“The beginning is always today.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The hero's journey is very validated in our culture; it has been said that the whole of Western cultural canon is built on the foundations of the hero myth. The hero's journey is one of the most important and relatable parts of the path of the seeker.
The hero's journey for the spiritual seeker goes a little something like this - they leave home, seeking out dragons to slay and unexplored terrains to explore. Generally, this is based on the life that was presented - the hero must reject, rebel, and abandon "home" and seeks out the "other". This is a very exciting, dynamic, and life affirming time for the seeker - it's empowering, because the rush of finding "the other" and "working on themselves", embracing the healing journey, transforming themselves and slaying those dragons is satisfying to the inner child.
A seeker in the hero archetype pursues an ever deepening expression of self in the world, asserting their right to exist, to be authentic and unlock new levels of self-healing, creativity, and self-mastery. But eventually, the hero either comes up against an insurmountable mountain, or unexpectedly ages out of the hero archetype - think of the archetypical image of the ancient knight, well past their prime, still wandering the countryside in heavy, burdensome amour, charging at windmills, and unable to see himself for who he has become.
What is often missed, because it isn't accentuated in our culture, is what happens after the hero's journey ends. Roll credits, right? What comes next is the Path of the Mystic, or one could say the life of the Artist. The artist sees that having total control over their environment, or life itself, or other people, is actually a losing game because it is a finite game in an infinite universe. They could stay in the fight, but it (and they) start to feel more and more unconnected and irrelevant... "there must be more to life than slaying these endless, tiresome dragons."
By embracing the unknown, and abandoning the once all important fight, the artist starts a different game. They shift their consciousness to playing the infinite game in the infinite universe, and realizing that what they can have and create is not related to other people, or even the limitations of their life experiences at all. There's something more to experience in life, transcendent of the heroic path.
The artist instead puts their attention on the journey itself, and where they find themself as "home" - aligning to their higher self and own spirit, listening to the still, small voice within. This new, deeper inner focus leads them down paths and through doors that have until this point been unknown, unseen, and perhaps even passed over.
Our culture validates winning at all costs, and winning requires dragons to slay. Being seen as a beginner, or being seen as having "nothing to show for it" is invalidated, scary, or so uncomfortable that we usually avoid it. There is a point when the hero must lay down the quest and stop fighting those endless dragons - even the ones they past up or passed by - letting them instead, just be.
This is moving from the Hero's Journey to the Path of the Mystic. Stepping onto this new path requires (ironically) the courage, fortitude, and strength that has been acquired so far on the hero's journey - from the outside, it looks like they've given up and perhaps even "lost" - but instead they've really won themselves by getting seniority to the game itself. The artist as beginner is not beginning from innocence - instead beginning simply from a new place of deeper, more conscious, and more true beginning. Perhaps Wendell Barry said it best:
“When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey." - Wendell Barry