"I am god"

Defense against the dark arts

“The Mask” by artist Rozzi Roomian. Buy her art here.

Once, in a daydream, a guy with a funny hat came up to me and said:

“Magicians use all sorts of fancy tricks to ward off evil: amulets, psychic shields, banishing rituals, incense cleansing, guardian summonings, etc. These have always seemed fun, but also goofy and theatrical to me. Now I think I understand why”

“Why?” I asked, sipping my cappuccino (I was staring about the window at a coffee shop in Mexico)

He continued: “Most ritual magic has the effect of plunging the user even more deeply into the realm of superstitions. This is the realm in which so-called ‘evil’ wields its illusions. To construct magical wards against evil is to reify it. When the mind constructs a story in which evil’s power is a given, the mind procedurally generates *more* of this power into being”

“So what’s the alternative?” I asked. “How do I defend against evil?”

He continued: “A more effective approach is simply to recognize and assert yourself as the power that precedes both good & evil. ‘I am god,’ you state in the face of distorting influences. Yes, really! ‘I am god.’”

“Sounds like megalomania,” I said.

“No. The ‘I’ here refers not to your particular mind and body, but to the awareness that precedes them. How do you know you have a mind and body to begin with? That.

“Some call it the creative void. Claws cannot lay grip on space itself. The forms of ‘evil’ have no power over the glory from which they spring. You are that.”

“Heh. Cool,” I thought.

“Yeah,” he said, reading my mind, because he was part of my daydream. I started to wonder where he got his funny hat from. I certainly didn’t create it, even though he was part of my daydream

I began to feel disoriented. I picked up my phone. There were 17 notifications, including 3 from TikTok. When had I downloaded TikTok??? “I am god,” I thought. My finger paused just before it could tap the screen, as if this surface had lost its magnetism. I put the phone down. The man with the funny hat was still there

“There is a related term from Vajrayana Buddhism,” he said, noticing that my attention had wandered. “Vajra Pride, it’s called. One translation of this term is ‘primordial self-esteem’. Nothing can shake this form of self-esteem”

“Why’s that? Oh, right: ‘I am god’.”

“‘I am god.’ This is an experiential exercise, not an intellectual one. Say the phrase not like a spell, but rather as someone who is remembering the obvious. Words that might describe this experience include: expansion, relaxation, luminosity, tenderness, power without effort, power without center, and grace

I will meet you there.

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