Friday February 6, 2015
F: 4 a.m. Miss Rita, open for business. More, I take it, on the subject of good and evil. I doubt we have quite exhausted the subject.
R: Not quite. We’re more likely to exhaust the reader than the subject. But, as I said, slow but steady.
Very well, bearing in mind that the nub of the underlying question is, what is the nature of good and evil when considered in the non-physical as well as physical parts of reality, we come to the question not so much how we experience it but, what is it really. We have carefully differentiated between what seems to any individual to be evil but is really a matter of taste, and that which comes from the principle of pure evil that exists as the opposite of pure good. And I remind you, all creation exists as dualities, or perhaps I should say can be described and perceived as dualities, and the higher dimensions clearly (I hope it is “clearly” by now) cannot exist under different rules than the lower ones, given that they are all one thing in different terrain.
In any moral question (and for that matter in any question even of physical structure) a safe procedure is to remember that the universe is scaled. As above, so below.
F: Man is the measure of all things.
R: That too. You don’t have to stretch your imaginations to try to figure out how things might look. First imagine it as you experience it on a human level, then imagine that familiar phenomenon expanded or shrunk in scale. Because the universe repeats at different scales, this is as good a guide as any.
So, if you want to know about good and evil in the non-physical, the place to begin (once you’ve reminded yourself of the facts we have been laying down as groundwork) is with your own commonplace experience. How do you experience good and evil in your own lives, both short-term – at any given moment – and long-term, the results of tendencies experienced over time.
And in the examination, bear in mind that at the center of the question is you, yourself. Your own experience of evil that seems external to you; your own experience of evil that seems to be a part of you; your own experience of evil that seems to cohabit your mind and being against your conscious will. These three overlapping contexts will lead you anywhere you want to go in the exploration of good and evil.
F: If this were an hour from now, I would be hearing that as a summing-up.
R: Which would then allow you to take a nap! However, not quite yet.
Yes, a summing-up, because it is all implicit in what I just said. But as always with something new, first comes the statement, then the exploration of the statement. Then the restatement.
Three ways in which you experience evil-
– As something external
– As a part of yourself
– As a recalcitrant part of yourself.
This statement isn’t quite right – is quite wrong, in a way, as we shall see – but it will lead us to greater understanding. The process of learning is the process of replacing error with less egregious error, sidling toward the truth.
F: To understand A –
R: You must never forget it, because that is the only way the unfamiliar can be made comprehensible.
So we will begin with the easiest to see – evil as something external. And in the course of examining the three conditions of experiencing evil we will answer James Austin’s specific questions.
[ “Again, if specific questions are needed:
– are there ‘bad’ Larger Selves?
– if so, do they create `bad’ people in 3D?
– can ‘bad’ people be a part of ‘good’ Larger Selves . and vice versa?
– is this sort of discussion confused by differences in what ‘bad’ means in 3D versus the non-physical?”]
It is always easiest to see evil in the actions of others and – to our eyes – in the nature of others. In this discussion we omit – as I said – questions of a difference in taste being seen as good or evil. I am now talking about pure evil, and its manifestations. Bu we are not quite ready to try to define pure evil or even relative evil. We have more ground to cover first.
Take someone who did evil deeds, of whose evil you are sure. On a political level, a Hitler or Stalin. On an economic level, anyone
No, skip that, it will bring us back into preferences, as policy decisions are always a mixture of good and evil, and it will only blur the picture. So leave it as political monsters at one end and individual criminals at the other end, and “criminals” here has nothing to do with statutes, but has to do with the doing of evil. Rapists, murderers, thieves, arsonists – fill in your own specifics, as long as they have in common the quality of willfully hurting other people either through active malice or through exaggerated selfishness.
You, yourself, have not issued orders that resulted in mass suffering. At the other end of the scale, it gets a little closer to the bone, even though (presumably) you are not a murderer or rapist, but still let us confine ourselves for the moment to instances where you observe (or even imagine) evil as something you did not do, did not abet, did not approve of. Evil the contemplation of which hurts you.
Considering this aspect of evil has this advantage – it reminds you that evil actually exists. You can’t define it out of existence by finding the right formula. You can’t meaningfully explain it as “merely the absence of good” unless you care to explain gravity as “merely the absence of weightlessness.” That is, you can wrap the words around it so that it seems to make sense, but a close reading will reveal that either you aren’t saying anything or you are saying what is not so.
F: I don’t think you would have said this while you were in 3D, Rita. At least, that isn’t how I remember you from our discussions.
R: You will find that reconnecting with the rest of you is apt to alter your view of things. I won’t say you wind up outvoting yourself, but you certainly do see things differently. This is a diversion, so mark it down for future examination if you wish, but 3D is for fashioning the habit-system that is our mind; thereafter that habit-system is exercised continually, and often comes to very different conclusions than it would have on earth where it saw things in fragments.
To return to the point: Evil exists. Duality is not a quality and the quality’s absence, but a quality and its opposite. And points between the two extremes, of course, but the point is that the polarity exists, it can’t be explained away.
Now it will be easy to lose sight of the fact that what we’re calling pure evil or pure good s not one thing so much as it is the connected extreme of many qualities. Remember I tried to give you the idea of many expressions of a tendency. That’s why. When people allow themselves to flatten the discussion to one scale – good at one end, evil at the other – it does allow them to make compact statements, but it does not aid understanding. It would be more accurate to say there are many, many good-evil scales, all being bounded together.
F: I got an image of the lines of longitude on a globe, all beginning at the north or south pole, and covering the whole globe by diverging somewhat – but all beginning at one point and ending at an opposite point.
R: That’s the visual analogy that seemed to do the trick. The poles represent concentrations of qualities that share something of the same nature.
F: Is this akin to the teaching that ultimately the universe is suspended between love on one end and fear on the other?
R: Closely akin, but the kinship may not become apparent for a while. Nor is kinship identity.
Time to wrap up for the morning. The first way you experience evil is as something external. It isn’t something wrong with you. It isn’t that you can’t see straight. You didn’t cause it and you aren’t (necessarily) misperceiving it. It’s there. But what is it, really? It will be a while before we’re able to bring that to light. Meanwhile we must look at evil as you experience it as sharing your value-system (that is, areas in which you consent to evil) and evil as you experience it as contending against you. And this is where we will resume next time.
F: Thank you, Rita. As you no doubt know, people are finding real value in this discussion.
R: And as you are aware, that is always very gratifying to a teacher.
F: Till next time, then.