Rita Warren: I’d like to pick up a little bit on one of the topics we were on last time. We were talking about all the disaster issues last week, and one of the things we’re hearing lots about is the idea of evil. And I wonder if you can talk some about the idea of evil as regards human behavior.
F: Big subject.
R: Well, yes.
F: All right. As usual, we have to start a long way away. Suppose you look at the whole universe as a balanced system. Let’s look at it in electrical terms, so that it has positive and negative — for the moment we’re not talking about good being positive and evil being negative, but as positive and negative. As polarity. And every polarity has to balance out. Otherwise, there’d be something left over, you know [laughs] and it couldn’t be.
Taking the universe as a unit, its various polarities all have a positive and negative end to them. And – this is a spatial analogy, but we don’t know how to avoid it – in various localized parts of the universe, there might be more negative or more positive. And certainly the negative and positive could be intermingled, they could fluctuate, they could go back and forth. Like everything else, they form fluctuating patterns. But there’s no such thing as being able to eliminate all the negative, and have even one atom of positive more than negative. It just can’t be done.
Now, you could concentrate all of the positive as a super positive, and have all the negative as a sort of spread out negative, do that the negative would have more area and the positive would have more intensity — or vice versa. You see what we’re saying, you can change the local formulations, you can change what seem to be, from a local point of view, the ratio, but overall it’s all an equal mix because it has to be.
Now, we’ll back off that analogy a little bit and come down to 3D Theater. In 3D Theater, you have time separating it all into slices, as we’ve said, and because of that the fluctuation is much less obvious to you; the overall balance is not at all obvious to you, and the symmetry of it is something you can conceptually pick up but probably have a hard time really internalizing.
So, when you think of the state of the world in the year 1950, it doesn’t occur to you to balance into that the state of the world in the year 1450. Vastly different times, totally unconnected things. Just as geographically, if you’re looking at a soil sample in Virginia, you’re not taking in account the soil of Mongolia, and yet from a properly large enough perspective, they are interrelated.
So, you have what you might call evil times and good times. There are so many aspects of this to deal with, but we’ll start with this one. Let us know when we get you lost.
Let’s for this moment take “good times and bad times” as though they were, abstractly, good times and bad times, rather than people’s preferences, or people’s illusions. You might have a century in which there was an overwhelming preponderance of positives, or one in which there was an overwhelming preponderance of negative, or one followed by the other; any conceivable choice. That’s all intrinsic to the play of it, but it’s not ever true, again, that the balance could be disturbed.
Neither is it true that you’re moving toward a future in which there will be a disturbance in the balance, in other words where the future all will be good or all will be evil. Except that when you rebalance everything in terms of time, when you consider all of the time-slices as one big orange rather than a series of slices, then it could very well look as though there was a tendency or trend in one direction. But to think that you’re going to go to a future that’s going to be all positives and no negatives –the only way you can do that is to have all negatives in the past and no positives, somewhere.
All right? Now, and we’re weaseling there, I don’t know if you heard it.
We’re weaseling a little bit, because it does occur to us that given that things are a matter of choice, you could skew the balance.
All right, now let’s back up again and start all over again for the third time. There is another more difficult question, and that is good versus evil as a matter of preference. And this is a subject that raises emotions, because it raises fears, and it raises uncertainties. More than that, at a very deep level, it seems to some of you to be evil, and we’re sorry about that, we understand the mechanism, but it’s more important that you know what’s right, what’s real, rather than what you prefer.
When one looks at reality, one makes judgments from one’s viewpoint. A slaveholder in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1820 has goods and bads that are radically different from yours. But someone looking from the viewpoint of the year 2130 in Denver, Colorado. has goods and bads that are vastly different from yours. There was a discussion started years ago about moral relativity, and some took that to mean an abandonment of standards. They took it to mean that there is right and wrong, but people prefer to do what they want, rather than what is right. And we would say this is because they’re not seeing that they themselves, always, inevitably, unavoidably, live by standards that are equally relative. And here’s why.
Which of you would be content to be judged by the standards of Victorian England? Or of Elizabethan England? Or of the Roman Empire, any time? Or of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Stalin’s Russia, or any oligarchy anywhere in South America? Now, we are disregarding hypocrisy here; we’re talking about those who had a moral standard and lived by it. Common sense says that all of those moral standards that the people lived by can’t all be right, because they’re all conflicting. But we would go beyond common sense and say, they were right in a sense.
Everyone’s standards may be regarded as a rule of thumb balancing of positives and negatives. So that today you condemn slavery. Perhaps in a hundred years people will condemn the wage-earning system. But the slave owners saw no acceptable substitute, and nor do you. Now how can you or anyone tell that what you’re doing is better or worse than the alternatives – other than trying them? But if you try them, then how do you know that that’s better or worse than something – You see? It’s endless. There’s nothing wrong with that, we’re just telling you the fix that you’re in.
If there were one standard of right and wrong applicable to every truly moral person, in the first place the game would come to an end. In the second place, the game would come to an end by arbitrarily freezing the play. Not by bringing it to its proper alignment, but by arbitrarily freezing it somewhere.
Searching for an analogy, here. Well, all we can think of is, supposing you have a swirl of black and white marbles. You can stir them or you can blend them or you could do whatever you want with them. What is the right pattern for that bowl of marbles? You see? There isn’t any “the” right pattern. There’s a pattern that’s more acceptable to you.
So that, given any moral issue, there are always compromises that have to be made; there are always shadow sides to positives, and it becomes a preference – it cannot be anything other than a preference – of those making the choices, as to which drawbacks they’re willing to accept in order to receive which gains.
All right. So that, an honest politician, should you chance to find one, might be too inflexible to prevent evils that he could prevent with some flexibility. A dishonest politician might be more flexible and might prevent a war, or some evil. A corrupt cop may be the way in which society, behind its own back, stitches together the underworld and the upper world.
We’re not advocating or dis-advocating any of this, we’re just saying, there are always costs to virtues, or to desired outcomes. Sometimes they’re acknowledged, but usually not. When your society eliminated red light districts, prostitution did not disappear, it changed forms. There was no other way that it could be. When you reached certain limits of toleration and moved against something, it mutated. It didn’t disappear, or where did you get your child sex industries in the cities? [pause] Aren’t you glad you asked that question?
R: [laughs] I am, but I am feeling overwhelmed with all that quite wonderful material. I’ll be glad to read that when he can type it up
F: You can hear him grinding his teeth. [they laugh]
R: I have been quite surprised to hear the extent of attribution of evil to the forces that attacked the United States last week. I believe that all human behavior could be explained if we understood the background and the dynamics of a person in a situation without attributing dimensions like evil, or even goodness. And it sounds from what I’ve heard that you’re accepting the idea of the continual existence, in some proportion or other, of positive and negative forces. Can human behavior be described in terms that don’t involve the concept of evil?
F: Easily. That’s how we do it.
You all look out onto the world from the cave of your mind, through the windows of your senses, and you interpret what you see or hear, and you interpret it from where you are: There’s no other way you could do that. Where you are is what you were raised to be, plus what you came in to be, plus what you’ve done with it since. You’ve created a set of values that come out of your point of view; they’re the same thing. If your value says, “thou shalt not kill,” and it’s an absolute, you become a conscientious objector and to some degree you may or many not call other people who are warriors evil, but you are saying that they are doing evil. Whereas if your emphasis is more toward protecting people, protecting society in general, more toward the willingness to sacrifice yourself because you’re bonded with your own people, then to not fight may be evil to you. And it’s a very thin line between saying that a thing is evil and that the person who does the thing is evil.
But it is not an unwillingness to make judgments that brings people to say “there is no evil as such”; it is a statement of fact that everyone is doing his best, pathetic though it may seem. People don’t do things for no reason. When they act in ways that are individually scary, they are labeled as mentally ill or as criminal or as inexplicably eccentric. You know? They are labeled. The labeling serves the psychological function of putting a distance between you and them. That’s the major thing that it does. When a society is at war, its enemies are its enemies; but they’re not thereby evil.
Except, how do you kill them? It’s easier to kill them if you regard them as evil. When American boys who were raised not to kill people were shooting and killing German soldiers who were defending Nazism, they did so believing that those soldiers were evil. [pause] Well, but were they?
The cause was evil. The cause was better destroyed than preserved, and some individuals – on all sides – are evil, if you are going to use those terms. But if an army or a society couldn’t move against the enemy until it itself was pure, it couldn’t move.
The systematic, persistent, and resolute ignoring of one’s own shadow side is the chief cause of labeling something or someone else evil. Young children are the most prone to do this at the least cause, because they have no sense of their own shadow, and they must believe, for their own psychological well-being, that they are good. The child who becomes convinced that he is bad has been broken in a very critical place.
However, most in your society, most of the time, in most of its ages, are still children in this respect. Because they want so badly to be good they are almost literally unable to bear to see their own shadow side. Which means that the accumulated pressure forces them to find scapegoats that to them seem most obviously evidently evil.
If an American, in defense of his own country, were to fly an airplane into a building in Afghanistan next week, he would not be seen as a coward or evil. He would be seen as a hero, because his motivations would be understood, his patriotism would be identified with. The major thrust of this is, that hatred and the attribution of evil to the enemy are rooted very firmly in intolerant self-righteousness stemming from weakness; stemming from the inability to recognize one’s own imperfection.
If the line between good and evil could be drawn between people, then all the good people could stand on one side of the line. And that’s what people very naively think can happen and maybe some of them even think does happen. But the line between good and evil runs within you, because good and evil are the same polarity. But they’re not really separate things. We’re using the words for lack of an ability to do otherwise.
R: Using this kind of language, it seems to me, takes us back to our religious concepts and particularly the fundamentalist religions that so clearly define good and evil, as opposed to many religions that seem to be a little more moderate in those definitions. And in the kind of conflict that’s going on now, it seems that we do have a culture of those who can easily find good and evil, versus those who in my mind – up until this week – I thought had definitions that were much more approximate and mixed, and made up of the kind of definition of partial dimensions that you’ve been talking about.
F: Yes, we understand. You know, of course, that under stress people revert, and when they revert, they never revert to a higher level of functioning; always to a lower, to a simpler. If you wish to draw lines in the sand, rather than drawing them between good and evil you might more productively draw them between those who look for an external source of rules and those who look within to say what feels like the right thing to do. Those who personify in others evil, who think that they’re on one side of a line because they have seemingly objective standards – the ten commandments, the laws of the country, whatever it may be – they say, to be good, one need only follow these rules. And when they get in a situation in which two rules are in conflict then they either ignore one or the other – or both – or they get under psychological stress of a quite unexpected sort, which can turn them quite murderous.
The others, who are more inner directed, function that way until their stress level gets greater; when their stress level gets greater, they’re tempted to revert back to their own religious training. That religious training doesn’t come from the churches, in your society, so much as it comes through the air they breathe. (“Your society,” we should point out, means more the West than just only America.) It may be dressed up in other ways, but it’s basically the religious idea of the ten commandments.
The entire idea that there is a code that one can follow which will lead one infallibly to be right, assuming one can follow that code infallibly – that whole way of looking at things is embedded in your society, because your society was founded as a Christian society. The ostensibly religious trappings have been stripped from it, but that only really leaves it all the more jagged when people come to it in moments of stress.
R: Most of the people that I am in contact with do not have this strong dividing line between right and wrong, or good and evil. You’re saying that that’s a tentative stance, that a crisis of sufficient dimensions could change that.
F: Well, we won’t disagree with what you just said, but let’s rephrase it. We would say that your friends tend to have a pretty good integration of their shadow side, and that integration could potentially be warped under stress. It’s really saying the same thing, but it’s a little different.
R: Makes it a little more acceptable. [they laugh]
F: Well, you saw through that!
R: Still makes us the good guys.
F: Well, but you see, you’re all good guys. If this whole play were for real, it would be sad. (And we told you, when we came down and visited those emotions, that was plenty sad enough.) There aren’t any bad guys in the sense that people mean. There are plenty of malicious people, but their malice comes from what they think are good causes. That’s the thing. You can have someone like Hitler who’s corroded with hatred, who totally – seemingly; it appears that he did it; let’s assume that he did it – he totally warps his whole time, and spreads misery in all directions. He did all those things thinking that he was good. Thinking that he was doing good. He served the values that he chose.
Now, in order to drive the point home – and alienate anyone else who’s listening – we would point out to you that there was hardly a thing that Hitler did that the Americans hadn’t done in connection to slaves or Indians. Now, rather than using that to feel guilty about the slaves and the Indians, it would be more productive if they were to use it to get a genuine insight into how people’s values can lead them to do things that later their descendants or contemporaries will look at aghast, and say “how could you possibly have done that?”
[interruption]
R: Okay, so many things came up in connection with what you were talking about, but I’d like to postpone going on with that until we can read the transcript, and maybe change to some different questions.
F: That’s okay with us.
R: This is another question that came up around the disaster questions last week. You had said that our 3D disasters had some impact on you. I wondered if you could talk some more about that. Here we are experiencing fear, other emotions, questions about how to behave, how to feel and so on. What happens for you?
F: It’s almost too simple to be able to get across to you. What happens to you is what happens to us – but with the caveat that it’s what happens to all of you. Including the trees, the rocks, the oceans and the air, all of which are sentient, as you suspect. What you feel is what we feel, only you only feel it one tentacle at a time, and we feel the whole octopus.
R: Mm-hmm. But without the emotional impact. Or is it the totality of the emotional impact also?
F: [sigh] Well, that requires – have you guessed? – another lecture.
What you experience as emotions are gradients. (This is difficult, because he doesn’t have this language, really.) You know what a gradient does, it connects. The slope of a hill could be considered to be a gradient between a high place and a low place. It connects them and at the same time its own nature describes how they connect. All right? So if you have a total discontinuity where you have a mesa, say, that rises straight out of the surroundings, the gradient there is radically different from the gradient in a gentle prairie that might still gain a thousand feet, but take a thousand miles do it. Well, your emotions are gradients between, shall we say, what happens and what you would prefer to happen. Now this is very crude and it’s not exactly right, but it’s the beginnings into the situation. What we’re trying to get at is, we don’t have emotions in the way that you do because we don’t have the preferred option in the same way you do.
That is to say, locally, although we are trying to steer things in certain directions, and hoping that you all make certain choices, we don’t identify with any one of you in the way that any one of you has to identify with yourself. Now you as an individual may become aware of your other lives and your other dimensions and expand the size of the part that you identify with, but you’re only identifying with one part of the whole while you’re in the body.
[interruption]
All right. Perhaps the purpose of the interruption was to allow us to regroup.
You will remember that we say that your purpose on earth in physical matter reality is to choose and choose and choose and to create yourselves, and that the creation of yourself is the gift. Well, it isn’t only the gift after you move over here and come back as part of us. It’s a gift while you’re doing it. So just as we taste cherry pie when you eat cherry pie, so we can experience the emotion of hatred and fear when you experience the emotion of hatred and fear. With the major exception — which invalidates the analogy – that we don’t experience things in one slice of time after another, and we don’t experience things in one slice of individuality, so-called, after another.
So what we get is so different from what you get. The way we experience it is so different from the way you experience it, that until people make more of an effort to understand the difference in terrain, they’ll never understand that both sides are doing the same thing at the same time. If you have a life largely lived in fear, you will still experience that life moment by moment by moment. If we are experiencing that life largely lived in fear, we’ll experience the fear more as a color or a tint or a flavor or a shade, tingeing the whole thing, rather than one specific moment at a time.
Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t see a moment. We’re here, with you, in this moment. But it means that what’s fluid for us seems solid to you; what’s fluid for you seems solid to us. Your whole life looks to us as one unit, and we have to sort of focus carefully to get you at any moment in time.
Okay, now we’ll go back and start again. Keeping all that in mind if you can – it’ll be easier when you read it – your emotions, we said, are a gradient between what is and what you want. Now, you could also put it in many different ways, all of them equally or more real. You could say, it’s a gradient between what happens to you and what your previous experience has led you to think would happen to you. We’re not going to get very far here without examples, so let’s go with an example. You give us an example that occurs to you of a strong emotion.
R: Well, there are people right now getting onto airplanes in a state of terror. They have to go someplace and yet they’re very fearful about that.
F: Uh-huh. Let’s see. Now let’s explore. What is it we want to look at about the emotion?
R: Well, my original question was, what are you experiencing on your side, when we’re seeing a disaster in terms of these strong emotions?
F: Well, the person boards the airplane in a state of advanced fear. The person next to them boards the airplane without fear, because they live in a different reality. They have a different belief system.
You experience the moment as the overriding thing, because you live moment by moment, or rather, you live in the continuing now. But we experience the overall flavor of it – the lengthwise flavor of it. So we see that person being brought to an opportunity-point of dealing with an ingrained pattern of fear that maybe until then has been unsuspected or has been dealt with casually.
So where you look at it as “how they feel right now,” we look at it as, “what opportunities does this give them to choose?” That’s really the way we always look at it. Thus, we can be made to look very cold-blooded, to you. We assure you that we’re not.
R: It doesn’t sound that way when you explain it.
F: [lightly] We have good lawyers.
R: [chuckles] I’ve been interested in a lot of the current research on prayer and its impact on groups of individuals who have some sort of illness. I want to ask whether someone is praying to you, on this score, or what they’re praying to or how you make sense out of this kind of phenomenon.
F: Well, oddly enough it would be almost accurate to say they’re praying to us, because– although they don’t know it – they’re praying to themselves! And we are themselves. Remember, we’ve said that the key to healing is to remove the illusion of distance, and that the way to remove the illusion of distance is to love. It’s the same thing, really, but it looks different.
So these people are gathering in a sincere, loving way, without intent to get something for themselves – in other words, it’s an altruistic way.(Speaking of good and evil, this is a good example of positives.) They don’t intend to create a group mind; they don’t intend to destroy the illusion of distance; and they don’t intend to provide a supportive magnetic field if you want to look at it that way, against which the person can lean and regain the vibrational level they need, but that’s another way of describing what happens. There doesn’t need to be anyone they’re praying to, and there doesn’t need to be anyone to say, “well, yes, I think I’ll grant your prayer,” or “no, no, you’re not really worthy.” That’s not what’s going on. You have an old cliché that says “prayer doesn’t change things, prayer changes people and people change things.” Now the people who made up that saying meant it in a different way. But in our way, you can see what goes on: When people pray, when they love, when they love without thought for themselves to erase the distance, with the intent of helping another, in fact it is literally true, that’s where miracles can come. It’s not the only place, but it’s certainly a place.
R: All right. Well, I like that. That really pulls that material together.
R: There are lots of people who have been recommending that we all go outside and bring candles at 10:30 at night tonight, that this will in some way help whatever’s going on, and with all these candles, it will be observed from our satellites, and parts of the earth will be all lit up. I don’t know if it’s possible to see candles from space, but —
F: It’s possible to see light. You won’t see the individual candles, you’ll see the light. In places where there’s enough light. So the question is?
R: Well, I don’t tend to I question that sort of thing. It feels like to me it’s the same sort of thing, decreasing distance between you and others who are in need as the result of disasters.
F: To make everyone feel less alone.
R: Yes. That one seems to me kind of easy to accept. Easier than the prayer one, for me.
F: And the underlying question tying the two together seems to us to be a matter of what would be appropriate for you, given your belief systems?
R: Yes, and that’s a continuation of what we were talking about last week. What do we do in the face of the disasters – what’s the best way for us to think of ourselves, and if we think of ourselves as beacons in the same way that our candles are beacons we go back to that ….
[change sides of tape]
R: You were saying it’s a lovely image.
F: It would be a lovely image if all the people on the earth could hold the candle outside with the same intent, not one against another but saying “we’re all on earth” in the way that you did at the new year when you were afraid that you would lose everything. And you watched the New Year come, all the way from the Pacific all the way around the world, and it was the first time ever, in our opinion, that it really got to all of you on a visceral level that in fact you are one planet.
So we wish those lighting the candle could say, not, “I’m an American, don’t push me around,” not even, “I am good and I stand against evil.” We wish it could say, “I am part of the whole [pause] and all parts of the whole are equally –um – well, my brothers.”
R: Mm-hmm. You aid a bit ago that you had preferences for the choices we would make.
F: Oh yes.
R: Are you speaking of preferences like you would prefer the earth to continue rather than be destroyed? Those kinds of preferences?
F: No, a little more manipulative than that. We are talking about near-term problems and solutions and things are being set up. For instance, this current crisis is not about America. This current crisis is about the future of the earth civilization that isn’t yet quite created. It looks like it’s America versus some terrorists, or possibly the West versus the Muslims, or possibly good versus evil. But really it is our attempt to correct certain manifestations that we think will make the earth unsustainable — which is not in anyone’s interest.
And therefore we manipulate situations to attempt to precipitate situations in which people will choose in certain ways that will change them. We are continually doing that. Remember, now, “we” are also “you” – when you go into your life, you go into your life and say, “okay, here’s the things that I can accomplish.” Well, those are not only on a personal level, they’re also – Dwight Eisenhower went into his life, you know, with the probability that at some point he would be used in a certain way.
So, we have very strong preferences. Our strong preferences are: that the earth continue; that the human plant, if you want to call it that, continue; that you move toward greater unity of being, greater unity of action, so that you increase your own awareness of all parts of yourselves and then become more aware that you’re all one thing. It’s important to us that ultimately we get to the point – where we will get, one way or another, but there are preferable ways and less preferable ways — it’s important that we get to the point in which we are all reconciled. In other words, you’re taking off the rubber glove, so to speak.
There’ll be a day in which humans live on the earth in full awareness of all of their own extensions and in full awareness that they’re all part of each other, literally. Not in your lifetimes, or anywhere near, but that’s what we’re moving toward, and we continually create new scenarios to try to adjust the course as we go along, but because the very number one essential is freedom of choice, we can’t just set it out and know that it’ll go that way, so we’re continually having to make new adjustments.
Yes, we know people very well. We could say, “if we do this, this will probably happen.” And so your hijacker and your airplane pilots and passengers were all part of that scenario. They were all playing a part. Not knowingly.
[continued in next post]