The ways in which evil works are subtle. This makes it all the more important to be attentive to the gap between freedom and responsibility. Those who do not take responsibility for their freedom invite evil into the space between us.
Where is the will weaving streams?
Will it flow from forgiveness
And, with love’s liminal vapors, rise to the Sun—
Sun that illumines all without judgment?Blessed, we have shadows
to find our way
through streams and spirit fields.
—JB
Evil is cunningly active in the world today. I experience it in the dissonance between what I am seeing and hearing in the swirling social world and my sense of what is ethical and moral. I simply cannot fathom the intentional, indiscriminate, cruel, and unaccountable violence visited upon targeted people. I locate subtle expressions of evil in interpersonal challenges, in long-coherent communities now at intractable odds, and in prejudicial, unprovoked, angry behaviors. Uncertainty seems prevalent, and the extreme distance between morphing polarities has become more like a bottomless chasm.
Perhaps the most salient symptoms of evil’s cunning are the brazen justifications for the wrong and the bad. When the distinction between fact and fiction no longer matters, I am left to work my own way through to a complicated and risky place, a moral atmosphere in which I can take responsibility for navigating. I can feel evil’s perverse aspirations in my striving for inner freedom and equilibrium. I expect others are struggling with the same. How does one find the healing strength of inner spiritual activity in a field that appears dominated by the dehumanizing and demonizing forces of evil?
Is it possible that evil is so unfathomable to human conscience that it can override moral boundaries before it is recognized for what it is? Is its mechanism an occult inversion, substituting what seems to be rational justification for the unjustifiable—a kind of alluring masquerade—before the betrayal in it is evident? Evil is an experience, not a thing; evil becomes palpable through what emanates from it. To fear evil is to feed it. To fight evil is to strengthen it. Its presence has a kind of darkness and opacity that makes it difficult to see and even harder to fathom. It does not want to be seen.
Bottomless and Pitiless
Evil’s history is connected to the impulse to destroy inner freedom, to reduce the human being to nothing more than working matter shaped by and obedient to external authority. The bench of examples is, unfortunately, deep and global. A few will do: the Spanish Inquisition’s violence and oppression in the name of religion; the enslavement of Africans and the elimination of Indigenous cultures in North America guided by a doctrine of manifest destiny1 and the capitalization of natural resources; the Third Reich’s fascist quest for power and the genocide of human beings it deemed unfit. The justifications—whether in the name of religion, for the sake of capital, or to abet the state’s control of human destiny—could never have appeared acceptable without a prevalence of deception, violence, and fearmongering.
The perverse genius of Arbeiten Macht Frei [work sets you free] posted at the gateways to Nazi death camps is one example of this deception. There are many more found in the history of propaganda, but for me, this one has graphic and emotive staying power. The knowing use of language in this way is manipulative, cynical, and cruel. Its false promise is poison. If we recognize the double or shadow at work in this language, we have an opportunity to call it for the lie that it is. Either way incurs risk. Accepting the lie, whether through innocence or coercion, is dehumanizing. The trap set by evil is to make it appear that there are no good choices. Evil intent works to potentize and cultivate distrust of one’s own sense of what is true.
Evil is bottomless and pitiless. At the age of ten, I found an album containing photographs (and negatives) from Dachau Concentration Camp that my father had made. I discovered the album high on a bookshelf behind glass doors in the antique secretary desk in our living room. He never once mentioned it, though he shared other war stories. The power of those images still makes me inwardly sick. His handwritten label says April 1945. Evidence from eighty years ago sparks intense concern about what we are witnessing in the world today. The images raise the unfathomable question: How was this possible? This is a bottomless question. Evil is without pity in that it is ever-present, waiting to re-emerge and seize a moment of human vulnerability—such as when polarities are so irreconcilably far apart that they create a vacuum between them, and when uncertainty is so prevalent that it has come to seem normal. While nature abhors a vacuum, evil does not hesitate to occupy one.
My Jewish immigrant grandparents fled oppressive pogroms; they saw evil in the form of cruelty and hatred. They came to the US seeking freedom—of religion, of speech, of congregation, of an open economy. Now, two generations removed, I find myself trying to characterize the pervasiveness of evil as a formative force in our time. It is shocking from my perspective of seven decades plus, and it is hard for the rising generations, who are distant enough from the ideals of political freedom that their grandparents fought for in World War II, to understand the longer-term implications of departing from the rule of law originally co-created out of that freedom in the US Constitution. We are witnessing a multi-dimensional crisis: a crisis of law and rights playing out in our streets and courts, a crisis of culture simmering in the question of national identity and values, and an economic crisis in the making as we withdraw from the reality of an interdependent world. The injustice of this manufactured crisis is the evil counterpart of what a just world might engender on behalf of a human-centered life and guidance for humanity. Are we entering a time in which we are further from the hope of a threefold commonwealth than ever?
Seeing Spirit
I have taken much inspiration from Sergei Prokofieff’s book, The Occult Significance of Forgiveness, in exploring evil and its presence in our world. I wrestle deeply with the question of forgiveness, especially when I return to the Dachau album. Sitting with the current rising tide of antisemitism and living in sympathy with the genuine fears of today’s immigrants, it is hard to forgive as the wounds marked by old scars are reopened. Have we learned nothing from our recent past? In understanding the linkage between freedom and responsibility, I can at best atone for my participation in current affairs. I can take responsibility and make a commitment not to contribute to the furtherance of evil even as it is unfolding. I can ask myself whether or not I have acted in ways that recognize and support humanness in others. It is clear to me that anyone who exercises freedom and takes no responsibility for that freedom is inviting evil from within themselves and into the spaces between us.
Facing and transforming evil is a long and arduous process. It calls on our depths of practice and guidance from the spiritual world. This work, as Prokofieff indicates, is essential to the evolution of humanity and the spiritual world. But, such a transformation seems far off on the horizon, dangerously close to the vanishing point. The risk of not taking up such a path is a kind of surrender to evil’s end goal of blinding us to spirit and denying it altogether. We each hold a piece of responsibility for our time in raising awareness of the significance of spirit in the practical world. How do we exercise that responsibility not only for the evil unfolding in the present, but also for the healing social processes so needed as an antidote?
Image Enslaved people on a cocoa plantation. Source: Social History Archive/Unsplash
Footnotes
- Manifest Destiny refers to a 19th-century American ideology, similar to the Monroe Doctrine, which states that there is a teleological mission to spread the cultural ideas of the United States of America westward. This was used to justify expansion and the fight against indigenous peoples.
