The Deception of the Serpent Energy

Along the spiritual path, there is an energy of deception that can enter one’s consciousness that can then lead to self-deception and the mistaking of spiritual darkness for light. It is in this way that spiritual seekers have sometimes been led astray by that which in the past was called the Serpent, Satan, Beelzebub, and the Devil, but which can also just be understood as an energy that can infiltrate consciousness. This energy must be distinguished from the kundalini energy which has an altogether different purpose. 

The energy of deception operates to convince innocent ones that wrong is right, and that there is a justification for seeking power as a substitute for love. It takes the vulnerability of loving and twists it so that it becomes something to abhor, rather than something to place at the center of life. It does not do this convincing by gross means through outer force, but through manipulating the inner streams of doubt and fear until they conform to a reversal of truth.  

Self-deception occurs when one’s motives, words, and behaviors are believed to be light-filled or godly, when they are actually not that but are putting forth a vibration that is at best, misguided, and at worst, harmful.  The serpent energy knows how to be convincing. It winds its way into the crevices of thought so a person does not know where their own thought ends and where another source has begun to introduce itself.

However, this influence cannot be totally successful without the individual being willing to abandon love, either love for self or love for others. The relinquishing of love and the substitution of the desire for power instead creates a nesting place where darkness can practice its deceptions and offer to the mind its rationalizations and justifications. The mind is the victim here, as well as the heart. For the heart’s love has been abandoned, and the mind has been confused so that it no longer sees reality clearly but believes that it does. Instead of truth, the mind is full of projections and distortions both about self and about others.

The energy of deception starts out as an external stream, but can quickly become an internal one once a person begins to act on the premise that darkness is light or that wrong is right. All this takes place through a devaluing of love, so that one does not even notice that it is absent.

Along a spiritual path, spiritual seekers can plainly state the principles that are guiding them, believing that they are following these principles, when, in fact, the mind and its principles have become split off from the body and the inner knowing, so that what is stated in words is no longer stated in practice, though the mind cannot recognize its own inner split or departure from truth.

Self-deception can travel with an embodied soul from lifetime to lifetime, waiting for the time when its illusion can be penetrated. For some, this can happen through discussion and through thought, but for many the penetration of self-deception must happen through the interiorization of greater spiritual light which is needed to show the errors in perception that are taking place.

Having seen these, even if only briefly and even if only to a small degree, the deeper self of the one being influenced can begin the path of struggle back to love and back to honesty, often needing both courage and humility in order to undo the false perceptions that it has carried. Nevertheless, the willingness to return to love and to recognize the other motives that have governed one’s life as no longer what one desires, can lead to a return from self-deception into the clarity of truth.

Humility is needed, courage is needed, and self-forgiveness is needed, to accomplish this reversal. Such a reversal has the magnitude of a rebirth of the embodied soul, who can then begin to live a life that is in harmony with the truth of their sacred purpose, and not the falsified life that they have been led to believe is theirs.