We Are All Angel-Demons
On deep shadow integration + 'good' and 'evil'
In every truth there is a lie, in every lie a truth.
In every Heaven there is Hell, in every Hell a Heaven too.
In every pain there is a joy, in every joy a pain.
In every flame there is darkness, in darkest night a flame.
In every angel a demon lurks, in each demon an angel.
In every savior a tormentor hides, in each tormentor a savior.
In every hate there is a love, in every love there’s hate.
In every cage lies freedom, in each freedom a cage.
In all black magick there is white, in all white magick, black.
In all lack there is abundance, in all abundance, lack.
In every shadow there is light, in every light a shadow.
In every halo a pair of horns, in each pair of horns a halo.
In all good there is evil, in all evil there is good.
In each crook hides a buddha, in each buddha, a crook.
In all wisdom there is folly, in all folly, wisdom.
In all vision there is blindness, in all blindness, vision.
In every meanness there is kindness, in every kindness, meanness.
In every Jesus there is Satan, in every Satan, Jesus.
In every curse there is a blessing, in each blessing a curse.
In every birth there is a death, in every death a birth.
Beyond and within all these is God, the Eternal One Un-Split.
Cradling All in Loving Grace, He has no opposite.
The above poem is one of my favorites I’ve written.
For me it profoundly captures a deep process of shadow-integration I am presently undergoing.
This process is definitely a continuation of that which led me to write these three recent posts:
The current deepening integration is not negating or falsifying what I shared in those posts. I still largely agree with what I wrote.
It is, however, adding further dimensionality. It’s basically revealing more deeply to me that:
Whether or not something is true for you, depends on your paradigm of consciousness.
This is why seemingly contradictory statements can both be true and useful, depending on your paradigm.
It’s why “both, neither, far beyond either” is so profound.
It’s why any statement one can make is true in some sense, false in some sense, and also not even relevant at all in a most profound sense, as God/reality is utterly and infinitely beyond any statement you can ever make about it, and infinitely beyond that which could be pinned down within our cute little dualistic true-false framework of epistemology.
I repeat: Whether or not something is true for you, depends on your paradigm of consciousness.
Reality is exactly what you say it is. It’s also not what you say it is. And it’s far beyond anything you could say or not say about it.
This isn’t pure relativism. It doesn’t mean that all truths are created equally, or that some truths are not “more true” / closer to God than others. In my view, some reality-tunnels are far closer to God / Truth than others.
We are All Demon-Angels
What I am now seeing more clearly, and what my poem expresses, is this:
We are all demon-angels made out of God’s Grace.
God’s Grace is the Highest Light Which Has No Opposite.
You could also call it the Lowest Dark Which Has No Opposite.
This Grace is Love—an Unconditional Love with no opposite, far beyond the conditional “love” that plays out in most human relationships.
We are made of God’s Love, Grace, Innocence, Freedom, and Truth…
Made of the all-embracing silent substratum that is both immanent within and transcendent of all things…
Yet, at least in this dualistic layer of Creation…
We are demon-angels.
We contain both the demonic and the angelic.
We are dark monsters as much as we are ‘light-workers.’
We are killers as much as we are creators.
To create any new reality is to kill the previous reality.
I thought I understood all this years ago.
I thought I had integrated my shadow to a radical extent.
And perhaps I had…
But as with seemingly everything in reality…
The rabbit hole just keeps going.
To actually embody this level of shadow-integration at greater and greater depths…
Is much different than simply having the insight that all of us are angel-demons, Jesus-Satans.
To actually viscerally know in your body that you are capable of primal acts of brutality…
Is a different animal altogether.
Integrating Your Inner Monster
Jordan Peterson likes to say that it is only once we know our inner monster, that we actually unlock the possibility of being virtuous.
Only when you know you are capable of terrible things, does it actually really mean something to channel your energies toward Love.
Only when you viscerally know that there is nothing in any other human or entity that is not also in you…
Can you truly Love all of Creation as your own Self.
When you do deeply and viscerally know your inner monster-demon…
It actually becomes far *less* likely that he will seize control of you and do hideous things.
When you know and befriend your monster-demon, he transfigures into a Powerful Dragon Ally that synergizes with your inner angel, as is depicted by the archetypal image of the Taoist Goddess of Compassion, Guan Yin, taming/riding the Dragon:
I’m reminded also of Atreyu riding Falkor the Luck Dragon in The Never-Ending Story:
Contrariwise, when you ignore and deny the fact that you have a monster-demon in you…
You are far more likely to fall into the trap of projecting / externalizing that monstrous, demonic energy onto beings or institutions outside of you, thus enabling you to feel righteous in ‘demonizing,’ attacking, and doing violence to those entities.
This pattern has plagued human history and is at the root of vast bloodshed.
Thus, integrating both your light and dark is one of the most powerful things you can ever do, if you wish to serve Love.
So what is evil, then?
The pesky little question that just won’t go away.
I continue to reckon with this and won’t claim to have final answers (about anything).
As I said in previous posts on the subject, in my view nothing is inherently evil.
In essence, all is God, and all events serve the Great Perfection.
In the final analysis, you cannot cherrypick one aspect of the Great Perfection and say, “Look, this right here is evil.”
Because nothing is actually separable from anything else. It’s all a function of one super-organism, one super-system, and you can’t have any of it without all of it.
It’s all “interdependently originating,” as the Buddhists say.
Every aspect of the Whole Dance is dynamically co-arising-with and co-creating and co-shaping every other aspect.
It’s One Tapestry.
Every scene is essential.
The macrocosm is in the microcosm.
Every character has the Whole in it.
And when you zoom out and look at the Whole, it’s a damn miraculous work of Divine Imagination.
With that being said, I *still* feel, as I said in previous posts, that…
It is important to draw pragmatic distinctions between “skillful” and “unskillful” behavior and to acknowledge earthly/karmic consequences of actions.
Let’s bring this down to a tangible level…
In the novel Crime and Punishment, the great Dostoevsky tells the story of Raskolnikov, a man who basically gets the idea to become a (twisted version of a) Nietzschean Ubermensch.
[Spoiler alert: About to reveal key plot points.]
That is, Raskolnikov decides that he is going to be beyond good and evil—he is going to transcend common morality. As such, he decides to murder an old woman who irritates him.
The story isn’t really about the murder. It’s about the psychological fallout of the murder.
Raskolnikov proceeds to be utterly and mercilessly tormented by his own anxious, guilt-ridden conscience. This leads to massive suffering. Eventually, near the end of the novel, it is suggested that Raskolnikov repents and experiences a kind of redemption via the Love of God.
This novel is truly a masterpiece. It haunted me when I read it circa ~2013 in South Korea (and led to me choosing the rap alias, LOSTBOYEVSKY, a play on Dostoevsky + the Peter Pan lost boys).
It’s an extremely visceral account of karmic consequences.
For me, the principle of karma essentially amounts to: As you sew, so shall you reap. What you do to another, you do to yourself.
This takes on an especially profound significance when you start to have direct mystical experiences revealing that we are all the very same Self—i.e. God, Tao, Source. Then it’s like, “Oh, now it makes *extra* sense why Jesus said to love your enemies. He knew your enemies are *You*.”
For me, I do intuit that the law of karma functions across lifetimes, meaning that in this lifetime as Jordan Bates I may be resolving karmic knots or debts created in other lifetimes.
However, and importantly, karma also seems to serve a very immediate, down-to-Earth, pragmatic function:
If you do something violent or harmful to another version of your own Self, you’re going to feel some of that same violence/harm within your own being.
If you pull a Raskolnikov and murder an old lady just because she annoys you, very likely that’s going to seriously weigh on you and torment you. And if it doesn’t consciously do so, my bet is that it’s nonetheless kinda like pouring corrosive acid on your soul. You’re not doing yourself any favors. On some level you’re putting yourself in Hell by doing that, even if you are so numb or disconnected that you aren’t really consciously feeling it.
And my strong sense is that this phenomenon is broadly applicable across a wide range of scenarios/acts, not just crazy shit like murder.
A simple example is watching porn. I bet almost every guy reading this has had the experience of watching some kind of weird, debasing, hardcore porn (because there’s billions of hours of it one click away), and immediately after ejaculating feeling some kind of ‘sinking’ sensation or pangs of shame / not-okay-ness.
Or take abortion as a more-extreme example. Despite all the propaganda in our overly-numb culture that downplays the grimness of abortion and makes it seem like an everyday occurrence, I know based on both data and intuition that vast numbers of women get blindsided by intense feelings of grief, shame, confusion, and self-torment after aborting their unborn children.
I don’t personally believe that all such negative feelings are purely arbitrary and based on cultural ‘moral’ programming. Probably many such feelings are that, but my sense is that a lot of them are not.
My sense is that such feelings are often indications from our own soul / deeper nature that we are on some level dishonoring or doing violence/harm to ourselves / our Self. In other words, we are “accruing karma” that will need to be resolved at some point, and we immediately feel the weight/burden of that.
Christianity’s framework of the “seven deadly sins”—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth—probably carries a fair amount of overly moralistic baggage designed to control people. As such, I don’t recommend over-attaching to this framework.
At the same time, just intuitively tune in to how you feel deep down over time / what happens to you internally/externally over time when you’re self-aggrandizing / puffing yourself up too much (pride), taking much more than your share without spreading the wealth (greed), getting overly caught up in promiscuity / one-night stands (lust), comparing yourself to others and yearning to be in their place (envy), constantly over-eating and over-drinking and over-consuming (gluttony), allowing yourself to fly into frequent fits of uncontrolled rage (wrath), or getting in the habit of persistent inactivity / doing nothing (sloth).
In the case of each of these ‘sins,’ that shit either rapidly starts to not feel good, or if you keep it up, you eventually start feeling depressed, or get some kind of hard ‘slap’ from the universe. (e.g. “Pride cometh before a fall.”)
I don’t think this is mere coincidence, or simply the result of cultural programming. My sense is that this is another expression of karma. Some actions simply more fully and intrinsically honor self / Self, while other actions dishonor and do violence to self / Self. The former tend to feel better and more wholesome in both the short-term and (especially) the long-term; we can say that they are karmically ‘cleaner’ or more ‘auspicious’—they accumulate less ‘stuff’ that will need to be resolved later.
Beyond Rigid Systems of Morality
Again, though, this is not as straightforward as simply following some kind of moral code handed down by Christianity or some other religious system.
Let’s contemplate Lao Tzu’s words in the Tao Te Ching for a moment:
When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.
For Lao Tzu, the highest ‘good’ (even beyond goodness itself) is to be like the Tao / God.
In essence, this is to be that all-embracing, impartial Silence that simply spontaneously and effortlessly nourishes and undergirds all of Creation.
To be Tao-like is to be spontaneous Love, which is endlessly powerful and creative and wild and does not necessarily look at all like our common conceptions of “love.”
To be Tao-like is to let Source take over your life and animate you.
Anyway… When the Tao is lost, (a slightly-more-contrived) ‘goodness’ arises. Then, on the path to chaos and confusion, goodness gives way to rigid morality, which then gives way to mere ritual, “the husk of true faith,” the “beginning of chaos.”
So… for Lao Tzu, when it comes to karma-regulation, morality is ‘better’ than a total Tao-forgotten free-for-all, but morality can easily descend into hollow, disconnected ritual—which then easily leads to (tribalistic) violence and all other manner of unpleasant shite.
Personally, I think that although our earthly moral systems have a lot of flaws, they’re useful for providing the general populace with a basic roadmap for understanding which actions tend to be more or less karmically auspicious.
Yet I agree with Lao Tzu that true skillfulness transcends morality and even ‘goodness.’ True skillfulness is to become Tao-like through moment-to-moment spontaneous attunement and surrender to Tao/God.
Here are a few more words from Master Lao Tzu:
“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
I include this passage here mainly because I think it’s a beautifully and elegantly simple instruction for being Tao-like, or at least ‘good.’
So… what actually is “evil,” then?
Wait, didn’t I already ask this question?
Damn, this one’s really a humdinger.
I can write and write about it and never quite seem to get to the bottom.
One way I could define it in this moment is:
Although nothing is *inherently* evil, we can *pragmatically* define “evil” as unskillful or Tao-forgetful or karmically inauspicious behavior taken to the *extreme*, leading the soul into a tortured, tormented, ‘hellish’ condition.
“Evil demons” can then be seen as primordial energies/entities whose deep forgetfulness of God / Oneness / Tao has led them into a contorted, hellish condition.
Paradoxically, again, knowing your own inner demon makes you *less likely* to become the human equivalent of an “evil demon” and more likely to become an integrated angel-demon (human) in service to Love / Tao.
Paradox #1: Are All Paths Equally Hellish-Heavenly?
Just when you thought we had reached some kind of neat-and-tidy conclusion…
There are a couple wild paradoxes here that I wanna mention and examine.
First of all, don’t forget the poem with which I opened this piece:
“In every curse there is a blessing, in every blessing a curse.”
I deeply sense the Yin-Yang-esque balance of truth in this.
The karmic scales always balance out in the end.
Even if you get swept down a highly “karmically inauspicious” path, there will be gifts there, both for you and for all beings.
(I’m reminded of my discussion of Hitler as playing the useful “black mirror” for humanity.)
And even if you fully surrender to Tao and spontaneously align with a maximally skillful path that leaves no ‘karmic trace,’ there will still be curses, scourges, pains, headaches, and challenges.
This is the nature of the dualistic realm of Creation in which we are currently playing.
The great John DeMartini (who partially inspired this post) suggests that all paths always contain an equal measure of pleasure and pain, curse and blessing, hell and heaven.
On the micro-scale of our day-to-day human lives, I’m not so sure about that, though perhaps it’s true. On the grand scale of the dualistic realm of Creation, the hypothesis seems to check out, intuitively, for me. In my view, every lifetime is ultimately Your lifetime, every being’s karma is ultimately Your karma. On the most profound level of your Self, you live it all, and the curse-blessings and blessing-curses balance each other, and it’s all Grace at the end of the day: Without a cage, there can be no liberation.
As I’m feeling into this now, I’m feeling like damn, maybe DeMartini is even correct about this equal-curse-blessing / equal-pleasure-pain principle playing out even on the micro-scale of our day-to-day human lives. I mean, even an enlightened bodhisattva finds themselves in a kind of cage, “cursed” to remain within Creation until all beings are liberated, “cursed” with an open heart that feels so deeply the profound suffering of all beings…
This reminds me of Carl Jung’s chilling words:
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
Nietzsche too observed that the heights of one’s joy in life were exactly proportionate to the depths of one’s suffering.
In the dualistic realm of Creation, this seems to be pretty much accurate.
What, then, is the point of consciously knowing and serving God / Tao / Love, if it’s all gonna be equally hellish-heavenly anyway, at the end of the day, no matter which course we choose? Especially if *all* paths serve the Highest *ultimately*?
DeMartini asserts that it’s more fulfilling to do so.
I’m also reminded of Peter Brown saying in one of his satsangs that the only reason to walk the path of enlightenment is aesthetics — that it’s simply more beautiful to go that route. Hah!
Fascinating stuff.
I guess for myself, I’d say it like this:
Love, Grace, Peace, and Truth don’t need a reason. *God* is the reason to consciously serve God.
Also, yeah, on second thought, I’m not actually so sure about DeMartini’s equal-pain-pleasure principle. This may hold true in the realm of duality, but the path of God leads beyond duality, giving glimpses of a space that is beyond suffering altogether. One still feels the peaks and vicissitudes of duality, yet the experience of these dualistic highs and lows is much-transformed—transfigured by Faith and Direct God-Knowing into an art-work less generative of suffering. This, at least, is my experience.
So yeah, I’m actually gonna say for now that all individual day-to-day human paths are not equally hellish-heavenly. Again, it feels to me like skillful, wholesome, karmically auspicious action tends to result in less (internal) strife. And beyond that, it feels like direct (non-dual) God-realization (often) (greatly) reduces suffering by enabling deeper surrender to God, a capacity to see life’s vicissitudes in a vaster context of the poetry of the Great Perfection, and a capacity to tap into the space of pure peace that lies beyond dualistic Creation.
My sense is that the “karmic scales” do balance when you zoom out far enough, in terms of a Cosmic Equilibrium that permeates all of Creation, but I’m not prepared to say that my life is equally hellish-heavenly as that of a child who is starved and tortured from birth for years and killed at a young age, to use a tragic example.
This is quite a conundrum, though, and I’m not ultimately sure. It’s probably in some sense both, neither, far beyond either.
Paradox #2: The Holy Fools
Yep, all of that was just the first paradox.
This essay just keeps on unfurling, damn.
If you’re still with me, you’re a real one.
So the other wild paradox I wanted to mention is this:
As beings empty themselves and get closer to the Tao, sometimes the Tao seems to compel them to do things completely outside the bounds of anything resembling traditional ‘morality’ or any reasonable image of ‘skillful’ behavior.
In a great piece on the four types of spiritual teachers, Timothy Conway —who has a ton of excellent stuff on his blog, including a useful/relevant framework on the ‘levels’ of non-dual reality—writes:
“Then there are: 2) The wild men/women or holy fools (avadhutas, majdhubs, masts, saloi, yurodivye, idiota, yu jen, mahasiddhas, et al.), within what is sometimes called the “crazy wisdom tradition.” These rather mysterious folks have spontaneously or deliberately gone beyond all societal conventions, sometimes simply because God-realization and liberation came for them in such an unusually powerful way that it blew out the circuits of normal psychological and social functioning. These wild ones, who usually display no regard for their own comforts and even many basic bodily needs (food, liquids, sleep, shelter, basic hygiene), are not usually known for any conspicuous "loving-kindness" on the conventional interpersonal level.
They have been known to grunt at, scream at, punch, push, piss on, completely ignore and in various ways “abuse” those whom they encounter—yet with an unexpectedly quite positive, beautifully transformational affect on the recipients of such “holy abuse.” In other words, just as with the free beings of category #1, so also there can be a palpable, edifying sense of divine blessing (saktipat, kripa, baraka, wang, descent of the Holy Spirit, etc.) that is experienced by the recipient during or after the bizarre encounter with a “wild fool” of category #2. This blessing force brings with it an amazing sense of freedom, peace, equanimity, bliss, love, and nondual identity with the One and all beings.”
Wild, huh?!
This is super fascinating to me and really opens a whole other can of worms.
Now, granted, this line of reasoning could easily be used (and has been used) by guru figures to justify all manner of questionable behavior under the guise of “crazy wisdom.”
Yet I do intuitively sense (and have experienced) that there is truth in this—that (increasingly) total Tao-surrender can lead to wild surges of energy resulting in unorthodox or mysterious behavior that nonetheless seems somehow auspicious.
This phenomenon further complicates any notion of pinning down that which is karmically auspicious VS inauspicious. It suggests that simply knowing from the *inside* what is right/indicated for *you* moment-to-moment may be the most auspicious, Tao-like path. It indicates that we truly cannot “judge a book by its cover” or “judge another till we’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”
God is truly an inscrutable trickster.
And thank Heavens for that.
It makes everything so much more interesting!
Phew… Where Does This Leave Us?
Okay, uh, so, wow, I’ve been writing this for like four hours or something.
What is going on?
It’s 10:13pm in Azores, and I’m tired.
Gonna heat up some spicy kiwi-infused veggie curry I made last night soon and maybe read a bit before bed.
So…
How can I wrap up this bad boy?
What are we left with here?
I guess if I were to reduce it to a few key principles, it’s something like:
We are all angel-demons.
Integrate your inner demon-monster if you want to serve Love.
Nothing is inherently evil.
Pragmatically speaking, some actions are more skillful and karmically auspicious than others, and thus tend to feel better.
Pragmatically speaking, “evil” can be seen as Tao-forgetful, karmically inauspicious behavior taken to the extreme that leads beings into a hellish, contorted condition.
There is a curse in every blessing and a blessing in every curse. No matter which path you choose, life is going to have gifts and scourges, joys and pains.
At the end of the day, it’s all You, all lifetimes are your lifetimes, and it all serves the Highest.
God is the reason to serve God.
The path of knowing and aligning with God / Tao leads beyond duality, alleviates suffering, and allows you to see the artistry and perfection of Creation.
Feel with your heart and totality of being what is right/indicated for you moment-by-moment—what is truly you—to align with Tao.
Something like that!
Thanks again for reading this winding, wavy wonder of a text.
I hope it has given you some valuable food for contemplation.
Love,
Jordan
Volcano Island is 2.5 weeks away.
There are still a couple spaces left for my upcoming retreat in Azores.
As with all of my retreats…
I intend to hold a strong field of unconditional love and acceptance…
One in which deep healing can take place…
While also empowering and activating you to own your genius…
And create the aligned and beautiful life you’re meant to lead.
This retreat will provide a fine balance of energy work and highly-pragmatic teachings on masterfully navigating earthly life, business, service, and leadership.
It’s going to be potent.
Are you meant to be there?
Apply here and let’s have a conversation and find a way to make it happen.
Because the retreat is so soon, I can offer you an uncommonly good price if you take the leap and join us.
Love,
JB
Jordan Bates is a Dad, Teacher, Mentor, Artist, Rapper, Entrepreneur, and Lover of Divinity. If you feel called to work with Jordan, apply for his upcoming retreat, Volcano Island, his upcoming mastermind for men, The Heart-Led King, and his new 1:1 journey, Sacred Power. Dive deeper and support his work by subscribing on Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube.