Managing Satan
"Get thee behind me, Satan."
He didn't say, "Go away. Get out of the picture. Vanish."
He said, "Get behind me. I am now the self in control, but I want you as my left hand, and I want to keep knowing all you know. But to use that knowledge to embrace all beings and heal all beings and offer my whole life to the realization of this new divine human path for the whole of humanity. But I cannot do that without you."
Excerpt from Transform Disillusionment and Loss into a New Reality
by Andrew Harvey
This would be a first unfolding of the teaching that breeds in us that fusion of shadow and light that is real, authentic divine consciousness, and that enables the process of transfiguration to begin. This is the teaching of Jesus, the evolutionary pioneer, on this marriage. It comes from the Gospel of Matthew 10.
Jesus is turning to his disciples and he's sending these ambassadors not of a religion but of a holy new way of incarnate divine human life out into the world that he knew would be extremely hostile to and menaced by the truth that was being visibly installed in them. He gave an ultimately sober and ultimately exalted teaching to set them into true illusionless, but radiant direction. He said to them, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be, therefore, wise as serpents and harmless or innocent as doves. But beware of men for they will deliver you up to the councils and they will scourge you in their synagogues. And you shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake. But when they deliver you up, make no thought how or what you shall speak, for it shall be given you in the same hour what you shall speak. For it is not you that speak, but the spirit of your Father which speaks in you." If you set this teaching as I believe you must set this teaching in the context of the unfolding story of Jesus's marriage of heaven and earth in his being and his pioneering of the divine human path alongside the great mystics at the core of the other traditions.
Then you discover something absolutely astonishing, you discover the stages of the map to the divine human. I will remind you of the four stages that precede this teaching out of which this teaching arrives. We begin with Jesus's enlightenment experience in which in the river Jordan the skies open, a fire lighted and a voice proclaimed, "You are my beloved Son." That voice will sound to you too on the day when the skies open. It's the voice of reality saying to the one who is born in reality, "You are my child." It does not announce Jesus's uniqueness. It announces his enlightenment. It is that voice that has been heard by all of those who have awoken to this reality. That is the first stage. The second stage is that Jesus, to integrate this absolutely astounding revelation which penetrated him mind, heart, soul and body, went into the desert to pray and purify himself. That led to the essential second stage, the stage of endarkenment, in which he met himself, his own dark twin. That dark twin, that is clumsily called Satan in the text, revealed to him what he could not face drunk only on the transcendent light. Revealed to him the depths of his own depraved lust for power on every level, mental, spiritual, and physical all together.
Because he was simultaneously able to absorb the full terrible lesson of that dark twin, the full terrible lesson of the wisdom of the serpent in all of its horror. And he was only able to do that because he had already been baptized in the light. That's a great clue, my friends. Because he had done that heroic work, he was able to do this heroic work of facing his dark twin and refusing from the depths of his newly awoken self the temptations on any level to power. Then he said something which has been immensely misinterpreted in the texts. He said, "Get thee behind me, Satan." He didn't say, "Go away. Get out of the picture. Vanish." He said, "Get behind me. I am now the self in control, but I want you as my left hand, and I want to keep knowing all you know. But to use that knowledge to embrace all beings and heal all beings and offer my whole life to the realization of this new divine human path for the whole of humanity. But I cannot do that without you."
The dove and the serpent have to marry, become a mystery of unity, of diversity in the One. Then he goes down with this new radiance of endarkenment and enlightenment, working in the marriage within him. He goes down, in front of that naked and holy power, he gives in his first sermon, the praise and the glory of the kingdom that already exists that he has come to reveal to everyone, because he's living its radiant embodiment. Then he faces, immediately the consequences of doing so. Because to be born as a revolutionary of transfiguration on the earth is immediately to constellate the darkest imaginable opposition. At that first sermon, they tried to kill him, and he escapes by grace. At that moment he knows that his time is limited on the Earth because he will have to give the full truth to seed it in humanity, but that giving that full truth will endanger him and risk what actually happened.
What this shows is something so astonishing that I am thrilled to be able to try and put it into totally inadequate words for you. What this shows is that the evolutionary path at this level where it really starts to be activated proceeds from enlightenment, baptism into total transcendence as your fundamental nature. Endarkenment which saves you from the secret shadow of that revelation and grounds all of you in the depths of matter, in the depths of the dark side of humanity, in the depths of your own dark side. And enables you to come by degrees into the mystery of the One that itself has a dark side. Because as Jung said, evil is the fourth face of God. If God is One, God is One. Everything is sacred. Everything is holy. Everything is utterly divine from beginning to end. There is no end or barrier between things. They're all interconnected in the unimaginable brilliance of an unknowable intelligence of love. You can say it's unknowable, but you can know that it is real because it infuses all of you with interconnected awareness. That's putting it mildly. Once the marriage of endarkenment and enlightenment, enlightenment and endarkenment starts to be fertile in you. Then what begins is a revelation of the no thing. The nothingness from which the manifestation, the everything is arising.
The knowledge of how that manifestation depends on this coincidence of opposites, this dance of opposites, this marriage of the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove. What that gives you is simultaneously an unknowable and extreme deep calm and deep peace and deep equilibrium, a much vaster capacity for human and divine feeling, and the fringes of a superconscious intelligence that enables you to experience everything from every event simultaneously because your one mind is one with the one mind. That one mind feeds you in a completely new way all of the information simultaneously that you need. That begins this absolutely astonishing revelation of the interpenetrating levels of transcendence and immanence that is the One, that is this reality that never wavers, never changes. Its manifestation changes all the time, but it never changes. That starts the process of transfiguration of engoldenment.
