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Good VS Evil
I remember, a long time ago when I was still a small
child, I made a very conscious and very precise decision to be evil.
It was a decision, make no
mistake.
It was weighed in my mind, I
contemplated the pro’s and con’s of the entire situation, all the evidence
that was at my disposal one way or the other and then I made the decision.
It was an enormous relief, mixed
with some sadness too and some anger, but the sheer relief that such decisions
bring with themselves was enormous.
It’s nice to know where you
belong. It makes you feel a lot less lost, a lot less lonely.
But, as is so often the case with
such decisions, there is a price to pay.
It seems to me that this price is
a loss of individuality, of freedom, of choice and in the end, of ability to be,
have and do certain things.
You could call it a kind of
slavery but we will come to this later.
Now, you may wonder, why a four
year old child would make such a rather life setting and determining decision
and what such a choice may be based upon.
This first came to my attention
in consciousness some years back during an EFT intervention for what alone, I
can’t remember. I was really struck by something though and have since
mentioned it numerous times to my friends in the course of a conversation,
because the question as to what actually is good and what is evil, and where you
stand in the “War of the Heavens” has a great deal of bearing on how you
conduct many aspects of your life, as well as what you might expect as overall
profits, when the final reckoning is made.
What is Evil?
There are two very divergent
philosophical starting points for what evil is and how a human gets to be evil.
One tends to talk of evil as you
would talk of a mountain, say, or a certain type of weather – it’s an
existing reality in the universe and it’s just there, not a lot we can do
about it other than hoping it doesn’t happen where we happen to stand at any
given time.
This worldview also includes the
possibility of being born evil; indeed, the more radical types tend to take this
for granted – being born evil by the very virtue of being born at all, that is
– and that one must strive to overcome this evil and get to be good.
The slightly more modern way of
thinking about this also includes evil as an existing force but here, we’re
basically born good but then something evil comes along and it can make you evil
by touching it, interacting with it, inviting it in and so forth.
So, if we take our
none-too-hypothetical four year old girl, we could start by wondering if she was
born evil and failed to have this driven from her in time through lack of care
by her supervisors, or we could wonder if she had been a “good little girl”
but something happened to take her down into the inevitable pits of hell.
I was quite fascinated by her
decision, so I endeavoured to gain her trust and talk to her, find out just what
her evidence procedure was before she arrived at her decision to “walk the
shadow path” – even the fact that there actually was DECISION and THOUGHT in
the picture at all was indeed, most intriguing to me.
One piece of evidence was the
fact that she was regularly referred to by her supervisors and caretakers as
“Satan’s daughter”. Now we, looking across this time span from the now and
here to the there and then, might begin a discussion on whether these people
were qualified to make such a pronouncement or whether they simply knew more
about her than we ever will; for the girl in question it is quite possible that
she would have not thought in such a way and simply accepted the fact as a
given.
There is a scene in the movie,
The Omen II, when a disciple reveals to the young boy that he is the Anti-Christ
whilst he is at boarding school. The boy is understandably somewhat disturbed
and traumatised by this announcement, having thought until then that he was just
a child, more or less like the other children around him. However, he comes to
accept the fact and when he does, his turmoil ceases and he resigns himself to
his new career.
One could set to musing at this
point how often this happens in real life, in real terms. How many Anti-Christs
walk amongst us for this very reason, for such an occurrence (or two, or three,
or four, or five ...) and who, just like the little girl back then, found a
great deal of relief and cessation of fear, doubt and insanity their final
submission to their own “inherent evil”.
However, this would not help us
in this case, so let us return to our real life case history and ask this little
girl, “What exactly does it mean to you, being evil? What do you mean by
that?”
She would look straight back at
you with her serious brown eyes and tell you a big list of evil things that she
had done, if she would trust you to just listen and take her at her word’s
value, which is not something that grown ups do a lot of amongst themselves, not
to mention when they are communing with children.
She would tell you that she had
stolen chocolate, lied about it afterwards so she wouldn’t get beaten, climbed
a tree in a brand new dress, taken a bite from an apple and thrown the rest
away, crossed a road when the little red man was showing, held her pen in the
wrong hand, deliberately drew outside the lines of a colouring in picture, spat
out her spinach, cried when she should have been silent, and as she speaks on
and on and on, you really begin to wonder just how much crime there can be in
such a young life, and you have the notion that there may be some things she’s
not telling you about that are even worse than what she’s confessing here at
such speed and rate.
Now, you would ask her, “And
did you not know what you were doing was bad, wrong, evil?”
And she would tell you that she
did.
“Why did you do it then?”,
you might ask in astonishment, and the little girl says, “It felt good at the
time. I liked it.”
And here’s the next piece of
evidence.
Bad is bad when it’s bad, but
when you actually like bad, things get nasty, slimy and tricky. When you are
asked to show remorse but you don’t feel it. Or you just say you do just so
it’ll stop – so THEY will finally stop and leave you alone. You lie and
that’s good then. Only it’s bad ...
Ah, but this is all getting far
too complicated. Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, it’s easy right? God or the
Devil, simple enough choice. Let’s go at this the other way around.
Ask her what “Being Good”
means.
This is what she said.
“There was this girl called
Susie. She was horrible. She punched and kicked me and broke my toys and said
bad things to me when no-one was watching. When the grown ups came, she stopped
and smiled at them. They liked her. Her clothes were always clean. Her hair was
always combed. They told me that Susie was good and I was bad and I should be
good like Susie. I hated her. I didn’t want to be like her.”
What else does it mean, being
good?
“It means you don’t talk and
you don’t say anything. It means to be silent. It means to sit still and never
move. To never make your clothes dirty. To do as you’re told. Not get
angry.”
Who else is “good”?
“My mother and father. And Mr
Smith. He beats his wife and steals from work. His children are afraid of him,
especially at night when he is drunk. He is a good man. My father says so.”
Well, there we have it. Bad feels
good and good feels bad. Perhaps a few more beatings to really drive the devil
out of this child?
Unfortunately, it didn’t
happen. The exorcism did not occur, and there’s this moment in space and time
where a four year old decides that she is evil.
What
happens next?
Well, now you can lie in peace.
When asked if you are sorry, you
can look them straight in the eye and say, “Oh yes, I’m very sorry. I’ll
never do it again.” and sound entirely convincing if you want to avoid the
beatings.
Or, of course, you can just
proudly look them in the eye and say, “Fuck off, I’ll do it again given half
a chance!” and at least stay true to yourself or should I say, your decision,
and this time when you get the beating, at least there’s a sense of justice
about it because you really did it yourself, it was your decision, your doing,
your just deserts and even in the pain, there is now a sense of control.
It is, indeed, an interesting
procedure.
It creates some very interesting,
very dangerous people.
When you are evil and you know
it, you can walk in places where “the angels fear to tread”.
You can challenge, you can
question and you can say, “No. Not like that.”
You can start to paint outside
the prescribed lines in earnest.
You can discover new things and
you can be creative. Really creative. Scarely creative. The kind of creative
that Susie would never dare present her teachers and her masters with because it
would make them feel uncomfortable, threatened and it would rock the boat that
keeps them all afloat on the icy black seas of reality.
But, as I observed earlier,
there’s a price to be paid.
The
Cost Of Being Evil
I have observed a number of
people deciding certain things which are structurally quite similar, and in some
fields it’s called “Coming out of the closet”.
I love that term to bits. I’ve
been wanting to come out of various closets for ages but I’m not sure just
which one to come out of!
See, if I was to “realise” or
read, “decide” that I was a lesbian, life would interestingly become a lot
easier all of a sudden.
There would be a whole host, a
cascade of ready-made hand-me-downs instantly at my disposal, to help me decide
what clothes I should be wearing, what music I should like, what friends I’ll
have, what pubs and clubs I will go to (and which to avoid), special housing
associations to welcome me and even poetry awards I could apply for.
There would be this invisible
MASTER that I can turn to in moments of crisis – the “Who the hell am
I???” types of crisis – to tell me how to decorate my home and what books I
should or should not be reading, what political persuasion I would like to
engage in and anything else really I might need to worry about.
As it is, I haven’t really
decided such a thing.
Nor have I decided to be a
“classic heterosexual sex kitten” or a “raving ugly old feminist” for
that matter. “Mother Superior” also doesn’t hold much appeal for me, and
neither does “elegant vampiric salon hostess”.
Hey. One day I might find a
closet to come out of, but you know, the older I’m getting, the harder this is
becoming. Perhaps I’ve played with my self concept a little too much, made it
too elastic, found that I can be all of those things and essentially remain none
of them, and now I’m finding myself a masterless slave, thrown back upon just
what I’m not sure to help me decide what things I like, what I should wear and
how I should behave.
This “lifestyle MASTER” of
any kind of ready made category is quite well known amongst teenagers and ugly
feminists; we shake our heads sadly at the Ku Klux Clan or fundamentalist
Muslims who take the lifestyle master to the extreme but it’s there alright,
and the worst part about it is just as in BDSM, the intense “relief” someone
experiences when they give up the daily struggle to make up their own minds and
instead, experience the true bliss of servitude and knowing just where you
stand, and who you are.
A choice between being “good
Susie” or “evil Silvi” is just such a lifestyle choice, if only we would
know it.
Like any other category decision,
fashion-, political-, or religious based, it creates a kind of fortress
landscape within our own self concepts and whatever we get to do, be, think, eat
and create becomes defined by and within it.
There are certain things that
Susie can never do, and there are others that Silvi cannot – areas out of
bounds, like a shadow divide between a land of day and night, where half
creatures live in each and neither can enter each other’s realms in eternity.
It is a very unhappy state of
being for all concerned, for Susie longs for some of the things, events,
manifestations that can only take place on the shadow side or, should we
say, in shadow time; some of things, events, manifestations, emotions can only
be had for Silvi on the sunny side of the street and both may stand and stare,
their noses pressed up hard against the glass, the grass always being somewhat
greener on the other side for one, and for the other, what you cannot have
seeming so much more precious than that which is in easy reach and always
available, just for the asking, just for the wanting.
Stepping
Across The Divide
Now, something happened to our
little girl who decided that she was evil.
Evilly, she decided at some point
to find out if, when you put your mind to it, you can do more good as an evil
person than a good person doing good, and found that you could.
This caused some chaos in the
simple order of things and some big problems with the lifestyle master which
ceases to function when you start to rock the definitive foundations just a
little.
How can you do good if you
are evil?
How does that work?
How can you do evil if you
are good?
How does THAT work?
There are a number of ways to
process such a stalemate.
The simplest way is to just STOP
trying to define what exactly good and evil might be.
After all, one man’s evil is
another man’s good and vice versa, so how can any man <in the sense
of, person> EVER know what’s what and be sure they are right about this?
Every mass murderer, from Pontius
Pilate to Adolf Hitler, was convinced they were doing good.
The guys running the killing
fields in Korea were doing it for the good of the unborn children, so that they
might have a better life.
Their victims didn’t think them
good, to be sure.
Victims usually don’t, may they
be the Christians who were eaten by the lions or the witches burned by the
Christians.
Thou shallt not kill.
(Apart from, if you’re a
soldier and you were ordered to; in self defense; if it’s an accident; if the
person you’re killing is generally disliked, feared or hated; if they are an
aristocrat/jew/German/Muslim/Christian/Apache/etc.; if you’re insane with PMT
at the time; if it’s for the “greater good” ...)
Think too much about these things
off your own bat (as opposed to not thinking at all and following a lifestyle
Master who prescribes such things to you and relieves you of this unpleasant
murkiness), and soon enough you begin to really lose a sense of just what is
good, and what is evil, in the now, in the long run, who decides this, how
it’s measured, how it works.
When you take out what is good or
evil, you’re kind of left with “what is”.
And what is?
What
is this?
What are we doing here, what’s
the point of being here at all, how do we conduct ourselves, how do we make
decisions, based on what?
Based on WHAT?
Discovering
The World
As I’ve said, in the simple
good vs evil decision a landscape is created, an entirely artificial distinction
that exists nowhere but inside our own minds, as to where you can go and what
you can do.
This becomes a person’s own
personal prison and in a way, their own personal “hell” – whether it be a
bright hell or a dark hell, it matters not really, in the end. (*little word
game there – hell means “bright” in German from which the term derives,
one of those strange things related to the fact that Lucifer means “bringer of
the light” in Latin and originally referred to the Morning Star).
A bright hell or a dark hell, it
matters not.
After wandering about in both for
a while, carefully cloaked against the fall out of those dimensions, I must have
made a decision at some point to stop this and to get out of hell and into the
real world.
There’s this amazing planet,
this fantastic eco system. Of which people are a part, as are their very strange
neurologies, a totally undiscovered country in every sense of the word,
metaphorically and otherwise.
There’s the sun in the sky and
at night, the moon, the stars, the milky way.
Rains, ice, heat.
Seasons that change. Comets that
come.
Thunderstorms and hails of frogs.
It is a most amazing place.
Perhaps, I thought, perhaps
it’s time to get out of our mindgames and stop trying to think that we know
what’s what at all, stop listening to musty books and aged scholars repeating
the chinese whispers of the ones who went before them, knowling, unknowingly,
who cares in the end, and start making a personal contact with this world in
which I find myself.
To learn about it, not second
hand through anyone else, but just to learn with my own eyes and ears, my skin
and my other senses, to just watch it like you would watch a troupe of strange
creatures in their habitat you stumbled upon quite unexpectedly.
To learn about the world, not so
I can teach others or tell them this, that or the other, but just for me.
So I find out some things that
make sense for me, for MY OWN RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS MY LIFE ON THIS PLANET.
Who
can teach me about the sunset?
Oh, but for sure, I can spend
years and years studying available descriptions of sunsets, astronomy,
astrology, umpteemology for all I care, but in the end, who gives a toss?
Who can teach me about the
sunset?
No-one can.
No-one can teach you, either.
It’s your sunset.
Indeed, it’s your sun. Your
moon and your wind, your pain and your body, your feelings entirely, this is
your world.
YOUR WORLD.
Totally, and exactly at the same
time as it is mine – no shortage, no division, no loss, no matter how many of
the 6 billion stare up at the sky and stand there, staring up at it and it being
THEIR OWN SUN as the planet turns through a single rotation on it’s axis.
It is your world and whether you
know this or not, your decision and your creation as to whether you want to be
in hell until you die, or whether you want to start coming out of hell and
carefully, slowly, cautiously if you will at first, make this world your own
again.
This world is not about anything
other than your own experience and your own life. When your life ends, the world
ends too, truly and profoundly.
This your world will end when you
are no longer there to observe it.
That is very true and no matter
what “other people” say.
When a small child holds up a
hand in front their eyes and says, “I’m gone.” – THEY ARE.
What has this to do with good and
evil, you might wonder.
It has everything to do with it.
Understanding that you are
neither and both REUNITES you and gives you the ability to see the world again
for what it is – see it, feel it, touch it, and experience it with all your
senses, all your neurology and all you are, not with half of what you are, or
that half you decided you were going to be.
Choose good and strive for good,
and you will lose the dark side.
Choose the evil and strive for
evil, and you will lose the bright side.
Neither can exist and be anything
other than true damnation and less than half of the truth.
Susie and Silvi aren’t good or
evil respectively.
They are human.
That is the resolution and not
the end, but the beginning, the awakening to a real life, the one and only real
life YOU can ever have, in direct communication with all-there-is, learning
directly from the all-there-is, and being all-you-are.
Next time, you help an old lady
across the street, don’t think you did something good.
You did something human.
Next time, you hurt another with
a cutting remark or the lash of your whip, don’t think you did something evil.
You did something human.
Know it, remember it, and hold it
clearly in mind should you ever be called upon to judge yourself, or another.
Herein lies freedom.
Silvia Hartmann
10. 04. 2002
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