We have all been through a long and weary epoch that has distorted our identities away from who we truly are. The ‘Dark Side’ (evil/narcissistic/patriarchal/imperialist/hierarchical) epoch addressed in these blogs has been dualistic and divisive and taught us to understand each other in terms of ‘us and them’, with one having ‘power-over’ the other, and to value money more than people. (This resulted in racism, sectarianism, capitalism, etc.)

Remember that Dark Side is an energy in its own right, a concept, but it is also in disembodied spirits that love the Dark Side ethos. For these spirits, Dark Side is their identity. And Dark Side energies show up as narcissistic, indifference for another’s suffering, and in outright harm.

Our Identity and Our Power Go Hand-in-Hand

We recently looked at, in this blog: Evolution and the Human Soul Part Three, how beings who identify with Dark Side have failed the first of three Milestones of Human Evolutionary Consciousness, which is ‘Am I on the Side of the Light or the Dark?’ Until beings can say, ‘My true nature is goodness’, and ‘I’m on the side of the Light’, that being will stay grounded at that first evolutionary milestone and not proceed. And anything that cannot know that its nature is truly good is “easy pickings” for Dark Side to manipulate, thwart and control. This means that our first task in how to detect, heal and be protected from Dark Side influence on us is to ask ourselves at an individual and a collective level: ‘Am I on the side of the Light or the Dark?’ It is to ask of ourselves, ‘What is our true nature?’ To know our identity, is to own our power.

And it is at the identity level that Dark Side has consistently attempted to have people ‘forget’ their true nature. If we can have a person believe that they are not the powerful person they truly are, then that person’s power is stripped from them. Trauma survivors can attest to this. This ‘forgetting’ has happened at the individual level, but also with the collective; the difference between the trauma survivor ‘forgetting’ who they truly are and losing their power as a result and the epoch that we have all just left/are leaving, is scale. The last thousand years or so have stripped us of our identity and taught us that we are ‘less than’, but we are not.

How Does Evil Work on Humans?

Consider Gollum. The wiry, pitiful creature who was a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium and novel, The Lord of the Rings. Gollum, once a decent and healthy Hobbit named Sméagol, was on a fishing trip when his companion found a gold ring glinting in the river bed. When his companion refused to hand it over, Sméagol, overcome by the evil power of the ring, strangled his companion and took the ring for himself. The ‘One Ring’ had been forged by the Dark Lord Sauron to help him to gain dominion over the free people of Middle Earth, but had been lost for centuries when it was found that day in the river. The evil within the One Ring unnaturally extended Sméagol’s life and over time he became ‘Gollum’, a twisted creature, corrupted in his body and mind, both obsessively drawn to and hating the ring that he called “my precious”. Under the evil affect of the ring, Gollum became ‘two people’; his ‘original’ self, Sméagol, who was good-natured and kind, and Gollum, the murderous character who was controlled by the power of the ring.

Evil in the world works in the same way as it did on Gollum. It tries to take you away from your true nature, your true identity, by offering promises of both power and dominion. The tempted soul takes that offer, enjoys the glory, but later finds that the evil with which they have grown has withered their soul and rendered them obsessed and compressed by the evil, so that it consumes them, their life-force (Light) and everything that the otherwise-free person would have enjoyed by right. This process is exactly the same process that narcissists use to lure and then control their victims of narcissistic abuse.

So, let us look at what Dark Side offers, to lure the unsuspecting would-be victim under its sway, and in so doing, we will come to know Dark Side more specifically and to see it more clearly. And, it is in the seeing of it that we are freed of its power over us: “I see you” are vitally important words.

The Promise of Power

Dark Side promises ‘power’, but there are two main types of power; authentic and inauthentic. The power that evil promises is not authentic, innate or true.

True power is authentic in and of its own right. True power stands alone and radiates power from itself, from its core; it does not need anything outside of itself to feel powerful or to ‘represent’ or ‘reflect’ its power. In fact, even when challenged, authentic power does not go away because it ‘just is’. Our true power is generated from our true identity, which is divine, and this informs our “knowing”. (Our “knowing” is very different to our “thinking”. Our ‘knowing’ is experienced in the body and our ‘thinking’ is experienced in the mind. The body is infinitely more intelligent than the mind.)

When we experience our ‘knowing’ in our body in terms of our identity, when we ‘know’ who we truly are and we feel it in our bodies, in our bones, we experience this authentic power in our core. This is the first step. The next step is to then accept this known identity, this authentic power, at our core level, as us. It is when we align with this ‘known identity’, this truth about ourselves, in a complete and true way that it becomes our power source. I call this ‘stepping into your power’. This is a goal that I would love for every person reading these blogs.

The converse is true for Dark Side. The power that evil promises is ‘power-over’, which is only as powerful as the control that it can exert over someone or something outside of itself. Evil (or anything that has to hide in the shadows) does not have any authentic power of its own. ‘Power- over’ is power that needs something else outside of itself against which to push, to ‘prove’ its power. It needs to use comparison and judgement and to ‘bleed boundaries’, pushing up against or pushing over others, to feel powerful.

The control used to exert ‘power-over’ is usually oppressive, but isn’t always so. A person can be controlled by fear, blackmail, intimidation, ridicule, etc., yes, but can also be controlled by lust, allurement, payment, bribery, manipulation of that person’s vanity or ideology, or some kind of promise. In my experience, the promises of Dark Side are not often fulfilled.

The Promise of Dominion

Dominion is the control over someone or something, often by force, such as when a colonial power assumes ascendency over another country.

This type of control is like having possessions, articles that can be admired, that assert in the owner an inherent sense of pride or self-worth. This pride or self-worth in the owner occurs because the owner believes that, in their “ownership” and control over the desirable country, person or object, this desirability is reflecting back upon the “owner”. In other words, for the narcissistic mindset, acquirement is an act of aggrandisement, not a dynamic of affection, loyalty or equality. But because we never really control anyone outside of ourselves, the narcissistic belief that a desirable person, or even object, reflects well upon its “owner” is a falsehood. But the feelings can be real.

Many Greeks, especially eminent philosophers, understood clearly the true dynamics of having possessions, which was that you do not own possessions and that, instead, they own you. Possessions can strip you of your freedom by controlling you. How is that possible? How can an inanimate object do that? The objects do not do that, but the dynamics of ownership can, if you let them.

This doesn’t mean that owning nice things is bad. We can own a nice house, enjoy our garden, have pretty things that we have worked hard for because we enjoy the intrinsic value of those things. The key thing is that we value those items because we appreciate ‘them’, and not because they are an extension of ‘us’, and that is the difference.

If ownership of (dominion over) an item or person is an act of aggrandisement, by us believing that they are an extension of us, then that dynamic involves the identity of the owner. (If I feel like I’m a ‘better person’ because I own a Ferrari, then my identity is involved in the ownership of that car; I have let my identity extend into areas that are not me, namely, a car.) This is important to know because when our identity is wrapped up in material things, or in any power-over dynamic with any other person, then our power has been extended outside of ourselves and is somewhat, therefore, outside of our control.

Owning our identity and keeping it intact with clean boundaries is key to wellness and self- empowerment. Dark Side knows this and so, when we are extended outside our true identity, we are at our weakest. And easiest to control.

Identity is Power

Dark Side knows that the key to the ruin of humanity is the desecration of its identity as divine. Emmanuel Swedenborg (a philosopher who lived and wrote in the 1740’s) said that “humans are the seedbed of the angelic realm”. I believe this to be true. We are a fantastic mix of many different beings but we all have divinity at our core as our true identity. And when we know and accept this, this divine origin and truth becomes our power.

The funny thing is that there is no Source for evil. There is no origin from which it leaps; it is, instead, metaphorically, a substrata of life form that relishes the ‘absence’ of Light. But, while it abhors and is repulsed by Light, its origin is the same Source as us, but denies this, so it is confused as to its identity. Dark Side is as alive as you and me and all living beings are born from ‘life-force’, meaning that they have Light at their core. And because they have Light at their core (all living, sentient beings do), this means that they absolutely need to feed from the Source of life- force (divinity) in order to be sustained. Most Dark Side beings do not know this, but it is true.

While we have digestive systems to convert food into fuel to feed our bodies and a sentience with which to feed our souls, Dark Side has no corporeal form, so it must absorb fuel (Light) from other sources. Because it hates Light, and relishes its desecration, Dark Side would rather seek food in a parasitic way that diminishes the life-force of its victims. This is exactly the same dynamic used by narcissists against their victims of narcissistic abuse. And this is why Dark Side uses trauma as fodder for its survival; in every case of child sexual abuse that I have worked with, the victim/survivor has had Dark Side beings in their core, eating away at that person’s sense of worth. Dark Side would rather diminish the Light of little children (through abuse) than face its true identity as Light beings, coming from and belonging to Source.

When we let Dark Side convince us that we are like it, not only is our understanding of our own identity inaccurate and our power thwarted, but we feed a mindset foreign to our nature that seeks ruin and despair over growth and kindness. Knowing our own true identity as divine keeps us separate and clean from the bleeding boundaries of Dark Side and keeps us squarely in our power.

Having pristine boundaries, in order to not project onto others, nor ‘commandeer’ others, to not have ‘inappropriate’ judgements about others, means to simply ‘own our own space’ and own our own identity. Clean boundaries is about owning what’s ours and letting go our identification with the rest. Pristine boundaries helps us to step into our power and now, at this time in history, this is an essential move for all of us, as we navigate these choppy waters ahead.

Blessings on you all and blessings on the work.