the ego in mystical oneness with the unconscious, and returns home transformed.  The world he returns to is the ordinary world that he left, but it too is now transformed because the two worlds, the divine and the human are actually one.  "The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness."

 Campbell's interpretation provides us with the key to using the hero myth as an expanation for the development of the collective human, and individual minds.  The separation of the hero from his home--the ordinary world--represents the separation of the mind from the larger mind that spawned it.  Campbell speaks of the quest as a search for the unconscious or the divine.  In fact it is driven by two separate impulses; the development of the individual consciousness and the dawning awareness of and search for those greater consciousnesses that the mind has left.  The quest is a two edged sword, propelling the individual consciousness to higher levels but at the same time resulting in the profound sense of loss and alienation that permiates mythology.  Alienation--emotional isolation or dissociation--is a natural emotional component of the hero's story, since the hero, either through his own choice or through the actions of others, has been physically isolated from his society.  The hero myth and alienation are necessarily intertwined, and both speak the the development of mind, as one mind develops by emerging--and in the process becoming alienated from--the larger mind that was its parent.

The alienation of the individual from the human and Gaian collectives has long been the subject of comment.  Social manifestations of this alienation include crime, mental illness, and the breakdown of social institutions all of which rise with the emergence of modern society and its emphasis of the individual over the collective.  Saint Augustine wrote that due to its sinful nature, humanity was alientated from God.  To the extent--as we have explored--that Saint Augustine's God was a reflection of the collective human mind, Saint Augustine's theory of alienation was one of alienation of the individual from the collective human consciousness.  Jean Jacques Rousseau's interpretation implies that alienation involves both the collective human and Gain minds.  Rousseau believed that civilization corrupted man, separating him from nature, and introducing "from outside" all the vices which are "alien to man's constitution".  The result was the destruction of the "original goodness of man".  Man's history was a "rapid march towards the perfection of society and towards the deterioration of the species."  Sigmund Freud believed that alienation resulted from the split between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind.  But to the extent that the unconscious mind really represents the larger human and Gaian minds, Freud's theory fits perfectly with our analysis of the relationship between minds.

The symptoms of alienation that Rousseau and Freud describe are the physical manifestations of the hero's struggle as they appear in each individual.  The hero myth works at many levels, and at the level of the mind, the hero's struggle is what Campbell describes as a taming of the unconsciousness--which a Gaian perspective seems to indicate--includes the achievement of unity with the larger minds around us.  As with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the hero (the individual) never really has to leave home to achieve enlightment.  The hero's journey is metaphorical for the development of consciousness.

A famous zen koan captures this journey that is not a journey; "Before I studied Zen, mountains were just mountains and rivers were just rivers. When I first took up the study of Zen, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers no longer rivers. But now that I've really got some understanding of Zen, mountains are once again mountains and rivers once again rivers."  The first stage is naive ignorance--before the journey has begun--an unawareness of the world around us.  The second stage comes early in the study or the journey, with a dawning awareness that the mountains are much more than "just mountains" but something strange and unkown. The final stage comes with enlightenment; the mountains are again mountains, although that understanding is now much more profound.  It is the observer who has been transformed; he is not just another creature living on the mountains he is a fully self aware mind who knows his place on those mountains.

The mythological record indicates that the collective human mind experienced similar alienation when it split from the Gaian.  It is no coincidence that profound signs of alienation emerged just as the collective human consciousness developed.  The story of Gilgamesh contains the first sign of angst about death.  Gilgamesh searches for the secret of imortality but has it stolen from him by a snake and must return to his home city knowing that he is mortal.  Gone is the sense of the eternal return that pervaded pre-historic cultures.  By the time of Genesis man's alienation from Gaia had become explicit in the story of the Garden of Eden.  Man's alientation from God has been a common theme in the Judeo Christian tradition; the divine order has been violated, man has alienated himself from "the ways of God."  The Oepipal myth shows both sides of the hero myth--Oedipus' unwitting murder of his father propells his own personal development by allowing him to become king while at the same time ensuring his ultimate alienation from his home.

The collective human consciousness is playing out its own Oedipal myth, and it is a struggle which is now coming to a climax.  The extent to which the collective human consciousness left its Gaian home can be measured in the environmental damage humans are inflicting.  After nearly four billion years of the most amazing balance and harmony, only the human species has been able to disrupt the Gaian harmony to such an extent that it faces a die off of species comperable to those caused in the past by the collision of a major asteroid.  This disharmony dates from the first development of a collective human consciousness.  The myth of Gilgamesh includes the story of the clearing of the cedars of Lebanon.  The cedars of Lebanon, also recorded in the Bible, are now extremely rare, an early casualty of human disharmony with Gaia.  There is a stong relationship between the development of the human consciousness--even from the beginning--and the upheaval of the Gaian balance that existed for billions of years.  The more the human consciousness advanced, the greater the threat to Gaia.  Today scientists estimate that half of the worlds wetlands have been destroyed, drained for agriculture, dams and development.  The oceans have lost a quarter of their coral reefs, fish catches are declining by about one percent annually as the oceans are overfished.  Half of all the species of plants and animals may be extinct by the end of the twenty first century.  Like Oedipus, Human society threatens to kill the parent that created it.

Humanity is about to reach the climactic stage of the hero myth.  The conflict with god/parent in this case is ostensibly with Gaia itself, but on a deeper level, as Campbell realized with the individual, the struggle  is with humanity itself. Humanity stands at the crossroads, with an Oedipal choice, to destroy the parent from which it sprang and ultimately doom itself as well, or to achieve a sort of transcendence and unity with the greater minds around it.  This is the crisis point the human mind now faces and its resolution will determine whether humanity--like Oedipus--faces a disastrous, crippled future, or returns to its true home having transcended its own limited consciousness and embraced the wider consciousnesses around it.

Humanity must must take its rightful place--like the hero--and return home--not as just another species in the Gaian whole, but as a conscious mind in its own right, as Campbell writes, having transcended its own ego in mystical oneness with the the larger consciousness.  Humanity will be transformed and will be ready to enter a new symbiotic relationship, at harmony with nature rather than so disastrously in conflict with it as now.