The Spiritual Response
To Gaza and other darknesses
As I wrote yesterday, my influence, with its limited reach through the algorithms of social media, is vanishingly small. Spending hours watching clips of survivors pulling dead babies from the rubble of Gaza brings a heaviness, a foreboding. One doesn’t want to be alone in that, so one reaches out, and inevitably transmits that heaviness. Even heavyweights like Gabor Maté do it. That heaviness and foreboding is nothing of course to what the survivors and emergency helpers go through in the rubble.
A number of contacts have messaged me about a different response. In short, it’s about holding one’s balance, holding one’s peace, and generally not engaging with the 3D shitstorm. It’s about avoiding that heaviness and foreboding.
Some refer to the thousands of photons the human heart emits when it sends love, compared to the negative trickle when it is in fear or loathing. Others to their desire to preserve their balance, avoid heaviness and foreboding and turn away, switch off social media and do something else.
I am reminded of tests I have undergone a number of times during ayahuasca ceremonies, alone and with others, and especially in the jungle.
The presence of spirit on earth, it would seem from these journeys, is actually a delicate thing. A single thought can disturb it. A crystalline vision of Inti, the Sun God, rowed across the sky in his solar barque by attendant spirits with long oars, was suddenly interrupted by an invasion of nature demons sent by a nearby tree guardian, after I offended it by asking it not to attend the ceremony. These energies resembled the Balinese Boma archetype, perhaps as I had earlier called on the protection of the Balinese guardian Barong. I remember the Sun Gog turning from his repose and frowning at the disturbance, before getting the hell outta there.
I wasn’t able to handle the resulting battle alone. Behind the Boma came a plethora of hostile serpents and macabre symbols. Inverted crosses, swastikas, hammers, serpents too big to behold, just their vast bodies slithering rapidly across my inner vision.
Luckily, I had my favourite sacred stone in my shirt pocket. As I reached for it, the snakes stopped and shot me a look of comical terror. No! Not the stone!
For this stone, they knew, is as gift from Apu Ausungate, the great harmoniser of the Andes, who channels power from the cosmos.
The battle began. I held my stone and channeled its power through my body with my breath. A ball of light formed amidst the mass of writhing snakes. They squeezed and constricted it, until it was a spark, a glimmer. I channeled again, redoubling my efforts, and the ball expanded. Snakes flew off, shafts of light broke out. The snakes recovered and constricted again. So it went, for some time until the snakes gave up.
It wasn’t over. A demon came, all mouths within mouths, eyes within eyes—an phantasmagoric apparition to make Alien or Predator look harmless. I will not say I was not afraid but, as I stared at it from the shoulders of Apu Ausungate, I was also calm. I looked into its eyes, and the eyes within those, inwards and inwards until I saw what was there: a Gollum-like creature behind a vast mask. I knew at once it was the projection of someone else in the room.
This is the great advantage of the spiritual battle. One does not face bombs raining from the sky, the wall of your bedroom collapsing on you as you sleep. One does not risk being shot in the head by a sniper as you rush to help your fallen mother or father or little sister. One does not have to suffer the water and electricity being shut off. One does not have to have a destroyed limb sawn off with no anaesthetic.
To be sure, the spiritual battle has its dangers. There are very powerful forces out there. One can be traumatised, or contaminated with harmful energies that can destroy one’s inner balance and steal one’s joy. One can be psychically damaged.
The most powerful force of all is not the demonic aspect of nature, the black snakes and biting things, but a grey force. We might call it the predator from the depths of the cosmos. We might call it the machines. It is blind to love.It does not care. It cannot empathise. It is something like a vacuum cleaner. It devours without pause or discernment.
It is far easier to defend against demons than this grey force. For instance, one can acknowledge a demon for its wondrously demonic appearance, which begins the transformation of fear into appreciation and into love. One can stare unflinchingly into a demon’s eyes and see the frightened phlegm of separation from God at its core.
The grey stuff is different. It calls for mastery of one’s inner cosmos, the universe that is born when we are born. To master it is to know it intimately, which in turn requires that its twists and turns be straightened out and simplified. Only then can we call to its four corners, and to the great archetypes that live there.
Mastery takes time. Perhaps a lifetime. By pretending, we only fool ourselves, and when the encounter comes we are too slow or unsteady. What we thought was bedrock turns out to be sand. Faith falters. Our inner world shudders.
The spiritual approach is essential practice for this inevitable encounter. Along the way we straighten our contradictions, unwind wounds, descend with candles into the karmic caverns of trauma. To drink ayahuasca is to practice dying. A rehearsal for the final moment of undressing. The body falls away. We are a candle flame in the winds of the void. Better to have calmed those winds beforehand.
Fortuna fortes iuvat, goes the Latin proverb. Fortune favours the brave.
These are the words distorted by the aggressors of the world into license to kill and justification for burying babies beneath rubble. This is the test of humanity. The golden hair that connects us to the divine is pulled taut. Our reasoning becomes tautologous. We answer to a voice that pretends to be God. A voice we have elected to power. If the golden hair snaps, we are no longer white or black, we are grey. We are machine. We are gun. We are F16.
In the demon story, you can sense the possibility of redemption. There is none in the case of the machine.
True strength is the strength of that golden hair. That is what will carry us through the death-birth convulsions of the world.
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