When I contemplate what is at the very bottom of the insanity—and evil—that is playing out in our world, I keep on coming back to one and the same thing. The cause—and solution—of the multiple world crises we are facing, when traced back to their very root, all have to do with that we are not in touch with our own creative power and agency. We are powerful magicians beyond—and only limited by—our imagination, but to the extent that we don’t realize this and believe otherwise, our own creative power is wielded unconsciously and boomerangs against us in destructive ways which undermine the fulfillment of our conscious aims and stifles our own creative genius. The collective evil that is playing out in the world’s body politic is reflecting—and revealing—this deeper process of unconscious self-sabotage that is being acted out within each one of us. 

It is an archetypal idea, expressed in every spiritual wisdom tradition in a myriad of ways, that the powers of light and dark are mysteriously connected, and that the forces of darkness parasitically feed off of and require the energy and support of the light in order to maintain and perpetuate their seeming existence so as to appear real. This is to say that the powers of darkness have no independent objective existence on their own separate from their connection to the light. When translated back to its deeper implicit meaning, this reveals that the light has for some reason used its own creative energy to constrain and delimit its infinite radiance, as if the light has cast a spell upon itself. We—as potentially both emissaries of light and/or agents of darkness—somehow play a key, participatory role in this process.

Seen as a reflection of a dynamic happening within each one of us, this expresses how something so incredibly powerful (i.e., ourselves as the radiant plenum – the boundless sentient luminosity which is the very fabric of our being) can fall under the spell of a nonexistent phantom appearance that arises from nowhere but the immense creativity of our own mind such that it entrances the light within us into believing that this imaginary, illusory phantom of darkness is more powerful than the light that we are. These apparition-like darker forces have no intrinsic existence or creativity of their own, but can plug into and mimic our own creative power such that they can use our own disowned and unrealized creativity against us. These darker powers can only take on a convincing, apparent existence by tricking us into believing that they have power over us. These darker forces only have power over us, however, to the extent that we don’t see through their illusory nature, but rather, unwittingly give our power over to them by investing them with an undeserved objective reality, making them appear more powerful than is warranted.  

One thing that we are indisputably geniuses at is deceiving ourselves – we are masters beyond compare at fooling ourselves, at tricking ourselves out of our (right) minds and then falling for our own ploy. This is pointing to our unfathomably vast and unrealized latent genius to creatively shape our own experience - both all around us (in the world) and inside of our heads. If used without awareness, however, we have a great propensity, as if hypnotizing ourselves, to fall under our own self-created illusions – which is a chief feature of unconsciousness. This whole process is potentially revealing to us that this same creative energy with which we bewitch ourselves, if used consciously and channeled so as to shed light on itself, can help awaken us from our self-created nightmare to become conscious participatory agents in our own evolution. 

It is as if we are unknowingly in possession of a magic wand that is powerful beyond measure, but not only do we not know how to use it to benefit ourselves and the world at large, most of us do not even suspect that we have such great creative power. Many of us are unconsciously wielding our creative genius to entrance ourselves so as to think that we are not in touch with our creativity—which is then immediately confirmed by the experience we create for ourselves—which ironically, is itself a direct and immediate expression of the enormity of our creative power. Not knowing that we possess undreamed of creative power, our power to create then possesses us from beneath our conscious awareness, which then fuels our worst nightmares – both of the sleeping and waking variety.  

To quote the great psychologist William James, our situation is “much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.... We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.” To amplify James’ metaphor, let us dare to dream. Let us fully incarnate into the rest of our multi-dimensional organism—both material and immaterial—and draw upon the untapped over-flowing reservoirs of creative inspiration that potentially fills us to the brim and surrounds us on all sides. The question arises: why not do this? What is stopping us? And the answer: nothing at all.  

About the Author

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Among his books are The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, May 2018) and Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 35 years. He was the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years. His email is paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.