 Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Of course, my name is Bryce. Today, we are going to be looking at the chapter 21 labeled a hero's journey in the return of the Divine, Sophia. But before we get into that, I do want to let you know that there is a link down in the description box for anybody who is still interested in taking the Yoga Online Intensive with me starting January 22, which also includes two Reiki sessions with Emmy. And I also on that same page under the same link have an area in case you are interested in private lessons with me. Now, again, you will have to email me separately for the private lessons. If you would like to take in-house private lessons, for example, if you live in or around the city of Atlanta or Marietta, the suburbs, you can take an in-house private lesson with me either at Astana Yoga Atlanta here at Inman Park in Atlanta or at Sacred Garden Yoga in Marietta. You will have to work that out with me privately, though, so we can book and arrange the time. In-house, in-live, in-person private lessons are 200 an hour. That can also be shared with friends if you wanted to do a semi-private and share it with your friend. Or if you want to do it on Zoom, Zoom is, I believe, 150 an hour. I have to go back and look at the website, but that information is all in the description box. If you're doing in-house private lessons with me, we will be solely focused on the Ashanga practice. However, if you're doing private lessons with me over Zoom, we will be working through some of the Yoga, but we will also be working on strengthening drills, all that kind of stuff. So anyway, if that's something that you're interested in, that link is down in the description box below. With that being said, let's continue with a hero's journey. Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, the arts, the social forms of the primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep all boiled up from the basic magic ring of myth. Joseph Campbell, the hero with a thousand faces. I had no idea that by merely pulling the name of a goddess from a shell, I would begin to live her story, but that is exactly what happened. Ishtar's story, like that of Sophia, the mother of wisdom, is the tale of humanity's descent into a place of sorrow and confusion, a place from which we must all be redeemed. Like many of the great kings and queens of heaven, Ishtar descends to fulfill a quest. In her case, it is the quest for love. Once achieving it, she returns to heaven enlightened. Like the daughter Sophia, Ishtar's tale is one of loss, hope, courage, and love. As she discovers the disowned parts of herself and finally reclaims her soulmate, Tamuz, to become whole once again. Because of the power of this tale and its reverberation in us, it has survived for more than 6,000 years. As I had already learned, Ishtar falls from heaven in search of love, arriving on earth alone and vulnerable, just like us. Once in the lower realms, she is drawn deeper and deeper into the material world, until she comes to stand before the great throne of illusion draped in its glamour of worldly power. There, she must face the one thing that she fears most, the dark mirror of herself. For some, this shadow queen might succumb to the glory of worldly riches. For others, that dark mirror is the search for fame or the insatiable desire to get the love or approval from others that we have never given to ourselves. For still others, the pain of being ripped away from the celestial realm is so great they choose the path of oblivion, falling prey to drugs or alcohol or sexual addiction, all monetary highs to distract us from our emotional pain. But these are only substitutes for what the soul really seeks, reconnection to the source of who we are. Light and darkness, life and death, right and left are inseparable twins. Yahshua tells us in the Gospel of Philip, reminding us that those who transcend these apparent opposites are eternal beings. Our fear or desire may take many forms. These are the terms the Buddha called Mara and Kama. There is no getting away from the fact that we are here in the realms of matter until our bodies disintegrate. We have fallen from the heights of heaven and forgotten our divine nature. This is the real meaning of the fall. It has nothing to do with being sinful. Rather, it's a state of ignorance that causes us to believe that we are separate from God. In truth, we have always been a part of the eternal. We have simply forgotten who we are. The Ashtavaka Gita, chapter 2 verses 4 through 5 tell us as a wave seething and foaming is only water, so all creation streaming out of this self is only the self. Thus, to find a way out of these illusions, we must discover the sacred presence behind the worlds of nature. This is the very essence of the eminence itself. The spiritual world is all around us if we can only see it. This discovery has the power to liberate us from the source of our pain which is our separation from love. The scales fall from our eyes and suddenly the world is revealed in a whole new light. Behind the forms is the only great divinity shining through. This is the inner sight that allows us to finally see the Kingdom of Heaven lies within ourselves as well as all around us. Pulling back the veils of Isis. In the ancient mysteries, this process of seeing the eternal behind the Ifira world was called pulling back the veils of Isis. These veils are metaphors for the millions of forms that conceal the numerous realms of light that form the true nature of the world. Through nature, we can discover the numerous world of the sacred at the very heart of creation itself. The original Aramaic version of the Lord's Prayer translated so beautifully by Neil Douglas Colts and published in the little jeweled book called The Prayers of the Cosmos Reads. O Berther, father-mother of the Cosmos, focus your light within us. Make it useful. Create your reign of unity now. Your one desire that acts with ours as in all light so in all forms. Grant what we need each day in bread and in sight. Loose the cords of mistakes binding us as we release the strands we hold on others' guilt. Don't let surface things delude us but free us from what holds us back. From you is born all ruling will, the power and the light to do. The song and the butterflies all. From age to age it renews. Truly power to these statements. May they be ground from which all my actions grow. Amen. Very different from the Lord's Prayer they teach us in the cabal-owned church. In Ishtar's story, she descends into the world of shadows to gain the one thing she most needs, her other half. But having lost her memory, she no longer recalls what she is searching for. However, as she stands before the throne of her half, sister, the queen of shadows, she is able to see the beauty behind the world of matter. And seeing this she embraces the shadow. Knowing that all expressions of duality are part of the divine pattern of life. Through suffering we learn compassion. Through limitations we learn choice. Through pain we choose a better path. With this one act of integration in surrender Ishtar unites the positive and negative aspects of herself uniting her moral and immortal natures. This is the way of wisdom and this decision sets her free. The modern hero is the ancient one. Many of our modern myths play out the same transcendental themes of reconciling the light and dark within ourselves. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker faces his shadow by discovering that he is the son of the evil Darth Vader. When Luke cuts off the head of his enemy in Yoda's cave, he discovers that the enemy he has killed wears his own face. This theme is repeated when Luke loses his hand just as his father did following in Darth Vader's footsteps. Both Luke and Darth Vader have the same spiritual gifts. But one uses powers for good while the other uses those gifts for evil. As the first movie trilogy concludes, Darth Vader is redeemed only through Luke's unswivering belief that below the shadow that lies over the father's heart is the eternal illuminated soul waiting to be reawakened. Likewise in the Harry Potter series, Harry finds a fragment of Lord Valdemort's soul buried within himself and realizes that his enemy can only be vanquished when Harry is willing to be the pure surrendered sacrifice. The hero is the man who self-achieved submission writes Joseph Campbell. This is the theme of the Christ, a theme espoused in the ancient world in the celebrations of Tammuz, Osiris, Addis, and Adonis. At their deaths, these solar lords surrender to death and are reborn. In Harry's case, he goes to heaven and meets his teacher. Dumbledore. Sorry, I've never seen Harry Potter, so if I got that wrong, I apologize. Who explains that Harry has a choice to continue into the higher world or return to earth to complete his mission. This voluntary act of egoic surrender gives Harry the power to be reborn and then vanquish the dark lord forever. So this is all metaphor of what the yoga sutras are telling us too. In order to truly understand who we are, we have to die to the ego. The shadow side of us only comes from the ego, the false sense of identity, not a literal death, but a death of who we think we are versus who we really are. One of the reasons these modern-day myths are so compelling is that they reveal a great archetypal path. In dissolving the judgment shame and guilt that often trap us in the world, we set ourselves free. The hero has died as a modern man, but as eternal man, perfected, unspecified, universal man he has been reborn, writes Joseph Campbell. An Ishtar story. By releasing the judgments in the realms of shadows and seeing the goodness behind all form, Ishtar is able to unite her ego and soul. With this, she is brought back into union with her other half and allowed to re-enter heaven. This is the essence of the hero's journey and the deeper meaning of redemption. Fairy tales of oneness. Ishtar's journey is one of a handful of myths that speaks to this dilemma of separation and redemption in the world of shadows. Often in moralized as fairy tales, these stories echo through the corridors of time. The most enduring of these tales seems to express two major themes. The first is the reconciliation between the worlds of spirit and the worlds of matter. The second is the merger of the male and female in sacred union. The prince searches for his princess. The princess searches for her prince. He saves her. She saves him. Once reunited, they live happily ever after within the kingdom of themselves. So let's take a look now at some of these beautiful archetypal tales that endure through time. We begin with the story of Sleeping Beauty. A beautiful princess whose kingdom is frozen in time is brought back to life by the noble prince who has the courage to search for her. She represents the sleeping spirit that is hidden inside each one of us. She is Sophia, the feminine spirit, caught in suspended animation who must be awakened by her illuminated other half. Likewise, in the story of Snow White, we find an unblemished heroine who has fled from the machinations of the wicked queen. A woman herself trapped in vanity and illusion, Snow White is the positive female polarity while the queen is the negative one. But in order to be saved, she must be awakened by her heroic prince. In essence, she must reclaim both her yin and her yang natures to be resurrected to win her kingdom back for the good. In similar vein, let's examine the story of Cinderella. An abused maiden who is the slave of three women who have been overtaken by their negative feminine polarity of greed and vicious and lies. Cinderella must find the courage to take back her power by being seen at the ball by the noble prince. Then, if he is willing to see past the trappings of appearances to discover her true self, he will marry her and restore her to the throne as his equal. They then will live happily ever after. Likewise, in the story of Rapunzel, a magical maiden has been subject to a lifetime of isolation and forgetfulness within her ivory tower. The heroine is finally rescued by an aspect of the positive masculine. All these stories reveal how the masculine polarity has the power to reawaken the feminine spirit within the world that has been dormant within us for so long. All these tales of restoration, symbols of the sacred marriage that restores the rightful queen as an equal beside her noble key. Only this has the power to save the world. As you will notice, in many of these fairy tales, the prince rescues the princess. But in the case of Ishtar, these positions are reversed. Ishtar goes insert of her slain prince, trying to free her other half from bondage. She is the heroine who rescues the man just as in the story of Beauty and the Beast. Beauty is the divine feminine who awakens the heart of the savage beast. He is only restored to his divine form after he places the love of others over his own selfish needs, finally breaking the spell that has kept him bound. All of these tales are about restoration of the world through the sacred feminine. As the knights of the round table search for the holy ground, they knew that they were pursuing the lost bride, furiously seeking to stop the oncoming darkness of the Middle Ages by recovering the soul of the goddess. This symbolized by the holy grail itself. These knights lived between 500 and 600 CE just as the church began to seriously suppress the worship of the goddess across all Europe. It was the same error beginning in 591 CE that the pope invaded against Magdalene, ranting her falsely as a prostitute. After that, the truth of the female Christ was lost for centuries, and the only aspect that remained was the worship of the obedient mother Mary. The resurrection of the goddess appeared briefly in the teachings of the Cathars, the knights Templars, the troubadours of love in the 12th and 13th century, but was wiped out once again in the 6th centuries of Inquisition. Yet as the holy grail stories reveal, the Fisher King or male Christ cannot be made whole without his queen or sacred chalice. Without the yin, the yin cannot be healed. The land is barren. The mare will not fowl. Only her restoration can restore the kingdom to balance. Interestingly enough, this same analogy was used by Yahshua in the metaphor of the bride and the bridegroom. This union within the self allows us to enter the kingdom of heaven, code words for our reunion with the source of all beings. Christ is the enlightened bridegroom, but who is the lost bride? She is the slumbering spirit that lies within each one of us concealed by the patriarchy. These mythical legends have long endured precisely because of their themes of sacred union, and we must begin to reawaken the divine feminine if we are to ever restore our own societies to health and balance. The three stages of the journey. In the hero's journey there are three basic stages, the departure, the journey, and the return. The departure begins with a radical sweeping away of our old lives, and that opens the way for something new. Like zutsu, this initiation often takes all that we have known in the past, our families, our homes, our jobs, and our ego identity and wipes it away, creating a voyage of loss and death that ushers into it, us into a new stage of life. Very much so. Very much so. When you enter on a spiritual path, so much of your life will absolutely fall apart. That's a good thing. It's a hard thing, but it's a good thing. The second stage of the hero's journey throws us into a new world where we are pulled by forces we don't understand into an adventure that will fundamentally change our lives. Along the way, we might meet sages, allies, monsters, wise women, dragons, and enemies. We may find that we have gone to heaven or hell depending on which part of the journey we are in. The third stage is the return. The completion of our journey where we return to the world with new insight, wisdom, or gifts, having gained the power to illuminate and solve the problems of our age. Let's take the story of Prasias, the half-divine son of Zeus. Zeus could also be Thoth because we think Zeus was Thoth's father. A tale that has a classic element of the hero's journey. Prasias is an orphan and does not know that he is half god, half mortal. But when his adopted family is drowned in a fishing accident caused by Hades, the god of the Wonderworld, Prasias is thrown into the departure stage of his journey with events that will change his life forever. This is beautifully depicted in the movie Clash of the Titans. Prasias must face Hades, who curses the city of Argos and decrees the princes and Andromeda will be destroyed by the monstrous Kraken. Prasias must then decide whether to continue believing that he is the only mortal fisherman or rise to meet his destiny as a demigod and save the city. We know the Kraken is very important to this timeline and I'm wondering if by releasing the Kraken all of us remember who we are, sons and daughters of Atlantis. Just like the children of Atlantis, we are half mortal and half divine. We just don't realize it. Just a thought. Prasias must then decide whether to continue believing that he is an only immortal fisherman or rise to meet his destiny as a demigod and save the city. Same as us. This is an impromptu to embark on his quest the second stage of the hero's journey. The journey is about discovering the various parts of himself and awakening something new within his heart. It frequently involves a descent into the realms of shadow to face his inner demons, find his power, and claim his true identity for himself. In Prasias's case, he must enter Hades, the underworld, and bring back Medusa's head since this is the only way to defeat the Kraken. As he overcomes these obstacles, Prasias sheds his old identity in his transform realizing that he is indeed both a divine being and also human and this realization allows him to save the city. His task is to return to us transfigured and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed. At this time, the hero will often bring back a symbol of victory, a sword, a book, a ring, or a chalice. In the language of the mysteries, these items represent the archetypal qualities that have been restored to the hero's soul. In the final stage of the hero's journey, in the return, the homecoming of the hero who brings back his gifts of knowledge. Having now viewed life from a new perspective, he has been reborn. Now he has the wisdom to save the city, defeat an enemy, or renew the world. Prasias saves the city of Argo and Andromeda and restores the world to balance. The beast releases his kingdom from the spell and reclaims himself as a prince and wins his one true love. Psyche reunites with her love Eros and is welcomed into heaven as an immortal. Behind all the stories is the legendary fall of humanity. We are not talking here about a fall into sin, but the descent of the soul from the celestial worlds into realms of matter. This understanding of our true divine origin springs from the mystery schools whose teachers understood the nature of the multidimensional realities. We, each the divine child of God, have forgotten who we really are. Half of our nature must be rescued by the other half in order for us to come back into wholeness, to redeem our ignorance in the world of shadow. We must awaken within the dream and return to our true state. American mythologist Joseph Campbell writes, the happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it is, but because of a swift of emphasis within the subject, it is beheld as though transformed. Ishtar enters my life. When I first pulled Ishtar's name in our sacred circle, I had no idea that I would suddenly be facing her with her living story. Her tale of loss and suffering for the sake of a man had great resonance for me because of the sacrifices of my mother. For the sake of love, my mother had given up nearly 40 years of her life to save my father from alcoholism, hoping beyond hope that he could be rescued from the bottle. So I understood the emotional cost of being trapped in the shadows of abuse and emotional pain and not seeing a way out. I knew how the chaos of such a prison can make us lose ourselves for the sake of love. While it takes great bravery to make such a sacrifice for another, sometimes the lesson is not whether to follow that person into the underworld, but whether you should just let him go. Despite my mother's incredible heart, she needed to recognize that the most important relationship we have with ourselves and with God. No matter how much we love another person, only he can face his own shadows, as only we can face ours. That is the power of free will. In the myths and fairy tales related above, committed to the love of another is symbolic to committing to the loving of the other half of oneself, the other aspect of the masculine feminine polarity. Our other half can guide us towards this realization, but in the end it must truly be self-realization. The journey must consist of all three parts. We must not get stuck in the journey stage and forget to return to ourselves, nor should we skip the journey stage to get the comfort and security of the return. Within a week of pulling Ishtar's name, I had met Brian, who quickly became my fair-haired Tammuz. He was Irish, a beautiful soul with blue eyes and blonde hair and a healer to boot. We met at a conference in New York where I was speaking and he sang me a love song that melted my heart into a puddle. I invited him to join me for a week-long retreat on Mount Shasta in California with 12 other lightworkers. We were going to make a contract with the spiritual masters who are rumored to live beneath the mountain. As the leader of the group, I made strict rules for everyone about maintaining celibacy for the duration of the retreat since our energies were to be focused entirely on the divine. We convened at the fabulous lounge on the side of the mountain and for the next five days we all fell in love with one another. Weather doing ceremony on the 7000 foot mountain slopes that were covered in snow, or exploring the secret Pluto caves, the trip catalyzed a change in all of us. As the days unfolded, Brian revealed that he was deeply in a deeply unhappy marriage with a woman who did not share his love of God. He had only stayed in the marriage because of his two teenage children. As a clairvoyant, I could see what had propelled him into marriage. Some 2300 years earlier, his wife had been the mother of a village outside of Rome. As a boy, Brian had been brutally kidnapped, been forced into slavery and died of abuse. This had set in motion many lifetimes of abandonment, and these two souls had been parted many times in subsequent lives as mother and son throughout outside calamity. So in this life they had come back together to heal. Now exactly 23 years since their marriage, their soul contract was complete. But since Brian's core wound was abandoned, that he was afraid to be alone. Without intending to, Brian and I fell in love. We spoke about our feelings the first time once the retreat was over. Brian desperately wanted a divorce but was afraid to be alone. He wanted to jump straight into another relationship with me without taking time to reflect. He wanted me to be his catcher in the rye and I said I would think about it. I returned home confused. The part of me that had fallen in love with Brian wanted to say yes, for he brought great joy to my heart. But the end of the marriage deserved to be honored as a big deal that it was. It is the departure stage of the hero's journey where all that we have known is swept away. It represents not only the death of the present, but the death of all the hopes and dreams that two people have dreamed together. And while it is an end of one face, from its ashes can come a whole new world of self transformation. But the only ethical thing to do is to allow people who are involved to complete their cycle and to take time for self discovery. Without the journey itself, there could be no solid foundation to start anew. If the wounded do not take time to gather themselves and heal, they will just project their unhealed issues into a new relationship. The journey must be undertaken to make an effective return to a new marriage. The question that I found myself asking was this, was I willing to go to hell to help save Brian? Or was this something he needed to do on his own? This was the dilemma of Ishtar, now fully alive within my own life. The power to choose. When I got home, Brian called. He had gone straight home and bravely told his wife that he wanted a divorce. He'd finally expressed his long varied feelings that living with the critical controlling mother was not making him happy. And since they hadn't been intimate for years, the passion had vanished. Apparently, he had done this once before, but this time he intended to follow through. Yet the more I listened to him go on and on about the breakup, the more clearly I saw that my beloved Tamuz was caught in his own hell. All the sweet love that we had experienced on Mount Shasta was rapidly evaporating. While it had been easy to support Brian within the strong group consciousness, now I was being pulled into his negative whirlpool, witnessing all his years of unexpressed rage and hurt in his unhealed marriage. This was not a good beginning for a new relationship or a good departure from an old one. I realized then that I could follow my prince into Hades or I could step back and let him find his own answers. Even with all the love I felt for him, Brian had to love himself enough to complete the cycle of his unhappy marriage without using another person to do it for him. In awakening the heroes within, Carol Persons writes, The heroic quest is about saying yes to yourself and in doing so, becoming more fully alive and effective in the world. For the hero's journey is first about taking a journey to find the treasures of your true self and then about returning home to give your gift to help transform the kingdom and in the process your own life. Knowing that my mother had gone into the depths of hell for the sake of love and remained there for 40 years with a man who either could not or would not extract himself, I realized that I did not have to be Ishtar. I could make my own choices and not be bound by hers. Whereas Ishtar had been mutually commuted committed in a partnership of love before her descent, I was not. I had only just entered the scene. Spending months in the angry muck of Brian's dissolution of his marriage would not make either of us happy. He had to find the path himself and then anything was possible. I told Brian that he needed to work on himself first and I withdrew, asking him to call me when he got things figured out. But he never did. Brian left his marriage a year and a half later, running off with another woman who was willing to descend into hell with him. But their marriage lasted only two short years. Since then, Brian has been married two more times.