Essay #9:  True Power vs. False Power

The ascent of the ego does not happen accidentally or at random.  Its overemphasis on the role and efficacy of our own actions amounts to a distortion of true power into false power. False power may also be called personal power. Personal power is that which the ego projects apart from God, as if any power at all could be owned and operated apart from the Creator.  Moreover, we will see that this projection assumes various shapes depending on certain factors pertaining to its origin.

In the previous essay the ego first emerged as the commander of power intent on eliciting a response from God.  In fact, as we noted at the end, the roles the ego assumes for itself are much broader and extend into arenas where the divine influence is hardly to be felt, much less acknowledged.  All of those roles, however, are spawned from that breakdown in our understanding where God’s universal caring and particular caring are separated, which is why we first needed to take that as our special focus.  Once God’s particular caring is divorced from the universal, it becomes just a further step to distort his particular creations on our behalf into manifestations of something ruled or understood solely by the ego.  Thus the ego’s abuses extend much farther than the hubris of merely claiming to be the instigator of God’s actions, and personal power takes much uglier shapes than just the boasts of the loudest member of the congregation. 

Our strategy in Essay #7 was to approach true knowledge through a growing appreciation of the limits of understanding.  We will take a similar approach to true power here.  We will first examine false power in order to reveal its origins and limitations.  In the course of our examination it will become clearer what true power is and where it comes from.  Let us note at the outset that our ego’s addiction to false power actually weakens us and keeps us from accessing true power in much the same way as the seduction of analytical understanding keeps us from accessing unitive consciousness and life in the Kingdom.

Our ego’s struggle for power may have begun just when power was taken from us early in our lives, or when we perceived that power was taken away.  If so, our struggle began when we were wronged. In this case, the root of the wrong lay not originally in us, but outside of us, in our parents or those charged with our care when we were little.  For them, too, the struggle for power must have begun with being wronged, denied power.  Over time, however, they allowed the root of evil to grow within themselves insofar as they made misguided attempts to right how they were wronged.  As they grew older they seized something they perceived as power and lorded it over us and others.  This made them feel powerful while making us seem and feel powerless.  In this way, the cycle we can characterize as the abuse of power has perpetuated itself.

To be clear, we have to say here at the beginning that true power was never taken from us by our parents for they did not have the means to grant it in the first place.  We will come to see that true power is only that which is granted from On High.  The struggle described above actually occurred within a vacuum where true power had already disappeared, as it were.  Nevertheless, the perception of a loss of power motivated our parents to try to heal by seizing power of a certain type and scope.

Their early loss or wound would have planted in them additional perceptions of separation and weakness, which themselves further watered the seeds of the belief that they had been robbed of a power originating in them.  We can imagine all this setting in motion a quest to recover that power in order both to bridge separation and to protect themselves with strength.  Into that quest the ego was born.  What we have here is actually quite reminiscent of the way we saw Adam and Eve come to analytical understanding.  Seduced by a taste for knowledge that offered the power to predict and control, they actually fell from true power. That is, they exchanged the power of true knowledge of the whole for the lesser power of understanding whose grasp extends only to parts.  Before they fell, they enjoyed true knowledge and true power without knowing any lack.  After they fell, the lack they experienced defined their understanding and their frailty.  In a similar way, before our parents were ever quite aware of what true power was, they were wounded and ejected into a vacuum of power comparable to Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden.  That is to say, in the scenario we are imagining, our parents may once have been truly powerful, flexing their muscles and exploring life with all the gusto of young sprigs rising up to meet the sun.  But then they were met with a shock that tore them from the very soil they had known and deposited them onto a landscape where they felt compelled to defend themselves against perils they didn’t know existed.  Thus the ego was born.

Perhaps we ourselves can remember such early days of our own youth when we acted strong but had no well-developed sense of separation from other children in our group.  We just played and frolicked, and pushed and shoved, trading places all the while, content to play every role.  Perhaps we can remember, too, one day when someone approached us in a way we had never known, took hold of us and shook us, scolded us and shouted, insisting that we pay attention.  At first we may have thought this was part of the game and looked back at the others for reassurance.  Surely they, too, were participating the same.  But then it came.  We noticed they were not participating.  The same rude force that was shaking us was keeping them at bay.  We had never noticed them in this way before, but now we were being made to.  We were being forced to see ourselves singled out and separated from the group, not for any reason other than that we were being made to feel different, and in particular, lesser. Perhaps they at the same moment were made aware of themselves as separate from us, and sensing our predicament, chose to come out on the other end and laughed at us.  How different this laughter must have rung in our ears from the laughter just moments ago that was the joyful expression of shared true power.  This new laughter was instead the bone-chilling sound of exclusion and derision, concepts we had no prior experience of.

In our new position we would have felt more naked than Adam, lonely and humiliated, betrayed and mortally wounded.  The course of our lives would have changed forever at that point, and our prior experience of true power would have quickly faded into a distant memory.  From that point on, our whole being would have been shocked into arousal like a sleeper waking up to find a snake nesting on his chest.  Our lives from then on would have been determined to collect a force sufficient enough to overcome any separation, prevent any attack, suppress any criticism, and defeat any enemy.  The shock itself would have driven any memory of true power from our minds, for true power depended on implicit trust. Our rude awakening was precisely designed to shatter in us any such sense of trust.   It was intent on rattling us to the point where we could no longer trust even ourselves and were made to stoop into meager compliance with our aggressor.

Once our parents were wounded, they became aware of their own separateness and weakness, whereas before these were not things they considered at all.  This awareness, as we are seeing, was the seed of their belief in a missing personal power.  Similar to the way that understanding exists in the absence of unitive consciousness, personal power exists in the absence of true power.  It is false power, as it were, because it is sees itself as the Source, or it simply takes no consideration of the Source.  It is false in exactly the same way that the principle of causality is false.  That is, neither causality nor personal power contain within themselves a force that necessitates any outcome.  Both causality and personal power are, therefore, wholly illusory.  So-called “causes and effects” do follow one another in regular succession.  Likewise, we observe changes in material things, humans, and other living beings in response to humans who exert personal power.  However, in both cases the effects or outcomes follow from God’s grace and not from any force of necessity separate from the Source.  Hence, the ascent of personal or false power is due not to its inherent effectiveness.  We will see that true power is vastly more effective.  Rather, false power arises in the vacuum where true power has been lost or forgotten and the perception of separation spawns all manner of illusory adversaries.  False power takes as its quest the control of all the separate pieces arrayed on the game board of life.  It is granted its portion of outcomes by God’s grace, but it believes itself able to be the sole source and measure of all that unfolds.  The ego accepts no rivals.

Like understanding, false power arises once a higher state of consciousness has been lost.  Unlike understanding, however, it springs from a profoundly emotional not an intellectual loss.  It seems very apt to describe the origin of personal power as a wound, whereas the origin of understanding cannot be so described.  Therefore, the specific shape and character that personal power assumes for any individual one of us must be traced back to the specific nature of the wound he or she received.  An investigation of the wound can reveal much about the character of the person and what it will take for them to relinquish personal power and follow the Way of Return to true power.  We will need to pay special attention to the physics of the wound in order to discover that false power, like understanding, has its limit border.  There is a time and place where we fall through even the most carefully crafted of our own defenses and discover again the lost universe of the playground and the puppy pile.  There can be a moment when a new and effortless power seems to spring from the ashes of our own spent power.

In coming to terms with the wound, then, we must return to the point in our lives where it seemed the only course to recovery was though a scramble to overcome separation and regain enough strength to prevent it from ever happening again.  We must admit that that which was imposed on us and withheld from us in our youth as powerlessness was not anything ordained from above.  It was the product of merely human effort, which issued in suffering.  What we perceived as a loss was crafted by our parent’s perceptions and delivered to us as part of a lie.  This was the lie they first told themselves about how to go about securing power to heal from their wound.  That lie became part of the DNA of a disease that started spreading as soon as they began acting out their grab for power.  The disease had many effects upon us–not only our own suffering but also the mental belief that replicating the infection in others defined a path to our own healing.  That was wrong.

The path to healing must begin from the event of perceived powerlessness in our lives–the wound–and bring to bear the truth that true power was never granted in the first place.  The parent acted out as if entitled to power, but there was never any such entitlement.  Rather, right at this juncture there occurred a slip out of alignment with the divine plan–with the Kingdom–that was indeed the infection by something deadly.  It amounted to the placement of the human ego upon the throne, and to the displacement of God’s own will.  The reason for our suffering was not so much that we were robbed of power we already had, but rather that we were not protected and guided so that we stayed in the flow of true power from the Source.  We were not properly educated, that is, led out into the world.  We were not properly taught.  We were left uneducated by those whose job it should have been to guide us and bring us along in the light.  Instead, we got infected by their darkness and deluded into believing that it was up to us to cure the disease.

Someone once saw in the word “ego” an abbreviation for “edge God out.”  Here we are discovering that the ego arises precisely at the moment where God has been edged out by a trauma or wound that spawns a serious delusion.  We become delusional just when we imagine that there is such a thing as personal power.  The impression left by the blow our handler inflicted on us created the impression that there must have been some true force behind it that originated from the handler.  That it had an effect upon us is beyond doubt.  In reality, however, its power issued from the Source and not from the handler.  By God’s grace it came through the handler.  The ego is the seat of the delusion whereby the true origin of power is displaced by a false one.  And again, the ego can take all kinds of shapes depending on the nature of the original wound.  If the wound was of such a nature that we became very fearful, then the ego would, for example, become very protective.  If the wound was of the nature that we felt completely thwarted, then again, the ego would turn out controlling or angry.  If the chief feature of the wound was loss, then the ego would become hoarding, and so forth.

True power is only and always that which is granted from above.  However, the distorted perception of a loss of power motivates us to try to heal that loss by seizing power of a similar type and scope to that which we perceive we have lost.  The ego arises like a workman who wants to pick up a manhole cover to go back and put it over an open manhole.  Except that the manhole existed in a neighborhood that was torn down long ago and persists only in memory.

The ego is thus always trying to use some artifice of the present to fit a wound in the past.  It is a losing proposition and teaches us something more about the illusory nature of personal power.  The old hole or wound cannot be filled or closed in this way.  The cover we seize today never quite fits the wound of the past.  This is partly because, as part of the past, that wound is no longer accessible to us in the present.  Merely human or personal power cannot in and of itself alter the past.  It attempting to do so on its own, it runs afoul of the same slip or error that led to misalignment with divine power in the first place.  In other words, the application of the same kind of power to heal the wound that led to the wound in the first place cannot succeed.  Thus it is not just because the wound is part of the past that we cannot heal it.  More fundamentally, it is because of the self-limiting nature of human power per se. Seen strictly from the viewpoint of the dimensions of space and time, historical events are perceived to determine later events but themselves sink into an inaccessible past.  Any attempt made to alter the present state of things to free it from past influences is doomed to failure.  Locked in this linear chronology, the human will or ego attempts to use counter-efforts and artifice to make up for its inability to transform the past.  Were it instead to reunite with God’s will, as we will see, the human will would not find the past intractable, nor would it encounter many other limits which it imposes upon itself.

Stuck in the present, we try to approximate the size and shape of our old wound or hole with what we devise–we might say–to achieve a kind of resonance with our old pain.  Thus the ego that becomes overly protective, for example, looks for resonance in its defenses which would “cancel out” or defeat its old fears.  The ego that attempts to rule from anger and control seeks resonances that would “drown out” or intimidate the old wound’s power to overcome it.  And the ego that has suffered great loss seeks resonances of any and every bandwidth by hoarding, in order to neutralize whatever kinds or frequencies of loss may still resound in it in the present.  We may note that all of these attempts to heal are counter-efforts played out on the same psychological level as the original wound.  It is a level both removed from divine interplay and confined by the perceptual strictures of space and time in a purely human world.  On this level, more and more effort, and greater and greater artifice, by themselves do not issue in the desired outcome.¹ In fact, as we shall soon see, they come to a limit border which itself points the way beyond spatial and temporal linearity altogether to a zone of true healing.

The ego’s efforts are doomed to fail, as we said, but they indeed create various disharmonies of their own.  Let us imagine trying to play a trumpet with a drumstick, or to play a French horn using cymbals.  Or let us imagine pushing a magnet against another magnet whose polarity is the same.  The harder we push, the more resistance we meet with.   The ego’s effort becomes ugly like this.  The disharmonies of the power push quickly begin to harm ourselves and others.   And because the ego’s lid doesn’t ever quite fit our old wound, the enterprise feeds on its own dissatisfaction and spawns still more suffering.

Once again, we find ourselves trying to heal our own powerlessness of the past by seizing power in the present. The characteristics of our past powerlessness govern our choices of the kind and extent of power we attempt to seize in the present.  The suffering caused by our present efforts is somehow proportional to the extent to which they cannot quell our old suffering or staunch our old wound.  Our old suffering, in fact, comes out of the ego’s trumpet bell magnified by the way we redouble our efforts to accomplish something that cannot be accomplished how we’re doing it.  How many others we drag into our suffering depends on how reckless we succeed in becoming.  Again, the disharmonies inherent in our efforts can take many shapes, depending essentially on the ways in which they fail to fit and cover our old wound.  Here we can think of Pandora’s box, and imagine her trying to cover it not only too late but having picked up a lid of the wrong size and shape.  All of her grating efforts to slam on that lid would not get the job done.  Yet a lot of ear-splitting noises could come from them.   If she noticed what she was doing, she would stop.  But not usually having the benefit of being able to see what we’re doing, we tend to go on and on in our misguided efforts to fix our past and our destiny:  here our past and future may collide in a way that casts our present into a living inferno.

To embark upon the Way of Return, we really have no alternative but to go back to our original event of perceived powerlessness and there unravel our catastrophe and find a way out.  It was someone’s event before it was ours.  That someone originally owned it, and then they may have passed it on to us by one of the many disharmonies that issued from it.  This sort of thing spreads like a disease.  All along this discussion we have supposed the event was our parent’s or that it belonged to someone in charge of caring for us.  These are only likely scenarios chosen for examples.  Our fall from true power could have occurred in innumerably different ways and at the hands of persons who intersect our lives in all manner of relationships.  The point is that it did occur for at least the great majority if not all of us and that it did occur in one or more specific events.

We begin to approach the limit border of false power when we realize that these events, though they did have an effect on us, all had a kind of borrowed power and not true or inherent power.  We come to see them at last like projections upon the floor of a great building.  The light streams in through the windows, gets filtered, and forms projections on the floor.  As impressive as the projections may appear, we at some point discover that they are not inherent in the floor.  They are not painted or inlaid there but are wholly dependent on a higher source.  Furthermore, we discover that the source itself is hidden from us.  In fact, the windows are stained and tinted, covered with layers of grime and grease.  The windows in this metaphor correspond to the distorting effects of our own minds and egos, and the projections correspond to our distorted perceptions.  Just as there is light behind the projections, there is power in the distorted ways that our perception and use of personal power appear in the world.  We might say that pure light condescends to pass through filthy glass and project on the floor.  In similar fashion, God passes his power to us through grace even when we have a distorted perception of it as our own and bend it to uses that he never intended.  In the end, the sum of all this refracted and distorted power cannot rival or replace God’s true power any more than those smudged images on the floor of the building can rival the orb of the sun.

That the nature of true power is like this cannot be proved any more than we could prove that the Principle of Expansion is the ontological basis of the universe.  It is an awareness that we come to from the careful consideration of the limits of personal power, just as a consideration of the limits of understanding led us toward unitive consciousness.  As we reflect more and more closely on our old wound and the effect it had on our awareness of power, we begin to see in our distorted perceptions the origins of evil and suffering.  We discover that there is a lack of goodness in the actions that spring from false power due precisely to the distortion and diffusion of true power.  Suffering and evil manifest where there is just such a lack of goodness, and we may define “evil” itself as the lack of goodness.

True power, on the other hand, shines through as goodness manifesting through action. Where do we say that goodness comes from?  As Plato noted in a prior age, in goodness we have about as accurate a description we can come to in this world of the inherent nature of the Source. It is that nature emanating and radiating into our world which we perceive and enjoy as true power. Strength without goodness cannot be called “powerful” for long.  Might which is not guided by goodness soon carries us into a ditch.  True power always implies goodness, and both goodness and power come from above.  That is, we ultimately come to see that goodness is not of our own making any more than power is from our own taking.  True power and goodness go hand in hand and spring from the same Source. This insight begins to crisply sharpen our view of ourselves as receivers in relation to the Source.

Another reflection will make this still clearer.  Take any action whether done by us or by another.  Actions themselves are just actions.  Often we cannot be certain whether they are ultimately good or bad.  At most, we have the ability to intend that they be good.  Obviously, even in our ego’s misguided attempts to fill our old wound can be found the intention for a good outcome. The point is, though, that our intention alone does not dependably guarantee us a good outcome.  The goodness of any action seemingly floats independently of the action itself.  What “anchors” it to the action?  Evidently not anything that we ourselves are in command of.  Rather, it is by the grace of God that actions become good.  We may imagine that God sends entities to us, messengers or angels if you will, whose job it is to deliver goodness to our actions.  Strange as it may seem, we may imagine that they bring “capsules” of goodness to us from the Most High.  By his command, let us say, they drop these capsules onto our actions which thereby become good.  Be these images metaphorical or not, goodness is granted from On High; it is something we receive rather than create by our own efforts.

When we land near the memory of our old wound with these insights we at last see that the path to healing is the same now as it would have been then:  to bring our emptiness to God and ask to be filled, to expose our darkness and ask that he bathe it in light.  We return to the juncture we earlier described as “a slip out of alignment with the divine plan,” realizing now that the slip occurred when we were made to stop relying on God’s true power by the perception of false power that was imposed on us.  The imposed illusion of a lack of power we realize now goes hand in hand with the perception that what was lost and must be regained was personal power, which is false.  What was lost was our proper relationship with our Creator through which we were fully cared for and supplied.  What must be regained is our natural and total reliance on his providence.  What we must pray once again with Jesus is that “God’s will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

To realign ourselves with the divine plan means to return to full awareness of where true power comes from and to full reliance on that Source.  We become aware, once again, that we are empty of any power of our own and ask God to fill us.  Furthermore, we become aware that our past distortions and misuses of the power God granted us through grace resulted in darkness, that is, a lack of goodness.  We acknowledge that goodness, too, is not of our own making and ask that God bathe our darkness in light filling us with his own good nature.  We ask to be allowed to abide in that nature–again following Christ–as those in whom the Father dwells and who dwell in the Father.  Uplifted and transformed in this sense, we can rejoin our kindred spirits in the sandbox and the puppy pile.

While we cannot literally return to the playground, to the time when we innocently enjoyed God’s true power playing out in us, it turns out we don’t have to.  To God, time has no measure, so in this way the hurts of the past become part of the spaciousness of the eternal present in which God works and where he transforms us.  We can work with past experiences all we like.² This is only saying that when the work is done and God has sent us grace, we are filled now, in the present moment, and moment by moment trust him and come from him.  The past is, in a way, forgotten, and we are truly transformed.  Thus we can come to God with past hurts as well as with present and future challenges.  The power of his will is such that past, present, and future exist in him simultaneously.  They unfold for us, but for God his transforming touch is a manifestation of grace that he has kept for us from the beginning and eternally.

When Jesus said that he came only to do the will of his Father in Heaven, he was teaching us about the Source of all power.  And when he denied being good but assigned all goodness to the Father, he was defining for us the equation that both goodness and power spring from the same Source.  This ontology, though briefly expressed, has all the profound consequences that we are seeing in these chapters.  When we begin to fully see ourselves as receivers of power and goodness then we begin to understand what Jesus meant when he said that God seeks those who “worship him through the Spirit and in truth.”  The Spirit is the means by which God’s grace flows from heaven into our lives.  To worship through the Spirit means to be open to receiving what God would give us.  To worship in truth means to come from true knowledge of God as Source rather than from analytical understanding which would place God outside his own creation.  With this we have arrived at the heart of Christologic ontology.

Power understood in this context is the “soft power” of doing nothing ourselves, just as Jesus claimed he did nothing of his own.  It is the “non-doing” spoken of by Eastern religions, in whose total yielding the most pure power takes up habitation.  This is a far cry from the “hard-edged power” we are accustomed to dealing with in the West.   Jesus of course knew this type of power, for it was the very backbone of the Roman Empire that crucified him.  And so he had much to do to and to teach in order to lead his disciples out from the threat of that debacle and into the light.  We will count ourselves among them and begin now to look more closely at who Jesus was and what he came to reveal that could be of help to us.  We will see that Jesus himself embodies the ontology which issues in the Way of Return.  He is the Father’s logos made flesh.  The practices of return spring from him as from the Source whose will he came to do.  Insofar as he received the logos in perfect form, he became for us the highest exemplar of the life that opens to it.  “Follow me!” he could say with no risk that his ego was projecting a path that deflected from the Father, for “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  Therefore, “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well.”

Notes:

1. We do not wish to undertake here a detailed criticism of the various theories of clinical psychology. That is beyond our scope. We only wish to point out that any theory of psychology which purports truly to heal the soul must discover the path by which the soul–or the ego–returns to God.  Otherwise, no matter what artifice it brings to bear, all of its efforts will meet with the same fate as the ego which wanders separated from God.  That is, they will eventually collapse back upon themselves ineffective.  Apart from God, they are like a number written above itself, which equals “1” no matter how large it becomes, confined to a single plane and unable to attain to that Force alone which can effect true change and true healing.
2. This would include, of course, the various kinds of therapy that engage with past experiences.