Spiritual balance can only be achieved in silence and with complete purity of the soul. This doesn’t mean that you are holy and free from mistakes or sins, but that you have a realistic and honest perspective on your actions. Are you able to recognize when you act rightly and when you act wrongly? Do you reflect on your decisions?
A person acts impulsively, driven by desires, often without bad intentions, yet their nature constantly balances between good and evil. The lack of this balance leads to chaos in the mind. If you don’t distinguish what is just from what isn’t, you start to drift – neither a “yes” nor a “no.” Your subconscious and reason strive for harmony, but without clear principles, they drown in contradictions. It’s like an army where one commander orders an attack and another a retreat – the soldier stands paralyzed, and chaos weakens the defense.
In the psyche, such a lack of coherence opens the door to manipulation because, without a strong foundation, you easily lose yourself. I’m not just talking about grand moral choices here, but about everyday decisions.
Take an example: someone wants to eat healthily but orders fast food, washing it down with a diet drink full of chemicals. Where’s the sense in that? Or abortion – someone supports the “right” to it, then rejoices feeling a friend’s baby move in her womb. Intuitively, they feel that life has value, yet they support its destruction. It’s a contradiction that gnaws at the subconscious.
Or pensions: people want to retire earlier, but if there are no new generations, who will work for their future? The system crumbles because there’s no logic in life choices.
Here, tattoos enter the stage as something more than decoration. People tattoo symbols on themselves – crosses, demons, dragons – and think it’s just a drawing. But the subconscious sees more. Carl Jung wrote that symbols are a bridge to archetypes, deeply rooted patterns within us.
Neuropsychological studies, like those using fMRI, show that symbols activate emotions in the brain faster than we can comprehend them. A dragon might mean strength in the East, but chaos in the West – and even if you consciously chose the former, your subconscious remembers the rest.
In 2018, the “Journal of Psychology” wrote that tattoos are often done at turning points – after loss, change, or rebellion. It’s a mark: “I was here, I lived through this.” Psychologists from Miami in 2020 added that people with tattoos feel more individual and resilient to stress if the design has meaning for them. But what if that meaning changes?
A demon tattoo done in anger might whisper of past darkness for years. Studies on implicit memory show that the brain stores emotions tied to symbols, even when we forget why we chose them.
Spiritual balance requires coherence. If you tattoo 666 on yourself, saying you don’t believe in anything supernatural, then why reach for that sign? The subconscious picks up the contradiction, and chaos grows.
Freemasonry says everything is a symbol – and there’s something to it. A cross reminds a Catholic of faith, while a skull might stir fear of death, even if it was meant to be just “trendy.”
A tattoo is an intervention in the body, once considered a signal of mental issues in the military. Today it’s art, but is it really just that? Can destroying the body be called art?
The influence of tattoos on the psyche is a fact. Studies on the “priming” effect show that the symbols we live with shape our thoughts. The priming effect involves introducing specific associations into the mind. It’s a form of manipulation where certain information is linked to other things to evoke specific emotional or mental reactions. For example, an image of a happy family might be primed with a product, suggesting that using it will bring similar happiness. A lion on the skin might boost confidence, but a demon – anxiety. In “Body Image” from 2015, it was written that tattoos with positive meanings raise self-esteem, but dark ones can stir rebellion or regret. It depends on what you see in them – and what your subconscious sees, even when you’ve forgotten. A lion is strength, but are you sure your subconscious doesn’t associate it with fear?
To regain balance, you need to live in harmony with yourself. A tattoo can be a meditation, a sign of strength, but also a mark of chaos. The choice is yours – just let it be conscious, because the subconscious will remember everything anyway. However, they always signify self-harm to your body, and it’s worth remembering that trends fade, youth does too, and the tattoo removal industry is growing much faster than tattooing itself.
Arkadiusz Niewolski
Catholic during the Great Apostasy 
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