The group provides the protective structure – conditional meaning and behavioral pattern – that enables the individual to cast off the dependence of childhood, to make the transition from the maternal to the social, paternal world. The group is not the individual, however. Psychological development that ceases with group identification – held up as the highest attainable good by every ideologue – severely constricts individual and social potential, and dooms the group, inevitably, to sudden and catastrophic dissolution. Failure to transcend group identification is, in the final analysis, as pathological as failure to leave childhood.

Movement from the group to the individual – like that from childhood to group – follows the archetypal transformative pattern of the heroic (paradise, breach, fall, redemption; stability, dissolution, incorporation, reconstruction). Such transformation must be undertaken voluntarily, through conscious exposure to the unknown – although it may be catalyzed by sufficiently unique or traumatic experience. Failure to initiate and/or successfully complete the process of secondary maturation heightens risk for intrapsychic and social decadence, and consequent experiential chaos, depression and anxiety (including suicidal ideation), or enhances tendency towards fanaticism, and consequent intrapsychic and group aggression.

The Bible, considered as a single story, presents this "process of maturation" in mythological terms. The Old Testament offers group identity, codified by Moses, as antidote for the fallen state of man. This antidote, while useful, is incomplete – even Moses himself, a true ancestral hero, fails to reach the promised land. The New Testament, by contrast, offers identification with the hero as the means by which the "fallen state" and the problems of group identity might both be "permanently" transcended. The New Testament is commonly read as a description of a historical event, which redeemed mankind, once and for all: it might more reasonably be considered the description of a process that, if enacted, could bring about the establishment of peace on earth.

The problem is, however, that this process cannot really be said to be "consciously" – that is, explicitly – understood. Furthermore, if actually undertaken, it is extremely frightening, particularly in the initial stages. In consequence, the "imitation of Christ" – or the central culture-hero of other religious systems – tends to take the form of ritualistic "worship", separated from other "non-religious" aspects of life. Voluntary participation in the heroic process, by contrast – which means courageous confrontation with the unknown – makes "worship" a matter of true identification. This means that the true "believer" rises above dogmatic adherence to realize the soul of the hero – to "incarnate that soul" – in every aspect of their day-to-day life.

This is easy to say, but very difficult to understand – and to do. It is no easy matter to translate the transpersonal myth of the hero into a template for action and representation, in the unique conditions that make up an individual life. It appears equally troublesome – even hubristic – to presume that the individual might a force worthy of "identification with the hero." Nonetheless, we are more than we seem – and are more trouble than we realize, when undisciplined and unrealized. The "banality of evil" – Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, applied to the oft-unprepossessing Nazi "personality" – is more accurately "the evil of banality". Our petty weaknesses accumulate, and multiply, and become the great evils of state. As our technological power expands, the danger we pose increases – and the consequences of our voluntary stupidity multiply. It is increasingly necessary that we set ourselves – not others – right, and that we learn explicitly what that means.

The nature of the process of "identification with the hero" can be understood in most detail as a consequence of the analysis of alchemy, which Jung made his life’s work. Alchemy – considered most generally as the precursor of modern chemistry – was in fact a twenty-centuries’ long endeavour to understand the "transformations of matter." The alchemical matter, however, was not the matter of modern science – logically enough, as the ancient alchemists practiced in the absence of the presumptions and tools of modern science. It was a substance more akin to Tao – to "that which produced or constituted the flux of being", or even to "information" in the modern sense (if information may be considered "latent" in unexplored places) – or to the "unknown" as such, the "matrix" of being. Investigation of this instrinsically compelling "matter" – this unknown – produced a series of internal transformations in the alchemical psyche, making it ever-more something akin to the Philosopher’s stone: something that could turn "base matter" into spiritual gold – something that had, in addition, the eternal, durable, and indestructible nature of stone. As the alchemical endeavour progressed, through the Christian era, the "stone" became increasingly assimilated to Christ – the cornerstone "rejected by the builders," the agent of voluntary transformation, whose actions eternally change the "fallen world" into paradise.

The late-stage alchemists "posited" that a personality that had completely assimilated the "spirit of the unknown" was equivalent to Christ. Jung translated their image-laden mythological language into something more comprehensible – but not yet understood. The terrible central message of this mode of thought is this: do not lie, particularly to yourself, or you will undermine the process that gives you the strength to bear the tragic world. In your weakness – the consequence of your lie – you will become cruel, arrogant and vengeful. You will then serve as an "unconscious" emissary of the agent of destruction, and work to bring about the end of time.