Why the oldest word for guidance in Western civilization was never about answers – and what that means for your journey
By Sunil Bhaskaran
I invite you to read the following for the following reasons:
- You will see and understand what real mentorship provides vs. most coaching available these days. What the differences are and how it will apply to you and your leadership and search for personal and professional development.
- You will start to understand how the mentoring journey provides superior value compared to short term answers available in workshops, training videos and most online training.
- You will start to understand and appreciate the value of age old wisdom; Not just from the Greeks, but from all kinds of ancient wisdoms. I focus on the Odyssey here written by Homer – but you will find similar teachings in almost any ancient text. Sometimes ancient wisdom can get it wrong. But most of the time, the benefit of time and accumulated wisdom outdoes most modern thinking by leaps and bounds.
Please enjoy the read and please do let me know what you think or feel or see as insights after the read.
I welcome you to the world of Ontological Mentoring.
Sunil Bhaskaran
I. One Who Causes Thinking
Nearly three thousand years ago, a poet we call Homer composed an epic about a man trying to get home. Inside that epic, almost hidden, is a second story – the story of that man’s son. And inside that second story is a single character whose name would outlive empires, cross into dozens of languages, and become the word we still reach for when we want to describe the deepest form of human guidance.
Mentor.
But here is what almost nobody knows, and what changes everything: the character Mentor – the old man of Ithaca, the trusted friend Odysseus left in charge of his household – is not the great teacher of the Odyssey. He barely does anything. The teaching comes from somewhere else entirely, wearing his face.
Before we get to that revelation, consider the word itself. Linguists trace “Mentor” to the ancient Proto-Indo-European root *men-, meaning “to think.” It is the same root that gives us mind, mental, memory – and, in Sanskrit, mantra. The suffix carries agency. The most careful renderings of the name give us something like “one who causes thinking” or “one intent of mind.”
Sit with that. The original meaning of mentor is not “one who gives answers.” Not “one who instructs.” Not “one who has arrived and now dispenses the map.”
One who causes thinking. In you.
A mentor, at the root of the word, is not a source of wisdom. A mentor is a cause of your thinking – a catalyst for the wisdom that can only be grown in you, by you, from your own journey. Everything else in this document unfolds from that single etymological fact.
II. The Athena Revelation: Wisdom Moves Through, Not From
When the Odyssey opens, Odysseus has been gone twenty years. His son Telemachus, now a young man, sits paralyzed in his own father’s house while arrogant suitors devour the estate and pursue his mother. Telemachus does nothing. He broods. He waits. He is a son defined entirely by an absence.
Then a stranger arrives at the door.
The stranger appears to be Mentes, and later takes the form of Mentor, the old family friend. But Homer tells us plainly who it really is: Athena, goddess of wisdom, in disguise. It is Athena-as-Mentor who stirs Telemachus out of his paralysis. It is Athena-as-Mentor who tells him to stand up in the assembly and speak – to become, for the first time, a public man. And it is Athena-as-Mentor who sends him on his own voyage, to seek news of his father and, without knowing it, to become someone.
The teaching does not come from the man. It comes through him.
This is not a Greek eccentricity. Across the wisdom traditions of humanity, wisdom itself is personified as something that visits the human vessel rather than originating in it. In Christianity, Sophia – holy Wisdom. In Hinduism, Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, flowing like the river she is named for. In Buddhism, Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom, called the Mother of All Buddhas – and Tara, who embodies wisdom in compassionate action. Different civilizations, separated by oceans and millennia, arrived at the same structure: the wise human is not the origin of wisdom but the clearing through which it moves.
What does this mean for you, practically?
It means there are two ways to relate to a body of knowledge or a body of distinctions. You can learn from others’ distinctions – borrow their maps, adopt their conclusions, live inside their answers. Or you can use another’s distinctions the way Telemachus used Athena’s visit: as the provocation that sends you to create and follow your own.
A true mentor knows the difference. A true mentor is not building disciples of his wisdom. He is causing the thinking that grows yours.
III. The First Function: Stirring You Out of Paralysis
Before any voyage, there is the couch. The pacing. The waiting.
Telemachus at the opening of the epic is a portrait of a very specific human condition – one I have seen in thousands of accomplished men and women across thirty years of this work. He is not lazy. He is not without gifts. He is paralyzed – suspended between a past he did not choose (a missing father, a besieged house) and a future he cannot yet imagine himself worthy of. He is, in the deepest sense, waiting for someone else to resolve his life.
The first function of a mentor is to end that waiting.
Athena does not comfort Telemachus. She does not analyze his childhood. She does something far more radical: she tells him to stand up in the assembly – to take his place among men and speak – and then she sends him on a voyage whose true purpose is to complete his primary past. For Telemachus, that past is the father-shaped absence at the center of his identity. For you, it may be a father, a mother, a trauma, a decision, a wound that has quietly organized your entire way of being. Whoever and whatever it is, the pattern is the same: the unfinished past keeps you in the harbor, and no amount of thinking about the voyage substitutes for taking it.
The paralysis, notice, always looks reasonable from the inside. It wears noble clothing: I am being careful. I am waiting for clarity. I am not ready yet. This is the structure I call X and Y: you avoid something (X – the uncomfortable truth, the risk, the voyage) with a seemingly honorable intention (Y – prudence, preparation, responsibility to others). The nobility of Y is precisely what makes X so hard to see.
A mentor sees it. And says so.
IV. The Journey Is the Wisdom, Not the Answer
The writer Christopher Hitchens observed that the Odyssey gave Western civilization one of its most subversive ideas: that the journey matters more than the arrival.
This is easy to nod along to and very hard to actually live. Because most of us, if we are honest, are living in one of two modes.
In the first mode, you are waiting for the answer. You are technically in motion – working, striving, consuming books and courses and content – but ontologically you are parked, arms crossed, impatiently demanding that life hand over the solution to wealth, success, and joy. Every present moment is treated as an obstacle between you and the arrival. This is waiting disguised as traveling.
In the second mode, you are the journey. Deeply engaged. Catching every moment. Reflecting on every moment. Harvesting each day for what it actually taught you – and out of that harvest, distilling wisdom that is genuinely yours. Not borrowed. Not downloaded from a guru. Grown, from your own crossings, your own storms, your own harbors.
Zen has said this for over a thousand years: the path is the goal. Ordinary mind is the way. There is no enlightenment waiting at the end of the road that is not already available in the walking of it. Heidegger, twenty-five centuries after Homer, said it in the language of ontology: human being is not a thing that arrives somewhere. We are beings whose very being is the journeying – thrown into a world, projecting toward possibilities, always underway. To wait for life to begin after the arrival is to misunderstand what a human being is.
The mentor’s role here is precise: to keep returning you from the fantasy of arrival to the wisdom of the road.
V. The Navigator: Distinguishing Truth from Bullshit, Challenge from Distraction
If wisdom must be your own, what exactly does a mentor do on the voyage?
A mentor is a navigator. Not the captain – you sail your own ship. Not the destination – that is your Ithaka, not his. A navigator does something specific and rare: he distinguishes.
He distinguishes the bullshit from the truth – including, especially, your own most convincing bullshit, the stories you have told so long they feel like weather.
He distinguishes unnecessary suffering from necessary challenge. This may be the most valuable distinction on the entire voyage. Unnecessary suffering and unnecessary resistance are the same phenomenon: energy spent fighting what is, defending a self-image, rehearsing grievances, avoiding the X. Necessary challenge is the actual terrain of your growth – the training grounds where your strength is forged. Most people cannot tell them apart. They endure the wrong hardships heroically and flee the right ones efficiently.
He distinguishes the distractions from the challenges. Homer gave us the whole taxonomy: the Sirens, whose song promises everything and delivers shipwreck. The Lotus-Eaters, whose comfort dissolves all memory of the voyage. The monsters that seem to block the way. A navigator can look at what is consuming your attention and tell you: this one is a Siren – lash yourself to the mast and sail past. This one is a training ground – go in.
And he shows you where the opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses actually lie – not where your fear or your vanity says they lie.
But here is the navigator’s deepest secret, the one that changes the nature of the entire voyage: these battles are primarily internal. Every monster on the map is, first and last, a battle for your presence and your grounding. Which brings us to Cavafy.
VI. The Sea Does Not Contain Cyclops
In 1911, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy wrote “Ithaka,” perhaps the greatest commentary on the Odyssey ever composed. Its opening move is decisive. As you set out for Ithaka, he says, hope the road is long – and do not fear the Laistrygonians, the Cyclops, angry Poseidon. You will never meet them, he says, unless you carry them within. Unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
This is pure ontology, delivered as poetry. The monsters are not out in the world. They are constituted by the being who travels. Fear discloses a fearsome world; resignation discloses a hopeless one. The obstacle you keep meeting on every road is the one you pack in your own luggage.
The sea does not contain Cyclops. Resignation does.
In my body of work I call the four great monsters the Four Horses of Death: Guilt, Fear, Resignation, and Frustration. They are the four riders that carry human aliveness to its grave – not dramatically, but slowly, daily, respectably. And every one of them is internal. Guilt is a Cyclops. Fear is Poseidon. Resignation is the Lotus. Frustration is the storm you mistake for the sea itself. No mentor can slay them for you – Athena does not fight Telemachus’ battles. But a navigator can name the horse you are riding when you cannot see it, and show you the moment your soul is setting the monster up in front of you.
This is why the internal battle – the battle for presence and grounding – is the real voyage. Win it, and the outer sea becomes what it always was: water, wind, and the way forward.
VII. The Clearing: Athena Does Not Sail the Ship
Here is the distinction that separates a mentor from every counterfeit: the mentor is a clearing, not a captain.
A clearing, in the sense the philosopher Heidegger used it, is an opening in the forest – the space in which things can appear, in which light can fall, in which what was hidden becomes visible. A clearing does not do anything to the trees. It is the openness in which seeing becomes possible.
Athena, for all her divine power, does not sail the ship for Telemachus. She does not fight his battles, make his speeches, or complete his past for him. She creates the opening – the stirring, the sending, the naming of what is so – and he does the voyage. This is not a limitation of her power. It is the deepest expression of it. Wisdom that does your journey for you would rob you of the only thing the journey exists to produce: you, transformed.
The counterfeit mentor – the guru, the answer-seller, the arrival-merchant – sails the ship. He hands you his map, his conclusions, his personality to imitate. It feels like generosity. It is theft. It steals your Telemachy.
I know the true structure from the inside, because it runs in my own lineage – with an uncanniness worthy of Homer himself.
VIII. Forty Years Apart: A Personal Telemachy
My father was an immigrant in the years before the Second World War. He grew up in a comfortable but constricting village town in South India – a place that offered safety and slow suffocation in the same embrace. And he had a mentor. I knew this man only as Paramur Uncle. It was Paramur Uncle who set my father on his journey – out of the village, across the water, to Singapore, to a life none of his circumstances had scripted.
Forty years later, in 1984, I made my own crossing – from Singapore to America. And I too was sent. First by something I can only call some strange God – a whisper I did not understand and could not ignore. And then, later, by my mentor in Orange County, the man who found me in my own version of Telemachus’ great hall: accomplished on paper, paralyzed in fact, pacing inside a self-incriminating story I had mistaken for my identity.
He did for me what Athena did for the prince of Ithaca. He did not comfort me. He did not sail my ship. He stirred me out of my paralysis and put the choice in front of me with terrible clarity: Journey or die – slowly, in suffering.
I chose life and the journey. And somewhere on that voyage – through the completing of my own primary past, through storms I would not wish on anyone and would not trade for anything – I found the words Telemachus finds: I am not afraid anymore.
I thank God every day that I responded to that whisper. Because here is what the journey made: it is the courageous young who grow into older, wiser men and women who can never die ontologically – whose way of being outlives their circumstances and pours into everyone they touch. I became someone worthy of standing next to other men and women. Not above them. Next to them. And I had to leave home to become him. There was no version of that transformation available in the harbor.
Two immigrants. Two mentors. Forty years apart. The same epic, running in a family the way it runs in the species.
If you are reading this and something in your chest just tightened – if you are pacing, or worse, if the pacing has hardened into stillness – then you already know what I am about to say. There are at least a few of you who feel and know the same thing: that it is time for another journey, and you are hearing the whisper for a guide who will take you there. That whisper is not weakness. It is the oldest sound in literature. It is Athena at the door.
IX. Ask for the Road to Be Long: The Delusion of Arrival
Cavafy’s second great teaching: hope the voyage is a long one. Pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of discovery.
Why would anyone pray for a long road? Because wisdom is a lifelong journey. It never ends. The moment you believe you have arrived, something corrosive begins – a corruption I call transformational arrogance. It is the specific disease of people who have genuinely grown: the transformed self quietly becomes a new fortress, the insight hardens into identity, and the traveler starts speaking as one who has completed the voyage rather than one who is on it. The arrival is a delusion, and the delusion clouds. It creates the arrogance that closes the very openness that made transformation possible in the first place.
The wise traveler holds the opposite stance. Cavafy paints it in images of pure receptivity: summer mornings when you enter harbors seen for the first time. Markets of mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfumes of every kind. Sitting with Egyptian scholars to go on learning – always, to go on learning.
Notice what all these images share: they are encounters of firstness. The harbor entered for the first time. This is what I call the unfortressed self – the self that has laid down its accumulated conclusions, its defenses, its need to already know. It is beginner’s mind, pure Zen: every arrival can be a first arrival if the self is not dragging its fortress into port. The unfortressed traveler receives the world fresh, and so the world arrives fresh. The fortressed traveler meets only his own walls, in every harbor, forever.
A mentor guards you against the fortress – including the beautiful new fortress built from your breakthroughs.
X. Ithaka Is What Gives the Journey: The Ontology of Vision
Now the poem’s final and deepest teaching. Cavafy tells the traveler: keep Ithaka always in your mind; arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. And then the stunning turn: if you find her poor when you finally arrive, Ithaka has not deceived you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Ithaka is what gives the journey – not what the journey gives.
This is the crucial distinction, and it rewrites the entire self-help understanding of goals. The destination is not a prize to be collected. It is a generative source: it opens a world, organizes commitment, calls the traveler forward every single morning. Its value lies entirely in what it generates in you now – not in what it pays out at the end.
My own Ithaka is a vision: to transform one million leaders who transform one hundred million lives by 2050. Hear that correctly. A million transformed leaders is not a trophy waiting for me in 2050. It is the Ithaka that constitutes who I get to be every morning between now and then – what I rise for, what organizes my days, what calls forth capacities I would otherwise never develop. If I arrive in 2050 and find the harbor “poor” by some accounting, the vision will not have deceived me – unless I had mistaken its function.
There is a quiet teaching about time hidden in Cavafy’s grammar: wise as you will have become. The future perfect tense. The poet speaks from a standpoint where the transformation has already occurred, and invites you to live from that completed future backward. This is the temporal structure of an authentic human life: being-toward what you are becoming, letting the future organize the present. It is the structure of every vision worth having.
And it transforms your relationship to time itself. On the journey, the past, present, and future stop functioning as sources of control or comfort – the past no longer a prison or a pedestal, the future no longer a rescue. They become instead sources of wisdom: the wisdom to know that, in the end, it is all invented – and that you are the source of your choices and your inventions. Odysseus’ nostalgia points here. The Greek nostos means homecoming; algos means pain. The whole genre of his story is named nostos – the return. But the return that matters is not geographic. It is returning to your past, your home, your origins as a wiser being – and discovering that from this new stance, home itself has transformed, because you have.
The traveler who understands all this can do something almost nobody can do: hold any goal fully committed and fully unattached at once. Every Ithaka – Cavafy’s plural is deliberate – is empty at arrival and priceless as origin. The wisdom is not disappointment survived. It is seeing the mechanism itself. Joy as ground, not as payoff waiting at the harbor.
XI. A Hero to Live Into
So what, finally, does a mentor give?
Not answers – we have established that. Not the voyage itself – that is yours alone. What Athena gives Telemachus, in the end, is a hero to live into: himself.
Watch the arc. The epic opens with a young man in a suspended, potential state – a son defined by absence, a life on hold, an existence mediated entirely by other people’s stories about his father. It closes with a man who has sailed, spoken, risked, returned, and taken his stand beside Odysseus in the great hall – a sovereign being with his own menos and the beginnings of his own kleos.
Those two Greek words deserve a moment. Menos is nearly untranslatable: the surge of vital force, the aliveness and fighting spirit that Athena literally breathes into Telemachus. Notice – she does not install it from outside. She breathes into motion what was always in him. That is what a mentor evokes: not new capacities, but your own menos, awakened. Kleos is the renown of a life worth telling – not fame as spectacle, but a life that becomes a story worth passing down, the ontological form of never dying.
This is the final gift of true mentoring: the opportunity to reinvent yourself as a wise hero – one worthy to follow, beginning with your own following of yourself. The shift is from a mediated existence to an autonomous one. From waiting in the hall to standing in the assembly. From a self defined by what is absent to a self defined by what it is voyaging toward.
The mentor does not make you into this hero. One who causes thinking – remember the root. The mentor stirs, sends, navigates, distinguishes, clears – and you sail.
XII. The Whisper
Three thousand years later, the structure has not changed by a single line.
Somewhere, right now, there is an accomplished man or woman sitting in their own great hall – estate intact, suitors of one kind or another eating the days – paralyzed inside a story about a past that was never completed. And somewhere in them, faint but unmistakable, is the whisper: it is time for another journey.
If that is you, understand what the whisper is and is not. It is not asking you to find someone with answers. Answers are what the harbor-sellers trade in. It is asking you to find a navigator – one who causes thinking, one who will stir you from the couch to the assembly, send you toward your own primary past, distinguish your monsters from your training grounds, guard you from the fortress of arrival, and hold your Ithaka with you as the generative source of who you get to become.
The road is long. Pray that it is. The monsters are internal, and so is the victory. The wisdom will be your own – it is the only kind there is.
And the journey, as an old blind poet knew before almost anything else was written down, is the whole treasure.
Sunil Bhaskaran is a transformational leadership coach, speaker, and author with over 30 years of experience mentoring professionals across six continents. His vision: to transform 1 million leaders who transform 100 million lives by 2050.
Begin your own excavation: Free Blind Spot Assessment at sunilbhaskaran.com/assessment.html – or take the first step of the voyage with a Discovery Session – book a Blind Spot Breakthrough Discovery Session with me here: https://calendly.com/sunilbhaskaran/the-blind-spot-breakthrough-discovery-session.