This morning a friend and I had one of those rare conversations that cuts past small talk and goes straight into the marrow of human experience. I stepped into a conversation that most people quietly avoid but desperately need. I’m grateful they brought this topic up , because conversations like this don’t happen nearly enough. Too many people live with this silently, privately, and in isolation. More of us should be having, more open, more honest, and with far more compassion for the realities we don’t have the language for.
It was about the truth of living in tension between what we see and what lives inside of us. They spoke about that of being feeling trapped between consciousness and subconsciousness, a constant battle. They described life living inside parallel reality, something like the Matrix. Out-of-body experiences. Demonic encounters. The ongoing struggle between Darkness and Light. The exhaustion. The vigilance of living in two worlds at once.
I’m glad they said it.
Because this happen more than people admit. In my world, in my philosophy this isn’t something to be cured. It’s something to become responsible for.
When someone says they feel like they are living in a parallel reality, what I hear is ...
Access to the mundus imaginalis
Access to the ancestral realm.
Access to the unconscious.
Access to the places we never learned to name.
The psyche is built from opposites. Consciousness is born from tension.
To wake up is to disturb the underworld. To see what others refuse to face. That conflict that pulls between light and dark ; That is not a symptom of failure. It is a sign of life.
The problem is not the presence of darkness.
The problem is the story we tell about it.
What people call “demons” are the parts of ourselves we exiled to survive. Shadowed truths. Suppressed power. Unclaimed instinct. Spiritual voltage with nowhere to go.
We don’t heal by banishing parts of ourselves or by pretending they dont exist. We integrate them.
You earn sovereignty by walking into the shadows,
meeting the thing that scares you,
and returning with it disciplined, harnessed, and understood.
Light vs Dark. Good vs Evil. Hero vs Demon.
Ego loves polarity because it makes us feel righteous. As long as the story is:
“I am fighting the darkness,”
then darkness controls the story. Your nervous system stays in survival mode. Your psyche stays in combat. And the “enemy” gets stronger because your feeding it.
Narrative is architecture.
Narrative determines reality.
When the story changes, the energy changes. The shift is “I am being attacked by darkness.” But instead “Something in me has summoned this power to me.”
its not "I didn’t choose this.” its "I am the author of own unfolding"
That shift matters. Because when you stop reacting to darkness and begin stewarding it,
you stop being prey and become sovereign.
What You Resist, Persists. What You Steward, changes.
Fighting a demon feeds it. Suppressing a shadow makes it grow. Starve the wolf and it will eat you alive. Chain it and it will eventually will break loose.
Stewardship is different.
Stewardship is know what you know and feeling what you feel.
Stewardship is naming it .
Stewardship is responsibility.
In alchemy, we take the vile, despised, and terrifying as raw, unintegrated potency. That High-voltage psychic energy that was never given language or purpose. You stop fighting it, you reclaim it. That energy becomes: Presence. Magnetism. Authority. Will.
As long as you fight, you remain a casualty of the battlefield.
When you steward, you become ruler of the realm. Light and Dark are not enemies they never were. They are necessary opposites.And you? You are the vessel that holds them. Your authority is not that you avoided darkness.
You developed the discipline to hold power instead of being devoured by it.There is a saying worth remembering:
“It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener on a battlefield.”
Power means nothing if you only discover it when it is too late to wield it. Sovereignty is cultivated. Discipline is trained. Authority is earned through preparation, integration, and responsibility.
You stopped fighting demons.
You govern them.
That is sovereignty.
That is integration.
That is power.
And that is the conversation we need to be having more often.
