In fact, when you experience the Beast, you might even experience yourself as a kind of devil, with horns, red eyes, a tail, and so on. Many people actually experience this structure explicitly. You feel as if you sprout horns and a tail and you’re full of fury and hate. You just want to annihilate. If you do act out your hatred, of course it is destructive. But many people believe that just feeling the hatred will be destructive. Feeling the hatred can lead some people to act out physically and to be destructive, and that needs to be avoided. But most people—unless they have difficulty knowing what behavior is appropriate—tend to resist acting out the hatred even as they begin to directly experience the Beast.

The distrust that is fundamental to the egoic perspective is based on not experiencing the goodness of the universe. From this distrust arises what we call the Beast, the part of the ego that is not only frustrated and angry, but also hates what is good and positive. When you are experiencing the Beast, if there is any love, you hate it and want to destroy it. “Where has it been? Where was it when I needed it?” or “God is supposed to be all-loving, all-merciful, all-compassionate, but if that’s true, why am I suffering so much and why is the world such a mess?” This part of the ego has the consciousness of a young child and it can’t rationalize these things as adults do, consoling and explaining to themselves that, “God is testing me.” Even though a child might not conceptualize it, the thinking is something like, “If God isn’t here when I really need Him, God is no good. If I stay open and vulnerable, I’ll get clobbered again, so what good is He? I don’t want Him—I hate Him. He just makes more trouble for me—I trust and then I get hurt. I had better just depend on myself and forget about Him. No more trusting—that’s it.”

Resolving the issue of the Beast has a salutary effect on the soul’s relation to her true nature. It opens up a deeper level of appreciation, love, and valuing of essence, and allows the soul to see it as sheer beauty, as what makes everything beautiful. Essence’s value becomes more objective, in the understanding that essence is valuable not because of what it does and gives to the individual soul, but because of its mere existence. True nature, the essence of the soul, is valuable, is worthy of appreciation and love, not because it gives her something, not because it adds to her, not because it liberates her, but because it is beautiful.

The process leads to deep hurt and abandonment and the understanding of the origins of the Beast, or hatred of the good, in the early oral frustrations and deprivations. One of the steps in this process of working through is the recognition of how this issue depends partly on the reification of universal or divine Being. Being is personified; the soul’s relationship to it assumes the form of an object relation between a separate individual soul and a separate powerful entity one may call God.

The Beast turns out to be a particular crystallization of the ego principle, the conviction about and identification with separateness. Separateness is what truly opposes divine love, and the devil's hatred is the final natural outcome of such separateness.

The beast arises when the personality of the individual is relating to the idea of God as a person, and it has the same dynamic as a young child relating to its mother. If a young child feels abandoned by mother for long enough, then even if she returns full of love, the child’s first response is often one of angry rejection. In the same way, if we feel that God wasn’t there when we were suffering and we therefore felt abandoned, when God’s love finally shows up we hate it. We oppose it, and say we don’t want it. There’s a level of not trusting that there is such a thing as this love, not believing in it because we’ve felt bitterly disappointed by it. But there’s also a level of not wanting to believe in it, and actually wanting to destroy it, so we don’t have to risk the vulnerability that comes with our dependence on it. So the beast opposes the light, opposes the love itself. And that’s fine, that’s part of what arises, and it needs to be allowed its space, without being acted out.

The soul suffused by divine love, forming an inseparable expression of its bountiful resplendence, is the divine offspring, the prince of light. The soul disconnected and alienated from Being, especially from its loving light, becomes the prince of darkness. It is important to see that even the Beast is the ;result of the reaction of the soul to her experience. It is not an ultimate form, nor an eternal one. Hence there is no eternal damnation, and no absolute evil.

The Beast is a very specific issue related to the essential quality of Power. The essential Power of the soul is caught up in, and distorted by, the hatred and pride in the Beast structure. When you allow the black hatred is when you may feel yourself become the devil—a giant, black and powerful demon with tremendous pride and destructive hatred. You might tower over the city, looking at it and laughing. You might be filled with a powerful, destructive, cold, calm, and calculating hatred. You might experience the absolute insignificance of everything you see. Allowing this energetic structure to arise, and understanding its origins, illuminates deep issues about early levels of the soul’s disconnection from love. If you are able to feel the hatred without resistance or acting out, the hatred will transform into essential Power. This Power can penetrate the delusions that keep the ego’s reactivity in place and it can allow the soul to become still enough so that the quality of love can affect its state and its perception.