A man stands in a schoolyard covered with numerous lanterns, bouquets of flowers and mourning cards and holds up a sign with outstretched arms. The school building can be seen in the background. Opposite the man are dozens of photographers with their cameras pointed at him. Here an excerpt. It is obviously a situation after a shooting rampage. It is possible that the man is a father who has lost his child. 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, in which case 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, then he is weak, …
Or he wants to and can , …:
Whence then come the evils, and why does he not take them away?”
(Epicurus (?), 341-270 BCE)
Albert Camus puts it more succinctly:
“Either God is good, in which case he is not omnipotent; or else 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 not been able to cope with the suffering and evil that has been occurring everywhere for thousands of years.
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*Evil: humanly caused negativity; the opposite of this is the term suffering: as unjustified hardship. Collective term: evil
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Your hidden assumption must be that evil is the antagonist of God and somehow removed from his sphere of omnipotence. Or they ask: If there is a God, why do people – hello, they are his creation after all – have no security and no peace?
The monumental evil in the last century alone: there have been around 180 wars and many genocides, not to mention regional massacres: The genocide of the Hereros by the German “protection” force in what is now Namibia, 1.5 million dead Armenians in Turkey in 1915, 75 million dead in the two world wars, including the Holocaust by the Nazis, millions of dead in the Gulag, the pogrom against the Igbo in Biafra (Nigeria), the cultural revolution in China with hundreds of thousands of victims, the “communist” hunt in Indonesia in the mid-1960s through massacres with millions of deaths, the extermination of 25% of the entire population in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, 800,000 dead Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, thousands of murdered Bosnians by Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995, hundreds of thousands of deaths through genocidal “cleansing” of the Rohingya in Myanmar. That’s a total of around 150 million dead. Then there is the civil war in South Sudan, the war in Ukraine, gang wars in Brazil and Haiti, mass murders in Mexico and Sudan, massacres in Syria and Iraq, car bombs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, suicide bombers, bloody massacres in Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Berlin, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh and Christchurch, school shootings, plane crashes or shootings, attacks (Boston), assassinations (Cologne, Paris), executions, rapes and, of course, “ordinary” evil such as domestic violence, hit-and-runs, fraud, theft, robbery, manslaughter, child rape (now a mass phenomenon) and murder.
“God, where have you been?” is an understanding of creation that contains the claim that our world must be a kind of land of milk and honey in which people, as the crown of this creation, live in peace, friendship and unlimited provision, because the Creator would provide his children with the best possible care. Schiller assumes that he does indeed do this, but not in the way that human egos imagine. The poet considers the Fall of Man to be the happiest moment in human history because:
“… moral evil was indeed brought into the world, but only in order to make the morally good possible in it…”
(Friedrich Schiller: “The Mission of Moses”)
And Camus, with his hidden accusation as to why God does not save us, cannot understand that this cannot happen: A human being who is the bearer of the Son of God and can be his equal expression, a substantially divine teenager, so to speak, only saves himself. Where else would his divinity be? The so-called “vale of tears”, this world of ours, which according to Buddha is per se suffering and appears as a hopeless planet, is however fundamentally in order and harmonious: the laws of nature such as gravity, electromagnetism, etc. function, the seasons, the tides, fauna and flora in their diversity function, the seas, the atmosphere with its currents, the soils, rivers, forests, everything is (still) in order, everything functions. And not only that, everything is breathtakingly beautiful. Sunrise and sunset, the early mists in the beginning of autumn, the snowflakes and ice crystals, the white clouds in the blue sky, the mighty lightning, the ripe fruit, the splendor of flowers in spring, the meadow landscapes, the high mountains. The human being is also a masterpiece, a symphony of anatomical, physiological, mental and emotional levels. Every single part of the body, such as an upper arm with tendons, muscles, bones, joints, leverage, etc., is in order. The interaction of the organs is intelligently ordered, as is the control by the hormones. There is only one factor that is not in order. This is the destructive consciousness program of self-preservation. Its servant, the mind with its logic, does not recognize this control and, through its seemingly independent but instinct-dependent freedom, destroys everything around it and thus ultimately itself in order to preserve itself. In this way, it wreaks incredible cruelty and actually creates evil and the suffering associated with it. This is why we live in a vale of tears full of alcoholism, neglect, property crime, violence, conflict, marital hell, family terror, street violence, rape, corruption, merciless exploitation, jealousy and existential fear.
“He calls it reason and needs it alone, only to be more animal than any animal.”
(Goethe: Faust I, Prologue in Heaven)
If you look at the state of human consciousness from the Neanderthals through antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day, you will see less of a child of God and instead an excess of ego-related anger, aggression, fear, mistrust, worry and violence. Despite many examples to the contrary, the majority of people today are still unconsciously subject to the almost unrestricted control of the instinct for self-preservation and the evil it triggers. Frank Zappa once sang:
“What’s the ugliest part of your body? It’s your mind.”
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:
Yin and Yang
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 “Lord’s household”, as a servant of God. However, an understanding of evil as an independent counter-power(Zarathustra, Luther) cannot be reconciled with the understanding of omnipotence. Accordingly, 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 will also understand Jakob Böhme:
“…because all things come from God, evil must also come from God.” (Aurora, ch. 2,36).
Furthermore, the Chinese wisdom teachings of Taoism make a clarifying contribution to the understanding of evil: It is about a mountain on which the sun shines. In the morning, it shines over the eastern slope, providing it with light and warmth. The slope is then bright, warm and dry. During this time, the western slope is in the shade, dark, cool and damp from the night’s dew. The picture changes in the afternoon. Now it is the western slope that comes with light and warmth and dries, while the eastern slope is now in the shade. It is important to see the unity and mutual condition – in constant change – of these two phenomena. There is no western slope of a mountain without an eastern slope any more than there is only one side of a coin or a battery without a negative pole. A battery without a negative pole is not a battery at all; it is only through the presence and interaction of both poles that something can exist at all and have a function. The apparent duality (polarity) is in reality a mutually dependent unity. The apparent contrast consists of two different surface phenomena, but their common substance is the mountain. The two different appearances are in reality parts of one and the same object, just as the different facets of a diamond are. The curve below is both convex and concave, depending on the angle of view. They are different aspects of the same curve. Human life takes place in the realm of opposites and can only identify good from evil.
This expresses the central principle of material creation: it is an apparent duality that is actually a polarity. It is apparent opposition that is actually unity. A battery can only exist with positive and negative poles, the earth only with north and south poles. Something hot can only be understood as “hot” because there is something cold. Without cold, we would not know what hot is. This is how we experience what we call temperature. This means that the world experienced through the sensory organs can only be experienced through opposites. Without blindness, we would not have the appreciation of seeing, without hateful behavior, loving behavior would not be identifiable as such. Without the agony of the valley of misery, there can be no paths to peace, happiness and well-being. Without misery, there can be no abundance. However, since people have a consistently self-centered understanding of abundance and also limit it to the material level, there is endless strife, envy, mistrust, fear, jealousy and hatred, which then lead to the most terrible consequences.
Indeed one could imagine a monotonous state without cold, without warmth, without wetness, without dryness, without light, without shadow, etc. Jewish wisdom calls this state desolate and empty, i.e. without contrasts. But then there is no meaningfulness, because there is a lack of experience and prospects for higher development.
Because then we would not know why we are in such a state and why we exist, what our tasks are, our goals, our purpose. All of this can only be experienced through sensory organs, and there must be polar opposites. That is why evil exists, to enable higher development (biblically: “back to the Father’s court”).
“That which we call evil is only the other side of good, which so necessarily belongs to its existence and to the whole…”
(Goethe: Kunsttheoretische Schriften: Zum Schäkespears-Tag)
In Christian wisdom, the parable of the Prodigal Son shows nothing else, in which evil, i.e. the suffering of the material world, appears in the form of impoverishment with the belly landing in the herd of pigs. This fall of the Son of God exists for the purpose of finding his way out of the filth of the herd of pigs: Suffering in order to end suffering through a change of consciousness. Another symbol of the productive function of evil is the figure of Judas and his role in the salvation process.
People seek a way out of bankruptcy and other financial collapses in alcohol, fraud, flight, etc. They fight tooth and nail against injustice, penalties, illness or the competition, instead of understanding these evils as lessons to achieve liberation from them.
They search and search and do not find the way out because they remain on the horizontal physical plane and do not 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 recognizes that this attachment is the sole reason for the constitutive suffering in our world.
Evil is a manifestation of the unified creation. It is designed to choose the path to liberation from it and to lead to perfection. (Perfection means recognizing the unity of all being behind the surface of diversity; this is shown by Beauty, who understands the prince in the beast, i.e. the divine core of evil). Anyone who wanted to abolish evil – and that is what all do-gooders want – would also abolish good. Both are good in a higher sense. Only the painful “evil” leads to the fulfillment of meaning by offering man the opportunity to leave the realm of opposites in consciousness in the direction of unity, i.e. the union of the material person with its inner spiritual core. Evil is there to be overcome.
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-centered 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 can 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 recognizing selfish behaviour in himself. Because the ego a) always blames everyone else, and b) the (male) ego loves to wallow in its own suffering. There is a chance 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 generalized: every crisis is potentially the father of all things. Ancient Roman wisdom says: “Through misery to the stars.” (Per aspera ad astra.) Peace between men is still the product of war.
If this man had actually found his own part, he would have taken a big step towards recognizing and overcoming the ego part in him. Of course, there could have been fewer violent moments to avoid the disaster if he had learned during his years of marriage to find and develop the connection to the intuition within himself, to spiritual guidance, and thus harmonize his relationship. But people always want to get rid of their evils, not the controls that created them.
It is characteristic of people’s ego behavior to want to cherry-pick from life and avoid the unpleasant. They do not want to accept what is coming and see it as a learning situation. That is why they have to suffer permanently from evil. But those who have recognized this do not have to.
“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, a crisis, the confrontation with evil, is the decisive instrument in the world of opposites to bring the outer man to his senses, to wake up and to 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.)
*Human goodness such as charity, donations, helping neighbors, etc. can be individually helpful in developing the ability to empathize, but it is usually only very limited because it makes distinctions (“preference”: own children – other children, perhaps even those with a different skin color). 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? How does it help 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), it has little significance for liberation from the vale of tears. For this horizontal goodness has no understanding of the differencelessness, i.e. the unity of all being, including that of ordinary citizens and criminals and thus that of good and evil (Cusanus, Georg Hamann: coincidentia oppositorum).
In this respect, the suffering in every marriage, in every neighborhood and generally at all levels of human coexistence is there to redeem us from the eternal lying and cheating, the hatred, the envy, the jealousy, the violence, to free us from this suffering. It wants to tear us out of the horizontal consciousness of egocentricity with the eternal suffering associated with it and lead us to the vertical one , into a life free of suffering.
Genocide: Creating good through evil?
What on earth can be “good” about genocide, of which Mephisto claims that such evil “creates good?”
Throughout the millennia, evil has dominated human life and 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 program 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 recognizing 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 program with its self-interest and exclusion programs in every human being.
The everyday person that Paul blasphemes against:
“The natural man hears nothing of the Spirit of God; it is foolishness to him; and he cannot discern it,” it must be spiritually directed.” (1Co 2:14)
does not see the hand in the glove, nor does he want to, and as far as spiritual direction is concerned, he may mention his gut feeling, but does not concern himself further with it.
When war and mass murder are brought up 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 program in people to emphasize the sense that does exist, namely the desire to get rid of everything that is disturbing. It’s all about exclusion, elimination and elimination. 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 a case – albeit a quantitatively special one – of human wanting to get rid of. Even Caesar had hundreds of thousands (!) of Usipians slaughtered, not to mention the genocides in German Southwest Africa or in Armenia in 1915.
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 program from our mammalian heritage must never be allowed to enter our consciousness.
Look-through as overcoming evil
Hardly anyone even makes an effort to follow the appeal not to criticize, not to reproach, 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 his congregation to pray for Islamists? 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 program.
Evil does not come from the assassins, the people who run amok or the mass murderers, but through them.
If we practiced this look behind the surface, the workings of the ego program would be revealed and with it its vulnerability and attack surface for the counter-program, for the love that is our spiritual soul and expresses itself through the word: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” As painful as it is, forgiveness also applies to the individual mass murderers of Oslo or Christchurch, as well as the violent truck criminals and remote-controlled knife murderers.
It is about understanding the evil superior or neighbor as a defenseless victim of the ego program that controls him. This requires us to see the Son of God within ourselves and within him. This stinker, stalker, rival, competitor, evil neighbor – whatever kind of aggressor – provokes us until we can look him directly in the drooling face and concentrate only on the mildly smiling divine soul within him – and within us. Then the raging surface collapses. That is the decisive factor: In the moment of our looking through, the harmonization of the problem begins.
“God does not look at the person ”, says the Acts of the Apostles, among others. Antoine de Saint-Exupery expresses it more poetically in “The Little Prince”: “You can only see well with your heart!”
In a sense, the enemy is our savior. This not only refers 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 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, “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 fight against this seemingly independent enemy, who they believe creates evil. The search for a scapegoat sends its regards. But Lucifer, 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. We must separate evil from the person who carries it, just as we separate 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 – 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 looking beyond it or through it (without burying one’s head in the sand) by recognizing the divine behind it and thus not letting it into 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 exclusion using violence. It starts in the schoolyard and in the classroom. Internationally, the xenophobia factor can be seen, for example, in the expansion of exclusionary 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 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 and so on, 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 everyday and everywhere, the persecution of homosexuals (even as a party doctrine in Eastern Europe), the burning of refugee homes and finally murder. It is the marginalization 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 (NSU) 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 their own instinct for self-preservation. They are no different from the rest of us, who are subject to the same subliminal program attacks. It is only through favorable cultural and social privilege that better frustration tolerance and greater empathy come about. Hatred of others, our own valorization through this very devaluation and the desire to get rid of others are not fundamentally absent in everyone else, i.e. in us.
Racism has – always – permeated the whole of society right up to the highest circles, the desire not to share is even more prevalent when we consider the extent to which money is hidden away, the struggle for advantages at the expense of others, sibling wars in inheritance disputes, fights to the death over children after divorce, etc., boasting, greed not only among bankers and board members, etc. are the order of the day and a reflection of what the ego does to 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 recognize my spiritual unity with the Islamist assassin, the home burglar or the hate mail sender, I will always and fundamentally have to live under the threat of him.
The counterexample is symbolically shown in the movie “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 the conscious recognition of 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 also 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 (!) blamelessness through ignorance, as the Buddha emphasized the latter. A first practical step in becoming aware is the mental exercise of developing a certain understanding for the enemies as messengersof “evil”, because they are only its messengers, but do not have this quality themselves.
Our soul uses the malice of others to show us the need to detach it from the person and to recognize it as a kind of overall psychosis that affects everyone. Only then is it possible to find understanding for evil behavior. This is the meaning of one of the greatest words ever uttered: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
But people always personalize. They attribute responsibility to people, even though it is not they who bear it, but their hidden control system. However, the ego program does everything it can to cover up this connection. There can only be redemption if it is uncovered, by “dying every day”.
The biological animalistic nature of humans
It should be borne in mind that 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: defending territory, puffing up in front of females, fleeing or attacking when threatened, mating instinct, conquering habitat, hierarchical struggles, ignorance of an overall good, and so on. 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 goodness is 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. Paul once more: “But the natural man hears nothing of the Spirit of God; it is foolishness to him.” (1 Corinthians, 2,14)
Freedom, equality and brotherhood as well as love of one’s enemies are characteristics that set man apart from the animal. In this respect, setting fire to refugee homes and ostracizing those who are “different” 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 characterizes in Faust as “more animal than any animal” (Auerbach’s Cellar). Overcoming this is the theme of the wisdom writings. Therefore, it is not the mammalian nature that is the model for spiritual action, 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 understanding love that looks through.
Free will
Do we have the ability to decide to act against our animal nature? 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 plaything when deciding between good and evil and has no free will. In so doing, he fails to recognize the person’s position at the decision-making mixer lever, reducing him to a puppet and more or less equating him with an animal, albeit with an advanced consciousness but controlled by his instincts. While this is largely true in reality, experience shows that humans can gradually work towards shedding their animal ego through personal responsibility.
“He who strives can be redeemed.” (Goethe, Faust II, Kehlen)
Through constant and recurring confrontations with turning points, i.e. in the daily decision-making situations between self-love and love for one’s fellow human beings, the painful boomerangs of one’s ego behavior make a person increasingly cautious in the former and strengthened in the latter. In this way, and especially through these difficult life crises, he can learn to suppress 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 touch of the soul. Luther seems to make the question of whether God or Satan dwells in man dependent on how the battle between the angel and the devil for the person concerned takes place somewhere up there . At best, he concedes a part to man in as far 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 kinds of people believe in all kinds of directions and even beat each other’s heads in. They believe in interpretations that can vary greatly even within the denominations. Their God is a God of their own making.
Luther and the churches in general have an understanding of evil that presents the devil as a countervailing power instead of grasping the common basis of contradictions. But a duality contradicts God’s omnipotence. It contradicts the commandment “You shall have no… other gods beside me”. For God is used here as a synonym for the lawgiver, and there cannot be any other instance of power. Director George Lucas is good at this, who in his Star Wars films does not speak of dark power but of the dark side of the power. He does not express duality (incompatibility) but polarity (unity of apparent opposites), as the old Chinese sages did with the eastern and western 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. This is why the term “lower soul” is occasionally used for the self-preservation instinct. Without it, there would be no redemptive work. This is why Jacob Böhme speaks of “everything (!) coming from God”.
In the movie “The Free Will”, the sex offender can not choose, whether he does evil or consciously decides against it. He is portrayed as the executive organ of his instinct, to which he is delivered. So how can the contradiction between free will and drive control be resolved? Normally, a sleepwalker follows the self-preservation impulses of the ego throughout his life. Waking up in a vertical direction is (almost) only possible through the painful impulse after strong strokes of fate. It follows that without the impulse of crises, free will does not develop.
In the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26), Jesus shows that man can very well make independent directional decisions with regard to reorientation towards spiritual life: at first he still hesitates whether to flee or to take the cup. In doing so, he is not forced or threatened by his inner voice (“the Father in me”) to follow it. He has consciously chosen to follow it in this case.
An earthly parallel to freedom of choice is the sovereignty of the electorate in modern democracies, where the people exercise their power by delegating it to their representatives.
However, it seems clear that the final decision as to how far a knock is opened or not is not in the hands of man. There are enough wise statements that say that the God within reserves this for himself. But decisions to “try” are a prerequisite in almost (Joan of Arc) every case to approach the great goal, perhaps not only within a single incarnation. Experiencing life crises should and can lead to walking the steep and rugged path of the spiritual vertical path.
In contrast to Luther’s interpretation of Satan, Homer describes evil as the brother of 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 man, is responsible for guidance and support in spiritual life, and Poseidon plays – similar to Mephisto – the role of the examiner who organizes the examination situations. Homer clearly emphasizes the two divine poles (“plus” and “minus”) of the spiritual path in their apparent duality. Poseidon achieves the enlightenment of Odysseus precisely through the most terrible dangers into which he leads the hero. Here, evil is always part of the concept of creation, always the engine of the process of deliverance from suffering.
Empirically speaking, for most people the 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 that the conditioning by the instinct of self-preservation is indeed largely present does not mean that we have to stay in the animal program. There are enough examples of people who selflessly and sacrificially work for others, often risking their lives: doctors without borders, refugee workers, whistleblowers who stick their necks out, development workers in war zones, etc., albeit without a spiritual reference. Although we normally act automatically in self-preservation mode, we can learn to prepare ourselves for a reciprocal communication with our soul. We practice consciously perceiving our spiritual nature, our soul potential, our true identity. The result is symbolically illustrated, among other things, by Job, who only finds salvation 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 paves 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 7), which is nothing other than the recognition of the same divine identity in the other person. And forgiveness means cleansing one’s own consciousness of negative elements through understanding (“…don’t know what they are doing”) and recognizing unity with the “beast.” Purification means understanding something perceived as evil (by the ego) as actually good in the direction of 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 behavior into good or bad. He avoids personification, recognizes her behaviour as instinctual control and does not attribute it to her person. He explains her adultery as a learning situation. After her insight (repentance), the mistake should lead to its future avoidance and 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 relationships of lack, worry, anger and fear. If we no longer think evil about asylum seekers’ homes, refugees, illness, job threats, 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 evaluates and thus divides 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 have evil in our consciousness. 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 airplane 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 in chapter 11 of the book) means allowing our soul power and the daily dying 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, fearless and safe even in prison and in all bad situations.
When an injustice is suffered, everyone 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 seeing him as a deficient person and not as the perfect 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 evil or wrong parts of our own consciousness. What we encounter on the outside is always the harvest of a seed of consciousness. It always depends on what we feed it. Only thinking as a division into good and evil creates it.
Everyone 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 the fight against the problem instead of the problem solver. He does not want to go within 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. Even more blinding is the consistent overlooking of the fact that it doesn’t 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, etc. 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. “Do not resist evil.” And this has never consisted of blind resistance or blind revenge, from Buddha to Gandhi and Mandela. (Chapter 10 in the book on non-resistance.)
Subduing 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 God efficacy there. There is as much God at work in our surroundings as there is God in our consciousness, so usually not much. 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.
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat and drink … all these things will fall to you.”
Two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha taught how to overcome misery in his “Four Noble Truths”. Siddhartha recognizes that human life is inherently painful. The Buddha, who blames ignorance for suffering, also clearly states that suffering, evil, evil, can be overcome and shows the way, the so-called Eightfold Path, which is similar in many respects 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 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 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 “ordering from the universe” is also an expression of an awareness of lack and is therefore counterproductive, not immediately, but always on balance.
“It is not the things that worry us, but the views (!) we have of things.”
(Epictetus: Handbook 5, Discourses 2)
How much imperfection there is in our lives depends on our evaluations or thought patterns. If we think materially, good and bad things come our way. If we think spiritually – meaning that we become aware 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 will fade 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 dramas 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 have sown.
We should know where it leads if we individually and, above all, collectively attribute the awareness of lack to external circumstances and blame scapegoats: “Jewish parasite”, “Bolshevik subhuman”, The sixty million dead and a country in ruins after the Second World War speak for themselves. Today it is “Muslim invaders”, “Chinese (!) viruses”, etc.
When I fall seriously ill, I have the choice of opposing it in my mind 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: “YOUR will be done!” Then the harmonization 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 instead of me chasing after it. We have to do this self-purification, pull the lever, because otherwise it will always go on like this.