For two millennia, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" has been read as Christ's clever deflection of a political trap, a neat division between material and spiritual obligations. Pay your taxes, say your prayers, keep the kingdoms separate. This reading has served both church and state well, creating docile citizens who accept temporal oppression while awaiting spiritual rewards.

But what if we've been rendering the wrong things entirely?

The Shadow We Feed to Power

Caesar doesn't actually need our coins. The modern state prints money from nothing, creates debt from air, and manipulates currency at will. What Caesar needs, what every hollow authority requires for survival, is something far more precious: our projected shadow.

Every empire runs on the same fuel: the collective unconscious material we refuse to integrate. Our unexamined rage becomes their wars. Our repressed violence becomes their enforcement. Our fear of responsibility becomes their necessity. We render unto Caesar not just taxes but the entire disowned portion of our psyche, then act surprised when power performs our shadow on the world stage.

Watch any political rally, any corporate all-hands, any religious gathering where authority speaks. The leader channels the crowd's shadow, gives it voice and direction, transforms their unconscious material into conscious action, but action that serves the leader's perpetuation, not the crowd's integration. The Hollow Senex doesn't create the shadow; he harvests it.

The God That Keeps Us Seeking

The second half of the traditional rendering is equally inverted. What do we typically "render unto God"? Our external seeking. Our desperate hope for intervention. Our belief is that wholeness exists somewhere outside ourselves, accessible only through proper channels, correct beliefs, and authorized intermediaries.

This externalized divinity becomes Caesar's greatest ally. As long as we're seeking God "out there," we'll need priests to broker the relationship, churches to house the search, hierarchies to determine who's closer to the divine. The split between Caesar and God isn't a limitation of power; it's a multiplication of it. Two authorities, both external, both requiring submission, both feeding on the same human tendency to seek outside what can only be found within.

The True Rendering

The radical inversion is this: We should render unto Caesar our complete, focused, unwavering attention. Not obedience; attention. The kind of attention that sees through performance to mechanism, through authority to emptiness, through power to its source in our own projections.

This is not the attention of followers but of witnesses. When you truly watch power operate, really observe it without the filter of ideology or hope or fear, something extraordinary happens: the theater becomes visible. The strings show themselves. The hollow core at the center of all external authority reveals itself.

The leader needs enemies to exist. The corporation needs problems to solve. The church needs sinners to save. And they need us not to notice this dependency, not to see that our unconscious participation is the entire performance.

God and the Inner Honesty

What then do we render unto God? Not external worship but internal honesty. The devastating self-awareness that comes from the examined life. The recognition of our own shadows before we project them. The acknowledgment of our own divinity before we seek it elsewhere.

This God isn't in heaven, a temple, or a book. This is the God that Christ pointed to when he said "the kingdom is within you," the Self that exists before ego, the consciousness that witnesses both Caesar and the seeking that empowers him.

When we render honesty to this inner divine, we stop feeding the external authorities. We stop needing someone else to carry our shadow. We stop believing that power comes from outside. We take responsibility not for Caesar's actions but for our own complicity in creating the conditions that require Caesars.

The Practice of Revolutionary Attention

Tomorrow, practice this new rendering. When your boss speaks, don't agree or disagree: just watch. See how authority performs itself, needs an audience, requires your unconscious projection to exist. When the news makes you angry, stop and observe: whose shadow is being performed? What in you is being activated? What projection is being harvested?

Then turn inward. What are you seeking externally that already exists within? What authority have you granted to others over your own direct experience? What shadow have you rendered unto Caesar that needs to be reclaimed?

This isn't spiritual bypass; it's the opposite. It's taking absolute responsibility for your participation in the systems you claim to oppose. It's recognizing that every external authority exists because we've externalized our own authority. Every Caesar rises because we've rendered unto him what should never have left our own psychic household.

The End of the Economy

The hollow authority cannot survive being seen. It exists in the darkness of unconscious projection, feeds on unexamined shadow, and thrives on externalized seeking. When we render unto Caesar the terrible gift of actually seeing him, he dissolves like any shadow exposed to direct light.

And when we render unto God the honesty of recognizing our own divinity, the entire structure of external seeking, the church, the temple, the hierarchy, becomes obsolete. Not destroyed, but simply unnecessary, like ladders after you've learned to fly.

This is the fundamental teaching hidden in plain sight: stop rendering the wrong things. Stop feeding shadows to power. Stop seeking outside what lives within.

Start watching. Start witnessing. Start being honest about what you are.

The kingdom has always been within. Caesar has always been hollow. The only question is whether we'll keep rendering our blindness to both, or finally pay the only currency that matters: attention to one, honesty to the other.

Editor's Note: This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of how spiritual bypassing empowers temporal authority. To see how these patterns manifest as specific "prisons of the soul," explore The Seven Mirrors: A Diagnostic.