You’re a predator
Surrendering to the primal self
This is a 4-part series. To read the last entry, click here. To peep the full series, click here.
If you want to access your full creative power, you have to surrender to a little bit of madness. You have to surrender to a little bit of badness. You have to connect with your inner predator. Because that part of you is the doorway to your primal self—the animal that presides over life and death.
As creatives, most of us tend to be more preoccupied with the aethereal realms—the domain of Spirit where all of our most lofty interdimensional ideas come from. We think all we have to do is keep lighting ourselves up like a radio tower until the next great vision hits. But if you don’t know how to work the equipment, nothing you channel will have any value here in the 3D.
You are an animal body transmitting divine frequency.
You are a physical being made of dirt and stardust.
Your creative channel is not just an energetic body, it is part of your physical anatomy.
And if there’s one thing your animal body and higher consciousness have in common, it’s that they don’t see the world through schisms of good and bad or right and wrong. Your anger is just a boundary alarm. Your destructive urges are creative urges. Your inner “villain” is just an apex predator, consuming what it needs to survive. The things you do that you think make you an unworthy, undeveloped person are actually just sometimes-misguided expressions of your nature.
But before we get too deep into theory here, let’s check our praxis. Because we don’t want to walk around murdering and stealing from people. We don’t want to allow our destructive capacity to run away with us. We can all be forgiven for acting out our unconscious urges every now and then, but we should, at the very least, effort not to as much as possible.
I may be a representative of occasional evil but only the fun kind.
Still, the fact remains that most of us law-abiding citizens of spiritualism spend the bulk of our energy concerning ourselves with how to be good and nice and “high vibe” and not enough thinking about the potential utility of our darker impulses.
Balancing the Light and the Dark
As the proverbial poster child of Trickster (with black moon Lilith sitting right on my Gemini Moon, Mercury, and Venus), I’ve spent a lot of my life turning this one over. I see myself as an opportunist; a mutable maven who thrives in the harshest environs. An irradiated cockroach, if you will. I don’t see myself as higher or lower and that’s what helps me get along with everyone. But I also don’t ignore hierarchy where it exists—because the paradox is that there is no ultimate hierarchy but certainly a circumstantial one—and that’s what helps me manipulate power.¹
I like to analyze challenging situations and determine how to leverage them to my advantage. My specialty is looking at people who appear to be against me and identifying how we might work together.
I find what I can relate to—what I can potentially resonate with—in people and systems that appear to threaten me (’appear’ being the operative word here) and use that resonance to influence them.
That’s part of our creative power—the power to create mutually beneficial situations while prioritizing our individual needs and desires. The power to create new worlds not by excluding and demonizing what doesn’t fit but by imagining how it can all coexist.
Because, look, the journey of evolving consciousness is dark and full of terrors.
Did you think it was going to be a clean break? Cutting off all the limbs that offend us and starting fresh?
Did you think that’s what creating new worlds was about? Razing everything to the ground?
Destroying the evil?
Evil will always exist. And evil is relative. We can’t shun it, we have to relate to it. Because the evil that exists outside of us is merely a mirror for that which exists inside of us.
As within, so without.
And if you want to unlock your full creative potential, you have to make peace with this fact. You have to work with the light and dark—both within and without. You have to make friends with your desire to create and destroy.
At the end of the day, you want what you want. You’re after what serves you above all else. This is good. This is the way it should be. A whole world of people going after what they want with no concern for the consequences or other people’s needs? Bad. A whole world of people going after what they want with clarity and honesty and a personally curated system of values and ethics? GOOD. But there comes a time to accept that not everyone can live in the worlds we create. We build those worlds for us—for ourselves—and no one else. And we hope that the people we interact with are looking after their own worlds, too.
Sometimes, you have to prioritize yourself and let the chips fall where they may.
Accepting yourself as the Villain
I’ve found myself in some sticky situations over the course of my tenure as a free agent of creative chaos. There have been times when I had to put the world I’m building above the people I’ve made commitments to. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve always ended these commitments fairly but others haven’t always understood my choices. Particularly when those choices no longer benefit them and the world they’re trying to create.
The temptation in those circumstances is to make the other person wrong. And baby, I’ve been made wrong a time or two. I’ve lost friendships for respectful detachments, for following my own desire. In those moments, embracing my inner predator hasn’t just been a benefit, it’s been a necessity.
In those moments, instead of trying to rationalize to myself that I’m good, that I never want to hurt anyone, that I did everything in my power to do things fairly—no matter how true those counts may be—I’ve elected instead to accept my own villainy.
In those moments, I’ve allowed myself to grieve while reveling in the darker corners of my shadow that crave destruction. That want to eat people whole. That know exactly what they’re doing when they have to put someone in a difficult position in order to take care of themselves—in order to survive. I revel in my own evil. Because I have no other choice. Because as a career people pleaser, I am confronted with the truth that I can’t please everyone all the time.
Sometimes, I have to destroy them.
I can take responsibility for that destruction even while I recognize my own inherent innocence—my desire to do good and take care of others in any situation where I am able without sacrificing myself.
I can allow myself to be the villain of someone else’s story.
I am that villain when I write something that triggers someone, that desecrates their values and the world they want to live in.
I am that villain when I represent things in a way that others consider to be morally reprehensible.²
I am that villain when the world I’m working to create threatens the world someone else is trying to create.
But all’s fair in love and war, as any Venusian well knows. And I’m in a war to save the things I love.
Shouldn’t we all be?
Claiming your power
So now that you’re beginning to come to terms with the morally gray, dual nature of your creative channel, we can talk about how you’re going to use this information to claim your power.
Once you begin to accept that you’re here to devour, that your job is to work with the full spectrum of light and dark, you can start to get to know your anatomy—energetic and physical. Now is when we get to learn how to receive intel and move that energy.
Next week, we’re going to get to know how your creative channel really works.
Discussion: What’s the most difficult decision you’ve had to make to prioritize your art? Have their been any consequences to your relationships? How have you dealt with those reactions?
Footnotes
I am using “manipulate” entirely neutrally here—as in skillfully maneuvering something. We manipulate things all the time; it doesn’t have to be a dirty word as long as we’re operating ethically and with transparency.
I famously hate the idea that art should moralize to us and support artists in telling stories that are reflective of reality without needing to tell others that the things being represented are wrong or should be changed. Fuck a Hays Code.
