XV-The Devil

You are your own worst enemy. You know that, right?

Every demon, every darkness, every self-sabotaging habit comes from something within you, and you alone have the ability to root it out. I know that sounds unkind, and there are so many external factors that give us the seeds of these issues that become problems. Sometimes things happen to us. Sometimes we ourselves happen to us. But whether the damage came from without or within, how we manage the result is always, always an inside job.

The Devil is dense. It is thick and dark, and it represents places that we have managed to trap ourselves. Usually, that looks like fear. Sometimes avoidance. Oftentimes compulsion or justification. But when the Devil arrives, it is always showing us that we have gotten ourselves stuck and that it is time to become aware and get ourselves unstuck.

In the practice of yoga we call the manifestations of this behaviour samskaras, or scars. They are the grooves that the mind can slip right into after repeating a pattern or a belief over and over again. You will play these patterns out throughout your entire life as you subconsciously seek to reinforce your personal, experienced belief system. You need to justify, on some level the experiences, emotions and traumas that you experienced as being valid. So you repeat them. You become your very own self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t think many people realize just how easy it is to get caught in this type of emotional feedback loop. The system of thought to emotion to physical reinforcement is lightening fast and well, well established inside our matrix. The thought leads to the emotion associated to it. And the emotion leads to the hormone response that validates the emotion, which validates the thought. All it takes is one thought to trigger this process. The reward delivery sensation in the body is exactly the same whether the thought is fear based or motivation based. The chemicals are different, but the process is the same. You think it, then you feel it. This is how we create beliefs centered around that “feeling”. Do it often enough and you create a reality for yourself.

You’re a junkie. We all are. Every single one of us is absolutely addicted to proving our process is correct, documented and able to be recreated. It is actually quite scientific. The problem is that most of us don’t even know we are doing it.

In order to break this, you have to choose your addiction, and you have to choose to participate. You have to look the Devil in the eye and take this process firmly out of those hands. No more autopilot.

The first instinct when the Devil appears is to deny. You’re spiritual, you’ve been working on your stuff a long time, you have cleared it. I mean, you made it to Temperance, right? Sure. The second instinct is to immediately ascribe a negative connotation. I mean, its the Devil, right? Right.

Or not so much. When the Devil comes knocking, you have to look. What pattern are you locked in? Where are you trying really hard to prove to yourself that whatever happened had purpose and that the decisions and reactions you make out of that experience are for your best interest. It is a highly selfish process, this Devil patterning. It is self-justification at its finest. Whether that justification be related to your spiritual evolution or your relationship abuse, a feedback loop is a feedback loop.

You gotta break it if you want to move on. That’s the only way to get to awareness.