A Wayfarer's Guide to Troubleshooting Life: Part 1– Finding Evil
The Battle Royale
Love Versus Evil
Engaging with the concept of evil can indeed prove to be a complex task! However, it’s not as black and white as you might perceive it. (And it’s not Eve’s fault.)
First and foremost, to fully understand evil, one must first recognize that its fundamental essence is LOVE. By love, I don’t mean the superficial sentiment often depicted on greeting cards. Rather, it reflects a profound truth expressed by the great mystic Meister Eckhart, who eloquently said:
Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.
If you fail to comprehend this, our conversation might not make much sense moving forward. Portraying evil as a self-originating force, analogous to love, is like believing a human body can exist without oxygen. That’s a misunderstanding of what has been labelled as ‘evil’. While both love and evil possess the power to create, their means and results starkly differ. Evil is empty calories. Love is the bountiful feast, constantly regenerating and providing abundant sustenance.
Though they appear to be absolutely opposed, love and evil are not in actuality on the same plane. They are not opposing forces battling on an equal field. Rather, their relationship mirrors that of a parent and a child who has yet to learn to provide for themselves.
In this analogy, love is the patient parent, nurturing and forgiving. Evil is the wayward offspring, unable to sustain itself independently, thus siphoning sustenance from others, ever reliant on an external source. However, this dependence on others is not sustainable; ultimately, the child must learn to nourish themselves, to evolve, to align with love’s way.
Consequence of Negligence
Is Ignorance Really Bliss?
Similar to an untreated ailment, it aggravates, intensifies, inflicting considerable harm and devastation. Evil, in essence, can be termed as the disease of ignorance, not a universal force. Understanding it this way might save us from creating an illusion of good versus evil, or the concept of demons out to tempt and possess us.
It’s hard to hold oneself accountable when caught in the web of religious dogma, providing a ready answer and justification for everything. But, who embodies this good and evil if not you and your own constructs? It’s our minds, our words, and our actions that manifest these two outcomes.
Again, many interpret evil as the antithesis of love, indicating a profound cosmological error. The absence of love manifests as evil. Interestingly, when you reverse the spelling of ‘evil’, you get ‘live’. To truly live is to love, and to love is to understand. Conversely, evil stems from ignorance. In this linguistic dance, perhaps our perception of reality depends on our perspective: are we the reflection in the mirror or the observer standing before it? Which represents our truest self?
This is a legitimate question, one that I habitually pose to myself as a sort of mantra, deliberately steeping in this introspection, ready to accept the response.
Evil isn’t only demonstrated in heinous acts like murder, rape, and torture towards others; often, such savagery is self-inflicted through the denial to retrace our steps and examine why we think and behave the way we do. Evil is what unfolds when we stray from the realm of our heart, our origin, and lose sight of our true self.
In doing so, our mind weakens, spiraling into ignorance, and our willpower starts to crumble. Gradually, we start to starve, and having forgotten our true nature, we begin to leech off others because we’re incapable of sustaining ourselves. We transform into a figurative ‘zombie’, and this epitomizes the essence of violence.
Call it Evil, call it what you want, the word does not matter, but the Cause and the Effect does. Ignorance is not bliss. Love is.
Final Findings
Over to You, Dear Reader
The questions posed are universal in nature, but they are personal ones, open to introspection:
Is evil, Evil? Or is it the reflection of our neglect?
Does evil make Sense? Or is this another of life’s mysteries laying just beyond our existential grasp?
Is evil, Self? Or is it a cosmic power we have no hope of vanquishing without a holy savior.
To be honest, I don’t have a clear-cut answer. But I do want to leave you with something, so I’ll let the title of a book by J. Krishnamurti be my voice: Freedom from the Known.
If liked what you’ve read, be sure to look for The Wayfarer’s Guide to Troubleshooting Life: Part 2. Finding Sense.
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