TGU — Evil and consciousness

Sunday, May 27, 2018

5:10 a.m. Shall we continue? And as I write that I get, start with “Sara’s Notebook.”

That’s right. Again, using the cues from your outer life to illustrate the connection with the inner.

Netflix sent me an email that it had added a new film it thought I would be interested in. Evidently it tracks not only what I watch but how often I watch it, for “Sara’s Notebook” is in Spanish like “El Ministerio del Tiempo,” with English subtitles. Usually I resist such come-ons, but something said try it, so, last night, I watched it.

It is a hard story – fiction but illustrating fact. Ignoring the plot line, the thing it stirred up in me was an active sense of how much deliberate evil there is in the world. Slavery, rape, murder, the enjoyment of inflicting pain, the absence of empathy – and the breeding of monsters. The story is about a Spanish woman looking for her only sister, who is caught among rebel forces in the Congo in an area controlled by rebel forces. But the emotional center is her love-inspired sacrifices, trying to rescue her, as against all that hatred and exploitation and suffering.

And the point for you once again was the reality of evil in the world.

We are always so tempted to say that because it is not as simple as it may appear, therefore it doesn’t matter, or (for some) doesn’t even exist. The reality though is harder. It does exist, it does matter, and there is so little we can do about it.

Talk about government and Westernization, commerce, and the native civilization.

I have a friend who is a libertarian. I was thinking, I wish he could see the film, to see what happens in the absence of government, for this was no paradise of anarchistic freedom; it was Mogadishu again, or anywhere in the world where anarchic forces are not controlled by a larger net of rules, understandings, centralized force (government as protection racket). Here were groups of bandits setting up their own slave camps – for that is what they amount to – forcing people to work to mine some precious mineral found mostly in that part of the Congo, needed to make electronic gadgets.

I looked at those rebel bandits – they were armed with guns made in the West; drove jeeps and trucks; wore Western uniforms; used satellite links for communication. One of the leaders wore eyeglasses. Western technology and commerce entirely underpinned their existence; it could not be said in any sense of the word to be a native revolt against the West. And the money they were making was only available because Western commerce needed the ore they were forcing people to mine for them.

In other words, it wasn’t racism that caused this evil – blacks were oppressing blacks. It was – as always – slavery imposed because it paid. The people at the top of the chain of violence profited by the system, as always, and did it make any difference to their enslaved people that the oppressors wore the same color skin?

The UN presence was there – very thinly on the ground – made up of black as well as white soldiers, pilots, etc. But they could do so little in such a vast land.

Oh, it was a sharp reminder of so much evil in the world. So how do you propose to build upon that?

You are also re-reading John Sandford novels, all about cops and killers, again glimpses of a part of life you don’t see first-hand.

And that too is impulse. Your doing, for all I know. So –?

It is important, it is a critical piece of the process, that you (anyone, of course) not allow more sophisticated understandings to overwhelm and drown out active manifestations of what you are studying. That is, criminologists and sociologists and psychotherapists may understand some of what goes into the making of a criminal or an insane or a criminally insane mind; they may see the ways in which monsters are created by maltreatment, neglect, and other factors. But that doesn’t make the resultant monster either less human or less of a monster. And the temptation always is to choose sympathy or understanding [clear-sightedness, I think, expresses it better], resulting in a safe distancing from the person.

We’ll keep saying it until it sinks in. Evil exists. It isn’t just a matter of opinion or of inadequately understood manifestations of rage or of resentment. At the same time, evil is not what it is commonly considered to be.

Well, either I got it long ago and you’re saying this for others, or I haven’t gotten it, and your words are meant to bring me somewhere, but I can’t imagine where.

Your own are not the only reactions we are aware of, you know. To that extent we have the advantage over you. We may describe vast impersonal forces, and vast personal forces, and individual internal and external realities and heritages and continuities and tendencies – but that doesn’t mean that anybody, much less everybody, understands what we are talking about, because of course you are all doing exactly what we warn against, associating what we say with what you already know or assume.

In other words, we are all editing the message as it comes in and we’re all reading it to mean different things.

And it is always that way. One might almost say, find agreement among those who hear any given message, and it’s a sign of only superficial understanding, or, just as likely, only superficial communication.

So is it worth the attempt?

If your input and your interpretation were dependent strictly upon external sources, probably it wouldn’t be. But what is said, heard, caught on the fly, concluded from an experience, whatever, will be used by your non-3D component to nudge you toward the truth, as best it can.

So why doesn’t that process hold for warlords and killers and government thugs and drug dealers and rapists and all who seem to have said, “Evil, be thou my good”?

Here we begin to get to the nub of it. Because their non-3D component does not share your values. Those people you itemize express other impersonal forces than yours, other values. (Only, don’t make the division between people very absolute. It is still a matter of the line between good and evil running through you, not between you.)

Evil needs to express in 3D life no less than good? I can’t say that I like the idea much.

Nor can you say that it is a new idea to you.

Let me put it this way. Suppose Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Seeing Things As Good and Evil. How would what we experience as evil manifest?

An excellent question.

Planted, I have no doubt. Well?

In the absence of polarity – or, let’s put it a different way, in the absence of polarization caused by perceived separation, everything would be different.

But you have said that perception of things (and time) as separate is a precondition of life in 3D.

And now it is time to modify the statement. It is a precondition of life if lived as if only in 3D.

A light begins to dawn. If we were walking around knowing, living, that we are also connected to the rest of the All-D, everything would change.

Of course it would. Some think of it as the world “ascending” to another dimension. That’s a way of thinking about it, but that’s all it is, a way of thinking about it. The disadvantage is that it brings in the spatial analogy through the back door, unnoticed. That is, a higher dimension “there” will have different conditions than the one you experience “here.” You have to travel, you see, in that analogy.

When we merely need to wake up, to open our consciousness.

It’s a big “merely,” but yes, that’s it.

I was thinking, watching that film, that I would gladly murder all those who inflict pain callously or for their own enjoyment, but that if I did, (a) I would be one of them, and (b) ten more would spring up for every one I killed.

That is why it is evasion to try to correct the world by fighting any specific manifestation of evil. New monsters spring forth to replace the old and evil cannot be overcome, but only at best displaced, by doing evil

This is not an argument to not resist evil per se. it is an argument to cut the roots, not the branches, and those roots are the firm perception of separation by 3D conditions.

It can’t be overcome by intellectual argument or conviction; it must be experienced. And although this work will appear to be evasion, it is the only real work there is. The key is that it works on your own inner issues and the world’s inner issues together. Indeed, they are inextricably interconnected.

Let us pause here.

Much food for thought here. At the same time we have to try our best to absorb what you say and yet remember than that very process is probably distorting your message somewhat.

You can take a more optimistic view than that. Words are sparks, not stepping stones. If the process is worthwhile for us, it ought to be worthwhile for you.

While we busily misunderstand, eh? Very well, our thanks as always, and till next time.