The Divine Taste for Adventure

When finally I had again a laptop, and then also the internet connection again, one of the first things I did was to try and find again some of my favorite musics to listen to.
Whatever was left of them on my old laptop I had no more access to, so since two months I had been starving.
The one site I could go to most easily at that point was the one I had the link to, sent to me by my dear niece just before Christmas: the great trailer for the upcoming film, ‘The Hobbit’. I smiled when thinking of that one, and went straight back there, and watched that trailer all over again.
And again, although I had had my own full share of hardships during and after the December 29th cyclone, there I was, swept off my feet, totally electrified by these deep-throated voices of the Dwarves singing their Song, full of their nostalgia for their past glory and riches, and full of their renewed determination to conquer it back, even if it meant going through terrible dangers and perhaps death. Amazing.
What does that Song say actually?… Let’s have a closer look:

‘Far over the Misty Mountains cold
To dungeons deep
And caverns old…’

Oh my!…  Suddenly the weirdness of it all struck me in full force:
What on earth makes us so irresistibly attracted to such frightening places as ‘dungeons deep’ or ‘caverns old’, that the mere mention of them in a simple song has the power to put us in such an emotionally-charged inner state?!?
And if most of us wouldn’t really go there at all because we would be too frightened, what makes us anyway love reading or hearing stories where some other people do go to such places, become heroes doing great deeds there, and then finally come back home?

Why is it that under all latitudes of this little planet, all human beings from any cultures have their own immemorial Tales of Adventures that inflame the imagination of their own people, kids as well as adults, and out of them all a few may indeed some day go out and have a real adventure, that will then become part of the ongoing treasured folklore of that specific people?…

To this question one may shrug and reply, ‘Well, that’s the way we human beings are…’ and not give it another thought.

But that might be a great mistake for someone intent on Conscious Evolution: anything we find to be common to all human beings, not limited to this or that region like customs are, but universally present wherever humanity is present, such universal tendencies must draw and keep our attention, for they reveal for sure something profound, something that springs from so deep within our human nature, it cannot be the result of mere chance.
I have heard since long of the books by famed Joseph Campbell about the Myths we human beings everywhere have come up with, and keep  coming up with, most of them having at their center the Hero, that Special Human Being who does things we ordinary human beings wouldn’t dare to do, and yet who inspires all the rest of us to sometimes dare indeed to do something special too.
For some reason I have never really read, even less studied the books by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade and the like.
Well, I know actually the reason: however celebrated and partly true their theories and explanations for this trait or that trait in human nature may be, it always seemed to me it was still too superficial an analysis, because it fell short of taking into account the most important part of us: our secret divine nature.
Not to take THAT into account is obviously the best way NOT to discover the real, truest reason why we do this or that thing, whether it is to speak a language, to sing, to dance, to play, to draw, to paint, to transform plain utilitarian objects into art pieces, or to make art pieces which have no utility whatsoever except being art pieces etc, etc. All of those universal tendencies, once you look at them while keeping in mind our secret divine nature, become an obvious array of characteristics, all part of a divinely planned strategy, all meant to bring the most creativity and enjoyment possible out of our experience while we spirits are involved in yet another lifetime upon Earth in a human body.

So having adventures, too, must be one such irresistible tendency in human nature because of the divine nature hidden deep in it and surfacing in us through all those totally non-utilitarian needs in our lives.

Each life we live is in itself actually an Adventure: an adventure for the Divine in each of us, our real Self.
Out of the total, absolute safety and bliss of our eternal divine Being, and yet still inside of It in fact, but in the illusory bubble of fake separation provided by this terrestrial pocket of space-time, we have planned for ourselves a certain story to be lived out in this physical reality.
For this story we do have an overall script, but in which very few events only are really fixed, all the rest remains open to modifications as the story unfolds and as we constantly adapt our script to it, deciding our next moves according to our changing or not changing goals.
There is what we intended to realize or learn through that lifetime, and there is the way our script translates itself into the actual events and influences their results in the direction we wanted, or not.
For during each such adventure we don’t know in advance what will happen, the main ingredient in any Adventure being your ignorance of what its outcome will be: it is that ignorance that makes the whole thing interesting, giving you the sense of ‘suspense’ any good writer or oral story-teller knows how to keep up in her or his audience. The twists and turns of the plot that put in danger the favorite character or seem to bring closer the victory of the villain are the proper use of space and time to keep us interested, not just with our mind, but with our emotions as well, our whole being affected down to the physical level by emotional reactions that in turn produce physiological responses in our very body.
To be the hero of our own story is of course the most intense experience in each lifetime; but even just to listen to a story, or to read one, is a perfect way to give ourselves yet another level of experience, not as ‘real’ as the one we live in our own current script, but nevertheless real to some extent too; in this way we can enrich our being with layer upon layer of fully experienced or half-experienced stories, the ones we ourselves may invent in the course of a given lifetime constituting potentially the strongest alternative realities available for our own growing consciousness.
This is exactly what happened for example with the soul embodied in 1892 as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, when he started writing his own first story (about ‘a great green dragon’) at the age of seven, later to reiterate that short-lived initial attempt by writing his first tales of luminous High Elves (and dreadful dragons again), in the most unlikely of circumstances: in the muddy horror of the trenches during the Battle of the Somme in France, 1916.
How much entangled with each other the two realities gradually became for JRRT himself becomes apparent mostly when one reads those remarkable ‘Letters’ of his, edited and published in 1981, eight years after his death in 1973, by his biographer Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Tolkien’s youngest son Christopher. There is no doubt it is the writing of this immense, astonishing mythology, literally in this case the work-of-a-lifetime, that has enabled Tolkien the erudite Philologist to also fulfill the intense inner need of expression of Tolkien the passionate lover of languages and of the heroic stories that got told through them.
An idealist deeply dedicated to living his life in conformity with the Will of the One all containing Being he called in his mythology ‘Eru’, he was faithful throughout that lifetime to the existing religion – Catholicism – that came closest to his inner certitudes; but he never allowed anyone, not even the Church, about which he had no illusions anyway, to dictate to him how he was to live his relationship to that One Being we are all part of.
Besides his ‘Letters’, the most moving testimonies that he himself left of his ardent inner life have been his speech on Fairy-Tales, and the lovely little story he woke up from one morning and immediately wrote down: ‘Leaf by Niggle’. Both those pieces are worthy of their own celebrating article on my part some day.
Today my point is that in all of us, whether strongly and directly expressed in our actual lifetime, or less strongly and then mostly expressed through the stories we will enjoy, there is a thirst, a taste for Challenge, for the Unknown and Unexpected, for Danger, and then for the joy and pride of overcoming those difficulties we ourselves have put in our script so as to experience our own divine power growing again within us in this terrestrial life that is is nothing but an Adventure of Evolution, for the sake of the taste, in our divine essence, for Adventure… When we know that, and remember it even in the midst of those very difficulties that may crop up in this lifetime of ours, it definitely helps, for it reminds us of the true reality of our being, which is divine, and of the true reality of whatever we are going through, which is that it is all but a divine Game of the One with all these possible forms of Himself/Herself…
When the very cells constituting our physical body remember that too, then the Game will become really interesting… Some of those cells are starting to do just that, so things might change in our bodies sooner than we ever imagined.
Cells reawakening to their divine taste for Adventure… I hear some of my cells laughing here and there in my body. We better get ready: we are possibly in for some fantastic fun!…