Obstructing Forces

As mentioned, unfreedom, ineffectiveness, and disharmony of the mind is its “darkened,” “shackled,” or, in more religious semantics, “fallen” state. As they say, the world as a whole is “darkened” and imperfect: in the East this finds expression in the figure of Mara’s omnipotence, holding the Wheel of Samsara in his claws, while in the West the same idea is expressed in the image of the “Father of the World” — Baphomet — the “fallen” World vortex.

At the level of being, this “constraining” property of the universe is traditionally called “Heimarmene,” “universal fate,” and on the level of the mind — its “inclination toward evil,” “Yetzer hara.”

If we set aside this terminology, we can say that both the “external” world and the manifestations of the mind possess a significant gilgul or samsaric inertia, sustaining a cycle with neither beginning nor end and preventing any escape from it.

That is, strictly speaking, the unfreedom of the mind does not have to be described only in terms of “hostile beings,” dark deities or demons (although such a description offers practical advantages); it can equally well be considered in mechanistic or automatic terms as simply one of the properties of the universe.

At the same time, underestimating this “samsaric inertia,” this “resistance to liberation,” often has very negative consequences. In particular, treating Yetzer hara not as a property, but as a mere “product” of the mind creates the illusion that it is relatively easy to overcome, which leads to the fatal error of many seekers: it seems to them that since the nature of the mind is light, then darkness can simply be ignored, and such ignoring is presented as a “victory” over darkness. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the “enlightened,” who have achieved a semblance of inner harmony and bliss by displacing darkness to the periphery of their inner world and building a wall between the acknowledged “light” part of the mind and the denied dark part, often prove to be the most powerful source of selfishness, lies, destruction, and other poisons that do nothing to increase light in the world and, on the contrary, deepen it. In the same way, a casual attitude toward Heimarmene as an inherent property of the manifested world often leads to catastrophes, like the one that befell the greatest stronghold of Enlightenment — Tibet, which fell under the onslaught of a materialistic civilization.

From the perspective of the magical myth, both ways of describing forces and actors — the “character-based” and the “mechanical” — are incomplete and adequate only with many conditions and caveats, and therefore it is precisely their combination that makes it possible to build the most effective strategy of development. As mentioned, mind itself as a universal phenomenon can be described both as a property inherent in the fabric of the universe, arising when giving a superposition of probable states of any system a definite state, and as the “subject” component of the Great Spirit — the supra-unified whole of transcendental reality. In the same way, all beings — people, gods, demons, angels, and so on — must simultaneously be regarded both as “automatic” predicates of reality and as quite concrete beings and entities possessing their own existence.

Accordingly, in order to build a sound development strategy, it is necessary to avoid unjustified carelessness and frivolity, and to ultimately acknowledge that it is inherent in the mind to resist development, and it is inherent in the universe to create obstacles to escaping its conditioning, and that these resistances are not simply easily surmountable illusions; they are woven into the fabric of gilgul and are one of its most important qualities.

When we speak of “demons,” they should simultaneously be understood both as manifestations of the mindstream’s own dark inertias and as volitional beings. And when it is a matter of forces that “obstruct liberation,” they should also be regarded both as one’s own “samsaric inertia” and as a collection of concrete actors. For example, for Tibet such “obstructing forces” became China’s “People’s Liberation Army,” which at the same time both carried out its own limited functions and served as an expression of the universe’s general tendency of mind to obstruct liberation. Such an attitude spares one from frivolity in development, and also prevents one from “pouring out” into the world one’s hidden — and therefore even more monstrous — destructive desires, inclinations, and reactions.