How to Become a Hero

How to Become a Hero

by

Michael Faust

Published by Hyperreality Books

Copyright

Copyright © Michael Faust 2011

The right of Michael Faust to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

ISBN: 978-1-4478-8734-8

Quotations

"The word hero is Greek, from a root that means ‘to protect and to serve’ (incidentally the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department). A Hero is someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others, like a shepherd who will sacrifice to protect and serve his flock. At the root the idea of Hero is connected with self-sacrifice." -- Christopher Vogler

"It’s difficult to avoid the sensation that the Hero’s Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality, a Platonic ideal Form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highly varied copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spirit of the form.

The Hero’s Journey is a pattern that seems to extend in many dimensions, describing more than one reality. It accurately describes, among other things, the process of making a journey, the necessary working parts of a story … and the passage of a soul through life. -- Christopher Vogler

Table of Contents

How to Become a Hero

Copyright

Quotations

Table of Contents

The Illuminati

Introduction

Ego versus Self

The Hero’s Soul Connection

The Great Beyond

Neo: the Ultimate Hero

World of Common Day (Ordinary World)

Call to Adventure

Refusal of the Call

Supernatural Aid (Meeting with the Mentor)

Crossing the First Threshold

Belly of the Whale

Road of Trials (Tests, Allies, Enemies)

Meeting with the Goddess

Woman as Temptress

Atonement with the Father

Apotheosis

The Ultimate Boon (Reward; seizing the sword)

The Refusal of the Return

The Magic Flight

Rescue from Without

Crossing the Return Threshold

Master of the Two Worlds (Resurrection)

Freedom to Live (Return with the Elixir)

The Inner and Outer Problems

The Unheroic Ego and the Transcendent Self

The Soul Mystery

The Soul Search

The Death of the Ego and the Birth of the Self

The Shadow

The Persona, Shadow, Ego, Id, Anima/Animus, Superego and Aurum

I Am Half Sick Of Shadows.

The Human Aura

Jung’s Concept of Archetypes

The Basic Storytelling Steps of Myths and Fairytales

Split or Steal?

The Sick Society

Freudian Nations

The Panopticon

The Perfect Prison

The Other

How to stop being Other

Deconstruction

Bad Faith and Abandonment: Gnostic Existentialism

The Power Narrative

The Invisible hand and complicitous silence

The Magic World

NLP

Magic II

WikiLeaks

The Information War

Saturnalia

Reverse Christmas – Short Story

God’s Calculator

The Hero Monomyth

Conclusion

The Illuminati

THIS IS ONE OF A SERIES OF BOOKS outlining the religion, politics and philosophy of the ancient and controversial secret society known as the Illuminati, of which the Greek polymath Pythagoras was the first official Grand Master. The society exists to this day and the author is a senior member, working under a pseudonym.

The Illuminati’s religion is the most highly developed expression of Gnosticism and is called Illumination (alternatively, Illuminism). Dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment, it has many parallels with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It rejects the Abrahamic religions of faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, considering these the work of the Demiurge; an inferior, cruel and wicked deity who deludes himself that he is the True God, and who has inflicted endless horrors on humanity.

If you wish to judge for yourself how deranged the Demiurge is, you need only read the Old Testament, the story of the Demiurge’s involvement with his Chosen People, the Hebrews. You may wonder why the God of All entered into an exclusive and partisan Covenant with a tribe in the Middle East several thousand years ago, why he promised them a land (Canaan) that belonged to others, and why he then actively participated with them in a genocidal war against the Canaanites. Even more bizarrely, according to Christian theology, he then despatched all of those Hebrews, whom he had supported so fanatically, to Limbo – the edge of Hell – when they died. They couldn’t go to Heaven because they were indelibly marked by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Only the atonement provided by the agonising death of God’s son, Jesus Christ, could wipe the slate clean and allow the Hebrews to be released from Limbo. But there was a catch. Only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour were eligible for Paradise.

Of course, the Chosen People of God have almost entirely rejected Jesus Christ. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, nearly all of the Chosen People are now in hell proper. Don’t you find God’s behaviour distinctly odd? Indeed, unbelievable? Don’t alarm bells start ringing? Doesn’t the behaviour of this God sound rather more like what would be expected of Satan?

Remember that this same God ordered Abraham to perform human sacrifice on his own son, Isaac. Abraham, rather than rejecting this monstrous command, rather than denouncing the creature that gave it as evil incarnate, agreed to butcher his own flesh and blood to demonstrate how slavishly and mindlessly obedient he was – the prototype of all psychopathic, fanatical believers.

Does God’s command to Abraham sound like something that would ever pass the lips of the True God? We pity you if you think it does because you are surely a creature of the Demiurge and one of the legions of the damned. If, however, you doubt the credentials of the Abrahamic God, you may be receptive to the message of the Illuminati and our future-oriented, rational, scientific, mathematical and dialectical religion of light – Illumination.

Introduction

The motto over the door of psychologist Carl Jung’s house read, Summoned or not, the god will come.

If he comes unsummoned, he will be a stranger to you and perhaps even your enemy or tyrannical master whom you must slavishly worship as the Abrahamists do their monstrous deity. But if you yourself summon him, the most incredible alchemy can take place: you and the god can become one. You yourself can achieve divinity.

Most of us go through life on autopilot, tuned to the wrong channel. We need to scan for new frequencies – above all for our own personal hero channel. This is a magic channel that takes us to new and extraordinary worlds, landscapes of endless possibilities and new beginnings. From there, we can bring back to this world incredible stories, knowledge, elixirs and treasures. We can educate, inform and heal. We can become the shamans, the gurus, the bold adventurers, the fearless explorers who cross the edge of the world into the Unknown Country. Only we are brave enough.

Psychologically, the hero’s task is to allow his ego to perish so that his Self may be born. Whereas the ego is limited, narrow in its outlook, afraid of change, the Self is expansive, fully part of the cosmos, brimming with energy. It represents a whole new way of being, higher, more connected, more adventurous. The confines of the old ego are obliterated.

The Self can soar to new, unimagined heights. It can see the farthest horizons. It can enjoy new, glorious vistas and panoramas.

When you are your Self, you walk with the gods. You have moved your centre from the mortal world to the immortal.

Everyone has access to the hero program, but few choose to activate it. Only those who do can become psychically whole. Only they can establish their true identity as complete people who have fully integrated all of the different strands of their life. They are the people who can defeat their inner demons, transcend their apparent limitations, aim for the highest stars that surround the throne of God.

It’s time to become a hero. Beyond that there is only one more stage…

To become God.

Ego versus Self

No one is ever hailed as a hero for selfishly and relentlessly pursuing his own self-interest. It’s extraordinary that celebrities and the super rich are treated as human heroes and gods when, judged by their greed and narcissism, they do not possess a single altruistic quality. These are people who have tirelessly worked to glorify themselves, to win and preserve the adulation of the masses, to show that they are superior to every ordinary man and woman. These are in fact the worst type of anti-heroes: those who are in it absolutely for themselves. They are creatures of the ego.

Psychologist Carl Jung contrasted the Ego with the Self. The Ego is the centre of consciousness and gives the individual his sense of identity and purpose. The Ego is what we imagine ourselves to be, yet we are entirely mistaken. The Self is the centre of our psyche, our real centre. It’s where our true identity resides. Jung said, The Self is not only the centre but also the circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind. (Likewise, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles, a Grand Master of the Illuminati, said, God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.) The Self is nothing less than the soul, the divine spark, the higher self, the imago Dei itself: the Image of God.

We must go on an arduous quest into our unconscious to find who we really are. No task is more difficult. Only heroes can succeed.

The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself.  -- Jung

The Hero’s Soul Connection

Most people hold absurd ideas about the soul. The soul theory to which they subscribe arises from discredited holy texts of ancient religions that have demonstrably failed the test of time. Just as Abrahamic texts contain the ludicrous idea that the earth is an immovable object at the centre of the universe – contrary to all known scientific facts – so they make assertions about the soul that are equally untenable and incredible.

Modern scientific and psychological theories are absent from traditional soul theory, implying, if such theory is correct, that the soul has no connection with modern science or psychology. An intelligent person could no more believe this than believe that the earth is flat or orbited by the sun.

A select few secret societies such as the Illuminati have always had teachings consistent with modern thinking (though obviously not expressed in the same vocabulary) and have taken the trouble to continually update ancient ideas to suit contemporary thinking. Religions that are locked into sacred texts – the inviolable words of God, allegedly – have no room for manoeuvre. With each passing year they become more outdated and preposterous, thus proving that no God authored them. Imagine how anachronistic the Torah, the Bible and Koran will be a million years hence. Future humanity will laugh at them and wonder at how these crackpot theories ever managed to flourish. They claim to present eternal verities, but their truths haven’t even survived two millennia with any credibility.

One of the central aims of the Illuminati is to show how the soul theories of the established religions have been comprehensively refuted by science, and to reveal what the authentic character of the soul is. The soul is not some spooky, anti-science entity that exists in some weird dimension defying definition. To understand the soul, it is necessary to understand the true nature of reality, and that is best done within the framework of philosophy, science and mathematics. Religion is not at odds with these subjects. Instead, it is the final meaning that emerges from them, their logical and inevitable culmination.

The conflict of religion with science is caused by holy texts being regarded as indisputably true when of course they are incontestably false. God is not contradicted by science, he is defined by it. God is the ultimate scientific concept. By the same token, he is the supreme expression of philosophy and the final and definitive meaning of the universe. He is the personalisation of the particle physicists’ mantra that anything not forbidden is compulsory. If it is not forbidden for the evolving cosmos to attain an apex of consciousness in one being then it will definitely do so.

The soul is our connection to God. In other books in this series, we will reveal the scientific nature of the soul, but the current focus is on the connection of the myth of the hero to the quest for the soul, and how this is intimately related to the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.

The Great Beyond

All paranormal activity, everything out of the ordinary, everything that transcends our everyday experiences, everything that is uncanny and spine tingling, comes from the unconscious. Our contact with the divine originates there.

Our ancestors, who possessed a primitive consciousness in comparison with ourselves, were much closer to the gods and felt their presence in a direct way every day thanks to the bicameral mind. This was a concept proposed by psychologist Julian Jaynes, based on the fact that the human brain has two hemispheres (bicameral is an adjective meaning two-chambered). Jaynes said, At one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. The god was a hallucinated voice that arose the right hemisphere and was obeyed by the man in the left hemisphere.

If Jaynes’ hypothesis is right, voices and images of the gods were an ever present reality for ancient humanity, part of their immediate awareness.

As humanity switched from this bicameral mind that was in such close touch with the immortal gods to the modern conscious mind of mortal men, our sense of the divine shrank spectacularly. But the bicameral mind is still with us. It’s locked in our unconscious, the layer immediately beneath consciousness, and from time to time it breaks through, particularly in times of high stress. Our unconscious mind is a repository of astonishing gifts and knowledge that mostly stay just beyond our grasp, forever tantalising us.

Secret societies such