It’s a monomyth
The following is a response to a post from David Perell and Lulu Chen Meservey:
It’s not just the story of Christianity. This is what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth.” In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell establishes the narrative arc that many, if not all, religions and mythologies follow.
In fact, Lulu is incorrect in saying “once you do it, things will go back to the way they’re supposed to be” as that statement denies the fundamental nature of the cosmos: change. What would be more accurate—and what Campbell states too—is that the hero goes through a journey and returns home BUT completely and utterly transformed, as though they are a new individual.
When stating that Christianity fills a God-sized hole, it begs the question: where did that hole even come from?
Someone who goes a layer deeper than Campbell is Stanislav Grof. Through his clinical research with LSD, studying trauma in patients, he discovered a fundamental pattern through which consciousness moves. Grof found that prenatal experiences were fundamental in defining our psychological trajectory in life. This is what he calls the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs):
BPM 1: Fetus feels relaxed and at home in the amniotic womb—a sense of universal wholeness (what Lulu refers to as “things were supposed to be a certain way”)
BPM 2: Labor begins and fetus now feels constricted due to contractions—a sense of no exit (what Lulu refers to as “something went horribly wrong”)
BPM 3: The birth canal starts to open and fetus enters into a life-death struggle to come out the other side—a sense of being consumed by the abyss (what Lulu refers to “and now we’re in another state instead”)
BPM 4: Baby is born along with a new identity, as it is separated from the womb of the mother—a sense of rebirth and enlightenment (what Lulu refers to as “but there’s a solution”).
The cycle continues on. We’re all moving through the BPMs, attempting to relive our birth trauma in order to heal from it. Ultimately what we refer to as the “return”is the amniotic womb from which we have all come from. There is a deep cosmic urge to return, constantly, to undivided wholeness. That is the God-size hole.
I know “Christ is King” is trending right now, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say: Krishna is King, Buddha is King, Confucius is King, Muhammad is King, Moses is King, you catch my drift.
Each mythological/religious figure has been on a hero’s journey, and the reason their stories resonate a thousand years later is because we too have been, and are on a similar journey. It is innate in the evolutionary process of the universe, as the cosmos itself journeys in a similar manner.
