At the bottom of a dusty old drawer in a forgotten filing cabinet in a basement room no one goes into anymore can be found the spore-dust of ancient fossilized egos. The dust-motes of dried-out old personality husks, you might say. They lie dormant, perfectly innocuous and inactive, yet any one of them can be revived in an instant when the conditions become right for them. It’s not as if they are waiting to be revived, just like Count Dracula in his coffin waits to be resuscitated by having fresh blood dripped on his pale thin lips. The spores aren’t waiting because they have no consciousness – they are only grains of dust, of no interest or concern to anyone. What could be less interesting than a handful of coffin dust in the bottom of a dusty draw in a rusty old filing cabinet that no one even knows of?
The spores aren’t waiting because they aren’t alive. They were never alive and they never will be – they have nothing whatsoever to do with life – but if one were to be reactivated it would immediately turn into a ravening demon, capable of permanently enslaving the consciousness of whatever unfortunate person woke it up. The Titans themselves would not cause so much trouble if they were freed from their prison under Mount Tartarus. The Titans are small fry in comparison to these ancient indestructible malignant egos. These spores are ancient and indestructible because they are so terribly rudimentary. Nothing is as rudimentary as these ancient egos – they represent the crudest, vilest oversimplifications of life. Each ego is – you might say – a closed system of well-worn short-cuts around every honourable challenge in life! They represent the most ubiquitous ways of avoiding everything difficult, everything challenging. Each of these ancient evil egos is an avoidance of life itself – a well-worn path that leads precisely nowhere. How after all could the much-used ‘pathway of avoidance’ lead somewhere when it skirts around everything that is good and wholesome in life?
These ancient egos are short-circuits in the very fabric of reality. Each ego-spore is a map, but it is not a map that anyone would want to follow if they knew beforehand where it would lead. It is a map of hell. The maps in question do not represent generic ways of being in the world that are repeated over and over again because they are so very unchallenging; they represent ways of not-being! Each ego is a way of avoiding the challenge of life itself; a modality of avoidance that captures us and never ever lets us go. Each ego is a cheat. Each ego is a patented way of side-stepping everything worthy in life and perversely making a virtue out of this shameful dishonour. When we fall prey to these ravening demons we become obstinate in our incorrigible laziness and perversely proud of our dirty scurrilous ways…
When possessed by the ancient malignant egos we know no greater aim in life than feeding and glorifying the obscenity that has taken control of our precious awareness and condemned us to a fate that is – in its horror – frankly beyond our ability to comprehend. Instead of living the life that is rightfully ours, we are shunted into an unholy parody of life, an inversion of all that is good and wholesome, and it is not given to us to see what has happened to us. We do not see our fate – we have no sense of it. Such is our degraded state that we never have the slightest inkling of what has befallen us. Or if we do have the occasional inkling, and are unwise enough to speak of it, our fellow prisoners will deride and spurn us for sharing our precious insight. But we must remember that it is not them who are deriding and shunning us – that is the work of the shadow that rules them. The harsh treatment we receive is the doing of the ancient malignant egos of which I speak, as is all evil in this world.
I feel like saying again that the Titans themselves were not nearly so much trouble, and did not cause so much suffering to the human race, but it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps the myth of the Titans and the titanic struggle that it took to overthrow them might be a story about the ancient evil ‘vampire-egos’ that reanimate, even after centuries have passed, to drink and drain our very life essence. Maybe I’m not talking about two different things at all. Maybe these ancient, infinitely malevolent personality husks are the Titans, are the Ice Giants, are the Rakshasas from myth and legend. Maybe they are the Invisible Predator, that Ancient Adversary who – it seems – we can vanquish only in legend…
