A man stands in a schoolyard covered with numerous lanterns, bouquets of flowers and mourning cards, holding a sign. Opposite the man are photographers with their cameras pointed at him: Here is a detail.
This is the situation after a shooting rampage in which 15 pupils and teachers were killed. The sign says: GOD, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Whenever horrific things happen, countless people ask themselves where God was during this incident, why he could allow this to happen.
This outcry is as old as humanity itself:
“Either God wants to remove the evils and cannot, then he is weak,
or he can and does not want to, in which case he is begrudging, …
Or he does not want to and cannot, in which case he is weak …
Or he wants to and can, …:
Whence then come the evils, and why does he not take them away?”
(Epicurus ?, Laktantius ?)
Albert Camus puts it more succinctly:
“Either God is good, in which case he is not omnipotent;
or he is omnipotent, in which case he is not good.”
(The Plague)
Many other voices join in this chorus: Luther, Leibniz, Dostoyevsky (‘The Brothers Karamazov’), Bonhoeffer and others. They grappled with the provocative question of whether the postulated omnipotence of God really exists if it has apparently been unable to cope with the suffering and evil that has been occurring everywhere for thousands of years.
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Evil: Man-made negativity.
Suffering: unjustified hardship.
Evil: Collective term
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Their hidden assumption must be that evil is God’s adversary and somehow removed from his sphere of omnipotence. Or they ask: If there is a God, why do people – they are his creation after all – have no security and no peace?
‘God, where have you been?’ is an understanding of creation that contains the unconscious claim that our world must be a kind of land of milk and honey, in which people live in peace, friendship and unlimited provision as its crown, because the Creator would provide his children with the best possible care. To remain within the framework of this creation story, it is lost in the process that these very children have turned their backs on the Creator’s will out of self-centredness, i.e. misunderstood self-preservation, as the parable of the Prodigal Son shows. It is only through the pressure of misery in its completely hopeless form that some of the ‘prodigal sons’ manage to free themselves from all evil, albeit under certain conditions such as Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:44) or the 41st Sura of the Koran in verse 34.
But Judaism (Leviticus 19, verses 18 and 34), Hinduism (Bhagavad Gita 13, verse 28) or Taoism (chapter 49) show just as emphatically where and how the path to return can be found. It is no different with the numerically ‘smaller’ religions such as the Sikhs, the Mormons, the Bahai, the Druze or the Sufis.
But Camus, with his hidden accusation as to why God does not seem to save us, absolutely fails to understand that, on the contrary, God endeavours every day to lead every human being on the path to liberation from ego-induced suffering. However, this applies not only to Camus, but to almost all other people. All wisdom texts provide the explanation for this blindness.
Humans are the only living beings that can develop in contrast to animals. As far as animals are concerned, the life of the steppe lion, for example, consists of earning a living (hunting), eating, resting, reproducing, conquering or defending territory and biting away competition. Although it can adapt evolutionarily to other environmental conditions to a limited extent, it is not able to relocate to arctic or rainforest habitats. It is not given the possibility of further biological development, let alone higher development in an ethical or religious sense. The meaning of its existence is its existence.
Man, on the other hand, not only has the potential for technological, socio-ethical or legislative development on the horizontal earthly level, but also has the possibility of higher development beyond these material paths of progress. In this respect, they can grapple with the question of personal freedom, morality and religion (e.g. likeness) as well as the meaning of life in general.
However, if you look at the state of human consciousness from Neanderthals through antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day, you will see less of the child of God and instead an excess of ego-centred anger, aggression, fear, mistrust, worry and violence, see Cain and Abel. In this way, people are still – despite some examples to the contrary – unconsciously subject to the almost unrestricted control of the instinct for self-preservation and the associated cruelties. For them, the meaning of their existence is also only their existence and its maintenance.
It hardly occurs to anyone that this is precisely what triggers evil. The unconscious instinct for self-preservation triggers marital crises, generates betrayal, deceit, theft, robbery and murder, is the reason for the competitive pressure in economic life and leads to territorial and ideological global wars with nuclear bombs and extermination camps, as well as largely ignoring the obvious climate catastrophe.
And despite the enormous pressure of suffering at all levels of human (co)existence, very few people ask why our creation is designed in such a way that so much evil exists. Yet there are clear answers to this question about the spiritual explanation of the forces of destruction:
Since evil exists, it is first of all a part of creation of some kind. Goethe expresses this in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ (Faust I) by having Mephisto, a personalised devil figure, appear as an integral part of the ‘Lord’s servants’, as a servant of God. In the great human drama of the ‘Odyssey’, the fatal force of evil even appears as the brother of the father of the gods.
Moreover, an understanding of evil as an independent counter-power (Zarathustra, Luther) cannot be reconciled with the understanding of omnipotence. Consequently, director George Lucas does not have his actors in “Star Wars” speak of dark power, but only of the ‘dark side of the Force’. Anyone who shares this understanding of creative omnipotence also understands Jakob Böhme:
‘…because all things come from God, evil must also come from God.’
(Aurora, ch. 2,36).
For there is neither only one side of a coin nor a battery without a negative pole. There cannot be a battery without a negative pole: It is only through the existence and interaction of both poles that something can exist and have a function at all. The apparent contrast consists of two different surface phenomena, such as the thumb and index finger, whose common condition of existence is the common blood flow, without which these fingers could not exist at all. The two different appearances are actually parts of one and the same object, just as the different facets of a diamond are.
This expresses the central principle of material creation: it is an apparent duality at the level of appearance, which is in reality a polarity, i.e. an apparent opposition, like that of hot and cold, but which are mutually dependent and in this respect – although opposite – make existence possible in the first place. People, however, only try to avoid evil or, like their illnesses, only try to fight it – as if they wanted to live in a world with only a South Pole and no North Pole. They avoid trying to understand the meaning and function of being ill (cf. chapter 14). The point is not to endure it without question, but to understand it as a message to take the path to higher development and thereby, and only thereby, to be able to fundamentally eliminate it.
For example, if the patient has a smoker’s leg, i.e. an arterial occlusion with tissue decomposition, he will do everything he can to get rid of it. When asked why, he himself will ‘explain’ it with his smoking (1) and medicine will perhaps also explain it with deeper psychological complexes: (Wikipedia: 4.5 million people in Germany), such as discrimination and subsequent compensation (Wikipedia) (2) But then the understanding of causes comes to an end, although this is when it really begins: Because the obvious question about the cause of the only secondary cause of the complexes is not answered:
For it remains unclear that self-preservation (3) is again behind it (see chapter 1) and even deeper, that the infinite torments have nothing else as their goal (4), to recognise these self-preservation impulses as information for liberation from them.
For it is a matter of largely replacing the absolutely dominant life programme of self-preservation – apart from a minimum – with the realisation of its opposite, i.e. all-preservation. People do not know how to take this only possible path of spiritual development – and liberation from suffering – on the basis of their likeness through their spiritual soul.
However, the great wisdom writings convey this very clearly: the Old Testament describes human beings created in the image of God. Jesus describes them as follows: ‘You are all gods!’, i.e. with a divine core (inner voice, intuition, gut feeling, etc.) and also: ‘You will do even greater works than I’ (John 14:12) But people do not know this and certainly do not follow it. This is by no means to be heard from the pulpit in the church, and the churches have done the exact opposite from the very beginning, since antiquity and the Middle Ages: for they have instilled inferiority in the believers and enforced this with their funeral pyres. They did this in order to maintain their power and, of course, ultimately for their own self-preservation. Nowadays, they avoid, conceal and avoid this topic as a matter of principle, because otherwise the remaining believers would also run away from them:
Their ‘anxiousconformity to worldly values ’ and their character as ‘interchangeable institutions of public welfare’ that have ‘submitted ’ to the rationalism of the age resemble ‘clubs to which you pay dues.’ The churches should have a voice as fighters for a better world, but are‘… only one of many and one that is heard less and less.’ In contrast to the Ethics Commission, they have ‘no exquisite answers’ and have forgotten that, as part of this world, theyhave ‘their true nature in that which is opposed to this world ’. (All: DIE ZEIT 49/2020, p. 62)
Without the lashes of the vale of tears, there can be no paths to peace, happiness, consistent integrity and well-being, because the path to freedom from suffering – as all religions show – only goes through the realisation of one’s own divine likeness – and consequently also that of all (!) other people, however embedded their spiritual souls – such as their conscience – may be.
Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses or Lao Tse name the two conditions for freedom from suffering. … Firstly, Matthew writes: ‘You shall love God … your Lord with all your heart …’ However, he does not make clear what practical form this can take in everyday life. As a rule, this means realising the likeness in the form of the ‘upper’ spiritual soul within oneself (intuition, gut feeling, first thought, ‘pangs of conscience’, ‘guardian angel’, etc.).
Puccini, for example, reduced this connection to a simple denominator as follows: “I do not compose. I only write down what my soul tells me.”
Anyone who has started to listen to their gut feeling, then learnt to consciously wait for it, then learnt to consciously ask it, then to thank it for its very slowly emerging presence and finally to enter more and more into a dialogue. This does not have much to do with the common concept of prayer, because its conventional practice usually consists of whining and begging, whereas spiritual dialogue knows nothing of the sort, but consists of questions, asking for guidance and then clear answers from within.
In order to overcome the eternal suffering in one’s own life, it is essential to recognise it as an instrument of the Creator, to recognise it as an agonising impulse to turn back from the egocentric programme of exclusive self-preservation. For Homo sapiens has never left its animal heritage and, like the pride of lions, still continues to see the meaning of its existence in existence.
This is why the wisdom teachings were created, to show meaningfulness and the path to higher development and its experience. Without them, we would not know why we are in such a state of suffering, why we exist and what our purpose is. All of this can only be experienced through the sensory organs, and for this to happen there must be polar opposites. This is why evil, evil and suffering exist in order to enable higher development (biblically: ‘back to the Father’s court’):
‘That which we call evil is only the other side of good, which belongs so necessarily to its existence and to the whole…’
(Goethe: Kunsttheoretische Schriften: Zum Schäkespears-Tag)
In Christian wisdom, the parable of the Prodigal Son shows this in a very central way: the suffering of the material world appears in the form of his impoverishment with the belly landing in the herd of pigs. This fall of the Son of God exists for the purpose of being able to find the vertical way out through the material fall into the herd of pigs. His material misfortune is in reality the last possible step of destiny to find the cause of the causes of this suffering instead of suppressing it, fighting it, getting rid of it. The modern medicine of symptom suppression is a classic example of this.
People only ever look horizontally for a way out of bankruptcy and other financial collapses in alcohol, fraud, escape, etc. They fight tooth and nail. They fight tooth and nail against injustice, fines, illness or the competition, instead of understanding these evils as lessons to achieve liberation from them by moving from the horizontal to the vertical level.
They search and search and do not find the way out because they remain on the physical plane and do not (want to) know that the way out can only be found in the vertical. The Buddha calls the bondage to the purely material conception of the world ‘attachment’. He recognises that it is the sole reason for the constitutive suffering in our world.
Suffering is there to end it. It is the only means to do so, because the past millennia have clearly shown that good persuasion – in the form of wisdom writings – has not even begun to lead to freedom from suffering. It is only through the fact that suffering can raise our consciousness from the material level to the spiritual level, almost forcing us to do so, that one or the other realises that there is no other way out.
Suffering is a manifestation of the unified creation. It is designed to almost have to take the path to liberation and lead to perfection. Anyone who wanted to abolish evil – and that is what all do-gooders want – would also abolish good. But both are good in a higher sense. Pain should lead to the fulfilment of meaning by offering people the opportunity to leave the realm of the opposites of good and evil in their consciousness – and thus in reality. Evil is there to be overcome. The proof is the concrete experience of all those who have almost always been brought to this by their own massive suffering and the blocking of all earthly possibilities. This can also be clearly seen in Jesus’ example, when we recognise his physical death as a symbol in its double function, once psychologically for the death of the human instinct for self-preservation (ego) and at the same time for the continuation of life on a spiritual level (see the parable of the Prodigal Son); this connection also becomes clear in Job.
‘The devil is only there … to make us realise that there is something in heaven.’
(Georg Büchner: Leonce and Lena)
Evil is only evil for the ego
Suppose a man is left by his wife because she no longer wants to put up with his self-centred behaviour. A world collapses for him, not only emotionally, but also in terms of provision. Half of the family income is lost, but the expenses for bringing up the children, rent etc. are not halved. He is faced with the emotional ruins of his previous married life and financial ruin. This is a catastrophe for him, and the whole thing is ‘evil’ for him. It is an evil par excellence. However, this evil is by no means as evil as it appears to him. Because only through this event could he go in search of the cause of the crisis, of his own part in the disaster. Without the break-up drama, he would never have the idea of recognising selfish behaviour in himself. Because the ego always blames everyone else, and the (male) ego loves to wallow in its own suffering. There is an opportunity for self-reflection that did not exist before. That is the meaning of evil. ‘War is the father of all things’, Heraclitus once said. This statement can be usefully generalised: every crisis is potentially the father of all things. Ancient Roman wisdom says: ‘Through misery to the stars.’ (Per aspera ad astra.) Peace between people is still the product of war.
If this man had actually found his own part, he would have taken a step towards recognising and overcoming the ego part in him, even if this only took place on the horizontal, i.e. material, level. Of course, there could have been less violent moments to avoid the disaster if, for example, he had learned during his years of marriage to find and develop the connection to the intuition within himself, to spiritual guidance, and thus harmonise his relationship. But people always want to get rid of their evils, not the controls (from ‘below’) that have created these evils.
It is characteristic of human ego behaviour to want to cherry-pick from life and avoid the unpleasant, even though this is precisely the agonising but therefore necessary wake-up call for giving meaning to material life and liberation from suffering. However, people do not want to accept evil and see it as a learning situation. That is why they have to suffer permanently from evil. But those who have recognised this have put an end to pain and suffering.
“Whether … ten thousand fall at thy right hand, it shall not come upon thee. … No evil shall befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy tabernacle.” (Ps 91).
This is not an assumption in the sense of a mere conjecture or working hypothesis, but the result of concrete experiences made by everyone who embarks on the path of freeing themselves from the ‘attachments’ of the instinct of self-preservation.
However, since spiritual self-criticism is not an issue for everyday people and the Gospel, the OT, the Koran and all Eastern wisdom teachings have remained more than unsuccessful, the crisis, the confrontation with suffering is the decisive instrument in the world of contradictions to make the outer man wake up, reflect and repent. Therefore, as absurd and contradictory as it sounds, evil serves the good (not the *human good, but the divine absolute good), it leads to it.
‘The fastest animal that leads you to perfection is suffering.’
(Meister Eckhart: On seclusion.)
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*Human goodness such as charity, donations, neighbourly help, etc. can be individually helpful in developing the capacity for empathy, but it is usually only very limited because it makes distinctions (‘favouritism’: own children – other children, perhaps even those with a different skin colour). Furthermore, it has no meaning in relation to the way out of suffering as long as there is no awareness that this goodness is not one’s own personal quality, but comes from the soul and that the thanks for it are due to it: “Do you think God cares that you are righteous? What does it profit him that your ways are righteous?” (Job 22) As long as human goodness remains on a purely human level – i.e. without spiritual orientation (self-recognition of one’s own divine identity) – and the person considers himself to be the saviour in question, it has no significance for liberation from the vale of tears. For this goodness has no understanding of the lack of difference, i.e. of the unity of all being, including that of normal citizens and criminals and thus that of good and evil.
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All these statements are not just exegetical assertions. They become truth when these commandments are followed in everyday practice and are thus filled with life. Those who ‘love’ strangers (for this misleading term, see chapter 17) will be loved back by them and everyone else. You ‘only’ have to try it out. However, it cannot be a question of loving strangers in the conventional sense in order to be loved back by them. Rather, the basis of true harmony in life is and always will be the realisation of the Son of God in me and them. Everyday life then shows that and how these decisive components for freedom from suffering become effective. This clear connection cannot be illustrated more simply than by the aforementioned parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11 ff.), which describes man’s path to redemption:
1) The purely spiritual man (Son of God) leaves his purely spiritual home, where there is no evil. However, he takes his ‘inheritance’ with him, i.e. his inner voice, regardless of whether it is developed or embedded in concrete. He then makes his appearance in the material world as Homo sapiens (second creation story).
2) His life on the material level proceeds in such a way that he degenerates (with more and more destruction of the material and spiritual foundations of his life) and sinks so low that it is impossible to sink any lower. He has to eat food waste intended for the pigs (‘spent grains’: pressed barley residues, the husks) – as a metaphor for severe suffering.
3) Through this evil and (for some) the understanding of its message, he decides to repent, to return to spiritual consciousness, with humility (ego-crucifixion). He therefore successfully returns to the spiritual level (‘to the Father’).
But despite the Golden Rule, despite the Bible, Koran or Buddha’s Eightfold Path, despite Martin Luther King, Mandela, Gandhi, Father Kolbe, Mother Teresa and many others, man makes active use of his at least theoretically free will in order to remain in the realm of good and evil. They do not realise that although their will is indeed free, it is by no means a decision-making authority. He is not a recipe maker, but a recipe user. He is merely a tool that functions unconditionally for his two controls. This means that he either realises the one from ‘above’, i.e. indiscriminate love (‘as I have loved you’; John 13:34 and 15:12) or functions for the one from ‘below’, i.e. for the instinct of self-preservation. Since over 99% of people now largely follow this instinct, it is no wonder that they continue to unconditionally follow the pattern of Cain and Abel. The fact that over the millennia and centuries the way we treat each other has become more cultivated and refined – mainly due to improved care – is a purely quantitative aspect; self-centredness as such has remained in the consciousness of Neanderthals, and such counter-examples of devotion to others, even to the point of death if necessary, are exceptions.
The instinct of self-preservation suggests very successfully (see Goethe’s Faust I) that devotion, sacrifice, service and selfless sharing jeopardise self-preservation, although on the contrary they are the only way to genuine self-preservation and ensure it.
The animalistic, sinister programme of egocentricity is the author of all evil in the world, which all people see clearly enough every day and do not draw any consequences from it. On the contrary, the mind does everything to realise the internal ego programme. Jesus’ life’s work, that of Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna and all the other great teachers of humanity have changed practically nothing in this respect. The ‘lower’ programme has so far more than successfully prevented their teachings from being given even the slightest chance to at least try out the ‘upper’ programme.
The connection is obvious: if my and everyone else’s central endeavour is only to care for the well-being of the whole within the scope of my possibilities and under my intuitive guidance, then this is expressed, among other things, in the fact that everyone else is also primarily concerned with the same whole, so that my concern for my own well-being is automatically limited to a minimum. As absurdly improbable as this may seem for humanity as a whole, it’s just as starkly realistic for the individual. However, unconditional devotion must not be a favouritism, as occurs millions of times, especially among mothers. (See chapters 1 and 17)
Man is the constructor of the conditions in the world through his consciousness, i.e. in the form of letting through the respective parts from above or below. If, instead of filling it with egocentrism, jealousy, envy and hatred, he were to fill it with his personal view of religion, politics, togetherness, democracy, communism, fascism, liberalism, feminism, sexual ethics, etc., and instead fill it with the Sermon on the Mount or the Buddhist Eightfold Path, i.e. unrestricted forgiveness and love of enemies (see chapter 17), he would immediately be freed from suffering.
Those who consider evil to be evil even cause further evil because they cause it to continue. However, anyone who abstains from superficial judgement in everything that happens, sees their suffering for ignorance and carelessness as a kick in the teeth (except for their ego) and in this respect gets off the hamster wheel of dividing things into good and bad, is no longer a slave to it. This is what Hermann Hesse’s Chinese parable means (see chapter 7), in which he describes the Chinese farmer who knows that ‘everything comes from God’ and therefore refrains from calling evil evil.
“Nothing is neither good nor evil in itself. It is thought that makes it so.”
(William Shakespeare: Hamlet. II, 2)
However, if I enter the realm of consciousness of only good, i.e. work against ignorance, as the Buddha recommended, only good (e.g. not applying the ‘eye for an eye’ principle) gradually displaces evil. St Paul calls it ‘daily dying’, i.e. the instinct of self-preservation. The result is a life in this world with not just one, but two states of consciousness, perhaps 40 % material and 60 % spiritual. It is then without luxury and without want, without ego-amusement and without worry, a life of serene and devoted joy. It is a level of consciousness that no longer contains any evil or suffering because it allows nothing of the kind in and understands all ‘evil’ as evil only for the ego and as an impulse for growth: We are just – as I said – there to develop higher and not to simply live out our lives. The animal does not recognise such a maturing process: higher development from the realm of good and above all evil is not possible for it; this is the privilege of humans and the only difference to the level of animals.
The external product of becoming is a concrete life without suffering and without evil. We are then constantly in the eye of the hurricane, wherever it moves, because evil cannot come to the fore in the presence of intelligent spiritual consciousness. In this respect, evil is not unconditional, but the result of ignorance and the purely material consciousness that this causes.
The accusation mentioned at the beginning, how God could allow any terrible event, shows a complete lack of understanding for the higher spiritual contexts. You could just as easily accuse an architect of allowing a drunken couple to get into a fight in the house he built.
So Shakespeare has basically already answered the question of why people, who are supposed to be children of God, have to suffer by saying that nothing (!) in the world is evil. For suffering is the only – admittedly tormenting, but redemption-related ‘good’ – impulse that is capable of releasing people from their total self-centredness in the sense of their survival programme and finding the only way out of this evil: It is that of love of neighbour, love of enemy and love of all. Without these hard broadsides of pain and agony, people would not take a single step out of their egocentric and – it can easily be said – animalistic behaviour. and – to put it bluntly – animalistic way of life. They could have had comprehensive care and security long ago, but on this very condition of seeing through evil as an instrument for higher development. It is ‘a part of that power which always wants evil and always creates good.’
As already mentioned, Mephisto is part of creation in that he belongs to the ‘servants of the Lord’ (Faust I, Prologue in Heaven), as a servant of God. He is supposed to ensure that people orientate themselves exclusively to the conditions of the material world and thus prevent them from any search for God; for only in this way will they fall into infinite suffering, because this is also the only way out that exists, the real search for God, that of turning inwards to intuition. If Mephisto had allowed Doctor Faust to continue his search for God, i.e. without any unfortunate experience, he would have continued to search outside, with the catastrophic consequences of all the religious paths that people have taken over the past three thousand years and continue to take. They have done and continue to do so without a hint of understanding for the only way out that the sages of all cultures and religions have pointed out:
Christianity: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you. Do good to those who, those who hate you!”
Mt 5:44
Judaism: ‘If a stranger sojourns with you, you shall not wrong him!’
Leviticus 3, 33
‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him with bread!’
Proverbs 25:21
Islam: “Repel a bad deed with a better one. Then the one with whom you
with whom you live in enmity is like an intimate friend and supporter!”
Koran, Sura 41:34
Hinduism: “He who understands the spirit of life as the one who is inherent in everything,
does not revile his self in the other self!”
Bhagavad Gita: XIIIth canto, verse 28
Taoism: “The heart of the wise beats in all. Because his being breathes goodness, he is
equally kind to the good and the bad.”
Tao Te King No. 49
Buddhism: “Enmity never ceases in this world through enmity;
Enmity ceases through non-enmity, that has been the course of things ever since.”
Dhammapada I, verse 5.
Anyone who looks at the worldwide state of political power relations, of peoples, of ecclesiastical organisations and of the friend-enemy consciousness of individual people will see that they do not want to see the path shown by these and the other founders of religions (Zoroastrianism, Sikhism or Jainism). The universal inner tensions between individuals, groups, factions and peoples, as well as the ties between state religions and their respective state powers, have continued over the past two and a half millennia, despite the wisdom teachers of all peoples and all centuries – such as Meister Eckhart, Maimonides, Ibn Arab, Ibn Khan and others, Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, Mong-Dsi, Plotinus, Rumi, Shankara, Thich Nhat Hanh, Angelus Silesius, Ramakrishna and many others — have still shown that the shift in consciousness from the level of matter to that of spirit has remained limited to exceptions and is still on the wane. The tendencies of ‘make great again’ or ‘… first’ show that the global pendulum is not swinging towards integration, but in the opposite direction, towards disintegration: how many world wars, concentration camps and atomic bombings have taken place?
From antiquity to the present day, it has been Mephisto’s task to distract us from what is real and essential in us and to wrap us up in such a way that we limit ourselves to the visible, and here only to the apparent, like the Trojan horse. It would be like standing at the bottom of a waterfall and believing that it springs from itself because we cannot see the mountain river that creates it.
Just like the ‘Lord’ and ‘Mephisto’ in Faust I, the two gods Athena and Poseidon in the Odyssey appear to be opponents, but together they organise the hero’s salvation. The ancient hero succeeds in doing this by shooting down the ‘evil’ suitors (thoughts of hatred) who want his spirit soul (Penelope), whereas Faust actually falls for the seductions of matter.
‘In every work, even in evil, … God’s glory is revealed and shines forth.’
(Meister Eckhart: No. 4 of 28 articles condemned in the papal bull ‘in agro dominico’).
Buddha was the first to reveal the principle of moving from the consciousness of human good/evil to that of liberation from suffering through the experience of suffering and the application of the means to avoid it (‘The Noble Eightfold Path’). To be found.
According to its ancient Greek origin, the ‘devil’ is the “diabolos”, the ‘divider’, who wants to separate what is in truth a unity like that of human beings. The only evil in the world is the exclusively unspiritual, stubbornly material understanding of the world, which divides into good and evil, does not recognise the unity of people like the fingers of a hand and therefore judges and evaluates. It is a misconception (Hindu: Maya) that my enemy is not in unity with me. I am then ‘beyond Eden.’ However, the devil in the form of the ego programme serves to return to the ideal state of unity with the ‘enemy’ through the pressure of suffering. Can you imagine a field chaplain in Ukraine advising soldiers to pray for Russian soldiers too – and vice versa? But these Christian (!) clergymen do not look behind the scenes, as they have always failed to do. However, anyone who manages to look behind the scenes (see Beauty and the Beast or Matrix I during the final battle in the underground) no longer has an enemy.
We have lost the direct line to the divine guidance within ourselves and do not care about restoration. Thus, suffering in the world, every illness, every misfortune, every agony is nothing other than a difference between the awareness of oneself as an external person and one’s own spiritual identity within. The soul expresses this difference through protest signals such as illness or discord. At the same time, it is a harsh invitation to refer back, to turn to the divine soul in order to escape suffering. In this respect, suffering, pain and illness are a disturbance of personal harmony, but they do not contradict the harmony of creation, because they are an instrument for restoring the harmony of the unity of man and the inner God. This is the reason why Meister Eckhart says that suffering leads to perfection.
All those who have dared to consciously walk this path know that this Eden state is largely attainable in this earthly life. The initially legendary figures who demonstrated the enormous arc of development from the existential nadir to fulfilment were Gilgamesh and Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.
People of modern times such as Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Padre Pio, Father Kolbe, Janusz Korczak and many others were or are spiritual instruments of the soul, as are Mary Baker Eddy, Fillmore, K. O. Schmidt, Goldsmith, Walsch, Tolle and many unnamed people who, unnoticed by the general public, realise their spiritual missions as seers, healers, coaches or teachers in a beneficial way. In everyone’s immediate or wider environment there are such awakened people who cover one or more areas of spiritual mission with their main focus.
When Jakob Böhme recognises that ‘… all things come from God…’ and therefore also the possibility of evil, this does not mean that God has anything to do with the real evil in the world. He endowed man with free will through the so-called Fall of Man (Gen. 3), giving him the freedom of choice, at least in principle, between good and evil in a world of opposites. One can actually decide to overcome the ignorance about the cause of the valley of misery and find the way out of suffering.
The result of this path is liberation from fear and worry and the provision of ‘full sufficiency’, as Luther translated it. This refers to fullness or abundance, which has nothing to do with wealth and luxury. The price that must be paid for this consists of many trials, including in relation to constant forgiveness.
This kind of love of neighbour is anything but fair-weather love exclusively for partners, friends and children, ‘preferential love’, as Leo Tolstoy says in the Kreutzer Sonata (Chapter 2). Rather, it is the love of all and therefore above all the love of strangers, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows. It is indiscriminate love that leads to the unity of all being.
To summarise, the evil, the ‘devil’, the bad, the suffering is anything but evil, although it torments us so terribly: it is the divine instrument that wants to take us out of the horizontal consciousness of material life and bring us into the spiritual vertical.
Because only this turnaround, as shown in the parable of the Prodigal Son, leads us to the fulfilment of the meaning of our lives. It is our destiny to be able to lead a life free of suffering (even in this world) on the basis of unity with the divine within us. And since, even after five thousand years, hardly anyone even thinks of not fighting back, recognising their inner God (‘You are all gods!’), offering no resistance to evil (‘Do not resist evil!’), forgiving everyone for everything (‘Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing!’) and loving their enemies (‘Love your enemies!’), there is this infinite suffering in our world.
And even this terrible amount (world wars with 75 million victims, the Holocaust and all kinds of other genocides such as those against the indigenous peoples of North America, the Armenians, the Tutsis, the Bosnians in Srebrenica, Sudan, South Sudan and the wars in Palestine/Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, etc.) brings people to their knees despite this earthly suffering. Despite this earthly hopelessness, this does not yet lead people to grasp the outstretched hand of the only alternative that all (!) wisdom scriptures admonish: Love your God within you, your inner voice, the ‘Father within you’, with all your thoughts and then, in addition, your (even hostile) neighbour as yourself.
That’s why God doesn’t stop at just showing us this spiritual path; rather, he obviously feels compelled to whip us into line. For not even the great role models such as Moses, Zoroaster, Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tse, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed and many ‘lesser’ prophets such as the Sikhs, the Bahai, the Manichaeans, the Mormons and others have led mankind to bring about the return of the Prodigal Son.
In one particular respect, however, evil is always truly evil, namely for the ego. Everything it does in terms of injustice, destruction and annihilation returns to it as a boomerang and is intended to smash its egotism, not only that of the countless evildoers and the bigwigs from corrupt politics, the car industry and MeToo show business in all parts of the world, but the general naughty little ego in everyone.
Even if the following exception is expressed exclusively on a purely material level, it shows the principle of suffering: it was his blindness that led Lois Braille to develop Braille.
Despite such exceptions (John 9:3), the answer to the question of suffering can also be summarised in this way: Every accident, every act of violence and every illness is a message: it wants to tell the person(s) affected very forcefully that lasting liberation is only possible with a radical course correction: it is about an elevation from the level of consciousness of the material point of view to the spiritual. This consists of spiritual self-knowledge (‘You are the light of the world’; Mt 5:14) and the definition of love in the Sermon on the Mount. (The same applies to other wisdom teachings such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Tanakh, the Buddhist Dhammapada, the Taoist Tao Te King, the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs, etc.).
Everyday people also search for causes: in the case of a patient with a smoker’s leg (a nicotine-induced open wound on the leg that does not close), the doctor at the hospital endeavours to treat this wound somehow.
Cause 1: In some cases, he tells the patient that his tobacco consumption is responsible for this ailment.
Cause 2: The fact that this damage to health, a kind of self-harm, has a cause is usually not mentioned, i.e. that smoking is done to achieve calming, pleasure or stress relief.
Cause 3: If such habits become an addiction (with 70,000 deaths per year), the main reasons are avoidance of depression, substitute satisfaction for other problems in everyday life or coping with anxiety.
Cause 4: The reason for all these causes, for these voids, threats and existential hardships is always and in principle avoided by those affected and remains unrecognised. No one even thinks of uncovering the cause of this general suffering of all people. Even if it is taken for granted that human suffering should be fundamentally and sustainably remedied, this central theme of all wisdom writings is and remains ignored in people’s everyday lives.
The reason for this is not stupidity, but a blindness that Hindu wisdom calls Maya. It is a specific discipline of the instinct of self-preservation that tries to suppress everything that could lead to self-preservation being jeopardised, especially by any effort to preserve others (Mt 5:44: love of enemies). All religions warn against this programme of concealment. To tear the veil, there are examples in Christianity such as the parable of the Good Samaritan or the admonition in the Sermon on the Mount to ‘pray for those who offend you’. But it is precisely this vertical path that does not resonate with people’s egocentric consciousness. The understanding of life on the material level is that of self-preservation and is therefore (!) invariably characterised by pain, suffering and agony. Only spiritual consciousness with a way of life for the preservation of all, without exception, enables fundamental liberation from suffering. This redeeming experience in the eye of the hurricane is experienced by everyone who changes course from the material to the vertical spiritual view.
In this respect, suffering in every marriage, in every neighbourhood and at all levels of human coexistence is there to liberate us from the eternal lies and deceit, hatred, envy, greed, malice, jealousy and violence, to free us from it. It wants to tear us out of the horizontal egocentric consciousness with the eternal suffering associated with it and lead us to the vertical of likeness, to a life free of suffering.
This is not a theory, because this perspective can be proven by the freedom from suffering that is then achieved. Because this connection can be tested. However, the hurdles for getting started are high, and in addition, many experience along the way that no matter how hard they try, they make no progress ‘on the way’ (Mt 22:14). The reason is that their karmic preconditions were not yet complete enough for this stage to finalise their development.
Genocide: Creating good through evil?
What on earth can be ‘good’ about genocide, of which Mephisto claims that such evil ‘creates good’?
Evil has dominated people’s lives for thousands of years and has spread in the form of blood orgies (Aztecs, Hutus and Tutsis, Nanjing, Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Rohingya and many other examples), decades of wars with countless victims, uninhibited racism such as raging anti-Semitism, and not just since the 11th century, without people having drawn any lasting consequences from this. The ego programme in people causes more or less insensitivity to the suffering of others. As long as people draw the wrong conclusions or no conclusions at all from these excesses, the consequences will become ever more terrible.
So the conclusion from the Holocaust should be that it is an elementary building block of the collective human consciousness, with countless (!) genocidal precursors. However, the ego in us unconsciously and fearfully avoids recognising and eliminating this. The methods for this are essentially either repression (Stalinism in Russia) or reappraisal in a form that distracts from the actual problem, such as the reappraisal of the Holocaust in Germany, which sheds light on everything but the ego programme with its self-interest and exclusion programmes in every human being.
The everyday person, about whom Paul blasphemes: ‘The natural man hears nothing of the Spirit of God; it is foolishness to him, and he cannot discern it’, must be spiritually orientated. ” does not see the hand in the glove, nor does he want to, and as far as spiritual orientation is concerned, he may mention his gut feeling or his conscience, but does not concern himself with it any further.
When war and mass murder are mentioned in dealing with the past, the word ‘senseless’ is all too often used. As if Nazis, Young Turks, Hutus, Serbs, etc. were mindless idiots. But it is too dangerous for the ego programme in people to emphasise the sense that does exist, namely the desire to get rid of everything that is disturbing. It’s about marginalising, eliminating and eliminating. Elimination is part of everyday life: Teachers want pupils out of their class, parents want teachers transferred, husbands want troublesome lovers, people slay their parents to get their inheritance, companies want to remove – at best drive out – competitors, courts impose death sentences and governments want others gone (‘regime change’). Wanting to get rid of something is part of everyone’s DNA. In this respect, the Holocaust is not the suggested special case of human cruelty, but rather a case – albeit a quantitatively special one – of human wanting to get rid of others. Even Caesar had a hundred thousand (!) Usipetians slaughtered, not to mention the genocides in German Southwest Africa or the millions in Armenia in 1915. Hitler clearly stated: ‘The Jew must go!’ The leaders in any civil war want their rival gone and the autocratic rulers in Russia want ‘the Nazi regime in Kiev’.
Wanting to get rid of, exclude or even eliminate is a constant in the human ego, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. It can hardly imagine coexistence or even co-operation with opponents and therefore stands wordlessly and unconsciously before, for example, the Sermon on the Mount.
It is therefore no wonder that the reactions to the Holocaust essentially consist of moral appeals that ‘something like this must never happen again’ and that the Nazis are to blame for everything. It is always supposed to have been Hitler and his Nazis (provocative books such as ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ or ‘We Knew Nothing About It’ are relative exceptions), but our shared ego programme from our mammalian heritage must never be allowed to enter our consciousness.
Hindsight as overcoming evil
Hardly anyone even makes an effort to follow the appeal not to criticise, not to reproach, to avoid all forms of violence, to forgive as a matter of principle and to observe the Golden Rule. Who has ever heard of a priest, rabbi or pastor inviting his congregation to pray for people who have run amok or murdered people with knives? And not as an intercession in the sense of appeasing their aggressiveness, but to see the Son of God in them as in oneself and to understand their misdeeds as being controlled by the human ego programme.
Evil does not come from the assassins or mass murderers, but through them.
If we practised this look behind the surface, the workings of the ego programme would be revealed and with it its vulnerability and vulnerability to the counter-programme, to love – our spiritual soul – which expresses itself in the words: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ As painful as it is, forgiveness also applies to the assassins of Oslo or Christchurch, as well as the assassins with assault rifles, lorries and knives.
When, in the final scene of the world-famous film ‘M – A City in Search of a Murderer’ (1930), the paedophile sex offender exclaims before the tribunal of the assembled persecutors: “I can’t help it! ‘, then – apart from perhaps karmic burdens – this corresponds to the factual situation: for it was not he as a person (’I”) who caused his crimes, but his overpowering instinctual soul, which had led him to rape and kill children and which he could not counter with his higher consciousness potential (spirit soul) because he did not know it at all.
(In contrast, the Prodigal Son, who had also reached the lowest possible point of his existence, had the insight into the alternative of returning to the vertical (‘I will set out …!’; Lk. 15, 17 f.), because he had found his spirit soul potential – ‘to the Father’ – through the earthly catastrophe).
The enthusiasm of large sections of the population for the Nazis after the global economic crisis and generally of the people for the politically authoritarian systems of the present is based on the human ego programme, which expresses itself, among other things, through wanting to get away and the associated economic existential fear. For its counterpart, the Sermon on the Mount (or more precisely: for its implementation), however, it is eminently important to follow the admonition “Know thyself! Because without consciously recognising our own fragility and weakness on the one hand (Jesus: ‘I can do nothing of my own accord, …’), which the ego is all too happy to cover up by showing off and grandstanding, it is not possible, but certainly not without becoming aware of our own divine potential, as Jesus emphasises: ‘You are all gods!’ (John 10:34) and ‘You will accomplish even greater things than I!’ (Joh. 14,11)
It is about understanding the evil fellow human being (boss, fugitive, evil neighbour, etc.) as a de facto defenceless victim of the ego programme that dominates him. This requires recognising the Son of God within oneself and within him. This stalker, rival, competitor, evil neighbour – whatever kind of aggressor – provokes us until we can look him straight in the drooling face and concentrate only on the mildly smiling divine soul within us – and within him. Then the raging surface collapses. That is the decisive factor: In the moment of our looking through, the harmonisation of the problem begins.
‘God does not look at the person’, says the Acts of the Apostles, among others. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry expresses it more poetically in The Little Prince: ‘You can only see well with your heart!’
In a certain sense, the enemy is our saviour. This refers not only to the individual situation, but above all to our entire mission in life. Without the purveyors of evil, the diseases, the attackers, the small-minded, the thieves, the racists, etc., we would always and forever remain stuck in the vale of tears, in the mental stench of fear, anger and hatred. They are a gift from God, a bitter pill that offers us the chance to recognise and realise the truth. Only through them can we heal ourselves if we finally look beyond the surface.
The fact that the devil is now supposed to be the saviour, ‘a part of that power that always wants evil and always creates good’, is unlikely to please the churches. After all, they derive part of their raison d’être from their preemptive defence against this seemingly independent enemy, who they believe creates evil. The search for a scapegoat sends its regards. But Luzi-fer, the bearer of light, actually brings the light.
It is not the people who are evil, but our false understanding of them and the concept of creation. Evil must be separated from the person who transports it, just as the bearer of the message is separated from its sender. The bearer of evil is not evil. In this respect, the despots of this world are not the source of evil, but its symptom – a symptom of our collective view that we consider evil to be evil. The Rolling Stones tried to express this in their song ‘Sympathy for the devil ’.
In this respect, evil is good in the highest sense. Meister Eckhart tries to express this by speaking of the fastest animal to goodness. But for the ego, evil is of course bad because every competitor, every enemy, etc. disrupts its security on the egocentric path of non-charity and self-love alone. That is why it fights with claws and teeth against every ‘weed’.
Evil cannot be destroyed because it is complementary to good in the realm of good and evil, just as there is no coin with only one side. (The ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism hints at this by opposing(?) the good god with an evil one, but at least declaring these two to be twins (!)). However, evil can be overcome by rising above it, i.e. by leaving the material dimension in consciousness. This means that you see through it (without burying your head in the sand) by recognising the divine behind it and not allowing it to enter your consciousness. To use a terminology from Christianity, you simply let the weeds grow next to the wheat without trying to pull them out. Then it dissolves in the individual environment because it is a matter of consciousness within me and not a matter of appearance in front of me.
Racism: an expression of the instinct for self-preservation
For the ego in man, the non-unity of people is his principle, the non-fraternity, the non-equality, the non-integration. It manifests itself in all forms of marginalisation through the use of violence. It starts in the schoolyard and in the classroom. Internationally, the xenophobia factor can be seen, for example, in the expansion of marginalising forces throughout Europe and North America. In its unleashed form, this eventually leads to arson and murder. The forms are quantitatively different. First of all, there is racist language ranging from the Nazi jargon of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik subhuman’ to the current ‘Durchrassung’, ‘Viehzeug’, “Lumpenpack”, ‘Invasoren’, there are banana throws from the fan curve at dark-skinned footballers etc., Then there are swastika smearings, desecration of graves, racial hatred in the USA, not only by the Ku Klux Klan and trigger-happy police officers, but on a daily basis and everywhere, the persecution of homosexuals (even as party doctrine in Eastern Europe), the burning of refugee homes and finally murder. It is the marginalisation and persecution of people out of fear for self-preservation and ignorance of unity with them.
The people who hunt refugees, send hate mails or commit serial murders are unconsciously succumbing to their urge for self-protection (Breivik’s fear of the Islamisation of Europe) and their deep-seated fear of ‘others’ and thus to their own instinct for self-preservation, their ego. They are no different from the rest of us, who are subject to the same subliminal programme attacks. Better frustration tolerance and greater empathy only come about through favourable cultural and social privilege. Hatred of others, our own valorisation through this very devaluation and the desire to get rid of others are not fundamentally absent in everyone else either.
Racism has always permeated the whole of humanity right up to the highest circles, the desire not to share even more so when we look at the extent to which money is hidden, the struggle for advantages at the expense of others, sibling wars in inheritance disputes, fights to the death over children after divorce, etc., bragging, greed not only among bankers and board members, etc. are the order of the day and a reflection of what the ego does in people in everyday life.
If it weren’t for the influence of the soul, our intuition, as a counterpart to our false understanding of the world and ourselves, we would have destroyed ourselves long ago.
If I do not recognise my spiritual unity with the Islamist assassin, the burglar or the hate mail sender, I will always and fundamentally have to live under the threat of them.
The counter-example is symbolically shown in the film ‘Beauty and the Beast’, in which the beauty is not frightened by the repulsive appearance of the monster, builds up love and understanding for his inner being and finally redeems the prince in this monster in the showdown through her kiss and wins her exaltation. ‘Love your enemies, do good [in recognising spiritual unity] to those who hate you ... ’ (Sermon on the Mount)
Everything we associate with a person (different, stupid, dangerous, etc.) comes back to us. If we believe that there are sinful people, then there will be sinful people around us, and then their actions will also affect us, because ‘…what a man sows, that shall he alsoreap.’
The fact that our own fear is triggered by constantly occurring external grievances makes the whole thing difficult and tragic and shows our relative (!) blamelessness through ignorance, as the Buddha emphasised the latter. A first practical step in becoming aware is the mental exercise of developing a certain understanding for the enemies as messengers of ‘evil’, because they are only its messengers, but do not have this quality themselves.
Our whole soul uses the malice of others to show us the need to detach it from the person and to recognise it as a kind of overall psychosis that affects everyone. Only then is it possible to find understanding for evil behaviour. This is the meaning of one of the greatest words ever spoken: ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ But people always personalise. They attribute responsibility to people, although it is not they who bear it, but their hidden control system. However, the ego programme does everything it can to conceal precisely this connection. There can only be redemption if it is uncovered, by ‘dying every day’.
The biological mammalian nature of humans
Human egoism stems from our tribal history: evil, i.e. acting out of self-interest and empathy for the sake of self-preservation, comes from the software of our biological starting point, the (mammalian) animal: defence of territory, puffing up in front of females, flight or attack when threatened, mating instinct, conquest of habitat, hierarchical struggles, ignorance of the greater good, etc. These are all biologically animal hereditary factors. In this respect, evil is ‘natural’ in the original sense of the word, i.e. from biological nature, and spiritual good is therefore not of this biological origin, i.e. ‘un-natural’. This is what prevents us from observing divine principles (e.g. the Golden Rule). Paul logically calls this the ‘natural’ man: ‘But the natural man hears nothing of the Spirit of God; it is foolishness to him.’
The Samaritan love of strangers in the Sermon on the Mount (or the existence of the spiritual soul as intuition) is the only characteristic that sets man apart from the animal. In this respect, setting fire to refugee homes and ostracising ‘others’ are, biologically speaking, our ‘natural’ mammalian impulses, just as territory owners bite away their competitors. Therefore, to be truly human is to act against these animal impulses, against our mammalian nature, which Goethe characterises in Faust as ‘more animal than any animal ’ (Auerbach’s Cellar). Animals do not build concentration camps. Overcoming the exclusive natural instinct for self-preservation is the theme of all wisdom writings. It is not the earthly mammalian nature that is the model for spiritual action (the pointless attempts to ‘make the world a little better’), but the specifically human, our divine consciousness, which we sometimes call ‘conscience’. It is about gagging the egoistic instinct of self-preservation and the unfolding of love that sees through and beyond the level of favouritism.
Free will
For Luther, good and evil are opposing forces fighting for humanity, and this is more or less still true for the churches today:
‘When God sits, he wills and goes where God wills … When Satan sits, he wills and goes where Satan wills.’
(De servo arbitrio, Weimar edition 18, 635)
He thus claims that man is a kind of pawn in the decision between good and evil and has no free will. In doing so, he fails to recognise his decision-making position at the mixing lever, reduces him to a puppet and more or less equates him with an animal, albeit with expanded consciousness, but controlled by his instincts. Although this is largely true in reality, experience shows that people can gradually work towards shedding their animal ego if they take responsibility for themselves. We have the ability to decide to act against our animal nature. ‘We can redeem him who endeavours.’ (Goethe, Faust II, Throat)
Through constant and recurring confrontations with the turning points, i.e. in the daily decision-making situations between self-love and love of one’s neighbour, people become increasingly restrained by the painful boomerangs due to their ego behaviour, but strengthened in their interpersonal reactions. In this way he can learn, actually only through severe life crises, to push back the ego impulse to such an extent that he becomes more and more aware of the power of his soul. Then he can decide more and more clearly whether he wants to accept or reject the soul’s touch. Luther seems to make the question of whether God or Satan sits with man dependent on how the battle between angel and devil for the person in question plays out somewhere above him. At best, he concedes a share to man insofar as he makes the unconditionality of faith the measure of faith. But faith without understanding and confirmation through concrete experiences is blind. That is why all sorts of people believe in all sorts of directions and therefore even bang their heads. They believe in interpretations that can be very different even within denominations. Their god is a god of their own devising.
Luther and the churches in general have an understanding of the devil as an opposing power instead of grasping the common basis of the apparent opposites. Duality, however, contradicts the omnipotence of God. It contradicts the commandment ‘You shall have no… other gods before me’. For God is used here as a synonym for lawgiver, and there can be no other instance of power. The director George Lucas, who does not speak of dark power in his Star Wars films, but of the dark side of the Force, does this well. He expresses not duality (incompatibility) but polarity (unity of apparent opposites), as the ancient Chinese sages did with the east and west slopes of the mountain.
If Mephisto belongs to the ‘servants of the Lord’, then this means that our ego programme also belongs to the unity of opposites, just as the negative pole belongs to the positive pole of the battery. This is why the term ‘lower soul’ is sometimes used for the instinct of self-preservation. Without it, there would be no work of redemption. This is why Jacob Böhme says that ‘everything (!) comes from God’.
In the film ‘Free Will’, the sex offender cannot choose whether to do evil or consciously decide against it. He is portrayed as an executive organ of his instinct, to which he is at the mercy of. So how can the contradiction between free will and instinctual control be resolved? Normally, a sleepwalker follows the self-preservation impulses of the ego for a lifetime. Waking up in a vertical direction is (almost) only possible through the painful impulse after strong blows of fate. It follows that without the impulse of crises, free will hardly ever develops.
In the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26), Jesus shows that a person can very well make independent decisions regarding the reorientation towards the spiritual life: At first he hesitates whether to flee or take the cup. In doing so, he is not forced or threatened by his inner voice (‘the Father in me’) to follow it. In this case, he has made a conscious decision to follow it.
An earthly parallel to freedom of choice is the sovereignty of voters in modern democracies, where the people exercise their power by leaving it to their representatives.
However, it seems clear that the final decision as to whether or how far a knocker is opened is not in the hands of man. There are enough wise statements to say that the God within reserves this for himself. But decisions to ‘endeavour’ are in almost (cf. Joan of Arc) every case a prerequisite for approaching the great goal, perhaps not only within a single incarnation. The experiences of life crises should and can lead to treading the steep and rugged path, the spiritually vertical path.
In contrast to Luther’s interpretation of Satan, Homer describes evil as the brother of the prince of the gods, as the god (!) of the sea (Homer sees the sea as a symbol of earthly life with its changing winds, lulls, storms and unpredictability. In fairy tales it is often the forest). Athena, symbol of the divine spirit soul in man, is responsible for the accompaniment and guidance in spiritual life and Poseidon plays the role of the examiner – similar to Mephisto – who organises the testing situations. Homer clearly emphasises the two divine poles (‘plus’ and ‘minus’) of the spiritual path in their only apparent duality. For it is Poseidon who brings about Odysseus’ enlightenment by experiencing and surviving the most terrible dangers into which he leads the hero. Here, evil is always part of the concept of creation, always the motor of the process of redemption from suffering.
Empirically speaking, most people have little chance of consciously and freely shaking off the ego because the universal ego is still overpoweringly present. But with today’s development of knowledge and spirituality, it is increasingly possible to break out of it.
The fact that the conditioning by the instinct of self-preservation is indeed largely present does not mean that we have to remain in the animal programme. There are enough examples of people who work selflessly and sacrificially for others, often at the risk of their lives: doctors without borders, refugee aid workers, whistleblowers who stick their necks out, development workers in war zones, etc., albeit without a spiritual connection. Although we normally act automatically in self-preservation mode, we can learn to prepare ourselves for two-way communication with our soul. We practise being aware of our spiritual nature, our soul potential, our true identity. The result is symbolically represented by Job, among others, who only finds redemption and enlightenment through direct dialogue with his higher self, i.e. through spiritual awareness (the ‘kingdom of God’).
I am the master of my fate (Henley)
Evil prepares the way for absolute good. In fact, only evil – through the pressure of suffering – leads to the necessary change of consciousness, i.e. to ‘enemy’ love (see chapter 17), which is nothing other than the realisation of the same divine identity in the other person. And forgiveness means cleansing one’s own consciousness of negative elements through understanding (‘…do not know what they are doing’) and recognising unity with the ‘beast.’ Purification means understanding something perceived as evil (by the ego) as actually a positive impulse towards higher development. Shakespeare’s Hamlet cannot be repeated often enough: “Nothing is neither good nor evil in itself. It is thinking that makes it so.”
Jesus makes this clear through the story of the adulteress by not dividing her behaviour into good or bad. He avoids personification, recognises her behaviour as instinctual control and does not attribute it to her person. He explains her adultery as a learning situation. After her realisation (repentance), the mistake should lead to a higher development towards the divine good, in which there is nothing humanly good and nothing humanly bad. This decisive turn in thinking leads to liberation from our conditions of lack, worry, anger and fear. If we no longer think evil about asylum centres, refugees, illness, job security, intrigues against us, bankruptcies, relationship failures, etc., there can no longer be any evil around us.
We ourselves are the legislator, the creator of our lives, so to speak, and sit at the switch lever between forgiveness and revenge. The ‘evil’ around us wants to make us believe that there is evil outside of our being. Evil does indeed occur outside of our being, but when it hits us, it is only the result or consequence of our own state of consciousness, i.e. that we interpret it as such and do not question it. It can therefore be said that the person who reacts is making judgements and thus dividing into good and evil. Then a further increase in suffering is an indicator of the hardening of the way of life that ‘my will be done’ instead of ‘your will be done’. Evil is not around us, but within us as a non-binding offer. It only exists because of our separation from our soul. It is what we make of it. In this respect, evil in the world is something conditional. If evil disappears in us, it disappears around us. It can only exist if and as long as we are aware of evil as such. In this context, ‘evil’ is already to be understood as non-spiritual: why do mothers die in childbirth, why do people die in a bus, car, train or aeroplane accident despite leading a perfect life? (John 15:6) This would hardly happen to them if they were reconnected to the power of their soul. That is why the Nazarene says that the one who remains without spiritual awareness ‘…is thrown away and withers.’ Suffering means denying what is and suppressing higher guidance. The affirmation of all that is present (see Hakuin, chapter 20) means allowing our soul power and the daily death of the ego and suffering.
If we look beyond the evil in you and in me, the soul asserts itself and the part of evil disappears. In this respect, the state of my environment gives me information about the state of my consciousness. Each of my evil experiences is nothing other than an element of consciousness from my own thinking. There is as much evil in my environment as there is evil in my consciousness. A person with abundance consciousness is protected, fear-free and safe even in prison and in all bad situations.
When an injustice is suffered, every person affected thinks that others have done this to them and recoils. In reality, however, it is the receipt for the injustice that he does to everyone else every day by at least seeing him as a deficient person and not as the Son of God. Above all, he does this to himself. The state of our world is an effect of the state of our individual and collective consciousness in its composition of good and evil. In this respect, it is basically pointless to fight against external evil as long as we do not primarily deal with the false or material parts of our own consciousness. What we encounter on the outside is always the harvest of a sowing of consciousness. It always depends on what we feed it with. Only thinking as a categorisation into good and evil creates it.
‘It is not the things that worry us, but the ideas (!) we have about things.’ (
Epictetus: Handbook 5, Discourses 2)
Anyone who suffers – whether from high blood pressure, abuse trauma, unemployment, whatever – makes the following mistake: they focus on the suffering instead of on their divine identity as the Son of God; they throw themselves into fighting the problem instead of the problem solver. He does not want to go inwards and wait for the clues to the solution. The erroneous belief that evil can be uprooted like the weeds that always grow right next to the wheat and should then no longer be there dominates people’s thinking. Understanding is made more difficult by the fact that uprooting often seems to work for a while. What is even more blinding is the consistent overlooking of the fact that it does not work after all and that the boomerang strikes back with multiplied force. Classic examples on a global level are the outcome of the Vietnam War for the Americans, the Afghanistan War for the Soviets, the Iraq War for the Americans and so on. In everyday life, a bitter war over the children in a divorce poisons one’s own psychological well-being for a lifetime. Hatred of refugees and the production of poison in shitstorms corrupts our own capacity for joy and love.
Suffering is there to give us the impulse to ask ourselves why suffering exists and how we can fundamentally free ourselves from suffering and evil. Evil has always existed, and there have always been people who have shown the way out, from Buddha to Gandhi and Mandela. ‘Do not resist evil.’ And that never consisted of blind resistance or blind revenge.
Subdue the earth
Spiritual effectiveness only exists where it is consciously recognised. In the wars in Syria, eastern Ukraine, during the expulsions in Myanmar, in the refugee boats, etc., any number of people could have held up a sign saying ‘God, where are you?’: There was no God efficacy there. There is as much God at work in our surroundings as there is God in our consciousness: so mostly nothing. There was no God during the rampage because there was no God in the consciousness of those involved. A soldier with spiritual awareness would not have come to the front line to die in the first place due to providence.
Two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha taught how to overcome misery in his ‘Four Noble Truths’. Siddhartha first recognises that human life is inherently painful. The Buddha, who blames ignorance for suffering, goes on to clearly state that suffering, evil, evil, can be overcome and shows the way, the so-called Eightfold Path, which is similar in many ways to the principles of other religious systems.
A few centuries later, the Greek philosopher Plotinus repeated that it is possible to escape from evil. Both emphasise that we achieve what we anchor in our consciousness: that is why there are so many successful criminals and just as many unsuccessful saints or geniuses. It all depends on the orientation: Deficiency or abundance consciousness. However, this is not meant horizontally as in the school of thought of ‘positive thinking’, i.e. human evil or human good, but vertically, i.e. earthly (good and evil) or spiritual (absolutely good). The widespread ‘order from the universe’ is also an expression of an awareness of lack and is therefore counterproductive, not immediately, but always in the end.
How much imperfection there is in our lives depends on our thought patterns and judgements. If we think materially, good and bad things come our way. If we think spiritually – meaning the realisation of the divinity within us – both (humanly) good and (humanly) evil leave our lives. If we succeed in finding meaning in everything, even if it is uncomfortable, unpleasant, devastating, horrific, etc., then everything in our lives will become more harmonious and the negative will disappear because it fades from our consciousness. Therefore, spiritual living is not initially a fight against people or conditions, but primarily against the negative thought attacks and thought patterns in one’s own consciousness that lead to negativity – such as the unrestricted consumption of crime films on TV. If I see the breakdown of my marriage, the burglary, my slipped disc, my permanent Hartz 4 as a lack instead of a wake-up call and see refugees as the cause of lack and evil, I will reap exactly what I have sown, namely lack. It’s a spiral, because reaping means that you get back several times what you sowed.
We should know where it leads if we individually and above all collectively attribute the awareness of lack to external circumstances and make scapegoats responsible: ‘Jewish parasite’, ‘Bolshevik subhuman’. The sixty million dead and a country in ruins after the Second World War speak for themselves. Today it’s ‘Muslim invaders’, ‘Chinese viruses’, etc.
When I fall seriously ill, I have the choice of either opposing it in my consciousness or overcoming myself to ‘love’ the illness: this does not mean jumping for joy, but understanding it as a wake-up call and trustingly placing myself in the care of my soul: ‘YOUR will be done!’ Then the harmonisation begins immediately and I am guided wisely along the right paths. I find out if, when and to whom I turn and the healing then comes to me. We have to carry out this self-purification, pull the lever, because otherwise it will always go on like this.