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Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

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A new reality, Deepak? Work of the Devil ;)

Dear Deepak,
interesting article and I agree with most of it. However....I don't believe that changing one's perception is a real cure. It might help for the moment...for that one instance...but as soon as the next situation comes about... we fall again.

That is like building a sandcastle in the sand...buiding castles in the air....dreaming an illusion.

The real cure, how I see it.... is not to eliminate evil but the belief in a separation from God.

I agree with Deepak that the true cure of evil is its opposite. For example, if someone is showing hatred, return the positive energy of love and watch the flow change into goodness. And if evil is darkness, shine a light on it and it's gone. Personally, I don't believe in a satan as a pronoun, but on the lines of a noun and a verb or even an adjective. And darkness is not our true self, nor is it the truth. I prefer to call good/light/love "God." God is perfection and whole. I believe that the further away a being or a force or an energy is from God, the darker it becomes, as it is separated by distance or lies or illusions.

Well, I've got to go, and I've enjoyed all these posts as well as Deepak's & Avtar's (including all the other replies to those recent posts) very much.

Love, Char

"In addition, they are false, or at the very least unprovable. Evil may be powerful, but nobody has ever photographed the devil or caught the unconscious on an MRI."

Also true about God or whether there is life after death. Isn't it about faith and beliefs relly?

Dara

Relly = really :)

dara

Thank you so much Deepak, this is very useful to me. I write a lot in a place on the web where street violence is discussed, and there is this compact tendency to demand harsh punishment for our fighting youngsters as a solution. There is this tendency to demonize and compartmentize, a flinging around of accusations and guilt and the process of creating the Devil is at work. So I'll use this map to try to produce change.

"Your aim isn't to be saintly but simply to understand, and with understanding, to break down the massive problem of evil into smaller components that can be solved." Deepak

this rings so true to me...

another way to help me understand is doing Byron Katie's "The Work"

through these questions there is recognition that we all are really so connected...

love, Carolyn

Greetings!

Dr. Chopra writes "Each of us can fight evil by shifting our perceptions; this is not only the best way to cure evil but the fastest."

I totally agree; however, I don't think it's that easy. My experience indicates there is nothing so difficult for a person to change as their own mind. There's nothing 'wishy-washy' about it: you have to want to change it, and usually badly, before any ray of light can be admitted. To 'rewire' your brain chemistry and alter your thinking patterns is a slow, painful process.

That's not to say you can't scatter seeds of enlightenment here and there and hope they take root. Confronting 'casual' evil daily, be it in the racist remark or sexist comment, takes a depth of understanding and patience and education.

Confronting 'real' evil - the abuser, the vicious swindler - takes a lot more than understanding. I may understand why a mother beats her child but in order to truly help her (not to mention the child) I think you do need to forgive - not the heinous act, not even the circumstances that surround and support the act, but just the person themselves. You don't and shouldn't accept what they've done but you do have to accept that they are a person - a child of God no matter how little evidence of that shines through.

"Pollyanna?" Actually yes: she looked for the good to be found, even when there were slim pickens indeed. It would be a better world if more of us would follow suit.

Guys, on the other page of this blog, we discussing the suggestion to drop the use of the word [ego], as an ongoing program to drop what it denotes.

Why don't you join us a drop the word [evil] as well, the more the merrier, after all the best way to fight it is simply (do) not see it.

Common guys life will be more fun.

Love

igor

Deepak,

This is a very interesting post with so much insight and so much to think about. I am somewhat torn though between believing that so-called evil is situational or believing that so-called evil is unexplainable.

"Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst. (Deuteronomy 22:20-21"

-Pre Bush Administration

Patience is a virtue...!

Cheers,

Steve

Very interesting commentary! I can recall a psychological test asking whether I believed in an actual devil or not, and I always remember answering no at the time only to probably change my mind about that a zillion times since.

I just watched an interesting film called As Far As My Feet Will Carry me, a story of a Russian Prisoner of War in WWII following the downfall of Hitler. Many Germans were sentenced to prison in Siberia, and this is a story of a man who attempted to escape his Siberian imprisonment twice round, and managed to make it second time round. The film follows his journey through China to Tehran, where he finally is jailed again only to be found and identified so that he can finally return to his native homeland. A very touching story that reintroduced me to the problems of evil pervading the lives of unfortunates in the 1940's. It is a deplorable film in many respects as the human condition is at an all time low. It made me wonder at how and why so many nations, Germany, Russia, Japan, and others, including Italy, were at such a low period to encourage truly evil elements in their backyards.

The devil is really the counterpart to God, and is actually the absence of god or light, so that any kind of evil can probably be wrestled from the darkness of loss of love.

God is described in a hermetic brotherhood book called Light of Egypt, as Light, Life, and Love. The unrepentants of evil doing are considered the devils or evil doers in life.

A true Satan is probably a figure of speech...but many who are considered the AntiChrist, including Napoleon, and others are often considered as demonic or devilish.

I do not believe in a horned beast but realize that bulls have probably often been the stereotype for the devil, making both devil worship and devil destruction easy for those who choose to use the poor animal as the metaphor for the devil, hooves and horns finally reduced to some silly red imagery in European folklore.

It is ironic to realize how readily we feed on both bull and cows in our love of steaks, beef, and hamburger, etc. If we are what we eat, and the bull is the symbol of the devil or archetype, then we are all devils indeed!

I guess only India has managed to save the cow from such a fate! Just as Pigs are inedible to both Muslims and Jews, every culture has some animal that it refuses to eat for one reason or another. Horses are exempt in America from our diet except by the depraved, naturally.

A real living devil, a symbol of real living evil! Most politicans seem to fit the requirements of a life that is anything but exemplary. I have yet to hear and learn of a true moral leader who is a political leader. Not since Mahatma Gandhi anyway.

But trite as it is, I do not believe that either God or a Devil exist in the sense that one wants to describe as a BEing that is able to be fathomed by mankind as a personal entity, only as a concept, an idea, a composite of qualities of goodness or lack of goodness.

None of us is ever ready to meet a true god or a true evil entity face to face, do you think?

Which would be worse to face, the God that is so all loving and pure, or an evil one, so hating and rank in every respect...only authors and novelists love to exploit either concept, and therein one finds true evil...usually in the movies, books, or t.v. world where conflict between good and evil attracts viewers and readers far and wide.

If I have to choose who I wish to meet and take my best chance with, let it be true God, true Love. I think I will fare better there.

Deepak,

I would have included fear in that list or somehwere. It seems to be the impetus behind most behavior that one might apply that label to.

advancedbeings.com

interesting development

Click my name below.

Dear Sir,
It was enlightening to read your post on nature of evil.Being a Sikh,I have read in Gurbani,and I believe in same that this world appears to us according to our evolution on Spiritual path.To a contented person,virtues will be visible in most depressing situation,while a discontented person will be ill at ease in best of the situation.
Thanks

Dear Deepak,

It is always heartening to know that when I am reflecting on a subject and require some external view, I can log on here and find a synchronistic post by your good self. Namaste'.

I was interested in Scott Peck's views on evil which were thought provoking. As you already probably know, M.Scott Peck believes Satan is real. This is an idea I have never accepted, but one can understand how a person can come to believe in such a notion, even when it is not part of one’s religious or theological indoctrination. That is because, although Satan is only a myth or a label we give to manifest evil, evil is, nevertheless real.

For somebody who believes in Spirit, Soul and God it seems strange to me that you take such a sceptical view about one of the oldest problems and beliefs in the world.
We are all energy forms and in investigating energy forms we discover that there are both dark and light energy forms. Children dubbed useless, bad, selfish etc., are bombarded with negative energy and can become dysfunctional. Disembodied negative energy forms are attracted to and can take residence in such individuals.
There is obviously a case for the dysfunctional ego being wholly responsible for the irrational yet rationalised evil that men do, but that surely is only the manifestation of such phenomenon in the physical body and through the physical body’s psychological functions. It is not something which touches the subtle body which is always trying to heal the coarse self. But when negative disembodied energies enter they infect and sometimes obliterate the original signal, the subtle body, the soul. Is not madness and possession a manifestation of such phenomena in your view?

We have tried different models of societies from tribalism, clans, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, democracies of various styles, religious states, and military dictatorships.

All of these worked in some ways and in some ways did not.

There is one we haven't tried: a society based on compassion. It could incorporate some of the other approaches. In fact, you could argue that any one of those systems is greatly improved when fairness and compassion are the guiding principles of their application.

Or, as the Dalai Lama would say: we don't need to invoke nirvana, God, or creator. We are simply talking about a warm-hearted human being.

While I see many, if not most people I meet are compassionate human beings, we do not structure our systems in society based on compassion.

The downfall of capitalism is the assumption that the individual's desire for wealth (greed) is a suitable motive to structure society around. Everything becomes a commodity, a product, sometimes even human beings themselves as in the sex and slave trades.

Militarism starts out as honoring the warriors who protect the family, tribe, clan, village, kingdom, or nation, but eventually turns into an all-consuming monster that the state exists to feed. The progression goes from defending homeland and loved ones to starting frivolous wars simply because the war-machine must be fed.

Add capitalism to militarism and you end up with war as a mechanism for acquiring wealth and political power. Of course the people don't want this, so the "leaders" resort to lying to the people and keeping their real activities secret in order to maintain their political power and wealth. Back-door deals and 'state secrets' becomes the M.O. of those who say they are representing the people.

However, a system whose primary values are fairness and compassion can optimize the powers of the market place for the good of the people. Suitable priority could be put on the actual important functions of society, such as feeding and educating our people, and structuring a society that does not destroy its own habitat or demand the lives of humans to exist.

Some of the lowest paid professions we have include caring for children, teaching in the public schools, caring for the elderly and disabled, and I was shocked to find out recently, that the emergency medical teams that save lives at accident scenes are also in the low-pay category.

We have arrived at the point where caring for children, educating our youth, caring for our elders, and saving lives are not considered to be worth very much.

In fact, if you want to help people, usually it is recommended to start a non-profit charity. So there you have it: the basic assumption is that caring for people is a non-profitable activity.

Then we act shocked when we learn that kids are growing up without proper reading, writing, and math skills, that elderly are being neglected, and that the public schools are suffering for lack of school supplies, facilities, and good teaching talent.

At the same time, CEOs are writing themselves humongous golden parachutes while employees lose their retirements and companies crash into bankruptcy.

It seems to be the time has come to make fairness and compassion the central organizing principles of society, not greed and military might.

This would be a jump in evolution to what Deepak has called a wisdom-based society.

We can kill to survive, and we can make lots of money. In the past, that might have been enough to guarantee our success.

But now those same values are destroying our own society. Ruthless greed and militarism are not working for us anymore - they are causing our demise.

New values to base the system on are needed.

the real cure

"A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas. There is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life. The
reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light." Hung Tzu-ch'eng (1593-1665)

I'm convinced that some traditional societies had rituals and practices not only for personal enlightenment but also to resolve societal conflicts and acts of harm. Small acts of contribution, retribution, and atonement prevent larger cruelties from growing. Even bearing witness to pain can help.

In my work with Family Repatterning Constellations,(based on the the family field) we probe into the sources of suffering in the ancestral past. Today's abuser was once a little child, and most often an abused one. In witnessing over a thousand constellations, I've only rarely seen an instance when this was not so.

I totally agree that it's not about forgiving the unforgivable, but it's also about understanding that victimhood and perpetration are an ongoing drama in the human condition, with which we must somehow come to terms.

What does true resolution look like? In my work, done in a group setting, we take representatives for all parties, and mere acknowledgement, being able to look each other in the eye-- at a safe distance with witnesses-- is often the most healing thing of all. When we all can see the underlying suffering, the harsh act remains, but the humanity returns. But this work takes place over the generations, and some perpetrators as we see them in public life-- are so hardened, that it may take the passage of the generations for the realization of the wrong doing to be acknowledged, suffered, and atoned.