THE NATURE OF EVIL

The Mystic Christ - Chapter Preview

The battlefield of Kurukshetra is there both outside and inside. Symbolically, it is the constant war which is fought within each one of us between righteousness and unrighteousness, vice and virtue, untruth and truth, evil and good, the demons and God. Ammachi, Awaken Children, vol. 1
In this chapter we will explore the question of unhappiness and its causes. Why do we experience pain, suffering and calamity and what should we do about it? Where does fear and anxiety come from and how do we get rid of it? We will dive to the very source of our deepest infirmities in order to assess the damage. Armed with this knowledge we will be inspired to find a course of action to rectify it.

DOES EVIL EXIST?

To say that we are all God flies in the face of our everyday experience. We are reluctant to believe that Adolph Hitler or Jack the Ripper are God. Even if we admit that they might be God in the depths of their soul, we are still pained to reconcile their actions with a reality in which only God exists. If only God exists, why is there evil? Why does God allow people like Hitler and the Ripper to inflict so much suffering on others? This philosophical question has been in circulation for ages.

The minds of our two examples were inclined to perform evil actions because they did not have the wisdom of unity. The absence of wisdom and love meant that their minds were ignorant of God and their own true nature. Without this "knowing" they became self-serving. They lost touch with the universal harmony of the cosmos. Their view of life became small, narrow and dark. Lacking the discrimination to set a course that conformed to the universal order, they were ships without rudders. Chaos was the result.

There are evil acts in the world because people have created them in their minds. With regard to human beings, evil is any act or thought that harms nature or others for the sole purpose of fulfilling a selfish end. Evil is the ego in action in the same way that compassion is love in action. Suffering, on the other hand, is not necessarily evil. Suffering is necessary for this world of duality to exist. One cannot have pleasure without pain, good without bad or hot without cold. The river of God's awareness flows between the banks of pleasure and pain. Suffering is also our greatest teacher. From it we eventually learn to abandon the pleasure fields of the senses and turn towards God which is the only lasting source of happiness.

All deeper spiritual questions such as the existence of evil can be addressed from two points of view with both being paradoxically true at the same time. There is the absolute point of view and the relative point of view.

From the absolute point of view, there is only God. There is nothing that exists outside of God. From this absolute way of seeing, evil is an illusion and not real. In our conversations we speak of evil as though it were a real substantial entity but, in fact, it is an imagined reality having its existence only in our mind. Sufferers of schizophrenia hear voices and hallucinate so it is difficult to convince these persons that the apparitions are in their own mind. In the same way evil is the hallucination of separateness. Can we say that the lake we see in the desert as a mirage is part of the desert? In the same way, we cannot say that evil is part of God. It is only an appearance.

On the other hand, from the relative point of view, it will not help those of us caught in the quicksand of suffering to simply say evil is not real. That would be like telling a starving man that he is not the body in order to appease his hunger. Evil may ultimately be an illusion but the problem is that we believe that the darkness and the untruth of our ego is real. Evil is the result. We see real evil actions in the world. In this way of seeing, evil is real and the ignorance that causes it should be resisted with all the vigor we can muster.
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