Adventures and the Hero’s Journey

Starting point of the Alberton Gorge rafting trip.

Yesterday my friend Taryn and I joined a crew of UM international students on a rafting trip to the nearby Alberton Gorge on the Clark Fork river. The gorge is a short strip of river carved out by the massive dam-bursts of Glacial Lake Missoula 10-15,000 years ago. The stunning rock walls and giant boulders, in and out of the water, make for a trip as scenic as it is thrilling. (some photos from the pro: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

There is something to be said in our finding most life in the moments when life itself is most at peril. This is an aspect of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” – the notion that in facing death, we are most alive. I experienced the same just a day prior on the climbing wall. The climb up, two stories above ground, is a thrill in itself, but the real adrenaline hits when you reach the top and must “let go” and trust your belay partner to safely lower you to the ground. The danger of this, of course, is becoming a “thrill junkie” – addicted to the immense sensations of life in those harrowing moments.

In Buddhism we even find the similar state of becoming a “jhana junkie” – addicted to the deep pleasures found in meditation. These pleasures are real, and indeed deep, and so too is the thrill of the rapids or the heights of climbing.

Young bald eagle.

Ah, but the pleasures of life are fleeting. Those who know this simple fact, and know it in their hearts, find solace even in the loss of pleasure, the end of thrills. At times I have known and faced change with equanimity, neither clinging to pleasure nor fleeing discomfort. And at times I have forgotten; clung and avoided.

This is perhaps then another way to translate Buddha’s avijja, normally translated as ignorance or delusion. Perhaps avijja is also a form of forgetting our true nature, the nature of reality itself. The hero, aware of change in all things, continues forward, through adversity, with growing equanimity.