Excerpt from "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell

"Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. [...] It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as-yet-unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved."

I read this as I read certain passages of Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" when he instructed his higher men how to press on toward the goal of the Super Man. Both Nietzsche and Campbell write in these passages of something that I have already been long familiar with. This is, precisely as Campbell states here, the willed introversion that, seeking within the depths of the self all the problems and revelations that life has to offer, permits the individual to internalize the hero's journey and pass through all the stages of the monomyth, finding within himself new and strange worlds, allies, enemies, threshold guardians, elixirs, et cetera; and finding that he has become both hero and villian, devil and savior, to himself, until at last he emerges victorious from this wonderland of the soul having assimilated all and thereby transcended the mundane rituals and concerns of the world.

As Campbell states, it is a dangerous journey, and not a few who undertake it, either by accident or design, are lost in their own Daedalic labyrinth, therein to face in perpetual horror the beast, half familiar and half strange. However, to those who overcome, a peculiar freedom awaits, and likewise a peculiar burden. They are estranged from the regular world and all its burdens, but they are also estranged from regular people and endowed with a particularly difficult burden: the responsibility of changing the regular world, or rather, of therein affecting change.

This can go both ways, though some may not be able to comprehend the identical nature of the two apparent opposite results of this singular process. Take, for example, the villian of Shyamalan's film Unbreakable. [SPOILER ALERT] In his efforts to fulfill his perceived calling, Elijah commits acts of terrorism, yet his society's perception of these acts as atrocities is meaningless to him, for he only perceives them as a practical means to a necessary end, an end dictated to him by his revelation of his place within a separate world paradigm. Essentially, Elijah's henious actions in this film are no different than Smith's actions in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, although society perceives Smith's actions as laudable. [END SPOILER ALERT]

Anyway, suffice it to say that I find Campbell's illustration of this thought of particular interest, specifically as he deals with willed introversion and its resulting estrangement (or refusal/rejection of the world). I have noticed that certain friends of mine have recently (over the last few years) begun to remark with increasing frequency how detached I seem from the regular, mundane issues of daily life, even, to remark to me that I "live in a different world" and so on/so forth. They are right of course, in their way, though they cannot begin to comprehend what being right in this particular matter means from my side of the issue. I have also observed various reactions on their parts, as this trend has progressed, ranging from anxiety and worry, to mockery and ridicule, to anger or frustration. Though such things concern me very little, I still like to carefully observe their unfolding so as to ensure empathy with their various positions.