Harry Potter's Invitation to the World
by Vickie Ewell
Chapter 93 – Harry Faces Voldemort (HP Chapter 17)
Quirrell didn’t think the voice was strong enough, but the voice insisted it was strong enough – for this. Voldemort obviously had a distorted picture of his self and attempted to defend that false idea against Quirrell’s insinuation that a mere 11-year-old child was stronger than he was. Voldemort envisioned Harry as nothing more than a weak little boy.
Harry felt like the Devil’s Snare was rooting him to the spot. He couldn’t move. It was like Voldemort’s physical presence had caused Harry to suddenly travel backward. That wasn’t actually true. Harry was just remembering what it felt like to be trapped by the Devil’s Snare earlier that evening. He was relating that feeling to what he was experiencing now.
Emotions are the connection between the past and present. Emotional associations trigger memory, but we often fall into the trap of believing that what happened in the past is happening again right now, even though people and situations have changed. That false belief causes us to react mechanically to similar situations. Harry associated Voldemort with the Devil’s Snare, his inner Demons (or Dementors).
Jo told us that Harry was petrified as he watched Quirrell reach up and begin to unwrap his turban. Fear of death immobilizes us. It robs us of our Power to Act. In prior dreams, Harry struggled to remove the turban from his head, but he never thought to simply unwrap it.
This unwrapping motion reflected the way we discover the various aspects of our self. It’s like unwrapping an onion a layer at a time. Eventually, when all of the false aspects have been discovered and deactivated, the one aspect we have yet to face is our own personal Voldemort.
Conditioning is universal. We’re all programmed in exactly the same way, but our individual differences and personal beliefs mix with our universal programming. It’s a bit of a jumble that has to be cleansed. Once everything in our Kingdom that isn’t our True Self has been deactivated (or cast out), our True Self still has to face that initial controlling programming power and deactivate it in some way.
Once the turban was unwrapped, Quirrell slowly turned around. Jo uses circular motion each time we enter the subconscious mind, but since we’re already in there, Voldemort’s presence is apparently found much deeper within than Harry had ever traveled before.
If Harry hadn’t been so paralyzed with fear, he would have screamed. That’s similar to how we behave when we’re having a nightmare. Dreams can be so frightening that even if we try to scream, no sound comes out. Harry’s fear was a physical, chemical reaction that automatically took over when confronted with the possibility of Death. It’s the way our mind is wired.
We can look at death rationally. We can say that we don’t fear death because we believe it isn’t the end of consciousness, but when Death is only a second away from us, our unconscious mind might not agree. That’s what’s happening here I think. Consciously, Harry was not afraid to die, even at the young age of eleven, but the unconscious mind is programmed to help us survive. It’s programmed to fear Death.
When confronted with a possibility of non-existence, the stress that causes immediately kicks into gear. That knee-jerk reaction floods the body with stress hormones that shut down body systems not immediately needed for physical survival. These hormones also immobilize energy sources to give the body the energy it needs to fight or run. This is an important point that Jo is making because the way we react to our conditioning does exactly the same thing.
When we feel disappointed because something hasn’t gone the way we hoped it would, that we’ve been wronged, are uncomfortable in our current circumstance, or experience any number of negative emotions, the body interprets that mental stress to be a physical threat. The unconscious mind reacts as if we were in immediate physical danger of survival. Stress hormones flood the body and blood sugar soars to give us immediate energy.
Only…we aren’t in a situation where we have to fight or run. Our life is not in danger. We’re just upset, so none of that energy gets used as it should. It just sits around waiting and causing damage to the body.
If this is an occasional occurrence, there isn’t much of a problem because the mind has mechanisms it can use to help the body adapt to the imbalance. It can also repair itself. When this false reaction occurs consistently on an almost daily basis – and for some people this occurs several times a day – the body doesn’t have time to rebalance itself or repair anything before it runs into another life threatening situation.
The result is degeneration and aging. It’s what eventually causes death. Our fractured awareness, inner turmoil, and conditioning results in Death. So the benefit of Transformation is that this whole physical degeneration that we experience on a daily basis no longer occurs because all of the fear, inner turmoil, and fractured awareness no longer exists.
Where the back of Quirrell’s head should have been was a face. It was chalk white with red eyes and only slits for nostrils like a snake. Except for the nose, the image ran contrary to what most would expect Voldemort (or the Devil) to look like. Most people see Voldemort as evil, having no value, so his white face and red-stone eyes don’t fit with what we think of as darkness.
However, darkness is always defined through the perspective of our fears and false beliefs. Knowledge is the ability to see what is. Wisdom is the ability to find value in everything that is. Conditioned man cannot do that. Voldemort appearing in white and red also resembled Biblical warnings that the Devil often takes on the appearance of an Angel of Light to deceive us. We won’t be tempted to identify with (believe or agree with) a false personality if we fear them.
The white face spoke Harry’s name. He Knew who Harry was. That’s because when we identify with our conditioning, our conditioning pretends to be us. Harry found that startling, so he tried to take a step backward, but he couldn’t move. Harry’s fear was still in control.
Physically, this occurs when our Proprioceptive sensory system isn’t integrating the incoming sensory data correctly. The mind can consciously tell the body to move through thought, but the body doesn’t comply. During the malfunction, the body is like a separate entity. It does not obey thought. This infers that we do not have to obey our thoughts either.
“See what I’ve become,” the face said. “Mere shadow and vapor….”
Although Voldemort’s first command for Harry to look at him was designed to raise self-pity, many see this announcement as Voldemort declaring himself to be the Shadow Self. That may, or may not be true, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that backs up the traditional definition of a single Shadow Self holding everything we don’t want to face – both good and bad.
Granted, there are ugly things about our personality that we don’t have enough courage to face…yet. We have insecurities such as those experienced by Ron, which he defeated when he destroyed the real locket horcrux. These aspects are part of the entire system of conditioning though – what most spiritual traditions call Mammon – and each aspect or belief is a separate entity that must be observed and dealt with individually.
“I have form only when I can share another’s body….” Voldemort isn’t a person. He’s a force. His fear of Death, however, has turned him into a parasite. Instead of performing the function for which he was created, he takes over physical bodies and controls them similar to the concept of possession by evil spirits. He encourages us to make rules, beliefs, ideals, and illusions that protect not only our physical lives, but allow him to keep us imprisoned.
He encourages us to fracture our awareness. We are also convinced through suggestion to create a legion of entities to populate our inner world. Since Voldemort isn’t God, but desires the same power (or more), he does the next best thing. He creates individual worlds