I was on holiday in Italy, lying in bed, when I was suddenly woken by a bright light. My heart raced while my body trembled in fear, for what I experienced felt utterly beyond myself. A long journey it had been. I had become used to the darkness and the sheer emptiness of reality. Even to the paradoxically painful heartlessness that I had to endure daily, but fortunately became lighter over time. So I wasn’t expecting such a dramatic shift in perception.
During my journey through the Underworld, I encountered all kind of archetypal forces. It started with a Wolf, who crept in my consciousness during the night and left me in a state of fear for becoming possessed by it and bite my wife in her neck. It forced me to write a story, which became the first Substack story I ever posted.
However, this specific experience was different. It wasn’t dark, it was bright. Too bright to handle, as the energetic shock for my body was so intense that it took months to re-regulate my nervous system. Looking back on that particular night, I realize that it was my first meeting with the daimon.
During that night, an angelic figure appeared. A figure that told me in a powerful voice that the Imaginal Realm (the collective unconsciousness in Jungian terms) was now unlocked. From that day on, my perspective could never be the same again, as I tried to describe in an essay I wrote during that time:
“a new perceptual door has opened, which infuses the felt simple physical reality with non-physical divinity. The real mixed with the imaginal. And whereas before the sharp eye of awareness would quickly neglect this experience as delusion, now it realizes that the opposite is true. That this ancient presence has been there all along, shielded off by subtle delusion.”
Both my daimon and the wolf are still with me. The wolf is merely one of the limitless archetypes found in the collective unconscious, but it plays an important role in my personal archetypal constellation. Each of us has an utterly unique soul code, a peculiar mixture of archetypes through which the Godhead uniquely manifests and experiences itself. Part of me is a lone wolf, secretly howling when the moon reaches her fullness. Part of you might be a stage animal, that loves to receive attention wherever you go. But beneath our utterly different personalities hides the same essence. Call it God, call it True Nature, call it Being, the One, the Godhead or Consciousness. Words shy away when trying to describe its essence.
The role of the Daimon
The real experience of this perspective of oneness can only be revealed through the daimon, as it is the daimon that holds the key to spiritual truths. It functions as a bridge between realms, creating material reality from its Imaginal essence in each moment. It is the spiritual half of the soul, the ideal image to which the soul eternally strives. The relationship to the daimon is like that of a son to a father, for the daimon possesses wisdom far beyond our rational minds can comprehend. That is why, after meeting your daimon and unlocking the Imaginal realm, you cannot ever claim inspiration to be yours again. Perhaps the “primitive” people that gave rise to our Western culture knew this, as the word inspiration comes from the Latin word Inspirare, which means “to breathe into”. In that sense, all humans who are in touch with their daimon become channels through which art, writing and ideas can be “breathed into” material form. Or, as Peter Kingsley writes:
“God produces its books through his prophets, who do and say not what they want as humans but what the God inside them commands.”
It is therefore not us that give rise to any form of innovation, trend, or cultural shift. It is the spirit of the times working through the people who are open to receive ideas which are already meant to be breathed into form. And these ideas do not come from the material world, they come from the Imaginal. Or God’s mind, if you will. Through inner revelation, the download of the formless inspiration in one’s personal consciousness, the receiver becomes the co-creator in turning the formless into form. And the daimon, in whatever form, acts as the bridge between the formless world and the material world. Between the eternal and unborn and the world of endless becoming and linear time.
However, the Godhead itself never changes. It never grows, knows no time, is never born. What changes is the projection, the material mirror world that is a manifestation of the Godhead, and that projection cannot be anything other than limitless. The expanding universe is not the Godhead itself, it is the projection of the Godhead through which it can know and experience itself. This revelation came to me through an archetype that presented itself as Thoth, traditionally known as the bringer of wisdom and related to Hermes Trismegistus in many traditions. It revealed the underlying message to me:
The Beginning has never happened.
The End will never happen.
Your entire life arises in this moment.
Your beginning, your end, and all that lies in between.
But none of it ever happened, other than it appearing now.Reality is constantly becoming.
Never beginning nor ending,
but becoming as paint on a canvas.
What underlies Reality does not become.
It is.
Unmoving, Unborn, Unending and Unknown.The mirage of Reality arises from this,
but never affects it in any way.
For it is the Ground underneath all,
the emptiness underlying the dream of becoming.
It also spoke of archetypes itself and revealed the nature and meaning of their existence:
A primordial split is the becoming of a new God.
For it to appear, it needs the minds of mankind.
Thus it is born as unknown in the depths,
While influencing the story of the material.
It needs to be recovered from the depths,
so that it can become Whole once again.
Known on the canvas,
known in the Heavens and the Earth.The Ground underneath all is the pure Light.
It can’t be known directly.
Thus it tries to let itself be known through the Gods.
Steering mankind along the way.
An endless cycle of becoming,
never starting,
never ending,
eternal Becoming cannot be contained by time and space.
Archetypes, deities, Gods, or whatever word you would like to put on them are in that sense datasets containing the potentiality for material form, or creation. The Godhead is ineffable and cannot make itself known, but what it can do is create “revelation packages” to manifest change in the material world. These packages seem to be contained in archetypal forms, which in a way are very much alive, just as we humans are. Both are manifestations of the same source, but archetypes are necessary for us to reveal to us the next step in the material world’s evolutionary progression. In that sense, none of us can ever escape the spirit of the times, or the “movie” projected on the unchanging white screen, even while realizing that we’re in essence not a character in the movie itself.
The daimon plays an essential part in this view, because it is the daimon that communicates with the other archetypes in a dimension that is separate from the space-time continuum. It is thus the first receiver of the revelations, bridging the gap between personal consciousness and the body that is necessary to give form to the formless, and the Imaginal, in which the formless revelations are stored to be released in the space-time continuum.
The more the soul becomes like the daimon, or conjoins with it, the more it is at peace with itself, for it is the paradoxical freedom we are all looking for. Freedom is often correlated to free will, whereas true freedom, in a very uncanny and paradoxical sense, is becoming a mouth piece of the Godhead. Or as Jung wrote in one of his books: Becoming a spoon in God’s kitchen table. Thus, the spiritual path is not a process of gaining anything, it’s a process of surrendering one’s personal will to that of the divine. Because what could the daimon be other than a manifestation of the Godhead too? Carl Jung intuited this desire for conjoining with the daimon relationship in his Red Book and wrote an alchemical saying next to the painting of his own daimon, Philemon:
“ Protect me- I will protect you. I give birth to the light even though my nature is darkness. Therefore nothing better, nothing more worthy of veneration can come to pass in this world than the conjunction of myself and my son.”
The world is created in this moment
Wisdom’s beginning is to give up on the endless fuss of looking hopefully into the future for some final solution to our ignorance, some perfect correction to the mess we´ve made so far.` - Peter Kingsley
The false self lets us believe it can create material reality as it so desires. Through the rational mind, it plans ahead, conjuring up great stories of satisfaction, wealth, enlightenment or whatever goal it seeks to strengthen its own view of being a separate individual. However, one who has met their daimon on the bridge between worlds inherently knows that the world is created in this moment. Only through paying heed to what the daimon desires of you, thereby strengthening the bond with the Imaginal realm, can you become a channel of true creation.
It is an indescribably humbling journey to realize that all your ideas were never yours to begin with. That there never was any personal egoic will or a separate form that could be called you. That you have to do what you are called to do with not much room given. And yet, it might be what is needed for humanity to regain its bond with the Godhead and its limitless potentiality. So that we once again live together with the Gods, instead of neglecting the indescribable beauty and love as a natural consequence of realizing there is more to this world than the eye can see.
Well, even after all of this, I feel there is still more to be told about the mysteries of the daimon. I’m sure part 3 will be written whenever my daimon wills it so.
With love,
Pim