Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  My research found four primary archetypal forms or shapes that dragon energies unconsciously take: royal energy of the king and queen, warrior energy, magician or magus energy, and lover energy.

  4. Dragon energy manifested in the royal archetype exhibits its grandiosity through the ego's posturing and pretension to be more in control of things than it really is.

  You experience the nagging anxiety and ontological emptiness that underlies the pretense of running things and being the center. You may be addicted to the idealizing projections of other people, so that when they refuse to idealize you, you nervously feel your anxiety more intensely.

  The royal form seeks to maximize hierarchical control and domination over others. Our ego says we do this “for their own good.” In its sociopathic form (what Theodore Millon (1969) calls an “active independent” form), you think that you are the law and other people are here only to do your will. When such persons become paranoid, as they usually do, their behavior insures that they will have good reasons for their paranoia. This is the royal form of dragon hell.

  5. Dragon energy manifested in the warrior archetype shows its grandiosity in workaholism, the fantasy that you can keep the world from crashing down around your ears by working harder and harder.

  You may also get compulsive rage energy expressed in bullying, physical and verbal aggression, and violent fantasies and behavior. You rationalize the rage with your conviction that you are one of the righteous ones defending the cosmos against evil. This fantasy gives you the role of a sinless and righteous avenger assigned to bring down divine wrath on the demonic ones. Your own grandiosity is not available to your consciousness but is carried by your perceived enemy. This enables you to act without empathy, compassion, or love.

  This madness of grandiose warrior acting out must be confronted and contained, whether the perpetrator is a violent husband, a terrorist, or nation engaging in aggression, oppression, or genocide. When possessed by warrior grandiosity, however, whether in the family, in police work, or in military actions, one always seeks to express as much unnecessary force as one can muster in the situation. This is the erotic, sadomasochistic, necrophilic appeal of savage violent acting out that classical Freudian psychoanalysts tried to help us face and confront, unfortunately without much success to date. This is the warrior form of dragon hell.

  6. Dragon energy manifested in the magician or magus archetype causes you to be strangely emotionally detached, “above it all.”

  You think you have the right, correct, enlightened point of view (theory, ideology, theology, psychology, or spiritual tradition), and that if people would accept your version of truth (doctrine, theory, ideology, or tradition), then everything would be okay. The now-integrated spirituality of an enlightened and peaceful world would easily see that evil is no more than an illusion held by those still unenlightened but marginal people who don't know what you know.

  Magician grandiosity cloaks a fundamental coldness, a lack of love and joy, and a denial of the horror of radical evil. With the erroneous perception that you are above it, you try to avoid any responsibility for confronting it. You keep telling yourself that the horrible things happening in the world are just illusions, that the world can only be improved by accepting your version of the truth. Only the abstract theoretical correctness of your belief system will suffice.

  This fantasy allows you to reject any notion of cooperating with others in urgently needed programs of compassion and justice. You see no need for a calm, centered, and blessing presence in the midst of all the chaos in family, community, nation, and planet. You see no need for joyful, embodied celebration of the preciousness of individual people. You see no need for wedding feasts, ecstatic erotic unions, messianic banquets, or sacramental dances of life, for all these things require repulsive engagement with particular real people. Surely humanity can be redeemed without all that messiness! This is the magician form of dragon hell.

  7. Dragon energy manifested in the lover archetype makes you believe that the world begins and ends with your feelings, your pain, and your bodily and emotional needs.

  Your victimization becomes the most important thing in the world. You are helpless in this weakened state, so no one should expect you to care about anyone else's needs. Your needs are greater, and people don't give them the importance they deserve. If they did, they would drop everything else and get busy meeting your needs for food, sex, comfort, recognition, status, prestige, economic support, and so on.

  Your ego has always longed for the experience of happiness to get beyond its shame and find meaningful sexual expression and satisfying intimacy with others, but unconscious grandiosity has brought you more despair and toxic shame than happiness, and sexuality is either numb, greedy, or addictive. Flooding lover energy pushes you into substance abuse, depression, codependent or masochistic patterns of intimate relationships, or destructive idealization of others, leaving you feeling passive and dependent.

  Everyone else is at fault for this but you. They created this hell you are living in, and they should work to get you out of it. If they were really adequate and responsible, they would liberate you from your pain and suffering by providing you with more food, narcotics, sex, money, and status. They have all the gold, but they're just hoarding it. If they were really good people, they would give it to you, because you deserve it. This is the lover form of dragon hell.

  These examples show how dragon energies use trickster creativity to insert themselves into our experience when we try to stay ignorant of their presence. A little study helps one get better at recognizing the various disguises. Any one of these unconscious ways of expressing dragon energy can bring chaos into your life and make it a living hell. Lack of awareness allows us to become portals through which hell can find its way into our lives. To become aware of how the dragon is invading or colonizing your life and forcing you into one of the circles of hell without your realizing it, you need to learn how to recognize dragon signs. You can prepare yourself to be a scout for yourself and others.

  8. The various shapes of unconscious grandiosity have some dragon signs in common, such as chronic anxiety, despair, hopelessness, aimlessness, lack of a sense of limits, lack of a sense of mystery, emotional coldness ranging from detachment to hate, and a lack of empathy, compassion, or joy.

  These marks indicate that the dragon is very close, no matter what stealthy form it might be taking. So long as its presence remains unconscious, the positive counterparts of these marks cannot manifest in an adequate way.

  9. Only by consciously and respectfully facing the dragon's presence and responding in faith to “the great other” can we manifest the positive signs, what Tillich called “the fruits of the spiritual presence”: love, hope, peace, joy, courage, gnosis and wisdom, and passion for justice.

  Many spiritual traditions have used the term repentance for consciously awakening to our grandiosity, confronting our psychological and spiritual idolatry, and changing our fundamental attitude and direction. Whatever we call it, without such a change, we will stay lost in despair and mired in estrangement from ourselves, from others, and from nature.

  10. The fabric of what Tillich called our “dreaming innocence” is torn when the enchantment of malignant unknowing has been pierced by the first epiphany of awareness of the reality and presence of the dragon.

  We become aware, perhaps for the first time, that we have not been so innocent after all. We suddenly start feeling empathy for others who live in their own self-maintained, creative versions of the dragon's hell and act out their own misery and fraudulent self-righteousness in destructive attitudes and behaviors. Without the illusion of innocence, we more readily understand why they do the things they do. We note with surprise the beginnings of compassion being born within us, even for those who do those things we find terrible. By finally saying “yes” to the truth that our unconscious knew all along, we see new psychological and spiritual fruits of the spirit being born in us and around us.
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br />   But what about our anxiety? Doesn't knowing this terrible truth about ourselves make it worse? On the contrary. The wisest psychotherapists with the most experience on the “road less traveled” agree on this with the spiritual masters of every great tradition. When we consciously face our hidden superiority complex, our preening sense of entitlement, enlightenment, and self-righteousness, then we can escape our delusional claim to be helpless victims, and our anxieties mysteriously begin to diminish.

  11. Anxiety declines as unconscious grandiosity declines.

  12. Denying our creaturehood causes the truth to return to us as symptoms in our body and psyche.

  The more unconscious grandiosity we have, the more anxiety we experience in our body. Recent research in neurophysiology confirms the physical nature of anxiety, how it floods the body with toxic hormones and neurotransmitters that attack the body's supply of life energy and its capacity to defend and repair itself. When we attend to our embodiment as creatures, and treat our bodies with empathy and compassion, this affirmation of creaturehood counteracts our grandiosity and lowers our anxiety. We must attend to our need for deep breathing, centering prayer and meditation, and start facing life tasks with more focused problem solving behavior. (This explains why the techniques described in chapter 10 are so helpful.)

  Prayer and active imagination also work with the creative and supportive face of the dragon to provide dragon energy and dragon insight. You have more insight into what you must change, and you have more energy to fuel the courage you will need to continue the transformative process.

  The inner magician also works better as your anxiety comes down. You listen better, focus better, think clearer, and engage in more effective, down-to-earth problem-solving behavior. Where you previously were a legend in your own mind and sole possessor of answers to all the world's problems, you now find that you can balance your checkbook! The decline of magician grandiosity makes possible a new advent of wisdom into your personality. Now you can pick up a book like Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) and start putting its wisdom and insightful techniques to use.

  Increased effectiveness will allow you to access your warrior energies in a more creative way. It was unconscious warrior grandiosity that led you to think you could live successfully without engaging in detailed and focused problem-solving. Trying to solve real problems turns off the panic, fear, and anxiety switches in your brain. This improves your ability to listen, think, and assess situations wisely. In short, as unconscious grandiosity declines, your actual effectiveness and creative productivity increase.

  A key transformation occurs when you reach a certain point in the centering and calming process. You can begin to access your royal dragon energies in a creative and healing way that embodies what systems theorists call a “calm, non-anxious presence,” the sine qua non for effective leadership in family, community, nation, or planet.

  When grandiose lover energies become more conscious and respectfully regulated, we put more value on other people and curb our longings to merge with them. Our sexual activity includes more tenderness and genuine empathy for the partner. Appetites transform from compulsion to an appreciative consciousness with enhanced awareness of the presence of the beautiful. Best of all, the increasing calmness enables us to slow down and “smell the flowers,” opening up a deep new sense of joy that can be nurtured to permeate all aspects of our experience. Here, more than anywhere else, we realize that we have opened a portal for some heavenly energies to enter into our lives.

  DRAGON LAWS IN SOCIAL LIFE

  These principles have many implications for social and cultural relationships. Once awakened from the “dreaming innocence” of unconscious grandiosity, we move decisively to establish our attitudinal and behavioral assumptions on a foundation of respect, empathy, and compassion, and this leads to better opportunities for reconciliation and creative cooperation.

  13. Unconscious grandiosity is the fundamental psychological engine behind our lack of respect and empathy for people who do not share our social location.

  It is the main engine of racism, classism, sexism, malignant nationalism, and terrorism. When dragon energies are present unconsciously, we have little concern for even the most blatant inequities. Injustice is not high on our list of concerns. We look for ways to stay in denial, to rationalize our acceptance of poverty, disease, political oppression, and environmental despoilation. Our “let them eat cake” attitude ignores the degradation and despair in refugee camps all over the world. We have no time to cooperate with compassionate action on behalf of people who cannot help themselves.

  We declare our lack of interest in nation-building among the abandoned, dispossessed, the “wretched of the earth.” In deference to so-called national security, we engage in the grandiose fantasy that we can live safely inside our gated communities while children elsewhere die of starvation and treatable diseases in the laps of their emaciated mothers. Thus the grandiose attitudes and behaviors of rich and powerful nations help create a fertile soil for extremism in the poor and weak ones.

  Young people are tempted by despair when they see their kinsmen in such appalling conditions. They become easy prey for articulate, charismatic demagogues who promise them a more decisive and heroic leadership than that offered by their ostensible but ineffectual elders. Warrior brotherhoods that are malignantly tribal and flamboyantly grandiose rise up to bear the “divine wind” of retribution to the enemy. Their hate and rage displaces all remnants of human compassion and empathy, even for noncombatants. The psychodynamics behind the rise of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network are the same as those at work in the German Nazis and fanatical Japanese warrior cults of the 1930s.

  14. Grandiose, disrespectful, and unempathic behavior by people with social and political power always generates powerful, rage-filled compensatory outbreaks of madness.

  Such behavior is fueled by a despair that feels powerless and has little or nothing to lose. In lieu of hope for a future on earth, a heroic death becomes intoxicatingly attractive.

  The ancient Greek wisdom that hubris (pride) inexorably leads to nemesis (retribution) has been substantiated by every spiritual tradition. Concern for nemesis is more than a paranoid worry of a few people “soft-minded” about spirituality. Whatever one's attitude about religion, the arrogant dismissal of the reality of retribution carries a high price. The greater the grandiosity, the higher the price, and tragically, not just to the arrogant. There is almost always some terrible collateral damage. Horrific lose-lose scenarios of rageful escalations are typical of our species. We must find a better way.

  15. Finding a better way will require us to learn how to discern the signs of the unconscious grandiose energies in our social groups and their leaders.

  This is never easy, because investing our grandiosity in socio-cultural groups was how we avoided facing our own personal grandiosity in the first place. Systems theorists claim that all social groups systemically resist all attempts to change them and their characteristic attitudes and behaviors. So when we try to challenge the grandiosity of our social group and bring its shadow into the light, we can expect that we will come under attack. The greater the challenge, the greater the attack. Only by standing with courage in our awakened state can we hope to be agents of transformation, reconciliation, and healing in our social world.

  DRAGON LAWS AND SPIRITUAL LIFE

  The dragon of unconscious grandiosity roams freely in the attitudes and behaviors of all spiritual traditions and their devotees. Pervasive religious grandiosity and unwitting, consciously well-intentioned idolatry provide an equal opportunity seduction for the spiritually inclined of all tribes. It is easy to mask prodigious amounts of personal grandiosity as a weak and selfless humility once you have displaced your grandiose energies onto your spiritual tribe.

  16. Spiritual grandiosity usually issues in grandiose claims for the mandate of one's own spiritual tribe under the assumed aegis of divine reality.


  The original conscious intent was simply to work one small part of the divine plan, but the seductive dragon of narcissistic grandiosity soon convinces us that we are the divine plan. The arrogant, exhibitionistic presentation of intuitions or revelations that one tribe has special and exclusive divine approval is one of the most common ways for the energies of hell to be channeled into human history. All spiritual tribes and their devotees are subject to this tendency to believe in their own marketing and to see themselves as legends in their own minds.

  17. Such naïve exclusivistic claims to know the divine mind ignores the invariable limitations of human thought and the limitations of mythic and symbolic language in discerning the divine mysteries (see Tillich 1957).

  All spiritual traditions and their leaders, without exception, are susceptible to the tempting seduction of turning the symbols that mediated the divine presence to them into idols that block the light.

  18. Every powerful manifestation or appearance of the sacred (hierophany or epiphany) tends to become imperialistic in the hands of its more “spiritually challenged” interpreters (see Eliade 1959).

  Unfortunately, not all stewards of tradition are, like Moses, competent magi. When Moses touched the rock, living water came forth. When incompetent ones do the interpreting, the fruit is more like that of the sorcerer's apprentice, for it brings hell into the world instead of living water or true bread.

  19. Those who have no empathy for other people currently misinterpreting their own traditions are likely to be unconscious of their own grandiose claims to exclusive entitlement.

  Alfred Adler provided the painful truth of this insight. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions have all struggled with this seduction, with each one pointing its finger at the others and denouncing them as bogus pretenders to the role of “the elect” or true people of God.