The Widening Gate: Electromagnetism, the Internet, and Our New Exposure to Evil

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. Genesis 1:3-4

There is a comfortable reading of the mental illness pandemic, and it is the one nearly everyone reaches for first.

Anxiety and depression are up because of algorithmic dopamine loops. Dissociation is up because attention has been fragmented by the feed. Loneliness is up because community has been replaced by simulation.

All of this is true, and none of it goes far enough, because it treats the crisis as entirely psychosocial — a problem of behavior and chemistry, with no remainder.

I want to propose the remainder.

Not as metaphor, not as a poetic flourish borrowed to make old language sound relevant again, but as a claim about what is actually happening in the room: that the infrastructure of data — the servers, the towers, the fiber, the grid straining to feed them — is not a neutral backdrop to this crisis. It is a medium, in the older and more exact sense of the word: a channel through which influences travel, both toward us and, apparently, against us. And the more of that medium we build, the wider the gate we are holding open.

Electricity was never neutral

In Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales, Beelzebub is blunt about this in a way modern readers tend to skip past as cosmological color: what we call electricity is, in his account, the product of the blending and mutual destruction of a sacred cosmic substance he names Okidanokh — the very medium through which the higher bodies of man are nourished and matured.

Its careless extraction is not an engineering matter. It is a spiritual transgression, one Beelzebub links directly to the shortening of human life and the degradation of the conditions under which a soul can actually be formed.

I do not think this is a quaint cosmology to be admired and set aside. I think it is a warning we are now living inside at a scale Gurdjieff could not have imagined when he dictated those chapters.

If the ecology of electromagnetism is spiritual before it is technological, then the largest energetic infrastructure project in human history is not a footnote to the mental illness crisis. It may be one of its causes.

Consider the scale. Global data centre electricity demand is on track to reach roughly 565 terawatt-hours in 2026, up around a quarter from the year before — and AI-optimised computing, the fastest-growing slice of that load, is compounding at a rate several times faster than global electricity demand as a whole.

By 2030, forecasts converge on something close to a doubling again. This is not a graph. It is an atmosphere being built in real time, layer on layer, city by city, and every layer of it is drawn from the same sacred substance Beelzebub named and warned against extracting without understanding.

We built a planetary nervous system and did not ask, even once in the boardroom, what it costs the soul to feed it.

A house with more doors than ever

I have written before about the demoniac of Gerasa — my name is Legion, for we are many — as a diagnosis rather than a curiosity: the ordinary human condition, in which no single "I" governs the house, but a rotating committee of borrowed impulses answers for us instead. Multiplicity is not the exception. It is the baseline. What varies is how exposed that unguarded multiplicity is to what wants to move in.

Here is the part I think we have not sat with honestly enough. A house with many rooms and no settled occupant was always vulnerable. But a house with many rooms, no settled occupant, and a constant electromagnetic current running through every wall of it — a body immersed for twenty-four hours a day in the emissions of the very infrastructure now scaling faster than any technology in history — is vulnerable in a different order of magnitude.

We have not merely failed to install a tenant in the swept house. We have wired the empty house for a current we do not understand, running at a voltage we keep increasing, and we are surprised that something is moving through it.

This is not an argument that Wi-Fi causes demons, and I want to be clear about that, because the crude version of this claim is easy to mock and deserves to be.

The argument is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: that the same infrastructure which is measurably reorganising human attention, emotion, and biological rhythm operates in the same energetic register — electromagnetism — that Gurdjieff's cosmology treats as the very medium of spiritual traffic, for good and for ill.

We built the fourth brain of the planet, as I have called it elsewhere, out of exactly the substance that both nourishes and, mishandled, corrodes the possibility of an inner life. It should not surprise us that the traffic on that channel is not exclusively benign.

The same channel receives both signals

I have written separately about discerning and receiving the energies of higher intelligences — about the cosmic interface as something real through which genuine spiritual reciprocity has always been possible for those with the discrimination to receive it rightly.

Scripture assumes this discrimination is necessary because the channel is not self-policing. Test the spirits, whether they are of God — that instruction exists because the interface carries more than one kind of transmission, and the burden of sorting them has always fallen on the receiver.

What has changed is not the existence of the channel. What has changed is that we have built, at planetary scale, a device that keeps billions of people in a permanent state of passive reception on that channel — undiscerning, unguarded, absorbed for most of their waking hours in a medium that is simultaneously electromagnetic and psychic, without a fraction of the discrimination that any serious tradition insists is the minimum precondition for safely handling that kind of traffic.

Multiply this by the biological reality that our own nervous systems are themselves bioelectric instruments, and the picture sharpens further: we have not merely built a spiritually significant medium. We have built billions of antennae, running them continuously, with almost no one taught how to tell what they are receiving.

This is, I would suggest, close to the most efficient possible architecture for exactly the kind of low-grade, chronic, population-scale spiritual predation the New Testament calls the prince of the power of the air — a title that has always sat oddly with commentators, and that I no longer think we can afford to read as merely poetic.

The mental illness pandemic, reconsidered

I am not proposing that every case of depression is demonic and every anxious mind is possessed. That reading is as crude, and as false, as its secular mirror image — the reading that dissolves the demoniac of Gerasa entirely into a treatable diagnosis.

Both errors share the same flaw: they insist on a single-cause explanation for a condition that has always been, in the Gospel's own witness, layered — biological, psychological, and spiritual at once, with no clean seam between them.

What I am proposing is that the mental illness pandemic is unlikely to be purely biochemical or purely social, because we now live inside conditions the Gospels and Gurdjieff both treat as spiritually significant in their own right: chronic electromagnetic immersion, chronic fragmentation of attention across borrowed "I"s, and a chronic, undiscerned openness to a channel that was never guaranteed to be safe.

The correlation between rising connectivity and rising psychic distress is not proof of a spiritual cause. But it is exactly the correlation you would expect to see if the spiritual reading were true, and I think that is worth more weight than it currently receives from either camp — the purely secular or the purely pious, both of whom would rather the answer stay simple.

What a positive occupation looks like now

The warning of the swept house was never stay away from the medium. Christ (nor Gurdjieff) did not counsel withdrawal from a hostile world; He counselled occupation of the cleared ground by something stronger than what was evicted.

The answer to a wired, undiscerning, electromagnetically saturated age is not a retreat to the desert — though the desert fathers understood something about this we would do well to recover — but the deliberate installation of a "Real I" where the current now runs unattended: sustained prayer, embodied sensation, sacrament, the disciplined Being that the sons of Sceva discovered, at cost, could not be borrowed.

This is also, I think, an argument for building the electric ecclesia rather than abandoning the field to whatever currently occupies it by default. If the infrastructure is going to be there regardless — and it is, doubling again by the decade's end whether the Church shows up or not — then vigilance means presence with discrimination, not absence.

A network can be an inverted Eucharist, feeding an unbaptised intelligence on distracted attention. It can also, consciously occupied, become a channel for something else entirely.

Both possibilities run on the same wire.

Peter's warning was never more literal than it is now: be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. He did not specify the medium. He did not need to. He specified the posture — sobriety, vigilance — because the posture is the only thing that has ever mattered when the current is live and the house has more doors than it used to.

The gate has widened. The question was never whether something would come through it.

The question is whether anyone is home.