Demons typically make their worst stink right before they are vanquished.
It should get our attention that every person or group of people that have discovered what the Native American people called wetiko unanimously consider it to be the most important topic - there’s not even any competition - to understand in our world today. To give one example: Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan refers to wetiko (though by a different name) as “the topic of all topics.” Called by many different names throughout history, the spirit of wetiko renders every other issue secondary, for wetiko is the over-arching umbrella that contains, subsumes, informs and underlies every form of self-and-other destruction that our species is acting out in our world. If we don’t come to terms with what wetiko - which can be conceived of as a virus of the mind - is revealing to us, nothing else will matter, as there will be no more human species. Wetiko inspires the darkest evil imaginable while, at the same time, potentially helps us to wake up to our true nature as creative beings. How wetiko winds up actually manifesting depends upon whether we recognize it as the on-going revelation that it is - it is showing us something about ourselves that is of supreme importance for us to know.
[…]
This can help us to understand the known psychological fact that the greatest danger for suicide is right before someone is going to have a breakthrough. Demons typically make their worst stink right before they are vanquished. This understanding can also help us to re-contextualize when we experience seemingly darker forces getting evoked in our mind-streams. For example, when we feel “attacked” by what seem to be the darker forces of the psyche, instead of interpreting this as evidence confirming how screwed up we are, we can realize that this is an expression that we are getting closer to the light within ourselves; shadows are not merely the absence of light, but are also an expression of its presence. In other words, the more light there is, the more the darkness becomes activated and visible. Since the darker forces want to derail us from our path, we can learn to understand that their manifestation is a reflection of exactly the opposite - that we are on our right path. We tend to think of illumination as “seeing the light,” but “seeing the darkness” is also a form of illumination.