Part 3 ⋮ Soul Adversaries and Allies

This essay is a gateway to what I’ve privately experienced, witnessed and observed, received private confirmation from peers and leaders on, or accurately intuited as happening within various tech professional communities. It’s a topic rooted in what I’m devoted to ensuring others get free from, as a writer and inner life coach. Part Three of this series lays a hard foundation, so you know exactly where I’m coming from.

Sharing my passion for Christ’s teachings here I’ve already accepted will turn off a select group of readers. It’s a risk I chose to take, remembering I also once shoved aside Biblical wisdom, afraid to connect or investigate because of old (non-Christian) religious wounds and self-worth issues. 

It wasn’t until an overload of similarly themed, repetitive patterns of loss in my professional and personal life kept arising that I realized my internal worldview was warped. Clinging to ignorance only sunk me further into more treacherous levels of soul enslavement, torment, and failure. 

Surrendering to God’s patient, stealthy, and cutting, guerrilla-style maneuvers in my life drew me close to Him again, and saved me. You don’t have to believe in, or love God at all the way I do. Just know I would not be able to offer this work with boldness – free of fear – without Him.

Let’s dig in.
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In the unseen world, our soul’s evolution is buoyed by allies, and damaged by adversaries.

These forces are personas, patterns, and portals of influence. They are the spiritual players for, and against, our soul’s growth as we build, serve, and lead.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
– Hosea 4:6

The phenomena of poor performance thrives in ignorance. Not knowing who you truly are – the deeper purpose you hold as a tech innovator – costs.

Time, increase of life force, resources, and opportunities to kill failure-bound situations are lost when you dismiss the nudge to find solutions beyond your zones of comfort and understanding.

In every global religious, metaphysical, occult, and earth-based/indigenous tradition, the spiritual world and its inhabitants are known and acknowledged. 

Power-players throughout human history and now, actively sought alliance with the supernatural realm to grasp and maintain "authority". To enforce personal desired outcomes and agendas. They owned – and boldly exercised – the agency of their soul to affect change in the material world.

As the steward of emerging software and hardware innovation, the tech sector has attracted the attention, individual and collective contributions, and investment of both benevolent and malevolent actors – of human and supernatural origin.

Yet, the average innovator building and struggling with a work performance challenge doesn’t view the tech sector as a mirror of the supernatural. Like every other market industry and cultural creation, technology is only seen as a human-made phenomena, not spiritually-influenced. 

In Part Two, I laid basic groundwork for understanding what our soul is, as the first atmosphere to explore while cutting through personal work performance challenges.

Part Three here will uncover:

• Who is against you: 

  • Those beings intent on directing your life and behavior toward progressive failure, loss, and delay – reflected in the phenomena of poor performance.

• Who is with you: 

  • Those beings fighting for, and devoted to your soul’s elevation, toward conquering poor performance challenges and habits. 

The Gospel teachings of Jesus Christ are extremely precious to me and exclusively guide how I move through life. Quick reference-verses from these teachings will be shared, for deeper context.

Prior to late 2022, I spent 27 years striving to understand and make peace with my inner world, the supernatural influences I experienced, and the familial-historical challenges I faced as a child and young adult. Later on in my 30s and early 40s, this same desire to “make sense” of my inner life was driven by a need to mitigate persistent battles and obstacles that resulted in unusually repetitive financial and private life setbacks, as I strove to help early-stage tech founders, executives, and their teams build and scale innovative software for human benefit. 

Pursuing counseling therapy and painfully seeking teachers, through practicing a variety of spiritual paths – metaphysical, indigenous/earth-based, and meditative/contemplative – was the unique cocktail mix I created to attempt relief. 

But Christ’s teachings were the only wisdom tradition I was persistently led back to that sharply documented and offered immediate, multilayered, and evergreen solutions to my professional life challenges. It has also been the only spiritual path robust enough to sustain me as I began aggressively confronting and cleaning up the trauma-born, inner life issues that blocked my soul growth and union with God. 

My own pastors and church have been ferociously generous in guiding me toward soul maturation – through reflective study and applied practice concerning the functions of the spiritual world – as Christ taught his disciples. 

Peace of mind, character development, and material well-being continue to progress  and lift me in beautifully restorative ways, even during inevitable setbacks. I credit this relentless momentum to uncommon, love-driven instruction, and amazing pastoral cover. 

Christ’s presence in a believer’s life is about imparting power, wisdom, and freedom to establish, protect, and increase everything we've been created to enjoy and share with others.

To have (and live) life more abundantly. 
– John 10:10

Awareness unmasks the unseen forces that work against us, and reveals who has our back to conquer every limitation. A victorious life – personally and professionally – requires collective effort, rooted in accepting the truth that the supernatural world is the foundation of our material reality.

In current Western thought – as a humanistic, tech-strong, meritocratic mental model – inherent evil is dismissed as myth. 

Believing that an entity and its connected realms exists explicitly to destroy and defile the nature and destiny of human souls is viewed by most as primitive or insane – an intolerant view of reality. 

Alternatively, evil is currently presented in the modern world as a fun, harmless persona invoking edgy, horror-rich storytelling, while driving risqué-fantasy entertainment for mature audiences, and schoolhouse child’s play views on learning to cleverly wield magic powers.

For adults driven to suss out and neutralize hidden obstacles to soul health and freedom, Jesus Christ’s teachings on the nature of evil are a weapon of protective revelation. He firmly and simply identified evil incarnate on Earth as "the enemy" (Matthew 13:38–39).

Christ spent ample time with his disciples equipping them to recognize and cast out – destroy – demonic influences from the souls, life affairs, territories, families, and bodies of people desiring to function and thrive at their fullest capacity. The purpose was to ensure the fulfillment of human destinies on Earth – rooted in and sourced from God’s love, power, authority, and dominion.

For tech innovators bent to serve beyond the snares of poor performance, it’s critical to understand the enemy as the linchpin adversary of your soul’s growth. Your professional realm, presence, and contributions are regularly targeted by this negating force.

Of course: we’re each accountable for our actions, mistakes, and eff-ups. 

Exclusively blaming external factors, other humans, or even spiritual world activities and players for our own challenges and failures does not birth “winners” in life. 

And: we’re also responsible to study and survey all of the terrain – material and spiritual – that we operate in. This is about cultivating offense-driven, inner life wisdom and insight to thrive. 

The first battle is within our own soul. We tear down darkness (ignorance) presented as the lie that our fight is against co-workers, managers, leadership (flesh and blood) who we’ve incorrectly marked as the primary obstacle holding us back from succeeding at work.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
– Ephesians 6:12

Confronting all avenues that could incite work performance issues is an inner life success principle requiring enduring stamina to pursue a higher order of resolve. 

Poor performance –  as a phenomena – is activated by a lingering spirit of perversion, destruction, and death. 

All strong words reflecting the raw-blade reality – and negating force – of what we’re actually contending with. These are the inner life and spiritual world bullies we must battle down.

• Perversion | distorted, corrupted use of our life force

  • Where we now work from habitual, increasing levels of:

    • burn-out 

    • stress 

    • overwhelm 

    • aggression 

    • anxiety / fear / torment

    • competitive envy and spite
      

• Destruction | perpetual breaking down, wounding of our confidence, self-worth, and resilient follow-through.

  • Where we now feel weakened, incapable of executing power and agency

    • Thoughts, feelings, and speech come from a place of evasive uncertainty about our own ability to manifest success (instead of expressing and intending clearly defined, positive outcomes for ourselves)

      • Examples: 

        • Non-committal responses to simple "yes" or "no" inquiries

          • "Maybe…" 

          • "I can try it, but…"

          • "I don’t know…" 

          • "I used to be able to do that…"

          • "This feels so hard now…"

        • Frequently missed deadlines for simple tasks

        • Aversion to taking on more responsibilities 

        • Allowing "stronger" (bullying) workplace peers and personalities to take credit for deep work done, in an effort to "not rock the boat" / present as a "team player"
          

• Death | blunt killing of our soul – mind/will/emotions – and its transformative power.

  • Where we stop executing effectively and taking personal responsibility

    • Increasingly being absent from, or showing up late to work

    • Communication shut-down and disengagement with (normally trusted) peers, leaders/managers, mentors, advisors

    • Resorting to addictive use of controlled and uncontrolled substances/drugs/alcohol to "get through" the day, work week, season, quarter, year

    • Increased, hidden activity in other forms of emotionally numbing behavior:

      • Gambling recklessly and wasteful spending

      • Porn, sexual activity addictions

      • Isolation, beyond usual need to rest and recover

      • Body-harm, self-cutting, burning skin, etc.

      • Lingering low-energy and drive, that can trigger depression

These are only a sampling of signs and symptoms I’ve either experienced myself, or have observed operating within peers, leaders, and extended professional circles I’ve worked alongside – across all sectors and industries. But most insidiously, I’ve seen it manifest too much within tech professional circles and workplace cultures.

My founding pastor talks about the damage done – the attempted mortal strike against our inner life well-being – as a wound. Our soul wounded then becomes the access point for the enemy to enter and exploit weaknesses to twist outcomes (birthed from the near-maimed quality of our thoughts, behavior, speech).

One expression of degenerating professional well-being (the twisted outcome) shows up as poor performance.

It’s here I'll stop and emphasize that counseling psychotherapy and / or trusted, compassion-driven psychiatric support should be the critical first-response to help shift and reverse the descending spiral signals listed above.

But for those who are already engaging professional mental health support, over a committed period of time for the above circumstances – and have not achieved resolution – the complimentary spiritual worldview presented here is another path to pool solutions from. 

Our soul is influenced by, and in constant communication with, the unseen. 

Negation of this truth is just as negligent as pretending we’re exclusively made of immaterial "energy", disembodied, without material form, unaffected by the visceral reality of gravity.

The above three expressions of the enemy’s damaging influence in our work life – perversion, destruction, and death – must be identified and bluntly called out to arrest, break, and destroy their hold on our professional growth and will to change. 

Awareness of the enemy’s operation in our professional life does not mean we focus on and become paralyzed by the negative. We don’t lock ourselves in fear. 

Polarity is a true spiritual and material world principle – always at play. 

• Attraction – Repulsion

• Indecision – Decision

• Chaos – Order

• Stagnancy – Flow

If the enemy / hatred / a demonic kingdom exists, so also does unlimited good / unconditional love / God and His Kingdom of Heaven. 

Many more are for us, than against us. 

Below I’ve chosen to share direct teachings on who our soul allies are – as taught to me by my founding pastor. His insights have been forged in lifelong study and practice as a fiercely faithful husband, father, believer, mentor, and prophet – rooted in the Bible – while still continuously learning from his own elder pastor-mentors of faith. 

1. Our first soul ally – God Himself. 

In the Bible, Jesus Christ referred to God as our Father, our Source. Alive, responsive, intimately knowing every secret / issue / eff-up and gift / power / potential we strive to hide and withhold from the world. God continues to love, wildly desiring to cover, instruct, and elevate us to know Him more. 

My pastor often talks about how God is Spirit. Untamable, Limitless. Unbound by human religious misconceptions. 

As sons and daughters made in our Father’s image, we’re created by Him to operate within, and to evolve and thrive beyond the limits of body and soul. 

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
– Romans 8:14

Our function and assignment is to become eternally loving, freedom-yoked, and powerful in nature – just like Christ – who was one with His Father. Even in the midst of our human imperfections, and because of them.

2. Our second soul ally – the Holy Spirit.

My pastor teaches generously that the Holy Spirit is the heart of God. His tender emotion for us, where our misaligned actions, thoughts, feelings and speech can and do cause Him distress. 

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
– Ephesians 4:30 

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
– Ephesians 4:32

The Holy Spirit is our Helper, Comforter, the Counselor, and Advocate against the accusations of the enemy directed against us. 

3. Our third soul ally – Jesus Christ.

God’s beloved Son given to us – whose work on the cross paid off the eternal debt we each should’ve paid because of our own sin – missing the mark.  

Not hitting the unique targets of success and victory God designed for each of us is the essential definition of sin – missing the mark. This is also a spiritually macrocosmic view of what poor performance actually is, at scale.

Ignorance of, and hatred towards God – not loving Him – expresses itself in all kinds of damaging ways we unknowingly and consciously engage that soils our soul. Also known as missing the mark – sin.

Jesus Christ reflects the power and wisdom of God always providing us a fresh way out. He is our "second shot" at destroying where and how the enemy choked away our love and joy for God, as Life itself.

4. Our fourth soul ally – the Angels of God.

The hosts of the Kingdom of Heaven – God’s military, enforcers, warriors. They are ministers of our Father’s love and might, sent to educate, fortify, heal, and restore souls. They are holy extensions and direct reflections of God’s presence. Created to keep us safe from spiritual and material harm – proving we’re not alone in these spiritual roughhouse streets. 

In the Gospels, starting with the Book of Matthew, the origin story of Jesus and his efforts in building God’s kingdom is documented. Tons of reflections are shared by the apostle Matthew, one of the twelve co-founding disciples, chosen by Christ to partner with him in his work on Earth. 

One reflection shares how Christ was tempted by the enemy at the end of his initiatory 40-day fast in the wilderness, before the startup of his ministry.

Then the devil left him, and angels came and were ministering to him.
– Matthew 4:11

These carrots sticks were dangled before Christ in that act of temptation warfare: 

• enticing him to eat to relieve his 40-day hunger – before the fast was complete

• pushing him to risk his own physical safety, as "proof" of God’s cover over him

• distracting Jesus with the potential of securing worldly power and land rulership – instead of completing God’s greater work assigned to him. 

When Jesus resisted, the enemy fled. Swiftly, angels arrived to care for, feed, instruct, and spiritually fortify him. 

God’s angels are known as Messengers, the Mighty Ones. They are responsible for protecting, raising up, and supporting those called to the five-fold ministry – the offices and ministering functions within Christ’s church: 

• Apostles 

• Prophets 

• Evangelists 

• Pastors 

• Teachers 

Angels exist to elevate and help humanity win – on God’s terms, under His laws – beyond the constraints of our weaknesses, defeatist ideas, expectations, assumptions, frameworks, or logic.

They are the most misunderstood power within God’s Kingdom of Heaven. Yet, they help us battle down demonic activity, influence, and strongholds. They strengthen our will and agency to transform our lives – in service to completing the unique destinies we’re each given, from God. 

For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
– Psalm 91:11–12

God’s angels reveal the indomitable strength, beauty, and constant presence of our Father. They are a function and reflection of His always-evolving mystery.

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Rest, joy, and grace are some of the fruits your soul allies bring, as you commit to inner life purification toward dismantling the phenomena and pattern of poor performance. Your inner spirit’s ability to become more brilliant, battle-tested, and resource-rich will result.