Presentation by Doug Scott, MA, MSW, LCSW
Doug Scott, LCSW, MA Panel 6: “On the Devil in Christian Thought” IIPSGP / Global Vision 2000 Joint International Conference — April 5, 2026
I. INTRODUCTION & EPISTEMOLOGICAL GROUNDING
I’m grateful to be on this panel and I thank you for inviting me.
Right here at the very beginning of my presentation, I want to tell you that I will be sharing with you my belief that there is a planetary-sized collective thoughtform or egregore (elemental) which we humans have created, have nurtured, and have been enmeshed within for millenia. The human imagination has called this Great Collective Thoughtform, “Satan” or the Devil. And here I assert that this Great BASH, what I call this Planetary Elemental, where BASH is the acronym for
B — Bellicose Attitude: the normalization of combative framing as default worldview.
A — Aggressive Actions: the translation of bellicose attitudes into policy, violence, and coercion.
S — Scarred and Scared: the trauma substrate. Collective woundedness that makes bellicosity feel necessary.
H — Hope Through Hostility: the deepest inversion — the belief that safety and salvation come through domination. The myth of redemptive violence. It never delivers what it promises. But it always promises.
I will circle back to deepen this concept and show how it applies to our current global situation in a moment. But first, I want to give you my epistemic background so you can get a sense of how I arrive at the themes I’ll share.
My name is Doug Scott. I’m a licensed clinical social worker and psychospiritual counselor based in Dallas, Texas. I hold two graduate degrees from Boston College — a Jesuit university — in clinical social work and pastoral ministry. I’ve spent more than twenty years in clinical practice. My religious formation is within the Roman Catholic tradition, specifically Franciscan spirituality and the contemplative Christian mystical stream. I’ve always been interested in the nexus between the spiritual and the psychological, and bridges between the conventional and the esoteric.
The sources I draw from include depth psychology — primarily Jung — the Desert Fathers tradition, particularly Evagrius Ponticus, René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, and centrally the Ra Contact, also called the Law of One Material — channeled material produced between 1981 and 1984, which I’ve studied since 2013. I had a direct UFO experience at age seven, in 1981, which happened to correspond to the beginning of the Ra Contact channeling. I’m telling you that not to establish authority but to explain why I can’t approach these questions as purely academic.
I hold all of this with epistemic humility — testing it against clinical observation, philosophical tradition, and the Christian mystical sources I was trained in. What I’ve found is that these sources corroborate each other from different angles.
II. THE COSMIC LAW OF THREE — TELEOPOTENTIATION
Let me lay the conceptual engine underneath everything I’m going to say today.
There is a universal creative principle that operates at every scale of reality: an affirming force meets a denying force, and from their interaction a reconciling force arises. These three operate simultaneously, not sequentially. This is drawn from Gurdjieff’s Law of Three as developed by Cynthia Bourgeault, integrated with Whitehead’s process philosophy and the cosmology of the Ra Material.
I’ve given this principle a name: teleopotentiation. From the Greek telos — purpose, aim — and the Latin potentia — power, latent capacity. The purposive activation of latent potential through the interplay of opposing forces. This is the eternal primal push of the Creator: to know itself through, in, and as the manifested world and every entity within it.
Contrasting forces generate tension. That tension is not a problem. It is very material which potentiates transformation.
The conscious self — what I call the significant self — sits at the nexus of these forces. And it faces two options at every moment.
Option One: Status Quo Resolution. The subconscious default. The self resolves tension by choosing the familiar. The karmic cycle recycles — but intensifies. Each unprocessed cycle returns at higher intensity. Not punishment — the system working to wake the self up.
Option Two: New Higher Arising. The significant self dares something new — resolves tension at a higher grade. This produces a neue Gestalt — something qualitatively new that includes all parts but transcends them. How wholeness begets more wholeness through incarnated choice.
Now — apply this to planetary scale. The Terran Planetary Entity — our Earth — has been cycling through Option One for millennia. Each cycle intensifies karmic inertia. What I’m going to describe to you today — the Great BASH — is the accumulated, now-sentient product of millennia of Option One at collective scale.
III. THE PLANETARY SHIFT — THE TERRAN ENTITY AND THE NOOSPHERE
The Ra Material describes Earth — Terra — as a planetary entity that is shifting into what they call fourth density. If you think of energy centers, this is the planetary body moving into its heart chakra.
We are sentient cells within a larger corpus — the Terran Planetary Entity. This maps onto Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere: a self-aware noetic membrane emerging from the biosphere.
What is emerging right now is a qualitative quantum threshold — the next stage of collective consciousness. We are in a liminal space. This is a birth, not merely a conflict.
But the labor is complex — because we do not use the catalyst of our own bellicosity efficiently. The work — and this applies to progressives and spiritual seekers every bit as much as it applies to the populations we’re tempted to diagnose — is to acknowledge, accept, and grapple with the warlike attitudes and shadow material that live in all of us.
IV. THE GREAT BASH — NAMING THE EGREGORE
A. Karma as Inertia
Karma is not punishment. It is inertia.
Forgiveness is the brake. When forgiveness is never invoked, the accumulating imbalance grows into an intense nexus of energy constituted by the nature of its own arising. Over millennia, this nexus achieves sentience. It becomes semi-autonomous, self-sustaining. It operates like a psychic parasite — even vampiric in its functioning.
B. This IS What Traditions Call the Devil
I want to be very clear here, because this is the central claim of my talk and I don’t want it to be missed.
I am not rejecting the language of the Devil. I am not saying the Devil is a metaphor. I am not saying it’s just a symbol for bad behavior. I am saying: the Great BASH IS what traditions have called Satan, Lucifer, the Evil One, the Eye of Evil. It is real. It is sentient. It is powerful. It influences human affairs. Everything the tradition says about the Devil’s operations — I am affirming.
What I am correcting is the ontology — specifically, where it comes from.
Conventional Christianity treats this force as wholly external, wholly Other — a fallen angel, a cosmic intruder who arrives from outside creation to tempt us away from God. That framing makes the Devil separate from us. And that separation is precisely the error that keeps the cycle running.
The Great BASH is not separate from us. We created it. It is a planetary-sized thoughtform generated by millennia of human bellicosity — fed by our collective worship of redemptive violence, nurtured by every civilization that has located its hope in the destruction of its enemies. Over millennia, it achieved sentience. It now has its own momentum, its own agency. In process theology, it is what Whitehead would call a nexus of actual occasions organized into something with its own will. Can it be intensified by non-planetary negative entities? The Law of One Material suggests yes. But the origin is ours. We built it. We feed it. And we live inside it.
Let me offer an analogy. We created social media and its algorithms. Can anyone deny that these creations now influence us, shape our perceptions, form our identities? We cannot call social media purely external — we created it, and now we participate inside of it. The same is true of AI. The Great BASH operates identically. We are both its creators and its inhabitants. The creature creates its creator in order for the creature to continue — a recursive loop.
So when I say the Great BASH is the Devil — I mean it. But it is not the Devil as someone else’s problem. It is the Devil as our own collective creation that we are currently living inside of, and that we will never dissolve by fighting it as though it were an enemy out there. Because that fight is exactly what feeds it.
C. Why This Matters for the Conference’s Question
If the Devil is wholly external, wholly separate from us, then the response is warfare — defeat the enemy out there.
If the Devil is our own collective creation that we live inside, then the response is shadow integration.
Externalizing it feeds it. This is Girard’s scapegoat mechanism at its most fundamental. Every crusade, every holy war, every demonization of the Other is the BASH feeding on its own diagnosis. Naming it as ours — not denial of its power, but recognition of its origin — is the only path toward dissolving it.
D. The Acronym
BASH stands for:
B — Bellicose Attitude: the normalization of combative framing as default worldview.
A — Aggressive Actions: the translation of bellicose attitudes into policy, violence, and coercion.
S — Scarred and Scared: the trauma substrate. Collective woundedness that makes bellicosity feel necessary.
H — Hope Through Hostility: the deepest inversion — the belief that safety and salvation come through domination. The myth of redemptive violence. It never delivers what it promises. But it always promises.
E. How It Operates
Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century Desert Father, described how intrusive thought-patterns — he called them logismoi — assault the monk in prayer. The word shares its root with Logos itself. Both come from legein, to gather, to sort. But where Logos gathers toward unity, the logismoi scatter toward fragmentation. The critical insight: a logismos is not a raw impulse. It wears the clothing of reason. It presents itself as Logos while pulling toward disorder.
Girard’s scapegoat mechanism is the primary engine. The BASH requires an enemy. It creates us, and then it requires us to create enemies, generating more raw material it feeds on.
F. Contemporary Illustration
I want to bring this down from the conceptual to the concrete, because the conference title asks us to look at the bombing of Iran, and that is exactly where the BASH is currently speaking at full volume.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a massive military campaign against Iran. As of yesterday, an F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran — the first confirmed U.S. fighter loss of the campaign. The president has promised to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.” And on March 25th, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has previously called for a “crusade” against Islam — hosted a worship service at the Pentagon in which he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” for every round to find its mark, and for enemies to be “delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.” He prayed this in the name of Jesus Christ. The day before, Trump had told reporters — laughing — that Hegseth was the only cabinet member who wanted the war to continue.
This past Thursday, Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff, the Army’s Chief of Chaplains, and a third general — during an active war. No reason was given. He replaced them with personal loyalists. He has invited a Christian nationalist pastor who has defended slavery and opposes women’s right to vote to preach at the Pentagon. He has directed military chaplains to stop providing mental health support to troops in combat. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received complaints from more than fifty installations — service members reporting that commanders are framing the Iran war as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
Every dimension of the BASH is present here. Bellicose attitude: war framed not as tragic necessity but as worship. Aggressive action: institutional purges to concentrate personal loyalty over competence. Scarred and Scared: a population experiencing genuine cultural displacement, whose catalyst was intercepted and redirected toward a designated enemy. Hope Through Hostility: the conviction that bombing Iran is divine mandate, that destruction of the enemy is the path to redemption.
The logismoi wearing the clothing of Logos. Scripture, liturgical form, the name of Jesus — all draped over a content of annihilation.
And the BASH does not confine itself to the evangelical Protestant stream. It moves through every tradition that has the vocabulary of transcendence — because it knows how to put on that vocabulary. In my own tradition — American Catholicism — Bishop Robert Barron, one of the most gifted Catholic communicators of our generation, has drifted visibly toward proximity with the administration. He compared Trump’s address to Congress to “a high liturgy of our democracy.” He joined the president’s Commission on Religious Liberty. And as bombs have fallen on Iranian cities, as the military chaplaincy has been conscripted into crusader theology, as the U.S. bishops’ conference and the Vatican itself have raised alarms — Barron has been largely silent. This is not the aggressive vector of the BASH. It is the passive-complicit vector: the strategic cultivation of proximity to power at the cost of prophetic witness. The Great BASH does not require that its participants be villains. It requires only that the pull of institutional belonging and social capital be stronger than the prophetic call.
This conference title also names the Epstein files. I’ll leave the detailed analysis to our colleagues in Session 4, but I want to note that the surfacing of that material is itself part of the dynamic we’re describing. The Greek word apokalypsis means uncovering, revelation — not destruction. An apocalypse is what happens when a transformation is underway: what is underneath surfaces, what is dark is exposed by the luminosity of wholeness. The Epstein files, the Pentagon prayer, the commander briefings invoking Armageddon — these are not separate phenomena. They are the BASH becoming visible. And that visibility, paradoxically, is itself part of the shift. You cannot work with what you cannot see.
V. THE WAY THROUGH — NOT AROUND: What is in the way of our path, becomes the Way through to our path.
So what do we do?
Shadow integration, not shadow projection. That is the only path. The Franciscan incarnational tradition teaches that God moves into matter, not away from it — the direction is always descendental, down and in. We do not transcend the shadow by denying it. We meet it. We name it. We hold it.
Forgiveness is the metaphysical brake. Not forgiveness as condoning — but rather owning the capacity to both point over there and see evil, but also pointing to ourselves and being honest of our logs in our eyes. Forgiveness stops karmic inertia at any stage of its accumulation. Every tradition represented in this conference knows this in its own vocabulary.
What fourth density looks like — if I can use that language — is transparency of thought and emotion, collective consciousness, the BASH dissolving not through being defeated but through being seen, acknowledged, and released. The contemplative task is not to meet bellicosity with more bellicosity. That only feeds the same thoughtform from the other side. The task is to see it, name it, and choose — in whatever small way we can — the symbolon over the diabolon: the gathering over the scattering, the encounter over the annihilation. Not because we are better than those caught in the pattern. But because we recognize the pattern in ourselves.
We are in the birth canal. The labor is real. The outcome is not guaranteed in timing. But the direction is set.
VI. CLOSING
I come to you as a pilgrim, not as an authority. Everything I’ve shared is my limited, partial, open-handed offering.
The Great BASH is ours. We created it. And naming it — honestly, without flinching, starting with its operation in ourselves — is the first step toward releasing it.
If you are interested in diving into anything I’ve shared at a deeper more comprehensive level, I’ve published a book called Raian Process Metaphysics: Cosmic Christology for Our Times. A free pdf of the book can be found at my website at cosmicchrist.net.
Thank you. I look forward to our conversation.
Building 4th Cosmic Christ 