It took me writing all 300 pages of the first draft of my second book, This Way to the Stars: A History of the Hero (now about 75% of the way through the editing process for those keeping track at home), to realize something that’s since become foundational to the whole project: myths—specifically, the enduring hero myths—map out how to develop psychologically as individuals. As products and projections of the unconscious, myths are, I believe, the soul’s way of educating itself.
It’s why, in my not-so-humble opinion, so many of the recurring patterns and themes that show up in stories continue to speak to and resonate with us, even if we cannot put our finger on exactly why. Because they speak to our spirit—the same spirit that ties us to our ancestors and summons us to take the path of Self-Actualization.
One of my favorite examples of this arrives in what the story of Perseus tells us about how the hero has a bias toward action where others tend to freeze. Ovid tells the story of Medusa in Metamorphoses and Apollodorus tells the story of Perseus in Bibliotheca. Together, they weave the tale of a budding prince Perseus, tasked with retrieving the head of Medusa—one of three Gorgon sisters whose sight (like Harry Potter’s Basilisk) turned all who gazed upon her to stone. As the embodiment of fear, her powers mimic the freezing effect of fear seen in everyday life.
But Perseus was no ordinary man. He was the half-divine son of immortal Zeus and mortal Danae, destined to set an example of how the heroic soul acts in the face of such forces: they default to action and step aggressively forward where others would freeze or default to inaction. Heroes step toward the source of fear:
The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with [] dissolution and extinction… For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness…1
Hidden in plain sight in Perseus’ legend is the lesson that the path to cultivating the divine hero within us is confronting what others—including ourselves—so often avoid. Of course, this applies to the big fears in our lives. The risks we don’t take for fear of failure. The art we don’t create for fear of rejection. Perseus’ story is absolutely one that commands us to face those things in our lives.
But it isn’t just relevant for the fears that we avoid; it also applies to the everyday tasks that we put off. The ones that, as they pile up, do just as much to eat away at our essence and steal our potential as the fears that bully us.
Let me explain.
So often when an opportunity, request, or desire arises, our first impulse is to place it in the future. Instead of taking immediate action and doing what we can in this exact moment, we put an obligation somewhere out on our linear timeline—maybe it’s tomorrow, maybe it’s ten months from now, or maybe it’s ten years. Instead of burdening our present self, we place it on the plate of our future self.
Sometimes we do this because we overestimate the pain or time the task will involve; other times, we simply default to deferral out of habit. Somewhere there also in the mix is typically the self-deception that we don’t have all the necessary information to take immediate action—a lie we tell ourselves simply because we’ve trained ourselves to favor information over action.
It might seem harmless at first. Until we quickly find that our future is filled with these deferred obligations and the mirror of our destiny reflects nothing but a life of playing catch-up until the curtains close. Suddenly, the future look like somewhere we’d rather not arrive. Each task earmarked for later takes up mental space and weighs us down. Like ghouls shuffling and scratching at the walls of our skulls, they haunt us every second they live as something yet-to-be addressed, stealing little slices of our life force each time we recall their presence.
But this is where it pays to remember Perseus. How heroes have a bias for action. How our highest self was meant to move and create before fear trained us to overthink everything. How the soul grows diseased in stagnation and yearns for us to operate with an action bias. In his book Time Warrior, Steven Chandler describes this action-oriented way of being as “non-linear time management”:
Non-linear time management is a commitment to action in the present moment…
The old-fashioned time management programs had a huge, burdensome focus on the future. The line of tasks stretched out forever into the future. It was fear-based and it was overwhelming to have so much of a future to carry around with you. It resulted in massive, pathological procrastination. Everything got put off in the name of perfectionism…
But when I teach people to go non-linear, a strange thing happens. New life and energy come in. When they open their emails they don’t get to save them for later. They have to deal with them if they open them. Like little attackers in a computer game, there is no longer anywhere to hide. Life becomes a great game and everything is handled right now on the spot.
All fear comes from picturing the future. Putting things off increases that fear. Soon we are nothing but heavy minds weighing down on weary brains. Too much future will do that.
Only a warrior’s approach will solve this. A warrior takes his sword to the future. A warrior also takes his sword to all circumstances that don’t allow him to fully focus…
Most people think too much. Then they compound that problem by studying the feelings that come up for them as a result of that thinking. All this time that they spend thinking and feeling they could have been taking action.2
To break the cycle of valuing information over action, we need to remind ourselves that it isn’t information we lack; it’s experience. The time to act is always now. That’s what the hero knows and one of the things that the story of Perseus has to teach us.
If we want to become who we’re capable of becoming, we must develop a bias toward action that favors transmutation over the disintegrating holding pattern of always waiting for enough information. That’s how you separate yourself from the masses and close the gap between your being and your potential.
Start taking whatever action you can immediately—no matter how small—as to-dos arrive. Watch as your vitality returns and your energy flows freely.
Here, in the infinite now, the half-divine hero has room to emerge.
Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, para 551.
Steve Chandler, Time Warrior, Introduction.
This is a great explanation of why I named my Substack *Not out, but through!* I've added some Ovid to my reading list. Have you been following a particular plan for reading the classics or just following your nose?