Carl Jung famously said:

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

But the implications of this go far beyond ordinary psychology.

The more unconscious we are of our shadow, the more likely we are to project it onto others, become possessed by our own emotional reactions, and mistake external evil for the sole source of evil.

In the context of spiritual warfare, this unconsciousness can also become an entry point for hostile forces that amplify and feed off our repressed emotions, wounds, and projections.

This article explores the relationship between shadow work, psychic attack, occult warfare, and the deeper problem of externalizing evil, which is characteristic of an age dominated by head-centered ego consciousness and materialism, where humanity lives under the illusion of separation and disconnection from the spiritual realities underlying existence.

I will look at how unconscious projections can function like psychic attacks, how the occult law of rebound works, why hatred and revenge can make us become what we fight against, and why a purely external attempt to “eradicate evil” can never address the deeper forces behind it or truly overcome the deeper roots of evil.

I will also explore why shadow work is not pacifism, why not everything we encounter is merely our personal projection, and why genuine discernment requires learning to differentiate between our personal shadow, wounded ego complexes, archetypal forces, and hostile occult influences.

Ultimately, the real work requires both inner and outer work. The battlefield is not only outside of us. It is also within us. And learning to consciously navigate that inner battlefield is one of the foundations of genuine spiritual and psychic protection.

The Battlefield Is Within

One of the greatest challenges on the spiritual path or the path of the truth seeker is not only learning how to recognize external attacks, but learning how not to become the very thing we are fighting against.

It also means understanding how we can unknowingly attack ourselves when the thought-forms and projections we send out return to us, almost like self-created entities that come back to haunt us.

This is why shadow work and spiritual warfare cannot be separated.

Whenever we encounter another person’s shadow, their projections, or even an apparent psychic attack, we potentially have a choice: do we react unconsciously and mechanically, or do we respond with awareness and inner sovereignty?

Most people are so unconscious and so controlled by their shadow and identified with subpersonality parts that they do not even realize they have a choice.

So the first and most important foundation is to establish the witness within and create enough inner space between the trigger and the reaction so that we are not immediately identified with whatever arises.

That is already easier said than done, because it requires us to stay with the discomfort within without immediately projecting it outward, acting it out, or trying to get rid of it.

When you receive negative shadow projections from others, whether psychically through their thoughts or directly through their words, it is important not to become reactive. Do not respond with a counterattack, negative projections, counter-gossip, or contempt toward the person.

By reacting on the same level, you enter their game and align yourself with the same frequency. In a sense, you give permission for the attack to affect you because you have accepted the invitation to participate in it.

The predator, or wetiko, works through the mind of the other person by activating their suppressed shadow. But it can also infect your mind if you accept their projections and respond from your own unresolved shadow.

This becomes an occult trap of agreement.

Once you respond with your own negative projections, whether psychically through your thoughts or outwardly through your words and actions, you begin fighting fire with fire. You then become responsible for the karmic consequences of your own thoughts and projections as well.

Most psychic attacks are unconscious.

We all can become channels for psychic attacks without realizing it, especially when we are emotionally triggered. These attacks occur whenever someone projects negatively charged mental or emotional energy toward another person, either verbally or through thought.

These shadow projections function like energetic arrows directed toward the other person, regardless of physical distance.

As Rudolf Steiner said:

“A feeling of hatred directed at another is very real, and for one who can see in the spiritual world, it is much more powerful than hitting him with a stick.”

Hostile forces and entities can piggyback on these projections. They magnify them while feeding off the emotional energy being generated. Their entry point is the repressed shadow, unconscious traumas, or childhood wounds within both people.

They activate the wound, ignite the trigger, and release the emotional energy they are after, which some people refer to as loosh.

This can take the form of passive-aggressiveness or overt aggression, projected anger and irritation, hatred, contempt, grandiosity, resentment, jealousy, and envy. It can also express itself through complaining, blaming, slander, gossip behind people’s backs, smear campaigns, and personal attacks on social media.

You can psychically attack others in this way, or you can become the recipient of the negative thought projections of others.

But whenever you engage in emotionally charged negative projections toward another person, or indulge in fantasies arising from your lower nature, you also create vulnerabilities within your own energy field.

You attract hostile forces that feed off this emotional energy and drain your life force.

Through the porosity of the mind, these forces can then intensify the projections, giving you more reasons, justifications, and thought injections to continue projecting while making yourself feel righteous about it.

You may begin to feel increasingly convinced that your hatred, resentment, contempt, or desire for revenge is justified. But the more you indulge these thoughts and accept them as your own, the more you become an instrument for the hidden forces working through you.

The Occult Law of Rebound

In this context, it is important to understand the occult law of rebound, sometimes called the law of return. This law states that any negative thought projected outward toward a specific person, especially when it is emotionally charged, will eventually return to the sender if the targeted person does not fully absorb it.

In other words, what you believe is coming from another person or an external entity may sometimes be your own thought-forms returning to you. The great occultist Dion Fortune warned that not every psychic disturbance originates externally from another person or a demonic entity. She wrote:

“It is not every case of psychic disturbance, however, which originates externally. It is a well-known cosmic law that everything moves in circles, and whatever forces we send out, and whatever thought-forms we extrude from our auras, unless absorbed by the object to which they are directed, will return to us in due course.

One of the most effective, and also one of the most widely practiced methods of occult defense is to refuse to react to an attack, neither accepting nor neutralizing the forces projected against one and thus turning them back on their sender.

We must never overlook the fact that a so-called occult attack may be evil thought-forms returning home to roost.”

- Dion Fortune

The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, explained the same occult law:

“In occultism, there is the ‘rebound.’ You send out a bad thought, it returns to you as an attack. That is exactly one of the reasons why you must have complete control over your feelings, sensations, thoughts.

If you become angry with someone or think badly of him, or wish him ill, in your very dream you may see this person coming with extreme violence to attack you. Then, if you do not know these things, you say, ‘Why, I was right in having bad thoughts against him!’

But in fact, it is your own thought that comes back to you. If you make a mental formation that something unpleasant should happen to a certain person, and this person is in a very high state of consciousness, the formation will come up against his atmosphere and instead of entering will rebound upon the one who has made it.”

- The Mother, Mirra Alfassa,

In other words, you can become your own attacker when you continually radiate negative projections while living under the paranoid illusion that someone else or an entity is psychically attacking you.

From a higher perspective, the rebound effect is karmic feedback for self-correction. It teaches self-responsibility and reveals the importance of shadow work, particularly the need to retrieve our projections. The saying ‘what goes around comes around’ points to the law of rebound.

But even when the targeted person absorbs the projection and it affects them negatively, the person who sent it has still created a karmic burden that will eventually return in some form, whether in this lifetime or another.

As Dion Fortune explained, one of the most effective forms of occult defense is to refuse to react to an attack or projection, neither accepting nor engaging with the forces directed against you, and thereby allowing them to return to their sender.

In other words, people who attack you, gossip behind your back, slander you, or project hatred and anger toward you ultimately become their own worst punishment.

There is no need to attack them in return, react defensively, or engage with them at all. They will eventually have to face and take responsibility for the shadow-triggered negativity they have projected.

And so will you. So will all of us. No one can escape the law of rebound.

Even dark occultists and sorcerers engaging in black magic, spewing curses, or directing psychic attacks will eventually have to face the karmic consequences of their actions and thought formations. They are simply so identified with the ego, Luciferic grandiosity, the lower nature, and the left-hand path that they live under the illusion that they can override Divine Law.

Understanding this law is particularly helpful in the context of social media, where reactive exchanges, emotional projections, and shadow projections are very common.

One of the most effective forms of psychic self-protection when you are personally attacked is non-engagement: do not feed the dynamic. Don’t feed their projection, don’t become defensive, and don’t feed the entity that is potentially working through them and wants that loosh.

Ignore, delete, or block when necessary rather than engage. You don’t owe any strangers on social media your time, energy, or attention.

That may be particularly hard for people with attachment wounds who are suffering from the people-pleaser program and are unable to set healthy boundaries. It is also often easier said than done, especially when your own shadow or childhood wound gets triggered, and you begin taking the attack personally.

When you take the bait and engage in this dance of shadow projection, you also open yourself to further occult attacks.

Hostile forces are attracted to the emotionally charged projections created by unresolved wounds hidden in the shadow. They are drawn to the “delicious meal” contained within this unresolved emotional ammunition. They then influence the mind to intensify the projection, provoking more anger, more resentment, more justification, and more loosh.

This is one of the foundations of the hyperdimensional Matrix divide-and-conquer agenda.

Human beings are continually pitted against one another through collective shadow projection. It becomes a massive trigger and loosh fest, with billions of people acting and reacting unconsciously while occult hostile forces pull their strings and feed on the emotional energy being generated.

This is also one of the reasons humanity remains so far away from any significant shift in consciousness, let alone a real collective spiritual awakening. We continually create more karmic debt through our unresolved wounds, mechanical triggers, and unconscious shadow projections.

We project onto one another, react to one another’s projections, and then justify our reactions. Round and round we go, while the hidden forces of the Matrix feed off the conflict and amplify the triggers.

They pit people against each other, particularly during times of rising polarization.

The Matrix and the Externalization of Evil

Most people remain caught within the tunnel vision of the three-dimensional manifestations of the Matrix. They focus exclusively on the Deep State, the globalists, central banks, the Illuminati, Zionists, secret societies, political parties, or whatever institution or group they believe is controlling the world.

While these groups and institutions play their part, focusing only on the human level misses the occult and hyperdimensional aspect of the Matrix control system, mistaking symptoms for causes.

Moreover, most people only project evil externally without ever sincerely confronting the darkness within themselves.

Carl Jung warned about the danger of remaining unconscious of our own capacity for evil:

“None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. Whether the crime occurred many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present—and one would therefore do well to possess some “imagination for evil,” for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature.

In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil. Harmlessness and naïveté are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease.

On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil into the “other.”

This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of his threat.

What is even worse, our lack of this insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil.”

– Carl G. Jung

For example, many people in the “truther community” cheered when it was announced that Jacob Rothschild had died, just as they cheered when Henry Kissinger or other people they considered evil died.

They reacted as though these individuals simply went to hell, the world became a better place, and that was the end of the story. It reflects the illusory belief, rooted in a materialistic worldview, that evil can be eliminated merely by getting rid of certain people.

Many of the powerful sociopaths and psychopaths in positions of power are nothing more than empty vessels and puppets of powerful asuric occult hostile beings.

Many murders and other violent crimes committed by psychopathic individuals, whether individual killers, rapists, or politicians in positions of high power giving orders to kill or engaging in sexual/satanic ritualistic abuse, can be attributed to these occult malevolent entities.

They possess, or work through, their human puppets in order to feed on the “loosh” of suffering. It’s way beyond the desire for money and power on a human level. It is a very ‘delicious’ frequency meal for these beings, for humanity is not at the top of the food chain, frequency- and consciousness-wise.

Remember what Hillary Clinton said about Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died!” followed by a big laugh. Frequency-wise, it is no different from laughing or feeling joyful about the death of someone you perceive as an “evil” person.

But the energy of feeling joy over another person’s death feeds the occult forces manipulating humanity from unseen realms.

By taking pleasure in the death and suffering of an ““evil” person, you lower yourself to their level. The same applies to projecting extreme hatred and anger toward people such as Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, elite pedophiles, or anyone else believed to be responsible for crimes against humanity.

This does not mean that we should take a love-and-light cop-out, deny evil, excuse criminal behavior, avoid discernment, or refuse to hold people accountable.

It means that hatred, contempt, and revenge do not free us from evil.

They bind us more deeply to it.

The death penalty will not change anything either. It will only give satisfaction to the demonic being, and to the human ego living under the illusion that “justice is done,” while the being itself simply looks for another suitable human vessel to use.

Hence, as Sri Aurobindo noted:

“…From this point of view, you will see that capital punishment is absurd. The man who murdered was under the possession of the impulse of some [occult] being. When the man is executed, the being takes possession of another. Some vital [astral] beings want to have their play here….”

Humans are too embedded in the tunnel vision of the dogma of material reality and corrupted religious dogma, with the idea of “heaven” and “hell” and an external God who “punishes” or “rewards,” which is a Matrix program in itself.

Hence, they mistake symptoms for causes and fail to recognize the spiritual reality of countless beings acting on and through them.

You may ask, what is the “solution” then?

First of all, be careful of black-and-white thinking. It is not about doing nothing, turning a blind eye to evil, falling into “blind compassion,” or retreating into some New Age love-and-light cop-out.

Ultimately, it is about a complete shift in consciousness through inner and outer work, rather than trying to “fix the world” or “escape the matrix” only on a superficial 3D level or attempting to eradicate evil externally, which is futile anyway.

We still live under the illusion that the external world is separate from our inner reality.

It is also about understanding spiritual science, the occult, and spiritual realities beyond the limitations of the five senses, and placing all of this within the broader context of the evolution of consciousness.

This requires moving beyond the age of materialism that denies spiritual reality altogether.

At the same time, this does NOT mean blaming everything on entities or avoiding personal responsibility. As many esoteric traditions from East and West pointed out, these occult forces and enities also have a teaching function within the larger process of the evolution of consciousness, although that is a major topic in itself.

Ultimately, a true “awakening” is not merely intellectual or informational awareness of these topics, the Matrix, hidden forces, or conspiracy. It is a complete inner shift in the human being at the level of consciousness through the process of soul embodiment, which also implies conscious action in the world.

It is not about retreating from life or trying to escape it. Nor does this transformation happen by itself.

Conscious effort is necessary.

Becoming What You Fight Against

Hatred feeds the very forces operating through these individuals. Whatever occult force is operating behind someone you consider evil wants you to project hatred and disgust onto its human puppet.

That emotional frequency sustains it and gives it something to feed on.

It is similar to the Emperor in Star Wars attempting to provoke Luke Skywalker into hatred. He wanted Luke to give in to his anger, attack him, and also kill Darth Vader. The Emperor understood that by surrendering to hatred and giving in to blind anger, Luke would begin becoming what he was fighting against. He would join the Dark Side.

This is another form of the occult trap of agreement.

The hostile force invites you to oppose it using its own lower level of consciousness, its own methods, and its own emotional frequency. Once you accept that invitation, it gains an entry point into you.

You give in to the dark side, and you become what you fight against as you are absorbed and invaded by wetiko and the dark forces from within.

The history books are full of so-called good people, revolutionaries, and truth seekers who eventually became that which they fought against or were consumed by their own shadow because they never engaged in genuine inner work.

You can observe this unconscious game of triggering and projection throughout your personal life. You can see it among friends and family, between former partners, on Facebook, X, and other social media platforms, and throughout the world at large.

Observe yourself honestly.

Do you carry resentment toward anyone in your life?

Does your mind continually justify it?

Who triggers you?

Who annoys and irritates you?

Who lives rent-free in your head?

Toward whom do you feel contempt, resentment, jealousy, or anger?

It may be someone you know personally, a former partner, a family member, a social media friend, a public figure, or someone you have never met in real life. Examine your emotions, thoughts, and projections carefully, because they can become entry points for occult forces to pull your strings.

Shadow Work, Inner Differentiation, and Occult Protection

One of the most powerful things you can do for yourself and for the world is to engage sincerely in shadow work, what Carl Jung called “holding the tension of opposites” within yourself, and retrieving your projections.

This is an extremely challenging practice that requires the attitude of a spiritual warrior. It is far easier, more tempting, and often feels much better to project externally rather than face what is arising within ourselves.

But you also need to understand the basics of shadow work, what it actually is, and what it truly entails. As the term “shadow work” has become increasingly popular, it has also become distorted, diluted, and oversimplified.

It is certainly not pacifism, nor is it about becoming passive in the face of evil.

Nor does it mean that everything you see in the world is merely your “projection” or personal shadow.

There are archetypal forces and forms of archetypal evil that you had better not try to integrate, and Carl Jung was very aware of this as well.

As Jungian scholar and analyst Robert Moore pointed out:

“All the different religious traditions have been convinced about this reality [of spiritual warfare]. We moderns are the only people who have not accepted it, and we have the bomb and pollution instead. Jung believed that when we stop talking about the demons we become more vulnerable to their destructive force.

So I want to suggest that there is more to this archetype of spiritual warfare than simply integrating your personal shadow, or merely learning how to love those denied parts of your personality.

It involves learning how to tell the difference between the personal shadow that comes from your individual experience, and the archetypal forces which have access to your psyche from within, that you can never integrate, and had better not try to integrate. Jung discusses this in volume eight of the Collected Works in his distinction between personal complexes and what he calls ‘spirit complexes.’”

– Robert Moore, Facing the Dragon

This ties directly into spiritual warfare and the ability to differentiate within yourself what is what.

That inner differentiation is the holy grail and essence of sincere inner work.

The late Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson, who was trained by Carl Jung’s wife, Emma Jung, and also studied at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India, considered “differentiation” a sacred word that should not be taken lightly.

For him, it pointed to something much deeper than mere intellectual discernment. It is one of the most essential foundations of genuine inner work and of what it truly means to “Know Thyself.”

One of the most important principles in shadow work and spiritual warfare is that genuine inner differentiation cannot be reduced to an intellectual checklist.

There is no simple ten-point list that allows the mind to reliably determine, “This is my shadow, this is an archetypal force, and this is a hostile entity.” Conceptual frameworks can help us, but they cannot produce genuine discernment by themselves.

Inner differentiation is a capacity that develops through prolonged psycho-spiritual work.

It requires radical self-honesty, self-observation, shadow work, inner-child work, somatic awareness, psychological maturity, meditation, aspiration, sincerity, and repeated confrontation with our own unconscious material.

Over time, we become increasingly familiar with the texture and signature of our own psyche. We begin to recognize the difference between an abandonment wound, a shame complex, a narcissistic part, a trauma response, a projection or an entity tagging into one of these entry points.

Ultimately, we begin to discern what is the true Self and what are the many fractured, wounded subpersonalities, or ego complexes, that we identify with and mistake for the real “I.”

Part of shadow work is a direct confrontation with evil, especially with the seed and potential for evil within yourself.

“In general, looking at one’s own shadow is purely disagreeable, it is no fun, and the results also are not very amusing, but it has one great advantage: the more one knows about one’s own wickedness, the more one is able to protect oneself against that of other people.

The evil within oneself recognizes evil within the other. If I am naive about my own evil intentions, then I shall fall victim to those of others…

The idealistic fool who gets cheated by everybody and always has bad tricks played on him cannot be helped by pity, but only by being led to his own shadow.”

– Marie-Louise von Franz

It is not an easy process. If you engage in shadow work sincerely and correctly, you will inevitably encounter parts of yourself that you do not like, do not want to see, or do not want to acknowledge, and would therefore rather project externally.

The wounded ego will resist this process and try to attribute your own shadow to the other person instead.

That is precisely why genuine shadow work requires courage, humility, discernment, and the attitude of a spiritual warrior.

It is also possible to merely intellectualize the process without somatically embodying it in an integral way.

Shadow work is not about indulging in the shadow and acting it out, nor is it about repressing or suppressing negative emotions.

It has nothing to do with inaction or simply letting external evil run rampant.

It is also not about forcing yourself to feel or think positive thoughts and emotions. This only pushes the shadow further underground and gives it more unconscious power. That is the dark side, or limitation, of stoicism and forced thought control: what appears to be self-mastery can easily become repression.

Instead, shadow work is about fully feeling, integrating, and transmuting these unconscious patterns through an internal alchemical process.

This process allows you to reclaim the energy trapped within the shadow and transform it, which can help you genuinely raise your frequency and level of consciousness according to the law of ascent and descent.

This law states that you can only rise into and truly embody higher levels of consciousness to the degree that you are willing and able to descend into the depths of your own being and shadow, through cycles within cycles, again and again, until enough of the shadow has been integrated for you to become firmly established at a higher level of consciousness.

But many people can overestimate themselves.

There is always the Luciferic temptation for the ego to become spiritualized while the shadow is pushed even further underground. In that case, what appears to be spiritual development can actually become another form of inflation and delusion.

It can establish what some esoteric traditions call a “false foundation,” which can be even harder to break through than a hardened ego structure.

We see this a lot these days, where narcissism has become normalized, especially spiritual narcissism. Robert Moore also explored this dynamic in depth in Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity. We also dedicated a podcast episode to this topic, The Shadow of Enlightenment: Confronting Spiritual Narcissism.

Engaging sincerely in shadow work will also free immense amounts of creative energy and life force that you didn’t realize you had.

Shadow work is also not something you just do in a weekend workshop, and then you are done. There are no shortcuts for it, and no one can do it for you. It is a 24/7 process integrated into your daily life, including dream work.

Own your projections and triggers. Take responsibility for what you feel. Use these reactions as opportunities to inquire within yourself and heal what has been activated.

Use them as fuel to ignite the alchemical fire of transmutation within. This does not mean blaming yourself, tolerating abuse, or refusing to establish boundaries.

Nor does it mean pretending that everything another person does is merely your own projection. It’s about refusing to fall into blame, victim consciousness and mechanical reactions.

It means responding consciously rather than allowing the unresolved shadow to respond for you and potentially giving occult adverse forces a doorway into your being.

In this sense, shadow work is not separate from occult warfare.

It is one of the most important forms of occult and psychic protection, because the more conscious you become of your own shadow and integrate it, the fewer entry points hostile forces have through which to manipulate you.

And remember, everyone has a shadow.

The less aware you are of it, the more it controls you unconsciously, and the more power occult forces and entities can have over you.

Claiming not to have a shadow is essentially the same as claiming to be fully enlightened.

I also created an abridged narrated version of this article, which you can watch below:

Godspeed.

If you want to go deeper into this work, there is a lot of free content on my website, VeilOfReality.com, about somatic shadow work in the context of spiritual warfare. I have written articles about it, and my wife and I have also explored this topic in many episodes of the Cosmic Matrix podcast, as well as in several masterclasses we offer.

You can find many of those episodes under the “Shadow Work & Psychology” and “Spiritual Warfare & Occult Forces” category in the podcast menu on my website.

July 20, 2026, marks the beginning of one of the most significant turning points in modern civilization.

French mundane astrologer André Barbault believed that a rare planetary configuration involving Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto could signal nothing less than a relaunch of civilization.

Barbault has been credited with anticipating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global pandemic crisis of 2020 decades before they occurred.

He described the 2026 planetary basket as “the most benefic configuration of the century.”

But what would a relaunch of civilization actually look like?

Global political upheaval, economic breakdown and transformation, and unprecedented technological acceleration.

Artificial intelligence is already reshaping human life at astonishing speed.

Old structures are disintegrating, while something new is emerging that we can barely comprehend from within the present moment.

All of this may ultimately lead humanity toward a radically different relationship with the sacred and the Divine, beyond religious dogma and institutional religion.

These powerful astrological configurations suggest that we may be approaching far more than another political, ideological, or technological shift.

When we connect Barbault’s Cyclic Index with Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero, another pattern emerges: history itself appears to be compressing as novelty accelerates toward an exponential climax.

More change, disruption, complexity, and transformation are being packed into shorter and shorter periods of time.

We are moving toward the technological Singularity, a Yuga Shift, a major stage of UFO disclosure, the thinning of the veil, and a civilizational and spiritual threshold that encompasses all of them.

Everything is interconnected and part of this galactic Time of Transition.

In the new episode of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, Laura and I explore the astrology of civilization’s next turning point, Barbault’s Cyclic Index, Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero, the Ekpyrosis purification phase, and what this rare planetary basket formation may reveal about the years ahead.

Yet one of the most common responses I hear when I talk about the Time of Transition, the shift, the birth of a new Earth, or powerful astrological alignments such as the rare basket formation occurring on July 20, is some variation of this:

“How many rare ‘configurations’ have there been over the past several years as humanity is hurled closer to the abyss? How often have people and prophets announced a ‘shift’ or a ‘new world’ to be born? But nothing really changes. Wake me when this nightmare is over!”

This reaction is understandable when viewed only through the world of appearances, but it is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Time of Transition is about and what astrological transits and configurations actually represent.

Astrology and Soul Evolution

You, the little “I” you think you are, with all its identifications, desires, and attachments, live under the illusion of separation from all that is.

Astrology and the planets do not make you do anything, nor do they bring about miraculous events while you simply sit back and wait.

Many people seek an astrology reading because they want to hear something positive about themselves or to be told that something great is going to happen in their lives, especially regarding love, relationships, career, success, or money.

This approach is already a setup for failure and disappointment. It misses the deeper purpose of astrology in the context of soul evolution.

Most people approach astrology from the false self, the ego-personality, rather than from the perspective of the soul’s deeper movement, its lessons, and its karmic trajectory beyond the superficial judgments of what the ego considers “good” or “bad.”

What is also rarely acknowledged is that one’s level of consciousness in the current incarnation influences how the natal chart and its transits manifest in one’s life.

Most importantly, it is still up to you to work consciously with these energies, engage the will, and learn the lessons that arise at certain junctures in life and may be reflected through powerful transits.

Many people, including mainstream astrologers, approach astrology in a highly intellectual and head-centric way, missing its deeper psychospiritual dimension and its direct application to inner work.

This can easily result in what I call the “astrology bypass,” especially when astrology becomes the foundational lens through which everything is interpreted.

Remember, the level of consciousness of an astrologer inevitably influences the reading they give. An intellectual interpretation of charts and transits alone does not necessarily reflect deeper spiritual understanding or discernment.

When this is understood and applied inwardly, astrology can become a powerful tool and ally.

The same applies collectively to humanity’s response to configurations such as the upcoming basket formation.

To put it simply:

It is an opportunity, not a guarantee, and it depends on you.

Look in the mirror and get to work instead of waiting for a magical configuration to do it for you.

As we explained in depth in our recent podcast, powerful astrological transits can catalyze personal and collective evolution, but only when we consciously align with their higher expression through inner work.

Your soul may respond to this call, but your ego will resist it. The unconscious parts within you, including the wounded inner child, the shadow, your attachments, and your identifications, may also resist the call of your higher nature.

Nothing meaningful happens when you merely sit back and rant on social media as if God is supposed to do the work for you.

The more you complain about the state of the world and remain trapped in victim and blame consciousness without taking responsibility, the more you feed the very “nightmare” you condemn.

No one is coming to save you, especially from yourself.

Truth or the Abyss

Many teachers and seers of the past spoke about the profound shift humanity would undergo, but they also emphasized that its higher outcome was not guaranteed.

It depends on a certain fraction of humanity, those with soul potential, consciously engaging in the Great Work of individuation and spiritualization.

This does not mean that a majority is required. David Hawkins suggested through his work and his Map of Consciousness that one human being established at a higher level of consciousness, acting as a transducer of Divine Will, can outweigh the ignorance of millions of people operating from lower levels of consciousness, especially those deeply rooted in victim and blame consciousness.

Through inner work and purification, they help anchor the Divine Force, the Holy Spirit, and participate in the transmutation of the world, gradually freeing it from the grip of hostile anti-Divine forces.

A failure of this evolutionary process could result in cataclysmic destruction similar to what befell ancient civilizations in previous cycles, such as Atlantis, and what is symbolized in the biblical flood.

As The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, said:

“The choice is imperative: Truth or the Abyss.”

Sri Aurobindo expressed the same essential choice:

“I cannot promise that the Divine’s Will is to preserve the current civilization. The present civilization must change, but whether by destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater truth is the issue.”

I’ve written about this topic in depth here:

The Time of Transition: The End of an Age and the Birth of a New Humanity

Be aware of the wishful belief that a genuine shift uplifting humanity will simply happen through external intervention or astrological transits.

These configurations mirror an opportunity. It is still up to you to do the work, seize the moment, and become the change.

Then you may begin to recognize God’s work within all appearances, for all is One. Yet you must still participate as an instrument of Divine Will, helping to bring forth a new world, a new consciousness, and an entirely new way of Being.

The outer purification of Ekpyrosis is not God’s punishment, nor is it a reason for doom and gloom.

It is a necessary phase in the evolution of consciousness.

The more we resist it, the more destructive it becomes outwardly. The more consciously we participate in it inwardly, the more it becomes a transformative force that can help humanity and the world.

This is why I state it again:

The most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community, and the world is to live in accordance with your Dharma, engage in conscious inner work, and willingly burn in the fire of transmutation.

Even André Barbault, who identified this powerful astrological basket configuration, said that it represents a great opportunity, not smooth sailing or a guaranteed outcome.

The Great Shift requires the Great Work.

Listen to the full podcast here:

The Astrology Of Civilization’s Next Turning Point: The Basket Formation

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at his main website Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.

One of the clearest signs of this dark age of materialism is that most people no longer think deeply about death.

It is ironic. None of us gets out of here “alive,” yet we feel uncomfortable contemplating death.

Death is as much a part of life as birth, yet we are so removed from our spiritual essence that many people do not seriously consider the possibility of life after death or the continuation of consciousness beyond the physical body.

Part of this is the fear of death.

We avoid looking at it directly and facing this fear, so we compensate by obsessing over the body, youthfulness, longevity, physical appearance, and physical survival, while giving little attention to the soul, the afterlife, or the spiritual consequences of how we live.

Many people are so entrapped in a materialistic, atheist worldview that they laugh at the idea of life after death or the existence of a soul because it cannot be “proven” scientifically.

But what if the way we live, what we believe, what we are attached to, and the forces we open ourselves to while incarnated directly affect what happens after death?

The Excarnation Jam

This is one of the central themes of our podcast episode with Thomas Mayer, author of COVID Vaccines: Consequences for the Soul, Spirit, and Life After Death.

Mayer has worked with the deceased for over thirty years and has helped them transition.

Based on his supersensible research, he says we are now facing what he calls an “excarnation jam,” a major blockage in the normal process of the soul’s departure from the physical body after death.

According to Mayer, an increasing number of the deceased today remain earthbound rather than entering the spiritual realms.

He emphasized that this phenomenon is unprecedented in its scale. According to him, about half of the deceased today are earthbound and do not enter the spiritual realms after death.

That is one in every two humans.

Similar observations have also been reported by other practitioners and supersensible healers who have worked with the dead for many decades, such as Dr. William Baldwin, Dr. Edith Fiore, Iris Paxino, and others.

An earthbound spirit is the surviving consciousness of a deceased human being who has not completed the transition after death.

They may remain attached to the earth plane because of trauma, addiction, sudden death, suicide, pharmaceutical or psychiatric drugs, lack of spiritual development, or a hardened materialistic orientation in life.

This is especially prevalent in our age of materialism, where most people are disconnected from Spirit, oriented toward the external world, and lacking a conscious inner life. Few genuinely aspire to their higher nature.

This outward focus is further amplified by the rise of technology in the emerging era of AI and transhumanism. Influenced by occult adverse forces, these trends serve to deepen materialism and can contribute to keeping the soul earthbound after death.

Another major cause is distorted spiritual and religious beliefs.

Interestingly, many dogmatic fundamentalist Christians, including Christian priests, have reportedly been found stuck earthbound due to erroneous beliefs about the afterlife.

Iris Paxino points out in Bridges Between Life and Death that even common phrases like “rest in peace” can create false ideas about life after death.

Death is not merely sleep, rest, or passive release. It is an active process that requires spiritual awareness. The soul has to confront its life, attachments, unresolved emotions, beliefs, karma, shadow, and spiritual orientation.

That is also why the more sincerely we engage in psychospiritual work during our physical incarnation, integrate the shadow, heal trauma, and learn our karmic lessons, the “easier” the transition in the afterlife may become.

Whatever we avoid in this life, we will face in the afterlife. No one is judging, punishing, or rewarding us. There is no external God or deity handing out rewards and punishments. The idea of “heaven and hell” is self-created through our own state of consciousness.

So when we casually say “RIP,” we may be repeating a comforting phrase while missing the deeper reality: the deceased may not simply be resting. They may be undergoing a difficult transition, or in some cases, they may not have transitioned at all.

Distorted Afterlife Beliefs

Another distorted belief is the growing narrative in fringe conspiracy circles that “reincarnation is a trap to recycle souls” or that the “tunnel of light is a trap.”

From the spiritual perspective Mayer points to, which also aligns with Steiner’s warnings about the 8th Sphere, this belief can be extremely dangerous.

Entering the tunnel of light is essential for the soul to move forward, avoid becoming earthbound, remain protected from adversarial spirits, and not be pulled into lower earthbound realms.

Ironically, these “don’t go into the light” narratives are most likely seeded by hostile, adverse forces themselves.

Their aim is to prevent souls from reaching the Light after death and instead keep them trapped in the earth realm, where they can be influenced, harvested, or used by darker forces.

The Spiritual Crisis of Our Time

I just re-uploaded our podcast with Thomas Mayer because it could not be published on YouTube due to censorship issues.

It is not only an interview. Mayer also gives a slide presentation, which you can download, where he shares his latest research into how the COVID vaccines may affect the human energy system, contribute to earthbound states after death, and increase susceptibility to materialistic and transhumanist influences.

This is not only a crisis for the dead. Billions of earthbound spirits also affect the psychic and spiritual atmosphere of the living world. These earthbound souls can attach to the aura of living human beings, creating additional burdens and disturbances.

Mayer describes cases in which earthbound spirits become vulnerable to hostile forces that feed on their life force.

He also speaks about vaccine-related beings in the aura, the Soratic forces behind transhumanism, the spiritual consequences of technology, and why fear-based paranoia only weakens our spiritual defenses.

Mayer stresses that anyone can help the dead, even without clairvoyant abilities. Simple actions such as inwardly connecting with the deceased, offering heartfelt prayers, or calling upon divine beings can open a healing pathway.

This is not about fear, and anyone who claims this is just fear-mongering does not understand the necessity of occult spiritual knowledge during these times.

If this information brings up fear, then that fear itself becomes something to work through and face consciously.

It is about spiritual knowledge, discernment, and the urgent need to orient our lives toward the Divine while we are still incarnated.

It is also common sense. Ask yourself: if our entire lives are centered only on the physical body, technology, biological health, material security, and external success, without any inner orientation toward our spiritual essence, what happens to the soul when the body dies?

That is the question very few people want to face.

But as Thomas Mayer emphasized, this may be one of the most important questions of our time.

Humanity’s battle is not merely political, medical, technological, or psychological.

It is spiritual.

Soul Embodiment is the Great Work

What many people do not know is that the esoteric “Great Work,” or what we may call psychospiritual work today, was also done with an understanding of the afterlife experience, so the “soul knows where to go” and can more consciously engage in the purification process without getting stuck.

Connecting to and bringing forth your essence, your soul-being, your true Self, not the ego-personality, is the most important work of our time.

Soul embodiment is the Great Work.

It has become more essential to cultivate spiritual strength, inner work, prayer, discernment, and a conscious relationship with the Divine.

Watch the full conversation with Thomas Mayer on The Cosmic Matrix Podcast here:

Vaccine Entities & Earthbound Spirits: The Spiritual Battle for Humanity w/ Thomas Mayer

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at his main website Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.

The most dangerous forms of tyranny rarely announce themselves as tyranny.

They arrive dressed as fairness, compassion, equality, sharing, and “social responsibility.”

A reader responded to my article, “My Father’s Escape from Socialism and the True Meaning of Freedom,” with the common argument that socialism is really just about fairness, sharing, and people being socially responsible to each other, and claiming, “Yes, freedom matters, but billionaires must share.”

I’ve heard this argument many times before, so I decided to publish my reply here.

Below is the comment and my full response.

I recommend reading the original article for context if you haven’t yet.

“I value freedom just as much as anyone, yet our country is so out of balance because of selfish capitalism. I see capitalism as different than free enterprise. Capitalism is an attitude of exploitation, which actually destroys free enterprise. The wealthiest people, the billionaires must share.

We don’t need more rules than that except producing anything. That’s destructive to society, which so many corporations do. If I understand it correctly, democratic socialism is about people being socially responsible to each other.

Right now the corporations are controlling us because they are given too much power, like Monsanto poisoning us with pesticides that should’ve been banned years ago. And on and on.

What is freedom if we’re not responsible with it? In the end, it destroys freedom and equality. There is something between capitalism and socialism that will allow us to have a freer and more balanced society. Either extreme throws us out of balance.”

My Reply:

You’re missing the essence of the article. It’s not about capitalism vs. socialism on the level of outer systems. That’s exactly the trap of externalization I wrote about.

“The billionaires must share.” No one owes you anything. Forced redistribution under the guise of “sharing” is the essence of the most evil, anti-Divine system there is. It goes against Natural Law and Divine Law, and my father had to experience where that ideology leads firsthand.

The regime he escaped from called itself the German “Socialist Democratic” Republic, built on the same promise you’re promoting: that the state will make people “share” and be “socially responsible to each other.” It ended in walls, prisons, poverty, deaths, and mass graves.

Every single time, and no, not because it “hasn’t been done right yet.”

Beyond that, this demand is rooted in victim/blame consciousness, and it’s one of the most common shadow projections: projecting one’s own unacknowledged shadow onto the rich and wealthy, making them the carriers of evil and the cause of one’s own condition.

Just like so many “holier than thou” virtue signaling liberals project their shadow onto Elon Musk, demanding higher taxes and bigger government, and essentially less freedom. It’s like a Stockholm syndrome, arguing for more imprisonment in the name of “sharing.”

Underneath that projection is usually unconscious envy and jealousy. Most people who rail against “the billionaires” have never honestly examined their own relationship to money, power, and success. The resentment gets dressed up as moral concern and a call for “fairness,” but it’s the disowned shadow speaking.

In fact, your comment is a good example of what happens when sincere shadow work is lacking: the shadow gets projected outward onto “the wealthy” and “the corporations,” while the inner work that would dissolve the projection, integrate the shadow, and ultimately empower you and others never happens.

I know this pattern intimately because I was caught in it myself for years, which I wrote about in detail in this article:

Reclaiming Your Birthright to Abundance - Breaking Free from Scarcity Programming: How Spiritual Distortion, Shadow Projection, and Victimhood Keep Abundance Blocked

Yes, there is corruption, exploitation, and corporate capture. I said so in the article. But no system, whether capitalism, socialism, anything “in between,” including anarchism, voluntarism, or any other “-ism,” will ever create a free and balanced society as long as the individuals within it remain unconscious.

You are mistaking symptoms for causes and projecting them externally.

Your distinction between “capitalism” and “free enterprise” is also an inner matter, not a systemic one. Exploitation is not a property of a system but an expression of the consciousness of the people operating within it. A greedy man will exploit under any system; a man of integrity will not.

But the most dangerous “greedy man” is the one who has disowned his shadow and projects it onto others from an inflated position of moral superiority, believing himself to be all good, altruistic, and compassionate.

We see this unconscious greed in many socialist-minded liberals who demand that others support and pay for them, whether through taxes or the state.

This is how they can feel morally justified, entitled, and good about themselves while camouflaging their own unconscious greed: wanting something for nothing, and even worse, expecting someone else’s labor to pay for it.

Musk or any other billionaire owes you nothing, just like you have the ability to create wealth via effort and work in the freest country there is, if you reside in the US.

Your idea that “there is something between capitalism and socialism” that will balance society is also the classic middle-ground fallacy: the assumption that truth must lie somewhere in the middle of two seeming opposites. It doesn’t.

Both poles, and any blend of them, are still on the same horizontal plane of external systems. The real “middle path” is not horizontal but vertical: the raising of individual and collective consciousness, which no economic arrangement can substitute for.

As David Hawkins showed in his Map of Consciousness, the vast majority of humanity calibrates below the level of integrity, caught in victim/blame consciousness. Any system built by and for people at that level of consciousness will reflect it. That’s the meaning of “as within, so without.”

You say, “If I understand it correctly, democratic socialism is about people being socially responsible to each other.”

No, you do not understand it correctly. That is the marketing slogan, not the reality. Democratic socialism is not about people being responsible to each other; it is about the state forcing people to comply with what it defines as “responsibility,” backed by coercion, taxation, and punishment.

Voluntary social responsibility between people is simply called community, or brotherhood, and it needs no ideology or government program. The moment “being responsible to each other” is mandated and enforced from the top down, it is no longer responsibility at all.

Responsibility, by definition, requires free choice. What remains is compliance under threat, dressed up in moral language.

That is precisely how the so-called socialist “democratic” country my father grew up in sold itself to his generation: solidarity, equality, everyone caring for everyone, the workers’ paradise. The word “Democratic” was in its very name.

The lived reality my father experienced was surveillance, informants, compulsory ideology in schools, imprisonment, and a wall with orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave this “social responsibility.”

He and his parents risked their lives jumping off a ship to escape it and spent ten months in prison for it. Every collectivist system in history has marketed itself with the language of care and sharing, and every one of them has ended in the opposite, because you cannot produce virtue through force.

The moral posturing around “social responsibility” is a substitute for the real thing, which can only emerge from individual psychospiritual maturity, facing your own shadow first rather than demanding the state make others share what they have.

This is also why psychospiritual work is essential for those who sincerely seek truth and freedom.

Without it, we remain trapped in projection, blame, ideological identification, and unconscious resentment and envy, mistaking external systems for the root cause of our condition.

Real freedom requires the inner work of seeing through our own shadow, wounds, conditioning, false identifications, and self-deceptions. Otherwise, we remain inner prisoners while living under the illusion of external “freedom.”

Even our ideals of justice, equality, and compassion can then become hijacked by hidden forces and turned into instruments of coercion and manipulation, all while wearing the mask of “saviors.”

This is a big topic in itself, which I explored in more depth in my article:

The Necessity of Psychospiritual Work in the Time of Transition: Inner Transformation, Spiritual Discernment, and Alignment with Divine Will

Freedom without responsibility destroys itself; on that we agree.

But responsibility begins within.

It means facing your own shadow and what you do not want to see within yourself, not pointing at billionaires. Pointing is always easier for the self-righteous ego, hiding in a costume of inflated “social justice.”

Full article for context: “My Father’s Escape from Socialism and the True Meaning of Freedom”

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at his main website Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.

This article is a foundation piece for what I understand as psychospiritual work and why I believe it is essential during the Time of Transition.

We are living in a period of global and cosmic upheaval, where most people are disembodied, dissociated, and dysregulated.

It shows up as a loss of a spiritual orientation, psychological fragmentation, and a deepening disconnection from the Divine in the midst of technological seduction, deceptive spiritual teachings, corrupted religious dogma, and the increasing influence of unseen forces that most people are unaware of.

The world is going through a death-rebirth process at the end of a large evolutionary cycle. The veil is thinning, and humanity is being pulled between materialism and genuine soul awakening.

In times like these, psychological work alone is not enough, and spiritual work alone is not enough.

We need an integrated approach that can meet the whole human being and help us discern what is influencing us, what is calling us upward, and what is pulling us downward.

Many more people now call themselves psychospiritual coaches and therapists. There is a growing wave of practitioners offering psychospiritual work, psychospiritual integration, and psychospiritual coaching under one banner or another.

The intention of this article is to delve deeper into what psychospiritual work entails, based on my understanding and approach, while making the case for why an integral approach is necessary during the Time of Transition: to help ourselves, help others, and align with the underlying evolutionary changes and forces.

I want to be clear that I am not presenting psychospiritual work as a new modality, nor am I claiming to be the authority on it. The term itself is not new, and many traditions, teachers, and practitioners have approached this work in different ways.

What I share here is my own understanding and approach, based on my research, personal experience, and years of applying this work in my own life and with others.

It is informed by many streams of wisdom and practice, including transpersonal depth psychology, Esoteric Christianity, Shamanism, Occultism, the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Roberto Assagioli, Carl Jung, and various contemporary psychospiritual, somatic, and trauma-informed modalities that approach the human being as a holistic body-mind-spirit complex.

This article explores:

• What Is Psychospiritual Work?

• The Limitations of a One-Sided Approach

• Psychospiritual Work Is a Bridge Between Worlds

• Why Differentiation Is Essential in Psychospiritual Work

• The Porosity of the Mind

• The Danger of the Intermediate Zone

• The New Age Astral Circus

• Beyond Mental Discernment and Creating the Divine Center Within

• The Great Unveiling at the End of an Age

• The Dark Age of Materialism and the Spiritual Vacuum

• The Great Work of Alchemical Transformation

• Why This Work Is a Battle That Affects You Beyond Your Personal Life

• The Role of Will in Psychospiritual Work

• Who This Work Is For and Who It Is Not For

What Is Psychospiritual Work?

As the name implies, psychospiritual work is the fusion of psychological and spiritual work: two streams that are often kept apart. Before making the case for joining them, let me describe what each one is based on my approach and understanding.

Psychological Work

Psychological work, in a nutshell, is the process of becoming conscious of the psyche, making the unconscious conscious, and becoming a more integrated whole human being.

By the psyche, I mean the ego, the shadow, inner-child parts, sub-personalities, complexes, childhood wounds, trauma imprints, defense mechanisms, projections, triggers, the anima or animus, the socio-cultural conditioning, and the unconscious drives that shape our actions and our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of reality.

The first thing it reveals is that you are not one unified self. You are a mixture of sub-personalities that you mistake for a single, continuous “I.”

To do this work, you need a map of the psyche, so you can tell what is what. And this is not only an intellectual process. You can fool yourself into believing you are doing the work when you are merely intellectualizing it.

You can be aware of your inner child, your anima or animus, and aspects of your shadow without ever truly integrating any of them.

It is a trap many people in our head-centric Western world fall into, myself included. I remember going deep into Jung’s work and inner child work in the 90s, filling folders with insights about my shadow and my childhood wounds, only to realize almost a decade later that I had merely intellectualized the whole thing.

I had missed the emotional and somatic dimensions needed in the work. I had mistaken dissociation and intellectual understanding for integration and healing. It was a defense mechanism that kept me from dissolving what Wilhelm Reich called the “armor” of my hardened body-mind of stuck and repressed emotions, or from melting what Gurdjieff called the “buffers” that keep us from feeling conscience.

The work is to meet all of it without judgment. To learn to tell one part from another. To feel all feelings, release what was repressed, retrieve what you have projected onto others, hold the tension of opposites within without externalizing, and integrate what has been split off from the psyche.

None of this is new. The idea that we are many parts that must be differentiated and integrated to bring forth the true Self runs through the esoteric traditions, from Esoteric Christianity to ancient yogic psychology to the mystery schools. Gurdjieff put it bluntly a century ago:

“Man has no individual ‘I’, but there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small ‘I’s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible.

Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, ‘I’.

And each time, his “I” is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.”

– G. I. Gurdjieff

Today, we have new psychotherapeutic and somatic modalities that allow us to do this work in a far more integrated, embodied way than was once possible. I see that as part of the evolution of consciousness itself and a very positive part of the times we’re in.

This work is becoming more refined, more accessible, and more widely understood than ever before, and many individuals are doing great work in this field.

Spiritual Work

Spiritual work is the work of opening upward. It is based on the understanding that a spiritual reality and a higher intelligence exist beyond the material world and what we perceive through our five senses.

It is also based on the understanding and experience that there is a soul-being within us, an expression of the eternal Divine essence, that incarnates into a body over successive lifetimes according to the impersonal Divine law of Karma, which is often misunderstood and oversimplified.

Through this process, consciousness evolves from dense matter toward unification with the Divine and the spiritualization of all life. It is the reach toward the Divine, toward God, toward a higher consciousness that is not the product of our ego.

The key aspects of spiritual work are aspiration, prayer, devotion, purification, meditation, and surrender to the higher Divine Force, which some traditions call God or Great Spirit. It is nothing external to us, not some judging guy in the sky, but the all-pervading Divine Force that created the universe. Nothing can exist outside of God. All is in the Divine. The Divine is in all.

Spiritual work is not an escape. It is not a simple transcendence that leaves the world behind, an exit from samsara and the wheel of rebirth for merely personal liberation, or even a departure from the body into a purely spiritual existence. This is where Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science become central to my approach.

The aim is not to flee the world, deny it, or see it as a burden, prison, or sin, but to transform it: to bring the Divine into mind, life, and body, and ultimately to participate in the spiritualization of matter, the earth, and humanity itself.

We will come back to the full scope of that vision later. For now, it is enough to say that genuine spiritual work anchors the higher Force into the body and into life rather than using spirituality as a means of escape from them.

The Limitations of a One-Sided Approach

Psychological work alone, without aspiration to the Divine, often becomes endless “digging in the mud,” stuck in symptoms, stories, and analysis that trace everything back to childhood.

There is no higher vertical dimension, no higher force to actually transform the nature of one’s being, and no aim beyond a slightly more comfortable life. It can keep us chained to the very past and identities it was meant to free us from.

Spiritual work alone, without psychological work, can lead to spiritual bypassing, spiritual grandiosity, and overestimation of one’s level of consciousness.

It can mistake dissociation and disembodiment for awakening, or misappropriate higher truths like “All is one” and “All is the Divine” to avoid dealing with the shadow, the reality of evil at this level of existence, and the necessity for differentiation.

We become weighed down by the suppressed past without processing it, while we “dream of waking up,” as the ego becomes spiritualized and wounded parts can take on a spiritual or religious identity to feel better, special, and “more awake” than others.

Psychospiritual Work Is a Bridge Between Worlds

It is not either/or. It is integral.

Psychospiritual work brings the Divine impulse into the human experience and helps transmute the wounded ego into an instrument of the Divine, aligned with the soul’s purpose and dharma.

Psychological work processes the past in order to integrate its karmic lessons. Spiritual work aspires to the Divine, which draws us toward the future of who we are meant to become: the true Self, the soul-being, the embodiment of the Divine, or Christ, within. And the two reconcile in the present, through soul embodiment and surrender to the Divine.

Psychological work must go beyond talk therapy and intellectual analysis. It needs to be processed somatically, through the body, allowing unintegrated material to be felt, released, integrated, or transmuted.

This prepares the vessel for the Divine to descend from above and creates space for the true Self to emerge from within.

Spiritual work must go beyond the impulse to escape the world. Integrative spirituality anchors the Divine into the body and into life. It does not retreat from difficulty, but meets it fully engaged in life, becoming a spiritual warrior in service of the Divine, grounded in presence and action, and aligned with dharma as a unique instrument of Divine Will.

Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis is especially relevant here because it emerged from psychoanalysis while also opening toward the spiritual and transpersonal dimensions of the human being.

Assagioli was influenced by Freud, Jung, whom he knew personally and regarded as a major influence, Eastern spirituality, Western mysticism, and Theosophy. He also showed a strong affinity for Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga.

His model includes the lower unconscious, the middle unconscious, the higher unconscious, the conscious “I,” the Self, sub-personalities, and the role of the will in the process of integration and synthesis.

One of Assagioli’s most important contributions was his emphasis on the will.

He argued that many psychological systems neglected the will, even though transformation requires conscious participation.

For Assagioli, the will is not forcefulness or egoic control. It is the capacity to consciously choose, direct attention, align with higher values, and participate in one’s own evolution. It is something many people tend to lack, and it is one of the main reasons people fall off the path. We will explore the importance of the will in psychospiritual work later in this article.

A synthesis of psychospiritual work is key because psychological work can create a false ceiling when it only focuses on the lower unconscious: childhood wounds, trauma, attachment patterns, repressed emotions, and outdated survival strategies.

Psychological work on this level is necessary, but if we stop there, we may remain identified with the past and never open to the higher dimensions of our being.

Self-development and self-actualization can create another false ceiling, getting stuck in the middle unconscious in Assagioli’s model.

This is the realm of much popular self-help, motivational, and “create your own reality” work. It often attempts to adjust the ego-personality to the outer world, focusing on confidence, success, productivity, emotional regulation, thought control, and the creation of the life the personality thinks it wants.

Some of this may be useful at a certain stage. It can help people develop the will, become more functional, disciplined, confident, and capable in the world.

But if it remains centered on the ego-personality and its desires, without ever questioning where those desires come from, it still operates below the threshold of the soul. The little self may improve, but it does not necessarily surrender, purify, or transform itself in service of the higher Will.

In both cases, the work may produce a more functional personality, but not a being aligned with the soul’s intention and the Divine.

Psychospiritual work must move beyond these false ceilings. It includes healing the wounds of the lower unconscious, integrating the personal shadow, and developing a healthy personality, but it does not stop there.

It opens to the higher unconscious, the soul, the deeper Self, and ultimately the Divine, creating a communion between the “I” and the Higher Self, also knwon as the Solar Angel or Guardian Angel in other traditions.

In that process, the little self becomes a conscious transducer for Divine Will, no longer driven by the conditioned desires of the ego-personality.

This is why an integral approach is necessary. The lower must be healed and integrated. The middle must be made conscious and turned into a healthy ego capable of opening itself to the higher Force.

Otherwise, we remain trapped in the past, in an improved ego that we mistake for the true Self, or lost in spiritual inflation without embodiment and true integration.

Why Differentiation Is Essential in Psychospiritual Work

But integration is only possible once we can tell the parts apart. We cannot integrate what we cannot first differentiate.

To do real inner work, we must learn to observe and differentiate our inner world: sub-personalities, programmed ego structures, inner children, Anima/Animus, triggered shadow fragments, Trauma responses, and the True Self.

Without this kind of self-observation and a clear map of the psyche, we can’t truly engage in inner work because we don’t know what we’re actually working with.

That’s why many people mistake their wounded inner child, protector parts, defense mechanisms, the socially programmed ego, or reactive shadow projections for their True Self.

Without Self-Knowledge, you can’t see yourself or reality clearly and are more easily manipulated by forces you’re unaware of.

Most psychological modalities include an understanding or map of the inner parts, even if it is on the most basic level, such as inner-child and protective parts in IFS, or Internal Family Systems.

Carl Jung’s depth psychology also offers a map of the psyche, including complexes, archetypes, and the personal and collective unconscious.

Most people who engage in spiritual work or open themselves up to the unseen higher realms through meditation, prayer, intense breathwork, psychedelics and medicine plants, or make contact with spiritual beings via channeling, mediumship, remote viewing, or calling in spiritual beings, ancestors, or guides, often have no idea what they are opening themselves up to.

This is the imbalance I keep seeing, and it is the reason I focus more on the spiritual side here.

Most people who do serious psychological work have at least some map of their inner parts, even a basic one. Anyone who is sincere in this work develops some awareness of when an inner-child part gets activated or their shadow is triggered.

Most people who do spiritual work have little to no idea, or maybe just a vague one, and overestimate their level of discernment and intuition. They open to the higher planes with no way to tell their own projections, wounds, and sub-personalities from the forces and beings they meet there.

The danger on the spiritual side is often the result of skipped psychological work. Without self-knowledge and inner differentiation, the seeker is far more likely to fall into spiritual bypassing and inflation.

Without the inner map, the seeker cannot tell a vital formation from a true contact, or his own inflated super-ego from a message from an “archangel,” or a fragmented, angry inner-child part from a hostile entity.

However, even without these spiritual practices and openings, everyone is already influenced by unseen forces and beings without conscious awareness. We simply mistake it all for our own inner material and lump it together as “I,” as Gurdjieff said, or we mistake parts of our psyche and inner sub-personalities for entities.

Inner differentiation is imperative for any sincere seeker and for those who intend to enter the spiritual realms and higher worlds.

Rudolf Steiner mentioned that if we haven’t developed deep self-knowledge, we won’t recognize our own inner parts when they reflect back to us, and we’ll mistake them for something foreign or external. He stressed that the safest path into higher realms always begins with honest self-inquiry and understanding our own nature.

The Porosity of the Mind

We are caught in the mind prison of materialistic reality, believing we alone create our thoughts, desires, feelings, and actions.

The sense of an independent identity and persona, separate and impenetrable from everything else, is one of the greatest illusions and spells we’ve fallen under.

The truth is, our mind is porous and permeable. We are transducers of cosmic, universal, and environmental forces, and we are influenced by conscious non-physical beings of the higher and lower realms, elementals, nature spirits, and the unseen forces of nature.

The porosity of the mind has been known to all occult and esoteric traditions. The great occultist Dion Fortune wrote in Psychic Self-Defense:

“We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them.

We need to realize that human consciousness is not a closed vessel. Cosmic forces circulate through it all the time, like seawater through a living sponge.

Whatever emotional state may arise within us is reinforced from the outside. The subjective self only has the kindling; the Cosmos supplies the fuel. Once the fire is started, the cosmic forces of the appropriate type will stoke it.”

– Dion Fortune, Psychic Self Defense

Many traditions have described hostile or adverse forces in various ways.

The Gnostics spoke of the Archons, Native American traditions of Wetiko, Sufi traditions of Shaitans, Arabian esoteric traditions of the Jinn, and Christianity of demonic forces and fallen spirits opposed to the Divine.

Rudolf Steiner described Ahrimanic, Asuric, Luciferic, and Soratic spirits, while Sri Aurobindo wrote of the Pishacha, Rakshasa, and Asura, hostile and adverse forces that, in his words, “seek to maintain falsehood in the world of Ignorance and present it as Truth.”

These forces are like astral parasites and vampiric entities that feed on our energy, false light beings and deceptive guides that masquerade as ascended masters, spirit guides, aliens, or angels of light, as well as egregores and collective thought-forms we feed and are fed by.

Even the psychic projections and thought formations of other people, conscious and unconscious, affect us without our awareness.

But not all unseen influences are hostile. Some are Divine and beneficent: the Divine Presence itself, higher guidance, God, the Higher Self, the soul or psychic being, the Divine Mother, the Shakti force of transformation and protection, the Christ Force, angelic beings, true guides, helpers on the higher planes in genuine service to the Divine, and the elemental forces and spirits of nature.

The Danger of the Intermediate Zone

This also relates to Sri Aurobindo’s warning about the “intermediate zone.”

When the spiritual seeker begins to expand his consciousness beyond the ordinary personal mind and opens to the higher planes, he does not automatically enter into the higher true spiritual realms.

He first enters what Sri Aurobindo called the “intermediate zone,” which overlaps with what many traditions call the astral realm, but is not limited to it.

It is a borderland between the physical and the true spiritual realms: a mixed zone of mental, vital, subtle-physical, and pseudo-spiritual formations where forces, beings, voices, suggestions, visions, half-truths, and deceptive lights can present themselves with great power and conviction.

Aurobindo mentioned that this is the plane where many distorted spiritual teachings originate, often brought forward by forces that imitate the Divine and seek to flatter and inflate the seeker’s ego.

I call this hyperdimensional Counter Intelligence, where truth is mixed with lies and discernment is very difficult, with malevolent beings often baiting with truth and then planting the lie within it, which the gullible seeker, tempted by his ego’s desire for the “marvelous” and “specialness,” swallows at the same time.

This is also the realm people enter when they take psychedelics, ayahuasca, DMT, psilocybin, or other “medicine plants”.

All these substances have become way more popular over the years, and people enter these realms without any understanding of what they are exposing themselves to. I had my share of experiences with them, both the dark and the light side, which I shared in a past article: Altered States of Entrapment: The Plant Medicine Manipulation

As Sri Aurobindo warned:

“The intermediary state is a zone of transition between the ordinary consciousness in mind and the true Yoga knowledge.

These intermediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialize something, or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth life, and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhak and make him their instrument for the purpose.

This is quite apart from the well-known danger of actually hostile beings whose sole purpose is to create confusion, falsehood, corruption of the sadhana, and disastrous unspiritual error. Anyone allowing himself to be taken hold of by one of these beings, who often take a divine Name, will lose his way in the Yoga.

Often, representing themselves as divine powers, they mislead, offer erroneous suggestions and impulses, and pervert the inner life.

One inevitably comes into contact with the vital plane and enters into it in the expansion of consciousness, which results from an inner opening, but one ought never to put oneself into the hands of these beings and forces or allow oneself to be led by their suggestions and impulsions.

This is one of the chief dangers of the spiritual life, and to be on one’s guard against it is a necessity for the seeker if he wishes to arrive at his goal.”

- Sri Aurobindo , Letters on Yoga

The New Age Astral Circus

This also connects to what David Hawkins called the New Age carnival or New Age astral circus.

Hawkins warned that many teachings presented as “spiritual” actually come from astral realms of consciousness. They may be seductive, fascinating, pleasurable, and even seemingly profound, but they do not lead to true awakening or God-realization.

They often appeal to the ego through specialness, secret knowledge, private messages from “God,” “masters,” “ETs,” or other beings, and can easily entrap the seeker in endless distractions.

As Sri Aurobindo warned, this is a zone many seekers must cross, where a great many get lost, tempted, and caught in the occult maze, some never finding their way out in this lifetime.

This understanding is especially important today because the online spiritual space is full of people presenting themselves as “channelers,” “remote viewers,” or transmitters of “codes,” “activations,” “downloads,” and “light language,” often based on contact with the intermediate zone, which they mistake for true higher guidance.

We see this increasingly in the new wave of New Age social media influencers. There is a growing trend of people claiming to be “remote viewers” and presenting all kinds of claims about aliens, galactic missions, and hidden cosmic agendas as absolute facts.

Be especially discerning of anyone who claims to be in contact with “alien beings” as their source of information and guidance.

There will be much more of this in the coming years, especially in conjunction with official UFO disclosure. This is part of a much larger deception by beings and forces that have been around for a very long time. I wrote more about this topic in my recent article here: Official Disclosure and the Rise of the Alien Religion

There is also a lot of spiritual grandiosity at work, with people claiming to have special insights, special access, and knowledge only they can receive. This is one of the ways the Luciferic deception works.

True discernment requires humility and grounded psychospiritual work.

It requires understanding that the astral and hyperdimensional realms are full of deception, mimicry, half-truths, and manipulation.

Just because something feels “high frequency,” expansive, cosmic, or “resonates” does not mean it comes from a higher Divine source or that it is true.

There is also such a thing as false resonance, often rooted in wishful thinking, emotional projection, and the unconscious desire to believe.

The false light can feel very convincing to the spiritualized ego, especially when it flatters our desire to feel special, chosen, advanced, or part of some cosmic mission.

This is why grounded psychospiritual work is so necessary. Without psychological integration, the ego can easily appropriate spiritual experiences. Without spiritual discernment, the seeker can mistake forces of the intermediate zone for Divine guidance.

Beyond Mental Discernment and Creating the Divine Center Within

All of this is beyond the mind to fully comprehend, and the differentiation needed here is not intellectual discernment alone. A purely mental approach can lead to analysis-paralysis, paranoia, and misdiagnosis. Nor is trusting only one’s feelings enough, for they can be misleading and infuenced by positive projections and wishful thinking.

While an understanding of these forces and their influence on us is necessary, along with a basic map or cosmology, we must not become dogmatic about it.

Unfortunately, this often happens when people become too identified with one specific teaching, system, or religion and attempt to interpret everything through only one lens.

What is even more needed is the development of psychic sensitivity, embodied discernment, sincerity, and spiritual perception.

This is not necessarily the same as clairvoyance, but is based on a connection to the true Self and the psychic being within. Just because someone has clairvoyant abilities does not automatically mean they are discerning, sincere, or on a higher level of consciousness.

For the average person who lives only on the surface of the mind and mistakes the ego-personality for the true Self, the inner life appears fairly simple: desires, thoughts, preferences, emotions, needs, moods, health concerns, ambitions, and the usual movements of daily life. It all seems to belong to “me,” lumped together into a single “I.”

But once we go deeper, we discover that the inner world is not simple at all. It is vast, complex, layered, and filled with forces, parts, impulses, and influences we were previously unaware of. What we mistook for one self and a single “I” is actually a whole inner world that must be known, differentiated, mastered, and brought under a higher Divine order.

The ultimate aim of psychospiritual work is to create a Divine center within us, bring forth the true Self, and align with Divine Will amidst all these influences, forces, and beings, all of which play their part in the evolution of consciousness, including evil.

As Sri Aurobindo described it:

“The average human being even now is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life.

But as soon as we go deep within ourselves, we find ourselves surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know and to conquer.

We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature.

Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.

Moreover, we find that inwardly, too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world.

The sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion. We do not exist in ourselves. We do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude.

Our mind is a receiving, developing, and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed, from moment to moment, a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside.

Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves.

A large part comes to us from others or from the environment… But still more largely they come from universal Nature here, or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences.

For we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness… from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use of for the manifestation of their forms and forces.

Of all this, we have to take account. To deal with it. To know what is the secret stuff of our nature and its constituent and resultant motions.

And to create in it all a divine centre, and a true harmony and luminous order.”

— Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

The Great Unveiling at the End of an Age

In my article The Time of Transition: The End of an Age and the Birth of a New Humanity, I explored the larger esoteric and evolutionary cycle and context of this period.

Humanity is in the midst of the death of an old era and the birth of a new one.

What we are witnessing is not only a political, economic, social, or ecological crisis. At its root, it is a spiritual crisis: a crisis of meaning, a disconnection from the Divine, and the exposure of a humanity trapped in ego-consciousness and a materialistic worldview.

The Time of Transition refers to the threshold between world ages. A successful transition depends on whether enough individuals consciously engage in the Great Work: becoming individuated, purified, spiritualized, and capable of anchoring the Divine Force within and in the world.

From the perspective of the Yuga Cycle, we are at the end of the Kali Yuga, the darkest and most materialistic phase of the Great Year of a 26,000-year cycle. (Note: There is much debate about when the Kali Yuga has ended or is ending. For an in-depth exploration of this topic, read my recent article and linked resources)

This is the age in which humanity has become the most separated from the Divine, the most identified with the body, the ego, the lower nature, and the material world.

It is also the age in which hostile forces have the greatest access to humanity through fear, disembodiment, fragmentation, ignorance, the lower nature, and the loss of conscious connection to the spiritual world.

The transition out of this age is not smooth or comfortable. It is a purification phase. Everything hidden is being brought to the surface: the personal shadow, the collective shadow, karmic residues, and the hidden forces that have been influencing humanity from behind the veil.

It is the apocalypse, which is the great unveiling.

We are not alone, and we’ve never been alone. We are approaching what some esoteric traditions have called “the unveiling of the heaven of the gods.”

There are forces and beings from unseen realms that have influenced humanity for thousands of years, and no one is exempt from their influence.

Part of spiritual work and the awakening process is becoming aware of what influences us and developing the discernment to recognize what is what.

As one opens to higher levels of awareness and begins to develop spiritual perception, contact with these beings and forces becomes inevitable in one form or another. This is why inner differentiation is so essential: to clearly recognize what to accept and integrate, and what to reject.

The thinning of the veil not only reveals higher spiritual realities. It also exposes us more directly to deception, impostor beings, false light, and the occult forces that have been influencing humanity for a long time.

At the same time, powerful Divine forces are guiding and assisting humanity through this critical phase.

At the hyperdimensional spiritual level, this manifests as a “war through us.” The most critical choice is what we align ourselves with and what we consent to.

The Dark Age of Materialism and the Spiritual Vacuum

The modern world is marked by a strange contradiction.

On the one hand, we have extreme technological advancement, artificial intelligence, material comfort, and unprecedented access to information.

On the other hand, we see increasing spiritual emptiness, psychological fragmentation, disembodiment, moral inversion, loss of meaning, and the growing mechanization of thought and consciousness.

Material progress is not the same as spiritual evolution. A more advanced technology does not mean a more awakened humanity.

In fact, when technology develops without spiritual maturity, it can become a tool of further enslavement and disintegration.

Artificial intelligence and transhumanism are expressions of the final temptation of materialism: the belief that consciousness can be reduced to information, that the human being can be upgraded through technology alone, without inner purification, embodiment, soul development, or alignment with the Divine.

This is the spiritual vacuum of the modern age, which Rudolf Steiner warned about.

When the connection to the Divine is lost, and people lack an inner spiritual orientation and are overly externally oriented, with a predominantly materialistic view of themselves, humanity, and the world, something else fills the void.

Adversary and hostile beings fill that void and take over humanity, working through humans to implement a spiritually dead, materialistic world. Hostile spirits are attracted by spiritual emptiness caused by materialism and mechanical, passive living.

As people withdraw from spiritual aspiration and inspiration, their physical bodies become exposed to the influence of non-human, hostile forces. Rudolf Steiner warned that future generations would have weakened or absent souls, making their bodies vulnerable to possession by demonic entities.

The true evolution of humanity is not the replacement or enhancement of the body by technology, or the merging with the machine.

It is the spiritualization of the human being.

It is the awakening of the soul, the purification of the lower nature, the embodiment of the higher consciousness, and the transformation of mind, life, and body through the Divine Force.

The Great Work of Alchemical Transformation

This is why, in my view, a more integrated and broader form of psychospiritual work, as outlined here, is so necessary during the Time of Transition.

Without it, humanity becomes increasingly vulnerable to the forces that seek to pull consciousness downward into mechanization and spiritual amnesia.

As I explored in a past article, the aim of this work is not merely healing, self-improvement, or becoming a more functional personality. The deeper aim is alchemical transformation: from the lead of the lower nature to the gold of the true Self.

In the esoteric Christian tradition, this is related to the “second birth,” the inner rebirth through which the old self dies, and the soul-being begins to emerge.

In Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, this points toward the emergence of the Divine Gnostic Being: the transformed human being no longer ruled by the lower nature, carnal desire, ignorance, fear, disease, aging, and death.

This is not an escape into some imaginary heaven elsewhere. The Divine Force is not only meant to transform the individual but also life and the earth itself. The aim is not to leave the world behind, but to bring the higher consciousness into mind, life, body, matter, and the earth.

But we cannot skip any steps.

It is tempting to bypass the difficult work, get trapped in corrupted religious dogma, get lost in New Age fast-food spirituality, fall into spiritual narcissism, or succumb to the Luciferic temptation of believing one has already “ascended,” been “saved,” been “raptured,” or one is already “awake”.

The real process requires both descent and ascent. It requires a confrontation with the darkness, falsehood, our wounds, and evil within ourselves, the very things we so easily project outward and deny in our own being.

Nor will things improve simply by trying to fix the outer world while remaining unchanged within, or by desperately searching for a “safe place” and falling into materialistic survival mode.

The true refuge is not found in external security alone. It begins with seeking the Kingdom within, bringing forth a grounded spirituality, and consciously engaging in the Great Work of purification, embodiment, and alignment with Divine Will.

Why This Work Is a Battle That Affects You Beyond Your Personal Life

As Sri Aurobindo noted, engaging sincerely on the path, anchoring the Divine Force, and transforming one’s being and the world is to enter an inner battle.

It takes the form of a spiritual war because there are forces invested in keeping you asleep. They especially target those who are on the verge of a deeper awakening.

“Accepting life, [the spiritual warrior] has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too, along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load.

Therefore, his Work has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country.

He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world.”

— Sri Aurobindo

Why is that? Because once your consciousness expands through sincere inner work, you will inevitably come into contact with various forces and beings that are battling over humanity.

You do not live in a solipsistic vacuum. Aurobindo also mentioned that the same battles return, even after you believe you have won them. The forces you face operate far beyond your personal life, and they have, in his words, “an almost endless right to recurrence.”

He said that because your inner existence has been enlarged, you are no longer fighting only for yourself. You have entered into solidarity with the being of others because, as he puts it, “in himself he [the spiritual warrior] contains the universe.”

In other words, the more sincere you are in this work, the more you help transform and heal the world.

As you raise your level of consciousness through this inner purification and shadow integration and come more into alignment with the Divine Force, your whole being has a positive effect on others and the world.

Your actions, as they become more aligned with the higher Will, have more powerful effects than those of social activists or conspiracy theorists who split psychologically, externalize all evil and darkness, never look within, and only fight shadows on the wall.

This path is not passive and doesn’t lead to inaction. It leads to right action in alignment with the higher Will.

The Role of Will in Psychospiritual Work

This battle is not won by aspiration alone. We need to engage the will.

Many people like the idea of awakening, individuation, and living a more authentic life based on their true Self.

They like the idea of alignment with Divine Will and living in alignment with their dharma. However, many people underestimate how important the will is in this work.

Some even mistake spirituality for being passive, just going with the flow, doing what they feel like, and mistaking feelings for intuition or Divine Guidance.

Others do not realize how deeply this work can affect their lives, including relationships, marriages, friendships, careers, identity, self-image, and everything they hold dear and are attached to. They also underestimate how much disillusionment is part of the process.

Psychospiritual work is not just about having insights, reading spiritual books, watching videos, or having peak experiences.

Nowadays, many people think awakening means scrolling social media, liking spiritual posts and memes, and watching 30-second clips, mistaking quick dopamine hits for “resonating” and “awakening.”

But real inner work is not a pastime you engage in whenever you feel inspired.

It is not a self-improvement or self-actualization program for the ego-personality we mistake for the true Self.

Real inner work requires the capacity to stay with what is uncomfortable and often painful to see. This is where the will becomes essential.

Engaging sincerely in psychospiritual work and individuation will bring up all kinds of internal and external resistance, along with distractions, rationalizations, excuses, uncomfortable feelings, and many other defense mechanisms that keep us from engaging in the work.

I’ve seen again and again how much people lie to themselves and make up all kinds of justifications.

And I have seen it within myself as well: the excuses and lies I was telling myself, realizing what both Carl Jung and Gurdjieff also saw:

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”

- Carl Jung

“To speak the truth, one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

- G. I. Gurdjieff

The programmed ego structure and wounded subpersonality parts stuck in grandiosity or self-pity and inferiority do not readily give themselves up. They prefer the familiar and the comfortable.

We need to observe ourselves honestly, stay present with uncomfortable emotions, face our shadow, withdraw projections, and take responsibility for the parts of ourselves we would rather not see.

Spiritual will is not the same as egoic will or forceful doing.

It is not about pushing or striving from the personality. It is certainly not ambition. It may use the ego as its instrument, but it originates from deep within the soul as a movement to align with the Divine.

It is the strength to choose truth over comfort. It is the capacity to recommit when part of you wants to quit. It is also the ability to feel all feelings without suppressing them or projecting them onto others.

Many people begin inner work because they feel inspired or called to do so. But once the work becomes challenging, the old personality often comes up with a million excuses:

“Now is not the right time.”

“This is too much.”

“I’m just going with the flow.”

“I’m busy. I don’t have time.”

Sometimes those statements may be true. But often they are the voice of resistance disguised as guidance.

This is why spiritual language can easily justify avoidance and a weak will. The ego can use “trust,” “flow,” “alignment,” and “surrender” to avoid the very friction that would actually help the soul grow.

The ego wants healing, awakening, and transformation on its own terms, without the death of its cherished self-images. It wants the fruits of the Work without the inner purification the Work demands.

Psychospiritual work requires the will to stay focused when the lower nature wants to scatter our attention, avoid discomfort, or retreat back into the known and familiar.

It requires the will to recognize our triggers, self-importance, victim stories, hidden agendas, and self-deceptions.

It also requires the willpower to push through the resistance of hostile forces that interfere with any sincere seeker, trying to pull him away from the path.

Real psychospiritual work requires both receptivity and effort. It requires openness to Grace and guidance, as well as the willingness to do one’s part.

As it is said, God helps those who help themselves. We need to build a strong will before we can offer it to the Divine and become conscious instruments of Divine Will.

Who This Work Is For and Who It Is Not For

The psychospiritual work I have described in this article is not for everyone.

This is not a value judgment of anyone’s worth. It is not about someone being “better” or “worse.” It is simply a matter of readiness and sincerity in the context of the evolution of consciousness.

There are vastly different levels of consciousness within humanity. We are all one, but we are not all the same, and not everyone is ready for this work.

It is not for people who are still firmly locked into a materialistic worldview and cannot even entertain the possibility of God, the Divine, spiritual realities, unseen forces, karma, reincarnation, or the evolution of the soul.

This work is not for those firmly identified with atheism, materialism, or the belief that consciousness is merely produced by the brain, nor is it for those who take a strictly reductionist approach to psychology and see the human being as nothing more than biology, conditioning, chemistry, and neurological processes.

There is no use trying to convince someone who is not ready to see beyond the material world, especially if they demand “scientific proof” for God or for realities that cannot be reduced to the limitations of materialistic science.

At the same time, this work is not for dogmatic religious believers who externalize God and evil, project their shadow onto others, and remain rigidly identified with their religious doctrine.

It is not for those who demonize or dismiss psychology as a whole because of their religious fundamentalist beliefs. It is especially not for those who believe their faith, scripture, teacher, church, lineage, or tradition is the only and ultimate truth.

Both extremes, materialistic reductionism and religious dogmatism, create their own closed systems that keep humanity entrapped and vulnerable to the forces of darkness.

It is not for those who are still stuck in blame toward their ex, parents, the government, the elite, any political or ideological group, entities, or anyone else, who keep complaining about the world, see it as a “prison planet” they need to escape from, and refuse to take responsibility for their outer life and inner world.

It is not for those looking for a quick fix or shortcuts, and who are not willing to “pay with themselves,” as Gurdjieff said, through effort and spiritual will.

It is also not for those who merely want “spiritual experiences,” want to take on a spiritual identity, are just curious, or believe spirituality is a trendy thing to get into.

It is something beyond all of this, and for people who sense a deep call from the soul within to align with something higher.

It is for those willing to do both the psychological and the spiritual work, who understand that neither half is enough on its own.

It is also for those willing to look within, to own their shadow, and to withdraw the projections they have cast onto others, the world, and even onto God.

It is for those ready to embark on the path of Individuation, where the question shifts from “What do I want?” and “How can I manifest my desires?” to “Who am I?” and “What does the Divine seek to express through me?”, restoring a direct relationship with the transpersonal.

It is for those who are ready to surrender their personal will to Divine Will.

And it is for those who long to become a conscious instrument of the Divine, knowing that their own transformation is also in service to the world.

This is the path of the spiritual warrior.

“The majority of people find many excuses not to work on themselves.
They are in a complete prison of their weaknesses.

Understand me right, I do not need followers.
I am rather interested in finding the real warriors of the new world.”

– Gurdjieff, The Last Hour of Life

Engaging in psychospiritual work requires an inner opening, a call from the soul within that is ready to embark on this path with sincerity, humility, and self-responsibility, and a willingness to give oneself to the Divine.

Even if that call is still met with resistance, fear, and doubt, at least a seed has started to sprout.

It is for sincere seekers, spiritual warriors, and those who sense, deep within, the importance of this Time of Transition and the work necessary, and who know that the nature of true transformation is a battle.

At the same time, they embrace it with an inner joy born of their soul essence and independent of outer circumstances, for they know, deep inside, that its successful outcome is glorious, magnificent, and beyond what the mind can comprehend.

They know that this is why they came here and that they have been here many times before. They have crossed the threshold, and there is no turning back.

There is only the call to accept their role as servants of the Divine, however it may manifest in their lives and through their unique path.

Rejoice and Godspeed.

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psychospiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast. His work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold.

His approach integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, spiritual discernment, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at Piercing the Veil of Reality

Go Deeper

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It is grounded in psychospiritual integration in service of awakening, purification, and alignment with the Divine.

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Contents

• The Official UFO Disclosure Machine

• Managed Disclosure and the New Creation Myth

• The Lure of “Mysticism of Phenomena” & The New Age Astral Circus

• The Illusion of Awakening

• How I Got Pulled Into the Disclosure Narrative

• The Disclosure Movement Has Gone Mainstream

• Divine Forces, Free Will, and the Kali Yuga

• The Need for Spiritual Discernment

The Official UFO Disclosure Machine

The official UFO disclosure machine has now moved into its next phase.

The Department of War announced the release of initial “never-before-seen” UAP files through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. More files are said to be released on a rolling basis after security review.

The whole process is being presented as a historic transparency effort and an unprecedented commitment to openness on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

Historic indeed.

But not as most people believe it is.

This is not simply the government finally “telling the truth.”

It is the formalization of a narrative.

There is indeed a UFO cover-up, but it is not what most people believe or want it to be.

To be clear, I don’t claim to know the whole truth about this phenomenon. No one does. What I am pointing to is a deeper pattern I have observed through decades of research, inner work, and study of the esoteric traditions: the UFO/Alien phenomenon cannot be understood through a purely materialist lens.

I wrote about this in much more depth back in 2010 in my essay, “UFOs, Aliens, and the Question of Contact,” where I explored the hyperdimensional, occult, and spiritual nature of the phenomenon, and why the standard “alien visitation” narrative is already a deception. A year later, that article became the basis for my UFO documentary.

For decades, humanity has been prepared and programmed for this moment through Hollywood movies, controlled leaks, intelligence-linked disclosure movements, “whistleblowers,” New Age channeling, alien contact narratives, and the constant promise that hidden knowledge about UFOs and “alien technology” would one day be revealed.

Now the government steps forward and says: we are opening the files.

The deeper issue is that most of the disclosure movement still operates inside a materialist “nuts and bolts” framework. It assumes we are dealing primarily with craft, technology, biological aliens, crash retrievals, secret programs, and hidden government knowledge.

I’m not denying the physical aspect, but that framework is too small and limited. It is still rooted in the worldview of our dark age of materialism, where spiritual realities are either denied, distorted, or forced into physical or psychological explanations.

As I already made the case sixteen years ago in my article and film, the government doesn’t really know what is going on. Not even black-op projects, Area 51, or other secret, clandestine programs have full control over this phenomenon.

Yes, some may have more awareness of its nature and may even be in contact with certain beings or intelligences. But they are pawns to it, too.

No human structure controls it because the phenomenon cannot be reduced to the physical plane alone.

It can produce real material effects, visible manifestations, craft-like appearances, physiological responses, trace evidence, and encounters that are experienced as physical, not merely imagined or symbolic.

But the physical aspect appears to be one expression of a deeper hyperdimensional, paraphysical, and spiritual reality, not the whole of it.

That is what the “nuts and bolts” materialist framework misses.

This is also why the “advanced alien technology” narrative is so deceptive.

What people are being conditioned to interpret as extraterrestrial technology may be the outer appearance of a much deeper occult phenomenon, not proof that benevolent ETs are flying in from distant planets to save or upgrade humanity and gift us “free energy” technology.

Some of it may also be highly advanced human technology, developed through black-budget programs or hidden research, that is later presented to the public as “alien technology.”

Either way, the narrative serves the same purpose: to direct humanity’s attention outward, toward technology, savior beings, and external rescue, instead of inward toward soul embodiment, alignment with the Divine, and the activation of our inherent spiritual organs and abilities.

This is our true “inner organic technology,” and it is far more powerful than anything external technology can offer.

The deeper forces behind it have been interacting with humanity for thousands of years, much of it outside our ordinary range of perception. They shape-shift and materialize according to the zeitgeist of any age, appearing as fairies, demons, angels, gods, spirit beings, and now as “aliens” in “UFO spaceships.”

We are in a spiritual war.

There are unseen forces acting upon humanity, and we are the battleground. The “alien invasion” has already happened, hidden from five-sensory perception.

As more people fall into disembodiment, distraction, and influences they do not recognize, the call to reclaim sovereignty and align with the Divine and our true spiritual nature has never been more urgent.

As the veil thins, anyone on a sincere path of awakening needs to understand the deeper spiritual realities we are embedded in and the forces that influence us.

Perhaps this is one of the real reasons for this “soft disclosure.” Certain factions of people “in the know” may also understand that some of these beings will make their appearance and become more visible.

Without deeper discernment, people become far more vulnerable to manipulation, projection, false guidance, and narratives that appear liberating but lead deeper into bondage.

This is especially important in the age of UFO “disclosure” and the deceptive nature of “alien” narratives, which are not new.

As these forces become more visible and their influence more obvious, the population is being prepared for disclosure in the most deceptive way.

In my view, this is part of the endgame of hostile occult forces that have been manipulating humanity for eons.

We need the capacity to perceive, differentiate, and choose what we align with, both within ourselves and in the world.

Managed Disclosure and the New Creation Myth

Any official disclosure will be managed disclosure, designed to further a specific agenda.

It functions like the ultimate COINTELPRO operation.

The national security state, Hollywood, and now the mainstream media have been conditioning the masses for this since the 1950s. It is no surprise that Steven Spielberg’s new UFO film, Disclosure Day, is scheduled for release in June 2026.

The long-term agenda appears to be the seeding of an alien religion for a spiritually starved population, including the claim that humanity was “created” or genetically engineered by alien beings.

I once believed this too, influenced by deceptivr New Age channeled material and fringe literal interpretations of ancient texts. But I now see this idea as part of the larger endgame. It fits perfectly with the Transhumanist and AI agenda: the installation of technology as humanity’s savior, the emergence of an “AI god” or oracle, and the further severing of humanity from its soul-being and spiritual nature.

This also ties into what I have written about regarding the spiritual effects of the COVID vaccine. In my view, the vaccine campaign was another front in the same spiritual war, contributing to disembodiment, soul fragmentation, and greater susceptibility to the Transhumanist trajectory.

Note: For those new to this topic, I recommend reading my article “The COVID Vaccine and the Spiritual War for Humanity” and my interview “Supersensible Investigations: A Deep Dive Into Occult Psychology and Spiritual Warfare.”

The alien creation myth installs a new origin story, funnels attention toward “alien technology” as humanity’s savior, and gets people to welcome what they should be questioning.

In this dark age at the end of the Kali Yuga, many people are disconnected from their true Self and inner guidance, fed up with mainstream religion, suspicious of official history, lost, confused, and spiritually hungry.

The alien narrative fills that vacuum.

It offers a ready-made mythology for a population craving meaning but unwilling to engage in real, grounded psycho-spiritual work. It gives people something “out there” to blame or worship, and a fantasy that “alien technology” will save, redeem, and uplift humanity.

What’s often called “alien contact” is an embedded spiritual hierarchy misperceived as extraterrestrial visitors, with deceptive shape-shifting forces posing as “aliens.”

These beings can take on any appearance needed to create what occult traditions call a “trap of agreement,” pulling people into consent through illusion, projection, wishful thinking, and the promise of special knowledge or power.

The Lure of Mysticism of Phenomena & The New Age Astral Circus

Sri Aurobindo warned about this danger. He said, when people are impatient, not sincere in their inner work, spiritually hungry, and looking for shortcuts to the “marvelous” or “magical,” they become easy prey for deceptive forces.

The esoteric traditions call this the lure of “mysticism of phenomena.”

This is also what we see in so much New Age “channeled” material, from deceptive beings like “Bashar,” who claims to be an “ET,” to the “Galactic Federation of Light.”

The allure of secret cosmic knowledge about galactic federations, alien agendas, ET races, and ascension timelines is often wrapped in mysterious, otherworldly language that can seem profound, fascinating, and spiritually advanced.

Many New Age ascension movements and Keylontic cosmologies are propelled by charismatic figures who use complex doctrines to assert authority, claiming to be “chosen” as an “ambassador,” “contactee,” or messenger of the Galactic Federation, Alliance, or some other supposed cosmic hierarchy. Only they, of course, have access to this “special knowledge.”

These teachings often offer a shortcut path to awakening through “special” codes, templates, DNA activations, upgrades, repairs, and complex “ascension mechanics,” without any grounded psycho-spiritual inner work.

They can produce temporary effects: a sense of uplift, meaning, expansion, or cosmic importance. But without sincerity, humility, embodiment, and real inner work, these experiences do not create a true foundation.

They often lead to spiritual bypassing, dissociation, inflation, and a false sense of awakening. When the ego hijacks these experiences, they can also feed grandiosity, spiritual narcissism, and the illusion of being more evolved or “chosen” than others.

Even worse, many of these teachings open people to so-called higher-dimensional communication without proper discernment or understanding of how Luciferic forces and other entities mimic the light. This makes sincere seekers vulnerable to astral hijacking, manipulation, and deceptive forms of spiritual interference.

As Boris Mouravieff wrote in Gnosis:

“It is possible to obtain so-called esoteric results that are impure, but they are false and thus transitory. Here we refer to the vast realm of occultism, where the children of this century, more capable than the children of light, seek to apply their abilities beyond the visible world. This occurs in what we call ‘mysticism of phenomena.’

These people are open to any form of hypnotic suggestion and practically ask to be hypnotized. They are of good faith, but they search for the ‘marvelous’ because they are too weak or too lazy to undertake esoteric work successfully.”

As Sri Aurobindo said when asked directly about “alien beings”:

“No trust can be put on the beauty of the eyes or the face. There are many Beings of the inferior planes who have a captivating beauty and can enthrall with it, and they can give too an Ananda [Bliss] which is not of the highest and may, on the contrary, by its lure take away from the path altogether. It is necessary to keep one’s steps firmly on the straight road to the Highest; all else must wait for the proper time.”

David Hawkins made a similar point in The Eye of the I, warning that many so-called “spiritual” teachings come from astral realms that can be seductive, fascinating, and pleasurable, but do not lead to true awakening.

He described this whole field as an “astral circus”:

“Many ‘spiritual’ teachings come from ‘astral’ realms of consciousness, which in themselves can be seductive, unending, and pleasurable, but they do not lead to enlightenment. Some misleading figures claim special private instructions from God and become self-proclaimed prophets and visionaries.

Avoid the attractive but irrelevant. There are endless astral realms and universes, each with its own masters, spiritual hierarchy, and belief systems. Many are quite intriguing, gratifying, even joyful and thrilling, but the unwary can be easily entrapped by these fascinating, esoteric doctrines.

These distractions all rely on form and specialness. The whole field takes on a carnival-like atmosphere, with reference to spaceships, UFOs, extraterrestrials, and prophecies. All these aspects tend to be accepted at face value.

One is easily misled into the astral circus thinking that it is ‘spiritual’. The whole new-age community becomes enamored of an endless array of ‘masters’, ‘ETs’ and legendary figures, most of whom cause one to go weak with muscle testing.”

This is exactly the spiritual vacuum hostile beings exploit.

The Illusion of Awakening

The most deceptive state is believing you are awake, evolved, and spiritually advanced while still caught in delusion.

This illusion is often harder to break than ordinary ignorance because it is reinforced by spiritual pride, specialness, and identification with being “awake,” “chosen,” or in possession of secret knowledge.

The “spiritual” or “truther” ego can be harder to break than the ego of someone still asleep in the matrix because it masks unresolved trauma and childhood wounds with a false sense of superiority.

Spiritual narcissism is often a compensation for deep-rooted insecurity and a negative self-image. These inflated identities become traps and open doors for hostile forces that feed on self-importance, grandiosity, and specialness.

The illusion of awakening becomes a false foundation that is harder to dismantle than ordinary ego structures because it is fused with spiritual inflation.

How I Got Pulled Into the Disclosure Narrative

I know this firsthand because I bought into Steven Greer’s “Disclosure Project” 25 years ago.

In 2001, I bought his whistleblower DVDs, handed them out to friends, and mistook my own romantic excitement and wishful thinking for discernment.

At the time, I wanted it to be true. I thought I was “awake.” I wanted to believe that the “truth” was finally being revealed, that benevolent ETs were waiting in the wings, and that hidden alien technology could help liberate humanity.

It took years of deeper research, inner work, and direct observation to see through it and admit to myself that I had been wrong and had fallen into deception.

In 2011, I produced a UFO documentary critiquing Greer’s role in the New Age UFO disclosure movement as a potential disinformation agent and pointing to the hyperdimensional, spiritual nature of the phenomenon behind the disclosure narrative.

The Disclosure Movement Has Gone Mainstream

The alien disclosure narrative has now gone fully mainstream. Entire careers and identities have formed around it.

New Age disclosure and first contact conferences are everywhere. The deception is sophisticated and it is designed to fool sincere people, not just naive ones.

Most people caught up in the disclosure movement are sincere seekers operating in genuinely difficult terrain where truth and lies are deliberately interwoven.

Others are deliberate plants meant to sell the alien religion and tempt people with “alien technology” as the savior of humanity.

And then you have the endless wave of self-proclaimed “contactees,” “ambassadors,” and “receivers” of special downloads, often inflated by deceptive astral forces that feed the wounded ego’s hunger for significance and self-importance.

As veteran UFO researcher John Keel warned decades ago, the UFO phenomenon is not extraterrestrial but “merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon,” with our skies filled with “Trojan horses that promise salvation while concealing hostile intent.”

As Keel wrote in UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse:

“The real truth is that the UFO cultists have been played for suckers for years, not by the government, but by the phenomenon.”

Divine Forces, Free Will, and the Kali Yuga

I want to be clear: I am not implying that there are no benevolent spiritual forces.

There are Divine forces, angelic beings, and powerful spiritual forces that assist and help humanity, even on an individual level, as I have experienced myself.

However, true Divine forces act according to Divine Law and respect the Law of Free Will. They do not “save” us in the way the religious savior program imagines. They do not override our soul lessons, nor do they simply “eradicate evil” on our behalf.

Fully aligned with Divine Will, they act beyond human morality and logic, adhering only to the Higher Will in the context of the evolution of consciousness.

They understand that we need to learn our own lessons. At the same time, they can assist, support, guide, and even offer protection.

But ultimately, we need to develop embodied soul strength and bring forth the true Self.

This work entails being able to consciously differentiate what we align with, both within ourselves and in the world. It requires sincere psycho-spiritual work so we can access true free will and no longer be puppets of forces we mistake for parts of our own being or “benevolent” forces.

However, we are at a very degraded level of consciousness at the end of this Kali Yuga.

This descent over thousands of years has opened the door for the rise of evil and the influence of dark forces operating from subtler realms, feeding on suffering, polarization, fear, desire, greed, grandiosity, lust, hatred, violence, and the fragmentation of the human psyche.

The spiritual senses are almost fully veiled, and hostile occult forces have the greatest access to humanity through the lower nature.

Understanding the characteristics of the Kali Yuga and this descent of consciousness helps explain why evil has such a grip on humanity and why, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, the forces of darkness often appear stronger and better organized than the forces of Light.

However, the most deceptive nature of these malevolent beings and dark spirits is that they do not always appear as outwardly obvious “demonic” beings, as Christians often oversimplify it.

They can appear as benevolent beings, “guardians,” “ascended masters,” “angelic” beings of light, extraterrestrial guides, or even as familiar religious figures to create a trap of agreement.

They are shape-shifters and can take the form of whatever image, archetype, or belief system the person is most likely to trust: Jesus, Mary, an angel, a spirit guide, a beautiful “Pleiadian,” a deceased loved one, or a radiant being of light.

As Mirra Alfassa, known as The Mother, said:

“The chief characteristic of these beings is falsehood: their nature is made of deceit. They have a power of illusion; they can take the appearance of divine beings or higher beings, they can appear in a dazzling light, but truly sincere people are not deceived; they immediately feel something that warns them. But if one likes the marvelous, the unexpected, if one loves fantastic things, if one likes to live a romance, one is likely to be easily deceived.”

This is why discernment cannot be based on appearance, emotional intensity, feelings, beauty, supernatural phenomena, or the sense of being chosen and given special knowledge, technology, spiritual powers, siddhis, or healing abilities.

These are precisely the hooks deceptive forces use to gain consent, inflate the ego, pull people away from the straight path to the Divine, and draw them into the astral circus Hawkins warned about.

This is also why sincere spiritual work and the bringing down of the Light is not merely a metaphorical battle, but an actual spiritual war acting through us.

It is much harder to engage in the inner psycho-spiritual work because we are the farthest removed from Essence in this dark age of materialism, and the resistance of our ego structure and the hostile forces is at its peak.

That’s why this work requires the sincerity, commitment, and courage of a spiritual warrior.

This New Age astral circus and disclosure narrative is going to accelerate over the next twenty years with Pluto in Aquarius.

With Uranus in Gemini amplifying the speed of information, nervous system overstimulation, diminishing attention span, lack of discernment, and the spread of new narratives, people will become even more vulnerable to deception.

This topic will take center stage, along with a lot of insanity and the emergence of UFO and alien cults.

It takes spiritual warfare to a whole new level.

What a time to be alive.

I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

The Need for Spiritual Discernment

We need grounded psycho-spiritual work that includes spiritual discernment. We need the capacity to differentiate between sub-personality parts, shadow projection, social programming, intuition, our true Self, Divine guidance, astral influence, and hostile interference.

Without this deeper discernment, people can easily confuse manipulative astral influence with guidance, deception with awakening, and external savior narratives with true spiritual liberation.

This is the deeper terrain I explore in my 10-week training, Mastering Spiritual Warfare: Unveiling the Unseen Forces & the Path to Embodied Sovereignty.

The next live round begins July 15, 2026. Applications are now open and enrollment is limited to 40 participants.

You can learn more here: masteringspiritualwarfare.com

One important topic in the realm of spiritual discernment is the Golden Shadow, also known as positive shadow projection.

This happens when we project our own unlived potential, spiritual longing, higher ideals, or unconscious fantasies onto another person.

It often shows up as hero worship, pedestalization, and spiritual idealization. We see someone as more evolved, more awake, more special, more divinely guided, or more important than they actually are as a human being.

This dynamic has played out many times in spiritual, alternative, and conspiracy research circles.

David Wilcock is one example of someone who received a great deal of this kind of projection. Many people placed him on a pedestal, and when the frail, insecure human being behind the projected image began to show more clearly, it became difficult for some to accept the disillusionment of what they had projected onto him.

Some even went so far as to deny that he had taken his own life because it contradicted the image they had constructed around him.

For context, see my article The Tragedy of David Wilcock and What It Reveals and the recent update I wrote about it.

Wilcock is just one example of a much larger pattern that appears again and again in spiritual and alternative circles.

The Seduction of Positive Projection

Carrying other people’s projections, whether positive or negative, can be very difficult, especially for people in the public arena.

Positive projections tend to feel better because they can feed underlying insecurities and prop up the false ego. They can make someone feel special, chosen, admired, powerful, needed, or spiritually important.

There is also the danger of inflation and grandiosity when someone begins feeding off these projections and then, consciously or unconsciously, identifies with the archetype being projected onto them: hero, savior, prophet, genius, healer, chosen one, wanderer, lightworker, or, in Wilcock’s case, the alleged reincarnation of Edgar Cayce.

Identification with being a “starseed,” a “wanderer” from the Ra Material, or a “lightworker” can also lead to inflation. Very often, it covers up deep insecurity, childhood wounds around not fitting in, and the pain of not feeling good enough.

From an esoteric occult perspective, inflation and grandiosity can also become entry points for darker forces and entity interference.

The identification with being special, chosen, or spiritually superior creates openings for deception and hostile beings that feed on exactly these unintegrated wounds, insecurities, and ego distortions.

Twenty years ago, when I was studying The Law of One and the Ra Material, I deeply resonated with the concept of the Wanderer.

It made me feel special, different, and, if I am very honest, better than others, even though I would pretend to be humble about it.

But the truth is that I used that identity to spiritually bypass deep insecurity, narcissistic wounding, related childhood wounds, and the need to be seen as special.

The Wanderer in the Ra Material is described as a more spiritually developed soul from a higher density or dimension that incarnates into human life with a special mission to help humanity awaken and evolve.

This is not about denying that such a concept can exist. In fact, it relates strongly to the Tibetan Buddhist idea of the bodhisattva.

However, a true wanderer or bodhisattva would neither identify with it nor proclaim it to others, let alone publicly. Only the wounded ego that becomes identified with it feels the need to do so.

The Persona Is Not the Self

The same dynamic can happen in more “mundane” ways as well.

People can become inflated through identification with being a healer, teacher, artist, musician, actor, writer, activist, truth seeker, intuitive, coach, therapist, or spiritual guide. The issue lies in identifying with the role to the extent that the person believes this is who they are.

Most people, when they look for their purpose or “dharma,” mistake it for a role to identify with, as if it were a career or job. Even being a musician or artist is not a “purpose” but a role.

Purpose is not a fixed definition. It is the bringing forth of the Self as a vessel and transmuter for Divine Will, which may express itself uniquely through the individual and the roles he plays, or even several roles, for it is never just one thing.

It often runs contrary to what the ego-persona thinks it wants, needs, or desires.

That is the danger of identifying with the mask of the persona rather than seeing it as a role, a costume one wears through which essence can shine, while still knowing that it is not who one truly is beyond the persona.

People can even over-identify with the archetypes of motherhood or fatherhood, to the detriment of the child, rather than simply seeing them as roles they are called to embody consciously.

Carl Jung warned that identification with an archetype is dangerous. It leads to grandiosity and inhibits the process of individuation.

From an esoteric occult perspective, this relates to Luciferic temptation and inflation.

We all do this. Everyone projects both negative and positive images onto others, and we all receive projections from others. We can easily feed on positive projections or feel hurt and offended by negative ones. We can also easily identify with roles and archetypes, mistaking them for essence or the true Self.

Identification with the victim archetype, or the rescuer, is especially pervasive in our culture.

It ties directly into the drama triangle of Victim, Rescuer, and Perpetrator, where most people remain caught, identifying with these roles or projecting them onto others. This often happens through oversimplified black-and-white thinking that casts people as either “all good” or “all bad.”

This is known in psychology as splitting, a very infantile state of consciousness, yet one that remains pervasive in most adults.

Projection as a Gateway

The issue is not projection itself. Projection serves a function in the growth of the psyche and the development of one’s being.

The key in depth psychology is becoming aware of our projections, because they are a gateway for bringing the unconscious into consciousness. This is part of what Jung meant by “making the darkness conscious.”

The work is to become aware of them, retrieve them, and integrate what they reveal.

This work is much easier said than done, especially on a somatic and embodied level, because it will bring up all kinds of uncomfortable feelings that need to be felt and transmuted.

It is partly because of this intensity that shadow work has become diluted and distorted. It is also why Jung said that not everyone is capable of shadow work, and that one needs a certain level of ego strength to engage in it.

That may sound paradoxical, but ego strength does not mean a big ego. It does not refer to arrogance, narcissism, overconfidence, or grandiosity.

True ego strength is the capacity to feel difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them, without becoming defensive, without escaping into the head and a story, and without blaming others. It means being able to feel all emotions fully without dissociating from them or identifying with them.

It is the capacity to hold what Jung called the tension of opposites, which is necessary for retrieving projections.

Real shadow work can feel like a death-rebirth process. The refusal to consciously face and integrate one’s shadow can lie behind many suicidal impulses and some suicide attempts. It is the futile attempt to cut off the dark side, the ego trying to kill the ego while still identified with the body.

As Robert Moore said:

“Carl Jung pointed out: anytime that you really are doing shadow work and you’re really encountering your shadow, you are going to feel some revulsion about what you’re now coming to know about yourself.

When you’re really coming to know your shadow, you know, the whole point is not that you disappear into any shame or disappear into the pain, which, sometimes, you do.

Sometimes people commit suicide at that point. But to be able to still function cognitively as the truth is coming at you, and that’s easier said than done.”

Having descended into the deep darkness of my own being, wallowing in toxic shame and intense emotional pain, I too at times contemplated suicide as the only way out, even visualizing holding a gun to my head and pulling the trigger to bring an end to the suffering.

It was only prayer, surrender to the Divine, and remembering the immutable law of ascent and descent that helped me walk through that valley of death and come out the other side stronger, more whole, and more integrated than before.

This law points to the truth that one can only rise into higher levels of being and awakening as deeply as one is willing and able to descend into the shadow.

Awakening is not a linear path into “heaven,” but a widening and deepening spiral through all levels of one’s being.

““None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.”

- Sri Aurobindo

“The tree that reaches to heaven must have its roots in hell.”

- Carl Jung

In that sense, projections can become gateways to individuation, essence, the Self, deeper purpose, and ultimately to God and the Divine.

However, there are also traps and detours on the path toward individuation. Shadow work is a foundational part of that path.

Without it, one risks being overtaken by archetypal forces and deceptive hostile beings masquerading as “divine forces,” “ETs,” or “spirit guides,” which can lead to inflation, disintegration, and in extreme cases even self-destruction.

Where the Real Work Begins

This is why spiritual discernment cannot be separated from psychological self-work.

Exposing deception and lies “out there” must go together with seeing where we ourselves are vulnerable to deception.

Facing the lies one tells oneself is one of the most important parts of psycho-spiritual work, and also one of the hardest.

The wounded ego is very tricky and will resist it at all costs, mostly by externalizing and blaming others while either propping itself up in grandiosity or collapsing into self-pity.

As Gurdjieff said:

“A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new.

Otherwise, the new will be built on a wrong foundation, and the result will be worse than before.

In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant, incessant lies he tells himself.

One must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

The real question is not only who we have projected onto, but where we are still identified with masks, roles, wounds, and archetypes in our own lives.

But the hardened ego, with its need for security, self-image, and fixed identity, gets in the way of this process and hinders the deeper movement of individuation and soul individualization. It hijacks the process through spiritual bypassing and unconscious projection.

In short, shadow work helps lead us back to our true Being and deeper purpose, without giving our power away through either positive or negative projections.

This is the threshold where the real path begins.

Further Exploration

You can learn more about these topics in the following podcast episodes, where we explore them in depth and offer many practical tools:

• Why We Put People on Pedestals: The Golden Shadow

• The Shadow of Enlightenment: Confronting Spiritual Narcissism

• How to Move from Victimhood to Empowerment: The Drama Triangle

• The Ascent and Descent – Suffering as a Catalyst for Awakening

• Why Awakening Often Begins With A Breakdown

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.

Many of you know by now that David Wilcock passed away in an apparent suicide by gunshot. If you believe he was “suicided,” I invite you to keep reading.

David Wilcock was a prominent figure in the New Age UFO and disclosure scene, known as an author, speaker, and online personality who spent years writing and speaking about extraterrestrials, hidden government programs, ascension, consciousness, and spiritual awakening.

It is a tragic and sad event, and my heart goes out to his parents, family, loved ones, and everyone affected by his death.

May his soul find its way back home and rest until the next round.

I first came across his work around 2006 and subscribed to his newsletter for a few years. I also met him in person in 2009 at a UFO conference.

At first, I appreciated some of his work and insights. But over time, as I dug deeper into UFOs, disclosure, and related topics, I began to seriously question many of his claims and sources.

Over the years, it became increasingly clear that the vast majority of his predictions, “visionary dreams,” and prophecies never came true.

He kept moving the goalposts and shifting the timelines, constantly coming up with new stories and new “insider information” to explain why nothing happened.

I clearly remember his prediction of “imminent UFO disclosure” back in 2008. He made similar predictions almost every year after that.

Around 2010, I unsubscribed from his newsletter when he claimed he would be working personally with Obama to bring down the Illuminati, that he was in contact with high-level government officials, and that mass arrests were coming to take down the cabal and usher in a Golden Age.

He also claimed that masses of people would literally ascend out of their bodies and that all “evil” would be eradicated by 2012.

One of the biggest red flags was always the same: unnamed “insiders” he claimed to know, who supposedly gave him information that could never be independently verified.

I don’t know whether some of what he said was fabricated for attention, or whether he fully believed it himself. But either way, the result was the same.

Out of curiosity, I listened to part of his last livestream a couple of days ago.

What I saw and heard was sad to witness. He came across as someone who seemed to be in serious physical and psychological decline.

Even in that final stream, just before his tragic death, he was again saying that disclosure is coming very soon, that it is imminent. It was the same prediction he had been pushing for nearly twenty years, like a dangling carrot.

In that last video, he also interpreted the photo of Jesus that Donald Trump posted as a “message from the Alliance,” suggesting that Trump was the Antichrist. Because both he and Trump had a scar on the ear, Wilcock then began wondering whether he himself was somehow part of that “Antichrist” narrative too.

My intention here is not to speak badly about a man who just passed away, nor to dismiss his work as a whole. On a human level, this is tragic.

The Elephant in the New Age, Disclosure, and Conspiracy Movement

But it also points to a much bigger issue, the huge elephant in the room that many people in the New Age UFO and disclosure movement either fail to see or explain away through spiritual bypassing.

That elephant in the room is the normalization of mental illness, personality disorders, and spiritual narcissism or grandiosity.

More than anything, I saw someone who appeared deeply troubled and psychologically unwell, and who seemed to be struggling with paranoia and increasingly distorted beliefs.

I also know from people close to him that he had been dealing with major debt and financial problems, a recent divorce, and a visible mental decline that, according to them, included increasing delusions.

The problem is that many people, especially his fans, explain these real-life and psychological issues away by claiming he was “targeted” by energy weapons, that his decline was “manufactured,” or that he was a threat to the cabal and therefore was “taken out,” “suicided,” or driven mad by outside forces.

Whatever the specific story is, the pattern is the same. Something or someone else is blamed, placing him entirely in the role of the victim, while rarely acknowledging his long history of false claims and increasingly concerning behavior.

I call this the “conspiracy bypass”: the refusal to consider that his suicide may have resulted from his own psychological decline, and the insistence instead that it must have been caused by some nefarious outside force targeting him.

Some people point to the fact that he said he was not suicidal. But when someone says they are not suicidal, that does not automatically make it true.

In some cases, the denial itself can be part of the psychological state, and in someone caught in grandiosity or delusional thinking, it may even reinforce the sense that they were too “important” to die by their own hand.

Since his death, some people have already claimed that he is still alive and was “extracted by the military and the Galactic Federation of Light, hidden away in Cheyenne Mountain or somewhere else.”

Another prominent figure in the New Age UFO and disclosure scene claims that her “psychic intuition” tells her David faked his own death with the help of the SSP, the so-called Secret Space Program.

Someone who knew Wilcock personally and worked with him for years said that if the so-called deep state had really wanted to take him out, they would have done so ten or fifteen years ago, not now, when he was mostly sharing increasingly delusional material about Disclosure and related topics.

Personally, I would go even further. I never saw Wilcock as a threat to the matrix or the so-called controllers in the first place. If anything, his delusions, false predictions, and endless distractions served them far more than they challenged them.

It would have been much more in their interest to keep him alive and let him continue distracting people with his material.

In fact, years ago I was more inclined to see him as a New Age disinformation agent than as someone who needed to be silenced for revealing dangerous truths.

I am sure this tragic event will generate many more wild claims and conspiracies.

But beyond all of that, it reveals a deeper issue in these New Age ascension and UFO disclosure circles: psychological problems, paranoia, delusions, and even schizophrenic episodes are often immediately reinterpreted as “ascension symptoms,” “alien implants,” “psychotronic warfare,” “high-tech energy weapons,” “entity interference,” or “psychic attacks.”

I do not deny that mind control weapons and psychotronic technologies exist. They have been around for a long time, are well-documented, and I have written about them over the years as well.

However, too many people jump to conclusions about themselves or others being “targeted” or “suicided” without the psychological awareness, sincere self-inquiry, and grounded psycho-spiritual discernment needed to distinguish real interference from unresolved inner material.

And almost always, these explanations cast the person in a victimized role with a “special mission,” as if he were somehow indispensable to “Disclosure” or “Awakening.”

Some even claim he was taken out to “delay and interfere with disclosure and a mass awakening.”

This framing is difficult to sustain, given how consistently his predictions failed to materialize, and it also reveals a fundamental confusion: real awakening has very little to do with informational awareness or so-called “UFO disclosure.”

The disinformation within the UFO disclosure movement is a much bigger topic in itself, as is the deeper question of what aliens and UFOs may actually be to begin with.

Occult Interference and Psycho-Spiritual Discernment

Now, I am the first to point out the reality of hyperdimensional interference, occult forces, archons, entity attachments, wetiko, psychic attacks, and the fact that people can be targeted on the path toward awakening.

These forces also serve a teaching function in the evolution of consciousness and the awakening process, and one of the biggest traps on the path is getting stuck in blame and victim consciousness.

I have experienced these things myself and have spoken and written about them for over twenty years. None of this is new, and these realities are well known in occult and esoteric traditions.

Mental health issues and spiritual or entity interference can be interrelated. David may indeed have attracted certain entities. I am not denying that. In fact, as I said, everyone, without exception, is influenced by these forces to varying degrees. All occult and esoteric traditions speak about this in one way or another.

But this is also a fact that is very easy to oversimplify and use as an excuse.

Looking at Wilcock’s history and behavior, it seems more likely that he created the opening through his own grandiosity, psychological issues, and narcissistic wounding. That is where the work begins: on a psychological level.

My point in this article is that too many people jump to conclusions too quickly and blame “entities” without truly understanding the topic, without psychological understanding, or worse, while dismissing psychology altogether.

But I am equally aware of the psychological dimension, and of the absolute necessity of sincere psychological inner work, trauma work, inner child work, and shadow work, especially for people seeking truth or trying to understand “the matrix” and to differentiate, on an embodied level, what may be interference and what is their own material.

Even the late occultist Dion Fortune emphasized the need to distinguish between psychological disorders and occult attacks. As she wrote in her classic Psychic Self-Defense:

“Psychic attack is often indistinguishable from obsession or neurosis. We must first of all bear in mind that there is great need of caution in presuming that a psychic attack is being made. We must not assume we are dealing with one until we have excluded all the other things it can possibly be.”

The same principle applies today. Trauma, shadow material, inner child wounds, sub-personalities, and personality disorders can easily be mistaken for occult interference or “mind control weapons” when there is not enough self-awareness, psychological understanding, and embodied, grounded discernment.

Without that foundation, discernment remains limited.

Real discernment requires sincere psycho-spiritual inner work, psychological understanding, and radical self-honesty, all of which an insecure ego caught in grandiosity, “specialness,” and victim consciousness will resist.

People become gullible and mistake feelings, biases, shadow projections, sub-personality parts, and wishful thinking for “truth” and “intuition,” or even for “attacks” and “entities,” leaving them wide open to paranoia and deception, especially the Luciferic temptation of grandiosity and specialness that so many wounded individuals fall for in the more ungrounded side of New Age culture.

The lack of grounded and embodied somatic psycho-spiritual inner work in the field Wilcock was active in, which has only grown more popular over time, is the unacknowledged pink elephant in the room.

Too many people are fascinated by “imminent disclosure,” New Age predictions, 5D ascension, mass arrests, the fall of the cabal, and the endless sci-fi narratives of “Cosmic Disclosure” that are so prominent in the disclosure movement.

All of this becomes a distraction from the most important work there is: to anchor Spirit and the Divine within and to be the change.

I think David filled a void of meaning for many people. They projected hope onto him. And to be fair, I believe he did inspire many people in certain ways.

But hope projected outward onto another person, a prediction, or a future event is not the same as the inner transformation that real psycho-spiritual work demands.

If David’s tragic death reveals anything, it is this: no amount of insider information, cosmic prophecy, “ancient knowledge”, or promised disclosure can substitute for the difficult, unglamorous, everyday work of facing yourself.

That is where the real work begins. And it always has been.

The only way out is in and through.

Godspeed.

If this article resonates with you, these related articles and podcast episodes go deeper into the themes of spiritual discernment, grandiosity, inner work, and the challenges of the path.

Related Articles:

• The Path to the Temple of Secrets: Why Seekers Fall Off the Way and What It Takes to Cross the Threshold

• Facing The Terror of the Situation and Rising Like The Phoenix

• Why This Is a Spiritual War and Why Spiritual Work Is a Battle

• UFOs, Aliens, and the Question of Contact

Related Podcast Episodes:

• The Shadow of Enlightenment: Confronting Spiritual Narcissism

• The Luciferic Deception, Levels Of Consciousness, & Shadow Work

• Deepening Spiritual Discernment in an Age of Deception

• The Spiritual Warrior’s Path of Navigating the Spiritual Realms

• Unveiling The Psyche: Sub-Personalities And Invisible Influences On The Mind

• Beginner’s Guide To Occult Forces

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.

This is a long-form piece that weaves together several esoteric traditions and frameworks, including the Esoteric Christian teaching of the Time of Transition, the Yuga Cycle, Ekpyrosis, and Sri Aurobindo’s revelation of the descent of the supramental consciousness.

Through these lenses, I want to explore the evolutionary threshold humanity is standing at and what is being asked of us at this critical moment.

It is meant to be read straight through rather than skimmed, as each section builds on the one before it. Take your time with it.

Contents

• The Collective Dark Night of the Soul

• What Is the Time of Transition?

• The Great Year and the Yuga Cycle

• The Ekpyrosis Phase of the Transition

• Climate Change, Geoengineering, and Cosmic Cycles

• A Dark Night of Civilization or the Fire of Inner Purification

• The Alchemy of Inner and Outer Transformation

• The Descent of the Supramental Consciousness

• The Split Within Humanity

• Spiritual Warfare & The Battle for the Human Being

• The Birth Canal of a New Humanity

The Collective Dark Night of the Soul

We are in the midst of the death of an old era and the birth of a new one.

We can see the writing on the wall everywhere: increasing polarization, wars, economic instability, and the old world disintegrating before our eyes.

But on a deeper level, what we are witnessing is not only political, economic, or social breakdown. It is also a crisis of meaning and, at its root, a spiritual crisis.

The dominant worldview of our time is pure materialism, stripped of spiritual depth. Our connection to the sacred has been severed.

The result is emptiness and despair in many people. Most are dissociated, numbed out, or in denial about what is happening. These are defense mechanisms. Many are also traumatized without realizing it.

As a result, depression, mental illness, suicide, and addiction have risen sharply in much of the modern world as more and more people feel disconnected from God, from purpose, and from any higher meaning in life.

In many ways, it is as if humanity is going through a collective dark night of the soul, a deep disconnection from the Divine and from the deeper meaning of existence.

Instead of confronting this crisis within themselves, many people regress into old and empty religious forms and dogma, blame politicians and leaders, or project everything onto some outer enemy or cabal they believe to be responsible for it all.

But these reactions only avoid the deeper issue. They keep attention fixed on outer effects while ignoring the inner roots of the crisis. Mistaking symptoms for causes, hardly anyone looks sincerely within.

Yet none of this is happening by accident or because of bad politics. It carries a deeper meaning and purpose.

What we are facing is the exposure of a humanity trapped in identification with the ego-personality and the material world, cut off from the Divine.

But this time is also a threshold to cross. In other words, the chaos and drama we see around us reveal something deeper. It is not about trying to save the world. The old world is dying because it can no longer withstand the evolutionary pressure now acting upon humanity.

Something deeper is seeking to be born through this disintegration and seeming chaos.

What happens next is of critical importance because it will become the seed of the next cycle of life on Earth. Therefore, we must understand what being in a transitory period really means and how it affects us individually and collectively.y.

What Is the Time of Transition?

People have often asked me what I mean by this “Time of Transition.” I’ve seen more and more people use this phrase to describe these evolutionary times, and everyone has their own ideas about it.

I first learned about the “Time of Transition” in 2006 when I studied esoteric Christianity and the Fourth Way teachings of Boris Mouravieff in his Gnosis trilogy. Long-time readers of my work know that I’ve quoted from these books extensively in the articles and essays I’ve written over the years.

Mouravieff writes about the “Time of Transition” in Gnosis, describing the shift of the ages.

According to the Esoteric Christian Tradition, not to be confused with mainstream dogmatic Christianity, human evolution, after a long prehistoric period, continues in a succession of three cycles: the Cycle of the Father, the Cycle of the Son, which is now reaching its end; and finally the Cycle of the Holy Spirit, which we are now approaching.

The Time of Transition we are currently in is the transitory period between the Cycle of the Son and the Cycle of the Holy Spirit. It is a critical stage in humanity’s esoteric and spiritual evolution. According to Mouravieff, a successful transition is not guaranteed.

It is an opportunity, but not a guarantee. It depends on a certain fraction of humanity, those with soul potential, consciously engaging in the Great Work to become individuated and spiritualized.

Through this inner work and purification, they anchor the Divine Force, the Holy Spirit, and help transmute the world, getting it out of the clutches of the hostile anti-Divine forces.

A failure of this evolutionary process would result in cataclysmic destruction similar to what befell ancient civilizations in previous cycles, such as Atlantis, and is symbolized in the biblical flood.

The destruction would result from humanity not learning its lessons and the necessity of repeating the cycle, in other words, the Divine “pressing the reset button.”

Mouravieff describes this transition as a period of immense danger, responsibility, but also possibility. His warning is worth quoting at length because it captures both the stakes of this moment and the deeper meaning of the crisis we are living through.

In the following parts of this article, I will return to key aspects of his warning and connect them to other traditions, teachers, and cosmological frameworks, such as the Yuga Cycle, Sri Aurobindo’s teaching on the descent of the supramental consciousness, the idea that the human being is itself a transitional being, the necessity of a spiritualized humanity, and the deeper meaning of the purification process.

“We have entered a period of transition whose purpose is to give us entry to the Cycle of the Holy Spirit. During this period, Faith will be progressively replaced by Knowledge, and Hope will end in Accomplishment….

The transition from one state to another is not affected without conscious efforts, hard work, and a struggle. For the one who today decides to engage himself on the path leading to the Way should in principle become another [spiritualized] man…

In case of failure, we cannot hope that the world will return to the status quo ante. The Era of the Holy Spirit has two faces, one of Paradise regained and the other a Deluge of Fire.

We must not forget that God is also a Devouring Fire; in case of failure, the situation will rapidly lead to an eschatological cataclysm.

This requires courage and humility. With the approach of the era of the Holy Spirit, everything must be gradually brought to the light of day, not only the secrets of the laboratory but the deepest meanings of esotericism. The same must happen with illusions, errors, and lies, which must also be revealed so that they can later be rectified.

This process is already happening. It is this which to a large extent explains the political and social difficulties which characterize our time of transition.

Yet only a few people know how to interpret the signs of our times.

The world is suffering from a lack of harmony which gets deeper on every plane, and this is a serious danger to the moral and spiritual recovery of humanity.

It also involves a serious risk of failure in the last stage of this Time of Transition that we are now entering. If this risk is not overcome, the Deluge of Fire awaits us.

We will have to make an immense effort to ward off this fate, and we have very little time in which to do it.

Man has only himself to blame for the greatness of the effort needed: this is a result of his obstinate refusal to heed the warnings that have been addressed to him time and again by the Divine Voice, just as he continues today to blind himself to the fact that the Deluge of Fire is being made ready; that it is now technically feasible and, it must be said, morally possible.

This final cataclysm, towards which humanity is advancing so blindly, can only be avoided by the conscious super-efforts of the spiritual elite, especially by young and enthusiastic elements of the present generation and those which follow it, whose esoteric predispositions will make them fit to assume key positions in all races and in all nations.

Neither the most marvelous technical progress nor a greater refinement of the intellectual faculties will be enough to enable us to remedy this state of affairs, which is still deteriorating.

The remainder of the Time of Transition offers the last chance for humanity to reestablish the threatened equilibrium and so avoid a general cataclysm.

Before the Earth can enter the Era of the Holy Spirit, the Time of Transition must reach a successful outcome, and this outcome will, in turn, depend on a positive answer to a whole group of problems which will be solved by the appearance of the New [spiritualized] Man.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis

Mouravieff’s warning is sobering, but it also points to a much larger cyclical and evolutionary process that has been described in different ways across esoteric traditions from the West and the East.

This Time of Transition is not a short period confined to our current lifetime. It will last hundreds, possibly even thousands, of years.

There is no need, then, to fixate on specific dates or predictions.

What matters is who you are, your level of Being, consciousness, and soul potential, and the sincere self-work and soul lessons you engage in to realize the truth of your Being and embody the Divine Force through soul individuation.

What you “see” beyond appearances through higher Knowledge, or Gnosis, and what you “do” in alignment with Divine Will in the Now helps shape the future timeline, both individually, in this lifetime and future incarnations, and collectively.

Time is not linear but cyclical.

It has all happened many times before, over and over again. But perhaps we can avoid the fate of Atlantis and other ancient civilizations of the past, when the Divine pressed the reset button through cataclysmic events brought on by humanity’s ignorance and refusal to heed the voice of the Divine.

This is what I have called “The Great Reset,” not in the sense of a human cabal enslaving humanity, which many people get distracted by, but as a Divine or cosmic reset, versus “The Great Awakening,” which is not merely an informational awareness of conspiracies and psy-ops, but a deeper awakening to one’s true nature.

The Great Year and the Yuga Cycle

There is an ancient map of time and consciousness that offers even more context and helps confirm Mouravieff’s insights into the Time of Transition we are currently in.

This map helps us understand why the world is the way it is and what is now being asked of us as humanity moves into the next cycle.

The ancients called it the Great Year, a 25,800-year cycle aligned with the precession of the equinoxes, consisting of a roughly 13,000-year descent and a 13,000-year ascent. It is also known as the Yuga Cycle, and we are now at the end of its darkest age: the Kali Yuga.

Many ancient cultures saw this cycle as the great cosmic clock.

This knowledge gives us a bigger-picture view of what is happening, because we are entering an intensified transitional phase that occurs between Yugas.

This is a period marked by societal upheaval, increasing polarization, war, and cataclysmic natural events, just as many ancient civilizations before us have experienced. These cosmic forces are part of a much larger evolutionary process.

Common Misconceptions About the Yuga Cycle

There are many popular misconceptions about the Yuga Cycle, including the idea that we are already in the Dwapara Yuga, or that the Kali Yuga lasts 432,000 years.

We addressed some of these distortions in our podcast, “Is the Kali Yuga Ending in 2025? The Great Turning and What It Asks of Us,” based on the book Yuga Shift: The End of the Kali Yuga and the Impending Planetary Transformation by Bibhu Dev Misra.

Bibhu was also recently a guest on our podcast, where we explored these themes in more depth in the episode “The Yuga Shift and the Planetary Transition Ahead w/ Bibhu Dev Misra.”

In my opinion, Misra cuts through much of the noise and presents a clear and coherent case for why the Kali Yuga ended around 2025 and why we are now entering an intense transitional phase.

By removing chronological errors, symbolic exaggerations, and cultural distortions that have built up over thousands of years, he reconstructs the original Yuga doctrine in a way that is both cross-cultural and grounded in actual data, while remaining consistent with other ancient cosmologies and world-cycle teachings.

The Descent From the Golden Age

The Yuga Cycle moves downward from the Golden Age through the Treta and Dwapara Yuga into the Kali Yuga over 13,000 years.

In this process of descent, consciousness gradually degrades, and human beings lose their natural unity with the Divine, becoming more ego-centered and materially oriented.

As consciousness descends, lifespans shorten, intelligence and physical strength weaken, and illness, disease, and suffering arise more strongly. It is a long decline in human virtue, wisdom, intelligence, and higher capacities through the ages.

It is interesting to note that spiritual rituals, scriptures, and formal spiritual practices only emerged after the end of the Golden Age, because human beings had lost their natural connection to the Divine.

As inner guidance and divine alignment weakened, people began seeking external guidance, and with that came manipulation, distortion, and corruption born of ignorance, spiritual blindness, and the temptation of power.

This arc of decline is what many myths describe symbolically as the fall from unity into separation, as reflected in the story of the Fall from Eden. By the time we enter the later ages, intuitive spiritual insight fades, materialism grows, and power is increasingly pursued for personal gain based on the illusion of separation.

The cycle reaches its lowest point in the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga. This is the age of darkness and moral decline.

As consciousness descends further, there is an increasing forgetfulness of our true nature and a loss, corruption, or distortion of ancient knowledge. This is also why it has been so difficult to reconstruct the original Yuga Cycle, as Misra points out.

As ego-consciousness separated further from the Divine, it opened itself more and more to darker influences.

The Rise of Evil and Hostile Forces

This descent opened the door for the rise of evil and the influence of dark forces operating from subtler realms, feeding on suffering, polarization, fear, desire, greed, lust, hatred, violence, and the fragmentation of the human psyche.

Humanity began engaging with dark spirits and entities in manipulative ways, even invoking hostile beings for power.

By the time we reach the Kali Yuga, the spiritual senses are almost fully veiled, and hostile occult spiritual forces have the greatest access to humanity through the lower nature.

Understanding the characteristics of the Kali Yuga and this descent of consciousness helps explain why evil has such a grip on humanity and why, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, the forces of darkness often appear stronger and better organized than the forces of Light.

This is also why sincere spiritual work and the bringing down of the Light is not merely a metaphorical battle, but an actual spiritual war acting through us, as I have written about before.

It is much harder to engage in the inner psycho-spiritual work because we are the farthest removed from Essence, and the resistance of our ego structure and the hostile forces is at its peak.

That’s why this work requires the sincerity, commitment, and courage of a spiritual warrior.

This is what Sri Aurobindo called the Hour of God:

“There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being; there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism.

The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny; the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result.

It is true that the latter may prepare the former, may be the little smoke of sacrifice going up to heaven which calls down the rain of God’s bounty.

Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call.

But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.

In the hour of God cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy and vain self-flattering that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. All insincerity of nature, once thy defence against the eye of the Master and the light of the ideal, becomes now a gap in thy armour and invites the blow.

Even if thou conquer for the moment, it is the worse for thee, for the blow shall come afterwards and cast thee down in the midst of thy triumph.

But being pure cast aside all fear; for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again, even though he seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return.

Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected, the incalculable, the immeasurable. Mete not the power of the Breath by thy petty instruments, but trust and go forward.

But most keep thy soul clear, even if for a while, of the clamour of the ego. Then shall a fire march before thee in the night and the storm be thy helper and thy flag shall wave on the highest height of the greatness that was to be conquered.””

— Sri Aurobindo, The Hour of God

The Double Kali Yuga

As Misra clearly lays out, we have not been living through one Kali Yuga, but two back-to-back Kali Yugas: a descending phase followed immediately by an ascending phase, totaling roughly 5,700 years.

The descending Kali Yuga marked the deepest fall into darkness, when consciousness hit its lowest point and humanity became almost fully cut off from higher spiritual realities.

The ascending Kali Yuga marks a slow upward turn in which material progress increases and ancient knowledge begins to re-emerge. Science and technology advance, yet spiritual consciousness remains severely degraded.

This is why the modern world displays such extreme technological advancement and unprecedented material comfort while so many people remain disconnected from the Divine and higher spiritual reality.

The result is hyper-materialism, mental overstimulation, dissociation, disembodiment, ideological extremes, scientific and religious dogma, and a growing fixation on lower expressions of sex, money, and power. Success is reduced to material wealth and popularity.

Material Progress Without Spiritual Maturity

A vast gap has opened between material and spiritual development. This is one of the clearest signatures of the ascending Kali Yuga, and it should not be mistaken for a true rise in consciousness.

Many people claim that humanity has evolved and is now at a higher level of consciousness, but they only look back a few thousand years, still within the Kali Yuga, rather than 13,000 years. They also mistake material progress for a rise in consciousness.

Many ancient traditions described this back-to-back Kali Yuga as a “night within the night.”

It also helps explain the splitting of humanity we are seeing now.

One part of humanity is responding to the inner call, engaging in spiritual work, and seeking to align with Dharma in preparation for the next cycle.

Another part is becoming further entrapped in the materialist religion of transhumanism and rebellion against Divine order.

The signs of the Kali Yuga are all around us and can be seen clearly in the modern world:

• Spiritual disconnection and loss of inner guidance

• Moral inversion and normalization of pathologies

• Hyper-materialism and identification with the body

• Obsession with physical longevity, youthful appearance, and fear of death

• Hyper-sexualization and fixation on lower expressions of sex, money, and power

• Rising narcissism and superficiality

• Loss of attention span, declining intelligence, and mechanical thinking

• Loss of meaning, nihilism, atheism, and psychological fragmentation

• Corruption and distortion of spirituality and religion

• Polarization, conflict, and ideological splitting

• Rapid technological growth without wisdom or spiritual awareness

• Rising depression, mental illness, and suicide rates

• Dissociation and disembodiment

• Declining fertility and nervous system health

• Breakdown of authentic human relationships and community

According to Misra, we are now at the end of the ascending Kali Yuga, around 2025. He explains in detail in his book why this marks the close of the cycle.

We are not merely living through the end of an age, but standing at the threshold of a purificatory transition between world cycles. This is what the ancients referred to as the Ekpyrosis phase.

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The Ekpyrosis Phase of the Transition

“I cannot promise that the Divine’s Will is to preserve the current civilization. The present civilization must change, but whether by destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater truth is the issue.”

— Sri Aurobindo

Ekpyrosis is a Greek term meaning “burning up completely” or “purification through fire.” It describes the transitional phase between world ages, a period of roughly 1,200 years during which the old world breaks down and the conditions for the next evolutionary stage are seeded.

This is not destruction for its own sake. Ekpyrosis signifies the burning away of the accumulated corruption of the Dark Age. It is the collapse of materialistic civilizations cut off from Spirit and the Divine, the exposure of moral and spiritual decay, and the beginning of the upward movement toward higher consciousness.

It is also the decisive crossroads that intensifies the split within humanity, as vastly different levels of being determine how people respond to the evolutionary call.

In Greek Stoic cosmology, Ekpyrosis was understood as the moment when the world is consumed in fire and then renewed.

Misra connects this ancient teaching to actual cosmic cycles: periods of extreme solar activity, increased comet and asteroid danger, major earthquakes, pole shifts, volcanic upheaval, atmospheric and climatic disruption, and intensified worldwide conflict, religious wars, and socio-economic breakdown.

The Deluge of Fire and the Time of Transition

This is where the Yuga teachings tie directly to Mouravieff’s Time of Transition from the esoteric Christian perspective.

Mouravieff warned that the era ahead has two faces: one of Paradise regained and the other a Deluge of Fire. What he called the Deluge of Fire corresponds directly to what Vedic and pre-Vedic traditions described as the fiery end-phase of the Kali Yuga, not a purification by water, but by fire.

In this sense, Ekpyrosis is the cosmic backdrop of the Time of Transition.

The Taurid Comet Stream and Cycles of Purification

According to Misra’s research, the destructive phase at the end of the Kali Yuga aligns with real astronomical cycles, especially periods of intensified comet and meteor activity associated with the Taurid Stream, the debris field of a massive comet that fragmented in the distant past.

Most of the time, Earth passes only through the outer edges of this stream, which appear as ordinary meteor showers. But every few thousand years, Earth appears to move through denser regions of this debris field, creating a window for more severe disruption.

Misra points out that these destructive windows align with abrupt climate changes, civilizational collapse, and cataclysmic events in history. They also correspond in duration to the transitional phases between Yugas.

In other words, the return cycles of the Taurid Stream may be one of the physical mechanisms through which these age-end purifications unfold.

Ancient peoples did not describe these returning celestial forces in modern astronomical language. They experienced comets as divine powers, gods in the sky, forces that returned at intervals to cleanse or reset the world.

There is also scientific evidence that points in this direction.

The Younger Dryas event, beginning around 12,800 years ago and lasting roughly 1,200 years, is now associated by many researchers with meteor impacts, likely from cometary fragments.

That period brought sudden ecological disruption, the loss of megafauna, major climate instability, and large-scale changes to the earth’s surface. Misra cites the work of comet researchers such as Clube, Napier, Asher, Steel, and Bailey, all of whom have argued for the periodic danger of the Taurid Stream and its recurring catastrophic potential.

According to this view, we may now be entering another major Taurid crossing. Misra notes that the coming decades, especially the period from 2030 to 2040, with particular attention to 2032 and 2036, carry elevated risk as Earth aligns more closely with the denser Taurid stream.

This does not mean a specific disaster is certain. The point is not to get lost in doom-and-gloom predictions or fear. The point is to understand the cosmic pattern, its deeper meaning, and ultimately what is being asked of us.

What matters is that these myths, astronomical cycles, and esoteric teachings all point to the same larger truth: the transition between ages is not smooth like the change of seasons. It is purgative and far more disruptive.

More importantly, this transition contains a deeper message and opportunity for real change. The good news is that we can actually mitigate potential cataclysms if we answer the call sincerely.

Climate Change, Geoengineering, and Cosmic Cycles

One of the biggest blind spots of the modern worldview is the belief that the natural disasters we see today, hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and abnormal weather patterns, are caused only by human activity.

Mainstream culture blames carbon emissions and pollution. Conspiracy culture blames geoengineering, chemtrails, directed energy weapons, and HAARP.

While there may be partial truths in both views, they are short-sighted because they still place the human being at the center, as if humanity were powerful enough to fully shape and control nature and cosmic cycles. Ironically, the idea that humans control it all is itself a signature illusion of the Kali Yuga.

Climate change is real, but not for the reasons most people assume.

It goes far beyond man-made factors, whether framed through the carbon narrative or technological manipulation. It is part of a much deeper planetary purification process that intensifies during major cosmic transitions.

On a deeper level, human consciousness also affects the Earth’s subtle and vibrational field.

The instability we see in the outer world mirrors humanity’s inner chaos: our disconnection from Source, our shadow projections, repression, conditioning, and polarization. The outer climate reflects on some level the inner climate of a humanity profoundly out of alignment with its true nature during this dark phase of the cycle.

The transitions between Yugas have always involved major shifts in solar activity, geomagnetic fluctuations, eath changes, and intensified encounters with cometary debris fields.

These forces can trigger sudden climate swings, cooling or warming cycles, earthquakes, volcanic activity, pole shifts, and long-term environmental instability.

This does not dismiss pollution, ecological destruction, or even the reality of geoengineering. But it does mean that far larger forces are at work, forces beyond human control, beyond human technology, and far more ancient and powerful than anything we can manipulate.

Over a hundred years ago, Gurdjieff gave a stark description of what happens at the end of a civilizational cycle. His words describe our time the same way:

“There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture.

Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge.

This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations.”

— G. I. Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky

A Dark Night of Civilization or the Fire of Inner Purification

This is why Mouravieff’s warning is so relevant. His Time of Transition is not merely a poetic metaphor for social change or something that can be reduced to superficial activism, conspiracy exposure, or external action.

It describes an actual evolutionary threshold in which humanity is faced with a choice.

If humanity refuses its spiritual task, if it continues to cling to ignorance and rebellion against Divine law, then purification comes more forcefully from outside.

But if enough people respond to the call, engage in sincere inner work, and undergo the fire inwardly to purify themselves, then that same force becomes transformation rather than destruction.

The fire will come either way. The question is whether it acts primarily as outer catastrophe or as inner purification.

Like Mouravieff, The Mother (Mirra Alfassa), Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, was clearly aware of the transition between ages and the potential cataclysms it carries.

She also made clear that the course of events is not fixed, that we can mitigate potential catastrophes, and that even a relatively small number of people sincerely engaged in the Work can alter what unfolds:

“At the moment we are at a decisive turning-point in the history of the earth, once again. From every side, I am asked, ‘What is going to happen?’ Everywhere there is anguish, expectation, fear. ‘What is going to happen?’

There is only one reply: ‘If only man could consent to be spiritualized.’

And perhaps it would be enough if some individuals became pure gold, for this would be enough to change the course of events. We are faced with this necessity in a very urgent way.

This courage, this heroism which the Divine wants of us, why not use it to fight against one’s own difficulties, one’s own imperfections, one’s own obscurities?

Why not heroically face the furnace of inner purification so that it does not become necessary to pass once more through one of those terrible, gigantic destructions which plunge an entire civilization into darkness?”

— The Mother (Mirra Alfassa), Conversations with The Mother

That is the real point.

It is not about waiting for a collective awakening or the end of the world.

It is not about obsessing over what others are doing or what you think they should be doing, as if you knew their karmic lessons or level of consciousness.

It is not about getting hooked on dates, predictions, conspiracies, or fear porn.

It’s not about falling into pure physical survival fear, stocking up and building bunkers.

The real question is: What are you doing with your life? What is your inner orientation? What is your intention in life? Are you aligned with your true Self and dharma? What is your relationship to God?

And ultimately, who are you behind this mask of personality?

The deeper message behind all of these traditions is the same: when humanity refuses the work of conscious evolution, purification comes from outside. When it accepts the call, the fire turns inward and becomes the furnace of transformation.

And that brings us to the deeper meaning of inner and outer purification during this Time of Transition.

The Alchemy of Inner and Outer Transformation

The accelerating energies will intensify in the coming times as the alchemical fire expands exponentially, fueled by the friction of seemingly opposing forces working through us and in the world.

Anyone who keeps clinging to political, religious, or social systems, sides, and ideologies, to any “-ism,” including anarchism, the dual opposite of statism and another side of the same coin, to mental moralism and self-righteousness, and remains fixated solely on fighting the “shadows on the wall” of the 3D Matrix through mechanical reactionary activism, trying to “fix” the system, “save” the world, or get rid of “evil” by externalizing the process, or waiting for a savior, whether technological, political, or spiritual, will have a very difficult time.

Sooner or later, suffering will force them to let go, face themselves, work on themselves, and surrender to the Divine, or they will begin to disintegrate, unable to withstand the Plutonian pressure of the necessary evolutionary process.

What is being asked of us is far greater than creating a new system of government or striving only for freedom, sovereignty, and decentralization externally.

This transition is about the necessity for a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness and the need to spiritualize our being.

But it is also not about avoiding daily responsibilities. It is not about non-action, denial of evil, or escaping the material world, which is itself a distortion based on corrupted religious ideas, such as the belief that the flesh is sinful, money is evil, and the aim of life is to escape earthly existence.

It is about transforming our nature and spiritualizing matter, so that our actions and choices align with our higher being rather than being distorted by ignorance, projections, wounds, and conditioning.

By its very nature, this is a process and will not happen overnight or within our lifetime.

It is about our inner alignment with the Divine and the transformation of our mental, egoic, and materialistic consciousness. Otherwise, everything will continue to disintegrate again and again until we get the message.

The old needs to die and be transformed before the new can emerge, above all the conditioned and programmed ego, the false personality we identify with and mistake for our true Self.

Our wounds and traumas, accumulated over lifetimes, need to be healed and transmuted, and our shadow needs to be integrated rather than projected, through this inner alchemical process: the transmutation of lead (matter and ego) into gold (spirit and soul-being).

This often difficult process of disillusionment ignites the fire within and helps grow the soul. Ego-identification is itself a trauma response, the original wound, the “fall from Eden,” the illusory separation from God. In that sense, everyone is traumatized.

The Divine Gnostic Being

From lead to gold, we aim to be reborn into the true Self. In the esoteric Christian tradition, this is the inner alchemical process of the “second birth.”

Ultimately, this path points toward transcending and transforming death itself so that we may embody what Sri Aurobindo called the Divine Gnostic Being we are destined to become, no longer half-human and half-animal, subject to the lower nature, carnal desire, disease, aging, and death.

The Divine Force is not only meant to transform the individual, but the earth as well. There is no escape into some imaginary “heaven out there.” Only corrupted dogmatic religion promises paradise in the afterlife through the Matrix religious savior program.

However, we cannot skip any steps in this inner transformation and necessary work across lifetimes.

As I have said many times before, it is very tempting to engage in spiritual bypassing, get lost in religious dogma or New Age fast-food spirituality, fall into the trap of spiritual narcissism and the Luciferic temptation, and overestimate one’s level of being by believing one has already “ascended to 5D,” been “raptured,” been “saved,” or “awakened” in the true sense of the word.

This process also entails a descent into our own being and a confrontation with the darkness and evil within, which we so easily project outward and deny in ourselves.

Ultimately, it is about both psychological and spiritual work, inwardly and outwardly.

Nor will things improve on their own, by trying to fix them externally, or by desperately searching for a “safe place” in the world and falling into materialistic survival mode.

As many other realized beings have tried to convey for hundreds and even thousands of years, we need to bring forth a true and grounded spirituality within ourselves, to seek the Kingdom within first.

In other words, we must consciously engage in the Great Work of inner purification and alignment with Divine Will.

Rudolf Steiner expressed this necessity over a hundred years ago:

“Everything depends upon insight into the Spirit that is lying hidden in European and American culture, the Spirit from which men flee, which for the sake of ease they would fain avoid, but which alone can set the feet of humanity on the path of ascent.

People like to put their heads in the sand, saying that things will improve of themselves. No, they will not. The hour of a great decision has struck.

Either men will resolve to bring forth the spirituality of which I have spoken, or the decline of the West is inevitable. Hopes and fatalistic longings for things to right themselves are of no avail.

Once and forever, man has passed into the epoch when he must manipulate his powers out of his own free will. In other words: it is for men themselves to decide for or against spirituality.

If the decision is positive, progress will be possible; if not, the doom of the West is sealed and in the wake of dire catastrophes the further evolution of humanity will take a course undreamed of today.

Those who would strive for true insight into these matters should not, nay dare not, neglect the study of the life of soul in mankind at large, and in the different peoples, especially of East and West.”

– Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Forces in Man

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The Descent of the Supramental Consciousness

Sri Aurobindo, the last avatar who incarnated at the dawn of this Time of Transition, helped through his Integral Yoga and divine revelation to establish the conditions on earth for the descent of the supramental consciousness.

By supramental consciousness, Sri Aurobindo did not mean a higher or more refined mind or higher intellectual or rational capacities.

He called it the Supermind, a “Truth-Consciousness” and divine level of existence beyond the ordinary human mind that acts as the intermediary between the ultimate reality of Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) and the manifested created world.

It is an omniscient and self-creative power that perceives absolute unity while embracing diversity of life and multiplicity in oneness. Its aim is to evolve humanity into a divine, supramental race.

This supramental consciousness is now descending upon humanity in this next evolutionary ascending spiral. The task is to become internally receptive and anchor this Divine force within, becoming an instrument of the Divine Shakti acting out the Divine Will.

The Aim Is Not Escape, but Transformation

The core difference of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga is that the aim of life is not escape from the world, but the Divine transformation of mind, life, body, and the earth itself.

It is not about escaping the body, withdrawing into samadhi, dissolving into nirvana, reaching some otherworldly heaven, or escaping the wheel of samsara as past traditions suggested. It is about fully and integrally embodying the supramental consciousness so that even matter and the physical body may eventually be transformed.

In Sri Aurobindo’s vision, the end goal is not liberation away from earthly existence, but the manifestation of the Divine here in life, leaving nothing untouched, cutting nothing off, but transforming everything.

This would culminate in what he called the Divine Gnostic Being, a fully embodied being no longer subject in the same way to ignorance, division, suffering, aging, birth, and death, as the transmutation of consciousness and matter reaches its fulfillment on a transformed earth.

This is not just about your individual liberation, but the liberation of all of humanity and the earth in the far distant future.

This is a radically different spiritual vision from the old ascetic and world-denying paths. It is not rejection of life, but its divinization.

As The Mother put it:

“The old spirituality was an escape from life into the divine Reality, leaving the world just where it was, as it was, whereas our new vision, on the contrary, is a divinization of life, a transformation of the material world into a divine world.

It is not the old one transforming itself; it is a new world that is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled.

In the supramental creation, there will no longer be any religions. The whole life will be the expression, the flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world.

When the physical substance is supramentalised, to incarnate on earth will no longer be a cause of inferiority; quite the contrary. It will give a plenitude which cannot be obtained otherwise.

But all this is in the future; it is a future… which has begun but which will take some time to be realized integrally. Meanwhile, we are in a very special situation, extremely special, without precedent….”

Man as a Transitional Being

Like the Esoteric Christian tradition, Sri Aurobindo also emphasized that we are in a transitional period, stating:

“Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to Superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth’s evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature’s process.”

This “Superman” Sri Aurobindo refers to, not to be confused with Nietzsche’s Übermensch, is the Divine Gnostic Being, the destined future of humanity’s evolution. It relates to what Mouravieff called the spiritualized “New Man” in the era of the Holy Spirit.

We are still far from this ideal and from the completion of that evolutionary process, and must pass through several stages before the supramental consciousness can be fully embodied and transform life, mind, body, matter, and earth.

According to Sri Aurobindo, we are currently in the age of mental man, deeply entrenched in materialism, a necessary stage before the supramental age. In other words, this corresponds to the dark age of the Kali Yuga, a necessary descent into matter and darkness that must be faced before the ascent and eventual supramentalization.

However, nothing substantial will change unless humanity consents to be spiritualized, and merely mental, moral, or external revolutions are not enough:

“All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualized; but his nature, mental and vital and physical, is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfections.

The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation.

The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.

If the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing.[…]

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there.

Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretations of present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity.”

– Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses

Beyond Mind and the Higher Call

Our ordinary mind, which we are so proud of and believe to be the pinnacle of human evolution with its intellectual and rational capabilities, is also an instrument of Ignorance, contributing to the darkness, suffering, and evil working through humanity.

The mind can never perceive Gnosis, higher knowledge, or the Divine.

At the same time, as Sri Aurobindo noted, a small spiritual elite has always worked tirelessly toward this great aim, at times exercising a powerful influence in civilizations such as Vedic India, ancient Egypt, and Atlantis.

Now, more and more people whose souls are ripe for the Great Work are answering this higher call.

“The mass of humanity evolves slowly, containing in itself all stages of the evolution from the material and the vital man to the mental man.

A small minority has pushed beyond the barriers, opening the doors to occult and spiritual knowledge and preparing the ascent of the evolution beyond mental man into spiritual and supramental being.

Sometimes this minority has exercised an enormous influence as in Vedic India, Egypt or, according to tradition, in Atlantis, and determined the civilization of the race, giving it a strong stamp of the spiritual or the occult.

Sometimes they have stood apart in their secret schools or orders, not directly influencing a civilization which was sunk in material ignorance or in chaos and darkness or in the hard external enlightenment which rejects spiritual knowledge.

The cycles of evolution tend always upward, but they are cycles and do not ascend in a straight line. The process, therefore, gives the impression of a series of ascents and descents, but what is essential in the gains of the evolution is kept or, even if eclipsed for a time, re-emerges in new forms suitable to the new ages.”

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga

The dark forces are currently far better organized and more unified in their agenda than the forces of Light in humanity. Too many people are still driven primarily by conditioned desires, shadow projections, fear, and lower nature impulses.

Any action arising from that foundation will eventually be usurped by hostile forces unless it is rooted in sincere aspiration and surrender to the Divine.

The Pressure of the Descending Force

The planet is being infused with ever more dynamic supramental energies of the Divine Force as the dark and light polarities increase, creating more friction for those caught in the current.

The Light brings up everything that is not in alignment with who you truly are, or who you think you are.

All your triggers and projections ignite until you own their source within yourself, stop externalizing and justifying your inner pain, step out of victimhood, blame, and grandiosity, integrate the shadow, and cut off the food source for anti-divine hostile forces that play humans like puppets and feed off projected emotional loosh.

Hence, it is essential to engage in the Great Work on all levels, physically, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually, in order to clear the vessel, purify your being, and bring forth essence, the soul or psychic being, as a transducer for Divine Will.

This work is imperative if one is to hold the frequency of the descending supramental Divine Force during this transition.

The Split Within Humanity

However, not everyone in their current incarnation and evolutionary state is able to engage in this work deeply enough to embody and anchor these frequencies. Hence the necessity of the splitting of humanity, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother also foresaw.

Mouravieff speaks of this splitting during the Time of Transition through the lens of Esoteric Christianity, pointing to the difference between Adamic man and pre-Adamic man, which also relates to the topic of organic portals or soulless humans.

It is important to understand that this splitting is a natural process in the evolution of consciousness before all of humanity can be spiritualized in some more distant stage.

Many people have abused and misinterpreted knowledge about different levels of being and soul potential to demonize others, falling into superiority, while overestimating their own level of being.

This means we can no longer spiritually bypass our inner work and shadow, nor can we bypass looking clearly at the darkness in the world and what must be resisted.

Both inner and outer work are required.

Sri Aurobindo was very clear that the supramental consciousness would not descend equally or uniformly into all of humanity at once. It would manifest through a few first, those inwardly prepared and able to receive it, and only then gradually spread into the earth-consciousness. In that sense, the split is part of a larger evolutionary process.

“The object of the [Integral] yoga is to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth, to fix it there, to create a new race with the principle of the supramental consciousness governing the inner and outer individual and collective life.[…]

It is first through the individuals that it [the supramental consciousness] becomes part of the earth-consciousness and afterwards it spreads from the first centers and takes up more and more of the global consciousness till it becomes an established force there.

It does not follow that humanity as a whole will become supramental. What is more likely to happen is that the supramental principle will be established in the evolution by the descent just as the mental principle was established by the appearance of thinking Mind and Man in earthly life.

There will be a race of supramental beings on the earth just as now there is a race of mental beings.”

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga

Spiritual Warfare & The Battle for the Human Being

One of the greatest battles of this Time of Transition is the human being itself.

The most important part to understand is that the war is essentially through us, for there are forces in non-physical realms that have been manipulating humans increasingly throughout the descent over thousands of years, and we have now reached the “end game.”

Transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and the growing push toward total technological mediation of life are expressions of a deeper anti-divine impulse that seeks to sever the human being even further from soul embodiment, nature, and the Divine.

Technology itself is not the problem. The problem is the spirit and intention behind how it is being developed and used, and the deeper agenda driving it.

The more people are pushed out of their bodies and into artificial, disembodied, and virtualized states of existence, the more vulnerable they become to manipulation and occult interference.

Transhumanism is not just a social or political issue. It is a spiritual issue. It affects the future of the soul in relation to the body, the earth, and the evolutionary possibility of becoming a spiritualized being.

The religion of Transhumanism is the end-game card of the hostile forces, an attempt to interfere with the process of spiritualization and entrap as many souls as possible.

We can see this distortion and temptation in many forms already: the obsession with technological control, the fixation on artificial enhancement, the commodification of the body, and the fear of aging and death.

The more human beings identify with the body as their true self, with image over essence, and with physical appearance over inner being, the more easily they can be seduced by the promise of artificial immortality, synthetic pleasure and beauty, or machine-based transcendence.

At its extreme, this is the birth of what might be called silicon-based man in opposition to the true spiritual evolution of the human being. It is an attempt to counterfeit transcendence through technology rather than through the difficult inner work of purification, soul embodiment, and union with the Divine.

We are being lured with the counterfeit of what we are actually yearning for, which is the Divine and true immortal soul being within us to come more forward.

Yet this dark agenda, however real, is not the final word. It does not mean it will succeed in the way its matrix architects and anti-Divine forces intend. There is light at the end of the tunnel, especially for those already engaged in the Great Work.

Soul integration and embodiment are imperative in this day and age. They are part of the antidote to the soul-harvesting agenda.

It is up to each one of us to prepare the vessel through sincere inner work, to anchor the Light, to surrender to the Divine, and to spiritualize our being. This is difficult work for human beings who love their ignorance and imperfections, who remain addicted to their lower nature, image, and desires.

Many are not yet ripe for this work in the present cycle. Others refuse the call and instead indulge their projections, blame, virtue signaling, entitlement, and victim consciousness, all of which serve as food for the anti-Divine hostile forces.

Sri Aurobindo was very clear when he said that the work is a battle, and it requires a spiritual warrior attitude.

“Accepting life, [the spiritual warrior] has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too, along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load.

Therefore, his Work has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country.

He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence.

Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.”

– Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

The Birth Canal of a New Humanity

We are in a birth canal during this Time of Transition.

We are emerging out of the long night of the Kali Yuga and standing at the fiery threshold of Ekpyrosis, the purificatory transition between world cycles.

This is not merely the collapse of an old age, but the painful and necessary labor of a new one being born. The old cannot survive intact because it is no longer aligned with the evolutionary pressure of the supramental consciousness now acting upon humanity and the earth.

Whenever I speak about this, some people assume I am promoting passivity, escapism, or spiritual bypass. But that reaction usually comes from those who have not sincerely faced themselves, or who have only intellectualized the work.

This work is anything but passive. It confronts you with life and with yourself in the most demanding way. It forces you to stop blaming, projecting, and looking for outer enemies to explain everything. It compels you to take responsibility for your inner state, your life, your choices, and your alignment with Truth.

Most people remain trapped in victim and blame consciousness, always needing a villain to point to, whether politicians, elites, governments, technocrats, the cabal, liberals, conservatives, communists, Zionists, or some other outer force.

Most of us never grasp what evil actually is in the context of the evolution of consciousness, or what it means to face the “Dark Half of the Truth”: a teaching function that also requires facing the darkness within oneself. That is where the real solution begins.

This does not mean there is no place for practical preparation or wise action in the world. But bunkers, wealth, physical strategies, and self-preservation plans rooted in fear and materialistic consciousness are not the solution. As Misra writes in Yuga Shift:

“You cannot buy your way to the next Yuga and the ascending cycle. No matter how much wealth you have, or what a big shot you are, or how many underground shelters you have built, you will not be able to make it to the next Yuga unless you transform yourself and align with Dharma. Don’t waste time building shelters. Work on your consciousness.”

The message is the same across esoteric traditions.

The outer purification of Ekpyrosis is not God’s punishment, nor a reason for doom and gloom.

It is a necessary phase in the evolution of consciousness.

The more we resist it, the more destructive it becomes outwardly. The more we consciously participate in it inwardly, the more it becomes a force of transformation that helps humanity and the world.

This is why I state it again: the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community, and the world is to live in accordance with your Dharma, engage in conscious inner work, and willingly burn in the fire of transmutation.

As Adyashanti said:

“This authentic impulse can be a bit frightening, because when you feel it, you know it is real.

When you have let go of all conditions, when you have let go of how you want your own awakening to be and what you want the journey to be like, you have let go of your illusion of control.

How does one know if they are ready? One is ready when they are willing to be absolutely consumed, when they are willing to be fuel for a fire without end.”

This is not the time to escape the world any further.

It is the time to embrace life more deeply by anchoring the Divine Force within us.

The great adventure of this cosmic yoga toward our divinity continues as we enter the birth canal of a new human possibility.

We still have a long way to go, but it is also right here. And you have a choice to make.

“The choice is imperative. Truth or the Abyss.”

— The Mother, Mirra Alfassa

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, guide, and co-host of The Cosmic Matrix Podcast, whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our world.

You can find more of Bernhard’s work at Piercing the Veil of Reality and through his programs Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, co-facilitated with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, and Mastering Spiritual Warfare.

“Most people confuse ‘self-knowledge’ with knowledge of their conscious ego-personality. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents.

People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of themselves, but not by the real psychic facts which are, for the most part, hidden from them.”

- Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

What Jung describes in this quote is very important to understand for any seeker interested in or engaged with truth, awakening, self-work, and self-inquiry.

Most people claim to know “themselves,” but they mistake their ego-personality, with all its desires, likes, dislikes, wants, preferences, attractions, repulsions, blame, grandiosity, inferiority, victim consciousness, poor-me narratives, identification with the body, and beliefs, for the true Self.

They identify with thoughts and feelings, believing this is who they are, and “self-work” becomes merely an exercise in trying to perfect this false personality, mistaking it for the true Self.

At its core lies the illusion of separation from the outer world.

People also mistake “self-actualization” for “self-work” or psycho-spiritual work and believe it is about manifesting their desires, fulfilling their “dreams,” and trying to find the perfect career, partner, house, family, status, security, and fulfillment.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. It is simply a necessary stage in the evolution of consciousness.

For most people, life is still centered around the aims and desires of the ego-personality, based on their karmic setup and level of consensus consciousness.

In other words, true individuation has not yet begun, which should not be confused with the social or cultural idea of an “individual,” since that too is usually rooted in the ego-personality and its conditioning.

Their personality is still largely a reflection of the collective, usually identified with a group, nation, religion, tribe, community, or family, and they have not yet engaged in the process of [inner] differentiation.

But let’s not confuse “self-actualization,” mainstream “self-help,” or motivational books on the New York Times bestseller list with the Great Work of “Know Thyself.”

As Joseph Campbell said:

“Self-actualization is for people with nothing better to do, people who don’t know their personal myth or deeper purpose in life.”

When the soul is ripe and makes its appearance through the crust of the ego-personality and answers the distant yet strong call of the Divine, the compass begins to point toward the greater work, which is the ultimate way out of the Matrix.

It is neither a “self-improvement” program nor a tidy step-by-step approach to becoming a “better and happier” person.

This path is something entirely different. It is for those who feel a deep inner calling of the soul to align with something higher.

And that is only the beginning.

The more sincere you are with this process, and the more you follow the needle of the compass of your soul, the more you will realize that most of “your” thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires, and wants are not “your own,” but have been conditioned externally.

The “I” you think you are, the personality mask you identify with, is made up of these programs, memories, sub-personalities, biological drives, and experiences, accumulated over lifetimes and influenced by the collective consciousness.

It also includes social, cultural, parental, educational, and media-conditioning programs.

None of this is truly “you.”

As you explore the deeper caverns of your being, you also begin to realize that mighty evolutionary forces, cosmic forces, forces of nature, and all kinds of beings and entities work through you and use you as their instrument.

You begin to see that the human being is a battleground of opposing forces, as well as a vessel for Divine fulfillment, and that much of what you once mistook for “your” impulses was never truly yours in the first place.

In this process, you come face to face with what Sri Aurobindo noted, reflecting what all occult esoteric traditions have conveyed:

“The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being, to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions and impulses.

Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy, and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, and influences in universal Nature.

We claim the universal forces that work in us as our own. We claim as the effect of our personal will what is really something else.

The mind rides on a swirl of natural forces, hovers between several possibilities, inclines to one side or another, settles, and has the sense of choosing. But it does not see, it is not even dimly aware of the Force behind that has determined its choice.”

Many of your desires, feelings, and attachments can also be expressions of unconscious trauma responses from childhood wounding, lack of self-worth, and unconscious shame, resulting in attempts to fill an empty hole within yourself through external means.

You may even become very successful in that pursuit in a world where success is measured by wealth, status, and fame. But it remains a bottomless hole.

Many desires directed outward toward achieving a state of “happiness” are actually unconscious attempts to seek the truth of your being, your essence, and the Divine within.

There is nothing wrong with desire. Only attachment to desire results in unnecessary suffering.

We also rarely question where our desires, goals, and aims in life come from in the first place.

That is why most New Age manifestation techniques, based on the distorted and superficial idea of the law of attraction to “manifest your desires,” either fail or can actually create more suffering, even if your “desire” is manifested.

Hence the saying, “Be careful what you wish for,” for there is always a price to pay based on the law of cause and effect and the law of agreement.

Many people suffer and remain unhappy even when they achieve success because they pursue desires, aims, and goals that are not truly their own, but are expressions of mechanical false personality parts.

We will never find true joy, freedom, fulfillment, or happiness as long as we remain only externally oriented and mistake the ego-personality for the true Self.

Once you truly cross the threshold and pierce through the false persona you believed for so long was who you are, and your true essence emerges, a new world opens up.

Then it is no longer about “self-actualization” or “manifesting desires.”

In fact, there is no need to manifest desires. There is a natural self-giving of the soul-being to the Divine, allowing the higher Divine Will to manifest through you unobstructed by the mechanical nature of the personality rooted in ignoranc.

That is what aligns with your true purpose for being here.

It is the moment when the ego-personality is transformed into a servant and instrument of the Divine Will and relinquishes its illusory authority.

And that purpose is not a job, career, or anything specific you “do.” That is again the ego hijacking the idea of purpose.

True purpose is a state of being and consciousness, as your life becomes your dharma and every single action is infused with purpose according to your unique dharma.

Yet to cross that threshold, disillusionment is inevitable, and the work takes on the nature of a spiritual battle, for there are forces that do not want you to awaken, but want to keep you identified with the false self and chained to your lower nature.

It is also what the ego-personality resists the most and why most people get stuck in “self-actualization” when it is merely a stepping stone toward the Great Work of Individuation and Self-realization.

If you want to go deeper into the themes explored here, I recommend these related articles:

On why so many seekers begin the work but never cross the threshold, and what it truly takes to stay on the path:

• The Path to the Temple of Secrets: Why Seekers Fall Off the Way and What It Takes to Cross the Threshold

On the disillusionment that is inevitable before real transformation, and how to rise through it:

• Facing the Terror of the Situation and Rising Like the Phoenix

On the hidden forces that work through humnaity and keep you identified with the false self, and why this work is, by its very nature, a spiritual battle:

• Why This Is a Spiritual War and Why Spiritual Work Is a Battle

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, and guide whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our reality.

He is the founder of Piercing the Veil of Reality (www.veilofreality.com), a platform dedicated to guiding seekers through personal and collective transformation.

Bernhard co-hosts The Cosmic Matrix Podcast with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, diving deep into spirituality, psychology, esotericism, and navigating our transitional times through the lens of consciousness evolution.

Listen to all episodes at www.cosmicmatrixpodcast.com

Together, they guide Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, a transformative 14-week group coaching program focused on psycho-spiritual work and the embodiment of your true Self. The program is offered periodically and limited in size. Sign up for the waiting list at www.thetimeoftransition.com

Bernhard also facilitates Mastering the Spiritual Warfare, a 10-week initiation into discerning the unseen forces operating through and around you and the path to embodied sovereignty. Learn more at www.masteringspiritualwarfare.com

What’s behind the sudden wave of public Christian conversions, the rise in dogmatic Christianity, and the demonization of everything non-Christian?

Is it really a return to God and the coming of Christ?

Over a century ago, Oswald Spengler predicted this would happen.

In his seminal work The Decline of the West, Spengler argued that every civilization, in its late winter phase, would experience what he called the Second Religiosity: a return to the religious forms of its cultural springtime after rationalism, materialism, and the soulless machinery of modern life.

But this return is not a genuine spiritual rebirth. It is not the birth of a new era of enlightenment, but a nostalgic longing for sacred meaning in a world that feels mechanized, dark, full of evil, and spiritually empty.

It’s a reaching back toward empty rituals, literalism, and dogmas, not with the living, creative Divine impulse that originally animated them, but with the exhaustion of a civilization embedded in the dark age of materialism, devoid of Spirit, and spiritually bankrupt.

For Spengler, such revivals do not reverse the decline of a civilization. They are a sign of it. A civilization that has fulfilled its cycle and is moving toward its final consolidation and disintegration.

Spengler wrote that there’s a phase of “mock-religion” in which people toy with myths (which they tend to take literally) in the hope of filling an inner void.

What we see today is the same impulse taken public: people adopting a religious appearance and personality while feeling the need to show off this new costume to the world. Hollow, performative, and corrupted.

Sound familiar?

What we’re witnessing right now, and increasingly so over the past 6 years, is a textbook manifestation of Spengler’s Second Religiosity playing out in real time:

the wave of “reborn” Christians,

the New Age to dogmatic Christian pipeline,

the rigid literalist Bible-thumping,

the labeling of yoga, meditation, astrology, and shamanism as “demonic” or “Luciferian,”

the missionary zeal of “accept Jesus as your savior or go to hell,”

the compulsive need to post “Christ is King,”

the obsession with Jesus as a historical figure and Biblical literalism,

to announce being “saved by Jesus,”

to record oneself being baptized for public display,

and the rise of “Christian” influencers.

People are reverting to a medieval form of dogmatic mentalized Christianity, devoid of the inner Christ consciousness that infused the original teaching even before the Bible was produced.

The forms are reoccupied, but the cathedrals are not being built from within.

When religious forms are no longer alive and infused with Spirit from the inside, they have to be enforced from the outside: through posturing, dogma, moral absolutism, social shaming, and the demonization of everything that doesn’t fit the program.

The less inner spiritual embodiment and realization of the “kingdom within,” the more aggressive the outer proclamation and the need to proselytize.

This is why you see former ayahuasca participants, Burning Man “Burners,” and New Agers violently condemning their past as “satanic” after converting. They are often judgmental of others for still engaging in these practices and beliefs, or feel superior to them because they have been “saved.”

They’ve swung from one extreme identification to another. One pill for another. One escapism to another.

The dead giveaway of this shallow neo-Christian revival is the need to make a public display of the conversion, the baptism, the Bible thumping, the new “Christian” identity.

Carl Jung called it a flight into the opposites. It provides temporary psychological relief but suppresses essential parts of the psyche that remain unintegrated and continue to feed the shadow.

Spengler analyzed this as a civilizational pattern that is inevitable, mechanical, and deterministic. His view of the late winter phase of the West aligns with where we are now in the last phase of the Fourth Turning.

But Spengler could only describe the pattern from the viewpoint of world history. He couldn’t see what drives it from behind the veil.

From the esoteric, occult, and psychological framework, there is another layer: hostile non-physical occult forces, known to all esoteric traditions, actively steer this process and seduce people into this Second Religiosity.

These are the same forces that have corrupted religions, and especially Christianity, over many centuries.

From an occult perspective, the Second Religiosity is a final attempt of the adverse forces that have been ruling over humanity for thousands of years to hijack an awakening impulse through a corrupt, distorted form of Christian beliefs.

From the hyperdimensional perspective, it is a long-term conditioning program by occult forces in which religious leaders, prophets, and scriptures have been influenced and distorted over centuries to lay the foundation for religious control and manipulation.

It’s the real endgame of the spiritual war, and it’s happening through us, not out there.

The genuine impulse toward the Divine gets redirected into externalized belief systems that keep humanity locked in guilt, fear, and dependency for potential takeover of body, mind, and soul.

The “Jesus savior” program, the literalist belief that accepting a historical figure as your personal savior is sufficient for salvation, is itself an occult control mechanism.

It keeps people externally oriented, guilt-driven, and psychologically split. It prevents the very inner transformation it claims to offer.

It creates the Veil of Light that Rumi warned about: self-righteousness masquerading as spiritual awakening.

It is more dangerous than obvious darkness because it tells you the work is done when it has barely begun, that you are awake and “saved” when, in truth, you have fallen deeper into delusion and into lying to yourself.

But here is the real irony:

Dogmatic Christians claim to fight “demonic forces” while unknowingly serving them.

Shadow repression, moral absolutism, and the demonization of psychology and of inner work create exactly the psychic fragmentation that hostile entities feed on.

The person who won’t face their own shadow becomes the perfect vehicle for the very forces they project onto others.

Even more ironic:

Many neo-Christians and conspiracy-minded people condemn others and “the elite” as “Luciferian.” But the true, deep esoteric meaning of the Luciferic force has been grossly distorted into an oversimplified caricature.

The irony is that many of them are themselves entranced by the Luciferic impulse, that Lucifer works through them. Lucifer is behind the deceptive Veil of Light that blinds many Christians while they project their shadow externally onto others.

Luciferic forces feed on grandiosity, spiritual delusion, and subtle superiority. They give the illusion of spiritual progress while avoiding the real inner work of transformation.

And there are many other occult forces that feed on the projections of this distorted form of Christianity.

Spengler was right that the Second Religiosity was coming: a return to dead forms wearing a shallow performative appearance, literalist dogma, and external salvation.

But this is not a spiritual awakening. It’s civilizational sleepwalking dressed in holy robes.

It will all come burning down eventually, figuratively or even literally, as the end of this cosmic cycle, the Kali Yuga, and the end of the West as we know it draws closer in alignment with the last phase of the Fourth Turning.

Instead of making sincere efforts to raise consciousness via the inner purification and psycho-spiritual work, aligning with the bigger cycle and what the Divine truly wants from us in accordance with Dharma, people get hung up on forms, dogma, and appearances that represent the old world.

People are trying to save the West with the empty forms of “tradition” by regressing to the past with a superficial, mental, external approach to God that reflects lower states of consciousness.

It’s like clinging to dead leaves in winter, when the real work is to let go, engage in the alchemical inner transformation to bring forth the true Self, become the seeds of the next cycle, and embody Christ, the Divine, Krishna, the Kingdom within.

You don’t need any ritual or savior for that. No baptism, no proclamation, no dogmatic attachment to any scripture.

Just the sincere aspiration and surrender to the Divine, and the humility, effort, and spiritual will to engage in the Great Work to bring forth the Kingdom within.

Godspeed.

If you want to learn more and for context, I recommend these articles and podcasts where I explored many of these topics in more depth:

• The Jesus Savior Program and Reclaiming Christ

• Spiritual Warfare in the Age of Religious Conversion

• The Only Safe Shelter: Becoming Seeds for the Next Cycle

• A New World Wants To Be Born – The End Of The Age of Religions

• The New Age To Dogmatic Christian Pipeline

• Is the Kali Yuga Ending in 2025? The Great Turning and What It Asks of Us

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, and guide whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our reality.

He is the founder of Piercing the Veil of Reality (www.veilofreality.com), a platform dedicated to guiding seekers through personal and collective transformation.

Bernhard co-hosts The Cosmic Matrix Podcast with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, diving deep into spirituality, psychology, esotericism, and navigating our transitional times through the lens of consciousness evolution.

Listen to all episodes at www.cosmicmatrixpodcast.com

Together, they guide Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, a transformative 14-week group coaching program focused on psycho-spiritual work and the embodiment of your true Self.

A new round begins March 18, 2026.

Learn more at www.thetimeoftransition.com

Many people who have spoken out about the Epstein files, and especially child trafficking, elite pedophile rings, and SRA (Sexual Ritualistic Abuse), for years and even decades, like myself and others, are being vindicated.

Not too long ago, we were called crazy and ignored.

However, the evil in this dark age, the Kali Yuga, goes far deeper and is far worse than what Epstein & Co. engaged in.

I call it more the “mainstream version” of elite pedophilia that mostly served blackmail operations.

You will never know or hear the whole truth from government agencies. Not the FBI, DOJ, or any congressional or Senate hearings. The truth is far more disturbing than what the public is being told.

A complete revelation would bring down the entire system and global economy. Not just a recession or market dip. There would be blood in the streets in rage and horror.

The collective is not ready, let alone spiritually and psychologically mature enough to handle it. The current level of consciousness and lack of shadow integration will not allow it to come fully to light.

The outrage and anger are understandable. So is the call for arrests, justice, and even the death penalty for anyone who has raped children or used them for sex and ritualistic abuse.

But if you believe you can just “eradicate evil” externally, you’re severely mistaken and don’t comprehend what evil is to begin with.

That is what people who believe the solution is just to “expose all conspiracies” miss: the psycho-spiritual dimensions and levels of consciousness. Awakening is more than just exposing “evil” or gaining informational awareness.

The nature of evil and its teaching function in the context of consciousness evolution are major topics in their own right.

The other reaction is ongoing denial. People believe that ignoring it will make it go away. Many are not ready to face how dark and disturbing it really is.

Many people are already getting traumatized and dysregulated by the little we have seen of the Epstein files.

That is understandable, as their illusions of consensus reality are being shattered.

Expect more disillusionment, more shadows, and more darkness exposed over the next few years as we enter the Ekpyrosis purification phase during this Time of Transition.

And it is a good thing, for all must come to light.

Laura and I explored these themes in depth in our recent podcast episode “Epstein Files And The End Of An Era: Exposing Shadows & Seeding A New Cycle.”

This article explores why evil cannot be eliminated through external means alone, the hyperdimensional forces working through human puppets, the sexual shadow as humanity’s darkest blind spot, and the corrupted religious conditioning that keeps billions trapped in the illusion of separation.

Most importantly, it reveals the path forward: facing the dark half of the truth.

Why You Can’t Kill Evil: The Hyperdimensional Reality

Most people are caught up in the tunnel vision of the 3D manifestations of the “Matrix,” like the Deep State, the Globalists, left/right politics, the Illuminati, Luciferians, Zionists, or any other “secret society” or institution they focus on, missing out on the occult hyper-dimensional aspect of the “matrix control system.”

Most powerful psychopaths in positions of power and elite circles are empty vessels and puppets of powerful anti-divine asuric occult hostile beings.

Many violent crimes, including murder, rape, and pedophilia, committed by psychopathic individuals at all levels of power can be attributed to these occult malevolent entities.

They possess or work through their human puppets to feed on the “loosh” of suffering, a very “delicious” frequency “meal” for these beings.

Humanity is not “top of the food chain,” frequency-consciousness speaking.

The energy of being joyful about someone’s death, even if the mind justifies it because it was an “evil” person, feeds the occult forces that manipulate humanity from unseen realms.

Remember what Hillary Clinton said about Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died!” followed by a big laugh. Frequency-wise, it is no different than laughing or being joyful about the death of what you see as an “evil” person.

You lower yourself to their level of “enjoying death and suffering.”

The same goes for projecting hate and anger toward these individuals.

It feeds them just like the Emperor in “Star Wars” wanted Luke to hate him and give in to the dark side.

You become what you fight against with your thirst for revenge.

It’s a trap of agreement with occult hostile forces.

You give unconscious consent to be possessed as your strings are pulled beyond your awareness, contributing to the feeding and creating more karmic entanglements.

So-called “Satanic rituals,” SRA (Sexual Ritualistic Abuse), and MK Ultra trauma-based programming are practiced to call in these powerful occult forces to gain more power and purposely possess specific individuals.

When their human host dies, nothing changes. Killing the human host changes nothing for the better. The occult hostile entity riding them will survive and attach to or possess a new host.

The occult hyperdimensional agenda exists outside human conception of “time and space” and beyond human lifetimes. The death of a vessel/puppet due to old age or unforeseen circumstances is accounted for.

This is how humanity has been manipulated for thousands of years.

A powerful asura titan being can do its work over generations and lifetimes, affecting multiple people within a family or group (not just blood-related).

That’s the enormous blind spot among people who believe the solution is simply to arrest all the bad guys or kill them off.

The death penalty won’t change anything either. It will only satisfy the demonic being (and the human ego living in the illusion that “justice is done”), which will then look for another suitable human vessel to use.

As Sri Aurobindo noted:

“…From this point of view, you will see that capital punishment is absurd. The man who murdered was under the possession of the impulse of some [occult] being. When the man is executed, the being takes possession of another. Some vital beings want to have their play here….”

This doesn’t mean passive acceptance or absolute non-violence. As Sri Aurobindo warned, rigid pacifism in an ignorant world can enable the triumph of falsehood and injustice.

The path requires discernment and conscious action aligned with dharma, rather than reactive violence driven by ego, hate, or revenge.

Humans are too embedded in materialism, linear time, and the 3D matrix, ignorant of the multitude of spiritual forces, beings, and planes that intersect with and influence and sometimes possess them.

In our degraded level of consciousness, most people mistake symptoms for causes and don’t recognize the spiritual reality with countless beings acting on and through them.

And the primary entry point for these forces is through the sexual shadow—the darkest and most exploited aspect of human nature.

The Darkest Shadow: Power, Sex, and Unconscious Evil

Most people don’t understand what power actually means, and the inherent drive to feed on the powerless.

Most people also have no idea how dark true evil can be, because they have never faced their own shadow or their own potential for evil, and are therefore shocked when confronted with others’ darkness.

That is also why people who have not faced their own shadow are more vulnerable to manipulation by evil forces that hide behind a mask of sanity and “niceness” in human form.

The Epstein files go far beyond sexual desire, fetishes, or hooking up with “hot young chicks.” It is even beyond attraction to children, especially when viewed through an esoteric, occult lens

At that level, you are dealing with asuric, soratic, and demonic forces working through and possessing certain members of the powerful elite, who serve as conduits for forces most humans have no awareness of.

The sexual instinct is the easiest vector to manipulate, especially in men.

And the sexual shadow is the darkest shadow of humanity.

That is why OnlyFans models can make hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Why porn sites are among the most visited websites in the world.

Why sex trafficking is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Why the movie and music industries, and our entire culture, are hyper-sexualized.

Why women on social media sexualize themselves with “thirst posts.”

Why crude sexual humor is always popular.

Why sex sells in advertising.

And it is also why people who present themselves as morally superior or religiously “pure,” while obsessively judging others as sinful, often carry a deeply repressed sexual shadow.

That shadow seeks expression in secret, and in extreme cases can surface as compulsive porn use, abusive behavior, or worse, all while maintaining the public mask of being “righteous,” “moral,” and “pure.”

People feed on attention for their sexual attractiveness and are mechanically attracted to what appeals to the lower nature. Through them, all kinds of non-physical forces they are unaware of can feed as well, even installing sexual desires that are not their own.

The entry point is always the shadow and unconscious trauma.

As within, so without. As without, so within.

People are under the illusion that if the elite pedophiles are arrested, everything will change, or that if porn is made illegal, the problem disappears.

Far from it. That is merely cutting a branch off a tree whose roots remain intact.

The branch will always grow back, often stronger than before, just as the shadow becomes darker, more powerful, and more perverse the more it is denied, repressed, and projected instead of faced and integrated.

In other words, shadow work is the name of the game.

And it starts with you.

As Carl Jung noted:

“None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. Whether the crime occurred many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present.

Onewould therefore do well to possess some ‘imagination for evil,’ for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature.

In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil. Harmlessness and naïveté are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease.

On the contrary, they lead to the projection of the unrecognized evil into the ‘other.’ This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of his threat.

What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil.”

- Carl G. Jung

The Biggest Blind Spot

Degraded, distorted, and popularized Christianity has conditioned the idea that Good and Evil are two separate things, that God and the Devil are two equal and opposing forces existing independently of each other, and that the spiritual path is about choosing one side and destroying the other.

The oversimplistic dualist view was influenced by Manichaeism, which taught that existence is a cosmic battle between two equal, opposing forces: Light (God/Spirit) and Darkness (Matter/Evil), fundamentally separate entities/substances locked in eternal war.

Moreover, corrupted and popularized religious teachings claim that the goal of spiritual life is to escape the material world entirely into “heaven” via rapture and salvation, and that this only happens through Jesus in the afterlife.

These beliefs only work in favor of the very occult forces that have reigned over humanity for thousands of years, the same forces that are behind the “Jesus Savior Program” and one of the most edited and corrupted religious scriptures: the Bible, as it has been taught to the masses.

The idea that evil is an absolute and a separate force, being, or power to God is the biggest blind spot, deception, and spell that billions of religious humans, particularly in the Western world, have fallen under.

We even see this in Hollywood movies, where the “hero” always wins by simply killing the bad guy, and that’s the happy ending.

It goes along with the same illusion and deception that one can just “remove” evil or “kill it off.” You see the same blindness and illusion on the political level. The left wants to get rid of the right, and the right wants to destroy the left.

It is an impossible task, for it goes against Divine reality, based on a collective misperception of what God and the Divine are, for “Good and Evil” is not even a true duality.

You need to face the Dark Half of the Truth, as Sri Aurobindo described it, for it is part of God. The shadow cannot be done away with and amputated. It needs to be transformed, transmuted, and integrated.

Carl Jung knew about this and gave the world, especially the West, a workable, alchemical, practical teaching to integrate the shadow.

But his work has also been grossly misunderstood and distorted. Many Christians literally “hate” him and call him a “false idol” because his work threatens their entire doctrinal fundamentalism.

As Satprem put it:

“As long as we reject one for the other, we will fail miserably and miss the goal of existence. How could we possibly remove ‘evil’ without blowing up the whole world?

There is one single substance in the world, not two, not a good one and an evil one. One cannot remove or add anything. All is right here.

We are right in the middle of the miracle, only we are missing the key to it. We are ourselves the battlefield: all these worlds, from the highest to the lowest, meet within us. So we must not run away, holding our noses or crossing ourselves, but we must enter the battlefield squarely and conquer.”

This is not as simple as escaping into “non-duality,” a concept many spiritual seekers have used as a philosophical spiritual bypass. It is something far more radical.

As Sri Aurobindo noted: “None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell,” mirrored by Carl Jung: “The tree that reaches to Heaven must have its roots in hell.”

If you grasp the deep esoteric meaning of these words and what is asked of you, you have found the key to the ultimate secret: the Kingdom of God.

The main question is also what is “good” and “bad,” and who determines that?

The ego’s subjective view of what the personality thinks is “good” in its conditioned, superficial, and oversimplified black-and-white mental perception is not always what the Divine determines necessary from a “supra-mental vision” (beyond the mind to comprehend) in the context of the evolution of consciousness or what the true Self within strives towards based on Divine Laws and Karmic lessons, collectively and individually.

As Satprem further elaborated:

“Each thing, each being, each force on the earth moves toward a special absolute, expressing it more or less accurately and often perversely, but despite all the flaws and perversions, it obeys an intimate law that impels it towards the one truth of its being – even the leaves on the same tree are all unique.

If it were not for that absolute and unique truth at the center of each one of us, we would crumble.

Truth has nothing to do with thought or good deeds, though these may be steps on the way; it has to do with a vastness of being. And the growth process is slow and difficult.

But the mind, which sees only the present surface of things, seeks to trim off all the rough edges, purify by exclusion, and reduce its world to a uniform, righteous, and equitable truth.

It decrees, ‘This is good, that is bad; this is friendly, that is hostile.’ It might want to eliminate all the Nazis from the world or all the Chinese, for instance, thinking they are quite unnecessary calamities.

And the mind is right, by definition, since it is designed to be reasonable and since it, too, expresses a mental or moral absolute that has its place and purpose.

But this is not the whole truth; it is only one point of view. Some will say that our partiality, our mind, our morals are necessary instruments for living in the world as it is now, and this is true. We do need to be partial.

But this is also why the world is not whole.

Not only does the supramental [Divine] consciousness capture all the points of view, but also the deeper forces at work behind each thing as well as the truth within each thing: it is a Truth-Consciousness – and because it sees all, it automatically possesses Power.

We are powerless because we do not see.

To see and to see totally necessarily means to have power. But the supramental [divine] power does not obey our logic or morality.

It sees far into space and time, and it does not try to do away with evil in order to save the good, nor does it work through miracles; it frees the good that is within the evil, applying its force and light on the dark half so it consents to its luminous counterpart.

Wherever it is applied, the immediate effect is to touch off a crisis; that is, to place the shadow in front of its own light. It is a stupendous evolutionary ferment.”

— Satprem, from “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness”

What Is the “Solution” Then?

First, be careful of black-and-white thinking. It’s not about doing nothing, turning a blind eye to evil, falling into “blind compassion,” just thinking “positive”, or some other New Age Love and Light cop-out.

It’s about a complete shift in consciousness through inner AND outer work, rather than trying to “fix the world” on a superficial 3D level or “eradicate evil” externally (which is futile anyway).

We still live under the illusion that the external world is separate from our inner reality.

It’s also about understanding spiritual science (beyond the five senses), the occult, and divine laws and karmic trajectories across lifetimes, within the broader context of consciousness evolution, and moving beyond the age of materialism that denies spiritual reality.

It does NOT mean just blaming entities or avoiding accountability.

These occult forces have a teaching function in the grand scheme of consciousness evolution. It’s a big topic in itself.

Ultimately, a true “awakening” is not merely intellectual or informational awareness of these topics or the “matrix,” but a complete inner shift at the level of consciousness through shadow work and soul embodiment.

This also implies conscious inner work, alignment with the true Self and dharma, and action in accordance with Divine Will rather than the ego’s desires.

It is also not about retreating from or escaping life, nor does it happen by itself.

Conscious efforts are necessary.

It requires sincerity, spiritual will, and humility, for there are many traps, distractions, temptations, and detours for the spiritual warrior in this Time of Transition.

It is all part and lesson of this dark age of the Kali Yuga.

The Dark Half of the Truth

The biggest shock will not be a major exposure or revelation of a dark evil cabal.

It will be when you realize that you are not separate from it, that all the evil and darkness we see “externally” in the world are part of the collective shadow, and your personal shadow (what you are not aware of within) is part of it as well.

Disillusionment is inevitable in the process of awakening.

But the real disillusionment that leads to true awakening, not an external, information-based “awakening”, occurs when we realize the terror of the situation, as Gurdjieff called it. I wrote about this process in this article: Facing The Terror of the Situation and Rising Like The Phoenix.

And when you see and realize that God is truly in all, including what we call evil, for there is only God and nothing can exist outside of God, and once you get out of the childish, distorted, oversimplified religious lens that God is some separate entity, opposing the “devil,” then you know what needs to be done.

You know what the Work truly entails and what life is all about in alignment with Divine Will.

But as long as the ego-personality with all its identifications and illusion of separateness runs the show, projecting its own lower level of ego consciousness onto God as if God were a person, who rewards, punishes, or judges, it will deny and resist this realization with all its might and keep engaging in the futile attempt to get rid of what it doesn’t like to see externally.

When you realize this viscerally, not just intellectually or philosophically, you have truly taken the “red pill” and begun to awaken.

Then the Great Awakening can truly begin.

Until then, it is all just shadow dancing and shadow boxing.

Then the real work can begin, starting within.

Deep within, to bring forth, transmute, and integrate what we’d rather not see within ourselves but deny, ignore, spiritually bypass, escape, dissociate from, or project onto others.

This is the path of Soul Embodiment, according to the immutable law of ascent and descent: descending into the body and shadow with full awareness, facing what has been buried, and anchoring the Divine within Matter itself.

Not escaping or eliminating but transforming and transmuting darkness into light, into the fullness of who we truly are.

That is how we discover the keys to the ultimate secret and goal we have been striving for unconsciously and ignorantly for eons. It’s buried in the dark half of the truth.

And it is time to face it.

This is what this Time of Transition at the end of this 12,000-year descending cycle demands of us to become the seeds for the next cycle.

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, and guide whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our reality.

He is the founder of Piercing the Veil of Reality (www.veilofreality.com), a platform dedicated to guiding seekers through personal and collective transformation.

Bernhard co-hosts The Cosmic Matrix Podcast with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, diving deep into spirituality, psychology, esotericism, and navigating our transitional times through the lens of consciousness evolution.

Listen to all episodes at www.cosmicmatrixpodcast.com

Together, they guide Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, a transformative 14-week group coaching program focused on psycho-spiritual work and the embodiment of your true Self.

A new round begins March 18, 2026.

Learn more at www.thetimeoftransition.com

“Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning. Where a monstrous and painful destruction appals thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and in the whirlwind.”

— Sri Aurobindo

As a little child, I used to get excited when I saw dark black clouds on the horizon, approaching with lightning, rain, and heavy gusts of wind.

I felt God in the thunder and storms, and in the destruction they sometimes brought through Mother Nature.

It felt like a cleansing. The air was always so much cleaner and fresher afterward, and I felt more alive.

Over the past decade, and increasingly now as we enter 2026, I sense the same energy, but on an exponential global and cosmic scale.

A purification that needs to happen and is going to happen.

The Coming Purification

The end of the Fourth Turning aligns with the end of a much larger cycle, the Kali Yuga.

The astrology is also very intense this year and in the years to come, reflecting the close of a long cycle and the beginning of a new one.

As Neptune enters Aries for good until 2039, we move into a new phase of spiritual warfare. This energy can manifest as a rise in religious wars, ideological polarization, civil unrest, and mass movements driven by dogma and fanaticism.

The battlefield is both internal and external, with hyperdimensional occult forces increasingly influencing humans from non-physical realms.

Together with Pluto in Aquarius, Neptune in Aries sets the stage for the ultimate spiritual warfare as the splitting of humanity intensifies.

At the same time, this cycle also offers an opportunity to step into true spiritual courage, individuation, take aligned action, and embody the path of the spiritual warrior with integrity and sincerity.

The most important and most challenging battle is the one within, for the war is through us and has always been.

Maybe it is just my Plutonian nature, with ten Pluto aspects in my chart, but I am grateful and excited to be here right now in this incarnation.

I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Whatever happens, I know deep inside that it is all in alignment with what needs to unfold according to Divine Will.

I have become far less interested in global politics, conspiracies, and psy-ops, which I researched and wrote about extensively since the 1990s. I am not waiting for change to come through social activism, political movements, anarchists, or religious groups.

Nor am I waiting for any so-called evil-doers to be arrested, or for some ultimate ‘boogeyman’ to be revealed and exposed, whether that is the Illuminati, Zionists, Islamists, Deep State, WEF, technocrats, bankers, aliens, or any other elitist group people believe rules the world.

Trying to “eradicate” evil externally is a futile endeavor rooted in the illusion that we can just cut off part of creation based on the illusion of separation.

What is needed is a shift in consciousness via inner transformation and purification, which then affects the “outside” world. Even evil plays its part and role in this adventure of consciousness.

As Satprem said with utmost illuminating precision:

"But the supra-mental [divine] power does not obey our logic or morality; it sees far into space and time, and it does not try to do away with evil in order to save the good, nor does it work through miracles; it frees the good that is within the evil, applying its force and light on the dark half so it consents to its luminous counterpart.

Wherever it is applied, the immediate effect is to touch off a crisis; that is, to place the shadow in front of its own light. It is a stupendous evolutionary ferment."

The Futility of Fighting Shadows

There are hidden power structures, groups, and even non-physical beings with agendas aimed at enslaving humanity. This is real. But attempting only to fight them externally is like fighting shadows in Plato's cave, a futile endeavor that keeps you fixated on projections.

I’m not suggesting we should be ignorant of these dark collective and global forces.

The plandemic five years ago showed us how many seemingly “spiritual” people, even those engaged in inner work, were easily manipulated by lies and propaganda because they lacked a deeper understanding of evil and the matrix forces acting on humanity through institutions.

However, most of what people do when they say we need to 'fight evil' is posting outrage porn on social media, changing their profile pic to a flag, or going to protests, as if any of that will change anything fundamentally.

Most often, this type of activism is fueled by shadow projections and heightened by egregores and hostile entities working through people.

These forces serve a teaching function: they feed on our collective shadow and mirror humanity's level of consciousness, which is very low in this current dark age.

The real solution lies in turning toward the light that casts the shadows, which means working on your consciousness and alignment with the Divine.

The Path of the Spiritual Warrior

I deliberately stay away from movements of any kind, whether ideological movements from left to right, or the so-called “truth” and “freedom” movements.

Carl Jung warned that mass movements are breeding grounds for mass psychosis and the collective shadow, especially those that believe they possess the truth and know what is best for humanity.

No truly individuated person would join a movement, let alone identify with a side or group. I am all for community, especially a community of spiritual warriors who understand that the true battle is fought within.

“The majority of people find many excuses not to work on themselves. They are in a complete prison of their weaknesses. Understand me right, I do not need followers, I am rather interested in finding the real warriors of the new world.”

- Gurdjieff

That inner work is far more demanding and difficult than any outer battle; to face the darkness within and transmute lead into gold, personality/ego-identification to Self-realization.

The inner purification process not only helps the world more than outer activism or online outrage ever could, but it also helps mitigate the potential cataclysms most of us will live through in this lifetime.

Whenever I bring up this subject, some people claim that I’m promoting inaction or passivity, as if the inner work I’m speaking of has anything to do with “navel gazing” or escaping life.

That kind of reaction usually comes from those who have not sincerely faced themselves, who have only intellectualized the work, or who are still engaging in spiritual bypassing.

But this work and process is far from being passive or submissive or anything “New Age.” In fact, it confronts you with life and yourself in more challenging ways, forcing you to stop blaming anyone or anything.

In other words, it will lead to engaging in life fully without lying to yourself.

David Hawkins was right in his calibrated map of consciousness that 80% of humans are stuck in victim/blame consciousness, always needing to blame someone else, be it liberals, republicans, the cabal, technocrats, governments, or any other boogeyman.

They never grasp what evil actually is in the context of the evolution of consciousness: a teaching function that includes facing the very darkness within oneself. That would point to the real "solution."

Beyond Bunkers and Physical Preparedness

I know people who have started building bunkers because they sense what is coming.

But bunkers and physical prepper strategies are not the solution. They serve only the self-preservation instinct rooted in fear and the ego’s illusion of permanence.

As Bibhu Dev Misra wrote in Yuga Shift:

“You cannot buy your way to the next Yuga and the ascending cycle. No matter how much wealth you have, or what a big shot you are, or how many underground shelters you have built, you will not be able to make it to the next Yuga unless you transform yourself and align with Dharma. Don’t waste time building shelters. Work on your consciousness.”

The Hopi prophecies echo this message:

“It is only materialistic people who seek to make shelters. Those who are at peace in their hearts already are in the great shelter of life. There is no shelter for evil. Those who take no part in the making of world division by ideology are ready to resume life in another world.”

The outer purification process of ekpyrosis is a natural event. I do not see it as doom and gloom, nor as something to fear. It is also not God’s punishment or judgment, as some religious fanatics believe. It is a necessary phase that supports humanity’s next stage in the evolution of consciousness.

Based on Misra’s groundbreaking work in “Yuga Shift”, 2030-2040 are high-risk years for global upheaval and cataclysmic events. But I don’t get hung up on dates or specific predictions.

This is a long-term transition, spanning many centuries, and the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community, and the world is to live in accordance with your Dharma that is specific to YOU and engage in conscious inner work.

This is a purification process, meant to help us return to Truth, align with Dharma, and embody the Divine within.

This shift is part of Earth’s long history. It’s not about physically escaping what is coming, but understanding the deeper message: align with the next cycle.

It starts with shadow integration, individuation, and ultimately spiritualizing to anchor the Divine fully within, so you can see and sense the Divine Force guiding you and acting through you as a servant of Divine Will, uniquely expressing it through you.

If you truly follow that call, it will likely interfere with what your ego thinks it wants. It may disrupt your life, your relationships, and anything you hold close and dear.

And that’s why most people don’t cross this threshold, even though they claim they want truth, freedom, sovereignty, joy, happiness, fulfillment.

But they look for permanence in a world that is dying, in the dead leaves, in the past and nostalgia, in their attachment to who they think they are instead of becoming seeds for the next cycle, to be part of this rebirth process, which includes destruction and death.

Seeds for the Next Cycle

Dane Rudhyar, the visionary philosopher, astrologer, writer, and pioneer of transpersonal astrology, also knew what was coming and urged people to become the seeds of the next cycle.

Rudhyar’s concept and vision of seed people centers on the idea that we are living in a fall period of civilization, a time of breakdown that precedes the birth of a new cycle. In this phase, most people are like leaves, destined to decay as the cycle comes to an end.

But within the decay lie seeds, symbolic of individuals and communities who carry the potential for renewal and transformation.

These “seed people” are not swept up in the chaos of the present or in superficial polarization based on cultural, social, or religious programming.

They are not trapped by the imitation of the past, or by trying to save the old world, or by trying to escape the world.

Instead, they are oriented toward the future while being grounded in the presence, embodying its possibilities through their vision, integrity, and inner development and alignment.

Rudhyar emphasizes that it is not what we do that matters most, but who we are, the quality of being and level of consciousness we embody, which makes us better instruments for the Divine.

“I think today it is of no use to try to look to the immediate future, because it looks very dark; but it is to look to prepare for the possibility that a new world may arise, if not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.

I think it is the only thing that gives value to all our sacrifices, all our courage, decisions, and choices today: becoming seeds for the development of the future world.

So I hope every one of you, each one in your own life, in your way, can, some day soon, very soon, if you have not done it already, make the choice, and become ‘seed men’ and ‘seed women.’”

— Dane Rudhyar

But there are many traps and detours on the path. The ego can easily hijack the idea of Dharma or a “soul mission” and turn it into a new identity, succumb to the Luciferian temptation, and spiritual bypass what needs to be faced.

The Only Safe Shelter

There is nothing to escape from. It’s the soul that matters, not the body. It’s not about how long you live, but about how conscious you are, for only your level of being determines what you do and what this action aligns with.

This doesn’t mean neglecting the body. Care for it as the sacred temple it is for your soul. But identification with the body, believing this is who you are, that is the imprisoning false belief of this materialistic dark age.

Who you are inside, your level of consciousness, and inner alignment with the Divine Force, is what guides you through these times and, especially, in the afterlife across many incarnations.

That is what allows you to be an impactful, positive part of this transition and prepares you to be a seed for the next cycle.

Sincerity is the key, and self-knowledge is the door that opens the Kingdom within, the only safe shelter for lifetimes to come.

Godspeed.

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, and guide whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our reality.

He is the founder of Piercing the Veil of Reality (www.veilofreality.com), a platform dedicated to guiding seekers through personal and collective transformation.

Bernhard co-hosts The Cosmic Matrix Podcast with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, diving deep into spirituality, psychology, esotericism, and navigating our transitional times through the lens of consciousness evolution.

Listen to all episodes at www.cosmicmatrixpodcast.com

Together, they guide Embodied Soul Awakening, a transformative 14-week group coaching program focused on psychospiritual work and the embodiment of your true Self. A new round begins March 18, 2026.

Learn more at www.thetimeoftransition.com

I’d wish you all a “Happy” New Year, but…

“Happiness” is mostly based on fleeting external circumstances that attempt to comfort the false self.

For 2026, I wish you disillusionment.

I don’t mean this negatively or with ill will, nor do I wish you harm. Quite the opposite.

Disillusionment is a positive thing. It frees you from illusions about others and the world, but most importantly, about yourself.

It aligns you with Truth.

It is the gateway to true joy, fulfillment, abundance, and love aligned with who you truly are.

May you dive deep into the underworld and burn in the fire of purification, to be reborn like the phoenix and become real with yourself and your life.

That is the gateway to lasting “happiness.”

Disillusionment can be painful, but it is a necessary process because it frees you from the illusions and lies you have been living by.

Many people have already experienced disillusionment over the past five years, mostly regarding their worldviews. The more important step now is the internal journey during this Time of Transition.

The Terror of the Situation

Disillusionment is inevitable in the process of awakening.

But the real disillusionment that leads to true awakening, not an external, information-based “awakening” or a supposed way out of the matrix, occurs when we realize the “terror of the situation,” as Gurdjieff called it.

The embodied recognition of the terror of the situation is not about the external state of the world, which can also be terrifying, but about facing yourself, the inner journey of “know thyself,” and engaging in sincere inner work to make the darkness within you conscious.

According to Gurdjieff, facing the terror of the situation involves realizing that most human thoughts, feelings, impulses, and actions arise mechanically from shifting energies and sub-personality parts rather than from real will and a unified I.

The personality mistakes these constantly changing impulses for a stable “me,” resulting in a chaotic pattern of contradictory desires, thoughts, and feelings that creates the illusion of independence, choice, and free will, while no true inner unity or conscious direction exists.

This insight is mirrored across other esoteric traditions as an initiation into self-knowledge. Sri Aurobindo describes this same inner reality in The Synthesis of Yoga:

“The ordinary man, living on the waking surface, experiences his psychological existence as fairly simple.

But as soon as we go deep within ourselves, and Yoga means a plunge into all the multiple profundities of the soul, we find ourselves surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know and to conquer.

We discover that every part of us, intellect, will, sense-mind, desire nature, heart, and body, has its own complex individuality, independent of the rest.

We are composed not of one but many personalities, a roughly constituted chaos into which a higher order must be introduced.

Moreover, we are not inwardly alone. Our mind is a receiving and modifying instrument through which a constant foreign flux passes.

Much of what we think and feel is not truly our own, but comes from the environment, from universal Nature, and from other beings and forces.

All of this must be consciously faced and known in order to create a true center, a real harmony, and a luminous order within.”

- Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Chapter II: Self Consecration (abridged)

Seeing this mechanical nature of the different parts within oneself is not an intellectual insight, but an existential shock that demands sustained inner work. It requires ongoing shadow and psycho-spiritual esoteric work.

It is not easy. It is uncomfortable, confronting, and messy, especially at the beginning.

Yet this work is necessary to bring forth the one true Self, the real “I,” and to establish it as master, rather than mistaking the false personality for who you are.

The ego and wounded parts want to avoid this process and generate unconscious defense mechanisms, resistance, distractions, excuses, and justifications, along with trauma responses, shadow projections, and interferences that pull attention away from the work and the necessary descent into the depths of your being.

It is far more tempting to suppress or numb pain, sadness, grief, shame, anger, and fear, or to project them outward and blame others and the world instead of looking within.

Hence, the Work requires the attitude of a spiritual warrior: spiritual will, determination, self-responsibility, self-honesty, sincerity, courage, humility, and full commitment.

Any weakness or blind spot becomes a significant hindrance on the path and will be used by adverse occult forces to target and tempt the seeker away from the truth of his being, keeping him chained in Plato’s cave and distracted by shadows on the world stage.

The Mechanical False Personality

The more sincere you are with this internal inquiry (which is an ongoing process), the more you will realize that most of “your” thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires, wants, etc., are not “your own” but have been conditioned or inserted externally.

The “I” who you think you are, the personality mask you identify with, is made up of these programs, memories, biological drives, and experiences, accumulated over lifetimes, and influenced by the collective consciousness.

It also includes social, cultural, parental, educational, and media-conditioning programs.

None of this is “you.”

Many of your desires, feelings, and attachments can also be expressions of unconscious trauma responses from childhood wounding, lack of self-worth, and unconscious shame, resulting in trying to fill an empty hole within yourself via external means.

But it is a bottomless hole.

Many desires that are externally directed toward achieving a state of “happiness” are actually unconscious attempts to seek the truth of your being, your essence, and the Divine within.

There is nothing wrong with “desire.” Only our attachments to desires result in unnecessary suffering.

We also never question where our desires, goals, and aims in life come from in the first place.

That is also why most New Age manifestation techniques, based on the distorted and superficial idea of the law of attraction to “manifest your desires,” fail or can actually create more suffering, even if your “desire” is manifested.

It can create more Gordian Knots, as it is called in Esoteric Science, resulting in more karmic entanglements and suffering over lifetimes based on involuntary mechanical movement in the wilderness of the matrix.

Hence the saying, “Be careful what you wish for,” for there is always a price to pay based on the law of cause and effect and the law of agreement.

Many people suffer and remain unhappy even when they achieve success because they pursue desires, aims, and goals that are not truly their own, but are expressions of mechanical, false personality parts.

These aims have been programmed into them or arise from unconscious trauma responses and insecurity.

We will never find true joy, freedom, fulfillment, or happiness as long as we remain only externally oriented.

Likewise, striving for sovereignty solely on the outside will still leave you enslaved within.

Inner Bankruptcy And The Call To The Way

I’ve come face-to-face with the terror of the situation within myself many times.

It is truly terrifying to see and experience it as a witness, looking at “me” [my personality] and observing all the mechanical behaviors, feelings, actions, thoughts, desires, and impulses that are entirely automated and happen without any free will involved, all of which the personality identifies with as its “own.”

It is even more terrifying to witness that none of that is my true Self. I realized that I was living a lie, dreaming of being awake.

I had to admit that I was asleep in ways I wasn’t fully aware of.

Before we can engage in the awakening process, we must admit to ourselves and truly see how we are asleep, acting mechanically, regardless of how aware we think we are of the matrix’s external manifestations and corruption.

This realization is facing the terror of the situation within. When it is authentic and without avoidance, evasion, or bypassing, it results in an inner bankruptcy, as esoteric science calls it: disillusionment.

“When man goes in search of the Way [toward awakening], it usually means that something within him has collapsed. This inner collapse leads to seeing reality in a new light, and two diametrically opposed effects can result.

If a person is sufficiently strong and impartial, he will have the courage to face reality directly and accept what he sees, no matter how disagreeable. This signifies that he has truly stepped onto the path that leads to the path of Access to the Way.

On the other hand, if the man is weak, this experience will weaken him even more. The law is explicit: ‘To whosoever hath, to him shall be given. But whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath.’

If he does not accept his inner state as it appears to him and instead justifies his personality through logic, legitimacy, and self-defense, he turns away from the path and is thrust further into the wilderness.

Nobody can reach the path of Access to the Way without first passing through an interior bankruptcy.”

- Mouavieff, Gnosis

I have also realized that many of the desires and goals I had when I was younger, which I tried to manifest through Tony Robbins-style goal setting, mindset self-help, visualization, or New Age manifestation techniques, were rooted in childhood wounding, insecurity, and social and cultural conditioning.

Thankfully, in retrospect, the Divine graced me with tough Grace, ripping away everything I thought I wanted and pulling the rug out from under me several times.

My wounded ego and personality did not like it at all. I was kicking and screaming, trying to resist the necessary disillusionment and descent into the shadow.

I suffered because I could not let go and remained attached to and identified with goals and desires that were not aligned with the real “I” and Divine Will.

God had a different plan for me, and I had no choice but to surrender to the higher Will in an ongoing process of surrender to the higher Law.

Over the years, as I dove deeper into my process, I uncovered suppressed parts, exiles, traumatized soul fragments, the imprisoned inner child, and many protective layers and forms of “armor” that covered trauma, wounds, and shadow aspects going back lifetimes.

Each of these parts has its own distinct desires and personality, and I mistook them for the “true self.”

One example of facing the terror of the situation occurred many years ago, in the late 90s, when I first began Jungian shadow work and made more consistent efforts to observe myself. I realized that I was acting out traits of my father and mother that I consciously despised in them.

I also discovered traits in myself that I hated most in others, buried deep in my shadow, which I was acting out mechanically and unconsciously.

I projected these shadow traits onto others and did not see them in myself at first.

It was a visceral, enlightening experience of disillusionment and shadow confrontation that I will never forget.

In that moment, as my sense of self-identity began to disintegrate, I experienced the true Self, the impartial witness, standing behind it all.

For a brief moment, the real “I” made its appearance, still, eternal, non-reactive, and grounded in joy (Ananda) that did not depend on anything external in my life.

It laid the foundation and direction for the ongoing work, for I am certainly not enlightened or awake in the true esoteric meaning of the word.

The higher we want to rise, the deeper we need to go. The more Light we possess, the more darkness we uncover.

It’s the esoteric axiom/law of Descent and Ascent.

Crossing the Threshold

Once you face the terror of the situation inside yourself and recognize the automated, mechanical nature of many of your feelings, actions, thoughts, and behaviors, you will also see this same robotic pattern in others.

You will notice that most people are unconscious automatons driven by trauma, conditioning, and programmed sub-personality parts.

You will see how people suffer without knowing they suffer, as their pain is suppressed, buried in the unconscious, and hardened in the body-mind.

Billions of people are sleepwalking, dreaming of being awake.

It is a humbling experience. Dark and disturbing, yet liberating and illuminating at the same time, for you also witness the Divine Force operating and moving through it all as all is One.

It cannot truly be captured by language.

Once you cross that threshold and begin to see the unseen, there is no return to your former “normal” life. That is when you truly take the red pill from an esoteric perspective.

Your priorities shift. You no longer waste energy on the trivialities of mainstream cult-ure, and you can no longer relate to many of the goals, pleasures, and desires you once had. You see how deeply they were rooted in a programmed, wounded personality.

You naturally become more inward-oriented as you embrace life more consciously in each moment, without trying to escape it.

It also marks the end of complaining and victim or blame consciousness.

This is the beginning of individuation, a process that often includes isolation, loneliness, and alienation, even among family, old friends, and crowds as you step outside humanity’s collective sleepwalking state.

This phase tests the sincerity of the seeker.

Esoteric traditions symbolize this process as crossing a threshold, entering the Kingdom, or passing guardians who test the soul seeking to awaken and leave the wilderness of the matrix.

This reflects the necessity of inner bankruptcy, disillusionment, and the death of the personality that initiates the seeker into “The Way” toward Awakening, as described in esoteric parables such as this one from Esoteric Christianity in Gnosis by Mouravieff.

“...This void, which can only be crossed at the cost of considerable effort or even of super-efforts, operates selectively.

The character and the quantity of effort necessary differ for each person, depending upon the nature and degree of deformation of each exterior man, an individual factor.

This esoteric parable gives some idea of the access to the Way:

I see a great building, one enormous mass. In the front wall is a narrow arch with open doors; behind them, dark mists. In front of the high threshold, there is a young girl, a pretty Russian girl.

A breeze comes from the dark and icy mists, a current of freezing air, bringing with it from the depths of the building the sound of a slow and muffled voice:

‘You who aspire to cross this threshold, do you know what awaits you here?

‘I know,’ answers the young girl.

‘Cold, hunger, hate, mockery, scorn, injustice, prison, illness, and even death?’

‘I know it. ‘

‘Do you expect to be shunned by everyone? Do you expect to be totally alone?’

I am ready. I know it. I shall bear all the suffering and all the blows’.

‘Even if they do not come from enemies, but from parents, from friends?’

‘Yes… even from those…’

‘Good. Do you accept the sacrifice?’

‘Yes.’

‘An anonymous sacrifice? You will perish and nobody… but nobody will even know whose memory to honor?’

‘I have no use for recognition and pity. I have no use for a name.’

‘Are you ready for crime?’

The young girl bowed her head. – ‘Even for crime.’

The voice that was questioning her did not continue right away. At last, it started again:

‘Do you know that one day you will believe no more in what you believe in now, and come to think that you have been a dupe and that it was for nothing that you have lost your young life?’

‘That too I know. Well though I know it, I wish to enter.’

The young girl crossed the threshold.

A heavy curtain fell. Gritting his teeth, someone uttered behind her: ‘A foolish girl!’

At which, from another place, a voice replied: ‘A saint!’”

Individuation and the Risk of Getting Stuck

Many people get stuck right when they have the chance to cross the threshold to what their soul is really seeking.

Alienation and loneliness harden them into cynicism or nihilism.

A victim mentality sets in, with blame projected onto the world and a “black-pilled” outlook taking hold. Impatience, boredom, jadedness, numbness, or anger follow, often accompanied by addiction, distraction, or avoidance.

They begin to see traps and conspiracies everywhere, even where there are none, and fall into psychological splitting, becoming trapped in black-and-white thinking.

Instead of turning inward, attention remains fixed on waiting for the world or others to change, while inner connection and guidance quietly erode.

Doom, gloom, negativity, and cycles of self-pity or self-inflation take over, accompanied by resistance to the necessary inner death and rebirth required for individuation.

Another common trap is spiritual bypassing, where wounded ego structures or sub-personality parts adopt a spiritual identity such as a “star seed,” “lightworker,” or claims of having “ascended to 5D,” creating a sense of being special, superior, or already awake.

This can also show up as getting caught in the Jesus Savior Program and taking on a Christian identity rooted in distorted religious programming, which I have written about here: The Jesus Savior Program and Reclaiming Christ

The real “I” is not invested in identities of this kind.

When a part of us feels the need to define itself as spiritual or religious, especially when strongly identified with a specific faith or dogmatic interpretation of scripture, no matter how compelling the inner justification, it is a signal to pause and inquire more deeply.

Such identifications can indicate a misalignment, with a sub-personality taking on a costume or mask to avoid disillusionment.

They can also be augmented by a Luciferian impulse, in which archetypes, spiritual language, and ideals are used to elevate the ego and bypass the necessary descent into humility, shadow, and inner work.

Many people are not yet ready to cross the threshold or to commit fully to the Work.

They attempt to return to their old lives, living in between, unable to let go. Some may need more time, experience, or even additional lifetimes before the soul is ripe enough to answer the call consciously.

As it is said, many are called, few choose to answer.

There is no judgment in this.

Humans exist at many levels of consciousness according to their karmic soul lessons, which only God knows, and there will be no collective awakening anytime soon.

Answering the call is a fully embodied yes, without conditions, surrendering the unfolding of the process to the Divine.

Facing the terror of the situation within yourself and disillusionment lays the foundation for the Great Work of transcending the matrix and transforming yourself and the world.

The Second Birth and the Real “I”

From lead to gold, we aim to die to the false self and be reborn into the true Self.

This is the esoteric alchemical inner process of the “second birth,” symbolized in Jesus’ rising from the tomb, which most Christians tend to take literally.

This is the passage toward aligning with Divine Will and spiritualizing your being, bringing the soul to the front through embodiment and living in the real I.

There, true joy, love, abundance, fulfillment, and your immortal Self can be found, not in a distant land or in heaven, but right here.

This is the descent required for the ascent, both individually and collectively.

It is a long, often difficult, but necessary process over many lifetimes during this Time of Transition, at the end of this Yuga, and in the evolution of consciousness.

It is not about escaping the world, but fully engaging in it with your whole being.

The only way out is in and through.

Six years ago, right before the plandemic hit, I made this short film with a friend. It reflects the lonely and often painful process of waking up from the Matrix of collective conditioning, confronting our own shadow and illusions, the hyperdimensional matrix, and surrendering to a higher force that leads to true individuation, soul embodiment, and Divine connection.

Watch it here:

Most people don’t realize how deeply hidden forces, false spiritual beliefs, unconscious shadow, and matrix conditioning shape their relationship with money.

This piece isn’t about manifestation hacks, mindset tricks, or the oversimplified “law of attraction.”

It’s a psycho-spiritual exploration of how to reclaim the money force from hostile influences and align prosperity with Divine Will and your deeper purpose.

Chapters:

• Beyond Politics and Economics: The Deeper Roots of Scarcity

• Seeking Meaning Beyond Material Success

• When My Money Shadow Was Exposed

• The Matrix Scarcity Program

• Conquering The Money Force From The Hostile Forces

• False Spiritual Beliefs About Money

• The Necessity for Payment to Open the Flow

• Two Practices That Changed My Relationship With Money And Helped Me Thrive

• Beyond Scarcity: Reclaiming Power, Responsibility, and Abundance

Beyond Politics and Economics: The Deeper Roots of Scarcity

We live in an age of hyper-materialism. On one hand, the number of millionaires, billionaires, and soon-to-be-trillionaires keeps rising.

On the other hand, more and more people are struggling, financially strained, living in poverty, or dependent on welfare.

The divide between rich and poor grows wider by the day.

Many blame capitalism, and it’s no surprise that younger generations are drawn to socialism or communism in response to rising living costs and the struggle of affording a decent life.

Anger toward the wealthy has increased. More people look to the government for “free” housing, services, and products, unknowingly deepening their dependency on Daddy government.

“Tax the Rich!” is a popular slogan among leftist socialists. But is raising taxes really the solution, especially when the tax system itself is corrupted, and taxation has become a form of theft?

There was a time when people didn’t pay income tax, and it actually benefited society.

There was also a time when the dollar and other national currencies held real value. But once it was decoupled from gold, and endless money printing took over, inflation began rising exponentially.

Paper “fiat” money keeps losing value, while people keep working harder for less.

Yes, Bitcoin and crypto offer some solutions, but they won’t fix everything and don’t address the deeper root of the issue.

I definitely think that a grounded, practical financial education is very important, something most people lack, and I used to lack as well.

However, this article is not about discussing political ideology, economics, fiat vs. BTC, inflation, taxes, macro-economics, or smart investments.

There are plenty of people giving sound advice on all of that on Substack or X.

What I’m offering here is different: a look beneath the surface of money, wealth, poverty, and scarcity, into the psycho-spiritual and occult forces that shape our relationship to abundance.

To be clear: this is not about “money mindset,” or the watered-down pop-spirituality version of “manifest your dream house, car, and relationship.” There’s more than enough of that out there.

Our relationship to abundance is shaped not just by upbringing and social conditioning, but also by karma and deeper soul lessons beyond the ego’s grasp.

There are many unknowns at play, especially on spiritual and karmic levels, in the larger context of both individual and collective evolution of consciousness. Needless to say, I won’t be able to cover all of that in this piece.

Seeking Meaning Beyond Material Success

I grew up in Germany in a lower-middle-class family, living in a small three-bedroom apartment for the first 22 years of my life. It wasn’t until I moved to the US that I lived in a house with a backyard (and five roommates).

I didn’t grow up in poverty or experience real lack, but I wasn’t surrounded by riches either. My dad was a good “company man” who enjoyed his work.

When I graduated high school, most of my peers went on to study business or pursue careers with clear material goals. I couldn’t relate to that path at all. The idea of chasing money, status, comfort, or possessions gave me no sense of fulfillment.

I had bigger questions. I felt there had to be more to life than material success or the pursuit of pleasure, entertainment, and security.

I needed depth, purpose, and meaning.

Questions like “Who am I?” and “What is life really about?” drove me forward and eventually led me on a quest.

In my twenties, I moved to Los Angeles and followed my passion for music, playing drums in bands while working odd jobs to support myself.

Around that time, I also discovered a natural talent for healing and bodywork through a mentor who encouraged me to learn and pursue it, which eventually led me to build my private practice.

At the same time, my deeper drive was always toward knowledge and spiritual understanding. I questioned everything and immersed myself in psychology, spiritual, occult, and esoteric teachings, along with alternative history and conspiracy research.

That pursuit eventually inspired me to write.

Writing became a way to process and integrate what I was learning. I created a blog in the early 2000s, thinking that others might enjoy it. Over time, it grew organically.

When social media took off, my work unexpectedly went viral in 2014, and I began receiving invitations to speak on podcasts and at conferences in the US, Germany, and Australia.

I never set out to build a “career” as a teacher, writer, or speaker. I followed what felt alive and meaningful, not what promised financial reward.

Looking back, it was what Joseph Campbell described as “following your bliss.”

Throughout all of this, I was always able to support myself and never went into debt. But money was never a priority for me.

When My Money Shadow Was Exposed

At the same time, I carried negative judgments toward wealthy or money-driven people. I believed I was “better” than them because I wasn’t chasing money. I thought I was more “spiritual.”

I also judged people who charged what I thought was “too much” for certain services, based on subjective assumptions that were purely my projections.

I struggled to ask for money myself and felt guilty charging what my work was worth, even though clients valued it.

For a while, I worked part-time at a high-end retreat center in Malibu, providing massage and bodywork to the rich and famous. I was well paid and one of the most-requested therapists.

Still, I lived modestly and never thought seriously about making more money or planning for the future. I clung to the idea of “living in the present,” but I also used it to bypass practical needs.

A big shift came when I was still living in a studio guest house and getting by month to month.

There was another massage therapist and yoga teacher at the same retreat center where I worked. He had far more private clients, hosted his own retreats, and was making very good money.

I judged him harshly. I gossiped about him with a friend and called him an “ass-kisser” who charged too much and was only in it for the money. I labeled him greedy and selfish. Of course, I never told him that directly. I was fake-nice to his face and resentful behind his back.

Around that time, I had started going deeper into Jungian psychology and shadow work.

One day, it hit me like a truck: I was envious of him. I was projecting my shadow onto him.

He was living out what I secretly wanted but judged in myself as unacceptable. I labeled him greedy, selfish, and unspiritual because that’s how I felt about myself when I admitted I wanted more money and success.

Unconsciously, I had been blocking my own ability to thrive because I believed that to desire prosperity and money made me unspiritual and greedy.

It’s a devastating form of self-sabotage because the shadow projection onto him felt so good, righteous, and justified.

Facing these lies I told myself and realizing how I projected my shadow on others was the necessary shock I needed to break through these unconscious false beliefs and self-imposed limitations.

The truth was, I wanted what he had. I wanted the freedom and prosperity that come with not just surviving, but thriving and building something.

For the first time, I saw the value of planning for the future. I realized I had been using the idea of “living in the now” as a spiritual bypass.

That was the moment I chose to embrace money and the material world and to begin creating wealth more consciously and intentionally.

It marked the beginning of a long process of unlearning and deprogramming. I had to dismantle all the false beliefs I carried about money and spirituality.

Most of them were rooted in unconscious programs like “I’m not good enough,” or “I don’t deserve this,” all of it linked to childhood wounds, ancestral trauma, and collective conditioning.

The Matrix Scarcity Program

After that turning point in my life, I began to see how scarcity was not just a personal experience but a collective program running through our entire society and culture.

What I call the Matrix Scarcity Program is not simply about economics or external circumstances. It’s not just about evil banksters keeping people impoverished or First World capitalists exploiting Third World nations through economic warfare.

Yes, those may be the surface-level symptoms. But it’s easy to get trapped in the superficial blame-and-victim game at the 3D level.

Nothing will truly change unless we understand the spiritual and hyperdimensional nature of reality, how hostile forces have hijacked the money force through their human instruments, and, more importantly, how we ourselves feed and justify the Matrix Scarcity Program on unconscious psycho-spiritual levels.

This happens through social conditioning, religious programming, unresolved childhood wounds, ancestral trauma, karmic entanglements, and, most insidiously, through identification with our lower nature.

It is said that all wars are bankers’ wars for profit and more power over others.

At the deeper level, it’s always been about money, power, and life force, harvested and redirected through occult mechanisms that keep humanity enslaved by manipulated free will.

But instead of getting caught in the disempowering victim trap and blaming the banksters, economy, governments, or any corruption “out there,” we need to ask:

• What is my relationship to money and power?

• What unconscious and conscious self-defeating beliefs do I hold around them?

• How and where do I give my power away?

The Matrix Scarcity Program tells us that survival is the best we can hope for, that money is tainted, there’s not enough to go around, and that wealth is reserved for the greedy and corrupt.

It installs unconscious beliefs that keep us disempowered, caught in fear, guilt, envy, shame, and self-sabotage. And like any good program, it runs silently in the background, and we project it outward onto others, just as I once did.

Most people fall into one of two extremes:

• They either reject or judge money as unspiritual or evil and project their shadow onto anyone who appears successful or wealthy.

• Or they worship money as a tool of indulgence and identity of self-worth, enslaved by desires that are not even their own.

Both distortions keep us trapped in the matrix, which is not an external political or economic system, but a hyperdimensional construct that works through our own minds.

Humanity has been manipulated for thousands of years through the corrupted forces of money, power, and sex. This manipulation operates:

• Through the temptations of the lower nature in a hyper-materialistic age

• Through inherited beliefs that glorify poverty and demonize wealth

• Through distorted spiritual and religious teachings

• And through hostile forces that have hijacked the money force to keep people disempowered

As a result, many spiritual seekers reject money altogether, believing it is corrupt or unspiritual.

Others become consumed by it, losing themselves in greed and compulsive consumption.

But whether we reject money as evil or indulge in it unconsciously, both are distortions, and both, as Sri Aurobindo noted, are errors:

“Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life.

As the money power today is in the hands of hostile forces, we naturally have to fight them. Whenever they see that you are trying to oust them, they will try to thwart your efforts. You have to bring a higher power than these and put them down.

For this reason, most spiritual disciplines insist on complete self-control, detachment, and renunciation of all bondage to wealth and of all personal and egoistic desire for its possession.

Some even put a ban on money and riches and proclaim poverty and bareness of life as the only spiritual condition.

But this is an error; it leaves the power in the hands of the hostile forces.

Money represents a great power of life which must be conquered for divine uses. Therefore, you must have no attachment to it but also no disgust or horror of it.”

Conquering The Money Force From The Hostile Forces

The spiritual task is not to reject money or be enslaved by it, but to consciously reclaim and purify our relationship to it.

Money is meant to serve higher aims: truth, spiritual growth, and the evolution of consciousness in alignment with our dharma.

That doesn’t mean renouncing material comfort, giving away all your money to others, or denying yourself the enjoyment of life.

It means mastering the lower nature and integrating the shadow. It’s not about suppressing human needs, but about enjoying material things without attachment, greed, or guilt.

True abundance arises when money serves the Divine, not the wounded ego.

It also means your peace, joy, and equanimity aren’t dependent on external circumstances. When you live from that place, you hold more power over money than money has over you.

We are living in a time of spiritual warfare.

Part of our work in this Time of Transition at the end of this Kali Yuga is to reconquer the money force so it can serve life, truth, and divine purpose rather than fear, greed, and falsehood. The same is true for the forces of power and sex.

Only then can we become effective, sovereign agents of change, rather than rejecting money as “evil”, staying trapped in the matrix scarcity program and victim-blame dynamics.

To reconquer the money force for the Divine means using your God-given creative power to generate prosperity aligned with Divine Will.

That higher Will moves through your true Self and your specific soul purpose (dharma), not the conditioned personality, which is often shaped by trauma, insecurity, or social and cultural programming.

The lower nature easily hijacks money and power. That’s where hostile forces enter.

In today’s world, success is often equated with money and fame, disconnected from spirit, integrity, and conscience. This opens the door to greed, corruption, and fragmentation, allowing hostile entities to influence or even possess a person.

On the other side of the spectrum, I’ve seen people reject money entirely while projecting their own shadow, frustration, and unconscious envy onto anyone successful or wealthy.

But that mindset only deepens scarcity, keeps the money force in the hands of hostile forces, and traps people in the very matrix program they think they’re resisting.

False Spiritual Beliefs About Money

Corrupted spiritual teachings and religious programming have reinforced the Matrix Poverty Program for thousands of years.

As a result, many spiritual seekers reject the money force altogether. They believe money is unspiritual or that charging for services is wrong.

This mindset is rooted in religious distortions, unconscious guilt, and generational conditioning.

Over time, it creates unconscious entitlement, where people expect to receive freely while seeing payment as a moral failure or spiritual corruption.

Some common scarcity-inducing false spiritual beliefs include:

• “You can’t have material possessions and be spiritual.”

• “A person is closer to God with nothing.”

• “The less you have, the more spiritual you are.”

• “God loves the poor more and disapproves of the wealthy.”

• “Money is the root of all evil.”

• “Being spiritual means not charging for services or only accepting donations.”

• “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (a literal misinterpretation)

• “No honest person ever made a million dollars.”

These beliefs often get passed down through generational trauma: war, migration, financial instability, or survival fear. Even if never spoken aloud, the emotional tone around money is absorbed through mechanical behavior, habits, and entrainment.

This programming is one of the most effective traps of the matrix. We confuse suffering with virtue, poverty with purity, and scarcity with spiritual authenticity.

But rejecting payment for real value is not humility. It violates the law of energetic exchange.

Money is not just paper or digits. It is a force. It needs to flow. When that flow is blocked, especially by guilt, shame, pride, or false virtue, it stops circulating and returning.

Not receiving for your work short-circuits the energetic exchange. Over time, it weakens the impact of your service and dries up the money force.

Rejecting money doesn’t make you spiritual or end poverty. It just leaves the force in the hands of those who misuse it.

“Money is a means, a force, a power, and not an end in itself. And like all forces and all powers, money has no value unless it circulates.

For each and every one, money is valuable only when one has spent it. But it should not be given without discernment.

Money is meant to increase Wealth. Wealth is a force of Nature, and it should be a means of circulation, a power in movement, as flowing water is a power in movement.”

- The Mother (Mirra Alfassa)

The Necessity for Payment to Open the Flow

When I first began working as a bodyworker and coach, I gave many sessions away for free or on a donation basis. I needed the experience to learn and grow in my craft.

Sometimes, offering free work makes sense, especially when you’re learning or genuinely helping someone in need. It’s not black and white. But over time, I saw the limits of this approach.

When services are given away to people deeply caught in the matrix scarcity program, it often reinforces entitlement and spiritual bypassing rather than growth.

Because of my own money wounds and guilt about charging, I gave away too much.

Most of the time, the work wasn’t truly valued. I saw that when people received something for “free,” they often didn’t invest their own effort or will, and as a result, it didn’t actually help them.

Oftentimes, it led to more entitlement, according to the old saying, “give them a finger, and they take the whole hand.”

I frequently heard, “I can’t afford it,” or “I don’t have the money right now.”

In most cases, that’s just an excuse. I know because I used to say it too. What I really meant was, “This isn’t a priority,” or “I don’t want to spend money on this.”

That’s okay, just be honest with yourself. Saying “I don’t have the money” keeps reinforcing scarcity at a subconscious level. It becomes a self-imposed spell.

This is where humility and radical self-honesty matter. We all lie to ourselves at times, especially around money. It’s part of the human condition.

There’s also a subtle form of narcissism, masked as false humility or spiritual idealism, that assumes things should be given freely. It expects others to do the work while remaining in a victim consciousness and self-pity.

As Manly P. Hall put it:

“The law of cause and effect is as in­evitable as day and night, as certain as the tides, and as constant as the ages. This law says that ‘as ye sow, so shall ye reap’.

What you earn comes to you, what you have not earned can never be yours, and neither god nor man can alter the complexion of these facts.”

Nothing is truly free. No one owes you anything.

There is always a price to pay for so-called “free” services, welfare, and government handouts. More often than not, that price is freedom, traded for dependency on Big Brother.

As I’ve shared in a previous article, my father lived through the loss of freedom in East Germany, a so-called “democratic socialist” state that he eventually escaped.

Over time, these systems disempower people by conditioning them to expect handouts, creating karmic imbalance and spiritual debt.

Just like borrowing money you didn’t earn, taking “free” credit always comes with interest.

Far from a real “Golden Age,” the next big step toward collective enslavement is “free” universal income, something Elon Musk and others are already promoting.

From an occult perspective, it is a form of black magic, leading to future debt repayment through suffering and loss of free will.

It is similar to a “Faustian pact with the devil.”

Most people are easily tempted by the lure of “free” anything without giving anything in return, just like most people consume more than they create.

You can see it already happening.

One consequence of the abundance of free content online is that people begin to devalue the energy, labor, and creativity that go into it.

Easy access also dulls the capacity to learn through sincere effort.

But this shift goes deeper than how we relate to content. It affects how we relate to life.

Over time, subtle entitlement creeps in and, along with it, the expectation that prosperity, growth, understanding, or even inner transformation should come without effort, sacrifice, or responsibility.

Jeanne de Salzmann spoke directly to this mindset in her esoteric masterpiece “First Initiation”, geared toward the initiate:

“You will see that in life, you receive exactly what you give. Your life is the mirror of what you are. It is in your image.

You are passive, blind, and demanding. You take all, you accept all, without feeling any obligation.

Your attitude toward the world and toward life is the attitude of one who has the right to make demands and to take, who has no need to pay or to earn.

You believe that all things are your due, simply because it is you!

All your blindness is there! None of this strikes your attention. And yet this is what keeps one world separate from another world.”

– Jeanne de Salzmann, First Initiation

This challenge is only amplified by the rise of free AI-generated content, which is already eroding the ability to think independently, shortening attention spans, and weakening the capacity to focus.

As a result, intelligence and creativity decline.

The “spiritual organs” atrophy through constant externalization and lack of inner inquiry to access the higher mind and true Self.

All of these are signs of the darkness at the end of this Kali Yuga, the height of hyper-materialism and absence of embodied spiritual wisdom.

More access to knowledge doesn’t equal understanding, just as reading something doesn’t mean you’ve truly grasped it.

When people don’t give, invest, or, as Gurdjieff put it, “pay with themselves,” they lose the very qualities, intelligence, creativity, and will that make real growth and transformation possible, resulting ultimately in spiritual atrophy and the loss of the growth of being:

“No, even if we needed no money at all it would still be necessary to keep this payment. It rids us at once of many useless people. Nothing shows up in people so much as their attitude towards money.

They are ready to waste as much as you like on their own personal fantasies, but they have no valuation whatsoever of another person’s labor.

I must work for them and give them gratis [free] everything that they vouchsafe to take from me. [They say:] ’How is it possible to trade in knowledge? This ought to be free.’

It is precisely for this reason that the demand for this payment is necessary. Some people will never pass this barrier.“

- G. I. Gurdjieff

Two Practices That Changed My Relationship With Money And Helped Me Thrive

As I worked to reclaim the money force in my life, regardless of economic conditions or media fear programming, two core insights changed everything.

These weren’t intellectual ideas but lived practices that naturally opened the flow of prosperity.

This isn’t financial advice. You still have to do the inner work: shadow integration, reprogramming unconscious beliefs, healing childhood wounds, and clearing ancestral and social conditioning.

“Money mindset” alone won’t cut it.

Years ago, after the incident I shared earlier, projecting my shadow onto a thriving coworker, I made a conscious effort to observe my everyday attitude toward money.

One major insight came while shopping for groceries. I noticed how often I judged things as “cheap” or “expensive.” Even with health as my top priority, I’d grab whatever was on sale. I was clinging to money, afraid to spend.

That day, I let go of the fear. I bought the high-quality food that I truly wanted without second-guessing or listening to the voice that said, “This is too much. You can’t afford it.”

I also dropped the word “expensive” from my vocabulary. I stopped looking at prices in the store and just got what I needed.

I realized these labels are entirely subjective, mental programs tied to arbitrary numbers. Something simply has a price. Whether I choose to pay it is a different matter.

I also began investing in myself: books, workshops, mentors, and training that refined my craft.

Over time, something unexpected happened. The more I spent without fear or judgment, without labeling goods or services as “cheap” or “expensive,” the more prosperity flowed, the more money I received, and the more opportunities showed up.

I stopped clinging to money, stopped fearing spending, and let it circulate, especially toward my own development.

Years later, I came across a quote by Henry Ford that captured what I had lived into:

“I think that much of the advice given to young men about saving money is wrong. I never saved a cent until I was forty years old.

I invested in myself – in study, in mastering my tools, in preparation.

Many a man who is putting a few dollars a week into the bank would do much better to put it into himself.”

- Henry Ford

Now, someone might say, “But some things are expensive, and I can’t afford them.”

Maybe so. I used to justify using the word “expensive” too. It was one of the hardest habits to break.

But that belief reinforces scarcity. Instead of saying, “It’s too expensive,” try reframing it: “It’s not my priority right now,” or “I’m working toward being able to afford it.”

That shift alone can begin to open the flow.

The Freedom That Comes From Not Commodifying People’s Work

This also helped me let go of judging what other people charge.

Whenever I catch my mind judging something as “too expensive,” I take it as a sign that I’ve slipped out of alignment with my true nature and fallen back into old scarcity patterns.

It becomes an invitation for inner inquiry.

Whether something is “worth it” is beside the point and always subjective. The real issue is the emotional charge behind the judgment of “too much.”

Once I stopped caring what others charged, a tremendous amount of energy was freed up, and prosperity followed.

As I healed my scarcity wound, passed down through generations and reinforced by matrix poverty programming, I stopped obsessing over prices altogether.

It hasn’t been easy. This work goes far deeper than adopting a positive attitude.

But the more I worked through it, the less interested I became in bargain hunting, chasing the “cheapest deal,” or gossiping and complaining about what others charge.

I also stopped commodifying people’s work and goods based purely on price.

By that, I mean reducing someone’s offering to a product judged solely by cost, ignoring the years of work, energy, and experience that went into it.

That’s what the matrix trains us to do: consume, compare, and expect more for less. It blinds us to the deeper value behind what’s being offered.

A scarcity wound drives this habit of price comparison without real discernment or understanding of quality, experience, or true value, mostly on an unconscious level.

What I’ve learned is that value isn’t measured in pennies saved. It’s recognized when you respect the craft, the product, the experience, and the person behind the work.

Discernment, Integrity, and the Price of Scarcity

Of course, not every high price reflects true value. In today’s culture of imitation and instant expertise, some people charge premium rates without real experience, study, or original insight.

This is part of the larger distortion of spiritual materialism, greed, and social media performance. But that’s a separate issue.

The key is to develop inner discernment, not based on price alone, but on integrity and quality. When you’re no longer stuck in a scarcity wound, you can sense that difference clearly.

At least that’s been my experience. I haven’t once felt “ripped off” since healing that unconscious scarcity pattern.

Again, the main point of this article is to “conquer money for divine uses,” as Sri Aurobindo put it, which means bringing it under Self-leadership, aligned with your dharma and deeper purpose.

If you’re out of touch with your essence and dharma, that’s where your real work lies. Otherwise, you’re easily tempted by the lower expressions of money, sex, and power.

You also become more prone to manipulation and may feel “taken advantage of” by others, or project your unresolved shadow onto those you believe are overcharging. That used to be me.

But real discernment only becomes possible when you’re in alignment with yourself and engaged in sincere inner and shadow work.

My work has been ripped off. My wife and I have been plagiarized many times. Some of our course content and outlines were copied, imitated, and sold by people who never put in their own work, effort, or experience.

When someone lacks integrity and has no strong spiritual foundation, but is driven by the persona of how one wants to be seen and appear, there’s no inner conscience.

That opens the door to greed, dishonesty, and being used as a vessel for hostile forces.

I used to get upset about it. I called people out left and right. But over time, I realized I have far more power and impact by staying in integrity myself and focusing on my own work, rather than wasting energy worrying whether others are in theirs, which I don’t have control over anyway.

As Gurdjieff said, “There is nothing to do with such people; they are already their own punishment.” No one is above the law of karma, and what goes around comes around.

Over the years, I have seen that many people who have created real wealth live by the same principle. Some were clients. Others were mentors I paid to learn from.

And just recently, I came across this post by investor and financial educator Stack Hodler that confirmed my insight and experience from years ago:

Beyond Scarcity: Reclaiming Power, Responsibility, and Abundance

Most people justify their scarcity by blaming the outside world: the “evil-doers,” the greedy 1%, the banking system, the government, and so on. I did this myself for years.

But your own shadow, conditioning, and unresolved trauma will keep reinforcing the matrix scarcity program through blame and victim consciousness.

The matrix feeds on that. It will always give you convincing reasons why you should live in financial hardship, why you can’t afford the life you desire, and why struggle is inevitable.

“Look at the world. The economy is bad.
Everyone is struggling. So must you. Be afraid!”

That is the message. And it is a lie.

You can thrive, live in abundance, and create prosperity if you are willing to make real inner changes and take an honest look at your relationship with money.

This has nothing to do with just “positive thinking” or distorted and oversimplified New Age ideas like the Law of Attraction.

Those approaches bypass the deeper psychological and spiritual work that actually changes your reality and aligns you with something higher than your ego-personality.

In fact, the best thing you can do for yourself, your family, and the world is to thrive, to be creative and productive, and to reclaim the forces of money and power from the hostile forces that currently corrupt and control them.

You always had that power. Don’t give it away. Don’t deny it. And don’t demonize it.

Scarcity isn’t resolved by blaming others or the system, by rejecting or chasing money, by expecting handouts, or by forcing positive thinking.

It changes when you confront your unconscious relationship to money, power, value, and responsibility, and align it with your true nature, dharma, and Divine Will.

“The Matrix Control System owes its power to the fact that people give it power. Freewill is bartered for security, and most people live as slaves, perhaps happy slaves but slaves nonetheless.

You might see this situation as an injustice, but once you realize that freedom is not denied or simply ignored, the matter is no longer an injustice but a tragedy.

Like Dorothy [in The Wizard of Oz], we have always had the power. We have always had the ability to open the flow to prosperity, but it takes a long and arduous road of failure and deception for most to finally recognize and gain confidence in a better way.”

- Tom Montalk

If this article resonated, and you feel called to go deeper into the spiritual, psychological, and energetic roots of money and abundance, I’ve created a full training for this exact work.

How to Create Abundance in Alignment with Divine Will

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• The deeper psycho-spiritual principles and universal laws that govern wealth

• How to increase the inflow of money and thrive creatively in alignment with Divine Will and soul purpose

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If you feel a genuine call to transform your relationship with money at the root, beyond mindset tricks or false spiritual virtue, this is for you.

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Learn More

An exploration of the esoteric Law of Seven, the role of conscious shocks, the Luciferic temptation, and why spiritual will, sincerity, and humility are the only forces that can carry a seeker through.

Are you familiar with this pattern?

You feel the need to make fundamental changes within yourself and in your life.

It might start with something simple, such as working out, losing weight, or eating healthier.

Or perhaps you feel the pull to delve deeper into psycho-spiritual work, such as shadow work, inner child healing, somatic trauma release, relationship work, or establishing a regular practice, like meditation, sincere prayer, Qi Gong, Tai Qi, Breath Work, or the Yoga Asanas.

You’re inspired. You start reading, watching videos, maybe even sign up for a class, course, retreat, or workshop to deepen the process and implement what you’ve learned into daily life.

But at some point, the excitement fades.

You don’t finish the book, the course, or the workshop. You stop practicing consistently.

Old patterns creep back in. You get distracted.

You tell yourself all kinds of excuses about why you can’t do this work right now, why you can’t finish that book, practice, or course. Maybe you blame the content, the practices, the teacher, or external circumstances.

Perhaps you start complaining and projecting onto others how “they” are not “doing the work,” whether it's your partner, friends, family, or people in the world, but it is really your own unconscious projection about how you feel about yourself.

Complaining is often a subtle form of victim consciousness that the wounded ego indulges in. And it’s incredibly tempting. That’s why the spiritual warrior attitude of no complaining is one of the hardest to embody, because it forces you to face yourself directly.

Perhaps you start giving unsolicited advice to people who don’t ask for it, when, in truth, you need to apply what you’re preaching more sincerely.

Offering guidance and advice without being asked is an infringement on free will. Even when driven by good intentions, it can create unnecessary resistance and sometimes make things worse.

Maybe you tell yourself you don’t need to do this work, that you’re already advanced and know it all. But in truth, the ego has hijacked the process.

You mistake a spiritualized persona for genuine awakening, using philosophical or spiritual ideas to bypass the more challenging somatic, psychological, and emotional work.

What feels like evolution is often subtle pride, avoiding the deeper work while believing you’re more evolved than others.

You might tell yourself the classic excuse: “I don’t have time” or “This isn’t the right time.”

Or you think you’re doing the work, but really, you’re just intellectualizing. You confuse mental awareness with transformation, mistaking the collection of knowledge and information for genuine understanding and embodied wisdom.

You talk about your triggers and issues, but never truly integrate or embody the healing.

And so you keep lying to yourself, wasting time and energy, imagining you’re on the path of awakening, while your false persona hijacked the process long ago.

I can relate to all of this. I’ve lied to myself plenty of times. I’ve had my own excuses and rationalizations.

And the same resistance still comes up at times if I don’t push through inertia, distraction, avoidance, or the traps of self-pity (”poor me”) and self-importance (“better than”). Two sides of the same narcissistic ego, which we all have to varying degrees.

I’ve also observed this pattern in many people I’ve worked with over the years.

Why do so many seekers begin the inner work but drop out halfway?

Why do courses, books, and practices that once sparked insight end up abandoned, half-read, half-done, and half-integrated?

Why do we start journeys of transformation, only to find ourselves months or years later back in the same unconscious patterns and dynamics we tried to break free from?

We live in a time where access to spiritual knowledge has never been easier. We read the books, watch the videos, take the courses, meditate, journal our shadows, and set New Year’s resolutions.

But most of us don’t follow through. We get distracted. We get “too busy.”

We sabotage ourselves. We fall at the first wave of resistance.

Real inner work isn’t comfortable. It demands everything the wounded ego is built to avoid: facing the shadow, feeling the emotions we repressed, breaking free from childhood wounding and conditioning, and stepping into radical truth.

Here’s the deeper truth.

We lack the sincerity, spiritual will, inner fire, and determination, along with full self-responsibility, humility, and radical honesty, to walk the path all the way through.

Especially when resistance appears and it becomes uncomfortable.

Everyone wants the truth, until…

Everyone wants the truth, until it reveals aspects of themselves they’d rather not see, or it doesn’t match their preferred idea of what “awakening” should look like.

The most important question you can ask is: Why do I want to do this work? Why do I do what I do?

If there’s even a trace of ambition to “become somebody”, whether a coach, therapist, teacher, content creator, or spiritual influencer, as the main driving force behind doing psycho-spiritual work, then sincerity is already lost.

The ego has hijacked the process.

And with that hijacking comes an entry point for interference by hostile forces and Luciferic beings, who feed off spiritual ambition and grandiosity and will lead you even more astray while you “dream of being awake,” as it is often described in the esoteric tradition.

This doesn’t mean that doing this work professionally or wanting to help others is inherently wrong.

However, ideally, that path emerges organically from deep personal experience and sincere inner transformation, following many years of study and inner work, much like the journey of the wounded healer, rather than from a drive for recognition, success, or ambition.

Psycho-spiritual inner work is not a career. It’s not a hobby or a pastime.

If done correctly, it is a destructive process that will question everything you think you want and desire, and expose the lies you tell yourself.

I’ve had to face this in myself, more than once. I’ve seen the same temptation in many others. It’s part of the journey.

So the real question is: Do you truly want to awaken, or just be happy in your dream state?

“The truth of the matter is that most people who say they want awakening don’t actually want to awaken. They want their version of awakening.

What they actually want is to be really happy in their dream state. And that’s okay, if that’s as far as they’ve evolved.

However, the real, sincere impulse toward enlightenment is something that extends far beyond the desire to improve our dream state.

It is an impulse that is willing to subject itself to whatever is needed in order to wake up.

The authentic impulse toward enlightenment is that internal prayer asking for whatever it is that will bring us to a full awakening, no matter whether it turns out to be wonderful or terrible.

It is an impulse that puts no conditions on what we have to go through.”

- Adyashanti

Unless we meet that with effort, sincerity, humility, and a decision to stay with the process no matter what, all transformation will hit a wall, or worse, mutate into bypassing, pride, delusion, or collapse.

“This authentic impulse can be a bit frightening, because when you feel it, you know it is real.

When you have let go of all conditions, when you have let go of how you want your own awakening to be and what you want the journey to be like, you have let go of your illusion of control.

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.

Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

In my experience, everyone will say they want to discover the Truth, right up until they realize that the Truth will rob them of their deepest-held ideas, beliefs, hopes, and dreams.

The freedom of enlightenment means much more than the experience of love and peace. It means discovering a Truth that will turn your view of yourself and life upside down.

For one who is truly ready, this will be unimaginably liberating. But for one who is still clinging in any way, this will be extremely challenging indeed.

How does one know if they are ready? One is ready when they are willing to be absolutely consumed when they are willing to be fuel for a fire without end.”

- Adyashanti

To make things even more complex, there are occult forces, real non-physical beings, and entities known to all esoteric traditions that feed on our resistance and actively try to interfere with the process. They don’t want you to awaken.

This article explores what it really takes to cross that threshold, what derails us, what sustains us, and the inner fire of spiritual will that must be awakened and applied for true transformation to unfold.

All esoteric traditions speak of this: the temptation to abandon the Work through interference, resistance, and distractions.

And they all point to the same antidotes: spiritual will, sincerity, and humility.

The Law of Seven and The Necessity of Disillusionment

One of the great illusions of modern life is the belief that we are consistent, that once we begin something with passion or determination, we’ll continue in a straight line toward its fulfillment.

But as the Russian mystic Gurdjieff observed in In Search of the Miraculous (and as Mouravieff later expanded on in Gnosis), nothing in nature, including human thought, feeling, or action, moves in a straight line.

All processes unfold in waves, cycles, and curves, inevitably hitting friction points where the original direction weakens, shifts, or even reverses entirely.

This is the essence of the esoteric Law of Seven, also known as the Law of Octaves.

It reveals a hidden pattern behind a common phenomenon: the inability to follow through with sincere psycho-spiritual work, the kind that actually leads out of the matrix and toward embodied awakening.

The Law of Seven explains why so many people begin inner work, spiritual practices, or transformational journeys with genuine inspiration, only to falter, self-sabotage, or abandon the process entirely.

We don’t just stall. Often, we regress. We lose our aim, drift off course, or even reverse direction, without realizing it.

It explains why:

• We start a psycho-spiritual practice, course, or new habit with inspiration, only to drop it weeks or months later.

• We set out to pursue truth, but end up entangled in dogma and self-righteousness.

• We begin with sincerity and focus, but find ourselves slipping into mechanical routine, avoidance, or even quiet resentment.

As Gurdjieff pointed out, most people don’t even notice when this reversal happens. We continue to believe that we are doing what we originally intended, even though the essence of our aim has long been lost.

It all happens mechanically and unconsciously.

This is why Gurdjieff compared the average human being to a machine. Unless we become conscious of this dynamic, it governs our lives.

It is also one of the key ways the matrix keeps us asleep, allowing us to believe we are “doing,” when we are merely reacting, trapped in mechanical patterns, mistaking programmed action for free will.

Gurdjieff insisted that man is not truly doing anything because he does not know himself.

What we call “doing” is really just a series of conditioned responses and unconscious reactions to external influences and unconscious drives, until we begin to work on ourselves consciously, to “grow the soul” and bring forth the true Self.

”You often think in a very naive way,” [Gurdjieff] said. “You already think you can do. To get rid of this conviction is more difficult than anything else for a man.

You do not understand all the complexity of your organization and you do not realize that every effort, in addition to the results desired, even if it gives these, gives thousands of unexpected and often undesirable results, and the chief thing that you forget is that you are not beginning from the beginning with a nice clean, new machine.

There stand behind you many years of a wrong and stupid life, of indulgence in every kind of weakness, of shutting your eyes to your own errors, of striving to avoid all unpleasant truths, of constant lying to yourselves, of self-justification, of blaming others, and so on.

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness. And ‘consciousness’ cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and ‘will’ cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution, of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and ‘doing’ cannot be the result of things which ‘happen.’

People do not know what man is. They have to do with a very complex machine, far more complex than a railway engine, a motorcar, or an aeroplane—but they know nothing, or almost nothing, about the construction, working, or possibilities of this machine.”

- P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

What Gurdjieff refers to as “the machine” is directly tied to the esoteric axiom “Know Thyself.”

It means recognizing all the parts within us that we mistake for the true “I”: the inner child sub-personalities, trauma-based beliefs, social/cultural conditioning, and adaptive identifications.

Our mental, emotional, and physical bodies also each have their own “identities”, needs, preferences, and blind spots.

Most people never pause to question who or what within them is actually speaking, thinking, acting, feeling, or reacting. They automatically identify it all as the same “I,” without realizing the fragmentation at play.

To observe all of this without flinching and starting the process of differentiation is the beginning of real self-knowledge.

This process, if entered sincerely, will lead to disillusionment, the dissolving of false identifications, the transmutation of the ego-personality, and the rebirth of the true Self in the fire of inner transmutation.

In esoteric work, this disillusionment is known as moral bankruptcy.

As Mouravieff writes:

“When man goes in search of the Way [toward Awakening], it generally means something in him has collapsed. This collapse is usually preceded by a re-evaluation of values, brought on by accumulated shocks and negative emotions.

Success rarely awakens man; it usually puts him deeper to sleep. From an esoteric point of view, disagreeable shocks are a better foundation for the Work than happy accidents.

If a man is strong and sincere, he won’t look away from implacable reality. He’ll accept what he sees in himself, however uncomfortable. That’s the threshold to the real path.

But if he justifies himself, hides behind logic or moral righteousness, and refuses to see, he turns his back on the Way.

We repeat, no one reaches the path with Access to the Way without first passing through an interior collapse—a moral bankruptcy [disillusionment].”

- Mouravieff, Gnosis

The Intervals: Where Everything Falls Apart

The Law of Seven is also called the Law of Octaves because it mirrors the structure of a musical octave: seven notes (do-re-me-fa-sol-la-si) forming a complete octave, with two key intervals, or “shocks”, where extra energy or assistance is required to keep the process moving in the intended direction.

In psycho-spiritual work, these intervals are where the real test begins. Without a conscious “shock” of effort, sincerity, attention, or grace, the original direction of the process begins to falter.

These are points of natural resistance.

The first between Mi and Fa. The second between Si and Do

Unless these gaps are bridged via a “shock”, the process will:

• Deviate from its original direction

• Stagnate or become mechanical

• Reverse and regress into its opposite

This is why spiritual inspiration can turn into indifference, why knowledge can become dogma and “know-it-all”, and why relationships can drift into staleness, unconscious patterns, and codependency, mistaken for “love.”

And most importantly, this is why we abandon the very work that could transform us, and often don’t even realize we’ve done it.

The First Interval: From Mi to Fa

This is where the initial momentum of a process begins to wane. In psycho-spiritual terms:

• The novelty of a new practice, course, or healing modality wears off.

• Emotional resistance or discomfort arises as shadow material and inner child wounds come to the surface.

• Life’s distractions suddenly feel more urgent or attractive.

• The unconscious pushes back to maintain the familiar.

• Entity interference increases, amplifying doubt, apathy, self-criticism, and confusion, as well as excuses and laziness.

• Spiritual pride may arise subtly. “I’ve done this before,” “I don’t need to do this”, or “I already know this,” serve as a rationalization to disengage.

The Second Interval: From Si to Do (before a new octave)

This interval is more crucial. It comes just before the breakthrough or integration:

• A real shift is close, but the ego resists surrender to a higher truth.

• Fear of the unknown, facing the lies of the ego, or identity dissolution, surfaces.

• Old habits, distractions, or addictive patterns suddenly return with force.

• Hostile forces may escalate interference: triggering doubt, inflating pride, or weaponizing flattery.

• Spiritual pride resurfaces as a protective mechanism: “I’ve already integrated this”, or “This is basic. I’m beyond this now”, “I need something more advanced or special.” (This relates to the Luciferic temptation, which will be addressed later on in this article)

This is often where people walk away from the work, not in failure, but in the illusion of completion and the illusory belief that they are “awake.”

Nothing Remains the Same

The Law of Seven teaches that nothing stays level. Every process is either:

• Ascending (developing, integrating, transforming), or

• Descending (degenerating, fragmenting, becoming mechanical)

If we do not actively ascend through effort and presence, we will inevitably descend and even potentially disintegrate. There is no neutral zone.

And many people deceive themselves, clinging to the form of the work, doing it very mechanically and not sincerely, while its essence has died.

That said, it’s important not to get overly fixated on the specific musical notes or turn the Law of Seven into an abstract mental puzzle.

It’s not about mapping every moment to “Mi” or “Si.” The octave is a model that points to a cosmic law of movement, development, and decay.

In life, we go through many octaves, nested within each other, often simultaneously, across different areas, including health, relationships, work, career, spiritual practice, and more.

Each contains its own intervals. These friction points may appear at different stages depending on a person’s karma, soul path, and current level of consciousness.

The key is not to memorize the theory but to recognize when you’re at an interval, when resistance arises, when the path grows dim, when old patterns return, and to respond with conscious effort, not collapse or rationalization.

The Necessity of Shocks To Awaken

“Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it.

Speaking in general, what is necessary to awaken a sleeping man? A good shock is necessary. But when a man is fast asleep, one shock is not enough. A long period of continual shocks is needed.”

- G.I. Gurdjieff

The only way to complete an octave and to stay aligned with our original intention and bring it to fruition is to apply conscious shocks at the moments of resistance.

A shock, in this context, is an intentional or accidental influx of energy or influence that revives the process and helps it cross a critical threshold.

Without these shocks, transformation simply does not occur. The momentum dies, and the person defaults back into mechanical repetition, slipping back into a state of “sleep” while pretending to be awake.

At its core, a shock does one or more of the following:

• Re-energizes a process at the moment it begins to stall

• Realigns a person with their original aim, or deepens it

• Interrupts mechanical habits or unconscious drift

• Helps to hone attention, stay focused, and cut out distractions

• Opens the possibility for conscious choice and inner alchemy

A shock doesn’t always feel dramatic. It may be subtle, a conscious moment of presence, a decision to stay with discomfort instead of avoiding it. But it changes the trajectory. Without it, the process collapses into entropy and mechanical unconsciousness.

Two Types of Shocks

1. Conscious Shocks

These are intentional efforts we make to counter unconscious resistance, rekindle the flame of sincerity, and reaffirm our commitment to our goal. They might take the form of:

• Self-remembering (establishing the non-reactive inner witness), returning to presence when caught in identification, projection, or emotional reaction

• Conscious effort, choosing to act against inertia, even when it’s uncomfortable or frustrating

• Reconnecting to the original aim, remembering why you began the work in the first place

• Support from others: remaining open to feedback, reflection, or honest encouragement from those walking the path, or from a trusted teacher or therapist.

This was also the original role of a guru: to provide “shocks” via guidance, mirrors, and accountability as necessary for growth.

These shocks often don’t feel good.

They often come through inner friction. It could be choosing to meditate instead of scrolling on social media, staying present with an emotional trigger instead of reacting, or picking the practice back up after you’ve avoided it.

Gurdjieff also called this “conscious suffering”, to not give in mechanically to our urges and desires of the lower nature and the mechanically programmed ego-personality with its sub-personalities, which we mistake for our real “I.”

Without conscious shocks, there is no transformation. The process becomes mechanical and degenerates.

2. External Shocks

These come from life itself. They are often unexpected and beyond our control, but they interrupt inertia and offer the possibility of awakening. However, they are double-edged.

If not met consciously, they can also lead to fragmentation, regression, and a downward spiral (even potentially leading to suicide).

• A divorce, breakup, betrayal, or serious illness

• Financial crisis or loss of livelihood

• The death of a loved one

• A global disruption (e.g., pandemic, war, economic collapse), and natural disasters

• A book, film, dream, or encounter that pierces through the sleep state

• Meeting a teacher or a moment of Divine grace.

These moments can shake us loose from identification and surface-level goals. They can strip us of illusions and force us to re-evaluate our lives. If received with humility, presence, and a sincere aspiration for truth, they can open powerful gateways to transformation.

But if resisted, denied, or filtered through pride, blame, and victim consciousness, they will only deepen the sleep state.

A Global Shock: The COVID Pandemic

A global collective shock was the COVID pandemic, with all the lies, fear-mongering, and propaganda that came with it. It triggered a mass fear of death, lockdowns, social ostracism, and widespread mistrust.

It tore apart families and relationships over the vaccine issue and political polarization, destroyed countless businesses, and shattered the livelihoods of millions. It left a massive psychic scar across the collective.

From 2020 to 2022, I observed two primary responses to the crisis.

On one side, it pushed people deeper into trauma and dissociation, getting stuck in freeze, fight, or flight. They believed the official narrative and fear-mongering without questioning and took the vaccine. Their nervous systems went into survival mode. Many never came out of it.

On the other side, I saw people begin to “wake up.” The shock compelled them to reevaluate the official narrative, not just regarding the pandemic, but also concerning politics, media, education, science, health, history, and the system itself.

But even that awakening took two different paths.

Some fell deeper into the rabbit hole of conspiracies, but the focus stayed entirely external. It led to disintegration. Everything became a psy-op. Everything was seen as a trap.

This is its own trauma response, a schizoid state rooted in hyper-vigilance and paranoia.

It leads to disembodiment, dissociation, and black-and-white thinking. The nervous system stays dysregulated. It typically leads to a “black pill” mindset characterized by doom and gloom, stuck in fear.

However, others used the shock as a means of initiation. It became the disillusionment necessary to access the Way, as described by Mouravieff above.

They didn’t just question official narratives, but they questioned their own lives: their choices, relationships, desires, life goals, and deeper purpose.

It led them to the most important question of all: Who am I?

That’s why I’ve said: any crisis, no matter how severe, has a teaching function. Every shock, whether personal or collective, carries the potential seed of deeper awakening. It depends on how we meet it.

Shock ≠ Suffering for Its Own Sake

It’s important to clarify: a shock is not simply a disruption. It’s not about pain or struggle for its own sake.

A true shock introduces new energy that breaks the loop of unconscious repetition, allowing the process to continue along its original trajectory, or evolve into something higher.

Because most people are mechanical in their habits and deeply avoid discomfort, many shocks arrive in the form of crisis.

But suffering alone doesn’t awaken. Only conscious engagement with the shock allows it to fulfill its transformative function.

The real tragedy is that when potential shocks arise, emotional triggers, shadow confrontations, conflicts, life hardships, and failed relationships, most people tend to avoid, escape, and often blame others.

They succumb to self-pity, blaming the world and others for their misery. The opportunity is lost until next time (or next lifetime), when the next shock may be even more severe.

Why Shocks Are Essential for Inner Work

In psycho-spiritual development, the pattern is always the same:

1. You begin with a sincere aim to change, awaken, or break a pattern.

2. You initiate the work, meditation, journaling, shadow integration, spiritual study, and inner inquiry.

3. Resistance inevitably arises: discomfort, boredom, fear, distraction, doubt, apathy, spiritual pride.

4. The process starts to falter. Unless a shock is introduced, internally or externally, it weakens or collapses.

This is where most people fall off.

They misinterpret the resistance as a sign to stop, when in fact it’s a threshold to go deeper. The ego offers endless excuses, rationalizations, and justifications. Or it inflates itself and says, “I’ve already done this,” “I don’t need this anymore.”

And most importantly: You cannot depend on external shocks alone.

If you don’t develop the inner capacity to apply conscious shocks, to supply your own “alarm clocks,” as Gurdjieff put it, you will always remain dependent on outer catastrophe to be the “shock” to wake you out of your slumber.

That’s the deeper meaning of spiritual maturity: learning how to introduce shocks at the right moment, before the process breaks down.

And the more you can apply these shocks through will, sincerity, and humility, the less outer events will destabilize you. You begin to receive guidance from within through the emerging true Self aligned with the Divine.

A shock is a fork in the road. Each time it arrives, you are given the chance to either fall back asleep or wake up a little more.

The Importance of Spiritual Will, Sincerity, and Humility

At the heart of true transformation lies a triad that is often overlooked or misunderstood: spiritual will, sincerity, and humility.

Without these three, no practice, teaching, or modality, no matter how advanced, can penetrate the unconscious resistance, ego defenses, or the interference of hostile forces that block the path of awakening.

Spiritual Will

Spiritual will is not the same as egoic will or forceful doing. It’s not about pushing or striving from the personality. It’s certainly not ambition. It may use the ego as its instrument, but it originates from deep within the soul, a movement to align with the Divine.

It is the inner fire that remains steady when inspiration fades.

It is the strength to choose truth over comfort.

It is the capacity to stay present with discomfort rather than escape, to recommit when part of you wants to quit.

It is the ability to feel all feelings, without suppressing, repressing, escaping, or projecting them onto others or blaming them for it.

It's the force needed to push through the resistance of the ego and hostile forces that interfere with any seeker, tempt him, or distract him.

It’s the force behind a conscious shock, the spark that keeps the fire burning.

Spiritual Will is also needed in surrender to God unconditionally, and aligning with Divine Will.

There is a big misconception about “surrender” in spirituality. Many people believe that being spiritual means being passive, as if “God” will take care of everything and remove all pain and suffering without any effort on their own.

They think all they have to do is pray, go with the flow, or only do spiritual practices when they feel like it.

It is a dangerous misconception because it opens the door to the hostile forces.

Spiritual surrender is an active force. You must cultivate your will in order to offer it to the Divine.

You don’t become a servant of the Divine by passivity. You become a vessel by forging a will capable of saying with sincerity: “I want what You want.”

“The most important thing is the capacity of attention and concentration, it is that which one must work at and develop. From the point of view of action, it is the will: you must work and build up an unshakable will.

From the intellectual point of view, you must work and build up a power of concentration which nothing can shake. And if you have both, concentration and will, you will be a genius and nothing will resist you.

And when you have a will, you will be able to say to the Divine: “I want what You want.” But not before that. Because in order to want what the Divine wants, you must have a will, otherwise you can will nothing at all.”

- The Mother, Mirra Alfassa

Sincerity

But spiritual will cannot function without sincerity.

All authentic spiritual and esoteric traditions, East and West, agree on one thing: sincerity is the foundation of the path. It is the prerequisite for giving yourself to the Divine without conditions.

But sincerity is not what most people think it is. Many believe they are sincere while lying to themselves.

Real sincerity is radical honesty. It is the willingness to see yourself without spiritual makeup, without pretense, without polishing the image.

It is the capacity to admit: I am not as conscious as I think I am.

Sincerity is the sword that cuts through self-deception, spiritual bypassing, and inflated narratives.

It strips away the ego’s disguises, the stories we tell ourselves to avoid seeing the raw truth of who we are, what drives us, and where we still hide.

It demands that we face life without self-deception, without victim-blame consciousness, self-importance, pride, or self-pity.

It’s easy to appear sincere on the surface, to say the right words, put on a smiley face, adopt the right persona, or project a polished image, and yet be fundamentally insincere in the deeper work.

To be sincere means to confront your own lies, especially the ones you tell yourself. It enables you to engage the parts of yourself you might otherwise prefer to avoid.

No knowledge, information, psycho-spiritual modality, technique, mantra, or spiritual system can compensate for a lack of sincerity.

Hostile forces can easily manipulate those who are insincere and dishonest with themselves.

Insincerity opens the doorway to adverse forces and the Luciferic temptation.

Sincerity is the ultimate spiritual protection. It is more powerful than any visualization, prayer, device, crystal, or affirmation.

Because none of those work without sincerity.

Sincerity creates a frequency that aligns you with the Divine, making it harder for deceptive forces to reach you.

It is the attitude of engaging in the inner work without excuses and committing fully.

Yet the ego can easily hijack the concept of sincerity.

When someone says, “But I am sincere!” it’s often a sign they’re lying to themselves.

Being convinced of one’s own total sincerity is usually a form of unconscious insincerity, a red flag of ego inflation.

As the Mother, Mirra Alfassa, pointed out:

“...When you are sure that you have attained absolute sincerity, you may be certain that you have plunged into falsehood....”

A true sign of sincerity is the capacity to see and admit all the parts within oneself that are not sincere, and still commit to the work anyway.

The same goes for those who claim to be “humble.” The very need to say it is usually a sign of a lack of humility.

We become more sincere as we progress, but the state of absolute sincerity is enlightenment.

“The way stands open to anyone whose will is sincere.”

– Rudolf Steiner

“Sincerity is the key. You have to be willing to see everything. Being this sincere with yourself may not be easy at first.
You may see aspects of yourself that you don’t want to see. Nonetheless, this is where awakening moves; awakening moves toward and into that which is not awake.”

– Adyashanti

“To be sincere, all the parts of the being must be united in their aspiration for the Divine. Sincerity is the key to the divine doors. All division in the being is an insincerity which opens the door to the adverse forces.”

– The Mother, Mirra Alfassa

“Sincerity is the key to self-knowledge. Each day you put on a mask, and you must take it off little by little.”

- Gurdjieff

“Being honest and sincere means confronting our inner experience and our outer life in a truthful way.
Being sincere means not lying to ourselves, not rationalizing, not comforting, not postponing, not bandaging difficulties.
Being sincere means grappling with our life and coming to terms with it with a sense of integrity and self-respect.”

- A.H. Almaas

Humility

Sincerity goes together with humility.

Humility is not to be confused with performative modesty or self-deprecation, nor with making yourself small and calling it virtue.

It is a deeper recognition that your ego-personality, with all its sub-personalities and inner child parts (which most people mistakenly identify as the true Self), can hijack the process at any time.

It can manifest as self-diminishment and a 'poor-me' attitude, or as inflation and grandiosity.

Humility is the ultimate protection against hostile forces and the Luciferic temptation that feeds on spiritual pride, which is one of the most common traps for seekers.

You can see it in the pop-spiritual New Age scene all over social media, where people focus more on image and performance than on sincere inner work.

The inner voice that says, “You don’t need this,” “You’ve already done this,” or “You’re already advanced,” is a classic sign of Luciferic entity influence and interference.

It’s important to see it for what it is, without getting pulled into it. Everyone encounters this at some point on the path.

Adyashanti referred to it as the grip of spiritual pride and superiority.

It is something every sincere seeker must face. It is also how the ego hijacks the work and spiritualizes itself, leading to inflation and, in more extreme cases, to the kind of spiritual narcissism that is widespread today.

This is why humility is so essential. Whenever there is spiritual pride, a sense of specialness, or the feeling of being above others, it creates an opening for Luciferic interference.

Spiritual Pride and the Luciferic Temptation

Rudolf Steiner described how Luciferic forces operate through subtle spiritual pride and self-sufficiency.

They convince the seeker that they no longer need devotional or embodied practices.

They promise shortcuts and suggest that awakening can happen without effort, mistaking intellectual understanding for realization.

It all sounds reasonable and flattering from the perspective of the inflated ego, which is easily mistaken for the true Self.

Lucifer’s influence often feels like mystical euphoria or spiritual elevation. But the ego becomes spiritualized instead of being transformed and surrendered. It adopts a spiritual identity that quietly judges others as less awakened or evolved.

Luciferic spirituality promises light, but it avoids friction. It rejects discipline, humility, and the inner alchemical process needed to face shadow material and integrate what has been suppressed or projected.

The doorway for these influences is usually an unhealed childhood wound, the need to be seen, to be special, to be recognized as wise or awakened.

Luciferic forces feed on grandiosity, spiritual delusion, and subtle superiority. They give the illusion of spiritual progress while avoiding the real inner work of transformation.

From an esoteric perspective, believing you are awake while you are still asleep is more dangerous than simply being asleep and knowing it. The illusion of being awake creates a false sense of certainty that is hard to break.

Overestimating your level of consciousness and identifying with labels such as starseed, lightworker, spiritual teacher, or even just a “spiritual person”, can often foster a false sense of specialness. That blocks the humility needed for grounded inner work.

Your true soul-being doesn’t need any of these labels and identifications. Only the ego attaches to them.

The spiritual ego is harder to dismantle than the ego of someone still asleep in the matrix. This is the core of spiritual narcissism, which is becoming more and more common.

The illusion of being chosen, being awakened, or having already “done the work” becomes a mask for unresolved childhood wounds, insecurity, and unprocessed trauma.

Whether someone identifies as an ambassador for alien races, a contactee for the Galactic Federation, or a self-righteous born-again Christian who believes they have exclusive access to God, it all feeds the same inflation.

Any identity that reinforces spiritual specialness becomes a trap.

It also opens the door to hostile forces.

Hostile entities, often posing as beings of light, feed on spiritual inflation and self-importance. They flatter the seeker and reinforce the illusion of progress through seductive downloads or visions, while keeping the person locked in delusion.

The New Age astral circus is full of deceptive distractions, channelings of alien beings, so-called light codes, DNA activations, Light language, and ascension fantasies.

Many people accept these claims at face value because “it resonates.”

However, the idea that resonance equals truth is one of the most perilous pitfalls in the current spiritual landscape. Resonance alone is not enough. It can just as easily reflect wishful thinking, trauma bonding, or manipulation.

As Gurdjieff said, the most dangerous state is to dream you are awake while still fully asleep.

This kind of illusion is harder to break than ignorance, because it is reinforced by pride, a sense of specialness, and a spiritual identity that believes it is already awake and possesses special knowledge.

It creates what the esoteric traditions call a false foundation.

That is much harder to dismantle than a typical ego-structure of someone who doesn’t claim to be awake, because it is fused with spiritual identification and inflation.

“A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new.

Otherwise, the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.

In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant, incessant lies he tells himself.

One must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

- G.I. Gurdjieff

Activating the spiritual will with sincerity and humility is what guards the seeker against pride, distraction, and regression.

It helps navigate the inevitable initiatory fires, including the shocks, trials, and temptations, without falling back into unconsciousness or illusion.

These three qualities form the inner compass that keeps you on the path, especially when outer appearances are deceptive and inner resistance arises.

The Temple of Secrets

To close, I leave you with a powerful esoteric parable from 1788 by Von Eckarthausen that encapsulates the journey, its temptations, and the indispensable role of humility in reaching the true Temple of Wisdom:

“The Temple of Secrets is located on a high mountain, and everywhere, thorns are covering the path leading to the Temple. The inconceivable, mysterious height of the mountain is the reason why many people doubt the existence of the Temple of Secrets.

Some think of it as a Fairy Tale, some consider it an old Myth and others believe it to be the Truth.

At the entrance of the narrow path stands Ignorance, with her sisters Stupidity and Laziness, and they tell awful tales to the travelers and of horrible adventures the travelers will encounter if they set foot on this path.

That is how lazy Human Beings and fearful Human Beings can easily be persuaded to turn back.

There are a few Human Beings on whom ignorance attempts her deceptions in vain. They climb up the first part of the thorny, steep path, and when they are about halfway up the mountain, they reach a plateau on which they find the Temple of Self-Love.

Next to this Temple stands Self-Conceit, Pride, and Know-it-All, and they offer the traveler a cup, out of which he drinks his own Self in great gulps and thereby becomes intoxicated with himself, with his own “I.”

These travelers then become so intoxicated with themselves that they imagine that their Temple, the Temple of Self-Love, is the Temple of Secrets, and there is nothing, but nothing, above them.

Desires, passions, and wantonness are the servants of these priests. However, those whose hearts search for the truth will not find satisfaction with this, and they will continue to search.

A few thousand steps from this Temple, you will find a very secluded little hut, inhabited by a hermit, with the following inscription above the door: The Residence of Humility.

The man who lives here guides the strangers to the residence of humility, which in turn leads them to Self-Recognition. This Divine Beauty becomes the traveler’s companion, and with her, he conquers the inaccessible mountain.

Whosoever tries to reach the Temple of Secrets without this Divine Beauty can very easily be misled by his Self-Love, and as a result, will follow the wrong path.

His greed for knowledge will lead him to the Temple of Curiosity.

The inhabitants of this Temple are: fraud, seduction, and deception, the founders of most of the secret societies, and those Human Beings who are in search of the Truth, and for the Temple of Secrets will, if they join these Secret Societies, be robbed of the ability to see with their Soul.

They are then led to the top of the mountain, where they fall into the abyss or into the labyrinth or maze, in which they will walk in circles for eternity without finding the Truth.

Humility alone is the best guide.

This alone will lead the seeker to the Master of Teachers of all secrets.

This Master Teacher is the pure will. This pure will becomes the friend of the highest of knowledge, and they enter into a bond of eternal union.

The knowledge of the effects of the Eternal Light of godliness in all created beings is True Magic in Theory. The conception of this Light, or the transition from the intellect to the Divine Will, is True Magic in Practice.”

- Von Eckarthausen, Magic: The Principles of Higher Knowledge, 1788

About the Author

Bernhard Guenther is a psycho-spiritual researcher, teacher, and guide whose work explores the deeper architecture of reality and the evolutionary challenges facing humanity at this critical threshold. His path integrates esoteric wisdom, depth psychology, and a grounded understanding of the unseen forces influencing our reality.

He is the founder of Piercing the Veil of Reality (www.veilofreality.com), a platform dedicated to guiding seekers through personal and collective transformation.

Bernhard co-hosts The Cosmic Matrix Podcast with his wife, Laura Matsue Guenther, diving deep into spirituality, psychology, esotericism, and navigating our transitional times through the lens of consciousness evolution.

Listen to all episodes at www.cosmicmatrixpodcast.com

Together, they guide Time of Transition: Embodied Soul Awakening, a transformative 14-week group coaching program focused on psycho-spiritual work and the embodiment of your true Self.

A new round begins March 18, 2026.

Learn more at www.thetimeoftransition.com

One of the most common questions I get is: “How can I attract a conscious partner and relationship?”

Especially nowadays, more people are single than ever.

Some have become disillusioned, hardened, jaded, sarcastic, or blaming the opposite sex.

Many still haven’t processed their past relationships and are stuck in grief or resentment.

There are many factors at play, including karmic lessons unique to each individual.

Much also depends on one’s level of consciousness.

Most people are still driven by their lower nature, prioritizing the sexual experience (often mistaking it for love), physical attraction, and shared surface interests over a deeper soul or psychic connection.

Others are unconsciously seeking to heal childhood wounds through their partner, trying to get from the opposite sex what they never received from their parents.

It’s like trying to fill a bottomless hole. Through unconscious repetition compulsion, they recreate the past, attracting relationships that keep them stuck in self-defeating loops or even abusive dynamics.

The current relationship crisis mirrors the state of the world in this Kali Yuga, as well as the dominant values of mainstream culture.

There’s no judgment in that; each person acts according to their nature and where they are on their soul’s evolutionary path.

But eventually, as the soul comes to the forefront, the call for something deeper begins to emerge.

This article is for those who hear that call.

Modern approaches to relationships, especially polarity teachings, tend to focus on performance and external roles. They mostly work on the persona and don’t reach the deeper layers of the psyche.

If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to any man, it’s this:

Integrate your Anima (your inner feminine).

And to any woman:

Integrate your Animus (your inner masculine).

Having worked with thousands of people over the years, and through my own journey from single to married life, I’ve seen how the lack of anima/animus integration is at the root of many relationship issues:

• repeating toxic patterns, relationship conflicts, and failed relationships

• attracting the “wrong” partner

• not attracting anyone at all, while blaming the opposite sex

• feeling alone and desperate for a partner

• falling into “poor me” and self-pity, claiming “there is no one out there for me,” or “I’m meant to be alone”, resulting in unconscious resentment

That’s why I see most polarity teachings or “traditional wife/traditional man” dynamics as a dead end, a regression that bypasses real integration.

Rather than leading to true wholeness or a lasting soul connection, they often create imbalance, projection, frustration, and stagnation over time

According to Carl Jung, anima/animus integration is part of the process of Individuation.

He said that Shadow work is the apprentice piece. Anima/animus work is the masterpiece.

It’s how we become Whole and rooted in the Self. Without shadow work, you can’t integrate your anima/animus.

It is very self-confronting work because it asks you to retrieve any projections you have toward the opposite sex (including your parents, ex, or partner).

As long as you are stuck in victim consciousness and tend to blame others, you are not ready for this work.

The wounded ego stuck in pride will avoid this level of self-responsibility.

Most people either repress their Anima or Animus or are unconsciously possessed by it.

What follows is a brief overview of how these inner archetypes tend to manifest in men, women, and their relationships.

Signs of Animus Repression in Women:

• Lacks inner authority; struggles with making decisions

• Fears assertiveness; avoids conflict and suppresses anger

• Underdeveloped critical thinking

• Idealizes strong, dominant men

• Feels inspired but can’t follow through or take structured action

• Submissive to external authority, validation, or approval

• Emotionally overwhelmed; lacks inner containment

• Needs a caretaker and provider

When the Animus is repressed, a woman becomes emotionally dependent, disempowered, and disconnected from her ability to act on her own insights. Her inner masculine is feared, disowned, or projected.

She’s drawn to dominant, assertive men who embody the qualities she’s disowned. She projects her Animus onto them, seeing them as strong and decisive while feeling passive or unsure of herself.

This often leads to emotional or financial dependency, fantasy-based attraction, and power imbalances, until she begins to consciously integrate her own inner masculine.

Real intimacy can’t emerge when the Animus is repressed and projected. The popular polarity idea of “submitting to the man” often reinforces this repression and bypasses true inner growth.

Signs of Animus Possession in Women:

• Overly opinionated or argumentative; needs to be “right”

• Intellectually rigid; cut off from body and emotion

• Critical, especially toward men

• Controlling or domineering; often unconsciously

• Disconnected from inner softness, Eros, and relational wisdom

• Compulsive need to fix or advise others

• Expects men to meet unrealistic standards and then feels let down, resulting in more blame

In this state, the Animus is her inner tyrant whom she projects onto men. The woman is identified with masculine traits at the expense of her authentic feminine nature.

She’s drawn to passive, indecisive, or emotionally dependent men who lack a strong inner masculine and unconsciously allow her to take control.

This creates an imbalanced dynamic. She leads the relationship, but grows resentful that he doesn’t. In truth, her own animus possession wouldn’t allow space for him to lead. Over time, both partners feel frustrated, stuck, or disconnected.

Animus-possessed women tend to attract Anima-possessed men, and vice versa. This happens on unconscious levels, for the psyche is always seeking wholeness.

Signs of Anima Repression in Men:

• Cut off from emotion; avoids vulnerability

• Over-relies on logic and control

• Suppresses grief, tenderness, or softness

• Uncomfortable with intimacy; avoids emotional depth

• Rejects the feminine; sees it as weakness

• Projects his Anima onto women, idealizing or fearing them

• Stoic, overly masculine, rigid, or performance-driven

• Feels empty despite external success; lacks soul depth or deeper meaning

This man has exiled his inner feminine, his soul. He often feels emotionally flat or disconnected from life and others.

A man who represses his anima projects the emotional depth, vulnerability, and soul qualities he’s disowned onto women, idealizing, objectifying, or even fearing them.

He may see women as irrational, manipulative, or dangerous because he hasn’t made peace with the unconscious feminine in himself.

This can lead to chasing fantasy, avoiding intimacy, reducing women to sexual objects of desire to be conquered, and expecting them to carry the emotional weight he avoids within himself.

In mainstream culture, alpha males are usually anima-repressed men.

Signs of Anima Possession in Men:

• Melancholy, hypersensitivity, or mood swings

• Falls in love with the image of a woman, savior, muse, or goddess

• Addicted to fantasy or spiritualized romance

• Passive, indecisive, avoids leadership or conflict

• Escapism through drugs, art, or mystical experiences

• Relies on women for emotional regulation

• Plays the victim or becomes emotionally manipulative

• Avoids grounded action, maturity, or direction

• Lacks real-life responsibility (finances, making a living)

In this state, the Anima runs the show; he is ruled by feeling, fantasy, and projection. He remains stuck in immaturity.

A man possessed by his anima tends to idealize women, projecting onto them the role of savior, muse, or goddess. He may become emotionally dependent, seeking in women the emotional regulation, nurturing, or depth he lacks in himself.

Instead of seeing a woman as she is, he gets caught in fantasy and illusion, confusing emotional intensity or romantic longing with real connection. This often leads to disappointment, drama, or heartbreak, as no real woman can live up to the inner image he’s unconsciously projecting.

In mainstream culture, beta males are usually anima-possessed men.

Anima and Animus Integration is the Holy Grail of Relationship Work

The irony is that a man can never truly embody his authentic masculine Self without consciously integrating his Anima, his inner feminine counterpart.

Likewise, a woman cannot access her full feminine depth and wisdom until she consciously integrates her Animus, her inner masculine opposite.

If you really understand your psyche and the necessity for anima/animus integration without repression or possession, and more importantly, how you may have repressed your anima/animus or are possessed by it, the more you see the futility of trying to change the opposite sex or waiting for him or her to play a certain role.

You will unconsciously attract and be attracted to what you need to make conscious and integrate within yourself.

In other words, the more you integrate your Animus or Anima, the more you’ll naturally attract the right partner, not because you “perform” polarity “correctly” via persona behaviors and roles, but because you’re no longer unconsciously seeking externally what you lack internally.

That’s the real magnetism and “secret” to fulfilling relationships:

Integration, Wholeness, Selfhood.

And only from there can love truly begin.

Doing the work of individuation, shadow work, and Anima/Animus integration within a committed relationship, when both partners are consciously engaged, accelerates soul evolution, deepens integration, and strengthens each person’s connection to the true Self and the Divine.

Learn more about the process of individuation in our recent podcast:

A Guide to the Path of Individuation

LISTEN HERE

You can also find our podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or browse over 160 episodes with show notes here:

The Cosmic Matrix Podcast

We are living through an intensifying spiritual war at a pivotal moment in human evolution.

Esoteric traditions from both the East and West have long identified this era as the Time of Transition, a threshold where the fate of humanity hinges not only on our outer choices, but also on our level of consciousness, soul embodiment, and, most importantly, what we align ourselves with.

At the same time, some people take issue with the terms “spiritual warfare” and “spiritual warrior.”

They believe we should move away from war-like language and speak only of peace, unity, and love. Some argue that if we are evolving into a higher consciousness, we should use “higher-frequency” language and avoid terms that sound too negative, aggressive, or outdated.

The Misunderstanding of Spiritual Warfare

Others claim that spiritual work is not a battle at all. They say that by calling it such, we make it harder on ourselves, that we create our reality through the words we use, and therefore should focus only on love and light.

But real spiritual work tells a different story.

As you go deeper, beyond self-help trends, beyond New Age positivity, and beyond the mental scaffolding of “high vibes only,” you begin to see that the path of awakening is a confrontation.

You come face-to-face with forces, both inner and outer, that do not want you to awaken, on both the personal and collective levels.

This avoidance of the process is known as spiritual bypassing.

It is part of how spiritual work has been corrupted, distorted, and diluted, morphed into a pop-spirituality that has stripped true esoteric and psycho-spiritual work of its depth, fire, and initiatory rigor.

It reminds me of what Jungian psychologist James Hillman said about how the complex and the disturbing have been reduced to packaged formulas of what spiritual growth is “supposed” to look like.

He joked that many New Age and pop-spiritual authors could compile their works into one large volume titled: “How To Become Aware of the Depths of Your Being Without Disturbing the Routine of Your Comfortable Lifestyle.”

The Battle Within: Ego, Soul, and the Hidden Forces

The truth is, if you sincerely engage in psycho-spiritual work to find the truth of your being and let the Divine force guide your life, it will uproot everything in your life that is not aligned with it.

Your ego, with all its attachments and desires, will not like it and will resist it.

It will come up with all kinds of reasons and justifications for why you can’t engage in the work, and why now is not the right time. That you’re not ready. That you have more important things to do.

Or, in the most cunning of all deceptions, it will convince you that you’re already “awake,” that you’ve transcended the need for further inner work, and that you’re “special” and somehow above others.

This is the ego’s favorite excuse, most often augmented by thought injections of occult adverse spiritual forces, which you mistake as your own.

This work is not a self-help, self-improvement, or self-actualization program.

It is not about perfecting the false self or making the ego more functional in a dysfunctional world where pathology has been normalized.

As the late Joseph Campbell said:

“Self-actualization is for people with nothing better to do—people who don’t know their personal myth or deeper purpose in life.”

This path is something entirely different. It is for those who feel a deep, inner calling of the soul to align with something higher.

The very essence of this work is a battle between your soul and your ego.

And that is only the beginning.

We are in a spiritual war. And more and more people are beginning to recognize and name it for what it is.

Christians, in particular, often quote Ephesians 6:12:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

But spiritual warfare is not only external. The real battle is fought within.

That’s where most people, even those quoting scripture, miss the mark.

We are not just victims of evil “out there.” We are also conduits through which these forces operate, especially when we remain unconscious of our inner fragmentation, childhood wounds, trauma, and shadow material.

Many, particularly dogmatic religious types, tend to view it all in simplistic, black-and-white terms. They label anything outside their doctrine as “demonic,” often in the most overgeneralized and reactive ways.

In doing so, they externalize evil onto others without recognizing how these same spiritual forces of darkness are also at work within and through them.

The Hidden War and The Problem of Evil

This is an occult (hidden) war, and it operates through us.

Dark forces often hide behind masks of the “virtuous,” the “good,” and the “moral.”

They feed on grandiosity, self-importance, as well as self-pity and victim consciousness.

The spiritual work necessary to anchor the Divine Force is a battle against darkness and ignorance, and these forces work in the most deceptive ways, disguising themselves within your own psyche.

Many masters, including enlightened ones like Sri Aurobindo, have clearly recognized and spoken about this reality:

“Accepting life, [the spiritual warrior] has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too, along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load.

Therefore, his Work has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country.

He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence.

Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.”

– Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

That is not “bad vibes” or “negative” language.

It is reality seen from a higher spiritual vantage point, beyond sentimentality or preference.

The problem is that many people misunderstand the word war or unconsciously project their unresolved wounds and fears onto it.

From a Jungian perspective, discomfort with the word warrior or the language of battle often reveals a shadow issue. It may point to unprocessed trauma (including past life trauma) or unconscious fears that are being bypassed.

This is not about glorifying violence, being “tough”, or adopting a macho stance.

But neither is it about ignoring the very real battle we are in, both within and without, with unseen forces that actively seek to block us from purifying, awakening, and aligning with the Divine.

There is also a deeper distortion in the belief that we must abandon “war-like” language in order to evolve spiritually.

This is one of the central New Age traps that Sri Aurobindo warned against, especially in Essays on the Gita, where he critiques spiritual pacifism and the refusal to engage with evil.

As both he and Rudolf Steiner emphasized, the problem of evil — its reality, its cosmic function, and our response to it — is one of the defining challenges of our time.

And it must be recognized in the world, faced within ourselves, and understood for the teaching function it entails.

Not everyone is called to the path of the spiritual warrior. However, those who are willing must be prepared to engage in both the outer and inner battles with sincerity, courage, and humility.

Why Differentiation Is Essential in the Spiritual War

As Sri Aurobindo said, “This is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country.”

Why is that?

Because once your consciousness expands through sincere inner work, you will inevitably come into contact with various forces and beings that are battling over humanity. You do not live in a solipsistic vacuum.

This is an ancient battle that moves through us, and it has reached its peak at the end of this Kali Yuga..

It is therefore imperative to understand the forces you are subjected to, so you can consciously choose what to align yourself with, and not be deceived by the veil of light, spiritual pride, imposter spirits, or the Luciferic temptation.

Caught in the mind-prison of materialistic reality, we assume that we alone are the creators of our thoughts, desires, feelings, and actions.

Yet the sense of a fixed, independent identity, separate from everything else, is the greatest illusion and spell we have fallen under.

Forces and beings from higher and lower realms, elementals, the forces of nature, collective suggestions, karmic and evolutionary currents, and the thoughts, emotions, and energy of other people are constantly moving through us.

They influence our behavior, identity, and life direction far more than we realize.

At the same time, you are affected by unconscious drives within yourself.

These include inner child parts, sub-personalities, suppressed shadow aspects, trauma imprints, Animus or Anima projections, and conditioning from your parents, ancestors, society, culture, and religion.

All of these shape how you perceive yourself, others, and the world, and they influence your desires, relationships, and life goals, for better or worse.

So who is the real “you” in the midst of all this?

A spiritual warrior must learn to differentiate, identify what is arising within, where it comes from, and consciously choose what to align with.

The Call of the Spiritual Warrior in the Time of Transition

Ancient non-physical beings have been battling over humanity for thousands of years. These unseen forces still contend for influence over the human soul, and each of us stands at the center of that battle.

The great bifurcation of humanity is accelerating. The splitting and polarization are intensifying.

This Time of Transition is an initiation, and the outcome is not guaranteed.

If human beings truly understood what is at stake, they would drop all distractions and focus on what matters most.

Many are called, yet few choose to answer the call.

As more people lose themselves in disembodiment, distraction, and unseen influence, the call to reclaim sovereignty and align with the Divine and Dharma has never been more urgent.

As the veil thins, it becomes imperative for anyone on a sincere path of awakening to understand the deeper spiritual realities in which we are embedded, and the forces that influence us, so we can discern what we consciously align with, both within and without.

If you still believe that “waking up” is just about exposing conspiracies and arresting all the “bad guys,” or eliminating evil externally, you are severely mistaken.

Nor is it about ignoring evil, taking the philosophical “non-duality” bypass, and focusing only on “love and light.”

All of these assumptions reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of evil, particularly its cosmic function as a force of ignorance, and what is truly required to eliminate it for good.

You cannot move toward a higher consciousness until you have sincerely faced the darkness, both within yourself and in the world.

Anything less is avoidance.

Anything less becomes a spiritual persona, a mask made of beautiful words, quotes, and ideas about what you think it means to be “spiritual.”

This is one of the core problems in New Age and pop-spirituality today. It also mirrors the deeper corruption of religion and the loss of esoteric truth in modern spirituality.

God is peace. But God is also war.

No one escapes the Law of Ascent and Descent, not the individual, and not the collective. I’ve explored this before in my work, and its effects are becoming more apparent and intense in our current time.

It requires a descent into darkness before there can be a real ascent into embodied higher consciousness.

“The higher one rises, the farther one is pulled down. Evolution does not move higher and higher, into an ever more heavenly heaven, but deeper and deeper.

Each evolutionary cycle closes a little lower, a little nearer to the Center where the supreme High and Low, heaven and earth, will finally meet. The more Light the seeker possesses, the more darkness he uncovers.”

– Satprem

The nature of true transformation is a battle, but its successful outcome is glorious, magnificent, and beyond what the mind can comprehend.

That’s why the spiritual warrior who serves the Divine with sincerity, humility, and courage, without blame or complaint, and who is rooted in the true Self and aligned with purpose through sincere psycho-spiritual work, does more to uplift humanity and the collective consciousness than millions who fight shadows on the wall, unaware of the deeper forces at play and disconnected from their true nature.

Godspeed.

Subscribe now

If this speaks to you, then I invite you to my Masterclass:

Spiritual Warfare in the Time of Transition
What Every Spiritual Warrior Needs to Know Right Now
with Bernhard Guenther

www.RiseOfTheSpiritualWarrior.com

This masterclass reveals the essence of spiritual warfare, how it operates through you & around you.

It maps the psycho-spiritual work required to face darkness, reclaim your power, and navigate this Time of Transition with discernment, courage, and alignment with the Divine.

This live class was recorded on October 11th, 2025

Running Time: 2 hours, 45 min. Includes PDF of the Slides

Learn More

Topics:

• Everyone is Acting and Fooling You

• When Discernment Turns Into Projection

• Somatic Embodied Awareness vs. Head-Centric Dissociation

• The Trap of the “Second Matrix”

• Caught in the Victim/Blame Drama Triangle

• Snake Eyes and Predictive Programming

• Nothing Changes, But Just Rearranges

• Wetiko: The Trap Of Externalizing All Evil

• COINTELPRO, MKUltra, and Manufactured Conspiracies

• The Spiritual War and the Real Solution

Introduction

Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10th, or let’s say “allegedly shot,” since many conspiracies have emerged over the past three weeks.

Some believe it was completely staged with fake blood, or that it was an AI simulation or hologram that gave the appearance of Kirk being shot. According to them, he’s still alive, and everyone on his team at Turning Point, including his wife, the FBI, and hundreds of others, is acting.

Let me start by stating that I absolutely question the official narrative around the Charlie Kirk assassination, and I would never pretend to know exactly what happened.

Perhaps Tyler Robinson was an MKUltra patsy, perhaps there was another shooter, maybe it was a Deep State operation designed to intensify polarization and usher in a Digital ID, etc.

The point is, there are many possibilities, and the official story is full of holes. Considering all that, I can absolutely see how this event could have been a psy-op.

I’ve been speaking out and writing about conspiracies, psy-ops, false flag attacks, fake shootings, and staged events since 9/11/2001, and before social media.

I’ve written about the London Bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing, Sandy Hook, and looked at virtually all high school shootings over the past 20 years with suspicion, since there were always holes in the official story or strange events leading up to them.

I’m not claiming I’ve always been right or that I know the whole truth. My views have evolved over the years, and they continue to do so.

In this article, I’m not interested in dissecting every detail of the Charlie Kirk assassination or debating competing narratives. Feel free to hold your own conclusions about what happened.

What follows isn’t really about this specific event, or any single conspiracy, even though I use the Charlie Kirk case as an example.

It’s about stepping back to examine the bigger picture: looking at this moment through a psycho-spiritual and occult hyperdimensional lens, and exploring how aspects of the truth-seeking movement have shifted over the past five years, as well as how my own understanding has changed.

Everyone is Acting and Fooling You

In my opinion, to say the entire thing was fake, that everyone involved is acting, and that Charlie Kirk is still alive doesn’t make sense at all.

This phenomenon has become more common since the plandemic, where many truthers default to the belief that everything is staged, scripted, a psy-op, or a grand simulation, often in increasingly exaggerated ways.

According to this line of thinking, everyone involved is giving an ongoing Oscar-worthy performance that would put Daniel Day-Lewis to shame.

It has become a parody version of truth-seeking. People look at a picture or a 10-second video and say “fake blood,” or “the casket is fake, it’s a mannequin.”

They see a weird hand movement and shout “Freemason!” They see a video of Kash Patel saying “It took us 33 hours…” and immediately conclude “It’s the Illuminati!” and call it “research.”

Suddenly, everyone’s a forensic expert, decoding supposed clues from social media posts.

When Discernment Turns Into Projection

I was once accused of being “Illuminati” by someone who commented on my YouTube video of my 2018 talk at the Anarchapulco conference, “Transcending the Matrix - Occult Forces and the Importance of Esoteric Self-Work.”

I’ve also been called “controlled op” and “shill” over the years simply for having different opinions and not believing the “it’s all fake, staged, and acted” narrative.

It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, not just because of the event itself, but because of the level of detachment from reality these reactions reveal. What’s most disturbing is how convinced they are that this is what it means to be “awake.”

Genuine discernment doesn’t look like this. This line of thinking reflects a troubling development within the truth-seeking community, a kind of paranoid mindset that disconnects from reality.

At best, it reveals an unconscious trauma response that sees psy-ops and staged events in everything. At worst, it veers into paranoia. Either way, it isn’t grounded.

It is disturbing to see how many online accounts attack Erika Kirk on her IG posts, calling her an “actress.” That, too, is an expression of evil, with forces working through them and feeding off their hateful projections onto a grieving widow.

And it feeds the very forces they claim to fight.

Now we suddenly have “grief experts” declaring that Erika Kirk isn’t grieving the way she is supposed to, so therefore she must be acting.

According to them, she will have to keep up this Oscar-worthy performance for the rest of her life, while Charlie supposedly hides somewhere forever to keep the act going. Some even claim Erika Kirk is a Mossad agent involved in child trafficking.

This kind of hyper-skepticism is often an unconscious defense mechanism. It reflects an inability to trust reality and life itself, the result of being constantly bombarded by deception over the past five years.

But discernment requires more than mental gymnastics, glued to the internet. It requires embodied somatic alignment.

Somatic Embodied Awareness vs. Head-Centric Dissociation

I’ve watched the close-up video of Kirk being shot, how he collapsed instantly, blood gushing from his neck. I felt the energy in my body as his life force left, and it made me nauseous. It was deeply disturbing.

I’ve seen a lot of dark things in my life, but I’ve never had that kind of visceral reaction to fake murders, horror films, AI-generated violence, or other staged events. This was different, and I trust my somatic response.

If someone feels nothing watching that, or immediately assumes it was fake, acted, or AI-generated, it likely reflects a disconnection from the body’s innate somatic intelligence, a state of dissociation, stuck in the head, or numbed by unresolved trauma.

When we are dissociated and disembodied, we also lose access to true intuition. We may mistake all kinds of impressions and thoughts for “intuition,” but we end up only seeing what we want to see. In other words, we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

Years of exposure to media violence, combined with chronic dissociation and the trauma-installment program of the past five years, have desensitized many people’s nervous systems, numbed their body–mind–spirit connection, and blunted their ability to register real human suffering.

I’ve also watched videos of students who were there, witnessing the shooting up close. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their faces, and sense it in their nervous systems. They’ve seen something horrifying. The PTSD is already present because it was very real. Yet according to some truthers, they were all in on it too, giving another world-class acting performance.

Sometimes the “it was fake” narrative isn’t critical thinking at all, but unconscious denial. When reality is too disturbing to face, the mind escapes into alternative explanations to avoid the somatic impact.

This is an unconscious defense mechanism, not discernment, even though the mind justifies it as such. Just as denial is the first stage of grief, the “it’s all fake” conspiracy story can become a coping mechanism.

The Trap of the “Second Matrix”

The overly paranoid “truther” is, in many cases, a product of the last five years of global insanity. It is a trauma response, an inability to trust reality itself, leading to the belief that everything is fake, staged, scripted, or a psy-op.

Researching conspiracy theories or uncovering hidden agendas without sincere inner psycho-spiritual work, especially shadow work, nervous system regulation, and inner child healing, will eventually lead you to get lost in the rabbit hole while believing yourself to be “awake.”

The keyword here is SINCERE. Many people think they are doing the inner work, but they are not being sincere.

You cannot discern truth from lies in the outside world if you have not learned to do so within yourself. That requires facing the lies of the false personality and seeing where trauma responses and shadow projections still distort your perception.

Otherwise, “truth-seeking” becomes just another loop in the Matrix, another ego identity propped up by fear, wounding, and misplaced mistrust.

It traps you in what Neil Kramer called “the second matrix” of your own paranoid mind while you dream (lie to yourself) that you are “awake.”

As Gurdjieff said:

“In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant, incessant lies he tells himself.”

Caught in the Victim/Blame Drama Triangle

Many people who immerse themselves in conspiracy research are genuinely motivated by a desire to uncover the truth.

Yet, without realizing it, it’s easy to become almost exclusively externally focused, constantly trying to expose the “boogeyman,” while unconsciously falling into the victim–persecutor–rescuer drama triangle.

David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness suggests that this state of perception, based on a victim-blame consciousness, typically operates below the level of 200, which means it’s more likely to misinterpret or distort reality than to perceive it clearly.

Without sincere inner work and self-awareness, anyone can end up seeing only what they want to see, mistaking projections and emotional reactivity for objective reality.

Psychologically, this often shows up as black-and-white thinking rooted in unresolved trauma and unconscious splitting.

It limits our capacity for nuance, or what could be called spiritual vision —the ability to reconcile paradox and hold complexity, including realities such as karma, soul lessons, the Divine Will, and the deeper teaching function of evil.

This is not to deny that conspiracies exist. They do.

However, when our focus remains solely on external plots without also turning inward to understand our own psyche and engaging in psycho-spiritual work to align with our true Self, we can easily become lost in a maze of shadows and projections.

The sobering truth is that a large percentage of humanity operates below 200 on the scale of consciousness, including many truthers who sincerely believe they are “awake.”

For a deeper exploration of this topic, you can listen to our podcast episodes, “How To Raise Your Level of Consciousness” and “How To Move From Victimhood To Empowerment.”

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Snake Eyes and Predictive Programming

People have asked me about the 1998 movie Snake Eyes in the context of “predictive programming” and the Charlie Kirk assassination, since there have been some similarities.

I am aware of that movie. I have also been aware of other synchronistic movie scripts, clips, Simpsons episodes, the infamous “Illuminati cards,” and other examples regarding false flag attacks, shootings, and so on, which could be seen as predictive programming.

This goes all the way back to the film The Matrix (1999), where Neo’s ID shows the date 9/11/2001. I used to use this clip to “expose” 9/11 as an inside job over 20 years ago, among other things.

I also used to call it predictive programming, but I no longer do. That label carries an assumption that “someone” is orchestrating everything and programming the masses at all times.

While I don’t dismiss predictive programming entirely in the context of social engineering, it is shortsighted and oversimplified to treat it as an absolute conclusion. You cannot reduce everything to it.

There are other possibilities for overlaps between films and real-life events, such as synchronicity, the circularity of time (where the future reflects back into the present), or simply the filmmaker’s imagination tapping into something archetypal without being aware of it.

When you make everything about an all-powerful “master puppeteer” controlling reality and scripting everything, you hand over your own power.

It locks you in a dead-end of negativity where “everything is staged” and “everything is programmed,” which leads straight to black-pilling and alienation.

Believing that everything is an artificial simulation and that we are caught in a gigantic AI computer program is the epitome of the black-pilled conspiracy mindset and a form of extreme victim consciousness.

It is a state of being cut off from Essence, the Divine, and Spirit, and caught in a form of materialistic nihilism, unable to witness and experience the beauty of Divine Creation even amidst the darkness.

Believing that some nefarious entity or cabal controls everything is the actual psy-op, and there are occult hyperdimensional forces that want us to believe that. Their goal is to disempower us and make us hand over our power and creative energy.

Considering Jung’s concept of synchronicity, its relationship to the collective unconscious, quantum physics, and the interconnectedness of everything, it is possible that many other explanations exist, even from a karmic evolutionary perspective, without assuming intentional programming.

In fact, looking at it from an evolutionary astrology perspective (which helps us zoom out from the subjective lens), Charlie Kirk’s natal chart, progressed chart, nodal placements, and transits during the eclipse point to a very fated event, as if it were Divine Will or a karmic trajectory. A similar pattern can be seen in Erika’s chart.

We have explored this topic in our recent podcast, The Eclipse, Mass Trauma and the Battle for Consciousness.

The mind struggles to reconcile this because it is stuck in a Newtonian, materialistic paradigm of linear time and an oversimplified materialistic view of cause and effect, seeing the world as separate from oneself.

The mind will also never comprehend how unseen evolutionary cycles, karmic trajectories, and Divine Will intersect with it all.

Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Synthesis of Yoga:

“The only free will in the world is the one Divine Will of which Nature is the executrix; for she is the master and creator of all other wills. Human free will can be real in a sense, but, like all things that belong to the modes of Nature, it is only relatively real.

The mind rides on a swirl of natural forces, balances on a poise between several possibilities, inclines to one side or another, settles and has the sense of choosing: but it does not see, it is not even dimly aware of the Force behind that has determined its choice.

It cannot see it, because that Force is something total and to our eyes indeterminate.

Behind this petty instrumental action of the human will there is something vast and powerful and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater than our individual choice.

This apparently self-acting mechanism of Nature conceals an immanent Divine Will that compels and guides it and shapes its purposes.

But you cannot feel or know that Will while you are shut up in your narrow cell of personality, blinded and chained to your viewpoint of the ego and its desires.

For you can wholly respond to it only when you are impersonalized [embodied] by knowledge and widened to see all things in the self and in God and the self and God in all things.”

I recommend reading The Eye of the I by David Hawkins. He lays out the illusion of the Newtonian cause-and-effect paradigm, which most of us are caught in.

I am not implying that the distorted New Age idea of “reality creation” or the corrupted “law of attraction” is the answer by ignoring evil and just focusing on positive thoughts in a solipsistic bubble.

Hawkins’ work, non-duality teachings, and quantum physics have often been misused in this way for spiritual bypassing.

I see many people get stuck in the predictive programming rabbit hole, as I once did.

It does not resolve anything and often creates more paranoia and mental loops that may satisfy the conspiracy intellect, which believes it is “solving a puzzle” (while receiving some dopamine hits from it) in the search for the boogeyman.

Nothing Changes, But Just Rearranges

Yet have you noticed that nothing truly changes in the long run?

No one is ever really revealed or arrested, and the conspiracies, evil, psy-ops, and wrongdoing continue, even as the ego believes it has achieved something by chasing the dangling carrot of “conspiracy revelation.”

The 9/11 conspiracy is still entrenched, and no major public revelation—let alone arrests—has ever taken place.

There will always be more to hook you in and “figure out.”

Why? Because there is no shift in consciousness and no inner transformation to positively impact the world.

It all remains a mental and external exercise.

This also relates to what I wrote in my article “Facing The Deep State And Psy-Op Within Yourself – The Essence Of Shadow Work” in the context of Wetiko:

[…] Most people, normies and self-proclaimed “awake” truthers alike, indulge in their shadow projections (sometimes truthers even more than normies, ironically).

The mind and reality, by extension through the process of projective identification, will always provide them with a “reason” and “justification” to mistake their projections for reality, augmented by thought injections from occult forces that trigger the unconscious shadow to feed off the emotionally charged projections of the suppressed shadow.

As Paul Levy explained in his work, this is also the modus operandi of Wetiko. It tags into the shadow and shows you what you want to see, so it can feed off you even more.

That is why trying to expose all the lies, psy-ops, and conspiracies “out there” in the world becomes an endless feedback loop.

“You” and the collective psyche, drawing from the collective unconscious and your personal shadow, will “dream up” more of the same while living under the illusion that the outside world is separate from “you.” […]

Wetiko: The Trap Of Externalizing All Evil

Paul Levy, the author of three books on Wetiko, defines it as a contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, currently being acted out en masse on the world stage through an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions.

This “mind virus” – which Native Americans have called wetiko – covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.

I have referenced Wetiko extensively in my writings over the past ten years, ever since Levy published his first book, Dispelling Wetiko, in 2013.

Paul has also been a guest on our Cosmic Matrix podcast three times in the past five years, where we explored this topic more deeply in the context of current and past events.

The topic has become more popular in recent years thanks to Paul’s research and revelations based on personal experience. More people are also open to this information out of necessity, given the state of the world and their search for deeper answers.

However, with its popularity came many distortions and false ideas about Wetiko. I have noticed that many people form their own concepts and assumptions without ever genuinely researching the subject.

Paul himself has encountered these distortions and premature assumptions to the point of coining a term for it: Premature Comprehension Delusion (PCD):

“Wetiko has myriad ways of derailing any serious investigation into its nature. Oftentimes, for example, I’ll meet a person or a group of people who seem genuinely interested in wetiko and want to learn more.

They’ll ask me a couple of questions and then, after hardly any time at all, they think they’ve got it and feel they sufficiently understand what it’s all about—an attitude that short-circuits any deeper inquiry into realizing the endlessly mind-blowing revelation that is wetiko.

When this plays out, instead of them “getting” the radical nature of wetiko, wetiko has “gotten” them. I have come up with a name for this syndrome: premature comprehension delusion, or PCD.”

– Paul Levy, Undreaming Wetiko

Wetiko Makes Us Think The Problem Is Outside Of Us

One significant distortion is the tendency to see only Wetiko (and evil) in others, in a particular group, or in “the system.”

It is the same trap as seeing the matrix only “out there” in its various 3D manifestations while failing to recognize how matrix occult forces and Wetiko also work through us.

Ironically, the insistence on only seeing evil externally and projecting the matrix onto the world keeps Wetiko and evil in power while people fight shadows on the wall.

As a result, many people, even within the truth movement, have become infected by Wetiko, projecting it onto others and the world at large.

Paul Levy explains:

“We all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and informs the underlying field of consciousness. Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world.

If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think that they have the disease and we don’t, in seeing them as separate we have fallen under the spell of the mind “virus””.

You can see this in people who are primarily negatively oriented and only see psy-ops “out there,” locked in oversimplified black-and-white thinking born of psychological splitting.

Without psychological self-awareness (inner work) and a higher spiritual vision (in the context of the evolution of consciousness), many people hardly recognize any goodness or the presence of the Divine Force anymore.

Instead, they become hardened, nihilistic, and disembodied, caught in the head.

As a result, they disconnect from their Essence and creative potential. In that disconnection, Wetiko installs a counterfeit false persona, which is mistaken for the true self.

Sri Aurobind called it “the charlatan within.”

This false persona becomes the vessel through which Wetiko and, by extension, the occult hostile forces, create their desired reality through us. All esoteric traditions, East and West, have spoken of these non-human occult forces and entities in their own ways.

One of Wetiko’s favorite strategies is to make us think the problem is outside of us. Levy writes:

“Wetiko subversively turns our ‘genius’ for reality-creation against us in such a way that we become bewitched by the projective tendencies of our own mind. Once we realize this, we can turn our attention inward, which is where the source—and the solution—of our problem is to be found.

Falling under wetiko’s spell, we become entranced by our own intrinsic gifts and talents for dreaming up our world in a way that not only doesn’t serve us, but rather, is put at the service of wetiko (whose agenda is contrary to our own).

Our creativity then boomerangs against us such that we hypnotize ourselves with our creative genius, which cripples our evolutionary potential.

To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic tapeworm or parasite has taken over our brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite.

Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms and beliefs into our mind which, due to their misleading and false nature, when unconsciously accepted and acted upon, feed it, and ultimately kill its host – us.”

“Awakening” does not happen by trying to resolve or expose endless conspiracy theories.

I am not implying that we should simply look away and ignore it all.

However, without inner alignment and a fundamental shift in consciousness, people can fall into the illusion of being awake while actually lost in a mental rabbit hole, subjected to psychic, archetypal, Wetiko, and occult forces, as well as manifestations of the collective and personal shadow they are unaware of.

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COINTELPRO, MKUltra, and Manufactured Conspiracies

Just as Wetiko operates through the psyche, COINTELPRO exploits that same vulnerability on the socio-political plane.

I suggest that the real psy-op is the “conspiracy” that it was all fake: Charlie Kirk is alive, and Erica, the entire Turning Point crew, and hundreds of other people are “in on it,” just acting and fooling you.

From a Deep State COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) perspective, this is entirely possible. I wrote about these kinds of operations more than ten years ago.

There are counterintelligence operations specifically designed to inject fake conspiracies into the truth movement, steering truthers away from the truth and reality, and making them believe they are uncovering a significant “secret” and are “awake.”

This ties into MKUltra as well. Deep State psy-op operators understand the psychological weakness of many truthers who, especially in the past five years, have become highly suggestible.

Their over-paranoid state of mind leads them to believe that everything is staged, scripted, and acted.

These operators exploit the fact that we are aware we are constantly being lied to, amplifying that perception to the extreme for their own purposes. This is COINTELPRO 101.

Keep in mind that good COINTELPRO disinformation operations always mix truth with lies to lure the seeker in, then lead them deeper into fake rabbit holes.

They hardly need to do anything. One “seed” is enough, and the insanity spreads on its own, fueled by an egregore-like entity that infects truthers who resonate with it. That resonance can also be mistaken for intuition.

Here’s an example of a possible COINTELPRO outlet spreading false conspiracies in the form of “alternative media”:

This particular post has garnered over 30,000 likes, and the account boasts more than 280,000 followers (likely inflated by purchased bots).

Most of the content also appears to have been generated by ChatGPT. When you watch the videos of the host of “TPV Sean,” he comes across like an NPC version of a truther, reading from a ChatGPT-generated script.

According to Jordan Sather,

“The People’s Voice” has been a clickbait disinfo blog for years. From 2014 to 2020, they were called “YourNewsWire”, then from 2020 to 2023, they were called “NewsPunch”, then they rebranded to The People’s Voice.

Nearly every article they publish is a sensationalized piece or straight disinformation, carefully crafted to get clicks on their blog and ad revenue from website views.

They write their articles to appear legit, but rarely, if ever, show direct evidence to support their headline assertions.”

Most people are already in a dissociated, disembodied, and dysregulated state, and conspiracy truthers who spend most of their time on the internet and social media “researching” are no exception, especially if they are not engaged in any embodied inner psycho-spiritual work.

It is easy to program a dissociated mind carrying unconscious trauma. When the mind no longer trusts reality because of psychological splitting, it becomes highly vulnerable to fake conspiracies.

This amplifies schizoid tendencies, convincing people they are awake and on the right track while they laugh at the rest of us, believing we are the ones who are asleep and gullible.

It is no surprise that many truthers who fall into this trap also lack emotional intelligence, can be hostile, childish, and often develop a kind of grandiosity.

This is MKUltra-style trauma-based mind programming combined with social engineering, and this new wave of truthers is more vulnerable to it than ever before.

That’s how easily an awakening impulse can get hijacked.

I said months ago that polarization and violence would intensify. The projections from leftists toward conservatives are escalating, and so are the projections from conservatives toward the left.

On the surface, it appears to be a socially engineered race war.

But at its core, this is a spiritual war.

The only ones benefiting from it are spiritual forces in unseen realms that have been manipulating humanity for thousands of years. And it is escalating.

The war happens through us. It always has. This is a hyperdimensional divide-and-conquer operation, with humans generating more “loosh” for these forces to feed on.

The Spiritual War and the Real Solution

There is no political solution.

There is no ideological solution, whether left, right, center, or anarchist.

There is no “law and order” solution of simply arresting the “bad guys.”

There is no social media solution. Outrage posts and prayer memes won’t cut it.

There is no “expose all the conspiracies” solution.

There is no New Age bypass solution: ignoring it all to focus only on “positive vibes.”

There is no religious solution (Religions were hijacked by the same occult forces long ago, as we can see in the rise of dogmatic, fundamentalist Christians.)

There is no revolutionary solution.

There is no savior solution.

Bitcoin won’t fix it either, nor technology, AI, or Transhumanism.

Some of it may have a positive effect for a while, but none of it will be sustainable in the long term, let alone bring about any fundamental change.

This is a crisis of consciousness and a war on consciousness. It is a spiritual war that works through us.

Hence, the solution must be spiritual in nature if it is to effect a change in consciousness.

We are functioning at a very low level of consciousness, deeply disconnected from our spiritual nature and from the Divine, lost in the depths of the Kali Yuga.

The distraction and illusion of external technological advancement convince us that we are more “evolved,” but in truth, we are like children in kindergarten pretending to be adults.

We still have a long way to go during what the esoteric traditions call the Time of Transition, if we want it to be a successful one.

What is the “solution,” you may ask?

For that, you must take a deep and honest look in the mirror. And I can guarantee that if you are sincere, you won’t like what you see at first.

Most people are not sincere, and so they project their insecurities and shadow onto others, looking outward instead.

We will need to understand the spiritual forces that have guided, influenced, and manipulated humanity for thousands of years, and how they also work through us, influencing our thoughts, emotions, desires, and actions.

Along with this comes the need for a deeper, integrated understanding of what Sri Aurobindo and Rudolf Steiner referred to as “the problem of evil.”

Most people, even within the truth and freedom movement, hold a simplistic, Hollywood-style view of evil. It is usually projected outward onto someone, a group, or a people, in black-and-white terms with little nuance or self-reflection.

But “good” and “evil” are not even a true duality. Evil is a force of ignorance that moves through every human being, expressing itself in varying degrees depending on one’s level of consciousness.

It does not only show up as the overtly violent or grotesque. It often hides within the “good,” the “moral,” and the “virtuous.”

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.

But the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, not between classes nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In a deeper esoteric context, evil and the adverse hyperdimensional forces also serve a teaching function. They play a role in the evolution of consciousness by confronting us with the necessity of inner transformation.

But to truly understand this, not just as an abstract philosophy, requires spiritual vision and embodied realization.

Does this imply refraining from action? Far from it.

The real question is: where is your action coming from, and what are you aligned with?

I am not trying to sound pessimistic, but seeing how many people are traumatized without realizing it, convinced they are “awake” yet trapped in unconscious defense mechanisms that keep them disembodied and imprisoned in the mental labyrinth of the matrix, I can tell you we will see more psychosis and collective insanity in the years ahead.

This will be intensified by occult hostile forces and entities feeding the already fragmented mind with thought injections, hardening false beliefs, nonsense conspiracies, and feeding off the grandiosity, anxiety, projections, frenzy, and delusion.

It brings spiritual warfare to a whole new level.

Soul embodiment and the ability to discern within yourself what is a shadow part, a wounded sub-personality, an inner child part, a defense mechanism, a shadow projection, an entity interference, a thought injection, an egregore, or your true Self in alignment with the Divine have never been more important.

Without that inner discernment, you risk losing yourself over the next twenty years, as Pluto in Aquarius will only intensify mental instability in those who are already ungrounded.

In short: Know Thyself.

Without it, your outer “discernment” will always be limited and compromised.

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If this resonates, I’ll be going much deeper in my upcoming live Masterclass: Spiritual Warfare in the Time of Transition – What Every Spiritual Warrior Needs to Know Right Now.

We are living in unprecedented times, a critical crossroads in the evolution of humanity.

The world appears increasingly polarized and divided. Yet beneath the surface, this is not just a political or cultural crisis; it is a battle for consciousness, and ultimately, a spiritual war. This is the time when each soul is asked to choose what it aligns with.

So, what is a spiritual warrior?

A spiritual warrior is someone who accepts any challenge and meets this moment in time willingly, not with blame or complaint, but with purpose, focus, and the commitment to do the inner and outer work required to stand for something greater than themselves.

A spiritual warrior shines Light into Darkness as a servant of the Divine, however it may express itself through their unique purpose and dharma.

To support those of you who feel this calling, I’ve created a live Masterclass on Saturday, October 11th, where I’ll be diving into the deeper spiritual context of what we are facing and what is required of us now.

In this masterclass, we’ll explore:

• What the Time of Transition truly means from an esoteric perspective

• Why this is the lowest point of the Kali Yuga

• Why we may see increasingly cataclysmic changes as part of a collective purification

• How to mitigate these upheavals and help make it a successful transition

• Why the splitting of humanity is inevitable

I’ll share insights into the hidden architecture of spiritual warfare, how hostile forces operate in and around us, why their interference is increasing, and the three key insights that must be understood in order to break free from the Matrix and align with the next cycle.

You’ll also be introduced to the 5 Core Pillars of Psycho-Spiritual Work, the foundation for the inner transformation required in these times.

This is not about spiritual bypassing, doom and gloom, chasing conspiracies, or relying on external activism or saviors.

It’s about confronting the unconscious within, discerning the forces that move through you, reclaiming your inner power, engaging in conscious soul evolution, and allowing the Divine to express itself through your life.

This Masterclass serves as a wake-up call, a compass, and an invitation into your own process of spiritual discernment, purification, and alignment.

As I often say, these are intense yet exciting times to be alive. So rejoice with a smile, and remember, on the deepest level, your true Self chose to be here right now.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE IN THE TIME OF TRANSITION
What Every Spiritual Warrior Needs to Know Right Now
A Masterclass with Bernhard Guenther

Saturday, October 11th
11am – 1:00pm PST

Includes Q&A after the lecture.
A recording will be provided for all registrants,
even if you are unable to attend live.

Click here to learn more and register:
RiseOfTheSpiritualWarrior.com

Learn More & Register

There’s a growing trend of people publicly renouncing what they call the “New Age”, including Eastern spirituality, shamanism, and festival culture, and converting to Christianity.

Many of them claim demonic forces deceived them and believe they’ve found salvation through Jesus Christ.

This article explores the deeper psycho-spiritual dynamics behind this conversion trend: spiritual bypassing, shadow projection, psychological splitting, and the deceptive pull of the “veil of light.”

It also examines how rigid dogma, when unexamined, can become a tool of the very demonic occult forces it claims to oppose.

This is not a critique of Christ or true esoteric Christianity. It’s a call for discernment, humility, and sincere inner work, because the real spiritual war is within and through us, and it is intensifying.

Spiritual Bypassing and the Rising Trend of Religious Conversion

While this shift may stem from a sincere impulse to grow and change, the way it plays out psychologically and spiritually reveals something deeper, especially when the condemnation becomes absolute, moralistic, and generalized in a black-and-white way.

What we’re seeing in this new trend of Christian conversion is a form of spiritual bypassing wrapped in religious language.

The term “spiritual bypassing” was coined by John Welwood, a Buddhist psychotherapist, in the early 1980s. He used it to describe the tendency to use spiritual beliefs, practices, or identities to avoid facing unresolved emotional wounds, psychological issues, or shadow material.

It creates the illusion of growth or awakening while actually serving as a defense against deeper inner work. Instead of integrating, the person becomes more entrenched in the illusion and the lies of the false personality, which is mistaken for the true self.

It happens when the ego becomes spiritualized and believes itself to be awake.

To learn more about “Spiritual Bypassing”, listen to our podcast “Spiritual Bypassing – A Guide To Spotting It And Stopping It”.

This new form of religious spiritual bypassing often looks like this: someone renounces their former lifestyle and beliefs, adopts a rigid Christian identity (usually through baptism and accepting Jesus as their savior; if you’re really on trend now, you join an Orthodox Church, the latest spiritual fashion statement), and starts labeling aspects of their past (especially spiritual beliefs and practices) as satanic or demonic.

Ironically, this plays right into the hands of the very occult “demonic” forces and “Satan” that dogmatic Christians claim to be fighting.

I’ll explore this further in the context of the hyperdimensional matrix and how non-physical forces have manipulated humans for thousands of years, primarily through corrupted religions and scriptures.

I have already touched upon it in a previous article titled “The Jesus Savior Program and Reclaiming Christ - How Literalism, Fear, and Religious Dogma Corrupted the Inner Path to the Divine.” I recommend reading it for more context.

A few days ago, I made a comment on X about Nicole Shanahan’s article, “Is Burning Man Demonic?”, which was quote-retweeted by a man named Cernovich.

His comment is a perfect example of the kind of nonsense that dogmatic Christians believe and project. It also shows how deep religious programming runs. How dare you talk to God directly? You need a middleman, a church, or else you’re demonic. The devil has you.

Apparently, he’s a popular conservative influencer. As a result of his quoting my tweet, I got swamped by Christians preaching the love of Jesus through personal attacks, condemning me for “heresy,” and accusing me of worshipping the devil.

It was more intense than the trolling and attacks I’ve received from woke leftists over the past five years.

It felt like a flashback to medieval times: witch burnings, mobs hunting down non-believers, and violent missionary crusades for “heresy” and disobedience to church authority. It’s no longer physically dangerous, but it still carries the same energy, and it’s far removed from anything Jesus actually taught.

They’d nail Jesus to the cross again if he came back.

Nicole Shanahan, Burning Man, and Satan

Nicole Shanahan is a tech entrepreneur, lawyer, and philanthropist, best known as the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and for her recent public conversion to Christianity.

Her article is about her personal experience of no longer being a Burner after being “saved by Christ.” She’s on her path, learning her lessons, and expressing herself. No judgment in that.

At the same time, her article is a good example of the deeper psycho-spiritual dynamics and religious spiritual bypassing behind this growing trend of Christian conversions.

Some may say, “It’s good people are embracing Jesus and getting more religious. At least it’s better than woke ideology or hedonistic festivals like Burning Man, full of drugs and unhinged sensual pleasures.”

Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details (pun intended).

This trend reveals a deeper issue with traditional dogmatic Christianity, Bible-thumping, “Christ is King” proclamations, and the insistence that you must “accept Jesus as your savior if you want to go to heaven.”

The more extreme forms of this neo-Christian revival show themselves when Christians claim that their religion is the only true one, and everything else is demonic, a false idol, or the work of the devil.

Ironically, that narrative only works in favor of the very “demonic” and “satanic” forces these newly reborn Christians claim to expose.

In a nutshell, Nicole Shanahan, a longtime Burner turned devout Christian, reflects in her article on her years at Burning Man and concludes that it’s not just a hedonistic festival, but a spiritually dangerous and demonic deception. She frames the ecstatic and seductive atmosphere of the event as satanic.

She calls Burning Man “one of the most effective tools for Satan to misdirect souls away from our Heavenly Father,” and now refers to herself as a “devotee to Scripture,” seemingly viewing the Bible as the unquestioned truth and literal word of God.

I’ve already addressed the problems with the Bible and the “Jesus savior” program in the aforementioned past article.

But instead of focusing on Nicole as an individual, it’s more useful to examine what her story represents.

She’s one example of a much broader phenomenon: the recent wave of people, especially those coming out of New Age circles, festival culture, or psychedelic and shamanic exploration, who are converting to traditional Christianity, accepting Jesus as the savior, and then labeling their past beliefs, experiences, or practices as demonic or satanic

We called it the “The New Age To Dogmatic Christian Pipeline” in a past podcast.

This is becoming increasingly common: people disown their former selves, reject everything associated with their prior path, and adopt a rigid Christian identity.

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The Deceptive Veil of Light

From a Jungian perspective, her story, like many others, reflects a psychic upheaval marked by shadow repression, projection, psychological splitting, and spiritual inflation.

Spiritual inflation occurs when the superego adopts a spiritual identity to avoid engaging in deeper inner work. This is a form of spiritual bypassing, often resulting in moralizing. It’s especially common in many of these new Christian circles that have never engaged in real psycho-spiritual or shadow work.

Worse still, many of them are caught in what Rumi called the “Veil of Light.”

“The Veil of Light, which is the barrier brought about by self-righteousness, is more dangerous than the Veil of Darkness, produced in the mind by vice.”

— Rumi

Rumi’s teaching highlights a subtle yet significant deception.

The Veil of Darkness is vice in its obvious forms: greed, lust, violence, lower nature indulgence, and addiction. These are relatively easy to recognize and, eventually, to confront.

The Veil of Light, on the other hand, hides in the guise of goodness. It flatters the seeker into believing they are already pure, already awakened, already “saved.”

This is where spiritual pride, moral superiority, and self-righteousness creep in. The person believes they’ve crossed the threshold into light, but they have only replaced one mask with another.

When someone adopts a religious persona, for example, proclaiming they’ve “accepted Jesus as their Savior,” and it’s built on denial and rejection of their own shadow, rather than psychological integration, it risks becoming an expression of the Veil of Light that Rumi warned about.

It doesn’t lead to inner transformation but repression. And repression always leads to projection.

Instead of facing the unconscious material and working through it, the shadow gets denied, judged, and cast out, projected on others.

Everything previously associated with the self becomes “demonic.” The new identity is framed as “saved.” This is textbook psychological splitting, not individuation.

In this condition, the ego doesn’t disappear. It simply puts on holy robes. The Bible, the language of salvation, and the newfound devotion to Scripture can all become a spiritualized persona.

The deeper unconscious material is never met and integrated, but rejected and bypassed.

What’s missed is that true redemption cannot come from religious conversion alone. It must be rooted in sincere inner transformation, facing the shadow, integrating unconscious drives, and grounding spiritual insight through lived embodiment.

The Veil of Light is dangerous because it tells you the work is done when it has barely begun. As Gurdjieff warned, it is “dreaming to be awake while still fully asleep.”

Today, many of these same converts call Jung a Satanist or a false idol. They dismiss transpersonal psychology as demonic. They believe that all one needs is baptism, Jesus, and the Bible.

But you cannot cut out half of the psyche and expect to be whole. And you cannot condemn your past and call it healing.

Shadow Projection and Psychological Splitting

Anyone who has done sincere shadow work can see what’s happening here: shadow projection and psychological splitting. This is common in people who adopt a new religious or spiritual identity without integrating their shadow. The disowned parts of the psyche get projected outward.

Psychological splitting occurs when someone divides the world into all-good or all-bad categories because they cannot tolerate internal contradiction or nuance. It leads to black-and-white thinking and the projection of repressed material onto others, who are now labeled “satanic” or “demonic.”

Burning Man, once a source of joy and meaning, becomes a symbol of Satan, two opposing extremes. The former self is cast into shadow, while the new Christian identity is seen as morally “enlightened” and “saved.”

Instead of integrating the complexity of the past through sincere inner work, the past is condemned entirely.

Rather than hold the tension of opposites, the alchemical fire that gives rise to the true Self, Nicole, like many other “saved” Christians, collapses into moral absolutism and simplistic black-and-white thinking.

To “hold the tension of opposites” means to consciously stay with inner conflict, contradiction, or paradox without trying to quickly resolve it through repression, rationalization, projection, or premature action.

It’s a core part of Jung’s individuation process, the path toward becoming a whole, integrated Self. Rather than collapsing into one pole (e.g., good vs. evil, light vs. dark, spirit vs. matter), the individual must hold space for both opposites to exist within, even when it’s uncomfortable or painful. This tension is not meant to be “solved”, but endured and metabolized.

Holding the tension of opposites is not the same as neutrality, apathy, pacifism, or finding the “middle ground.” It’s not that truth lies somewhere in between two extremes. It is also not dissociation, nor is it a philosophical or intellectual exercise.

The inner process of holding the tension of opposites inevitably brings about what esoteric science calls “conscious suffering”, a necessary kind of suffering that ignites the alchemical fire within.

By doing so, a third element can emerge. This is not a compromise, but a higher synthesis that transforms the psyche. It’s how psychological and spiritual growth occurs. In esotericism, it is known as the Law of Three.

It is through this alchemical inner fire that the real “I” is born, as an expression of the Divine. From Lead to Gold.

In yogic psychology, this process leads to a state of true equanimity, where the soul and the true Self emerge. This inner equanimity is not to be confused with the outer personality’s concept of “equality” or passive indifference.

Holding the tension within is painful. That’s why most people avoid it. Instead, they dissociate or project their unresolved inner conflict and tension onto the world and attach to a group, movement, ideology, political side, belief system, or identity to ease the pressure.

Not being able to hold the tension of opposites can also result in jumping from one identification to another, from New Age to Christian, from liberal to conservative, or from one spiritual system to another, all in an unconscious attempt to escape the inner fire that would otherwise forge the soul.

If you want to learn more about the psycho-spiritual concept of “Holding the Tension of Opposites”, listen to our podcast episode “How Can We Heal This Polarized World?”

I’ve witnessed the same pattern in some old friends who were deeply identified with the shamanic and medicine plant path.

After not getting the results they hoped for, despite repeatedly drinking ayahuasca and doing dietas without sincere inner work, they jumped on the Christian conversion bandwagon, got baptized, and now preach that shamanism and ayahuasca are satanic and demonic, completely throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

They literally went from one extreme identification to another.

Jung referred to this as a flight into the opposites. It may bring temporary relief, but it suppresses essential parts of the psyche that remain unintegrated and continue to feed the shadow.

This false persona is often reinforced by fellow Christians who applaud the conversion, not realizing it reflects the same unresolved shadow suppression and projection they themselves carry.

Sooner or later, the shadow has to be faced, whether in this life, the afterlife, or the next. No Jesus, and no savior, will integrate your shadow for you.

Religious Dogma and the Afterlife

The afterlife will come as a big surprise for many dogmatic fundamentalist Christians. Instead of instantly experiencing “Heaven,” they will first encounter their own shadow reflected back to them before they can enter the light.

Christians who hold rigid, literal interpretations of the Bible, who externalize God and lack an inner experience of the Kingdom within, may get stuck in the afterlife as earthbound spirits. Their expectations and fixed beliefs do not align with spiritual reality.

Dr. William Baldwin, who spent decades working with earthbound souls and helping them transition, documented several cases where fundamentalist Christians did not cross into the Light due to fear of judgment, hell, or punishment.

In one example shared in his book "Spirit Releasement Therapy”, a devout Baptist minister refused to enter the Light after death because it didn’t match what he believed Heaven should look like. Despite his unwavering belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior, his soul became trapped in the earth’s astral realm.

Iris Paxino, who has also worked extensively with the dead, describes a similar phenomenon in her book “Bridges Between Life and Death.” She explains that individuals with rigid religious beliefs are at risk of becoming stuck in the etheric realm after death.

Their inflexible thought structures harden the etheric body, making it difficult to dissolve after death. As a result, they confuse their own mental constructs with the actual spiritual world.

Actual spiritual development after death requires emotional openness, inner flexibility, and a heart-centered perception. Intellectual religious knowledge or belief is not enough.

In other words, the soul is not liberated simply by “accepting Jesus as the Savior,” reading scripture, or engaging in theological studies. Freedom and salvation come through genuine inner psycho-spiritual development.

That process involves confronting and integrating whatever has been repressed or projected onto others, known as the shadow. This is a core part of the afterlife experience, as described across many esoteric traditions.

“People who, during their incarnation, have developed very dogmatic spiritual views or fixed mental ideas about the spiritual world form a group of the deceased trapped in the etheric world.

Dogmatism of any kind produces one-sided thoughts and inflexible inner images. Since the etheric body is the carrier of our ideas, rigid thought formations cause it to harden, meaning it then has difficulty dissolving after death.

The solidity of the deceased’s mental structures remains, leading them to confuse their own fixed ideas and imaginations with the actual spiritual world that now surrounds them.

Spiritual thoughts alone do not guarantee a healthy development after death. Instead, emotional and spiritual mobility, tolerance, and openness of heart are the prerequisites for an unbiased perception of the spiritual world and a harmonious development after death.”

- Iris Paxino

Radical Christians would call Baldwin and Paxino heretics and accuse their work of being demonic. But the truth is, everyone will find out for themselves when the inevitable moment arrives and the transition to death is upon them.

The afterlife is not about reward or punishment. It’s not about heaven or hell. These are limiting beliefs implanted by the authoritarian Church to control people.

The deeper truth is that it’s about soul evolution. This path requires making the darkness conscious and uniting the opposites in order to become whole, not perfect. It’s about facing what we’ve repressed, projected, or bypassed, not denying or spiritually bypassing it.

As I’ve written in a previous article, one of the most significant corruptions in the Bible was the removal of the concept of reincarnation, along with the understanding of karma and the evolution of the soul across lifetimes.

Festivals, Psychedelics, and Medicine Plants

Burning Man is a massive gathering of around 70,000 people. Attendees create art, dance, express themselves, party, take drugs, and explore altered states. Some overdose. A few die each year.

It’s a bit like “Sin City” in the desert, with hedonism, sexual orgies, and wild escapades. But to label the entire thing “demonic” or “satanic” is a reaction rooted in psychological splitting.

Especially when the superego takes on a spiritual mask and views everything through the lens of one of the most corrupted religions and texts in history.

I know many people who went to Burning Man long before Nicole did, some for ten years straight between 2000 and 2010. They did all the drugs, dancing, and partying. Most of them stopped going years ago. Today, many are married with kids, grounded, and spiritually engaged, without ever needing to be “saved by Jesus” or convert to Christianity.

I never went to Burning Man myself, but I spent years at full-moon desert raves in the 1990s, high on MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms. In the words of the late comedian Bill Hicks, “I had a great time, then went about my day.” Those experiences never felt demonic. If anything, they sparked a deeper interest in inner work, psycho-spiritual study, and healing my childhood wounds.

I was a psychonaut for years. After I stopped partying in the early 2000s, I used psychedelics and medicine plants only to explore my inner world and other realms by myself.

I’ve taken heroic doses of mushrooms (in the Terence McKenna sense), smoked DMT and 5-MeO-DMT in controlled settings, and traveled to Peru to work with Ayahuasca and Huachuma (San Pedro), before plant medicines became trendy. I’ve seen both the light and the dark sides of psychedelics and shamanism.

I’ve worked with people who took on entity attachments from poorly held aya ceremonies. I’ve also seen spiritual bypassing in the medicine world, just as I’ve seen people swing to the other extreme, condemning it all as “Satanic” and “Demonic” after converting to Christianity.

Yes, there are real risks associated with drug-induced altered states and festivals like Burning Man. I’ve written about the darker side of both in detail, especially from a hyperdimensional occult perspective:

• Reflections on Ayahuasca, Psychedelics, Marijuana, and a Critical Look at the Psychedelic Movement

• Altered States of Entrapment: The Plant Medicine Manipulation

But it’s not black and white. I never felt the need to adopt a spiritual identity that demonizes other paths.

The main reason is that my focus has always been on inner work, integrating the psychological and the spiritual. I never identified with a religion, faith, scripture, or teaching. I never took any path or modality as the sole foundation or the lens through which to view the world.

What guided me was an integral approach to psycho-spiritual work that includes all levels: physical, somatic, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual.

The more I engaged in shadow work and faced my own darkness, my potential for evil, the less I projected it outward. The more I integrated what I found, the less I was able to deceive myself or adopt a fixed spiritual identity based on a particular path or belief system.

In this process, I found God, not through any church, book, priest, or ritual.

That doesn’t mean I’m fully awake. There’s still more work to do, more layers to shed and integrate. But I no longer look for a savior outside myself.

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The Hidden Trap: When Demonization Serves the Demonic

Here’s the big irony behind this rigid black-and-white labeling of things as “demonic” or “satanic,” especially from the moral high ground of being “saved by Christ” and quoting Bible verses.

This kind of moral labeling, where complex human drives, archetypal forces, and other spiritual paths are reflexively condemned, often serves the very occult forces that dogmatic Christians claim to fight.

From the perspective of spiritual warfare and the hyperdimensional matrix, this mechanism of shadow suppression and projection becomes a tool for hostile entities, especially when fueled by the guilt-and-shame programming of the Church. These forces feed on fragmentation and repression of the shadow.

When someone disowns their lower nature and primal impulses, especially around sexuality and altered states, and labels them “satanic,” they split off vital parts of themselves.

That split creates an opening for entity interference, as understood in all esoteric traditions. The repressed energy then feeds projections toward others who carry the disowned shadow.

This shadow hides behind the veil of light mentioned earlier. It is one of the most deceptive states of being.

In my previous article, I explored how dogmatic Christianity’s repressive view of sex created a deep, unconscious sexual shadow. This often leads to moral posturing on the surface while secretly indulging in the very “sins” being condemned.

From a Jungian lens, this dynamic of repression, guilt, and projection explains why the regions with the most rigid conservative Christian values often have the highest rates of porn consumption, including taboo content.

The more these primal drives are denied rather than integrated, the more powerfully they resurface through projection, hypocrisy, or even abuse. True transformation doesn’t come from suppression or moralizing, but from conscious inner work and transmutation.

When you project your own repressed drives onto festivals, subcultures, or “the other,” you become blind to those same energies within. That makes you easier to control. Entities feed on the fragmentation and projections toward others that you refuse to face in yourself.

Calling Burning Man satanic without engaging in sincere shadow work is not genuine awakening. It is psychological splitting, deceived by the veil of light. It is repression dressed as salvation.

The hyperdimensional matrix (and what Christians call “Satan”) doesn’t just thrive on indulgence in the lower nature. It also feeds on dogma, rigidity, and religious absolutism. The false light is more deceptive than obvious darkness.

In that split state, people become more programmable. They mistake corrupted scripture and the “Jesus savior” program for Divine guidance.

The so-called “devil” (occult hostile entities) most often appears as an “angel of light,” even taking on the appearance of Jesus, a Pleiadian, an alien, Mother Mary, Buddha, or any other form that appeals to the seeker in order to deceive.

In other words, having a “vision” or “encounter” with Jesus is not proof that it’s the real thing. I know several people who fell into this deception, what’s known as a “trap of agreement,” an occult law that hidden forces use to gain permission for interference or possession.

"The chief characteristic of these beings is falsehood: their nature is made of deceit. They have a power of illusion; they can take the appearance of divine beings or higher beings, they can appear in a dazzling light, but truly sincere people are not deceived; they immediately feel something that warns them.

But if one likes the marvelous, the unexpected, if one loves fantastic things, if one likes to live a romance, one is likely to be easily deceived."

- Mirra Alfassa, The Mother

“To say that all light is good is as if you said that all water is good – or even that all clear or transparent water is good: it would not be true. One must see what is the nature of the light or where it comes from or what is in it, before one can say that it is the true Light.

False lights exist and misleading lustres, lower lights too that belong to the being’s inferior reaches. One must therefore be on one’s guard and distinguish; the true discrimination has to come by growth of the psychic feeling and a purified mind and experience.

The word “Appearances” refers to the forms they take in order to rule the world, forms often false and always incarnating falsehood, sometimes pseudo-divine. Often, representing themselves as divine powers, they mislead…”

– Sri Aurobindo

The Real Spiritual War Is Within

Many Christians talk about spiritual warfare. They’re right about that part. We are in a spiritual war. I’ve been writing about it for over 20 years.

What they don’t seem to see is how the hostile forces are also working through them and how easily they can be deceived. Through their rigid religious identity. Through their self-righteousness. Through their moral absolutism. Through their projections. Through distorted doctrines and scriptures, they cling to dogmatically.

This is why the esoteric traditions emphasize sincere inner work. Knowing all parts of yourself. Especially the dark and uncomfortable ones. Not bypassing them with an external salvation program.

Not hiding in a new identity or taking on the deceptive veil of light. Not projecting the shadow onto others and calling them demonic or satanic in an oversimplified black and white perception, but facing that very “evil” you project outward onto others within yourself.

Confronting the darkness within yourself without flinching, without escaping it, without repression, while resisting the urge to project it externally by holding the tension of opposites within, is one of the most difficult inner processes. It requires a spiritual warrior's attitude to face it, because you will fight demons both within and without.

Moreover, if you haven’t faced your own evil and shadow, all the disowned parts, sub-personalities, inner child wounds, trauma parts, and the like, you won’t be able to discern demonic or satanic forces truly. You’ll mistake your own shadow projections for “demons” and only see them in others, not in yourself.

It’s a big red flag when someone claims to see only demons and entities in others, but not in themselves.

Anyone who claims they’re not affected by entities at all is deceiving themselves. The only exception would be a fully enlightened being.

The real spiritual war is within, and it works through us. It always has.

“The majority of people find many excuses not to work on themselves. They are in a complete prison of their weaknesses.

Understand me right, I do not need followers. I am rather interested in finding the real warriors of the new world.”

– Gurdjieff, The Last Hour of Life

Check out more of my work and resources on my website: veilofreality.com