Sin and the (false) sovereign

The spiritual war is ultimately fought in our daily interactions and close relationships

Let’s say for a moment that you’ve done your therapy, and come to terms with your mummy, daddy, spouse, ex-spouse, abuser, sibling, offspring, preacher, and teacher issues. Over time you come to realise that everyone is struggling with the same basic life and relationship challenges, and that inner peace only comes with a radical acceptance of the broken world “as is”. You stock up on self-help books, up your game on self-compassion, and accept that healing emotional wounds is part of life.

Then you “awaken” to the corruption of the world, and the sophisticated deceit that is used to strip us out of birthrights. You research how each of us is collateral for hidden financial instruments being traded in a tax scam under corrupted law. You begin to disengage from The Beast’s systems as best you can, and fight back as your energy and resources allow. You take all the legal and practical steps you can in order to reject your conferred status as a debt slave, and instead assert your true nature as a living man or woman.

Now you are a “sovereign”, or so you imagine. After all, you are a defender of unalienable rights, and battle against wickedness in the world. You might even flatter yourself as a protector of children and guardian of the innocent. Yet, just as a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so is a modicum of righteousness. The temptation is to compare yourself to others around you, and their lesser stage of outward development, while being blind to how far you have yet to progress inwardly. When you should be “looking up” and accepting your own fallen nature, you instead “look across” as if this is a competition with prizes for crossing the “sovereign line” first.

I am seeing a trap for those on the sovereign path, and it is a subtle one. If we awaken to the fallen nature of the wider world, but not to our own selfish desires, then we can end up as a “false sovereign”. We feel better than others because we have done some “shadow work”, and can see the unprocessed darkness in others that they miss. All our energy goes into fighting the system, and we end up feeling better than those who operate as its dogsbodies. We decry the ignorant “woke sheep” and venerate ourselves as the “awake”. This fans the root sin of pride, which is the ultimate learning disability.

Furthermore, trauma can feed into narcissism and sociopathy. Having been harmed as a child, for instance, we identify with the victim position, and having been wronged. In order to protect ourself, we have ways of fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning that attempt to keep us safe from feeling those old hurts ever again. There may be unhealthy learned behaviours, such as lashing out against personal boundaries in general because we endured an abusive father or mother. But the end state of all this is that we refuse to accept our own darkness and wrong, as it disrupts the victim narrative that has become our identity.

The false sovereign is able to justify all kinds of behaviour because they are superficially engaged in asserting their own divine status against a system of power that would steal it away. All temporal authority is rejected, whether legitimate or not. Every law enforcement officer, government bureaucrat, and customer service agent who is asserting policy is denied standing, simply because they are associated with disliked institutions and unwanted constraints. Wrongful actions of other “freedom fighters” are defended simply because they are on “our side” and against “them”.

I have repeatedly seen a phenomenon where those who have had the initiative and opportunity to do great research via books and online become insufferable. In one memorable incident, an old man who has spent decades decoding the Bible insulted everyone and anyone as ignoramuses since they had failed to grasp its hidden meanings. Yet his behaviour was obnoxious and unloving, which meant he himself has failed to internalise the most basic holy message. As a result, he was no ambassador at all for spiritual enlightenment.

Conversely, I also observe others who load up on the doctrines of morality, and can quote you scripture line by line, but refuse to research and revise their understanding of the temporal and material world. It is all “sky map” with no “terrain map”, which makes them crash into peaks of problematic environments. “But I was reading the astronomical chart so well!” is the lament, while they refused to look forward out of the window at the looming mass of immovable rock. The pursuit of morality without truth, just as much as truth without morality, is a folly from its inception.

I have friends who are Freemasons, Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, pagans, atheists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhists, Hermetics, and more. There is wisdom in every single one of these, since no tradition can survive over time if it is all lies or delusions. Even dogmatic cults can have some redeeming value in coercing their members into good habits like sobriety. Yet at the end of the day, everything seems to boil down to the central New Testament message of loving they neighbour as oneself, and thus not doing to others what you would not have done to yourself. The end to suffering comes from stopping our wrongs to others; peace is not (only) an inside job.

The gaslighting spouse is just as much a tyrant as the despotic dictator. All tyranny is a rip in our unity consciousness, dividing us into the controller and controlled, ruler and ruled. Tyranny requires the subjugated to coalesce into controlled mass behaviours, which makes ideology its focus, since priestly belief is preferred to police batons. Control over minds is built on two pillars: a false logic, and a false morality. Hence freedom must be its opposite: truth and morality. When we reject either of these, or take up power to define them for ourself, then we honour the lie, and we lose freedom. Sovereignty is where the free will of each of exists in harmony, without the violence of external control.

The false sovereign is someone who rejects infringements upon themselves, while continuing to readily infringe upon others. In order to avoid control by others, we need to control ourselves, which puts the spotlight in an unwelcome place. A true sovereign understands that rights come with responsibilities, and accountability demands liability. You cannot have one without the other, and the lop-sided demand for benefits without costs is childish and selfish. In some ways the false sovereign is worse than the minor tyrant, since there is a pretence to be something you are not. At least the functionary “only obeying rules” honestly accepts they are a bought and paid for tool of the system.

When you refuse to hear evidence of having hurt others, or engaged in risky behaviour, then you are not acting in a sovereign way. When you are violent in your words or expression, then you are not being sovereign. When you evade responsibility for your acts, and reject punishment for wrongs, you are not being sovereign. In the extreme case, you are no better than the enemy, being equally willing to privatise the benefits of the sovereign path, while socialising the losses. The hypocrite is a worse enemy than the heretic, since they light up a broad road that is not The Way, and draw others off the narrow path by misguided example.

The rejection of slavery means each of us taking up two simultaneous quests for freedom: a ministry of reconciliation (with truth and morality being decided outside of us), and a ministry of repentance (for our failure to discern these or act into them). We are poor judges of our own competence, our intuition is through warped perception, and our hearts routinely seek unhealthy pleasures. This paradoxically means our greatest allies are those who give us feedback that we are off course, and indeed impose boundaries on us when we stray too far and cause harm.

These is essentially only one meta sin, which is a refusal to learn from error due to pride, which means you have to repeat the life course endlessly. Every form of blame on external agents or circumstances is a distraction from the only thing we control, which is ourself and our own behaviour. The journey to be sovereign, individually and collectively, is the same one as to purge ourself of sin. It’s all about elimination of the trespasses wherever possible, no matter who commits them, or against whom. To attempt to be sovereign without owning our sinfulness is instead to become a new form of petty tyrant, imposing our superiority complex on others.

Going full circle, secular institutions like psychotherapy may help is to identify with our own shadow and those of others, but they eschew the language of sin. Truth and morality are too easily rendered into shades of grey; good and evil are framed as outdated modalities of thinking that lack nuance. We are encouraged to make peace with our resident demons, rather than drive them out with vigour, thus embracing spiritual mediocrity as the best on offer. To be on the path to sovereignty means being spiritual at a higher divine level, not only celebrating our light, but also engaging in relentless battle with our personal darkness.

In my opinion, the path to sovereignty is less about grandiose legal gestures in the world, and more about the micro interactions at the everyday level with those around us. You cannot be a conduit for Source at the same time as sinning via subjugation of others via your choice of harsh language or overbearing outbursts. To be on the sovereign path is not to be sinless, but rather to be the owner of your inevitable sin. Stopping the trespasses against others is a higher priority than halting the wrongs being done to yourself. For instance, you can never justify a ruinous risk to someone else by a survivable risk to yourself.

The great paradox of all this is that the humility of the genuine sovereign is essentially silent. You do not boast aloud of how you conquered your addictions, whether to toxic substances or the feeling of being right. Every day is a fresh engagement with temptation, and there are constant setbacks and losses as you get lonely, hungry, or even horny. The more sovereign we become, the less noisy we are about the crimes of others, and the greater our hushed attention to our own moral lapses. Perhaps the truest silent weapons for a quiet wars are grace and mercy, since the real enemy opposing sovereignty is sin.

Summer in an English village