The Psyche Revealed Through The I Ching by Moog Hanna & Anthony Carol K

Author:Moog, Hanna & Anthony, Carol K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ICHINGBOOKS
Published: 2011-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

16. “The Devil’s Country”62

Demonic Elements in the Psyche

Demonic elements in the psyche have long been observed in mental illness. We tend to think they only belong to the mentally ill, and therefore put as much distance as we can between “us” and “them.” This is because we do not understand what they are. They are in every person’s psyche due to the development of the ego, although, in the average person, they are not as obvious as in the mentally ill. What we observe in mental illness are demonic elements that have become visible through occupying the entire stage of consciousness, so that the person has no more room for his own thoughts and feelings.

What the ego does not want us to see is that the ego and the demonic elements that make it up, are not part of our nature. They are foreign elements. So long as we think they are part of our nature, the sense of shame they create causes us to deny their presence.

Once we realize that these elements are indeed foreign to our nature, we are able to distance ourselves from them, which is the first step toward freeing ourselves from them. First, however, we must get past the fear we have to look at them, and the fear that by looking at them, they can do something to us. For this, we need to know that all demonic elements owe their existence entirely to the false words, phrases, and images we have accepted as true, and thereby taken into our psyche. As we have mentioned in previous chapters, this acceptance is often neither a conscious nor a willing act; rather, it often happens by default through not knowing whether those words and phrases are true. This ambiguity ends in being a subtle acquiescence in their validity simply because someone has said they are true. Taking things into our psyche by acquiescence is also the way we accept fears, self-doubts, and crazy-making fantasies.

Perceptive writers such as L. Frank Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz,” have shown how these ideas trap the psyche in fear and doubt, but also, how the demons they create in the psyche may need only a little cold-water thrown on them to free us from their hold.

The Land of Oz was a good paraphrase for the land of the psyche where the inhabitants were held in awe by a wizard, who was revealed to have created the illusion of power through cheap tricks. The tornado that lifted Dorothy’s house and killed the first witch, is a metaphor for the effect of shock in breaking the spell that made Dorothy feel helpless in the face of the threat to her dog. She woke up in a land populated by Helpers who had come to help her resolve her problem.

This story is not just a fairytale for children. It describes a number of things about the psyche. The first Helper one meets in the psyche, the Sage, appears in the guise of the “good witch.

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