For most of us, evil begins with the old, old story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve with the golden apple, the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve bought the serpent’s argument, shared the goodies with Adam, and both Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden for good.
Whatever you may think about the historical accuracy of this narrative, its symbolic import is all too clear. To know good as good experientially requires an encounter with evil. Before the serpent, Adam and Eve knew good, but they had nothing to contrast it with. They couldn’t know good as good.
Humanity thus entered the realm of duality, and all spiritual paths seek to bring us back to that primal unity, this time all the wiser, knowing good from evil, and consciously choosing the good as good.
The Devil Made Me Do It!
Back in the early 1970’s, the delightful Black comedian, Flip Wilson, coined the ultimate excuse that everyone instantly recognized and loved. “Don’t blame me, the Devil made me do it!” In a single phrase, Flip brilliantly captured our individual and collective irresponsibility. Everyone got it that this was the ultimate cop-out.
In the Early 2000’s, Bishop Carlton Pearson, a close friend of the legendary faith healer, Oral Roberts, and a personal advisor to both Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, got thrown out of 299 churches in his Holiness denomination, barely holding on to his own church for declaring:
“There is no such thing as eternal damnation. The devil himself could be saved.”
Oral Roberts had begged Bishop Pearson not to do it, but the bishop’s own conscience would not let him go on preaching fire and brimstone, even though his own congregation rocked to the rhythm of hell hot and heaven cold.
The good bishop dispelled forever that the doctrine of hell had a solid scriptural basis with his classic, The Gospel of Inclusion: Reaching Beyond Religious Fundamentalism.
How Can You Possibly Have Good without Evil?
The ultimate symbol of Taoism, the Yin Yang circle, reveals to all who contemplate it that the dark half contains the white half, and the white half contains the dark half. Each side turns into the other in a perpetual dance.
In life, we alternate between happiness and suffering until we realize that ultimate bliss lies beyond both.
Carl Jung gave us the image of the Shadow, the unassimilated part of us, that in us which we refuse to consciously own that has command value over all of our actions. This Shadow is not the light, but that which is hidden from the light.
The Gospel of John puts it even more dramatically: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness overcomes it not. Only the light is real.
When the light penetrates the darkness, it is instantly cast out. Darkness cannot possibly extinguish light, because it has no reality of its own. The light, itself, stands for both life and love - pure consciousness.
Look Who Is Calling It “Evil”
When does evil become evil? Does it have an easy definition? You could conveniently declare that evil is whatever causes harm to other people. But what about plants and animals? What about our planet’s ecosystem? Suppose that you hold a zero carbon footprint. Does that get you off the hook with your fellow human beings? Is there not collective responsibility?
As you will quickly see, once you start calling this “good” and that “evil,” you will find that there is no end to the process. Whatever you don’t like instantly becomes evil, even if it is for your own good. If you are not careful, everybody and everything will end up being considered evil.
Look at the larger picture. Does God get off the hook? As the Prophet Isaiah once declared, “I create good, and I create evil [adversity].” That same scripture tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he refused to let the children of Israel leave Egypt, inadvertently bringing devastation to his own people. Did God do all that?
Beyond Evil: Step Back and View the Vast Panorama
Whenever we have a true, mountaintop experience, we see that everything ultimately fits together.
There are no real mistakes. Everything that ever happened had to happen to bring us to this very moment of infinite possibility.
How could we even learn without making mistakes? It is only through mistakes that we ever learn anything.
Could it be that we are all of it, the good and the apparently evil, and that together, it is all perfect, just as it is? True, we will always prefer the good, but adversity makes us stronger, and pain in the body is a useful warning signal.
Life is evil only when we have lost all perspective.
To realize our divinity, we have no other choice but to stop pointing fingers. To be a victim is to disempower ourselves. To believe in the Devil more than God is absurd. It is interesting that, in the most revealing scripture ever written on the subject of suffering, the Book of Job, Satan is seen as His Majesty’s loyal opposition, whose role is to test humanity in order to better reward it.
How could you win the laurel crown in the Olympics without fierce competition? In that context, your opponent might actually be considered your friend.
Freeze Time and You Are Free
The most unbearable suffering is tolerable when we can abide in the Eternal Now Moment, and flow with everything that is happening around us. The great 20th century mystic, Sri Ramana Maharshi, underwent surgery for cancer. Ramana refused anesthetics, maintaining, “Who is feeling the pain?”
There is pain, and there is Ramana Maharshi. No need to confuse the two.
We are, indeed, living in an era of maximal stress, with disruptive climate change, widespread religious terrorism and financial instability. It is no accident that Eckhart Tolle has become a spiritual superstar with a single, simple message around the Power of NOW. Once he stopped his monkey mind, he was forever transformed.
To be truly free, all you have to do is BE. Every moment has a pleasure of its own. You can see hidden beauty all around you and everywhere. It is just that you never bothered to look that closely until NOW. All we need to do is take a few deep breaths and go with whatever is happening. Every single instant is perfect just as it is.
Only Love Is the Ultimate Answer
I was early into working with my best friend to develop a book on the topic of perfection: Awaken Perfection: The Journey of Conscious Revelation. She tried to share this insight with a colleague of hers, who recently lost her son in Afghanistan. My friend and I realized that, from an experiential standpoint, the truth of ultimate unity and perfection was not enough to quench the inner sorrow and pain of this woman.
Siddhartha Gautama once went into a village where an extremely distraught mother brought her recently departed son, begging Buddha to bring him back. Siddhartha didn’t have the gift of resurrecting people. However, Siddhartha urged her to go back into the village and find a household that had never been touched by sorrow and death. The mother came back all the wiser, with a profound appreciation for the incomparable insight of the very first World Teacher.
Saint Paul, who underwent every form of suffering imaginable to share the Gospel in the early Roman Empire, including being whipped to near death, intermittent imprisonment, acute hunger and shipwreck, having nearly drowned. Paul shared with the Church at Rome his secret for a life triumphant over any and all forms of apparent evil:
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.
Is Evil Real? appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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