When I watch shows with particularly evil or arrogant villains, my response to them is – as the writers have intended it to be – “Kill them; they have no place in the world.” It would be useless, of course; new villains spring up all the time. Worse than useless, because you become like the worst in those you fight. The only practical plan I have ever read was Anselmo’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Make the miscreants work until they come to realize the error of their ways. This might or might not reform the villains, but at least it would not destroy those who confronted them.
The key here, as you well know, is that your emotional reaction to anything may be as powerful as anything you do or say. It is your second-tier and third-tier reaction that counts, and this is one reason people of ill will do such damage: They rouse the righteous indignation that outdoes them.
By the end of a war, people are enthusiastically doing things to others that they would have been horrified to consider at the beginning. Fight fire with fire, is the saying.
Yes. That works out better in forestry than in human relations. In human relations, it is merely arson, and arson that incinerates friend and foe and self alike.
And why does it have to be this way?
Your question is, why is human life prey to evil.
I hadn’t put it quite that way, but let’s look at it that way. I understand that life in duality must include both ends of every stick. Somehow, though, that isn’t terribly comforting.
Evil is good balanced. We know you don’t like it, but he longer the stick, or the shorter, still the center is where it will balance, nowhere else.
If I just heard you right, you are saying too much goodness constellates too much badness.
Well – almost. Another analogy would be intensity. A black-and-white negative may be muted or vivid. It may consist of highly contrasted lights and darks, or tones that are much more in the center scale.
But this life does not seem to have any excess of goodness. What I see chiefly is excess of violence.
Yes, that’s what you see. That’s what is pictured. There is no entertainment value in portraying goodness, except occasionally as a change of pace. You know how it is.
The news media used to have a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Precisely. Plus, people want to feel alive, and if their ordinary lives offer too little, you will find young men running to get into a war, as in 1914, for the sake of smashing things. They have no idea why they feel that way, having no idea how intolerable their lives were that they are fleeing. And of course long after the enthusiasts volunteer, men are unwillingly conscripted to continue what was begun and cannot now be allowed to fail.
Why? Why is 3D life made into such an endurance test?
It needn’t be. It could be a life lived more at the mercy of what are called natural forces. But one way or another, 3D life is going to express duality in full, not only the half you prefer.
Couldn’t we modulate the evil that has to manifest?
You could, but it involves wholeness in place of goodness, as you have been told.
I can’t remember who said it. More or less, “When a man realizes that it is better to be whole than to be good, he enters upon a harder life that makes his previous goodness seem like flowery license.”
It is true, and there’s a reason for it. It involves bearing your own share of the world’s evil., and thereby helping to corral it, to curb it from wild manifestation.
I don’t know. Jesus said it is inevitable that evil comes into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.
Yes, but that refers to ushering it into the world, not holding a piece of it that already exists and has manifested.
& & &
On so many subjects like this, you must remember that context is everything. Look at something while forgetting what you have learned about reality, and you cannot see with greater perception. But bring these new, seemingly unrelated, perceptions to the subject, and the maze may become penetrable. So, here.
Every religion is at least in part an attempt to see why evil exists in the world, and an attempt at strategies to overcome it. Every serious philosophy must grapple with this question. So far, none has found an answer that others find satisfactory. Manicheans see the world as battleground between extra-human forces. Some philosophies say that evil is merely the absence of good. And all other attempts fall somewhere between these two poles.
Partly it is a question of appearances. How do conditions seem, as opposed to how are they really? Partly it is a question of meaning. How should we see this or that in connection with what else we know?
And partly it is a question of values? Of what we wish to uphold or stave off?
We can see how you would think that this is so. But, not really. Your values are chosen partly by what you were, pertly by what you are, partly by what you wish to be. It is a cycle, a reiterative process. A cycle looks like a circle sometimes, but it involves an additional dimension.
It is a question of depth.
Yes. Depth or lack of depth will affect your perception of how things are.
Now, we said appearance and meaning. This too is part of an iterative process.
- How things appear depends upon the inner resources one can bring to the perceiving.
- What things mean depends upon the connections one can make.
In both cases, changes in the observer lead to changes in what can be observed, and thus both appearance and its meaning seem to change, leading to further changes in the observer. There are two reasons, not just one, why you can never step into the same river twice. Yes, the river’s flow makes it impossible. But so does your flow. You are not the same, even between two attempts.
“But” – we hear you object – “there must be some ultimate view of reality.” Perhaps; perhaps not. In neither case can you get to the bedrock of things. At most you will get to an explanation that satisfies you, now. Don’t expect to get one that will satisfy everybody, nor one that will satisfy anybody forever.
People like certainties. They find it hard to deal with uncertainty and with leaving open-ended questions open-ended. Thus so many “final” answers, mutually contradictory but similarly certain. We or you or anyone could and can (and, often enough, do) decide, “This is the way it is,” but that is mostly a decision to stop looking.
Obviously as you change, the reality you can perceive changes, and you learn to deal with it. When you think “All is one,” it is a different world to you from when you think all is chance and accident. When you realize that there is no “external” unconnected to who and what you are, it is a different world from one in which unconnected forces exist. But even as perceptions change, your assigned meaning changes, and not mechanically. You choose to see one meaning or another, and the choice helps determine the next thing that happens to your perceptions
It’s almost a fun-house, set up to distort perceptions.
No! And that’s a good example, right there, of how the process of assigning meaning to perception may result in conclusions of great definiteness that may have little relevance to anything but one’s momentary state of being.
Now, it may appear that we haven’t advanced an inch on our task of examining evil in 3D life. But surely you can see that the discussion that follows will be different from what it would have been if your mind had not been turned by this bit of brush-clearing.
& & &
Perhaps it has not yet become evident that this is a conflict of perception, not of essence. It isn’t better for a person to be whole than to be good, it is better for that person to picture himself, herself, as whole rather than as good. If it were possible to be entirely good, who could argue against it? But it is obstructive to be one thing and think oneself another.
Well, that puts it in a different light entirely. This, then, is a conflict of ideals, rather than of states of being.
Yes, but that will take some spelling-out.
I don’t see why. It’s simple enough. If our ideal is to be good, we will suppress awareness of, and manifestation of, every part of ourselves that is not good. But this will force that part of ourselves into the unconscious, where it will be beyond our control. If our ideal is wholeness, though, we will welcome awareness of what we are, without manifesting it deliberately but without disowning it when it does manifest, hence keeping it more in our consciousness, hence more under our conscious control.
Occasionally you surprise us.
It suddenly clicked, and became clear. It never ceases to amaze me, how things can be murky one minute, clear the next.
After a flash of insight comes the work of assuring that the new insight remains in context, so that it does not become like the cryptic scribbles that are left from a dream in the night.
Bear in mind, this insight is a very practical insight. It tells you what to do, how to live. It does not shade off into the question of why evil exists or how it manifests in the 3D world. Practical is worth more than theoretical, if you have a choice. It’s just that sometimes you need to re-examine the theoretical in order to provide new practical awareness.
So we’re bailing out of the larger question?
We are anchoring an important insight before proceeding to that or any other matter.
Everyone lives according to an ideal, or to multiple (often conflicting) ideals. If you were units, you could have one ideal, perhaps. As it is, each of your sub-selves has its own ideal. How are they all to be harmonized so that you are not working against yourselves? One way is to have one over-arching ideal that all can agree upon.
This will not be possible at all for some self-divided people. It will be possible to some extent for others, and possible to a great extent for a relatively few others. Someone fused into one thing, such as Jesus, can have, will have – cannot not have – one ideal.
One over-arching ideal. What can serve so well as wholeness? What other ideal can contain everything? Goodness, by comparison, is continually choosing, discarding, rejecting, criticizing. You can measure up to an ideal of wholeness, acceptance of what you are and how you have been created and faith that you are as you are for a reason. But how can you measure up to an ideal of goodness?
Hemingway is a case-study of a man whose impossible ideals tormented him, wracked him with guilt, led him to deny what he had done, filled him with remorse and despair and yet continued valiant attempts to reach the unreachable.
He certainly provides a valid example. He would provide insight into the faith-filled despairing lives of the saints in terms comprehensible to your age. To have as your ideal to be good is to invite repression of all in you that is evil, and to set yourself an impossible task, because one man’s evil is another man’s good. This refers not to other 3D beings around you; it refers to the multitude of strands within you.
It almost sounds like the proper ideal is tolerance.
If tolerance did not shade so soon and so easily into indifference, that would be so. Anyway, wholeness is a belter ideal. Tolerance will come in its wake, but it will be a judicious tolerance. There is no great advantage in learning to be tolerant of mass-murder, or torture, or any of the manifestations of individual or social insanity that are liable to pop up.