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The Gifts
The great key to understanding myth and symbol is that the two realities, ordinary and nonordinary, are actually one. The deed of the hero is to explore both dimensions and then return, to teach again what has been correctly taught and incorrectly learned a thousand times throughout human history…
The great quandry for the returning hero is how to translate, into terms of yes and no, revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites. How can the hero communicate the message of the all-generating void to people who insist on the sole evidence of their own senses?
Another problem for the hero is how to reenter a world filled with all that was once meaningful but which no longer is. How does one make plausible the bliss of transcendent experience to people preoccupied with passion and materialism? The easy way out is to withdraw, to keep the message to oneself and forget about the world and its limited concerns.
— Joseph Campbell
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…In a kind of coma, as a boy of nine, Black Elk had a most tremendous spiritual experience, which he kept to himself till he got a thunder phobia. Then he went to a medicine man who said: “Your experience has not been given to you only, you owe it to your tribe.” So he told the tribe of his visions and the phobia disappeared. I would say that a real…
