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It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.

Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group - none in the world: all is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the hman psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.

Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence - for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness.

Each carries within himself the all; therefore it may be sought and discovered within. The differentiations of sex, age, and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world.

From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is a nothing. From the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the quest.

The various judgements are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race and age.

The mighty hero of extra-ordinary powers - able to lift Mount Govordhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe - is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the king within.

Beyond life, these heroes are beyond myth also. Neither do they treat of it anymore, nor can the myth properly treat of them. Their legends are rehearsed, but the pious sentiments and lessons of the birgraphies are necessarily inadequate; little better than bathos. They have stepped away from the realm of forms into which the incarnation descends and in which the Bhodisattva remains, the realm of the manifest profile of the Great Face. Once the hidden profile has been discovered, myth is the penultimate, silence the ultimate, word. The moment the spirit passes to the hidden, silence alone remains.

The pattern is that of going to the father, but to unmanifest rather than the manifest aspect: taking the step that the Bhodisattva renounced: that from which there is no return. Not the paradox of the dual perspective, but the ultimate claim of the unseen is here intended. The ego is burnt out. Like a dead leaf in a breeze, the body continues to move about the earth, but the soul has dissolved already in the ocean of bliss.

The savior figure who eliminates the tyrant father and then himself assumes the crown is (like Oedipus) stepping into his sire’s stead. To soften the harsh patricide, the legend represents the father as some cruel uncle or usurping Nimrod. Nevertheless, the half-hidden fact remains. Once it is glimpsed, the intire spectacle buckles: the son slays the father, but the son and the father are one. The enigmatical figures dissolve back into the primal chaos. This is the wisdom of the end (and rebginning) of the world.

The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.

The youths walked onto the field. Everybody saw what his own nature revealed to him: The wrestlers thought Krsna was a wrestler, the woment thought him the treasure of beauty, the gods knew him as their lord, and the Kans thought he was Mara, Death himself. When he had undone every on the the wrestlers sent against him, slaying finall the strongest, he leapt to the royal dais, dragging the tyrant by the hair, and killed him. Men, gods, and saints were delighted, but the king’s wives came forth to mourn. Krsna, seeing their grief, comforted them with his primal wisdom: “Mother,” he said, “do not grieve. No one can live and not die. To imagine oneself as possessing anything is to be mistaken; nobody is father, mother, or some. There is only the continuous round of birth and death.”

All of you watch me. Don’t look around. Listen to what I say. The world is just as big as my body. The world is as large as my word. And the world is al large as my prayers. The sky is only as large as my words and prayers. The seasons are only as great as my body, my words, and my prayers. It is the same with the waters; my body, my words, my prayers are greater than the waters.

The tests imposed are difficult beyond measure. They seem to represent an absolute refusal on the part of the parent ogre, to permit life to go its way; nevertheless, when a fit candidate appears, no task in the world is beyond his skill. Unpredicted helpers, miracles of tiem and space, further his projects; destiny itself (the maiden) lends a hand and betays a weak point in the parental system. Barriers, fetters, chasms, fronts of every kind dissolve before the authoritative presence of the hero. The eye of the ordained victor immediately perceives the chink in every fortress of circumstance, and hsi blow can cleave it wide.

In sum: the child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger; impediment, or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored. And this is a zone of unsuspected presences, benign as well as malignant: an angel appears, a helpful animal, a fisherman, a hunter, crone, or peasant. Fostered in the animal school, or, like Siegfried, below ground among the gnomes that nourish the roots of the tree of life, or again, alone in some little room (the story has been told a thousand ways), the young world-apprentice learns the lesson of the seed powers, which reside just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named.

Parvati determined to change the world situation by matching sira in meditation. Aloof, alone, indrawin into her soul, she too fasted naked beneath the blazing sun, even adding to the heat by building four additional great fires, to each of the four quarters. The handsome body shriveled to a brittle construction fo bones, the skin became leathery and hard. Her hairs stood matted and wild. The soft liquid eyes burned.