A Numinous Power Has Taken Over the World
The drive to life and to God-consciousness has been shut down for most people, and they have instead been taken over by a Death Drive. And most people, whether they are conscious of it or not, depending on how much inner work they have done, have an unconscious where, that’s to say, a repressed belief in their inferiority, in their unlovableness, and in their absolute non-godliness, and the belief that they don’t even deserve to live, and they want to die. This is what is in psychological terms called a neurotic ego, but that neurosis is a logical structure in which an unbearable self-concept, or set of self-concepts, and self-images, are locked into the mind, frozen, and that are too painful to look at, and to change, and to realize are not true—you have bought into them so deeply and they have wounded and traumatized the consciousness so much, that one keeps them repressed, but they have their effects in your life: they produce symptoms, they produce blockages in your consciousness, they produce cuts in your ability to think and to feel, and to use your willpower to change, and to move out of that consciousness, and they cause a self-sabotage, and an implosion of one’s own life force, and turn it into a death force.
And it’s the overcoming of this difficulty of consciousness being trapped in a negative image of itself, that has become a prison, that one cannot leave because it’s too unbearable to even go close to the bars—they’re electrified—and if you get too close to them, you feel like it’ll kill you to know the “shadow”, as Jung called it, to know how bad it really is. And so that badness will appear in the form of negative tendencies, and physical illnesses, dis-eases.
But ironically, or paradoxically perhaps is a better word, the very appearance of neurosis, the very appearance of this power that has become negative, that has become a Death Drive, is the way that Ultimate Reality appears within the life of the ego, because that Death Drive is an absolute; it’s no longer relative. And it is itself a numinous recognition, and event, that there is a force within you so powerful it doesn’t care whether your body lives or dies. I mean, when someone is in an anorexic mode of being, they do not care, and they’re happy that their body is dying, wasting away, and they’re feeling more powerful. They are literally in the presence of God. They’re having a glimpse and a feeling of God, but God, now, in the form of a negative Death Drive. But it’s the same power; it’s not a different power. Or if someone creates cancer in their body, or someone creates some other form of sabotage—there are people who cut themselves, or they drop things, or they make mistakes, and they will create terrible situations, glitches in whatever situation they’re in, working with other people—that’s God working in that form of that negative absolute, that doesn’t care, that will disrupt anything and everything, in order to present a numinous realization of something that transcends the ego, that in itself says, in a way that’s undeniable, is: “I’m not what you take me to be. You think I’m inferior but there’s a power in me that is so great that it could destroy everything”. It has turned into a negative force.
And that negative force has now taken over our planet, and that’s why we are in the middle of what they are now calling the “6th Great Extinction”. And we’re at the beginning of the push toward a world war, that will have the use of thermonuclear weapons that can destroy most of—or if not all—of our species and life on the planet. We are in an apocalyptic period, whether we want to be in denial of it or recognize that—but this is a powerful divine force that is operating. The same force that can show up as love and bliss and infinite intelligence. But now the only way that it can appear, because of the structure of the postmodern ego, is as this negative destructive power—that is absolute—and it shows up microcosmically in the same way, within each ego structure.
And thus, if you look at the logic of an ego, even if there’s a veneer at the conscious level of, “I’m very intelligent, I can handle it. It’s all in control”, there’s always a self-contradictory undercurrent of, “No, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m screwing up, I’m out of control. I can’t handle it”, or, “I don’t want to live, or I want to kill you”, or whatever, but there’s a negative energy that is obvious and self-contradictory to whatever is said in words. There’s a counter force that is operating in nearly everyone, that you can feel, and it creates a tension in almost every relationship, and a continual tension within the individual, and a tension within every communal situation, because people are relating at both of these levels, and they know that something is going on here that’s out of control, it’s dangerous, and that brings up paranoia, and that brings up all kinds of negative numinosity.
And we are in the presence of a moment in which the world is going through the “Valley of the Shadow of Death”, and in which there has to be a planetary transformation in human consciousness that blows out this negative ego-form that has usurped our consciousness and caused us to act in ways that are self-destructive, and destructive of nature, and to return to the true divine blossoming of the Sat Chit Ananda, the heart, the love, the beauty, the bliss, the intelligence that works to create and sustain life, not to destroy it.
But right now the archetype of destruction is dominant—Kali, the goddess of destruction—and it’s the time of Shiva. But Shiva means “transformation”, not just destruction. But we have to go through a destruction on a planetary level, a death and a rebirth, just as we have to do this, each of us at an ego level, through the process of surrender to God, of the Real Self, the surrender of the ego, with all of its negative, destructive thought forms that are out of the range of our ordinary conscious mind, because we have put them out of that range, but that because of that, have even more power over our lives than if they were in our conscious mind—which is why most psychotherapy is about bringing up from the unconscious these concepts, and images, and beliefs, so we can look at them and say, “Yeah, but it’s not true. You see, you’re not inferior, and it’s not less to be a girl than a boy, or a boy than a girl. And you weren’t wrong to be what you are. And the projections on you had no validity.” And so therapists try to talk people out of the beliefs that they have in the unconscious, if they can bring them up. The problem is that the ones that are the darkest and the deepest, they’re not going to come up, and you’re not going to know them, and people will go for years and say, “Well, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I did that or said that. I don’t know what that dream means.”
And it will remain as a mystery—a mysterium tremendum et fascinans—but in a negative way, and will not reveal itself no matter how hard you try, because it is an absolute. We’re dealing with a principle that transcends the power of the ego, or of a therapist’s ego, to break through. Cannot be done. We are dealing with absolute power and intelligence being used against the life of the individual, and the species, and the planet.
So we have to recognize the nature of the powers that are at work here. Principles, the word “principle” and the word “prince” come from the same—they rule—and these negative principles that are embedded in your ego structure rule you. And until we have released them through an even higher power, of the King of Kings, beyond this prince-iple of evil and darkness, and self-hatred, and other hatred, we will not be free. We will not be liberated from the karmic terror of our own self-destructive consciousness.
And so, in this retreat we will be dealing with the negative numinosity as well as the positive, and through the nonbelief in the ego, the disidentification from the egoic identity—and that’s the death of the ego, nothing really dies because it was not alive, it was a bunch of dead thoughts and deadening thoughts, nothing living—but it is metaphorized as an ego death. But it’s only the death of that self-destructive attitude that then enables the heart to open and love to flow again, and the intelligence to open so that you can lead a life that makes sense, is coherent, and that can connect and commune, and relate powerfully, and lovingly, and organize, and mobilize, and transform this world before we kill ourselves, and enable the Kingdom of Heaven to be brought into being, to replace this hell realm of dark force that has taken over our lives.