Victor's Way - On Spiritual Bypassing

Not everything horrific is Satanic.

Although worshipped in the two different forms, both Durga and Kali are representations of the same feminine ‘Shakti’.

If you want to go to a spiritual garden for the afternoon and frolic with statues of fairies, unicorns and angels, then go ahead, but to say that this is the true spiritual journey is spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassing is a New Age paradigm, it’s all love and light, and if it’s dark, well, then you can push it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.

The New Age movement has created more darkness deliberately through it’s denials. You see, we all have our own darkness. Deep within us are the parts of us that we don't want to see. We don't want to know about them, at all.

In my book, Heal your Inner Wounds, I don't write about the ‘shadow’. Shadow work is very popular because it’s not easy work, and it sounds cool. It isn’t the deepest work you need to do, however. When something lurks in a shadow you can’t see it - for example, it could be a bad behaviour that needs pointing out to you, a pattern that you don’t realise you’re caught in. It can be difficult to own, and then takes a lot of energy to change. Shadow work is challenging at the best of times. But I believe that the aspects hiding in your shadow are not alway bad, for example - being a superb violinist could be a shadow aspect of you, simply because you’re not aware of it. Darkness is different. You know it’s there, and you don’t want to go there.

I write about darkness in my book because I’m not afraid to do that work. I’ve done it for myself and I have brought many clients into their own darkness over the years. We can stare at the darkness directly in the face, and if it is true darkness, it's remains dark. In the darkness we stand on the precipice between life and death. The dark parts are the parts of us that cause us, and the people around us, the most pain. These are the parts of us that we see reflected back to us so wildly in the collective at the present time. It is inherited, it is our own, it is part of who we are.

You cannot hack these pieces off of you - to cast these dark aspects of ourselves out is to cut a piece of ourselves off from ourselves. Doing this is a dismemberment, a mutilation. Again, we can see this mirrored in society right now so plainly in our faces. It is not okay. Cutting off pieces of ourselves is not going to heal anything. In fact it only makes things much, much worse.

What we need to do is go deeply into the darkness and get comfortable with these parts of ourselves. They are real. Over time, as we witness the darker parts of ourselves, we learn how accept them for what they are. We must listen to them. Sit with them. Bring in compassion as we recognise them as ourselves. When they trust us, we can hold their hand and we merge, we walk together out of the darkness and into the light. For darkness is made from a lack of light, darkness is separation from God.

This is the path of self-mastery. It is a spiritual process, similar for everyone in that it is a universal part of growth, but also different for everyone because each experience is deeply personal. It's never pleasant. Most people never go here unless they become faced with their own death. Depression and the deep pit of despair is touching into the darkness that I speak of. That's why I believe people have an aversion to the images floating around the internet recently from Victor's Way. And that’s understandable.

Victor was a Buddhist monk who is now in his 80s and lives in Ireland. He’s created the most glorious private garden in a hidden part of Wicklow, taking this spiritual process of darkness to light and making a contemplative walkway adorned by the most amazing, custom-made statues. He commissioned each one of them, they’re unique and special, and based on Buddhist and Hindu themes, describing the dramatic journey from darkness, true darkness, to light. And yes, it is dramatic, as are the statues.

Out of respect to Victor I am not going to share photographs of his statues here because they're sacred, and taken out of context, they can be shocking. Just as you would not like to see the darkest parts of you plastered over the internet, these images out of context on the internet have triggered people into calling and labelling them satanic. We are surrounded by satanic images, and these images are not satanic. We must be able to discern, to tell the difference, and to be mature enough to know what is evil and what is not.

Satanic images are made to be worshipped. There are plenty of them hiding in plain sight around the world - because they want your consent, because they feed from your energy. Again I will not post an image of an example here, because then it is as if I am giving consent to these monstrosities. I do not consent. Victor’s statures are not in plain sight, on the contrary they are sacred, in a private garden, where he says explicitly ‘This space is not for children.”

As I've already explained, these dark parts of you wants to be seen by you, understood and forgiven. They’re sacred. With the internet, we have lost the sense of what is sacred. I've also said this before - sacred Reiki symbols only taught to people in the second level are easily accessed by Google images. In fact, you could probably search for sacred third and fourth level Reiki symbols if you wanted to, and you would find those very easily too. It is also very easy for a someone to stumble across a sigil of Solomon and activate it inadvertently just by looking at it, and invoke a demon. Or for a child to stumble across pornography. It’s all in plain sight - I do believe has been the intention of the internet all along.

Plastering sacred things all over the internet is a symptom of the powers that be normalising a lack of privacy. It numbs us to the idea of accepting a surveillance state. It's disempowering because by sharing our sacred processes it dissolves them. But this is a topic for another time. (This is the reason why I've not been writing very much of late - I am currently in an alchemical process of distillation which is sacred, and just like a cake, you can’t open the oven to keep checking if it is cooking without destroying what it is you are trying to create.)

So back to Victor's Way.

There is great beauty and peace to be found in the Sacred Garden of Victor’s Way for the adult explorer. The reason why children need not walk through these darkest aspects of themselves is not that they have yet to create them, no. Many of them are born with these dark aspects already in place. They simply don't have the resources they need yet to manage them, or to heal them and Victor doesn’t want to illicit them too early. Victor's Way is a pilgrimage and designed to be as such. Victor himself is a pioneer, he has written many books, which even I, as an avid reader have trouble deciphering. For they are more like a codex than a manuscript - Victor's Codex opens up the collective subconsciousness and the unconsciousness to release the pressure that is created by so many people not doing their darkness work. I will in time, write a story about Victor for I find him incredibly inspiring.

Ahh, dear reader, it is a lot to take in. You’ve probably had enough of my meanderings at this point. So I will say gently to you, there's a lot of anger in the world right now. A lot of mistruth, and much misunderstanding. A friend wrote to me just this morning and said “This is a super messy time, designed to get even messier, so me, I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible.” Just know that not everything is what it seems.

I ask you to open your mind and be willing to be wrong. Be willing to listen to the other. But most of all, when that dark energy aspect of you knocks on your own door, because if it has not already, it most certainly will do in the coming weeks and months, be willing to open it, sit with it, listen to it, and honour it. Because only when you do this, and I do this, and others do this, the darkness that we all carry, as a collective, will be brought into the light.