Evil is Personal

Capital from the Museum at Reims Cathedral

 [A continuation of the posts of notes on evil]

…every man, from the beginning of his human career, has a good spirit, an angel, and an evil spirit, a devil. The good angel advises and continually inclines him to that which is good, that is godly, that is virtue and heavenly and eternal. 

The evil spirit advises and inclines the man continually to that which is temporal and transient, to what is sinful, evil, and devilish. This same evil spirit forever woos the outer man, and through him ever secretly plots against the inner man, just as the serpent wooed Lady Eve and, through her, the man Adam (Gen. 3 : 1- 6.) The inner man is Adam.

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, The Nobleman, p. 558-59

If sin is personal, and flows from inner impulses towards evil, as Swedenborg claimed—it seems difficult to argue that point, however else one wants to evaluate Swedenborg—then evil is personal. That is to say, evil is a personal choice. As Gurdjieff himself said in his aphorisms, If you already know it is bad and do it, you commit a sin difficult to redress.

If there is bad in Gurdjieff’s universe, there is good; and if there is good, evil must lurk in it too. (We can recall Orage’s remark that when he first saw Orage, he realized that hanging was too good for him.) Evil is personal: it’s an inner quality that emerges in us and belongs to us. Evil does not choose us; never mind the devil and angel on our shoulders—a device attributed to St. Jerome which Gurdjieff also adopted to his teachings. 

We choose evil. 

Anyone who doubts it can go read Hitler’s Willing Executioners for a primer on that question. The principle here is a simple enough one: granted agency as one of the law-conforming properties of creation, we are given choice; and our spiritual choices, which begin in the distilled and uninflected difference between selfishness and unselfishness, quickly run up against the consequences of that one choice, which become progressively disastrous the more force they acquire. The potentials of selfishness and unselfishness are, in practical terms delineated by death alone: on the one hand, Cain slays Abel; and on the other, in the classic John 15:13, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Love will die for another: evil slays the other.

Our choices between good and evil, then, begin with our choice of unselfishness or selfishness; and what begins here in nearly benign innocence—of course I sometimes need to choose for myself, don’t I?—rarely ends there.

I remember a conversation with a friend who is a follower of Sadhguru, who asserted there was no such thing as evil. We disputed that; to me, it smacks of westernized interpretations of what are otherwise very complex eastern philosophies.  In these philosophies, everything is actually “good;” it’s just how we see it that colors it. (Such ideas are in my opinion not too different from Christian Science, as it happens, but when covered with a patina of eastern philosophies they’re apparently more acceptable to western modernist spiritual communities.) 

I asked this friend whether it would be evil if some depraved individual raped, tortured and murdered her son (who was with us at the table.)

She paused for a moment and then said, after reflection, and with a touch of sobriety less infected with spiritual overenthusiasm,

“That’s very different.”

Indeed.

My point is that it’s easy to sit in one’s armchair—or in a full lotus pose—hands folded in lap and pontificate over the idea that there is no evil. This impersonal, intellectual, and essentially selfish idea collapses in the face of real personal experience. We can’t meditate our way out of the real world: there is evil. It’s a fact that has to be dealt with; and an actual encounter with it pulls back the veil of negationist philosophies to reveal its deeply personal roots. It’s like the old saying: there are no atheists in foxholes. Survivors of evil know its face in ways that philosophers can’t. I’ve never met a person who truly suffered at the hands of true evil and then denied its existence; but I’ve met plenty of comfortable, middle class spiritual practitioners who do deny it.

One can sense evil in people; it has a physical presence as an emanation. It’s a material of coarse vibration that collects in people, and collects more of itself to itself. Evil, one estimates, has about the same capacity for recruitment of inner force as good does. It is only our will than can make a difference.

One of its salient features is that evil always poses as good. Those who adopt evil ideas or do evil always believe they’re doing good; hence Swedenborg’s definitions of devils, who do simply awful things because they think they’re the good thing. 

If we study the table of inversions from Metaphysical Humanism, we can perhaps see how decisively good and evil separate themselves from one another. Evil is almost exclusively selfish and uncaring, and good is almost exclusively unselfish and compassionate. 

The evil of this level—the 24 inverted laws—are, unto themselves and in their own eyes, a good. They only acquire perspective when juxtaposed against the corresponding table of angelic laws. 

  

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.