What is the Path of the Hero? pt. 1

Arbor
Fall 2006

Across the banner of human history, in all ages and climes, is emblazoned the phenomenon of the hero, and our unique attachment to its ideal. The will of humankind, the desire of all peoples who have left us record of their existence, reflects a yearning towards this state of development, the crown-point of positive intent. Whether the image is of New York firefighters risking everything to rescue the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, or of a Socrates who spoke only the truth and because of which was forced to drink poison, or of a world savior nailed to a cross in order to save the world from its dastardly state of ignorance and spiritual vacuity, this ideal, or archetype of the hero, has persisted throughout our story on this planet. The names, faces, scenarios, and motifs evolve, however the essence of hero-nature persists as does gravity or photosynthesis. We are shaped and informed by this ideal of hero-nature just as much as we shape and inform it. The hero character or hero-nature represents to us the cumulative model of all of our achievement as humans, on the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual planes. We have the choice, every second of every incarnation, to embody this archetype, and strive in the only way that we uniquely can as individuals, towards its light. It is a beacon, a lighthouse, which we use, consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or erringly, to understand our actions and decide which further to perform. Hero-nature represents the goal which we all feel and know we must attain to, through triumph or tragedy, sickness or health.

A work which, since its publication in 1949, has been the makeshift authority on the subject of the hero, is Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces. It is a review of the subject of the hero through the lens of the world's mythologies from the prime authority on comparative mythology. As the work I will be doing over the course of this semester revolves around the axiomatic question of "what is the path of the hero?", I decided to choose this book as the first I would be studying, since it is such a renowned authority on the subject, above all others. The work is outlined so that the entire path of the hero, from the prophecies of hir birth to the tales told after hir death, is presented and scrutinized, using as its raw material the mythologies of most of the known civilizations on the planet, from the Eskimos to the Aboriginees, from the Sumerians to Star Wars. Written in high literary style, and mostly free from the bonds of academic pomposity, it speaks of the entire palette of humanity's understanding of its own unique, universal schema; that of the hero. It is the purpose of this paper to comb through this work and provide an adequate synopsis of its message, and to further answer the question of just what we have to learn about our own collective existence and disposition, and what we can each individually do to aspire to the "height of our halo," by studying the mythologies of the world.

Hero With a Thousand Faces is broken up into chapters which describe the elements of the hero's archetypal journey in sequence. Part one outlines the adventure of the hero, from hir departure, through the initiatory experiences sHe then must experience, to the variegated stages of hir return to the world of everyday, temporal existence, and the trials sHe must undergo therein in light of hir newfound, cosmic boon.

The departure of the to-be-hero usually begins with some sort of uncanny experience which acts to press the character beyond the scope of everyday understanding of the world. As Campbell says, "a blunder- apparently the merest chance- reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood (p. 51)." There is some sort of unexpected herald of a future sequence of events, to which the character is drawn inextricably, if sHe is ready, able, and willing to heed the call. The bringer of this message is "often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world; yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through the walls of day into the dark where the jewels glow (p.53)." At this stage, the to-be-hero is another mere mortal, a john doe in the world of everyday comings and goings, however, for one reason or another, sHe has manifested enough inner purity, understanding, and moral scope to be able to receive the message which is in order, waiting and ready to be assimilated. By definition, the herald of the existence of the path must be in some sense bizarre or mystifying, and must be worthy to chase after. Campbell tells of a fairy tale wherein a young princess has dialogue with a lonely frog who retrieves her golden ball from a stream in return for the fulfillment of its wish to be her companion, and an Arapaho tale of a young woman who sees a porcupine scurrying along a tree branch, following it out further and further, until she cannot anymore be seen by her peers who remain on the ground. This occurrence marks the transition of the character from the mundanity of everyday existence into the otherworld, the strange, the dark, or the subconscious. Campbell calls this the "call to adventure," which "signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown (p. 58)." It represents the call to delve into the deep, rich, black silt at the ground of our being, wherein our hitherto hidden desires, motivations, and memories lie, where we must go if we are to understand our true nature and integrate the
elements of it which we had previously kept banished from our waking consciousness.

The stage which commonly follows the "call to adventure" is the hero's refusal of the call. The reason that the call is usually refused is simply because it requires changes in the character and actions of the hero which are altogether inconvenient and painful, which is "essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest (p. 60)." The difficulty lies in the newfound existence of a choice. If one is stuck in the mire and has no chance to get out, then at least the internal anguish of being able to will the positive changes to occur cannnot be experienced; only the baneful, dull, unsurprising decay of everyday life. But when one receives the call to rise to greatness, and sees the distant possibility of its attainment, "one is harassed, both day and night, by the divine being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one's own disoriented psyche (ibid)." When the call is refused, the entity who sought the hero with the call typically reels in spiteful anger and vengeance, at the dismissal of its crystalline offer to escape the realm of normalcy, a gift for which no one can directly apply and which very few are offered. In short, the hero offends those who are trying to help hir, and usually this action stacks the cards against hir evermore wretchedly, to a degree far more devastating than the hero's state prior to receiving the call in the first place. However, the refusal of the call does not bar the hero from taking it up in the future, in fact, the refusal can be the harbinger "of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release (p. 64)." By nature, the awesome and terrifying call to greatness the hero first experiences drives hir deep down into hir own being, initially out of fear, however "willed introversion . . . 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 (ibid)." If the call must be refused, it must as well be yet another source of wisdom for the hero; for it is an unfortunate circumstance of humanity to be afraid of greatness, and the reclusive fear contingent upon our realization of the possibility of our own greatness is one more galvanizing step that the hero must, of necessity, take.

If, however, the call is accepted and the hero lays down hir own will to be broken and aligned with the will of hir own, unique, divinely designed path, then supernatural aid must surely be in store. This aid is usually in the form of a "protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass (p. 69)." After receiving welcome from the herald of the bizarre, the hero experiences the assistance of an altogether disinterested but wise figure, who proves to be (unknowingly to hir at this point) a sort of replica of hir own higher self, or guardian angel. "What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance- a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost . . . that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart (p. 71-72)."

Campbell notes that the typical figure who delivers aid to the hero at this stage is usually masculine, "in classical myth this is Hermes-Mercury; in Egyptian, Thoth," as these two deities, to their respective cultures, are the gods of not only communication and magic, but the messenger gods, those who deliver lost souls through to the underworld safely (p. 72). However, they can also be and are usually portrayed as tricksters or thieves, "and not infrequently the dangerous aspect of the "mercurial" figure is stressed; for he is the lurer of the innocent soul into realms of trial (p. 73)." The hero cannot be handed anything on a silver platter until far later in our story, and must remain intrepid and watchful through this initial period directly precedent to hir descent into the darkness.

We come to the point in the hero's journey where sHe must make the descent into the dark, unknown, bizarre worlds underneath the surface of everyday waking reality. This is the realm where the hero must face all of hir fears, in order that sHe might be able to become freed from them. It can be characterized as basically anything which is beyond the pale of everyday, known phenomena. It is outside of the hero's comfort zone, culture, and dimensional reality. It is an arena (or lack of one) where two and two equal anything other than four. It is the fear of this plane which keep most of us locked in our safe and stagnant places in life. "The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored (p. 78)." We may find ourselves face to face with a monster, ogre, troll, homunculus, giant, dragon, leviathon, demon, or satan himself. This stage and its counterparts have much psychological import, for "the regions of the unknown . . . are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight (p. 79)." In whatever form or shape the evil, otherworldly force manifests itself, it must of necessity be somehow connected to the hero at a very deep, unconscious level, and must reflect a deep seated fear or agonized memory of something traumatic and embarassing. Facing these demons in this realm represents facing these elements of our character and our past which we have been hiding from for so long, and the longer they are kept locked in the storehouse at the bottom of our minds, the more impish, terrifying, and malicious they will surely become. To stave off this encounter may provide temporary, superficial solace for the hero, however if sHe is to experience any true peace on down the line, sHe must face them.

This process finds its culmination in the complete annhilation of the hero, which is usually the next step. After the hero accepts the challenges which the threshold guardians and demons put hir to, sHe must now take the penultimate sentence; the extermination of hir ego-mind, personality-identity, or otherwise false self which was taken, up until this point, to be hir true self. A familiar story which recalls this theme is the story of Jonah, who refused to spread the word of god in Ninevah, and was therefore swallowed by a whale, wherein he stayed for three tumultuous, tortured days (the three days in the underworld being a universal motif). "The dissapearance corresponds to the passing of a worshipper into a temple- where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal," for "the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; he sheds it, as a snake its slough (p. 91-92)."

This motif is present in two of the most important myths in the world, that of Osiris and that of Jesus Christ. Osiris, symbol of the sun's light and goodness, and its mercy and justice, was slain by his jealous brother Set (from where we get satan) and cast into the Nile. After coming back to life, Set killed him again, this time scattering his body across Egypt in fourteen pieces. Isis, Osiris' consort, mournfully traveled throughout the country searching for all of the pieces of his body. She found all of them but his phallus, and after putting them back together, he once again came back to life, effectively dismantling Set's destructive force on the Earth forever- this was basically an analog to the sun's rising, setting, its complete descent through the 'underworld,' and its rising which victoriously follows, renewing the Earth and its inhabitants. The story of Jesus has parallel themes- that of a hero nailed to a cross, which symbolizes the three dimensions of material reality and its four directions and elements. After having been tortured and slain on this macabre device (which, funny enough, christians celebrate with pendants and bumper stickers), he descends to the underworld, faces Satan himself, and returns to earth three days later, renewing the world by delivering a novel type of salvation to humanity. Both characters are destroyed- their annhilated bodies symbolize and become the means by which a new sort of atonement can be availed to the seeker; they absolutely had to go through this violent, horrific process in order to bring it about. "And so it is that, throughout the world, men whose function it has been to make visible on earth the life-fructifying mystery of the slaying of the dragon have enacted upon their own bodies the great symbolic act, scattering their flesh (p.93)."

But the annhilation of the ego-self, or false self, is far from the final step. Armed with hir newfound knowledge of the eternal nature of her soul, and of the continuity of consciousness itself, the hero must undergo a series of trials which will decide if the initial choice to enter onto this path was made from a place of power. Campbell describes this as the "process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past," where the hero "discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage," a power not still limited to the amulet or entity which initially reached out to help hir, but to be found perhaps within the hero hirself (p. 101/97). These fabled trials and tribulations are often of the carnival variety, however equally dangerous and unwholesome. It is now that the hero must integrate hir own dark, hidden, occult ingredients from the shadow, back into the waking self, or the recently discovered true or higher self, "either by swallowing it or being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh (p. 108)."

Following these manifold trials and tests, through which the hero had to pass with courage and fortitude, with a near-insane zeal for future attainment, comes the resting place wherein sHe can rest for some time, and come to know the first fruits of hir ardor. This is classically taxonomized by Campbell as "the meeting with the goddess." It is now that the hero can lay down hir sword and come to know the rewards of hir seemingly endless, backbreaking, agonized suffering towards the 'life which abideth in light, yea, the life which abideth in light.' When sHe has traveled past the demons and dragons, through sheer might of will, hir wounds can now be temoporarily dressed, and her mouth can once again be wetted by cool water, which Campbell calls the "crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart (p. 109)."

This "meeting with the goddess" carries within it a veiled portrait of the later, ultimate boon; the complete unification of the hero with the divine Source of all being, the merging of the microcosm with the Macrocosm. As Campbell desccribes it

She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire,
the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero's earthly and unearthly quest.
She is mother, sister, mistress, bride. Whatever in the world has lured,
whatever has seemed to promise joy, has been premonitory of her
existence- in the deep of sleep, if not in the cities and forests of the
world. For she is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the
soul's assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of
organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known
again: the comforting, the nourishing, the "good" mother- young
and beautiful- who was known to us, and even tasted, in the
remotest past. Time sealed her away, yet she is dwelling still,
like one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of the timeless
sea (p. 110-111).

After the hero's arrival at this stage, it is now that sHe can totally, for the first time, comprehend and experience the union of all perceived 'opposites.' She hirself, as the subject of all death and decay, and all error and incomplete understanding, can unite with the goddess; the rejuvenating, illuminating, beautiful, bountiful source of life and love in the cosmos. The hero is finally able now to enter into holy communion with hir own source of being; hir mother figure. Any and all neurotic associations and complexes which had beaten against hir sails while in the normal, waking world, all of hir Oedipal and life-denying dis-connections from the divine mother, wrought from the decayed experiences of infantile development, are to be here dissolved.

Our disconnection from the divine mother comes from our rejection of her role as life-taker, as the annihilator of form and presence. Campbell provides the image of the Hindu goddess Kali as adequate analogy for this figure. Not only is she the divine mother, the bringer of all forms into existence, but she is also the bloody-jawed taker of life as well, terminating all temporal forms into their eventual nonexistence. The two seemingly opposed roles she plays must be integrated into the hero's understanding of hir own development as an ultimately spiritual being. "The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats her farrow. Thus she unites the "good" and the "bad," exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity. Through this exercise his spirit is purged of its infantile, innapropriate sentimentalities and resentments, and his mind opened to the inscrutable presence, which
exists, not primarily as "good" and "bad" with respect to his childlike human convenience, his weal and woe, but as the law and image of the nature of being (p. 114)." It is illuminating that here Campbell refers to the goddess at this stage as the totality of the world-to-be-known, and the hero as the knower of the world-to-be-known.

Whence, after luring and posessing the queen or goddess, the hero looks about at where sHe has brought herself to, there is a crucial and often unfortunate realization; the goddess represents, still, a lesser form of union with divine energy than sHe ultimately set out to attain. For, as beautiful and illustrious as her caresses and sounds may be to the weary wisdom-seeker, they still reap not the harvest which the hero really deeply wishes to make manifest within. For the award, or holy grail, is not to be attained through temporal or material means, of which the "meeting with the goddess" represents the highest echelon of. After the shudderings of all night wing flappings and brazen, sweat-soaked, euphoric laughter have subsided, the hero still remains in the same decadent state of body-reality. Therefore a stage exists after the "meeting with the goddess" wherein the queen represents rather a temptress, or an anchoring force bonding the hero to the needs and desires of the body-reality, from which sHe originally sought refuge from. This revelation proves to be rather detrimental to the hero, for "when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul (p. 122)."

This discovery of the nature of the initial meeting with goddess, however ecstatic and epiphanal in nature, represents a necessary ascent up the octave of human consciousness. For what was initially taken to be the grail itself is seen plainly as merely yet another exoteric symbol of the grail- and disappointment is sure to follow. For "the innocent delight of Oedipus in his first posession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is . . . he turns from the fair features of the world to search the darkness for a higher kingdom than this of the incest and adultery ridden, luxurious and incorrigible mother. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond (ibid)." Hence, at this point, it is for the hero to move past this stage, and, with more bravery than was necessary to face the ogres and dragons before meeting the goddess, he must seek union with the father, the true inspiration behind his fears which he thought he had completely destroyed.

The importance of the stage Campbell calls the "atonement with the father" is at a level more rarified than the previous two, which dealt solely with the feminine aspects to which the hero was forced to align hirself. The father-figure, from birth, represents the sum total of all resistance to the will of the child. The hero must overcome hir own desire to murder the father for being the authority which not only has the ultimate voice in deciding hir fate as a personality, but who the hero has subconsiously battled with to wrest control from over hir own destiny from birth. For we have not yet dealt with the father until this stage. The hero has left home and started out on hir own quest of transcendental meaning and redemption, however sHe has not put to rest the patricidal cravings which have not only followed hir from birth, but have been the subconscious motivation for all assertive actions since leaving the womb. The father represents, at this stage, the ultimate summit to scale; the ultimate monster to defeat. This is so because the son must receive the keys to the kingdom, as it were, from the father. And the father "is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all innapropriate infantile cathexes- for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-agrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of "good" and "evil" to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being (p.136-137)." For just as much as the father needs to be symbolically killed by the son, does the yearning of the son to kill the father need to be snuffed out of the hero's being. It must be moved past. As long as the desire to kill the father remains in the hero, sHe will be hampered by hir own "infantile, innapropriate" desires, which represent longings which find their origin in the nursery, and, although representative of legitimate needs at that time, no longer serve a positive purpose in the hero, and therefore must be let go of, or destroyed. In short, the hero must assimilate the father/prime authority figure into his consciousness just as the mother-destroyer needed to be similarly assimilated. As Campbell writes, "the problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being (p. 147)." And again, "as the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father (p. 155)."

With the "atonement with the father," the hero has reached a crucial point in hir development as a spiritual being. SHe has conquered the confused relationships which bounded hir to hir own childhood and material investments. SHe is now free to return to the world of hir peers, to the world from which sHe came, to make manifest the message which has been so long in the making. Campbell terms this stage "apotheosis."

A classic rendition of the apotheotical state is provided by the symbol of the bodhisattva, a being within Buddhism who has attained prajna, or enlightenment, but postpones nirvana in order to return to earth and help others attain the same. At this point, the hero has purified hirself; however as sHe knows now that all human beings are essentially one, and connected interminably throughout all time, out of love and instinctive charity, must save the world if sHe is also to be saved. This is similar to the Christ who returned after three days in heaven and hell; he didn't have to return after attaining to such a rarified state. Most christians miss this point: that Christ already came back, and this was the entire point of his giving of the great commission to the disciples. Now we all must do as Christ, the Logos, the source of spiritual wisdom in our cosmos, has done. There is now nothing more to wait on, no more necessity for decay and death. However, the message obviously has fallen on deaf and ignorant ears for the past two millenia.

Campbell makes the point that the hero at this stage is freed from the bonds of locality and temporality; it is no longer the hero's own self, family, tribe, or nation which must be duly saved, but all human beings on the earth. There can be no more division between Jew and Gentile, between black and white, between man and woman, between old and young, indeed between good and evil, for all must receive the message of light and duly take up their own cross for the good of the world. "Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children (P. 157-158)."

When the hero returns, by hir own accord or by command of the gods, challenges are still at hand, perhaps greater in some sense than before ever embarking on the journey. For to return to the world of ignorant, fearful, and childish men and women is to risk not only losing what one has learned, but one's own life as well. And how can sHe suspect that the world of normalcy will accept hir message? How can they see the truth that sHe has seen, when they have never left the comfort of their own village?

The first challenge is that of the transmission of the message, for how can the hero "teach again, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the milleniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate task. How render back into light-world message language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form (p. 218)?" Certainly this must be a humbling and herculean task. For the hero is back in the world of shopping malls and estate taxes, of crime infested cities and corrupt governments, and must accept them as equally real and necessary, "after an experience of the soulsatisfying vision of fulfillment (ibid)."

As the character in the song "Rosetta Stoned" by the band Tool, after having been taken aboard an alien ship while on DMT, and having been shown the fate of the world and his own now-inescapable task of saving it, recounts:

and after calming me down with some orange slices and some
fetal spooning, ET revealed to me this singular purpose: he
said "you are the chosen one, the one who will deliver the
message, a message of hope for those who choose to hear it
and a warning to those who do not." Me, the chosen one, they
chose me! and I didn't even graduate from fucking high school . . .
[I am] overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position, such a
heavy burden now to be the one born to bear and read to all the
details of our ending, to write it down for all the world to see...
but I forgot my pen, shit the bed again...typical...[I'm] strapped
down, to my bed, feet cold, eyes red, I'm out of my head, am I
alive, am I dead? I can't remember what they said to make me
out to be the hero...can't remember what they said...

The boon the hero receives on hir cosmic, psycho-spiritual journey is a blessing and a curse, for there is no returning back to the world of easy comings and goings, of boogie nights and missed lessons. SHe must do what she must do, and it will be perhaps more difficult than the slaying of the dragons which initiated hir voyage into hirself. There will be manifold doubting Thomas's along the way, and no holes for them to easily stick their fingers through.

In the book, Campbell goes on to describe that the inherent cycle the cosmos must go through necessitates this pattern, and how all must essentially travel this path, if inner and outer redemption is to occur within this cursed kingdom of matter. The cycles of the ages of the manifested universe are exhaled into existence as the book of genesis states, that God spoke and it began, and sometime he will inhale it all back in, at the end of the present age. But all is, in its own uknowable way, returning to its original state of purity, for God created the universe so that he might know himself. Innumerable cultures include this idea in their cosmologies, such as the "great cycle" of the Mayans, the precession of the equinoxes of the Egyptians, the passing of the yugas (aeonic increment) of the Hindus, and the Apocalypse of Christianity. There exists a point where this, all of this, must be reabsorbed or dissolved back into the source which originally banged it out into existence. And it seems that all must be 'saved' before this can occur. It is this process of salvation which the path of the hero describes to us; the path spells out to us what we must do to manifest this purity within so that we can pass onto the higher, unseen levels of spiritual existence. As Bill Hicks said, this involves making one choice that must be made and followed out: that of fear and hate, or hope and love.

Sources Used:
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton University Press, 1973)
Tool. 10,000 Days. Tool Dissectional/Volcano Entertainment, 2006.