The Call to Adventure: Brining the Hero's Journey to Daily Life

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Summary: THE CALL TO ADVENTURE: Bringing the Hero's Journey to Daily
Review: In 1949, years before Joseph Campbell became a popular hero for our meaning-hungry age, the great scholar and mythographer published "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," the book that made his academic reputation and helped to launch a new appreciation of the universal relevance of mythology to contemporary experience.

For actor/director and therapist Paul Rebillot, author of "The Call to Adventure," Campbell's work provides a context that he uses to create a ritual structure designed to bring the archetypal hero story into direct contact with here-and-now experience. Propelled by a period of intense personal crisis in the late '60s when he lost touch with ordinary reality, Rebillot discovered firsthand the demons one must face in the quest for wholeness and integration. He is convinced that it is the lack of meaningful rituals of transition and initiation that creates much of the spiritual emptiness of our acquisitive consumer society. In a world currently dominated by biochemical experts who give Prozac to record numbers of patients as part of an enormous medical bureaucracy, he has turned his fascination with the roots of theater, his training in Gestalt psychology, and 25 years as a group leader at Big Sur's Esalen Institute and in Europe into an experiential process that he calls "The Hero's Journey."

The book itself is a combination of Rebillot's story of his development of the process and clear instructions on how to use it. It has been designed as a guidebook either for an individual ritual of self-discoveryor use with a group. Readers of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf may remember the Magic Theater visited by its protaganist; Rebillot's connected exercises can take a willing reader into an imaginal place as deep and vivid as that.And it's as much fun as you had as a child at play---though this game is one that's been told and played since the childhood of the human race!

Included are beautiful meditations for centering, grounding, and group-bonding as well as a wealth of insights from an artist and healer who has made transformation into a life's work.