Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

by Robert L. Moore

  While most traditions have a sense of the true spiritual warrior and the reality of spiritual warfare against radical evil, not all traditions are equally as vulnerable to the seduction of literalizing a so-called holy war against other spiritual tribes. All traditions know in their mystical core that the true jihad is a struggle against their own idolatry, especially the desire to replace the authentically divine with the ego's pretentious and self-serving interpretations.

  20. The so-called peoples of the book in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are particularly tempted toward literalizing and acting out their sense of special election in violent ways.

  These claims historically have not been just to a place in heaven, but made to justify appropriating the lands of other people and then refusing to share with them the bounty of the earth in peace, prosperity, and mutual affection. We will know that the peoples of the book have faced this shared issue when they start working together to solve the problem of the Holy City of Jerusalem. It should be clear that political authority over Jerusalem itself is not the real problem. The spiritual grandiosity of all parties involved is the real obstacle to a peaceful cooperative solution.

  But what if your intuition or revelation about the specialness of your tribe in the unfolding of the divine plan is actually true in some mysterious way? Such a truth can never be literal or simplistic, because we all know that creatures only “see through a glass darkly.” Once you realize how easy it is to be narcissistically wounded and thus feel inferior and insignificant, you will see that arrogantly trumpeting your privileged position to other tribes results from your own unconscious grandiosity, the satanic Lucifer complex.

  21. People who truly awake to the divine presence and power in their tradition do not need to trumpet their privileges.

  Once you truly “offer up” your unconscious grandiosity on the tribal altar, the light of your tribe will so shine that the authenticity of your election and special role will be evident and impressive to everyone without your having to explain it to them. One legend says that the messianic banquet will feast on the body of the great dragon Leviathan. This legend could well come true if enough people would begin to offer up their unconscious grandiosity as a sacrifice to the real spiritual presence. The light of the tribe would then shine brightly in its works of empathy, love, and compassion, in its effective care for those people who have no other advocates or resources.

  The attempt to turn the divine presence into an exclusive franchise has been the historic tragedy of all religious tribes, without exception, from the fundamentalists of the right to the fundamentalists of the left. Even those who assume the mantle of “most liberal and tolerant” often use their ideological, hermeneutical, and political correctness to justify self-righteous posturing.

  22. Such grandiose spiritual posturing always markets itself as a commitment to transforming the world toward the reign of God on earth, but it is actually an “ego-spirituality.”

  The cup is full of self and cannot experience the openness that leaves room for authentic empathy or compassion for others.

  23. People standing in unconscious spiritual grandiosity, anxious to be idealized by others, are particularly reactive to any lack of dogmatic or ideological agreement.

  Their narcissism demands a rigid ideological sameness from everyone. They experience the unique interpretations of others as painful narcissistic wounds to their own inflated pretensions, and this provokes a whole constellation of rage responses. They see “the other” as a demonic agent shaking the foundations of their already shaky narcissistic equilibrium. They see their own unconscious satanic inflation in the face of “the other.” They generate unconscious genocidal fantasies of holy revenge. They want to become heroes who step up to the task of cleansing the world of chaos and evil. The prospect of performing rituals of sacred violence against “the other” begins to glow with archetypal energy in their unconscious.

  24. A severe enough narcissistic wound causes unconscious fantasies to irrupt into the consciousness for acting out.

  Possessed individuals hijack the symbols of their tradition to rationalize and channel the emerging compulsive necrophilic and nihilistic energy and behavior, so they can be demonically creative without becoming personally chaotic, planning and executing acts of mass murder, so to speak, with a clear conscience.

  Why shouldn't you be so creative? Like Faust, you can channel the hideous strength of satanic energies into the purity of your hatred. This is how Hitler's elite S.S. corps, Hirohito's samurai, and bin Laden's Al-Quaeda all became so terrifyingly effective in their missions of hate and destruction.

  Without a powerful awakening in our species, we will no doubt see more of these gifted Jedi knights going over to the dark side of the Force. Where are the Jedi knights who are not possessed by this kind of satanic enchantment?

  25. Leaders in every spiritual tribe must face the urgent task of asking how their own grandiose attitudes and behaviors are blocking the light that needs to shine more than ever now that history has reached this critical time with so much potential for a great turning.

  As in personal and social life, the question is not whether my spiritual tribe is grandiose, but “How is my spiritual tribe grandiose? How does it manifest the presence of the dragon energies in an unconscious way? Where is the hidden grandiosity?”

  Spiritual tribes show their unconscious grandiosity most clearly by their reluctance to engage enthusiastically and effectively in cooperative deeds of compassion that build a common future habitat for humanity and its friends. The relative grandiosity of any spiritual tribe or organization can be discerned by the degree to which it sets aside its claims of exclusive superiority and steps instead into bold, cooperative, and compassionate action with other tribes to meet the needs of the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the oppressed.

  26. When a tribe's spiritual grandiosity declines, it immediately gains more radiance as a portal for the incarnation in history of what Tillich called the “authentic spiritual community.”

  This community is made up of individuals from all spiritual tribes, and it even includes some who do not identify themselves with any tribe, yet still embody in a mysterious way the transformative presence of the true spirit that is above every name. Entry into this radiant spiritual community only requires an authentic and effective confrontation with the existential and psychological, if not theological, idolatry that represents the attempt to substitute human ego for divine reality.

  How can we know that this authentic spiritual community is present in the work of any tribe? Once we face the dragon of our spiritual grandiosity and open ourselves up to awareness of the spiritual presence, miracles begin to happen in us and around us (Tillich 1957). The fruits of the presence of the true spirit begin to manifest with amazing forcefulness and clarity. Love suddenly arrives with more power, and the romance of hate and rage begins to lose its enchanting power. Anxiety and fear rapidly begin to decline. We suddenly find ourselves able to cooperate effectively with some unlikely people in doing the right things. Courage enables us to take a stand both for our best selves and for a world of justice and peace. We lose our blindness to the beauty that was around us all along, and we begin to experience joy!

  When we are privileged to witness the presence of great goodness in people and communities during terrible times like the aftermath of September 11th, something radical, decisive, and irreversible changes within us. We remember something that our enchanted sleep had let slip away from us. Although we grieve about all the waste and the nightmare of our human past and present personal and collective grandiosity, when we witness a responsive outburst of courage, love, sacrifice, and generosity, it makes us doubt our despair and cynicism, and begin to look for ways to make things better.

  Suddenly it is possible once again to entertain the thought that “Earth might be fair!” With Gandalf in Tolkien's Return of the King, we can say, “Come, there is much that we can yet do!” To prepare
for a mission of effective transformative love, compassion, and healing in this struggling world, we will look for the courage to learn how to ride the dragon. That is our continuing project!

  CHAPTER 12

  Beyond the Lucifer Complex

  Befriending the Dragon

  PREVIOUS CHAPTERS DISCUSSED THE IMPORTANT PROBLEMS and issues that arise when we accept the task of facing the dragon of psychological and spiritual grandiosity. In conclusion, let me recap the main points and point the way to the next agenda.

  The widespread presence of dragon symbolism and imagery in world mythology, both East and West, resulted from a general intuition of the presence and dynamic power of a “great self” within every human psyche that I call the “Great Self Within.” Psychoanalytic theorists like Freud, Adler, Jung, and Kohut all referred to such a psychological reality, but with different names. Freud called it the “id” and the “punitive superego,” Adler called it the “superiority complex” and the “depreciation tendency,” Jung called it the “archetypal Self,” and Kohut called it “grandiose exhibitionistic self organization” and “narcissistic personality disorder.” My own neo-Jungian psychoanalytic theory draws upon all these theorists but attempts to document with more detailed clarity the structure and dynamics of how the Great Self Within expresses itself as grandiosity in our everyday psychological and spiritual life.

  This great force in the psyche is characterized by grandiose energies that constantly pressure the human ego from within, resulting in anxiety, mania, and depression. It generates two kinds of inflation: (a) personal, psychological, and spiritual states of possession and (b) idealizing projections that displace the grandiose energies onto other persons, institutions, or tribes expressed as religion, race, gender, social class, and so on. When we project grandiosity onto others to displace it from ourselves, the onset of chaos is only delayed and shifted to another more insidious form of expression. Much scapegoating and projective hate and ritual violence result, as was often characteristic of premodern peoples. Their ritual strategies, however, while morally flawed from our standpoint, were more sophisticated and effective than those currently being employed as cultures all over the world lose their traditional mythic and ritual vessels for limiting the freedom of the dragon.

  In the wake of the modern eclipse of the mythic imagination and ritual process, the more recent strategy has been simply to deny the existence and power of the dragon and to attempt to function without a conscious awareness of its presence and power. As many of our spiritual and mythological traditions have intuited, when the darkness of such a malignant unknowing comes, the dragon can operate freely without detection. Then it can devour the consciousness and turn us into greedy, violent monsters bringing chaos and destruction that leads to fragmentation in our personalities and communities and to alienation and violence between the various spiritual traditions and tribes.

  Premodern tribes were aware of this dragon's presence and power, and they put much of their energy into coping with its reality. A great deal of the intellectual energies and cultural creativity of premodern peoples went into gaining knowledge about how to deal with the reality and power of such transpersonal energies. This led to elaborate systems of myth and ritual practice that attempted to connect with these transpersonal, ego-alien, sacred dragon energies and protect themselves from them.

  Lacking the resources of depth psychology, however, even their most sophisticated understandings of the sacred energies in both good and demonic forms continued to rely heavily on mechanisms of externalization and projection. This is why we must cease idealizing tribal shamanic and other premodern spiritual traditions.

  Even when they were aware of an “enemy within,” they assumed that it came from an alien source of contamination, not from their own inner archetypal plumbing. The human ego, not yet completely possessed by the dragon, can experience its egoalien nature, but it has difficulty seeing that it comes from the inner depths and not simply from outside. Before psychoanalysis, it was extremely difficult to understand that neither the problem nor the potential of dragon energies come “from out there.”

  Some of our human forebears intuited that the presence of dragon energies could be dangerous, and they determined to become enemies of the dragon. This “Ahab approach” occurs especially in Western traditions and is well illustrated in the stories of Beowulf and Moby Dick. The heroic ego is constantly surprised to find that the dragon keeps coming back, that it is very hard to kill.

  People in modern times seem to be increasingly blind to the presence of the dragon and yet increasingly enchanted by its seductive power. The enchantment leads us to become increasingly destructive of both ourselves and our environment. Most people try to deny its reality and presence, while a few heroes try to kill it through psychoanalysis or cure it through various other techniques. Spiritual parallels are found in those techniques that seek to escape, whether through asceticism or renunciation, into a naïve “angelism” that seems to cultivate humility and inner peace. These psychological and spiritual approaches make elaborate systems of defense that deny the depth and difficulty of the continuing problem.

  Such strategies are doomed to failure. The resourceful trickster capacities of the human psyche have a creative plethora of defense mechanisms that enable the ego to pretend that grandiosity is not present and not a problem. If denial is attempted and the ego unconsciously identifies with the grandiosity, then dangerous personal inflation results that expresses itself in one of the four forms delineated in my research.

  More often the ego uses the unconscious mechanisms of projection and displacement to fend off the destabilizing personal effects of the grandiose energies and attempts to cope by displacing the grandiose energies onto relational, social, and religious vessels. Both grandiosity and true greatness are displaced through projective mechanisms and then both loved and hated in the ambivalent dance of idealization and envy.

  When the grandiosity is displaced onto a group, the ego can experience less anxiety and feel righteous and humble while sanctioning horrific, arrogant, and hegemonic behaviors by the tribe. The Spanish Inquisition was a prime example of this all too popular human tactic. The long history of religious, ideological, and genocidal warfare exposes this failed strategy of coming to terms with the dragon energies within. We turn our arrogant inflation over to social, religious, ideological, institutional, or national surrogates, while our deep intuitions about the presence of an enemy cause us to demonize and dehumanize those other people outside our group.

  Those people who think they have destroyed or mastered the dragon must look again. They are simply in a trickster trance, and it is having its way. Like Beowulf, they will have to face it again.

  There is another strategy for dealing with the reality and power of the dragon that views it as the source of all creativity and blessing. When we relate to the dragon energies consciously and with respect, then individuals and the community at large can benefit from a positive relationship based on respectful good will and cooperation.

  Carl Jung encountered cultural traditions embodying this alternative in his studies, most notably in his examination of Chinese culture. It is in this tradition of Jung that we find hope for a truly effective postmodern strategy for relating to the dragon. Both Carl Jung and Edward Edinger image for us the possibility of developing a conscious and respectful relationship with the presence and power of the archetypal Self, the Great Self Within, a relationship that can provide the human personality with inspiration, creative energies, and a pressure to commit to the incarnation of our best selves, to what they called the “individuation process.” They viewed this archetypal Self as the imago Dei, a god-imago in every psyche. Both Jung and Edinger felt a sense of this inner reality as an undomesticated mysterium tremendum, a wonderful and terrible reality in the psyche. They believed it to be imperative that we relate to this reality with respect, both consciously and carefully.

  Contemporary Jungians all too often trivialize a
nd seek to domesticate this reality and have difficulty understanding that it is the source of the grandiose and exhibitionistic energies in the human psyche. The post-Jungians have sought to question or diminish its reality and significance as a structure in the collective unconscious. Thus they unwittingly enable the dragon to take refuge once again in its increasing invisibility.

  Our challenge is to reverse this trend. We must increase our capacity to discern the presence and activities of the dragon. We must break through the enchanted enclosures of consciousness created by our denial and trickster defense mechanisms.

  We must give up the arrogant, hopeless attempt to destroy the dragon, for it will be our companion as long as we survive. We must learn to acknowledge it with respect at the same time we disidentify with it. We must resist the temptation to regress into a merger with its beauty and power, its unlimited aspirations and ever-flowing golden energies.

  We must, on the other hand, realize that trying to live without the aid of dragon energies condemns us to a dull, depressed, and gray life. People with rigid enough ego-defenses may live out their lives in quiet desperation, but they will seldom experience the golden energies beneath the surface. People with weaker defenses will find the energies manifested in violence, addiction, psychosis, or other archetypal invasions.

  The dragon guards the treasures of life. Those who avoid it find their lives drained of energy and creativity. Those who encounter it without conscious intention and good will must know its terrible, horrific face. As Jung suggested, the unconscious meets us in the same spirit that we bring to it.

  Thus the only real alternative left to us as individuals and as a species is to face the challenge of a careful, respectful, and conscious befriending of the great dragon within. Jung and Edinger taught us that this is a demanding and perilous path. Development of the relationship must proceed slowly with mutual respect, as with any other serious attempt at deep friendship. Boundaries must be clear and acknowledged. The shadow potentials of each partner must be kept conscious and on the screen while trust is being developed. An arcing of golden energy gradually begins to occur. As the beneficent face of the dragon begins to manifest itself, the radiance of the human partner begins to shine as human potential moves closer to its optimal possibilities.