Good evening everyone, welcome to our adventure today. I inform you that next week, exceptionally, we will not have the reading session. I will be doing a trip, a lecture, in another state. So we will skip a week. It's good, 'cause you'll have a little more time to catch up with the reading. Because today's chapter is huge, right? There are almost 80 pages. Remember, we are in part 1, chapter 2. We saw last week chapter 1, which talked about the departure, the call of the hero to the tests. To the test To his heroic experience. And
today we will talk about the initiation. The process of entering the hero, already in the process of tests, in the difficulties that will raise his consciousness to the human condition, which is the goal. The goal is not to kill an external dragon, but the dragon of his own defects, of his own weaknesses, to become a full human being. Within what Campbell called monomyth, which is a tremendously bold proposal. He says that all the classic stories of sacred or traditional theory, talk about a single story. That is the story of the departure of man from ignorance
and the arrival to wisdom. That is, the human trajectory. All myths, all fairy tales, all traditional fables, not those that we invented for entertainment, but the traditional ones, talk about the human trajectory, the departure of ignorance and the arrival to wisdom. That is, the search for man to reach what nature expects of him. To conquer himself. So today he will talk about this entry. The hero lived his daily life, banal. He received the call. He answered this call or did not answer. At a certain moment life forced him to answer, because it was a matter
of choice. But sooner or later we have to face the task of continuing to ourselves, because we came here for that. And once he accepts this call and enters this second phase, he starts to pass through the tests. That is, it is called initiation. That's what we're going to deal with. Just remembering our friend Campbell, American, who lived entirely in the last century. He died at the age of 83 in Honolulu, Hawaii. And this is one of his most famous books. Let's go then. The Hero's Adventure, Chapter 2. The Initiation. The path of the tests,
remember that it has a limiar, that we talked about this limiar. That the gap between everyday life, banal life. The call and the passage to another dimension. Where nothing is the same. Where everything is new, everything is fantastic. Where man breaks his routine. There is a philosopher who says something very interesting. That from time to time we should purposely break our routine. So that we do not become so mechanized. Because life, if you don't do that, it will generate sudden ruptures. Which can generate psychological ruptures in man too. From time to time do things differently.
Take a different path for work. Have a different routine during the day. So that the personality gets used to change. Because if not, one of the most painful consequences it has is to have a fear of death. Which is a big change. So get used to the personality that things are not definitive. We live in a world where the only eternal thing is change. The continuous death that takes everything, all appearances. So get used to it. And realize that nothing is so safe. So he will talk about this hero who went through the limiar. Enter
an ambiguous landscape. Remember Alice in Wonderland? Enter a totally strange world. Different for him. And begins to live a succession of tests. He will win some, will lose others. The tests will be successive until he reaches the meaning of the test. Why am I living this? Then you realize he fights a monster. Another monster. There are certain stories that for people who do not understand that, they find it tiring. Why so many monsters? Why so much fighting? Look at your life, you will see that every day you face a monster. The monster of tiredness, the
monster of incomprehension, of impatience with others, of impatience with yourself. And life repeats these tests constantly until you learn what they want to show. And if we knew how to read the kind of test that life is sending us, it shows, it clearly signals, exactly what is the weak point that it wants us to work. Remember the classic example that I gave you a million times. If you are that person who always enters the queue that does not walk, it is likely that life is saying that you have to be more patient. And how many
times is the same monster in the queue that does not walk? That is, repetitive tests until the hero awakens and finds the meaning of the tests. And assimilating this meaning, passes to the next stage. This is life. And all these stories are reproducing human life. Succession of tests assisted by advice, amulets and agents of the donor. Remember that the donor, within the fairy tale, is very clear. The donor is that citizen who arises out of nowhere. Sometimes it is an animal. It can be a bird, it can be anything that the hero will help. And
as gratitude, that being reveals a secret to him. Give an instruction, give a magic weapon, give a cape that makes him invisible, give something that protects him and helps him. It represents the master. Those who have already stopped their battle and who can teach the one who comes after. Life is full of people, of masters. I don't say full, but there is a significant number of these beings who have something to offer us. If we are willing to receive. If we want to stop, start from where humanity stopped. If we don't want to reinvent the
wheel. If we have the humility to learn from those who know how to live. Life has these instructors. They are placed. At a certain moment he realizes that, in the same way that he has proofs, he also has a benign power that accompanies him all the time. If you haven't read a book called The War of Art, I gave a lecture about it, a course called How to Overcome Your Internal Limits, it's on YouTube. This book is fantastic. Pressfield puts this structure of the myth into his practical life, his biography. As at the same time
he had difficulties, he had in some way an equivalent being of another polarity, luminous, helping. All the time, in all the situations he had, he had something dark and something luminous. Sometimes it's morbidity, it's so much that we turn our backs to light. This is to see shade. There are also those luminous donors, those assistants, who are there all the time, accompanying too. Benign power everywhere, encouraging and supporting. Realize that it is interesting. At a certain moment he realizes that nature is all the way with him. I put a piece here of a classic sacred
book, that maybe some of you already know, which is called Bhagavad Gita, an Indian sacred book, which locks a battle, it is a battle between two armies, which symbolically represents the inner battle of man, between our virtues and our defects. At a certain moment, when these two armies face each other, there is a passage from this book, which is written, the battlefield was called Kurukshetra. And the book says that even the stars rotate more slowly to see what happens in Kurukshetra. There the fate of a man is not decided, the fate of humanity is decided.
Arjuna was there to prove it, because if a man is able to be victorious over himself, it is a sign that all humanity has this potential. All humanity is the heir to this victory. He is a hope. So, in a certain way, all nature is in our favor. And this is very beautiful. We had a person who brought the New Acropolis to Brazil, long time ago, already deceased, Professor Michel Echenique. He gave a lecture that was about how to deal with the future. He said something very interesting. If your life project, your future project, coincides
with the nature project, that is, nature wants men to walk there, to be more human, and my life project helps, because I want to be more human. This gives an example. I want to help people grow. This helps nature. If your project coincides with that of nature, it cares and sponsors and says, count on me. Now, if your project is personal, selfish, and goes against the laws of nature, walk alone. With the personal power you have, with the karma that carries. That is, nature walks by your side, if what you do coincides with the cause
of nature itself. And wanting to grow, to be like a human being, coincides with the cause of nature. So, at a certain moment, he feels, the hero, a little of what Jung called synchronicity, that nature brings in his favor. When he needs a tool, before he realizes it, the tool has already appeared. When he needs something, there is a synchronicity that brings this thing into his hand. Sometimes even a memory. It must have happened to you, a memory that blooms in our memory, I don't know, a childhood fact, that we never remembered. Remembered at that
moment, if you go to see, because that was the moment you needed that information. Show some trap you had, that you were not understanding, and understand it, it can help you overcome it. The flower, why? Because you needed it. So nature brought it. Because your cause is correct, because otherwise it would not sponsor it. So he feels this power around him. Well, in the book, Campbell, he intertwines his examples with countless stories. He says that this is the power of nature, and he remembers a passage from a book by Apuleius, called The donkey or the
metamorphoses, the golden ashen, there are two names in the book. This golden ashen tells, among many other things, the story of the ashen itself, but in the middle of the story there is a myth, which is the myth of Psyche. Where Psyche, which represents the human psyche itself, goes through a lot of tests to be able to unite to the zero god. That is, our psyche, going through countless tests to unite to the zero god. And for our luck, she can do it. This is a sign that this is possible. And he narrates a historical
fact, which also reminds a lot of this. He says that the shamans of the Lapps, which is a people who live in frozen regions, every time there is a sick person in the tribe, they make a kind of drink, which they drink and enter a mystical ecstasy process, where they are in a state of ecstasy, and they unconsciously make a journey through planes, unconsciously from the body, conscious and other more subtle planes. They make a journey in subtle planes, where they go to the presence of the god of death, to ask what is the right
medicine for that sick person. But they win a lot of adventures. They say that several are slaughtered out there. They cross a lot of monsters, have to dribble a lot of difficulties, to get in front of the god of death and ask what is the right medicine for that sick person. And if they can return to life, they return with the element that will act on the causes of that person's illness. And it is able to bring them back. He says that this is traditional in many tribes, not only in these. That these shamans, these
priests, have a process of ecstasy, where they go, in some plane of nature, to get the information they need. This is very mysterious, I'm not the one who will say how or where they go. But the fact is that there is some kind of process where they dive into the unconscious and come back with this answer. This is not so uncommon, nor does it need to go so far. We know that here, even in South America, some tribes of pre-Columbian origin, still have some shamans, even Amazonian tribes, who have a very great knowledge, for example,
of medicinal plant power. And when we ask, where did you get this from? They narrate fantastic origins of this knowledge, that they or some ancestors had, received from some exceptional being of nature. Well, then you say, it's a lie, it's fantasy. Look, we are not owners of the truth. I remind you, for those who have not watched a wonderful video that shows an interview with Carl Jung, Mysteries of the Heart, beautiful, it's worth watching. Where, when he receives an assistant who will work with him, the two attend a patient who said that he was going
to the moon. And then the girl, who is young, had just arrived to be his assistant, said, this is a delirium, she said it was the moon. He said, no, it was really the moon. You are saying that she thinks it was the moon, right? No, it was the moon. And she was shocked. Well, I came to work with this doctor, he is a lunatic like the patients, he thinks his patient went to the moon. And she says that for her it was a decision, I stay with this man and I'm leaving. And then it
clicked in her head, and she understood, this moon that is there, is not the most important. Within us there is something equivalent to the moon. Some satellite that somehow represents a mystery within our consciousness. And on this moon she really went. She said, if I hadn't understood this, I would have abandoned Jung and would have lost the opportunity to learn from him. So what he demanded of the symbolic mentality of the people who worked with him, it was not a joke. What Jung did was something fantastic. And much of what Campbell uses is based on
his work, his analytical psychology of Jung, he is anything but sensational. Well, he will talk about this descent to the spiritual labyrinths. Because deep down, all these beings, whether it is the mythical being of a fairy tale, of a properly said myth, whether it is the historical being, the priest calling the lacoons, deep down what he dived was in a labyrinth within himself, to seek answers, to seek information, that exist latent there. And he can only dive when he has a goal and a method. Goal, a generous goal, a human goal, for humanity in some
way. He wants to benefit, because otherwise he can get lost in these abysses and not come back anymore. A dive like this can provoke a process of mental alienation and the person does not come back anymore. And it seems that it is not rare to happen this. He dives and comes back because he has a goal and because he has a method. The method is humility. To dive into this world carefully. What worlds are these? I told you in the first lecture we had that the unconscious from the point of view of philosophy is greater
than our personal unconscious. It is not simply to dive into your personal unconscious, that set of information from the past, but a little bit in the mystery of nature around you too. Dive with a goal. I want to help humanity. Discover some mystery and bring it back. Like a bird that flies to get food for the chick. It is able to see a huge distance. Don't you think that's crazy? That a little ant flies to that height and suddenly sees a little food down there. How does it see from that height? And dives and takes
it and takes it to the chick. That is, go hunting food for your chick and see much more than you would normally see. Just to illustrate to you once again our friend Jung. If any of you have heard about Red Book, his red book, which is his diary that was published not so long ago. One thing he says is when I dived to understand the human psyche, I only returned for one thing, love. Love for my patients, love for my work, love for my family. If it wasn't for love, I did certain dives that I
couldn't come to terms with. So, dive into the mysteries of nature that includes our own nature, looking for an answer and bringing it back. For a deep commitment human commitment. With the human cause. A deep bond of love. You will see that there is in medieval alchemy an example that I like to use because it helps a lot to understand what Campbell is talking about here. That are the three stages of alchemical work. The black work, which is the dive into the unconscious. Everything that lives inside you and you don't know. Everything that lives around
you and you don't know. The domain of all these forces, which is the work in white, the purification and the rise of consciousness towards wisdom, which is the work in red. The black work is like you visualize your particular zoology. All those forces that live inside you and that dominate you. And it's not to eliminate them, it's for you to establish a domain over them. And then you create the work in white, which is the purification. Purification is not the extermination of instincts, of weaknesses, it is a domain over them. Because nothing is bad in
itself. Bad is the use you make of things. I'll give you a practical example. A person who is very stubborn, if she dives and confronts this stubbornness, without eliminating this force, just by supporting her a little bit, can't she turn stubbornness into determination? Just by removing from her obstinacy, vanity, and selfishness, she transforms stubbornness into determination. A very passionate person can become a very enthusiastic person, no longer dragged by instincts, but dragged by dreams, which is a very good thing. And if you are a person who is very passionate, you can become a person who
is very enthusiastic, but dragged by dreams, which is a tremendous capacity to run after the things she loves. In short, certain elements, just give a slight conversion, nothing is bad in itself. Bad is the direction in which they are being channeled. So you dive inside you, rescue, domesticate all your particular zoology. And come back with this domestication, with this domain over yourself. This is the work in white. And then it starts to rise. Cut the ties. That balloon that is stuck to the ground, will start to tie, will start to gain altitude. This is the
work in red. So what he is talking about is the descent of spiritual labyrinths that demand purity and demand goals. That is, that you do not do it for selfish purposes. That you do it in some way for your good, for the good of humanity. For the growth as a human being, yours and those you will be able to help. And that protects you. That is like the link of Ariadne, when Teseu enters the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur. There is a link of Ariadne. The silver thread. That will bring him back. The thread of
spirituality, of goodness, of good intention. Continuing, a phrase from the Koran that he puts, which is very beautiful. Or do you think that you would enter the Garden of Good Fortune without passing through the trials because those who came before you passed? Do you think that dinner is free? All those who ate paid for dinner. Jung himself says that every time you approach a portal, the dragon, the guardian of that portal, if you do not know how to fight with the dragon, it will not work. That is, the path has its own onus. These are
the proofs. And it is this onus that gives merit. Without any onus, we would not have merit. If everything were really easy, we would reach the other side of the same spiritual size. What we are forming in the path, in the conquest of ourselves, is internal musculature, moral, psychological, spiritual. This is also trained. It's a hard fight, but we get to the other side much bigger. And anyway, that's what nature expects of us. We can postpone, but not avoid. Who will run away from the fate of becoming a human being? You came here for that.
You came here to build yourself. There is no way to escape that. There is no way to postpone and lose opportunities. Now, a repeater usually goes through the one who passes first. So, it is not convenient to postpone too much. He will talk about Sumerian mythology, about an example that he considers one of the oldest, which speaks about this confrontation. It is the goddess Inanna, the celestial goddess, who descends to hell to see her sister Ereskigal. Ereskigal was herself, but on a dark plane. But they were enemies. She descends to hell to confront Ereskigal. Do
you realize what the black work is? You will find a part of you there. Your dark half, the one you don't know yet, the one you didn't dominate. Jung said that either you confront it and dominate it, or you give your back to it and it is dominated by it. She descends to hell, but there is a detail. To be able to enter the presence of her sister in hell, she is being despised in the middle of the way. They take off her earrings until she comes totally despised in front of her sister. She has
to go purifying herself along the way, losing selfishness, losing vanity. When she is totally pure, she is able to withstand the vision of what she is. In a more frontal way, without traumas. She purified herself of all kinds of alienation. Remember, people, that we said in our last or late class, that all evolution is a preparation to see. We are preparing ourselves to see what life is, what we are. Therefore, we are going to the brink of alienation, fantasies, egoism, and we must be pure enough to withstand the vision. Because it is not easy to
see. In general, we hide from ourselves. It is a hard vision. We do not know what our subterranean lives. We do not even want to know and we are angry with who knows. This is very similar to the Odyssey. When Ulysses, the Odyssey, is despised by Poseidon to reach Ithaca, which is the brilliant, the radiant, which is nothing more than your own soul, where your laborious soul lives, waiting for him, who is Penelope. Penelope means exactly this. The eye of the plot, the center, is the soul of Ulysses himself. But do you realize that he
lost everything in the middle of the way? He loses his boats, he loses his men, he even loses his clothes. When he emerges naked, he finds the island of the ugly who will take him home. When he purifies himself, he loses everything that is not himself. Remember the meaning of the word intelligence, intelligere, choose within. Within everything they say who you are, who you really are. And despise the rest. Inanna does this to get ahead of her dark counterpart and dominate her and be able to return to the purified heavens. She loses all the adresses.
So it's the same story. He puts something very interesting too, which is the continuous presence in the myths, in this very myth of Inanna, in fairy tales, that the hero has to dive in the house of the lady of the house of sleep, who is a lady. A lady exceptionally beautiful, but who is sleeping heavily. And he has to overcome a lot of tests to get there and wake her up. The lady of the house of sleep, so beautiful, so wonderful, who is sleeping inside us, are the seeds of our realization that need to wake
up at a certain moment. You are facing a test, a difficulty, I need more concentration to overcome this. You have to go there and wake up a lady of the house of sleep. A seed that exists inside you, a virtue that you have not yet realized. We have a pile of seeds inside us. From time to time we have to go down and bring a ton, because to be able to continue I need another virtue that I do not have yet. But in potential all human virtues exist within me. As in potential also all defects.
So you have to control them, you have to direct the energies so that they are ascending. Because the same energy, when it is ascending, is a defect. So I have to go there and awaken a sleeping energy, beautiful, wonderful, but that has not yet awakened. It is her moment. It is the moment that my hero consciousness descends there and brings a ton, a latent power that I have not yet exercised. So this is the sleeping beauty, it is the snow white, it is a lot of people, it is very recurring. That's why you will forgive
me for not telling you that you are a fairy tale in social networks, in limited company, when people say that they will not tell fairy tales to children anymore because it is alienation, because it works against the feminine imponderance, for God's sake. It is a lack of symbolic mentality. And without symbolic mentality we will not only lose fairy tales, we will lose the history of our own life. You can be throwing a massive gold bracelet. Be careful with that. He says that the mother-child relationship is very similar to the relationship of the adult with the
surrounding world. So that child who, when she is little, loves her mother, depends on her, is wonderful, then she starts to get older, becomes a teenager, becomes rebellious, wants to be independent, does not like the mother stuck with him, and this mother picks up my foot and blah, blah, blah, blah, and goes to that whole soap opera. When she reaches an adult age, if she becomes mature, she looks back and says what a wonderful creature my mother was, or is, let me take care of this, a jewel, a pearl. Our relationship with nature is like
that. We were little, we liked her, we arrived at a certain moment, we started to explore her, to disobey her laws, to ignore her and think that she exists to serve us. When do we reach an adult age to recognize the value of nature as our mother and treat her as she deserves? That is, this maturity, this human activity that takes so long and causes so much harm for not arriving at the right time. All nature is expectant, waits for the moment of man to mature. He talks about an Indian goddess, quotes a great Indian
master who was Ramakrishna, who worked in a temple of this goddess Kali. This goddess Kali is terrible, a frightening goddess. He says that this is part of the mother's archetype, because the mother is sometimes not pleasant to the son, but always beneficial and loving. But true love is not always a kiss. Sometimes it can be to be without dessert, to be punished, to be the slap in the hand to not put your finger in the socket. And as we are a little stingy and we are used to identify the loving with the pleasant, sometimes we
think that the mother is not so well done, she is a mess. This aspect of the mother that does not always seem so pleasant to us. He says that the meaning of the word Kali, I found it interesting, I did not remember this, the word Kali means bridge over the ocean of existence. That is exactly it. The mother has the duty to teach you to cross the world, which is her home, obeying the rules of the house, with less damage. That is, to deal with nature in an intelligent way. So, deal with nature in a
way that is not harmful. To deal with the mother means to understand this duality. She is not always sweet, she is always good, which is different from good. She wants the good, which does not always coincide with the pleasant. So, sometimes the mother is represented as a witch, sometimes as a wonderful woman. This is also very present in the stories. Like the mother bird that throws the nest, for example. This is a little bird, if it weren't for that, they wouldn't fly today. Poor thing! It's not even there, it plays. He will talk about a
Greek myth, which is the myth of Actium, which maybe you have already heard about. Actium was a hunter, he goes hunting, hunting, hunting, and he finds Diana naked. Artemis, Diana naked, taking a bath. She gets furious for having seen him. She turns him into an animal, into a bark, and this bark ends up being killed by his hunting dogs. He was a hunter. He says that this represents the man who is immature to see nature in its purity. And when he suffers, he attributes responsibility to her. He is not prepared to see what nature is.
He is not prepared to understand the love, for example, of a mother. So, when he suffers, his responsibility is hers. The myth is like his vision, that she is a witch and he eliminated her. No, what eliminated him is that he was not prepared to understand nature as she is. He had no maturity, he had not grown enough. It is a curious thing, medieval alchemy said that maturity is not a matter of chronological time, it is a matter of time of conscience. There are people who are like fruits, they pass from the green phase to
the rotten phase and do not mature. This is terrible, but it is true. So, he did not reach enough maturity to understand nature. He is still at war with her. And when he suffers, he thinks that she is the one who persecuted him. She was the one who was harming him. So, it is always the point of view of the victim who is there. The unpreparedness to interact with mother nature the way she is. Who sees the woman as the one who asks for the breaking of the grills has the potential of a king. He
will quote a story about this. He says that as nature is associated with the feminine role, mother and mother nature have a very narrow parentage, and he understands nature as when it is hard, when it is soft, always as a beneficent, he wants to make you grow. He understands and is able to become a benefactor of nature, able to become a father, able to become someone who will protect her, who will protect her. He shows several myths that talk about it. This one he will tell, which is not so well known, is the story of
an Irish king who had five children and who got stuck in the forest and was thirsty. He asks a young man to find a fountain. He finds one, but it is kept for an old woman, who was horrible. The old woman says, I'll give you water if you kiss me. He says, ah, he jumped out. Then the other one, the same thing, asks for water, but he jumps out. He says she is a very ugly woman. Then the other one, who was not even a legitimate son, was considered a bastard. He says, I will give
you a kiss, but also a hug. He kisses her and she becomes a beautiful young woman. He says to her, you will be a king, you and all your descendants will be kings, because you understand the real rule. The real rule is that you have to face situations, sometimes very ugly, to make them beautiful. You will sometimes face disorder to generate order. You will face war to generate peace. You will face disharmony to generate harmony. If you embrace this cause with all your good intention, you will see the beautiful side of it. You understand that.
You understand the real rule. You will be a king and all your descendants. Your brothers will not. It is very interesting that the man who has this ability, this kindness, because the Keritim is exactly that, to deal with the feminine, in general, has a good ability to be a good king. Because he will have this same respect for nature and therefore can rule those who live together with her. Human nature and external nature. He is a good king. You will see that it is the same thing of the Arthurian myth of Gawain and Ragnel. Have
you heard them talk? The same thing. I will not tell you in detail, but Gawain had to marry a witch to save King Arthur from death. It is a slightly more complicated story. He accepts to marry. She becomes a beautiful woman and the story continues. It is the same idea of a gentleman, kind, noble, who is able to face adversity with nobility and turns it into something exceptionally beautiful. That is, a nobleman, a king, knows the real rule. This has a very big relationship and then we can really make some psychological points. The man who
has this delicacy and this kindness with the feminine as an excellent leader. If he doesn't have it, it is very difficult for him to lead something or someone with efficiency. He puts this Japanese Japanese courtesan poetry, which I found very beautiful. Before the kind heart, in the scheme of nature, love did not exist. Nor did the kind heart exist before love. Only a kind heart is able to discover the mysteries of love. The hero must be, above all, a kind heart. He remembers the Spartan codes too much. The Spartans, to know who would be a
warrior in battle, do you know what they looked at? Who in times of peace was kind. It says that the man has a psychological duality. If he is kind outside, it means that he is hard inside. And a warrior has to be hard inside. He has to have courage to know that maybe he won't go home. Courage to know that maybe it is the last day of your life, if it is for a just cause and is able to walk. The man is soft inside, weak, with himself. Therefore, in the face of difficulty, he will
cool down. It is a very intelligent work that they did to realize the psychological duality of man. Who is very kind outside is usually hard inside. Therefore, he is able to face great difficulties. This is a criterion that many people have already spoken about. Nihal, just a curiosity, but very interesting. He will talk about another aspect very present, not only in mythical heroes, but also in historical heroes. The citizen begins to want to be too pure and begins to reject the female role. He begins to confuse purity with puritanism. There is the horror of women,
and women become devils. This talk is so feminist. He says, look, the woman is a symbol of life. When he has no domain of his own life, he starts to demonize the woman. This is a bad symptom. He starts to want to move away, to lock himself in walls, so that no woman can get close. He says, look, there is no wall that protects a human being who has a body and does not dominate it. He will do nonsense in his dream. There are no walls that protect you if you do not dominate yourself and
are not pure. He did not do the work in black, he did not do the work in white. When he realizes this, he realizes that he is fighting against internal things and that the woman becomes a symbol. Sometimes associated with something angelical and sometimes associated with something demonic. Because of his identification with life. The woman is a symbol of life. Not knowing how to deal with the factors of life, for example, instincts, the man demonizes the feminine. He says that the woman is life and the hero is his acquaintance. The marriage, he knows that they
were happy forever, is the domain of the protocols of life. Amplified consciousness. The hero harmonized with nature. He married the princess, with the maiden. He harmonized with nature, he dominates the protocols of life. The canons of nature are in harmony. This is interesting. Marriage is the domain of the protocols of life. That is, it has to end with and they were happy forever. It means that this man managed to overcome his tests and harmonize the factors of nature. Failure in dealing with circumstances means a limitation of consciousness. A man is the size of his tests.
At a certain moment, if you say this, no, it's fine. Life will respect. But this is your size. So, knowing how to deal with the circumstances of life, as proofs, he will talk about it soon, is one of the factors that is measured to the level of consciousness of a man. I don't know if you've heard of something called Disciple in Provation. It is said that it is a man who is already at a certain level of wisdom. A Disciple in Provation is a man who sees all the difficulties of life as proofs. A portal
that keeps a treasure. It does not see as an unhappiness or a disgrace, but as a portal that keeps a treasure. If I open this door, I go ahead. There is a treasure before you. It's like the boy who is playing a game. If I win this stage, I will have such a level of skill, of expertise. I will grow as a player. He knows that. So I don't think the difficulties of the game are an injustice or an unhappiness. They are opportunities to reach another level. Life is the same. Our life is so apathetic
that that's why boys prefer to play than to live. They are the most important in society. They steal the human beings from life. They have absorbed the attributes that life no longer has. My computer was updating. I was irritated. I looked at it and said, that's why computers are so good. They always update themselves. I don't do that. I need to update myself more constantly. That's why games are so good. They have goals. They have attributes that life lost. We should reincorporate them. Life was fun. Instead of fighting with things, learn from them. Myth is
a general human formula for evolution. Each one must find out which step is in order to help him to overcome the next barrier. I talked about this to you in the first lecture we did. It's like a ladder. We have ignorance here, but in each of these steps there is a mythical hero telling you how to climb. There is a myth teaching you how to climb the next step. The big question is to find out where you are. And call the myth of the next step. It's a manual of human life instructions. The mythical mentality.
This monomyth he is talking about is a manual of instructions expressed in several languages in several historical times. There is a little story that teaches you the next myth in the manual of instructions. The next step that I have to climb. What is the example I can follow? How can I draw a magic donor who teaches me to climb? There are many. Who knew how to live always liked to teach. And left it as a legacy in many ways. The myths, the tales, the fairy tales are manuals of instructions left by men who knew how
to live. The hero feels the smell of flesh in what he does. The woman as a symbol of life receives the blame. When the hero sees instinct, selfishness, interest, staining his work, he usually blames the influence of some temptress. This is very common in stories both fictitious and real. Something is dispersing my attention. It is not my attachment to things in the matter. It is something external. Something demonized. The hero and the heroine must lose their identification with the body and conceive themselves as a pure being. Liberation. That's where he talks about that point that
is important. There are no walls that isolate from temptation the possessor of a body that identifies with him. They put you locked in a tower like Rapunzel. A tower without doors, only with windows. One day she will start singing, a prince will pass by and find her. That is, it is no use. Rapunzel's story has another symbolic key. What I want to say here is that if you need an experience, you will find a way to live it. It is no use locking yourself behind a wall. If you do not want to live this experience,
try to overcome it through a reflection, a conscious search to overcome this need. Dominate yourself. Do not lock yourself in a wall because your fantasies will find doors. And you will always find a way to go towards the things you want to live. I put this Zen story from Ancien that he does not narrate in the book, but it is perfect in relation to what he is talking about here. Maybe you know. Zen stories are very suggestive. There was a lady who supported a monk. Many old monks were beggars. She had a little corner in
her rural property where he slept, like a small cabin. Every day she went there and took a plate of food. Or she sent a child there. Ten years passed. How can I know if I am feeding a sage or if I am supporting an idiot? How can I know if I am not investing my plate of food for nothing? She had an intelligent idea. I think this woman was wiser than the world she fed. She went to the city and took the most beautiful girl she had. She said, take the plate of food for him.
And do not do just that. Instill yourself on him. Throw yourself on him. Then the girl goes. She comes there and offers the plate of food. She does not even look at her. She starts to come to him. Get out of here, you rotten, tempting flesh. I do not want to see what you offer me. The girl is fine. She went there and talked to the old woman. The old woman put him out. I'm feeding a stupid idiot. Of course, if he is afraid of the girl to be aggressive like that, it is because he
did not dominate himself. Imagine a man who dominated himself. A girl comes and tries him. What would he say? I would say, thank you for your kindness. You are offering me the best you have. But it's not for me. I know you are doing it like a child. You are giving me what you have of the best. Thank you very much, but I do not need it. I would have compassion. It would be pure kindness. Because there is no need for that anymore. So there is no reason to banish or use cholera with something that
no longer attracts him. Whoever had control would have kindness. She is wise. Perfect. Law of the inquilinato in the angel. You realize that it is very similar to what he is saying here. A citizen who has control does not need walls and does not demonize anyone for the purposes that are his and not the other. What tries him is a female figure that is inside him, not outside. Then he will start to talk about the father. This part of the woman ends. The woman is the father. She is the element that brings many things to
the human psyche. He will start to talk about the role of the father. The tune with the father. The father is the initiator priest who makes way for a wider world. He gives powers to the child that was purified from the engrowing of himself, of personal preference or resentment. The function of the father is to form the child so that he is another father. That is, in a certain way, the patron, the protector, the patriarch, the protector of the whole. He has to think about the whole. Whether this whole is a family, a city, a
country, a whole humanity, depending on the moral and psychological stature of the man, it can be a lot. But to protect him, he has to think more than just about himself. Therefore, the father is the initiator. It is a second birth. He will tell the story of several indigenous villages. In Sparta, there was a lot of that too. The father was born in the mother's realm and passed to the father's realm. It was the second birth. By the way, Bardotodol talks about this. The man has to have two births, as well as two deaths. I
will not go into this detail with you, which is complex, but the two births would be these. The birth of the mother and then the birth of the father. Birth in matter, birth in spirit. Both sacred and necessary. There is nothing superior or inferior. Both sacred. The only thing that is not clear about the hero's conscience is that father and mother are one. Because at the end of things, it is unity. He will show that in several myths, God is androgynous. He is the union of dualities. He is neither father nor mother, he is both.
He divides himself in two, in a pedagogical way, to give the man the opportunity to learn one thing at a time. The feet on earth, the head in heaven. Harmonized with time and eternity. That would be the task of a human being. A wise human being is like that. He is in time, but at the same time he is in eternity. Therefore, he is able to bring the laws to this plane. He makes a bridge between the two worlds. He harmonizes with father and mother. And perceives both as sacred. So the function of the father,
in some way, is the initiator. Now he will talk about the spheres. A father who makes a rite to make the child a good father, of family. Or to make the child a good director and a father who makes the child a human leader. To lead humanity to a higher level. That is, to the levels. But the role of the father is always of the initiator. I put this quote from King Arthur because King Arthur was like that. A true father, a pater, he can't fight for personal causes. He always thinks about the group. It's
like a family father who, when dividing the food, takes everything from him and leaves crumbs for the children. A father is stupid, an explorer. A father will think more about the children and the family as a whole than about him. If someone has to make sacrifices, it must be him. King Arthur had this a lot. When someone offends his wife, he says it's a personal offense. He can't fight for it. Because before being your husband, I am king. He calls one of his knights to fight for the father of the whole nation and not just
the husband. This role of thinking about the whole was above personal issues. So every leader has as a main characteristic altruism, fraternity, the ability to think greater than just personal interest. Look how interesting! He will enter a myth that is one of the most complicated in Greece, which is Dionysus. Dionysus means exactly a child of Tyranus, twice dead. I will not tell the complicated story, but there is a moment when Princess Cemerie was pregnant with Zeus and asks Zeus to see her in all her splendor, all her brightness. Zeus had promised to meet her wishes
and she appears, and dies in a fit of rage. She was pregnant. Zeus takes the child, Dionysus, and plants in her thigh. The child is born again after some time from Zeus' thigh. It is a second birth. The child is born again after the father's birth. The mother's birth is when we are born to time. The father's birth is when we are born to eternity. The two-time born represents the man who was born in matter, and was born in spirit, and harmonized the two. He puts this part in a drama called The Bacchae of Euripides,
or recovers from the belly of Cemerie. Come, O Dithyrambus, enter into my male uterus, which is your thigh. He plants Dionysus in your thigh. Death and rebirth. Do you remember, for those who were here last week, the amount of things we talked about? In truth I tell you that no one will enter the kingdom of heaven but to be born again. Abandon your life if you want to live. It is by dying that one is born to eternal life. Remember? He puts a lot of myths where the hero died and was born again. It is
the symbol of the human being who has to die for a certain level of consciousness and be born for another. And in this other he does not despise the previous one, he harmonizes the two. It is maturity, when the man is born in body and soul. He is born in spirit, in matter, and harmonizes all worlds. And he realizes that God is not male or female, it is both, it is unity. When the man denies matter, it is the Middle Ages. When he denies the spirit, it is this high-tech and materialistic era that we live
in. There is never balance. When he understands and harmonizes the two, there is balance. So, Tabuz in Sumeria, Adonis in Greece, Mitra in Persia, Hathes, Phrygian, Greek, Osiris in Egypt, all beings who died on a certain level and were born again. The second birth of baptism, which is a sacrament that talks about the second birth, and in a certain way even Eucharist, when the flesh and blood of the Father, represented by the host and wine, are ingested by you and the Father is reborn in you again, who ingested your flesh and blood and embodies this
divine potential. So, deep down, it is a myth of rebirth. Many, many times repeated. Here shows Dionysius coming out of Zeus' thigh. It is a painting of a Greek vase. Highly complex and beautiful. You can even give a lecture only about this myth. It is very beautiful and very interesting. From Providence come the opposites. Understand this. That story that people say if God is good, why is there evil? Good and evil are merely appearances of the manifested world. Deep down, if there was no evil, man would not overcome these obstacles, he would not have to
grow. If there was no obstacle ahead, you would not climb to the next step of the ladder, you would always stay on the horizontal. In a way, the obstacles are what drag us to the next step. If it were not for the tests, your son would not study in college. Why are the tests of our children in college different from the tests of our lives? They are the ones that provide us with another level of consciousness, of domain, of knowledge, of knowledge and of knowledge. This is the pedagogy we create. It happens in the pedagogy
of nature, which was from there that we copied. So good and evil only exist when we are on the same level as them. Imagine a being looking from above. For him, both are necessary. Because both lead a man in his direction. An obstacle will make him pass over, that is, stay higher, closer to me. So for your son, the math test is a terror. For you, who are parents, it is not good. It will make him learn a little more. It is only when you look from a higher level that you realize that good and
evil are two aspects of the law of necessity. And both justify each other in the unity that is God. Then it is said that when a man reaches a certain degree of wisdom, he becomes a man in trial, a disciple in trial. Do you know what that means? It is a man who considers all the difficulties of life as proofs. He does not criticize, does not think they are injustices, does not get angry. He always faces opportunities. And he knows that on the other side there is a higher degree. That is, he sees, although he
is in the world, he sees the world with God's eyes. He sees from above and realizes that the difficulties are steps. This is the characteristic of a man who has an intimate relationship with his father. He sees the world with his father's eyes. Because he knows him. With him are the keys to the invisible. And he will return. And he will show the truth of everything he did. When you get there, God will explain to you. Do you know that rake you took? It was for you to leave such and such and come here, otherwise
you would have gone there. You know that day you lost such and such? You were super upset. If you had stayed with that thing, I would have been away from me. You will say, oh, how wonderful! How beautiful! It was all so good! We understand the law of necessity, the protocols of life, everything is justified and everything becomes good. Because good is what makes us grow. If you consider your point of view, you have to hang other labels on the events of life. Good is what makes you grow. Good is not synonymous with pleasant. Onipresence.
This is also an interesting thing. To see God in all things. He puts a very beautiful Gnostic aphorism, which says, Rake the staff, that there will be Jesus. If there is a point of nature that is not divine, this point limits God. He is not absolute. God is not in this chair. So there are two, this chair and God. This chair limits him. He is in all things. If he is in all things, all things can teach me about him. Life becomes entirely pedagogical. And all things deserve respect. Look once again and see his divine
essence. See the need for all things. Wherever we go, we return to the presence of Allah. This is the Quran. In all places. Seeing God in everything allows us to see the silent music of universal harmony. Realize that the universe is a great symphony. If one note is missing, it gets stuck. Take a note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, it gets stuck. Everything is necessary there. Our life is a great symphony. All things compose. A note you take out, it gets stuck. It produces a vacuum that disharmonizes everything. He tells this story, very interesting, of the
Hindu ascetic. There was a sage, an ascetic, who was resting and put his feet on a shiva image. Then another monk passed by, looked at him and thought that was absurd. What disrespect! You are putting your feet on a shiva image, on a lingam. He said, I'm sorry, young man. Do me a favor. Take my feet and put them where the shiva is not. The other monk pulled his feet, put them in another place and an image of shiva emerged from the earth. He pulled, put in another and another emerged. I'm sorry, I understood. If
I have feet, they have to be somewhere. Where they touched, they were in shiva. So shiva is limited. Even on my feet. I thought this story was great. Put where there is no shiva, please. The boy did not find it. He gave up. Then he realized the wisdom of the monk. He talked about these tears of Viracocha, which is a pre-Columbian god from South America. It is an Inca tradition. It is very beautiful, because it is a representation, there is this image in the book, of Viracocha crying. He says that, in a way, he is
a demiurge for this creator. He knows that when beings enter in multiplicity, in time and space, they will suffer. But there is a law of necessity, that to evolve, they need contrast. Consciousness needs contrast. Therefore, in contrast, there will be pain. This is necessary, but there is no being who has the morbidity of wanting to see beings suffer. That is, if there is a pain, it is the pain of this creator, the need to create a manifested world. We have already talked about this many times. Today, they sent me an animated drawing, awarded at an
international festival, which I found very interesting. I was reading exactly this to tell you and received this drawing. I don't know if you have seen it. It is an animated drawing of a man who lived in a lighthouse and raised his son since he was little. The child grows up, at a certain moment becomes young, goes away to study, get married, have children, and the man gets old alone, looking at the toys, remembering the child. The child is already at the extreme, then you are teared apart in tears. What a drama! But, deep down, what
happened to that man is nothing unusual. He raised the child and the child went to live his life. But you realize that the transitory nature of things is a drama. When a father leaves, he looks at the toys. Where is my son? He creates a bond that, suddenly, if everything goes right, the child follows his path, and he is part of life. But it is painful because it means something that was closely linked to me, that one day was one with me, and now it is not anymore. So this transitory nature makes life very painful.
But why is it painful? Because we do not find something that remains in all scenes. We only see things that we will lose at a certain moment. If you have a firm ground to put your feet on, you don't suffer so much anymore. You see things going by, but you have something that doesn't. So there is a point of consciousness that sustains you. Your identity, your essence, you don't suffer so much anymore. And it seems that we came here to find this point. To saturate ourselves with so much transitory nature and find what is permanent.
To saturate ourselves with the passing time and find the time that remains. That is eternity. This is what it is about. We came here to suffer so much, to stop suffering a certain way. And look at what we will never lose. So this is the meaning of life. The common man cannot evaluate the will of God. Just like a child cannot evaluate the will of his parents. You will ask the child if his father is good or bad. He is bad, he made me eat lettuce today. It's terrible, a tyrant. When will he understand that
lettuce is good? When he is the age to be a father. When he has a child, he will understand how good my father was. But you can't do a democratic inquiry with children to choose the best father, because it will not work. It's just the one who gives dessert, chocolate, coca-cola and a little park. And let him kill class. You can't do that. In fact, this would give a continuity of reflections. So he will say that when the child has grown enough to understand the father, the tests are endured. Then he is what we call
a disciple in trial. When he understands the father, he considers the tests as a privilege. And it's no longer a drama, it's a unfair father. Today we will be indebted to a piece of this chapter, because it is too big, we have already reached the time. The hero has surpassed time and eternity and incarnated the father, the whole. And it is valid the need to exist to reach the being. I understood the rules of the game. So I know why I have to exist. Losing something, winning something, losing something, winning something. Because if I lose
so much, I will win one day and I will reach the being. The game is painful, but it is valid. Rebellion, hatred, is the result of not having yet understood the rules of the game. Lack of intimacy with the father. And then he will enter this last sector of this chapter, which is apotheosis. I will not go too far, but he talks about a god, Avalokitesvara, who is Tibetan, Chinese, Buddhist. But here in China and Japan he is called Quan Yin, a female goddess. He is the lord of compassion. He will talk about the importance
of this attribute of compassion. We will stay here today. Give you a little more time to read the book. So do not forget, next week we will not have, we will finish this little piece and move on to the next chapter. In the next chapter I will see two together. It will be the third and the fourth. The fourth is small. Thank you very much.