Waking from the Dream: Ben “Doc” Askins and the Anti-Hero’s Journey
By: Lauren Smith
In a culture obsessed with personal branding, purpose-driven lives, and heroic transformation, Ben “Doc” Askins arrives with a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a busted mirror in the other. His book, Anti-Hero’s Journey: The Zero With a Thousand Faces, doesn’t aim to inspire. It aims to explode. Not out of nihilism, but from the deep desire to set people free—from their myths, their masks, and most of all, themselves.
A combat medic turned psychedelic therapist, Askins isn’t your typical spiritual provocateur. He’s crass, candid, and carries the emotional shrapnel of war, grief, and fatherhood like a jagged badge. Through that lens, the heroic narrative—our cultural darling—gets not just critiqued but dismembered.
At the heart of Anti-Hero’s Journey lies a bold concept: the Zeromyth. If Joseph Campbell’s famed Hero’s Journey maps the arc of transformation through trials and triumph, the Zeromyth yanks the curtain back to reveal an empty stage. Askins calls it “what happens when life curb-stomps the Monomyth.” Where Campbell’s hero returns enlightened, Askins’ anti-hero wakes up to the truth that there was never anyone to save.
“The Hero’s Journey pumps the ego full of helium and launches it toward ‘purpose’ like a birthday balloon,” Askins says. “The Zeromyth is the slow hiss of that air escaping until all that’s left is the deflated rubber you thought you were.”
It’s not just intellectual. Askins lived it. In one haunting recollection, he describes flying home on emergency leave from Iraq to meet his newborn daughter—alive but clinging to life in a neonatal intensive care unit—only to return days later to the desert, where he would shoot a suicide bomber he sarcastically nicknamed the Virgin Mary. “The Hero’s Journey doesn’t cover that scene,” he says. “That’s when the Monomyth snapped in half like the pool cue my dad used to beat me with.”
His words are brutal. Deliberately so. He wants to provoke discomfort because, in his view, the stories we cling to—identity, ego, personal development—are the source of our suffering. “Identity is the costume,” he writes. “Ego is the lie you tell yourself right before you put it on.” To Askins, every war, heartbreak, or ambition is just “different flavors of cosplay.”
So what replaces the comforting structure of a hero’s journey? Nothing. Literally.
“Ultimately, non-dual consciousness is Oneness swallowed by Zeroness,” he explains. “Nothing to see here—literally.”
It’s a hard sell in a world where even spiritual enlightenment has become a personal brand. But Askins isn’t interested in selling salvation. His goal is liberation. “Being ‘someone’ damn near killed me,” he says. “Being no one? That saved my ass.”
For Askins, freedom lies in dropping the act, not perfecting the performance. His book is full of philosophy, psychedelics, war stories, and dark humor—but it’s not a guide, or a map, or a path to enlightenment. It’s a sledgehammer. “I want to dismantle all the myths,” he says. “Starting with the ones that keep you asleep at the wheel.”
And he’s not shy about which myths are on his hit list: that trauma gives you purpose, that healing makes you whole, that God is watching, and that fulfillment comes from becoming more. “I don’t want you safe,” he says. “I want you free.”
At times, Anti-Hero’s Journey reads like a fever-dream manifesto. It’s jagged, nonlinear, and emotionally intense. But that, too, is the point. Askins resists a tidy resolution because he doesn’t believe life offers any. He challenges the assumption that there’s a core self to uncover or a final truth to arrive at. For him, the journey isn’t toward wholeness—it’s toward un-becoming.
“I wrote this book as a Molotov cocktail for my own mirror,” he says. “If you’re lucky, it’ll explode what you think you are too.”
That destruction, paradoxically, is an act of healing. By abandoning the illusion of ego, Askins argues, we can finally stop suffering to protect it. “Spend enough time patching up bloodied kids in the sandboxes of empire or walking veterans through their psychic shrapnel afterward,” he says, “and you learn: identity is a prison made of stories.”
His rejection of the Monomyth isn’t a rejection of meaning—it’s an invitation to find something more honest. Not in becoming a hero, but in waking up from the need to be one. In the quiet, raw, and sometimes terrifying space that remains, there may be, as Askins suggests, a strange kind of freedom.
And in that freedom—stripped of illusions, purpose, and pretense—we may find not nothing, but something closer to truth.
Or as Askins puts it, “This breath. This terrible, beautiful, empty Now.”
You can pick up your copy of Anti-Hero’s Journey on Amazon or explore it further on Ben’s official website. Whether you’re curious, questioning, or just ready for a different kind of journey—this one’s worth the read.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and reflects personal views. It does not constitute professional or medical advice. Individuals seeking mental health support or guidance on psychedelics should consult qualified professionals.
