Spiritual Quest: Homing In to the meaning of Homer’s Odyssey

David Beardsley explains that the central metaphor in the Odyssey is nostos, the return home, in “The Journey Back to Where You Are: Homer’s Odyssey as Spiritual Quest.” The wisdom that is revealed in Homer’s work is a story strand passed on through generations. Finding the path to wholeness is illustrated through allegoric story threads that encapsulate wisdom. It contains a perennial philosophy for visualizing the Good on a pathway that reunites the pathfinder with Self. The stories in Homer’s Odyssey carry kernels of wisdom over a story bridge through time and generations. This journey is not for the feet, but a walkthrough that is an inner transformation. The hero’s journey advances through a turning wheel of perceptions on a journey that takes you back to where you are.
This can be understood as a systematic process of “dis-illusionment” that takes one beyond the war-like forces playing out in our lives. Beauty, truth, goodness, and justice shine through in moments when humans “possess their soul.” This soul-searching takes us on what can be understood as an odyssey.
In Homer, we see that home is encoded in the author’s name. Homer, is possibly a key that opens to a deeper understanding of the journey. The odyssey traces the homing in process, as voyagers find their way back to the homeland through the experience of homecoming. This homeward journey is guided by the memory of the Good. It is a voyage on the sea of life that takes us through trials and tribulations in order to develop discrimination, the perception of difference with unusual intelligence.
 
By reading the Odyssey, we learn to sing the song that the gods arranged for us. By transposing the wisdom written within the lines into our own life hi-story, we subsequently influence the trajectory of our own lives. Our life’s song is an original composition that provides musical notations and symbols that map the oeuvre, indicating how the piece should be played. Much like a sheet of music that guides the pianist, the Odyssey contains the fundamental elements that indicate the various partitions that delineate a spiritual quest. The pages guide the reader through the different arrangements, much like a composition of lyrics and melody on sheet music. The ancient text provides a transformational template for spiritual heroes.
“The fact that the gods may have arranged it, however, does not let us off the hook.
We still need to play our part in the song, while simultaneously becoming aware of the song and learning to sing it ourselves. So for the spiritual hero, there is an extra dimension to the quest: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine. This quest has been expressed by many different people in many different traditions over many centuries, but those who wish to can see the common thread: from Strife to Love (Empedocles), from becoming to Being (Parmenides), from the shadows to the sunlight (Plato), from the many to the One (Plotinus). It is, as we shall see, a nostos—”a return from darkness and death to light and life,” and although it is often portrayed as a journey, as Plotinus says, “It is not a journey for the feet.” It is an inner transformation, a return to a Self that is always there and does not change; a “journey back to where you are.” 
 
https://chs.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-Journey-Back-To-Where-You-Are.pdf