Entering the mysteries—through analysis or mysticism, or by directly experiencing death and love in your life—is about learning to accept and love life in the body and on this earth. Being fully present in the body in no way negates the possibility of the immortality of the Soul, because the body is the expression of Soul and hence part of it. Our

On the symbolic level, living life only at the level of the Ego is like being a robot, toy, or other inanimate object. The hunger we feel is for a more genuine experience. The quest with its call to Spirit is only the first step in finding such genuineness. Initiation shakes up our way of seeing the world and requires us to connect with our deeper

for until we confront our Souls, we may be good, we may even be successful, but we will not feel truly real because we are, in fact, not ourselves.

we get many chances. It is genuinely never too late. We enter and reenter the mysteries many times at deeper and deeper levels of understanding.

mysteries.

Preparation for the journey is about learning to be strong, moral, and healthy, but the journey itself is about experiencing the great mysteries of life—death, passion, birth, creation—as

The journey requires us to put all these desires aside and see the Soul’s truth: the essence of life is mystery. The Soul’s truth does not necessarily make any sense from a rational Ego point of view. It is good to be “healthy, wealthy, and wise,” but what makes us alive and real is journeying into the central mysteries of life, where we learn

The hero’s journey is an initiation into the realities of the Soul journey.

Initiation makes such experiences conscious, not in the language of the Ego but in the language of the Soul—through myth, symbol, song, art, literature, ritual.