The departure: hearing and heeding the call

Introduction
The following is an illustration of why I decided to leave my old way of life behind in order to go on a pilgrimage on the path of myth. With myth, I mean the stories that connect us by pointing us toward deep patterns within reality and therefore allowing us to gain orientation in life.
It is an invitation to reflect upon your life by giving you insight into mine. The pilgrimage is a Theoria – a sacred journey to test a theory of which I am part. It is an experiment, but not one where I am the supposedly distant observer; rather, the way I participate in the experiment will have a great effect on the result, and the process will have a great effect on me.

We will move from exploring about what makes hearing a calling difficult, to discuss what might us help to hear a call and lastly to reflect on how to interpret one’s calling in order to differentiate between inspiration and inflation, I will give insight into how I try to frame my calling.

Hearing the call
A young person’s life is directed toward the future. The path that lies ahead is still greater than the path already gone. We long for a place where we can belong, and we search for ways to be worthy of that belonging. But it seems to me that in our culture we have confused being worthy with being able, and then being able with having a certificate. This marks a shift in the way we existentially relate to the world. It is a shift from the being mode to the having mode. Being worthy is not only being able, but also being in right relationship with the sacred. Being able is also valuable, but it can lack the proper context in which a skill is performed. A skillful doctor with years of experience, treating his patients like products rather than humans, is able but not in right relationship with the sacred.
A certificate, in the best case, is proof that one is able; but more often than not, especially now in the age of AI, it is merely recognition by bureaucracy, by the machine.
What once could have been our calling is now often our job. A job is something that is necessary to make the rest of life possible. This leads to our identity being disconnected from our highest gift: the capacity to give back to the world by making it a more beautiful place.

To feel worthy again, I believe we need to relearn how to hear a call, provide places where people can hear their call, and then create social networks that ground the calling through initiation, so that the calling ends up in service to the community.
Initiation is a process in which the whole organism is primed in a way so that it knows how to stand and move within the spheres of personal, social, and spiritual life. It affords a deep relationship with reality itself; one’s identity is bound up in the story of life, and the story that emerges from this relationship is an end in itself.

I feel that in our era we slowly slide into adulthood. The stories that once gave us meaning by structuring our transitional phases and everyday life are slowly dying. This leaves us feeling like imposters, like personalities that were never initiated, stuck in the position of a mature person. Even if we are able, we are not sure whether we are worthy; and even if we feel worthy, we may not know the humility with which worthiness should be carried, and thus we are not worthy.

I have struggled for years to mature, and in my experience the institutions in my life, especially school and university, did not provide opportunities to mature in the ways I desired, though I must admit that in higher education there were more opportunities. But in some cases, the institutions even hindered me. The work I was able to do outside of these was different. By engaging in things that truly mattered, education in sports and experiential learning in my case, I learned and matured a great deal. I am grateful for that opportunity, but after a few years I still felt that something essential was missing.

The following portrayals are, of course, based on my personal experience, but I believe they could mirror, or at least rhyme with, the experience of our zeitgeist.
To explain this, I will use the solar system as a metaphor for stages in the development of my psyche. During my teens and early twenties, I identified with the planets and their orbits; they represent my roles and personas in life. I would spend two weeks on one planet, “the study planet,” then two weeks on another, “visiting my girlfriend who lived in another city planet,” and there were around ten other planets of similar significance. But there was no power harmonizing their orbits. I was staggering around, constantly in danger of crashing one planet into another.
To harmonize these orbits, my identity slowly shifted from the planets toward the sun. The sun here represents the witnessing I. The orbits stabilized, and after consciously crashing some planets into each other, a somewhat harmonious system emerged for a while. But I began to feel terribly lonely. Everything was circling around me; I was the center connecting everything in my life. And what is a small planet compared to the might of the sun? The witnessing I was the only thing I could relate to anymore, and even that, I did not know what it was or where it was. With that growing disorientation, the system started to become turbulent again.
There I was, empty, lonely, and without orientation. I wished to extinguish the star, to not carry the burden anymore of being the center of my world.
Then slowly, it dawned on me that I was not the only star, that I might in fact be the whole solar system, and that there were other solar systems around me.
This was the point where I feel collective factors began to trump personal ones. The way I was embedded in society made it impossible for me to connect as a whole system to other whole systems. Everywhere I went, I could only relate through a role. Each role acted as an independent point of contact with the world. The only unifying factor that remained was myself. And life quickly becomes meaningless if everything revolves around oneself, so I entered a deep meaning crisis.
What I needed was a constellation of other solar systems, other whole beings, that could harmonize with mine, so that together we could orbit within a galaxy. The galaxy here represents collective meaning.
To expand my identity to the whole solar system, it was essential to find a niche in which my whole being could be embedded. But with the strict separation of work, friends, personal interests, spiritual practice, romantic relationships, and family, the strong identification with the sun remained necessary to prevent the system from collapsing. Thus, I found myself in a dilemma: either becoming fragmented again, or unified under the tyranny of nihilism that arises through the rule of the ego.
In order to fulfil my desire to realize meaning, society seemed to offer two paths:
One option was to fully identify with a single planet, a planet aspiring to become a star. This meant putting everything into a career, becoming a professional athlete, or losing myself completely in romance or drug addiction. I tried and failed. It was not my path.
The other option was to continue balancing between fragmentation and narcissistic nihilism until I would start a family, which would then provide the new nucleus of my solar system. In this scenario, the I of the solar system would be replaced by the family as the gravitational center. But I felt that this would merely bypass the problem and pass it on to the next generation. I also have the intuition that the nuclear family is another institution that arose over centuries after we lost a sense of organic collective meaning: God, the true center around which all solar systems orbit.

But the desire to become more integrated led to a search for other approaches. The pilgrimage is that very search, and I already have some and encountered some ideas I’d like to test which could address the problem.
For now, I need to depart from the systems I don’t feel at home in anymore in order to search for a binding element, a gravitational object larger than myself. To some degree, I have found it, or at least an intuition of where it might be, and that is story. More specifically, myth. I have come to see myth as something alive that acts as a binding element, stabilizing everything into harmonious orbits.
By engaging with the stories that have emerged in my own life, as well as the great stories and their transformations that humanity has told forever, I slowly began to hear a calling that is growing ever clearer. The calling I hear is to create spaces where people can find their calling by re-membering their own story.
If you want to dive deeper into what precursors there could be for hearing a call, here is another blog post about the vision for a “center for personal mythliving.”

Interpreting and heeding the call
Now I want to touch on how to interpret one’s calling in order to differentiate between inspiration and inflation. Because finding yourself within a Kairos moment – the feeling of the opportune moment when personal destiny and collective fate are aligning – can be intoxicating. Also, balancing being inspirited and being possessed can be a tightrope walk.
I’ve always had a pretty mythological view of life and a deep relationship with my dreams, but in recent months my dreams and visions started to take a turn into the religious domain. I don’t want to dive into their content, but they felt loaded with meaning and notions of transformative power. I found myself a bit dumbstruck, not knowing what to make of them.
Interpreting them literally would make me look like a fool, for example if I were to interpret a dream of an angelic encounter and prophetic visions of new ages as me now being a prophet.
But just explaining them away in a reductionistic manner would feel dismissive of a personally meaningful experience that could even extend into collective meaningful action.
I don’t have a good answer for how to interpret these phenomena. I’m deeply interested in them, but I can’t make definitive propositions about what they are and what they imply. Even though these questions are highly interesting to me, I feel like pursuing them only in such a detached manner is not fruitful. Instead of trying to explain them, I try to get into relationship with them by bringing them into dialogue with my peers and by converting them into works of art, where the energies can fully express themselves. That way I get feedback from outside of myself to see if I have fallen prey to self-deception, but I can still express them and work with the themes and energies.
So instead of a messi(m)anic calling, which opens up a space in which one is either fully enveloped by unconscious forces or in full neglect in order to stay sane, I would like to frame a healthy call as a rational quest. Rational in the ancient sense of being in right relationship with reality, knowing one’s ratio/proportions, and quest in the sense of an earnest search coming from a place of not knowing and dedication to something higher than oneself.
I would not be honest if I said that this project would not be highly influenced by my dreams and visions. In fact, this project is a way in which I try to ground the abstract, mystical thoughts and experiences into something practical and embodied. What helps me with this is approaching it as a scientific experiment.
John Vervaeke talks about how the flow state and the scientific method share prerequisites. What this means for this project will be another blog post coming soon.