A man stands in a schoolyard covered with numerous lanterns, bouquets of flowers, and condolence cards, holding a sign. Opposite the man are dozens of photographers with their cameras pointed at him: here is an excerpt.
This is the situation after a shooting rampage in which 15 students and teachers were killed. The sign reads:
GOD, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ?
Whenever terrible things happen, countless people ask themselves where God was during the incident and why he allowed it to happen.
This cry is as old as humanity itself:
“Either God wants to eliminate evil and cannot, in which case he is weak,
or he can and does not want to, in which case he is resentful…
Or he does not want to and cannot, then he is weak, …
Or he wants to and can, …:
Where then do evils come from, and why does he not take them away?”
(Lactantius?, Epicurus?)
Albert Camus puts it more succinctly:
“Either God is good, then he is not omnipotent;
or he is omnipotent, then he is not good.”
(The Plague)
Many other voices join in this chorus: Luther, Leibniz, Dostoevsky (“The Brothers Karamazov”), Bonhoeffer, and others. They grappled with the provocative question of whether God’s postulated omnipotence actually exists, given that for millennia he has apparently been unable to cope with the suffering and * evil that occur everywhere.
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Evil: Negative things caused by humans.
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 realm of omnipotence. Or they ask: If there is a God, why do humans—who are his creation—have no security and no peace?
“God, where were you?” is an understanding of creation that contains the unconscious claim that our world must be a kind of paradise in which people live in peace, friendship, and boundless provision as its crown, because the Creator would provide his children with the best possible. What is overlooked here – to stay within the framework of this creation story – is that these very children have turned their backs on the Creator’s will out of egocentricity, i.e., misunderstood self-preservation, as the parable of the Prodigal Son shows. Only through the pressure of misery in its completely hopeless form does one or the other of the “prodigal sons” initially succeed in freeing themselves from all evil; however, this is under certain conditions, such as Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:44), or the 41st surah of the Koran in verse 34.
But Judaism (Leviticus 19, verses 18 and 34), Hinduism (Bhagavad Gita 13, verse 28) and 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 Bahá’ís, the Druze, or the Sufis.
But Camus, with his hidden accusation of why God does not seem to save us, cannot understand that God, on the contrary, undertakes every day to lead every human being on the path to liberation from ego-induced suffering. However, this does not only apply to Camus, but to almost all other human beings. The explanation for this blindness is provided by all wisdom texts.
Humans are the only living beings that can evolve, unlike animals. As far as animals are concerned, the life of a steppe lion, for example, consists of earning a living (hunting), eating, resting, reproducing, conquering or defending territory, and biting away competition. Although they can adapt to other environmental conditions to a limited extent through evolution, they are not capable of relocating to Arctic habitats or those of the rainforest. They do not have the possibility of biological further development, not to mention higher development in an ethical or religious sense. The meaning of their existence is their existence.
Humans, on the other hand, not only have the potential for technological, socio-ethical, or legislative development on a horizontal, earthly level, but also have the possibility of higher development beyond these material paths of progress. In this respect, they can grapple with questions of personal freedom, morality, and religion (e.g., likeness), as well as the meaning of life in general.
However, anyone who considers the state of human consciousness from the Neanderthals through antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day is likely to see less of God’s children and more of an excess of ego-related anger, aggression, fear, mistrust, worry, and violence, see Cain and Abel. Thus, despite a few counterexamples, humans are still unconsciously subject to the almost unrestricted control of the self-preservation instinct and the cruelty associated with it. For them, the meaning of their existence is also only their existence and its maintenance.
Hardly anyone realizes that this is precisely what triggers evil. The unconscious instinct for self-preservation triggers marital crises, causes betrayal, fraud, theft, robbery, and murder, is the reason for competitive pressure in economic life, and leads to territorial and ideological wars worldwide with atomic bombs and extermination camps, as well as to widespread ignorance of the obvious climate catastrophe.
And despite the enormous 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 for the forces of destruction:
Since evil exists, it is first and foremost a component of creation of some kind. Goethe expresses this in the “Prologue in Heaven” (Faust I) by having Mephisto, a personalized devil figure, appear as an integral part of the “servants of the Lord,” as a servant of God. In the great human drama of the “Odyssey,” the power of evil even appears as the brother of the father of the gods.
Furthermore, an understanding of evil as an independent counterforce (Zarathustra, Luther) is incompatible with the understanding of omnipotence. Accordingly, director George Lucas does not have his characters in Star Wars speak of a dark power, but always only of the “dark side of the Force.” Those who share the understanding of creative omnipotence also understand Jakob Böhme:
“…because everything comes from God, evil must also come from God.”
(Aurora, chap. 2,36).
For there is neither one side of a coin nor a battery without a negative pole. A battery without a negative pole cannot exist: it is only through the existence and interaction of both poles that something can exist at all and have a function. The apparent contradiction consists of two different surface phenomena, such as the thumb and index finger, whose common condition of existence, however, is the shared blood flow, without which these fingers could not exist at all. The two different phenomena are in reality 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 on the level of appearance, which in reality is a polarity, i.e., an apparent contradiction like that of hot and cold, but which is mutually dependent and, in this respect, although opposite, makes existence possible in the first place. However, people only try to avoid evil or, like their illnesses, to fight it – as if one wanted to live in a world with only a South Pole and no North Pole. They avoid wanting to understand the meaning and function of being ill (cf. chapter 14). It is not a matter of enduring it unquestioningly, but of understanding it as a message to embark on the path to higher development and thereby, and only thereby, to be able to eliminate it fundamentally.
For example, if a patient has smoker’s leg, i.e., arterial occlusion with tissue decomposition, he will do everything he can to get rid of it. When asked why, he will “explain” it himself with his smoking (1) and medicine may add deeper psychological complexes (Wikipedia: 4.5 million people in Germany), such as discrimination and consequent compensation (Wikipedia) (2). But then the understanding of causes ends, even though it is only just beginning: Because the obvious question about the cause of the only secondary cause of the complexes remains unanswered:
Because it remains unclear that behind this lies self-preservation (3) (see chapter 1) and, even deeper, that the infinite torments have no other goal (4) than to recognize these self-preservation impulses as information for liberation from them.
For liberation, it is necessary to largely replace the absolutely dominant life program of self-preservation—apart from a minimum amount—with the realization of its opposite, namely, the preservation of all. People do not know how to embark on this only possible path of spiritual development—and liberation from suffering—based on their likeness through their spirit soul.
However, the great wisdom writings convey this very clearly: the Old Testament describes human beings as created in the image of God. Jesus puts it this way: “You are all gods!”, meaning that you have a divine core (inner voice, intuition, gut feeling, etc.) and also: “You will accomplish even greater works than I have done” (John 14:12). But people do not know this and certainly do not follow it. This is by no means heard from the pulpit in church, and since ancient times and the Middle Ages, churches have done the exact opposite from the very beginning: they have drummed inferiority into believers and enforced this with their burning at the stake. They did this for reasons of maintaining power and, of course, ultimately also for their own self-preservation. Nowadays, they fundamentally circumvent, conceal, and avoid this topic. Otherwise, the believers they have left would also run away:
Their “fearful adaptation to worldly values” and their character as “interchangeable institutions of public welfare,” which have “submitted” to the rationalism of the age, resemble “clubs to which one pays dues.” As fighters for a better world, churches should have a voice, but they are “… only one of many and one that is heard less and less.” Unlike the Ethics Commission, they do not have “exquisite answers” and have forgotten that, as part of this world, “their essence lies in what is opposed to this world.” (All: DIE ZEIT 49/2020, p. 62)
Without the lashes of the valley of tears, there can be no path to peace, happiness, consistent integrity, and well-being, because the path to freedom from suffering — as all religions show — can only be achieved through the recognition of one’s own divine likeness — and consequently also that of all (!) other human beings, no matter how cemented their spirit soul — such as their conscience — may be.
Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, and Lao Tzu name the two conditions for freedom from suffering. … First, 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 involves becoming aware of the image of God in the form of the “higher” spirit soul within oneself (intuition, gut feeling, first thought, “pangs of conscience,” “guardian angel,” etc.).
Puccini, for example, summed up this connection as follows: “I don’t compose. I just write down what my soul tells me.”
Everyone who has begun to listen to their gut feeling, then learned to consciously wait for it, then learned to consciously ask for it, then to give thanks for its very slowly emerging presence, and finally to enter more and more into a dialogue, is familiar with this. This has little to do with the common concept of prayer, because its traditional 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 eternal suffering in one’s own life, it is essential to recognize it as an instrument of the Creator, to recognize it as an agonizing impulse to turn away from the egocentric program of exclusive self-preservation. For Homo sapiens has never abandoned its animal heritage and, like a pride of lions, still sees the meaning of its existence in existence itself.
That is why the wisdom teachings arose, to show meaningfulness and the path to higher development and how it can be experienced. Without them, we would not know why we are in such a state of suffering, why we exist, and what our destiny is. All this can only be experienced through the senses, and for that there must be polar opposites. That is why evil, suffering, and hardship exist, to enable higher development (biblically: “back to the Father’s farm”):
“What we call evil is only the other side of good, which is so necessary for its existence and belongs to the whole…”
(Goethe: Writings on Art Theory: On Shakespeare Day)
This is shown very centrally in Christian wisdom in the parable of the prodigal son: the suffering of the material world appears in the form of his impoverishment with his belly landing in the pig herd. This fall of the Son of God exists for the purpose of finding the vertical way out through the material fall to the pig herd. His material misfortune is in reality the last possible kick of fate to find the cause of the causes of this suffering, instead of suppressing it, fighting it, getting rid of it. Modern medicine’s suppression of symptoms is a classic example of this.
People always seek the way out of bankruptcy and other financial collapses horizontally in alcohol, fraud, escape, etc. They fight tooth and nail against injustice, penalty notices, illness, or competitors, instead of understanding these evils as lessons, achieving liberation from them by moving from the horizontal to the vertical level.
They search and search and cannot find a way out because they remain on the physical plane and do not know (or do not want to know) that the way out can only be found in the vertical plane. The Buddha calls attachment to a purely material view of the world “clinging.” He recognizes that it is the sole cause of the constitutive suffering in our world.
Suffering is there to be ended. It is the only means to do so, because the past millennia have shown all too clearly that persuasion—in the form of wisdom writings—has not even begun to lead to freedom from suffering. Only because suffering can raise our consciousness from the material level to the spiritual level, virtually forcing us to do so, do some of us realize that there is no other way out.
Suffering is a manifestation of the unified creation. It is designed to set us on the path to liberation—almost to compel us—and to lead us 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 is meant to lead to the fulfillment of meaning by offering people the opportunity to leave the realm of opposites of good and evil in 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 led to this by their own most massive suffering and the blocking of all earthly possibilities. This can also be clearly seen in the example of Jesus, if one recognizes his physical death as a symbol with a dual function: on the one hand, psychologically for the death of the human self-preservation instinct (ego) and, at the same time, for continued life on a spiritual level—see the parable of the Prodigal Son.
“The devil is only there … to make us understand 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 can no longer tolerate his ego-centered behavior. For him, his world falls apart, not only emotionally, but also in terms of his livelihood. Half of the family income disappears, but the expenses for raising children, rent, etc. are not halved. Emotionally, he is faced with the ruins of his previous married life, and financially, he is faced with ruin. For him, this is a catastrophe, and thus the whole affair is “evil” for him. It is evil par excellence. Yet this evil is by no means as evil as it appears to him. For it is only through this event that he can search for the cause of the crisis, for his own part in the disaster. Without the drama of separation, he would never have thought to recognize his own selfish behavior. For the ego always seeks to blame everyone else, and the (male) ego loves to wallow in its own suffering. The opportunity for self-reflection is there, which did not exist before. That is the meaning of evil. “War is the father of all things,” Heraclitus once said. This statement can be meaningfully generalized: Every crisis is potentially the father of all things. An ancient Roman proverb says: “Through hardship to the stars” (Per aspera ad astra). Peace between people is still the product of war.
If this man were to actually find his own share, he would have taken a step toward recognizing and overcoming the ego part in him, even if this only took place on the horizontal, i.e., material level at first. Of course, there could have been less violent moments to avoid disaster if, for example, he had learned during his years of marriage to find and develop the connection to his intuition, to spiritual guidance, and thus to harmonize his relationship. But people always want to get rid of their evils, not the controls (from “below”) that created these evils.
It is characteristic of human ego behavior to want to pick the raisins out of life and avoid unpleasantness, even though this is precisely the painful but 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 under evil. But those who have recognized this have put an end to pain and suffering.
“Though ten thousand fall at your right hand, it will not come near you. … No evil will befall you, and no plague will come near your dwelling.” (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 follows the path of freeing themselves from the “attachments” of the self-preservation instinct.
However, since spiritual self-criticism is not an issue for everyday people, and since the Gospel, the Old Testament, 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 opposites to move the outer human being to wake up, to reflect, and to repent. Therefore, as absurd and contradictory as it may sound, evil serves good (not human good, but 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, neighborly help, etc., can be helpful on an individual level in developing empathy, but it is usually very limited because it makes distinctions (“preference”: one’s own children – other children, perhaps even those with a different skin color). Furthermore, they are meaningless in terms of finding a way out of suffering as long as there is no awareness that these good deeds are not one’s own personal qualities, but emanate from the soul, which deserves thanks for them: “Do you think God cares if you are righteous? What does it help him if your ways are righteous?” (Job 22). As long as human goodness remains on a purely human level—that is, without spiritual orientation (self-knowledge of one’s own divine identity)—and the person considers themselves to be the savior in question, it has no significance for liberation from the vale of tears. For this goodness has no understanding of indifference, that is, of the unity of all being, including that of ordinary 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 thus filled with life. Those who “love” strangers (see chapter 17 for more on this highly ambiguous term) will be loved in return by them and by everyone else. One “only” has to try it. However, it cannot be a matter of loving strangers in the conventional sense in order to be loved in return. Rather, the basis of true harmony in life is and always will be the recognition of the Son of God in me (!) and in them. Everyday life then shows that and how these crucial components become effective for freedom from suffering. This clear connection cannot be illustrated more simply than by the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11 ff.), which describes the path of human redemption:
1) The purely spiritual human being (Son of God) leaves his purely spiritual home, where there is no evil. However, he takes his “inheritance” with him, that is, his inner voice, regardless of whether it is developed or buried. He then makes his appearance in the material world as Homo sapiens (Second Creation Story).
2) His life on the material plane proceeds in such a way that he degenerates (with increasing destruction of his material and spiritual foundations) and sinks so low that it is impossible to sink any lower. He has to eat food waste intended for pigs (“spent grain”: 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, and to do so with humility (crucifixion of the ego). He therefore successfully returns to the spiritual level (“to the Father”).
But despite the Golden Rule, despite the Bible, the 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 to remain in the realm of good and evil. They do not know that although their will is indeed free, it is dominated by reason and emotion; and reason and emotion are in turn dominated by the instinct for self-preservation (see chapter 1). That is why humans believe they are recipe makers. But they are not: they are recipe users. Their free will consists only of being able to choose between one of the two recipes. It is always a choice between the horizontal and vertical paths. (The words of the New Testament are those of the “narrow gate” and the “broad way to destruction.” However, his freedom of choice is not truly free as long as he believes that he can make free decisions based on his intellectual powers without being influenced; for these are based, unrecognized, almost exclusively on his self-preservation. Through his way of life, Jesus tried to refute and overcome this instinctive control through selflessness. But this is precisely what people have never recognized.
Their intellect is only seemingly their control, but merely a tool that functions unconditionally for both controls — either material or spiritual. This means that it either realizes the one from “above,” i.e., indiscriminate love (“as I have loved you”; John 13:34 and 15:12) or for the one from “below,” i.e., the self-preservation instinct. Since over 99% of people largely follow the latter instinct, it is no wonder that they continue to unconditionally follow the pattern of Cain and Abel. The fact that our interactions with one another have become more cultivated and refined over the millennia and centuries—primarily due to improved supplies—is a purely quantitative aspect; egocentricity as such has remained in the consciousness of Neanderthals, and such counterexamples of devotion to others, even to the point of death if necessary, are exceptions.
The instinct for self-preservation very successfully suggests (see Goethe’s Faust I) that devotion, sacrifice, service, and selfless sharing endanger self-preservation, although, on the contrary, they are the only way to true self-preservation and ensure it.
The animalistic, disastrous, one-sided program of egocentricity is the source of all evil and suffering in the world. For humans see (intellectually) the world only in material terms. This also applies to those who are religious. For they draw no conclusions from this, fundamentally forgiving everything, not retaliating, and not resisting evil. This applies in a very special way and even more so to “loving” one’s enemies. This choice of words is more than misleading, because love for one’s enemies has nothing to do with the kind of love that people understand (eros and philia; see chapter 17), but is to be understood exclusively in a spiritual sense (agape). The Bible contains many statements to this effect, such as “God does not look at the person” or “love as I have loved you”, i.e. without distinction, i.e. purely spiritually. It is the conscious view of one’s own likeness and then of that of the other person, through the person, so to speak, as the ‘beauty’ does in relation to the “monster.”
The mind—dominated by self-preservation and too little by “conscience”—does everything it can to realize the internal ego program. The life’s work of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, and all the other great teachers of humanity has so far done virtually nothing to change this in people. The “lower” program has so far more than successfully prevented the teachings of the founders of religions from even having the slightest chance of trying out the “higher” program at least once.
Yet the connection is obvious: if my central aspiration, and that of everyone else, is to care for the well-being of the whole within the scope of my possibilities and under my intuitive guidance, then this will manifest itself, among other things, in everyone else also caring primarily for the same whole, so that my concern for my own well-being is automatically reduced to a minimum. As absurdly improbable as this may seem for the whole of humanity, it is brutally realistic for the individual. However, unconditional devotion does not mean preferential love, as is particularly common among mothers. (See chapters 1 and 17)
Through their consciousness, i.e., by allowing the respective influences from above or below to pass through, human beings are the architects of the conditions in the world. Instead of filling it with egocentricity, jealousy, envy, and hatred through their personal views on religion, politics, coexistence, 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., unlimited forgiveness and love of one’s enemies (see chapter 17), they would be immediately freed from suffering.
Those who consider evil to be evil cause even more evil because they perpetuate its existence. But those who refrain from making superficial judgments about everything that happens, who understand their suffering as a kick in the teeth for ignorance and carelessness (except for their ego) and who, in this respect, step off the hamster wheel of dividing things into good and bad, are no longer slaves to it. This is the meaning of Hermann Hesse’s Chinese parable (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 good or evil in itself. It is thinking that makes it so.”
(William Shakespeare: Hamlet. II, 2)
If I enter the realm of consciousness of only good, i.e., work against ignorance, as Buddha recommended, then only good (e.g., not applying the “eye for an eye” principle) gradually supplants evil. Paul calls it “daily dying,” i.e., that of 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 then proceeds without luxury and without want, without ego amusement and without worry, a life only in serene and devoted joy. It is a level of consciousness that no longer contains anything evil or painful, because it does not allow anything of the sort in and understands all “evil” as evil only for the ego and as an impulse for growth: for, as we have said, we are here to develop ourselves higher and not simply to live out our lives. Animals do not know such maturation: higher development from the realm of good and, above all, evil is not possible for them; this is the privilege of humans and the only difference between them and animals.
The external product of becoming is a concrete life without suffering, already in the here and now. We then find ourselves constantly in the eye of the hurricane, wherever it may move, because evil cannot prevail in the present state of spiritual consciousness. In this respect, evil is not unconditional, but a consequence of ignorance and the purely material consciousness that results from it.
The accusation mentioned at the beginning, how God could allow some terrible event to happen, shows a complete lack of understanding of the higher spiritual connections. One might just as well accuse an architect of allowing a stoned couple to fight in the house he built.
The question of why human beings, who are supposed to be children of God, must suffer has already been answered by Shakespeare when he says that nothing (!) in the world is evil. For suffering is the only – albeit agonizing, but redemptive – “good” impulse that is capable of freeing people from their total self-centeredness in the sense of their survival program and finding the only way out of this evil: it is that of loving one’s neighbor, one’s enemy, and everyone. Without these harsh broadsides of pain and torment, people would not take a single step away from their egocentric and – it can easily be said – animalistic way of life. They could have had comprehensive care and security long ago, but only on the condition that they see through evil as an instrument for higher development. It is “part of that power which always wants evil and always creates good.”
As 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 orient themselves exclusively to the conditions of the material world and thus prevent them from seeking God; for only in this way will they fall into infinite suffering, because only in this way will they take the only way out that exists, the genuine search for God, the turning inward toward intuition. Had Mephisto allowed Doctor Faust to continue in his way of seeking God, Faust would have continued to seek externally in the church or elsewhere and not within himself, with the catastrophic consequences of all the religious paths that people have taken over the past three thousand years and continue to take today. They did and continue to do so without a hint of understanding for the only way out, which Christianity names with the admonition “Love your enemies!” “Bless those who curse you!” “Do good to those who hate you!” (Matthew 5:44) and which the sages of all other cultures and religions have pointed out:
Judaism: “If a stranger stays with you, you shall not oppress him!”
Leviticus, 33
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him bread!” Prov. 25:21
Islam: “Repel evil with what is better. Then the one with whom you
live in enmity will be like a close friend and helper!”
Koran, Sura 41:34
Hinduism: “He who understands the spirit of life as that which dwells in all things
will not revile his self in the other self!”
Bhagavad Gita: XIII. Song, Verse 28
Taoism: “The heart of the wise beats in all. Because his nature breathes goodness, he
is equally kind to the good and the bad.”
Tao Te Ching No. 49
Buddhism: “Enmity is never ended in this world by enmity;
Through notbeing hostile, enmity ceases; that is the way of things.”
Dhammapada I, Verse 5.
Anyone who considers the global state of political power relations, peoples, church organizations, and the friend-foe consciousness of individual human beings will see that they do not want to see the path shown by this and other religious founders (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 remained unchanged over the past two and a half millennia, despite the wisdom teachers of all peoples and all centuries—such as Meister Eckhart, Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, Mong-Dsi, Plotinus, Rumi, Shankara, Thich Nhat Hanh, Angelus Silesius, Ramakrishna, and many others—have shown that the shift in consciousness from the material to the spiritual realm has remained limited to exceptions and is even declining. The tendencies of “above all” or “first” show that the global pendulum is not moving toward integration, but in the opposite direction, toward disintegration: How many world wars, civil wars, concentration camps, and atomic bombings do we still need to make the transition from a material to a spiritual perspective?
From ancient times to the present, it has been Mephisto’s task to distract us from what is real and essential within us and to entangle us in such a way that we limit ourselves to the visible and, even then, 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 as in Faust I, the “Lord” and “Mephisto” are apparent opponents, so too in the Odyssey the two gods Athena and Poseidon are apparent opponents, but together they organize 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 succumbs to the temptations of matter.
“In every work, even in evil ones, … God’s glory is revealed and shines forth.”
(Meister Eckhart: No. 4 of 28 articles that were naturally condemned in the papal bull “in agro dominico”).
Buddha was the first to uncover the principle of finding liberation from suffering through the experience of suffering and the application of the means to avoid it (“The Noble Eightfold Path”) from the consciousness of human good/evil.
According to its ancient Greek origin, the ‘devil’ is the “diabolos,” the “divider,” who wants to separate what is in truth a unity, such as that of human beings. The only evil in the world is the exclusively non-spiritual, stubbornly materialistic understanding of the world, which divides it into good and evil, fails to recognize the unity of human beings, like the fingers of a hand, and thus 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 program also serves, through the pressure of suffering, to find a return to the ideal state of unity with the “enemy.” Can one imagine a field chaplain in Ukraine recommending that soldiers also pray for the Russian soldiers – and vice versa? But these Christian clergymen do not look behind the scenes, as they have almost never done. However, those who succeed in gaining insight (see Beauty and the Beast or Matrix I in the final battle in the subway) no longer have any enemies.
We have lost the direct line to divine guidance within ourselves and are not concerned with restoring it. Thus, suffering in the world, every illness, every misfortune, every torment is nothing more than a difference between the consciousness of oneself as a material person and that of 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 call to return, 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 why Meister Eckhart says that suffering leads to perfection.
All those who have dared to consciously follow this path know that this Edenic state is largely achievable in this earthly life. The first legendary figures who demonstrated the tremendous arc of development from existential low point to spiritual and material fulfillment were Gilgamesh and Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.
Modern figures 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, K. O. Schmidt, Joel Goldsmith, Neale D. Walsch, Eckhart Tolle, as well as many unnamed individuals who, unnoticed by the general public, blessedly fulfill their spiritual missions as seers, healers, trainers, or teachers. In everyone’s immediate or wider environment, there are such awakened individuals who, with their areas of focus, cover one or more aspects of spiritual mission.
When Jakob Böhme recognizes that “all things come from God” and thus also the possibility of evil and suffering, this does not mean, as already stated, that God has anything to do with the real evil in the world. He endowed humans with free will through the so-called Fall (Gen. 3), thereby giving them at least the principle of freedom of choice between good and evil in a world of opposites. One can indeed decide to overcome ignorance about the cause of the vale of tears 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 abundance or superfluity, but has nothing to do with wealth and luxury. The price that must be paid for this consists of many very painful trials, including constant forgiveness.
This kind of love for one’s neighbor is anything but fair-weather love exclusively for partners, friends, and children, the “preferential love” as Leo Tolstoy puts it in The Kreutzer Sonata (chap. 2). Rather, it is love for everything and, above all, love for strangers, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows. It is indiscriminate “love,” in reality knowledge, that leads to the unity of all being.
In summary, evil, the “devil,” the bad, suffering, is anything but evil, even though it torments us so terribly: it is the divine instrument that wants to lift us out of the horizontal consciousness of material life and bring us into the spiritual vertical.
For only this turnaround, as shown in the parable of the Prodigal Son, leads us to the fulfillment 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 has come up with the idea of not striking back, but of recognizing their inner god ( “You are all gods!”), to offer no resistance to evil (“Do not resist evil!”), to forgive everyone for everything (“Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”) and to love one’s enemies (“Love your enemies!”), there is this infinite suffering in our world.
And even this terrible quantum (world wars with 75 million victims, the Holocaust, and all kinds of other genocides, such as those of the indigenous peoples of North America, the Armenians, the Tutsis, the Bosnians in Srebrenica, in Sudan, in South Sudan, and the wars in Palestine/ Israel, the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, etc.) does not yet lead people, despite this earthly hopelessness, to take the outstretched hand of the only alternative that all (!) wisdom writings urge: love your God within you, your inner voice, the “Father within you,” with all your thoughts, and then your neighbor—even your enemy—as yourself.
That is why God does not just show us this spiritual path; rather, he obviously feels compelled to whip us there. For not even the great role models such as Moses, Zarathustra, Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed, and many “lesser” prophets such as those of the Sikhs, the Bahai, the Manicheans, the Mormons, and others have brought humanity to effect its return, that of the Prodigal Son.
In a certain sense, however, evil is always truly evil, namely for the ego. Everything that it causes in terms of injustice, destruction, and annihilation returns to it like a boomerang and serves to destroy its egotism, not only that of the countless evildoers and bigwigs from corrupt politics, the auto industry, and MeToo show business across the globe, but also that of the general cheeky, mean little ego in everyone.
Even if the following exception is expressed exclusively on a purely material level, it illustrates 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 summed up as follows: every accident, every act of violence, and every illness is a message: It wants to tell the person(s) affected very emphatically that lasting liberation is only possible with a radical change of course: it is about an elevation from the level of consciousness of the material perspective to the spiritual one. This consists of spiritual self-knowledge (“You are the light of the world”; Matthew 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 Tanach, the Buddhist Dhammapada, the Taoist Tao Te King, the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs, etc.)
Ordinary people also search for causes: In the case of a patient with smoker’s leg (a nicotine-induced open wound on the leg that will not close), the doctor at the hospital tries to treat this wound in some way.
Cause 1: In some cases, he points out to 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 of its own is usually left unmentioned, namely that people smoke to achieve calmness, enjoyment, or stress relief.
Cause 3: When such habits become addictions (with 70,000 deaths per year), the main reasons are usually to avoid depression, to compensate for other problems in everyday life, or to cope with anxiety.
Cause 4: The cause of all such causes is also always and fundamentally avoided by those affected and remains unrecognized. No one even thinks of uncovering the cause of these causes for this general suffering of all people. Even though the desire to fundamentally and sustainably alleviate human suffering is self-evident, this central theme of all wisdom writings remains unnoticed 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 self-preservation instinct that attempts to suppress anything that could lead to endangering self-preservation, especially through any effort to preserve others. All religions warn against this program of concealment. To tear away 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 insult you.” But it is precisely this vertical path that finds no resonance in the egocentric consciousness of human beings. The understanding of life on the material level is that of self-preservation and therefore (!) is characterized without exception by pain, suffering, and torment. Only spiritual consciousness with a way of life aimed at the preservation of all without exception enables fundamental liberation from suffering. Everyone who makes the change from the material perspective to the vertical spiritual perspective experiences this liberating experience in the eye of the hurricane.
In this respect, the suffering in every marriage, in every neighborhood, and indeed on all levels of human coexistence is there to redeem us from eternal lying and deceit, hatred, envy, greed, malice, jealousy, and violence, to free us from it. It wants to tear us away from the horizontal egocentric consciousness with its associated eternal suffering and lead us to the vertical consciousness 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. This connection can be tested. However, the hurdles to entry are high, and in addition, many experience on the way that they cannot progress “along the way,” no matter how hard they try (Mt. 22:14). The reason is that their karmically conditioned prerequisites were not yet complete enough for this stage to complete the development.
Genocide: Creating good through evil?
What on earth can be “good” about genocide, which Mephisto claims is such an evil that it “creates good”?
Throughout the millennia, evil has dominated human life and manifested itself in the form of bloodbaths (Aztecs, Hutus and Tutsis, Nanjing, Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Rohingya, and many other examples), decades of war with countless victims, and uninhibited racism such as rampant anti-Semitism, without people drawing any lasting conclusions from it. The ego program in humans causes more or less insensitivity to the suffering of others. As long as people draw no conclusions or the wrong conclusions from these excesses, the consequences will become increasingly terrible.
The conclusion to be drawn from the Holocaust should be that it is a fundamental building block of collective human consciousness, with countless (!) genocidal precursors. However, the ego within us unconsciously and fearfully avoids recognizing and eliminating this. The methods for doing 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 illuminates everything possible except the ego program with its self-interest and exclusion programs in every human being.
The everyday person, about whom Paul says, “The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them,” they must be spiritually discerned.” 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 he does not care about it.
When war and mass murder are discussed in the context of coming to terms with the past, the word “senseless” is all too often used. As if Nazis, Young Turks, Hutus, Serbs, etc. were brainless idiots. But it is too dangerous for the ego program in humans to emphasize the very real meaning, namely the desire to get rid of everything that disturbs them. It’s about exclusion, elimination, and removal. Elimination is part of everyday life: teachers want students out of their classes, parents want teachers transferred, husbands want annoying lovers gone, people kill their parents to get their inheritance, companies want to remove competitors—or, in the best case, drive them away—courts impose death sentences, and governments want others gone (“regime change”). The desire to get rid of something is part of every human being’s DNA. In this respect, the Holocaust is not the suggested special case of human cruelty, but a – albeit quantitatively incomprehensible – case of the human desire to get rid of something. Caesar already had a hundred thousand (!) Usipeters slaughtered, not to mention the genocides in German South West Africa or millions in Armenia in 1915. Hitler clearly stated: “The Jews must go!” The leaders in any civil war want their competitors gone, and the autocratic rulers in Russia want “the Nazi regime in Kiev” gone.
The desire to get rid of, exclude, or even eliminate is a constant in the human ego, albeit to varying degrees. It can hardly imagine coexistence or even cooperation with opponents and therefore stands speechless and contemplative before, for example, the Sermon on the Mount.
It is therefore no wonder that reactions to the Holocaust consist essentially 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 (relative exceptions are provocative books such as “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” or “We Knew Nothing About It. “), but our collective ego program from our mammalian heritage must not be allowed to enter our consciousness under any circumstances.
Seeing through as a way of overcoming evil
Hardly anyone even makes an attempt to follow the appeal not to criticize, not to make accusations, to avoid any kind of violence, to forgive as a matter of principle, and to observe the Golden Rule. Who has ever seen a priest, rabbi, or pastor invite their congregation to pray for rampage killers or knife murderers? And not as 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 program.
Evil does not come from the assassins or mass murderers, but through them.
If we practiced this view behind the surface, the mode of operation of the ego program would be revealed, and with it its vulnerability and susceptibility to the counterprogram, to love—our spirit soul—which is expressed in the words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. “ As painful as it may be, forgiveness also applies to the assassins of Oslo or Christchurch, as well as the assault rifle, truck, and knife murderers.
When, in the final scene of the world-famous film “M – A City Searches for a Murderer” (1930), the pedophile sex offender exclaims before the tribunal of his assembled pursuers: “I can’t help it!”, then this corresponds to the facts of the case, apart from perhaps karmic burdens from previous lives: for it was not he as a person (“I”) who was the cause of 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 (spirit soul) because he did not know it at all.
(In contrast, the Prodigal Son, who had also reached the lowest possible point in his existence, had the insight into the alternative of returning to the vertical (“I will set out …!”; Luke 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, in general, of peoples for politically authoritarian systems of the present day is based on the human ego program, which is expressed, among other things, by the desire to have and the associated economic existential fear. For its counterpart, the Sermon on the Mount (more precisely: for its implementation), however, it is eminently important to follow the admonition “Know thyself!” For without conscious self-awareness of one’s own fragility and weakness on the one hand (Jesus: “I can do nothing on my own …”), which the ego all too readily covers up with showmanship and megalomania, it is not possible, but even less so without the awareness of one’s own divine potential, as Jesus emphasizes: “You are all gods!” (John 10:34) and “You will do even greater things than I have done!” (John 14:11)
It is a matter of understanding the “evil” fellow human being (boss, migrant, evil neighbor, etc.) as a factually defenseless victim of the ego program that controls him. This requires recognizing the Son of God within oneself and within him. This stalker, rival, competitor, evil neighbor—whatever kind of aggressor—provokes us until we can look him straight in the face and focus only on the gently smiling divine soul within us—and within him. Then the raging surface collapses. This is the crucial point: the moment we see through it, the harmonization of the problem begins.
“God does not look at the person,” says the Book of Acts, among others. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry expresses it more poetically in “The Little Prince”: “One sees clearly only with the heart!”
In a sense, the enemy is our savior. This refers not only to individual situations, but above all to our entire life’s mission. Without the bringers of evil, the diseases, the attackers, the small-minded, the thieves, the racists, etc., we would remain stuck forever in the valley 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 recognize and realize the truth. Only through them can we heal ourselves, if we would finally look beyond the surface.
The fact that the devil is now supposed to be the savior, “part of that force which always wants evil and always creates good,” is unlikely to please the churches. For they derive part of their raison d’être from their pioneering struggle against this seemingly independent enemy, who, in their view, is supposed to be the one who creates evil. The search for a scapegoat begins. But Lucifer, the light-bearer, actually brings light.
It is not people who are evil, but our misunderstanding of them and the concept of creation. Evil must be separated from the person who carries it, just as one separates the bearer of the message 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—namely, the symptom of our collective view that we consider evil to be evil. The Rolling Stones attempted 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, as I said, of the fastest animal as good. But for the ego, evil is of course bad because every competitor, every enemy, etc., disturbs the security of the egocentric path of non-charity and self-love alone. That is why it fights tooth and nail against every “weed.”
Evil cannot be destroyed because it is a complementary counterpart 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 declaring the two to be twins.) However, evil can be overcome by rising above it, i.e., by leaving the material dimension in consciousness. This means seeing through it (without burying one’s head in the sand) by recognizing the divine behind it and thus not allowing it into one’s consciousness. To use Christian terminology, one simply lets the weeds grow alongside 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 before me.
Racism: Expression of the instinct for self-preservation
For the ego in humans, the principle is the non-unity of humans, non-brotherhood, non-equality, non-integration. It manifests itself in any form of exclusion involving the use of violence. This starts in the schoolyard and in the classroom. Internationally, the factor of xenophobia is evident, for example, in the spread of exclusionary forces throughout Europe and North America. In its unbridled form, this eventually leads to arson and murder. The forms vary quantitatively. First, there is racist language, from Nazi jargon such as “Jewish-Bolshevik subhumans” to the current “racial mixing,” “cattle,” “rabble,” “invaders,” there are bananas thrown from the fan stands at dark-skinned soccer players, etc., there is swastika graffiti, grave desecration, racial fanaticism in the US, not only by the Ku Klux Klan and trigger-happy police officers, but everyday and everywhere, the persecution of homosexuals (even as party doctrine in Eastern Europe), the burning of refugee homes, and finally murder. It is the exclusion and persecution of people out of fear for self-preservation and ignorance of unity with them.
The people who hunt refugees, send hate mail, or commit serial murders have unconsciously succumbed to their urge for self-protection (Breivik’s fear of the Islamization of Europe) and their deep-seated fear of “others,” and thus to their own self-preservation instinct, their ego. They are no different from the rest of us, who are exposed to the same subliminal program attacks. Only favorable cultural and social privileges can lead to greater frustration tolerance and empathy. Hatred of others, self-aggrandizement through the devaluation of others, and the desire to get rid of them are not fundamentally absent in everyone else.
Racism has always permeated the whole of humanity, even in the highest circles, and unwillingness to share even more so when we consider the extent of money hoarding, the fight for advantages at the expense of others, sibling rivalry in inheritance disputes, bloody battles over children after divorce, etc. extravagance, and greed are not only common among bankers and executives, etc., but are also a reflection of what the ego in humans causes in everyday life.
If it weren’t for the influence of the soul, our intuition as a counterpart to the false understanding of the world and ourselves in humans, we would have destroyed ourselves long ago.
If I do not recognize my spiritual unity with the Islamist assassin, the burglar, or the sender of hate mail, I will always and fundamentally have to live under the threat of them.
The counterexample is symbolically shown in the film “Beauty and the Beast,” in which Beauty is not frightened by the monster’s repulsive appearance, builds love and understanding for his inner being, and finally, in the showdown, redeems the prince in this monster with her kiss and wins her exaltation. “Love your enemies, do good [recognize 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, he will reap.”
The fact that our own fear is triggered by constantly occurring external grievances makes the whole thing difficult and tragic and shows our relative (!) innocence through ignorance, as the Buddha emphasized the latter. A first practical step in becoming aware is the mental exercise of developing a certain understanding of enemies as bringers of “evil,” because they are only its messengers and do not possess this quality themselves.
Our collective soul uses the malice of others to show us the need to separate it from the person and recognize it as a kind of collective psychosis that affects everyone. Only then can we succeed in understanding evil behavior. This is the meaning of one of the greatest words ever spoken: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But people always personify. They attribute responsibility to the person, even though it is not he who bears it, but his hidden control. However, the ego program does everything it can to conceal this connection. Salvation can only come when it is uncovered, when one “dies daily.”
The biological mammalian nature of humans
Human egoism stems from our tribal history: Evil, i.e., acting out of self-interest and a lack of empathy for the sake of self-preservation, comes from the software of our biological starting point, the (mammalian) animal: defending territory, puffing oneself up in front of females, fleeing or attacking when threatened, mating instinct, conquering habitat, hierarchical struggles, ignorance of the common good, etc. These are all biological animal hereditary factors. In this respect, evil in the original sense of the word is “natural,” i.e., derived from biological nature, and spiritual goodness is not derived from this biological origin, i.e., it is “unnatural.” This is what prevents us from observing divine principles (e.g., the Golden Rule). Paul logically calls this the “natural” man: “The natural man does not perceive anything 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 spirit soul as intuition) is the only characteristic that distinguishes humans from animals. In this respect, setting fire to refugee homes and excluding “those who are different” are, biologically speaking, our “natural” mammalian impulses, just as territorial owners bite away their competitors. Therefore, true humanity is to act against these animalistic impulses, against our mammalian nature, which Goethe characterizes in Faust as “more animalistic than any animal” (Auerbach’s Cellar). Animals do not build concentration camps. Overcoming the exclusively natural instinct for self-preservation is the theme of all wisdom writings. It is not the material mammalian nature that is the model for spiritual action (the futile attempts to “make the world a better place”), but rather what is specifically human, our divine consciousness, which we sometimes call “conscience.” It is about gagging the egoistic instinct for self-preservation and developing a love that sees beyond the level of preference.
Free will
For Luther, good and evil are opposing forces fighting for humanity, and this still applies more or less to churches today:
“When God sits, he wants and goes where God wants … When Satan sits, he wants and goes where Satan wants.”
(De servo arbitrio, Weimar edition 18, 635)
He thus claims that humans are a kind of plaything in the decision between good and evil and have no free will. In doing so, he misjudges their decision-making position at the mixer lever, reduces them to puppets, and more or less equates them with animals, albeit with expanded consciousness, but controlled by their instincts. While this is largely true in reality, experience shows that humans can gradually work toward shedding their animalistic selves through personal responsibility. We have the ability to decide to act against our animalistic nature. “Those who strive, we can redeem.” (Goethe, Faust II, Kehlen)
Through constant and recurring confrontations with turning points, i.e., in daily decision-making situations between self-love and love for one’s neighbor, humans become increasingly cautious due to the painful boomerangs of their ego behavior, but are strengthened in their interpersonal reactions. In this way, they can learn, really only through serious life crises, to suppress the ego impulse to such an extent that they become increasingly aware of the power of their soul. Then they can decide more and more clearly whether they want to accept or reject the touch of the soul. Luther seems to make the question of whether God or Satan resides in human beings dependent on how the battle between angels and devils for the person in question is played out somewhere above them. He concedes that human beings have a share in this, at most, insofar as they make the unconditionality of faith the measure of faith. But faith without understanding and confirmation through concrete experiences is blind. That is why all kinds of people believe in all kinds of things and even fight each other over it. They believe in interpretations that can vary greatly even within denominations. Their God is a God they have imagined.
Luther and the churches in general understand the devil as a counterforce, instead of grasping the common basis of apparent opposites. But duality contradicts the omnipotence of God. It contradicts the commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” For God is used here as a synonym for lawgiver, and there can be no other authority. Director George Lucas succeeds well in this, speaking in his Star Wars films not of a dark force, but of the dark side of the force. 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 program also belongs to the unity of opposites, just as the negative pole belongs to the positive pole of the battery. That is why the term “lower soul” is sometimes used for the self-preservation instinct. But without it, there would be no work of redemption. That 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 the executive organ of his instinct, to which he is at the mercy. So how can the contradiction between free will and impulse control be resolved? Normally, a sleepwalker follows the ego’s self-preservation impulses throughout his life. Awakening in a vertical direction is (almost) only possible through the painful impulse of severe blows of fate. It follows that without the impulse of crises, free will almost never develops into consciousness.
In the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26), Jesus shows that human beings are indeed capable of making independent decisions regarding their reorientation toward spiritual life: at first, he hesitates between fleeing and drinking the cup. His inner voice (“the Father in me”) does not force or threaten him to follow it. In this case, he consciously chose 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 entrusting it to their representatives.
However, it seems clear that the final decision on whether or to what extent a knocker is opened is not in the hands of man. There are enough wise statements that say that the God within reserves this right. But decisions to “make an effort” are in almost every case (cf. Joan of Arc) 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 (in Homer, the sea is understood as a symbol of earthly life with its changing winds, calms, storms, and unpredictability. In fairy tales, it is often the forest). Athena, symbol of the divine spirit soul in humans, is responsible for accompanying and guiding spiritual life, and Poseidon plays—similar to Mephisto—the role of the examiner who organizes the painful test situations. Homer clearly emphasizes 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 through the experience and overcoming of the most terrible dangers into which he leads the hero. Here, evil is always part of the concept of creation, always the driving force behind the process of redemption from suffering.
Empirically speaking, for most people, their chances of consciously and freely shaking off the ego are slim because the universal ego is still overwhelmingly present. But with today’s development of knowledge and spirituality, it is increasingly possible to break out of it.
The fact of conditioning by the self-preservation instinct does not mean that we have to remain in the animal program. There are plenty of examples of people who selflessly and sacrificially help others, often risking their lives: Doctors Without Borders, refugee aid workers, whistleblowers who stick their necks out, development aid workers in war zones, etc., even if they have no spiritual connection. Although we normally act automatically in self-preservation mode, we can learn to prepare ourselves for mutual communication with our soul. We practice consciously perceiving our spiritual nature, our soul potential, our true identity. The result is symbolically represented by Job, among others, who finds salvation and enlightenment only through direct dialogue with his higher self, i.e., through spiritual consciousness (the “Kingdom of God”).
I am the master of my fate (Henley)
Evil paves the way to absolute good. In fact, only evil—through the pressure of suffering—leads to the necessary change in consciousness, i.e., to love of one’s “enemy” (see chapter 17), which is nothing other than the recognition of the same divine identity in other people. And forgiveness means cleansing one’s own consciousness of negative elements through understanding and recognition of unity with the “beast.” Cleansing means understanding something perceived as evil (by the ego) as actually being a positive impulse toward higher development. One cannot repeat Shakespeare’s Hamlet often enough: “Nothing is good or evil in itself. It is thought that makes it so.”
Jesus makes this clear in the story of the adulteress by not classifying her behavior as good or bad. He avoids personification, recognizes her behavior as driven by instinct, and does not attribute it to her person. He explains her adultery as a learning situation. According to her insight (repentance), the mistake should lead to higher development toward the divine good, in which there is no longer anything humanly good or humanly evil. This decisive shift in thinking leads to liberation from our conditions of deficiency, worry, anger, and fear. If we no longer think of anything evil in asylum seeker homes, refugees, illness, job insecurity, intrigues against us, bankruptcies, failed relationships, etc., then there can be no more evil around us. This can be proven by trying it out.
We ourselves are the legislators, the creators of our lives, so to speak, and we sit at the switch between forgiveness and revenge. The “evil” around us wants to make us believe that there is evil outside of our being. Evil does occur outside of our being, but when it affects 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. Therefore, it can be said that those who react are judging and dividing things 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 “Thy 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 within us, it disappears around us. It can only exist if and as long as we are conscious 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 crashed bus, car, train, or plane despite leading blameless lives? (John 15:6) If they were connected to their soul power, this would hardly happen to them. That is why the Nazarene says that those who remain without spiritual consciousness “will be thrown away and wither.” Suffering means denying what is and repressing higher guidance. Affirming everything 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 me, or rather through it, the soul prevails and the evil disappears. In this respect, the state of my environment provides me with insight into the state of my consciousness. Each of my bad experiences is nothing more 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 an abundance consciousness is protected, fearless, and secure even in prison and in all bad situations.
When someone suffers an injustice, they think that others have done this to them and fight back. In fact, however, it is the consequence of the injustice they do to everyone else every day by seeing them as deficient people rather than children of God. Above all, they do this to themselves. The state of our world is a reflection of the state of our individual and collective consciousness in its composition of good and evil. In this respect, it is fundamentally pointless to fight against external evil as long as one does not primarily deal with the false or material parts of one’s own consciousness. What we encounter externally is always the harvest of what we have sown in our consciousness. It always depends on what we feed it. Only thinking in terms of good and evil creates it.
“It is not things themselves that disturb us, but the ideas (!) we have about them.” (Epictetus: Handbook 5, Discourses 2)
Everyone who suffers—whether from high blood pressure, abuse trauma, unemployment, or whatever—makes the following mistake: they focus on the suffering instead of their divine identity as a child of God; they rush to fight the problem instead of the problem solver. They do not want to go within and wait for the clues to the solution. The mistaken belief that evil can be pulled out like weeds that always grow right next to wheat and that should no longer be there dominates people’s thinking. Understanding this is made more difficult by the fact that pulling out weeds often seems to work for a while. Even more blind is the consistent overlooking of the fact that it does not work after all and that the boomerang strikes back with multiplied sharpness. Classic examples on a global scale are the outcome of the Vietnam War for the Americans, the Afghanistan War for the Soviets, the Iraq War for the Americans, etc. In everyday life, a bitter war over children in a divorce poisons one’s own mental well-being for a lifetime. Hatred of refugees and the production of poison in a shitstorm spoils one’s 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 or evil. Evil has always existed, and there have always been people who have shown the way out, from Buddha to Gandhi and Mandela, and it has never consisted of blind resistance or blind revenge.
Subdue the earth
Spiritual effectiveness only exists where it is consciously recognized. 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 with the exclamation “God, where are you?” There was no divine effectiveness. In our environment, God is as effective as God is 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 ended up on the front lines dying in the first place.
The Buddha taught how to overcome suffering two and a half thousand years ago in his “Four Noble Truths.” Siddhartha first recognizes that human life is inherently painful. The Buddha, who blames ignorance for suffering, goes on to clearly state that suffering, evil, and wickedness can be overcome, and he shows the way, the so-called Eightfold Path, which in many ways resembles the principles of other religious systems.
Several centuries later, the Greek philosopher Plotinus reiterated that it is possible to escape evil. Both emphasize 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 our orientation: a consciousness of lack or a consciousness of abundance. However, this is not meant horizontally, as in the school of thought of “positive thinking,” i.e., humanly evil or humanly good, but vertically, spiritually (absolutely good). Even the widespread “ordering from the universe” is an expression of a consciousness of lack and is therefore counterproductive, usually not immediately, but always in the long run.
The amount of imperfection in our lives depends on our thought patterns and evaluations. If we think materially, both good and evil will come our way. If we think spiritually—meaning we become aware of the divinity within us—both (human) good and (human) evil will disappear from 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 disappears from our consciousness. That is why spiritual living is not primarily a struggle against people or circumstances, but against negative thought attacks and thought patterns in our own consciousness that tempt us toward negativity—such as the unrestrained consumption of crime shows on TV. If I view the failure of my marriage, the burglary of my home, my slipped disc, my long-term unemployment as a deficiency rather than a wake-up call, and see refugees as the cause of deficiency and evil, I will reap exactly what I have sown, namely deficiency. It is a spiral, because reaping means that you get back many times what you have sown.
We should know where it leads when we individually and, above all, collectively attribute our sense of deprivation to external circumstances and blame scapegoats: “Jewish parasites,” “Bolshevik subhumans.” The sixty million dead and a country in ruins after World War II speak for themselves. Today, it is “Muslim invaders,” “Chinese viruses,” etc.
When I become seriously ill, I have the choice of consciously opposing it or overcoming myself to “love” the illness: this does not mean jumping for joy, but understanding it as a wake-up call and placing myself trustingly in the care of my soul: “Thy will be done!” Then harmonization begins immediately and I am wisely guided onto the right path. I learn whether, when, and to whom I should turn, and healing comes to me. We must undertake this self-purification, flip the switch, because otherwise it will always continue like this.