Spiritual Agents are Where It’s At
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God – Exodus 20:5
A current I’m picking up in general world affairs is a hugely rising interest in the esoteric. Western society kind of bet the farm on science explaining everything. There was a high water mark sometime around 2009, where it seemed like it was close to explaining consciousness. Then the tide fell back. Scientists visibly and very willingly became priests during Covid and it became clear to many of us just how delusional we had become during the years of Western secularism. We still needed God. We didn’t want to call him God. But we still projected our need for him on the world around us.
God as consciousness, God as the ground-of-all-being, no one has much issue with. No one can be bothered fighting the Buddhists. But God as some kind of man-in-the-skies directing world affairs, that’s where it all kicks off. That’s where we fight about God.
You may need this kind of God. You may need someone to back up your superego if shit starts to get real. Fair enough. I may also at times need this type of God. You may need someone to lay down moral laws, to tell you what’s right and wrong, to condemn, to punish, to dispense justice. You may need to hate demons. Fair enough. I have no problem with someone stating their needs.
But let’s take a look at this famous passage from Exodus quoted above, because I think it is the Jewish god getting real for a moment, letting the mask slip.
Judaism, like Christianity or Islam, is a monotheistic religion. There is only one God. So why would Yahweh get jealous? Because the other idols being worshipped, presumably, are not real, mere images. So Yahweh is like doing you a favour telling you the truth, telling you to only worship him? Except that’s not the context. Yahweh is enraged about other gods. He’s saying to the Jews, worship other gods and I will send the Assyrians and the Babylonians to fuck you up. And he proceeds to do just this. And so the Jews learn, don’t fuck with Yahweh.
Exodus is telling us that polytheism is real, that there are heaps of gods. But that if you believe that, then the one you’re currently in touch with is going to fuck you up. So monotheism is kind of an extreme form of marriage. Not only do you select one partner but you also condemn all others as either not existing, or as actual demons – demons who will do all sorts of hideous shit to you if you listen to them.
So what are we looking at here, if we pull back? We’re looking at a reality that is populated by humans, some of whom are in contact with spiritual agents. And some of those spiritual agents are hyper-focused on getting one-true-god status, on being the GOAT of gods. To achieve this end, they demand total obedience and status through every trick they can come up with.
Seen through the lens of secularity, this might seem like all pretty archaic and mad. But, let’s face it, secularity has failed. As a people, we will likely soon have to deal with the reality of God or gods. It is also the case that our interpretations of objective reality are transient. We use mental framings to relate to the world according to our needs, often unconsciously. If we can develop higher self-awareness, we can reduce the intensity with which the framing is held in place. We can start to drop some of our need for a justice-dispensing Talmudic or Quranic god that will fuck us up if we don’t do just what he says. Or we can pick him up and let him go according to the situation.
The reality becomes clear. Demons exist. And our monotheistic God, whichever we subscribe to, is one of them. And so the word “demon” itself begins to lose some of its stigma. Demon is just how your current partner describes your ex, to try and keep you away from them.
Is secular liberalism creeping in through the backdoor here? I don’t think so. Being human is still extremely intense, or at least it is if you actually live in your body and not in some abstracted world populated only by thoughts. You may absolutely need to defend your mind and your body at times and gangster spiritual agents like Yahweh have their uses.
But if humanity is to develop, I believe we will soon need to have some deeper conversations about God, which actually means gods, which actually means talking about the reality of spiritual agents, and the competition trips and manipulation games that some of them have going on.