Dancing with the Devil

Something is breaking through the surface of the world.

Something is emerging
from underneath our skin.

Have you noticed the horror of the world no longer staying hidden beneath our carefully constructed floorboards?

Now pressing, pounding on our doors…
Literally breaking through institutions, culture, through the thin membrane of civility we have spent centuries perfecting.

Oh, when the shadow comes to roost.

Before the chilling reality of World War II, Jung’s patients were seized for years by dreams of the European streets filled with blood. And after devoting his working life to understanding the acts of the Führer, Jung warned that this century — the one we are living in — would not be defined by progress, enlightenment, or moral triumph over evil —

but by a visceral confrontation.

A confrontation with the rejected, the exiled, the unspeakable, the systematically violent and shameful — that which our sincerely perfected modern etiquette, our moral performances, and social facades were built to contain.

Oh love, but what is buried does not disappear.
It ferments.
And eventually, baby, that rot — it grows skin.
A consciousness, behaving like a mold, it lives its own private life and grabs ahold of you when you least expect it.

This! is the Dance of the Demonic.
And counter to the modern aversion, I believe

The Demonic is here to save us.

You see, we wonder why crisis comes. Why tower moments strike. We gasp when we hear of the private lives of the elite. Yet we can all sense, that there is something we’re all holding back.

A scream A dream An unlived life,
unfulfilled promises The unexplainable desires,
unexpressed passions.

The sweating in the night the terror you didn’t want.
The reaction that burst out of you.
The outrage at the world.
The spontaneous madness of love.

— What lurks beyond your image. It all still lives under the surface.

and beneath that surface something inside YOU is begging for liberation, for exposure.
This isn’t an idea — it is under your skin.

But of course, against our modern instinct — the instinct to observe the horror of the world from a distance. That distance is what turned ordinary men into brutal fascist pawns during the Nazi era.

That distance is bullshit.
This is all much, much more personal.

We are not simply witnessing horror.
Our bodies, our psyches, are actively participating in its exposure.

We are not separate from the conditions that produce what shocks us. The systems we condemn are sustained by countless small agreements — compromises, silences, performances of normalcy. We point upward at visible power while ignoring the architecture that makes such power possible in the first place. These systems — they live in our bodies like mold.

So may I ask you —

What instinct are you keeping pressed beneath the floorboards?

I listen to people speak the unspeakable for a living. Hours and hours every week I listen beneath the polished surfaces of ordinary lives, beneath competence and kindness and social grace —

there are entire psychic underworlds sealed shut by necessity, fear, and shame.

The world is not becoming worse. The underworld is simply becoming less concealed.

We have attempted to sanitize existence.
And we call this civilization.
The cost of this politeness is violence, simply.

Behind closed doors — in private thought, private impulse, private fantasy, private despair — another reality breathes.

A force that will not negotiate with the ego’s demand for comfort. A pressure that insists on reality — whole reality — not the curated fragment we prefer to inhabit.

The demonic is what does God’s dirty work for Him.
And perhaps that is why we recoil from it so violently.

Perhaps that is why we call it evil.
Because it does not ask permission.
It demands.
It comes pounding on our doors at night.
And at some level, we always knew it would. We know it is telling the truth.

But perhaps—

“Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.”

I’ll use a dream to help articulate…

3 a.m. last night — a demon bursts through my door, coming for me as I lie helpless. It rips me completely out of my sleep. “My sleep” — in other words, the last threads of unconscious slumber I walk through life with. “Yeah… you should be scared.”

Shocked awake. The sliding glass door beside my bed is somehow open. I feel the fresh air caress the side of my face, the empty ecstasy of the silent night, and it dawns on me. The meaning of the dream, like a lightning strike, erupts from my chest, and I am in tears. I am waking up

to the utter lack of separation between my bedroom, my interior life, my dreams, my desires — and the world outside.

The door is fully open, and I breathe the air coming into my bedroom, free from the shackles of something I once believed imprisoned me. My heart is still racing from the dream. I believe I am saved…

by the very horror I fought to keep away.

If I could have moved — if I had the power — I would have shut the door so that creature couldn’t get inside. But I couldn’t. And that

is why this moment in time is so, so very important.

Before you look outside at the horror we are immersed in and say, “Wow, isn’t that awful?”
while helplessly going about living your life…

There is something you can do to participate.

Turn toward that which horrifies you, or that truth crawling at the back of your neck, or the bottom of your belly.

Have the courage to put your phone down after reading this and listen. Look it in the eyes and ask…

“What is it that you are asking of me? Of what do you demand of me?”

Have the courage to be unflinching in its response.

As this might be the path to reclaim what it means
to truly be

A sovereign Individual