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ELDER, PROPHET, PHILOSOPHER: TRANSFORMATION ON THE HERO’S JOURNEY

To achieve the status of an elder, a prophet or a philosopher, one must provide others with a means of transformation in the Hero’s Journey: so that the unenlightened person that they were before, is different from the enlightened person after. So that one’s explanatory power over the universe is increased. So that what was once unseen could now be seen. So that one was unempowered, is now empowered.

In some cases we can enlighten generations – if our stories can be understood in childhood, our biographies as youth, our science in adulthood, and our wisdom and our history in late age. But we make many hero’s journeys in our lives, and we treat as elter, prophet or philosopher, those who help us in that transformational journey.

The problem is that we are ‘ready’ for our transformations at different ages, and are capable of different complexity in our understanding. As such, we need many elders prophets and philosophers.

It is only in the wisdom of late age that we see all our elders, prophets and philosophers as using whatever techniques were available to bring about in us the same transformations, using different words, and different means.

And in retrospect we see they all tell us the same things in better or worse terms, with better or worse precision, with less or more success.

The most successful has been Aristotle, for having given us the means of generating transformations that most correspond with reality, instead of those that create analogies that correspond with reality.

And these descriptions rather than analogies are what we call ‘truths’.

And truth-telling is not only the language of gods now – but the language of men because of him.