America's Fight with the Shadow
An excerpt from my forthcoming book "The Coming World Nation"
This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book The Coming World Nation. It’s taken from the final section of the book’s first chapter, which is titled “How Capitalism Changed America”.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the book’s introduction, which I shared a couple weeks ago: “The Kali Yuga Reaches Its Grand Finale”.
Revisiting our earlier discussion of Aztec mythology, we recall how Tezcatlipoca, the spirit of darkness, manifested its archetypal themes through the rise of an evil cult of black magicians who fetishized power, instigated wars, and practiced human sacrifice. Are today’s capitalist oligarchs - with their insatiable thirst for power and wealth, their war profiteering, and the economic hardship they inflict by their usurious debt policies - not guilty of the same crimes? Do they not embody, in the modern age, the same 'Shadow' archetype as Tezcatlipoca?
Like Tezcatlipoca, these oligarchs adhere to no moral imperative or sense of higher purpose. Their motivations are entirely egotistical and self-serving - dedicated to the expansion of their own power and wealth at everyone else's expense. They pursue their ambitions at any cost, even if it means sacrificing large numbers of human lives, their suffering and death seen as nothing more than a justified means to a necessary end.
This modern-day iteration of Tezcatlipoca is not a natural creation of the United States. It was ported into America from Europe, its original homeland, where it had developed for millennia from a lineage that stretches back to the heyday of the Roman Empire.
Through a dedicated conspiracy, during the 19th century an elite network of European oligarchs strategically transplanted their system of financial capitalism into America. This plan required decades of careful plotting and strategizing before it finally succeeded.
The US Constitution was purposefully designed to try to prevent this from happening, but after a century of covert financial warfare waged against the young American nation, the capitalist oligarchies of Europe finally won out and achieved their great victory, with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 solidifying their capture of the United States.
In this manner, the feudal economic tradition of Europe, with its debt-based monetary regime, was institutionalized within America. As philosopher Manly Hall once pointed out, “that mistake set us back two hundred years.” In a 1944 article titled “Ours is the Blessed Land”, he explained that “our entire economic system is merely the transplanted European theory of coinage. We just moved it here. And that was a very serious error, for we created a conflict between traditions of the past and innovation.”
Instead of building a new civilization from scratch, one guided by the high philosophical ideals of the Founding Fathers, America instead “fell back upon European tradition for everything. … What we call American civilization is therefore merely European culture transplanted to a new environment.”
Hall wryly observes that “we fought the Revolutionary War to free ourselves of European interference, and then promptly accepted an economic system that was the supreme interference.” In particular, “the economics we use belonged to medieval Europe,” and before that to fallen Greece and Rome. It didn’t work for them, and it hasn’t worked for us today. Again and again, financial capitalism has demonstrated itself to be unsound, inadequate, and inhumane. And yet here we are, embracing it once again as the foundation of our modern way of life.
The monstrous economic system that has been built up in America over the past 150 years (since the onset of the Gilded Age), has steadfastly eroded the democratic foundations of the nation. It also led directly to America’s transformation into a global imperial superpower. In this role, it has become an agent of corruption, infecting the entire world with the same sickness that the oligarchs of Europe had originally inflicted upon it: the disease of financial capitalism.
The oligarchy behind financial capitalism operates as a great parasite: an unnatural, vampire-like Shadow monster that sucks the life out of society in order to feed and grow itself. In other words, this oligarchy is a modern manifestation of Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec spirit of darkness.
Collectively, these oligarchs and the system of financial capitalism they lord over personify the “Dweller on the Threshold”: the archetypal adversary of the ancient Mystery Schools, which arises to impede the candidate’s progress in their initiation journey, creating an existential barrier between them and the goal they are trying to achieve.
Philosophically considered, this is the classic role that the “Shadow” always plays in human life: it confronts us - both individually and collectively - as an archetypal adversary that impedes and blocks our own evolutionary advancement. In other words, its purpose is to lure us away from the realization of our higher potential. The only way to actualize this latent potential is to first overcome the barriers that Adversary has constructed around it.
In this manner, the modern-day capitalist oligarchy acts as an initiatory instrument designed to test collective humanity and lure it away from achieving the next stage of its evolutionary development. In order to attain the evolutionary growth we are seeking and to move beyond the current fallen state of civilization we have trapped ourselves in, we must first successfully confront and overcome this Adversary.
The only way to do this is to constructively engage with the challenges it presents us with and use them as an opportunity to learn and grow from. Here we come to a key point: the Shadow that confronts us - the capitalist oligarchy - is actually the karmic manifestation of the weaknesses and negative karma we maintain within ourselves. In other words, it exists as a concentrated expression of the Shadow traits present within each of us. As such, we cannot defeat its challenge until we are ready to successfully address and overcome our own shadow complexes.
Specifically, the capitalistic Shadow that guards the gate to the evolutionary progression of our civilization feeds off the greed, egotism, competitive instincts, and superstitious idolatry of wealth that most of us harbor within ourselves in some form or fashion.
Without the widespread existence of these character flaws within ourselves, the plague of corruption that financial capitalism brings could not take hold. Therefore, to overcome to evolution that financial capitalism represents and break through to a higher state of collective achievement, we must turn inward and confront the negative psychological elements that this parasitic economic paradigm preys upon within the populace. If we can successfully address these elements on a person-by-person basis, then we can come together to fight and win the great battle against this collective Adversary.
Building on this point, Manly Hall emphasizes that “We have to break up the old patterns. It is the only way we can free ourselves to build new patterns.” This requires “a complete breaking up of most of the intolerances we cherish.”
While the heritage of the oligarchical Adversary we face today has its roots in Europe, the headquarters of its operations is now in America. Consequently, it is within the United States that the final battle against the Shadow must be fought and won.
Manly Hall writes that “the natural temperament of our people is to be the greatest inventive and constructive genius of any people on Earth.” This genius “comes from the very earth beneath us here in the New World.” Being archetypally embedded within the land, it is ever-available for the American populace to draw upon; but before we can do this, we have first move beyond the inherited karmic baggage from Europe that has been transplanted into America, infecting it with its sickness.
Hall explains that the US has been torn, from its inception, between two opposing forces: “We have a competitive system coming down from the top, and a cooperative theory coming up from the very Earth beneath our feet. The struggle between these two forces is one of the greatest in the Western world, and that struggle must continue until the destiny or fate for which this continent was originally devised is fulfilled.”
What is this fate that Hall speaks of? It is one that Francis Bacon first envisioned hundreds of years ago. Here, in America, “must arise a model civilization: a civilization that will lure other nations to a similar way of living.”
“It is here, on this Western continent, that a great world sociological experiment must take place. By a curious destiny beyond human control, this continent demands, by reason of its vibratory forces, by the very archetypal pattern that caused this land to emerge from the primordial polar continent, that here the great economic experiment of the world must be played out.”
Hall declares that it is within America that “the theory of economics must finally be put in order.” To achieve this, “we must have the courage to break with traditional laws, to establish ourselves in our own way of life. We must do so harmoniously, cooperatively, and courageously.“
Put simply: the great initiation test that collective humanity is currently undergoing has its epicenter in America. The entrenched capitalist oligarchy that has taken control of the US government arises as an archetypal Adversary that Kali, the Hindu goddess of initiation, is using to perform her mass initiation ritual on us.
The candidate undergoing this initiation is collective humanity: we will only be allowed to proceed to the next phase of our evolutionary journey once we first undergo the experiences and pass the tests that Kali is presenting us with through her instrument of financial capitalism.
To succeed in our initiation, we must use the challenges we are being presented with as an opportunity to develop the wisdom, strength, and intelligence necessary to overcome the weaknesses within ourselves that Kali is externalizing through her chosen instrument: the capitalist oligarchy.
From a philosophical standpoint, Hall tells us that “money is not the root of all evil; it is merely one of the little twigs on the tree of Cause and Effect.” It is an instrument of the dharma in other words - a vehicle through which man’s evolutionary destiny is to be pursued and eventually fulfilled.
Hall further explains that “the economic problem is therefore not a supreme evil, it is a supreme challenge” - an initiatory test - “and the international nation cannot be developed from a possibility into an actuality until it is solved, nor can world peace be achieved.”
The challenge we now face, as Kali's collective initiation ritual comes to its culmination point, is to “restate, reestablish, and revitalize the great idealism of the world. We have got to restate in practical application the simple code upon which democracy was created: the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Nothing can be worked out until that is accomplished.”
And it will not be accomplished until we first begin the process of “transmuting the Shadow” within ourselves. “There can be no path that leads to permanent peace except that which is founded upon self-conquest. This is the most difficult and arduous of all procedures in nature, and yet no individual who has not conquered himself can safely be entrusted with the guidance of others. The only individual fit to rule is the one who has ruled himself.”
To become self-ruling, we have to shed the individual Shadow tendencies we maintain within ourselves. These are what the Collective Shadow - manifesting in the form of the capitalist oligarchy - feed off of in order to exert its tyranny. Therefore, so long as wealth addiction, greed, competition, and the other negative attributes of the Shadow linger on within us, the Dweller will remain in place, guarding the gate to a new and better age.
Philosophy is the key resource that we must turn to for guidance as we seek victory in this battle. Without it, we can’t access the wisdom and intelligence necessary to overcome the challenges that the Dweller confronts us with.
We need for philosophy to be revitalized and its vital teachings understood and put into practice. This is really an education problem, and therefore, as Hall emphasizes, “it is in the field of formal education that we should discover the creative power of divinity in the life of man.”
Through the resurrection of philosophy, America will discover that it has “the power to build soundly a way of life that can bind up the wounds of the world and bring out of humanity’s chaos a great political, social, and economic commonwealth of peoples, united in every sense and freed forever from the threat of traditional exploitation policies.”
In short, through philosophy the World Nation will rise phoenix-like into being. The gods have decreed that it is our destiny to make this ideal a reality: to bring about a better world and, eventually, a new golden age, one embodying the lofty vision that Francis Bacon originally first put forth hundreds of years ago in his prophetic novel New Atlantis.
At the present moment, the end of the Kali Yuga draws near. Consequently, the possibility for a new beginning and a “great leap forward” in human civilization is more real today than it ever has been before. But the gods won’t do the work of transcendence for us; they won’t drag us past the threshold kicking and screaming. Mankind must willingly participate in the realization of its evolutionary growth.
Philosophy is the key that allows us to do constructively engage in the collective initiation process that Kali is putting us through. Until we realize this and embrace the wisdom it has to offer, we will continue to suffer at the hands of the Adversary now confronting us.