About Robert Mitchell
In 1966, as a twenty-year-old university student with a good job as an apprentice architect, I received my draft notice. I did not know why my draft status was changed, but I accepted my fate and enlisted in the Army’s flight school to become a combat helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. I rationalized that going to war would be a great adventure that would initiate me into manhood. As fate would have it, my helicopter crashed, and I was flown back to the States with traumatic injuries.
I was discharged in 1970, but I did not return immediately to my hometown. The military experience had thrust me into a space that was disassociated from everything that I had known to be “normal.” Though I had completed my university degree in mathematics while still in the army, I knew that I needed to heal my soul of the wounds of war before I would be accepted back into civilian life. Rather than try to return to a mundane existence, I embraced the possibility for a new adventure and fled to Europe.
Being away from the United States put me in a mysterious, magical space between reality and fantasy–between the world of mundane reality and the realm of the spirits. Free from the ego-restraints of my upbringing, I could discover and confront the wounds to the soul caused by the war.
Journey to Myrtos is a story of healing the wounds of war. It tells of my experience serving the warlords of the patriarchy in Vietnam and the transformation that took place when I met the mother goddess who rules over the soul. That meeting, in a small fishing village on the south coast of Crete, was not an end but, rather, the beginning of an incredible odyssey of transformation, told in a second book, The Trials of the Initiate: Transforming the Warrior Spirit. Healing the wounds of war can be an even greater adventure than the war, itself. For me, it was a heroic journey – an adventure of initiation that ultimately allowed me to re-integrate into American society, free from the burden of a scarred and wounded soul. As such, these two books are a guidepost to all young combat veterans who need to heal the wounds to their deep psyche caused by their combat experience.
My reintegration into American society began in 1982 when I returned to the university to acquire my teaching certificate. Subsequently, I taught math, English, history, and art at the junior high and high school level in both public and private schools for 27-years. During that time, I discovered the vocational archetype that resides in the soul to direct character and personality. The vocational archetype of the teacher mastered the wounded archetype of the warrior to give purpose and direction to my civilian career.
TEACHER: Seeking the Vocational Archetype is a hybrid memoir-essay that continues my adventure of discovering and unleashing the power of the soul to guide the personality, in spite of the conflicts with the demands made on the ego by society. Currently, that conflict is evident in every classroom teacher in America. While social and political pressures are invading the autonomy of the classroom, the teacher stands at the nexus between educational policy and the sacred duty to nurture the souls of the students in the class.
Since retiring from classroom teaching, I have been active as a lecturer and writer on educational reform, child development, and the educational process of nurturing the presence of a future spiritual democracy in young people. Currently, I have two additional books in progress. One book outlines a completely revisioned K-12 curriculum. The second book deals with the educational and psychological impact of our current understanding of child development. Since K-12 education is the way in which we nurture the presence of the future in our children, this second book will examine a new model of child development that can lead us toward a spiritual democracy.
