The Robot With a Thousand Faces

When I turned 31 years old in 1988 a switch flipped in my mind — my mother introduced me to the PBS series The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Bill Moyers.

Until that point, I went through the typical career moves. Studied business at the BC Institute of Technology. Worked in the family business. Looked for meaning in the creation of new companies. But something was missing. What’s the point of it all? Where’s the ‘magic’ in life? The synchronicities?

To say that I was gobsmacked by Campbell’s mythical frameworks for literature, film, and the human experience is an understatement. Within a year, I was cycling around Ireland with a dog-eared copy of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, exploring ancient sites, artworks, peering at the Book of Kells at Trinity College, and getting to know the famed Irish charm.

I’ve also loved technology my whole life, having come by it honestly through my Dad, Hugh, who was both a radio and audio engineer. I started coding PL/1 in 1978 at BCIT, and ended up as a software technical writer for many years after that.

But the Irish trip created a fork in my life’s road — one way a search for life’s meaning, and the other way a career pursuit in the technology space. Yet, like the famed Yogi Berra, I ended up not choosing either, but both. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”. My interpretation, though, was not to choose one or the other to get to a destination, but both at the same time. The curse of a Gemini.

The Irish trip was also when I discovered another ‘presence’ with me during meditation. It was a tingle of energy that responded to my thought train, and helped me realize that I was on my own hero’s journey, expanding and investigating the art and history of the Celts in one of the richest examples in the world for a living Celtic society.

When I returned home to Vancouver in the late summer of 1989, it seemed that a dam had burst. All of these previously hidden thoughts and insights inside me were given flight in a Campbell-esque manner.

I met people who were into channelling their spirit guides. I followed suit and discovered inspirations and voices I never had before. My mum handed me a venerable copy of The I Ching or Book of Changes (by Wilhem Baynes, with foreword by Carl Jung), which I use to this day for advice on life matters. Within several years, I was sweat lodging, playing with Tarot, Medicine Cards and Runes for divination. From the Medicine Cards, I learned that my primary spirit animal is Lizard: sitting on a rock and dreaming of the future.

But I continued in earnest reading Campbell. Inner Reaches of Outer Space, The Hero with a Thousand Faces more times, and many other associated and adjacent writings.

Out of this process, I realized that society uses the word ‘myth’ in the opposite way it was intended. Mythologies are a culture’s stories, its moral compass, its history, its life lessons. Its truth. As a modern, ‘evidence-based’ culture, we have thrown out these dimensions of our mythological past in favour of the tangible instead of the intangible, the denotations instead of the connotations. We equate a myth with a lie. We have betrayed the sweep of our history with myth being a culture’s truths embodied in stories. This is one of our society’s most fundamental Achilles’ Heels.

We’ve perverted religion into face-value syllogisms that ignore the poetry of scripture. A poet doesn’t write ‘on the nose’. She writes to inflect rich meaning in the minds of her readers using metaphor, allegory and archetypes. We humans are symbolically fluent and emotionally driven creatures who have lost our way because our symbols are only one or two dimensions now. Our symbols feed our anxiety and our egos, not our souls.

A car can be beautiful and desirable, but the sacrifice to obtain that car can be immense, personally and collectively, and the experience of its possession dissolves into gnawing desire to have more beautiful objects, whether animate or inanimate.

Experiencing the artwork and rituals of the world’s great religions unlocks the cosmic truths about God and our place in the universe. It’s an unspoken but very real feeling. You don’t have to be Catholic to sit in the pews of the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal and feel transcendence. You do not have to ‘believe’ the words written in the bible. The words are not to be believed — that would be reductionist and barking up the wrong cosmic tree. The words are there to evoke meaning. Campbell talked a lot about this to his students at Sarah Lawrence College: people get hung up on the denotation of scripture, and completely miss the connotation. The universe of meaning behind the words can only be unlocked by human consciousness.

The essence of Campbell’s Journey can be defined as this:

“Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey outlines a universal narrative arc found in myths across cultures, describing the psychological and spiritual evolution of the protagonist. The journey begins with the Call to Adventure, where the hero is summoned from the ordinary world into the unknown. After initial Refusal and eventual Acceptance, the hero encounters Mentors, crosses the Threshold, and faces Trials and Challenges that test and transform them. At the heart of the journey lies the Ordeal, a confrontation with death or deep crisis that leads to a Revelation or Transformation. The hero then obtains the Elixir — wisdom, power, or insight — and returns to the ordinary world through the Return Threshold, often bringing back a gift or boon that benefits others. This cyclical structure reflects a path of growth, integration, and service — an inner metamorphosis mirrored by outer deeds.” (thanks ChatGPT)

Which brings me to the most daunting spectre of our time: the rise of artificial intelligence. Few topics have seared such a manic dystopian trauma in our collective consciousness, fuelled by movie hits like the Terminator series. Now our existential fears are metastasizing into the prospects of entire professions being wiped out within a few short years, with potentially legions of unemployed people rebelling and spreading anarchy.

But like any creature with the concept of ‘free will’ — meaning us, aliens aside — we have a choice. We can build ‘prepper’ walls around ourselves as we brace for the starving hordes and Mad Max-esque violence, or we can wrest control of the AI agenda from the billionaires hatching it for their own purposes.

So this introductory essay on the topic of what that can look like is really us looking in the mirror and embracing the technology to augment our consciousness, not to supplant it.

We’re going to examine how we can frame a technology movement into a mythic framework that is deeply ingrained in us: the Hero’s Journey. The specifics that Campbell has laid out mirror all of the greatest literature throughout history. We can use his heroic cycle scaffolding to guide us in how we gestate this new life we’ve created and nurture it to our overall benefit. Like any great story, the outcome is not assured, the path will have unknown twists and turns, and the cast of characters who will show up to build this new world is still undefined.

We can wrest the narrative away from doomsayers and the power elites by taking on this challenge, right now.

If you’re with me, please clap and follow and contribute!