The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so. You must start slowly to undo the world.

Your problem is that you confuse the world with what people do. The things people do are the shields against the forces that surround us; what we do as people gives us comfort and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are only shields and we let them dominate and topple our lives. In fact I could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more important than the world itself.

- don Juan, from A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda

An idea that is common in some religious and spiritual circles is that we are surrounded by “beings,” though beliefs differ on whether they are “angels” or “demons” or both.

However, in a clear, practical sense, we are constantly surrounded by, and constantly create and maintain, “entities” that have semi-independent realities. They are simply natural consequences of our mental actions and our social instincts, the externalizations of inner experience.

I call them “entities” because, to some degree, they behave as if they live. They are “born” when someone exteriorizes or projects an idea into the world, an event analogous with physical birth. They “feed” on thoughts and emotions, and grow according to the quality and quantity of what they are fed. They “die” when they are deprived of energy and attention.

The “entity” becomes the repository and the expression of ideas and attitudes, and as such, becomes somewhat autonomous. This is not uncommon in the arts — many writers and actors will attest to the independent reality of their own psychic constructs, e.g. fictional characters “telling” their creators about their motivations. Sometimes they even surprise their creators. I recall reading Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, saying that sometimes he would start out a cartoon strip with a direction in mind, but Calvin would insist that he would do it differently, so Watterson would have to change his ideas to accommodate Calvin. So much energy had been invested into creating and shaping an imagined construct that it attained a certain density, a certain independent existence.

Another example of an “entity” is a plan. The summer after I finished massage school, I visited a number of acupuncture schools, and decided that I definitely wanted to attend a school in Seattle. For the next two years, my wife and I planned accordingly. I took some classes that were prerequisites for admission to the school, and my wife researched possible jobs and areas to live. In general, we continually invested energy into this idea of what we would do “when we get to Seattle … ” It became a near-reality, with definite shape and form on an astral level.

When, two years later, I abruptly changed my mind and decided to go to a school in Florida, there was a very real grieving process. My wife and I felt the existence of this “entity” we had created — this complex of ideas, feelings, and expectations that comprised “going to Seattle” — and we felt a sense of loss as we withdrew our energy from that entity and let it die.

This kind of thing is also known in spiritual circles. One popular idea in the New Age is that of creative visualizations and affirmations, which in essence is the deliberate empowering of certain positive ideas. Prayer can also be a form of this.

From this understanding of the psychic constructs indigenous to our lives, we can also begin to understand the spirituality of groups and the psychic constructs formed by collective identification.

One provocative idea in the aforementioned book by theologian Walter Wink is that institutions, too, have an interior, spiritual reality.

Most people have an intuitive understanding that other people have interior experiences. It’s common knowledge; this theory of mind, as it’s called in developmental psychology, is one of the first things we have to learn as infants, and we continue to hone this awareness throughout our lives. Not quite as obvious, however, is the understanding of an interiority to a collective identity — what is called an egregore in occult terms, or the psychic consciousness of a group.

Perhaps the simplest version of this is the relationship between two people. As soon as two people begin to interact, something forms between them: an acknowledgement of a shared reality, a certain degree of responsiveness between the two. In a sense, an entirely separate “entity” is formed by the interaction, fed by the thoughts and emotions that fuel it.

In a brief interaction with a stranger, such an entity may die out within moments. In a long-term relationship, however, it grows and deepens. It is the inner existence of what is perceived outwardly as the love (or hate) between two people. It’s the essential stuff that therapists work with.

In local interactions such as what occurs between two people, perhaps this is not so obvious. But as sociologists know, the more people you add, the more the group “entity” gains an existence beyond the individuals, and can even be shown to control the people whose minds and hearts feed it, rather than being controlled by them. The insanity of a raging mob is one example — ordinary people who are willing to beat each other to death over a soccer game, for instance.

Another example: One time a friend of mine attended a Christian revival meeting and told of how energizing and uplifting it was, even though he didn’t have a particularly positive view of Christianity; it had more to do with the collective energy of the participants than with the tenets of the religion.

These examples are of spontaneous, emotional collective entities. The more powerful ones, though, for good or evil, are those that are rooted more deeply. They are the families, the clubs, the tribes. They are the institutions, the organizations, and the corporations. These are all entities in and of themselves.

Even our legal system recognizes this, in an oblique way. Corporations are treated, for all legal intents and purposes, as if they were individual entities. Corporations can own money and property, they can make decisions, they can be sued.

For the most part, though, people are unaware of this kind of psychic-emotional interaction, and the existence of these metaphysical entities. Nonetheless, they exist on all levels of our social existence, as a natural consequence of relationships.

These entities are our angels and demons.

Or some of them, in fact. Actually, if the occult literature is to be believed, there are innumerable planes of existence with many types of beings. But in our reality, the entities that have the greatest impact on our lives are those that we ourselves create.

The irony is that, just as creations can slip free of their creators on an individual level, this occurs on the collective level as well. For instance, back in the 1980’s, Steve Jobs, one of the two legendary founders of Apple Computer, fought and lost a political battle which ended in his leaving the company (though he later returned). He was rejected by the same institution that he had founded and which had made him a legend.

The system, then, has a life of its own.

Wink states:

… A change of emperor might affect the ordinary Roman incidentally for good or evil, comments Harold Mattingly, but it was really the system that mattered, and the system changed very little, whatever particular opponent might be enthroned in the seat of the Caesars. The office of the emperor seemed to possess a power independent of its incumbent: “It was inevitable that the system should come to tyrannize over each Emperor of the moment, that caprice, never to be completely excluded, mattered less and less, that the Emperor should end by being as much a prisoner of his office as the meanest serf among his subjects.” A highly placed officer at the Pentagon expressed to me the same sentiments: “Sometimes it feels like it’s just a massive system that got going and no one knows how it happened or how to stop it.”

For we are not contending against mere human beings, but against suprahuman systems and forces, against “the spirituality (pneumatika) of the evil Powers in the invisible order.”

The modern sociologist Peter Blau concurs that institutions seem to be beyond human control: “Once firmly organized, an organization tends to assume an identity of its own which makes it independent of the people who have founded it or of those who constitute its membership.”

People establish institutions, but they are in turn themselves molded by the institutions they have established. We come into a world already institutionally organized, often for injustice. “I suppose that at first, it was people who invented borders,” writes the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “and then borders started to invent people.”

We are born, in other words, into a system which, by its nature, is limited, and therefore limits us.

It is thus futile to look at George W. Bush and imagine that, if only Al Gore or John Kerry had been elected, all would be well. To some extent, perhaps this would have been true. Yet the fact is that a corrupt system will by definition support a leader that must accept some degree of corruption.

And, by definition, a system that does not respect all people is corrupt. A system in which some people hold power over the lives of others is corrupt. Even if a good, ethical person occupies, for the moment, the position of power, the existence itself of that position indicates corruption.

Which doesn’t mean that there is an easy answer. Some people (including myself, at one point) think that the best solution is one in which equality is enforced through the physical living condition — in other words, if civilization were wiped out and we had to go back to living more or less primitively. But this would not then teach us the lessons of power and its abuses.

At this point, I see two areas that call for further exploration.

The first is to comprehend the outward manifestation of our inner selves — to become aware of our own projections and externalizations, which are normally unconscious; to understand them and take responsibility for them. The more we know, the more we can control. This requires self-knowledge and thus is the path of personal spiritual growth.

The second is to comprehend the inner manifestation of the external world — to see into the metaphysical nature of the Domination System, and to come to understand how it can be redeemed.

In Wink’s cosmology, the Powers — as he terms the institutional entities — are of God (”good”), divorced from God (”fallen”), and can be reconnected to God (”redeemed”). This is analogous to prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal states of consciousness. Ken Wilber has written on the pre-trans fallacy, which in essence is the mistaken idea that what came before is identical to what comes after, so all that needs to be done is to go back.

That’s the mistake some primitivists, and some fundamentalist Christians, make. But all will not be as the Garden of Eden. You can’t undo the learning of technology, and you can’t undo the eating of the apple. But you can learn from the experience, and use it wisely.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I am convinced that “redemption” involves transcendence of the “fallen” aspects — their transformation, rather than their rejection.

After all, these entities are our creations. It may be easier to forget their existence, but they spring out of the chaos of our own psyches. Therefore, as much as they may oppress us, they are opportunities for us to confront the shadow aspects of ourselves, to come to grips with our own powers and learn to exercise them with wisdom. None of which can be done in a state of childlike Eden. None of which can be done without going through a phase of challenge, painful as it is.