The Danger of Becoming the Darkness When Fighting the Dark Side

    

The evil Sith Lord Sidious encourages Luke to fight his father using aggression and hatred. Sidious cunningly knows that even while Luke fights against evil, if he does so by using hatred, then Luke is already succumbing to the dark side because hatred and anger are of the very nature of darkness itself. The inter-dimensional entities behind the dark agenda taking over the world, like the Sith of Star Wars, tap into the power of the dark side of “the force”, which is light—the substance of the universe and creation—but inverted, using hatred instead of love (that’s why when you see symbols of the light inverted, you know black magicians are likely to be behind it).

Seeing dark global agendas stream rolling over goodness, truth, and freedom throughout the world is more than enough to make anyone feel angry, negative, and even enraged. We as a humanity, along with all our rights, are under siege and the most common response to being attacked is either through anger and aggression, or fear and retreat—which is based on a raw fight or flight reaction. While it sometimes seems there is no other way to respond, there is a danger of becoming the very thing we’ve set out to defeat if we act through aggression or hatred in any way.

Instead, there is another way of responding in which we are still able to stand and defend ourselves against darkness, but do so from a place of consciousness within. It has been taught since ancient times and even the Jedi knights of the Star Wars movie series used it. It requires an inner discipline and gives access to the intelligence and power of love, something crucial to defeating attacks from darkness.

Remember the famous scene from the movie Return of the Jedi in which Luke Skywalker faces his father Darth Vader in battle. Luke must struggle to contain his own rage and instead use the light side of “the force” which is love. Thus he becomes a true Jedi, as one who opposes evil but does so from a place of love, not hatred, and would rather die than go to the dark side.

A similar theme is used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien where characters are put to the test by being tempted with the power of the ring, which would give them access to the vast powers of darkness, enabling them to at last liberate themselves and their people from the evil that seeks to enslave them all. As in Star Wars, the heroes and heroines of the story must resist wishing to fight “the dark side” by using the power of the darkness and instead use the powers of light, such as love, courage, and true friendship. Those who succumb to fighting darkness using dark powers become the very evil they originally set out to destroy.

The character of Boromir in the movie Lord of the Rings, who is tempted by the dark powers offered by a supernatural evil ring. Each character in the story is symbolically tested by being exposed to the ring, which brings out the desire hidden within humans for greed, selfishness, power and control through force and dominance.

Both Lucas and Tolkien studied ancient religions and spiritual teachings, and brought into popular culture the essence of the struggle between good and evil found in the messages of Jesus, Krishna, and Lao-tzu.

Hatred eventually turns us against one another

While it can feel totally justified to be insulting, hateful and resentful to those who attack and hurt us, feeding ill will and hatred, even towards the most treacherous criminal on earth, feeds the energy of hatred within nevertheless, and that rage grows the more it’s fed like a beast that starts getting out of control. There can even be a sense of satisfaction in denigrating and hurting those who harm us; many, having a sense of powerlessness at those whose actions decrease the freedom of humanity, resort to taking their anger and frustration out in various ways.

As harmless as this venting seems, feeding anger within is ultimately harmful to the one getting angry and taking enjoyment from hurting others is at its core something demonic. Those demonic entities behind the dark global agenda take pleasure from the suffering of others, and anyone who feeds this goes into the dark side no matter how altruistic their aim. This rage can easily turn people against one another, even within those who are active in the struggle for truth, as anger becomes more easily inflamed and starts attacking anyone who disagrees, creating infighting and disharmony amongst those who are supposedly meant to be instilling higher principles in the world. Wherever this kind of division exists, there can be no effective fight back against darkness.

In one scene taken from Lord of the Rings, Tolkien shows how the power of darkness seems to feed off the anger between those who would do good. J.R.R. Tolkien wove an incredible metaphorical story about all the races of earth needing to work together to battle a growing dark agenda.

So, can we really win this battle, or any for that matter, with anger? If we pit ourselves against the hatred of those who enslave us through using our own hateful energy, it could turn us into the very thing we are fighting against. And what is the battle for anyway if we end up spending our lives in angry embitterment?

Passive observers stay calm but without growing

Acting from a point of integrity within, whilst in the thick of a war between good and evil, is extremely difficult to say the least, as the urges of the animalistic drives instinctively and compulsively arise, eclipsing consciousness as they do. Opposing evil can bring out some of the most raw and vicious psychological responses within a human being, including the wish to wreak revenge, to see others suffer, and to brutally kill. Many retreat from the opposition to evil and the responses it brings up, and instead hold onto a sense of peace by simply avoiding all conflict and by not getting involved. Well-wishing and praying for a good outcome, safely from the sidelines, is easy; likewise it is easy for people like this to look and feel superior to those going through the psychological responses actively opposing evil brings.

But the wish for a better world has to translate into action, which means that we actually have to get out and do things. If we value light, truth, and goodness we also have a duty to defend it against darkness, as without that defense, goodness would simply be eradicated from the earth by the plans of evil. By doing so, those who oppose evil must confront their true self as it is only in facing opposition that the dark side of our own psychology emerges and can thus be seen and changed; much of the battle is overcoming the darkness within and this is what leads to real inner change and spiritual growth.

Ancient sacred texts reveal the philosophy of action without hatred

One of the most powerful teachings in the world on this subject is the famous text the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna reveals a series of profound truths to prince Arjuna on the nature of reality before they set out to battle in the Kurukshetra war. It expounds an incredible philosophy, found echoed in the Jedi of Star Wars, on opposing darkness from a place of compassion and detachment. In it, neither running away and avoiding it, or fighting with hatred and rage, is the right course of action—instead Krishna teaches Arjuna what is called the Path of Right Action.

“Anger induces delusion; delusion, loss of memory; through loss of memory, reason is shattered; and loss of reason leads to destruction. But the self-controlled soul, who moves amongst sense objects, free from either attachment or repulsion, he wins eternal Peace. Having attained Peace, he becomes free from misery; for when the mind gains peace, right discrimination follows.”
~ Krishna, the Bhagavad Gita

A similar philosophy is found in the ancient Chinese text the Tao Te Ching:

“Unevolved people are eager to act out of strength, but a person of Tao values peace and quiet. He knows that every being is born of the womb of Tao. This means that his enemies are his enemies second, his own brothers and sisters first. Thus he resorts to weapons only in the direst necessity, and then uses them with utmost restraint. He takes no pleasure in victory, because to rejoice in victory is to delight in killing. Whoever delights in killing will not find success in this world.”
~ Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

Jesus was also depicted in the Gospels as someone who opposed darkness, yet at the same time did so from a place of love.

“Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.”
~ Jesus, Matthew 5:43

Love is a state of being within; to feel love for those who hurt us, to harbor no resentments or ill will towards anyone, no matter what they have done, is difficult to achieve but something very worthwhile, as it then allows us to keep love as a permanent state of being rather than a feeling that arises only around selective people at selective times.

The power of love and consciousness

Sometimes it seems like there is no other way than to use anger, insults, and reactions in the struggle for truth, freedom, and justice. However, love and justice can’t just be the end goal to be accomplished by whatever means. If so, they will only ever stay as an ideal that cannot be reached—to be achieved they must also BE the means.

Being able to deal with those involved in harmful activities in a conscious, just and detached way allows the intelligence of love to emerge and for us to be more effective in our actions. Whilst anger and hatred makes us compulsive, reactive and violent, detachment and consciousness enables us to perceive a situation clear of the cloudiness of emotion and to act in the best way. It is possible to have a sense of love towards those who have hurt us, whilst still acting justly to defend ourselves against them. In this way love becomes a permanent state and way of being rather than just a fleeting feeling.

Love is often seen as something sappy and weak, whilst aggression gives someone the appearance of strength and courage. However, it can be surprising to find out that it is quite the opposite: true love comes from the consciousness within and gives real courage, strength and intelligence that does not depend on external things and gives the ability to endure even the greatest hardships, whilst aggression only puffs up someone who may ultimately be very weak within—controlled by the extremes of anger and fear that are completely dependent on outside circumstances.

To defend goodness against evil is so important and a wonderful thing, but ultimately, if we don’t free ourselves from our own anger, hatred and resentments, whoever they are held towards in our lives, then we will lose the war within. As found in many ancient sacred teachings, the battle in the truest sense, is the one against the darkness inside us, which is the purpose behind the timeless struggle between good and evil in the world anyway.

How to check for a Scammer

      This article came to my mind after a heated debate from another blog article. So I feel this is a subject that needs to be brought up. Many investigators of phenomena such as ghosts, UFOs, haunting s, paranormal creatures and many unusual events often find themselves in a situation where they need to know how to check out a hoax. This article will provide a set of guidelines you can use to determine whether or not a claim or a story you are examining is a hoax.

     As a paranormal investigator or researcher, it is your responsibility to discern between deception and truth. The word "hoax" refers to those stories, videos or pictures where there is intentional deception or fraud. For example, it's up to you, as the unbiased observer, to separate the story that a homeowner may tell you about a haunting from your own efforts to determine what's really causing the phenomenon. However, there are times when the storyteller is a con artist, an attention-seeker or a sociopath. As a paranormal investigator, you need to remain vigilant against these types of people.

Identifying a Hoax Before It Grows Legs

     The field of the paranormal is filled with tricksters. On YouTube, over half of the "ghost videos" are fabricated or spoofed videos meant to poke fun at people who believe in ghosts. Unfortunately these "hoaxes" are mixed in with a gold mine of video that homeowners have shot featuring authentic paranormal phenomena. There is no faster method to become disenchanted with a field of research than coming across one or two of these ridiculous hoaxes.

     Elements of a story, video or phenomenon that will help you to immediately flag it as a potential hoax include:

•Is the "evidence" in a format to be distributed to a large group of people, such as an email distribution or a website?

•Does it fail to provide legitimate and verifiable confirmation sources?

•Is the language used either very emotional or highly technical?

•Is the source anonymous, or is it impossible to verify the source's expertise?

Identifying a Hoaxer

     While identifying a fabricated story may be easy, identifying a hoaxer isn't. Hoaxers are essentially con artists who are attempting to sell a particular audience on a paranormal story. The following are common characteristics of such con artists.

•Chameleon: The con artist adapts quickly, using the same lingo and basic core beliefs as the crowd and incorporates those into the hoax.

•Charismatic: A clever con artist can come across as extremely professional, successful and charismatic.

•Techno-babble: They often use poorly understood science to peddle certain "technology" or research. They use meaningless phrases like "ectoplasm anomaly", or "micro-cosmic harmonic stabilization", which sound no different than highly technical phrases from a scientific journal to a layman.

•Nasty Skeptic: If you ask a hoaxer for evidence, the con artist will act slighted and attempt to make people feel that questioning the source of information will cause the information to stop.

•Too Good To Be True: If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Aliens do not offer secret free-energy technology. Ghosts do not shoot dishes across the room while flickering the lights and shooting ectoplasm from the walls. And, when Bigfoot is captured, he likely will not be stored in an ice cooler available to the highest bidder. Using common sense can go a long way when you research paranormal claims.

     The following are examples of paranormal hoaxes that took place over the past few years.

The Elevator Ghost Hoax

     In early 2008, a creepy video surfaced on YouTube and throughout the Internet, showing security camera footage of a ghostly, stooped figure of an old woman haunting an office building in Singapore. It quickly became well known as the "Raffles Place Ghost." Later in the year, the GMP Group admitted they fabricated the video, at a cost of $100,000, in order to "highlight the dangers of working late". Many thousands of people had fallen for the hoaxed video.

The Aleshenka Creature

     In August of 1996, a mentally ill elderly woman named Tamara Vasilievna Prosvirina claimed that she'd discovered a small creature in Kaolinovy, a small village in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Locals claimed that the creature was extraterrestrial in origin. For years, Ufologists and crypto zoologists believed that the creature was not of this world. However, in 2004, scientists from the Moscow Institute of General Genetics, used genetic testing to prove that the creature was nothing more than a prematurely born female baby with severe deformities.

Planet Serpo and the Human-Alien Exchange Program

     In 2005, a story about a human-alien exchange program surfaced on the Internet. An anonymous person, claiming to be a government insider, used free Internet email accounts to send poorly written military journal entries written by military officers who allegedly visited the alien planet. In 2006, investigators at Reality Uncovered, using email-tracing evidence, revealed that the anonymous hoaxer was former U.S. Air Force Sergeant Richard Doty, famous for his part in a number of past UFO hoaxes that he distributed to UFO researchers Bill Moore and Linda Moulton Howe during the 1980s.

Bigfoot Found

     During the summer of 2008, Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer claimed that they'd discovered the body of Bigfoot in the backwoods of northern Georgia. The hoax built up steam throughout the national and international media as the two men claimed they had the corpse frozen in a chest freezer. Self-proclaimed crypto zoologist Tom Biscardi picked up the story and pushed it into the national news by promoting several large media events. The two men sold the body to a research group called Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. for $50,000.00. After thawing the creature, the hoax was revealed when they discovered that it was nothing more than a rubber gorilla costume.

6 Ways Drumming Heals Body, Mind and Soul

From slowing the decline in fatal brain disease, to generating a sense of oneness with one another and the universe, drumming’s physical and spiritual health benefits may be as old as time itself.

Drumming is as fundamental a form of human expression as speaking, and likely emerged long before humans even developed the capability of using the lips, tongue and vocal organs as instruments of communication.

To understand the transformative power of drumming you really must experience it, which is something I have had the great pleasure of doing now for twenty years. Below is one of the circles I helped organize in Naples Florida back in 2008, which may give you a taste of how spontaneous and immensely creative a thing it is (I’m the long haired ‘hippie’ with the gray tank top drumming like a primate in the background).

Anyone who has participated in a drum circle, or who has borne witness to one with an open and curious mind, knows that the rhythmic entrainment of the senses and the anonymous though highly intimate sense of community generated that follows immersion in one, harkens back to a time long gone, where tribal consciousness preempted that of self-contained, ego-centric individuals, and where a direct and simultaneous experience of deep transcendence and immanence was not an extraordinarily rare occurrence as it is today.

This experience is so hard-wired into our biological, social and spiritual DNA that even preschool children as young as 2.5 years appear to be born with the ability to synchronize body movements to external acoustic beats when presented in a social context, revealing that drumming is an inborn capability and archetypal social activity.

Even Bugs Know How to Drum

But drumming is not a distinctively human technology. The use of percussion as a form of musicality, communication, and social organization, is believed to stretch as far back as 8 million years ago to the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans living somewhere in the forests of Africa.

For instance, recent research on the drumming behavior of macaque monkeys indicates that the brain regions preferentially activated by drumming sounds or by vocalizations overlap in caudal auditory cortex and amygdala, which suggests “a common origin of primate vocal and non-vocal communication systems and support the notion of a gestural origin of speech and music.”

Interestingly, percussive sound-making (drumming) can be observed in certain species of birds, rodents and insects.  Of course you know about the woodpecker’s characteristic pecking, but did you know that mice often drum with their feet in particular locations within their burrow, both for territorial displays and to sound alarms against predators? Did you know that termites use vibrational drumming signals to communicate within the hive? For instance, soldiers threatened with attack drum their heads against tunnels to transmit signals along subterranean galleries, warning workers and other soldiers to respond accordingly. 

6 Evidence-Based Health Benefits of Drumming

Drumming has been proven in human clinical research to do the following six things:

1. Reduce Blood Pressure, Anxiety/Stress: A 2014 study published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine enrolled both middle-aged experienced drummers and a younger novice group in a 40-minute djembe drumming sessions. Their blood pressure, blood lactate and stress and anxiety levels were taken before and after the sessions. Also, their heart rate was monitored at 5 second intervals throughout the sessions. As a result of the trial, all participants saw a drop in stress and anxiety. Systolic blood pressure dropped in the older population post drumming.
2. Increase Brain White Matter & Executive Cognitive Function: A 2014 study published in the Journal of Huntington’s Disease found that two months of drumming intervention in Huntington’s patients (considered an irreversible, lethal neurodegenerative disease) resulted in “improvements in executive function and changes in white matter microstructure, notably in the genu of the corpus callosum that connects prefrontal cortices of both hemispheres.” The study authors concluded that the pilot study provided novel preliminary evidence that drumming (or related targeted behavioral stimulation) may result in “cognitive enhancement and improvements in colossal white matter microstructure.”
3. Reduced Pain: A 2012 study published in Evolutionary Psychology found that active performance of music (singing, dancing and drumming) triggered endorphin release (measured by post-activity increases in pain tolerance) whereas merely listening to music did not. The researchers hypothesized that this may contribute to community bonding in activities involving dance and music-making.
4. Reduce Stress (Cortisol/DHEA ratio), Increase Immunity: A 2001 study published in Alternative Therapies and Health Medicine enrolled 111 age- and sex- matched subjects (55 men and 56 women; mean age 30.4 years) and found that drumming “increased dehydroepiandrosterone-to-cortisol ratios, increased natural killer cell activity, and increased lymphokine-activated killer cell activity without alteration in plasma interleukin 2 or interferon-gamma, or in the Beck Anxiety Inventory and the Beck Depression Inventory II.”
5. Transcendent (Re-Creational) Experiences: A 2004 study published in the journal Multiple Sclerosis revealed that drumming enables participants to go into deeper hypnotic states, and another 2014 study published in PLoS found that when combined with shamanistic instruction, drumming enables participants to experience decreased heartrate and dreamlike experiences consistent with transcendental experiences.
6. Socio-Emotional Disorders: A powerful 2001 study published in the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that low-income children who enrolled in a 12-week group drumming intervention saw multiple domains of social-emotional behavior improve significantly, from anxiety to attention, from oppositional to post-traumatic disorders.

Taking into account the beneficial evolutionary role that drumming likely performed in human history and prehistory, as well as the new scientific research confirming its psychosocial and physiological health benefits, we hope that it will be increasingly looked at as a positive medical, social and psychospiritual intervention. Considering the term recreation in its root etymological sense: re-creation, drumming may enable us to both tap into the root sense of our identity in the drumming-mediated experience of being joyous, connected and connecting, creative beings, as well as find a way to engage the process of becoming, transformation and re-creation that is also a hallmark feature of being alive and well in this amazing, ever-changing universe of ours.

New to drumming and want to try it?

Fortunately, drum circles have sprouted up in thousands of locations around the country spontaneously, and almost all of them are free. You will find them attended by all ages, all walks of life and all experience levels. The best way to find one is google the name of your area and “drum circle” and see what comes up. Also, there is an online directory that lists drum circles around the country: http://www.drumcircles.net/circlelist.html