… a two-part inquiry into the darkness and the light

Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite movies. Some people I’ve talked with about it thought it was too violent for them to watch. I get that. It definitely has its darkness, kind of like our world.

I decided to watch the two trilogies back-to-back again, The Hobbit and LOTR, and see if immersion gave me additional insights. I am only halfway through the 2nd Hobbit film and here I am, insights in hand, heart, and soul. With the state of the world today, it is likely that these insights were primed to go.

Tolkien’s work is filled with varying stages of evil’s embodiment: orcs and wargs, ballrogs, trolls and dragons, creepy giant spiders and the oathbreakers, the Nazgul and barrow wights, and that incomplete list doesn’t even include the Dark Lords, Morgoth and Sauron, the two who have fully gone over to evil, or Gollum, the once-Hobbit who is having an identity crisis, vacillating between helping and killing Frodo.

There are monsters enough for anyone in Tolkien’s work.

We tend to tell ourselves stories, stories that allow us to sleep at night, to look in the mirror and not cringe, stories that paint us as the good guys, or at least as the not so bad guys, surely not monsters.

The story goes like this: we are the dragon slayers not the dragons. We are the ones who clearly see the orcs, the amassing spiders, the trolls coming down from the mountains. We are doing all that we can, but the world is big, and we are (in the words of Gandalf) “quite a little fellow in a wide world after all”.

We don’t look at the monsters, not for what they really are, the billionaires we celebrate while they pick our pockets, while they tell their lies to grab more booty, while they program the algorithms to ensure we never see the truth.

… or the politicians putting their reflection, their reelection, their own bank accounts, their hidden crimes, their payoffs and bribes from criminals they pardon, ahead of the victims of those self-same crimes.

They live without thought of the people who are suffering, laughing while many are literally dying in detention camps, and immigrant children are being separated from their mommies and daddies and then like pennies, are conveniently lost in the system. These same people are intentionally failing to educate America’s children while requiring our teachers to share their lies or lose their jobs. They gleefully cheer while denying funds to states because they voted blue, because they think differently, because they dared to oppose their rotten hearts and lost souls.

We rarely even look at the monster’s victims, the homeless man on the street, the children dying in Gaza, the neighbor next door who can’t afford his meds or has to choose between them and his next meal, the broken families crying for help, the elders suffering from lack of connection, from constant episodes of loneliness, unable to find their way to the light at the end of the tunnel that no longer exists. They are casualties of war, a war being fought without permission, a war between the rich and poor.

We close our eyes or tell ourselves stories to get through the night. It’s no wonder we don’t want to look at the monsters in the movies. We can’t even look at the monsters standing right next to us.

We elect them over and over again. That’s how blind we are to their monstrous natures. We elect them. We celebrate them. We idolize them. Magazines chronicle them. Books are written about them. Our celebrity fixation is silently sucking the soul out of our world.

And it has almost completed its job.

When everyday people take on the sheen of monster, you know that we are close to the finish line, not a line most of us would like to cross, but one that bodes a point of no return. When people cannot see the monster sitting next to them, the monster they admire, the monster they have become, the transition is nearly complete.

I always wondered how Germany could have murdered millions without much in the way of opposition. I guess I shouldn’t have put that question into the ethers, because life is answering it loudly. Good people didn’t sit by and allow it to happen. Those good people were transformed into monsters, slowly, silently, one unconscious agreement, one unresisted cruelty at a time.

There is a reason to look, to allow ourselves to see, to sit down in sacred unity and befriend our own monsters. If we can’t look, if we don’t see, we are unintentionally slipping and sliding into the monstrous evil that is penetrating the soul of the world.

If we can’t watch it on the movie screen, there is little hope that we will allow ourselves to truly see it, to grok what is happening, before it is too late, before we too are consumed by the lies.

We can be the monster, any one of them, from an orc to Sauron. There are as many kinds of evil as there are people who have lost touch with their hearts and souls, with their innate compassion and unbridled empathy. Or we can let the monsters within fade into oblivion and instead be like Frodo or Sam, Gandalf, Legolas or Aragorn, or any one of the nameless soldiers who simply showed up and stood for the light.

Whatever we choose, we must consciously choose. The monster is the default, the person we become when we do nothing in these immoral times.

Part II

Many get stuck in the ascension phase because it feels so good. Hey, if it feels good it must be right, right? It’s also the story many gurus are selling. but theirs is not the full story. It’s a shell game. But, we humans do love our gurus. They keep us safe, our on their limb rather than on our own.

Yesterday I wrote about monsters, the monsters without, the monsters under the bed, the monsters within. It was a dark piece, that is if you divide the world into dark and light. Most scrolled right by. You know, we have enough darkness in the world; we don’t need to look too closely.

But we do and many of us now have the capacity to befriend the monsters that are utterly, remarkably, basic to this story called awakening. We do our deep shadow work in order to rise, to discover what we are, what life is without the stories of our agreed upon monsters, only to return, to come back into the world renewed, to walk amongst the monsters with the grace of genuine recognition that no one was ever monstrous at all.

How can we be of good use while separating the world into good and evil, while seeing ascension as the ultimate goal and all who have not as ignorant, while isolating ourselves from the world and letting it burn, while being unwilling to look into the monster’s eyes and not look away?

We, those of us who are on the front edge of shift, and there are many, can stop now at the heights, where life feels good as long as we remember to focus on the light, like we have throughout the ages, or we can do something truly radical.

It’s what made the walk of Jesus so memorable that we still talk about him today, not that he was God, but that he was fully human. He stood right in the middle of the monsters, in the midst of those who had lost touch with their hearts, with their innately human need to empathize, with their willingness to lend a hand to a stranger and showed them what love-in-action looks like.

Yes, he was nailed to a cross for his impossibly beautiful actions, for the truth that resonated in his words, but he knew that this world wasn’t a final destination, that it was but one of infinite stories unfolding across time and space, and even so, it was precious beyond understanding, worth everything his love could offer.

Jesus was a way shower. That’s the reason those in control, those who have lost their sacred connection, made him into a God. They nullified his message, putting distance between his actions and the people. They disarmed the threat, thinking they had removed the fuse and walked away: job done.

But they were wrong. Their job is not done. The message ripples across the universe and is available to any and all with the willingness and ability to hear.

It isn’t done when we move through ascension and return to the world. It isn’t when we bring the message back with us. It isn’t when we consciously descend into the middle of the hot mess, not as missionaries or as proselytizers, but as love-in-action.

Amaya is the author of 7 books, the latest Actuality: infinity at play. It is available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and IngramSparks and others. Link to B&N https://bit.ly/4bXLFie