The Text - Section 184
184. THE MEANING OF EVIL AND ITS TRANSCENDENCE
Greetings, blessings to all my old and new friends here. And welcome to all those who have
already made progress in their attempt to find the truth of their innermost being, and to all those
who have not yet taken active steps. Your being here signifies a conscious and unconscious search
for the real meaning of your lives. Although this lecture is a sequel to the one I gave before the
summer recess, it also constitutes a new beginning. It should be as meaningful to work back from it
as it is to go forward.
Human beings are continually confronted with the deep problem of how to handle the
destructive forces residing within themselves and others. This problem seems unending, for ever
since the beginning of human existence, theories and philosophies have been built around it. Your
search has always been concerned, directly or indirectly, with this great issue. All suffering really
comes exclusively from one's own destructiveness, negativity, or evil -- whatever name you give it.
The great difficulty you are up against is that you are trying to solve this problem within the system
of duality. You conceive of two opposite forces: a constructive one opposed to a destructive one:
good opposed to evil. The moment you become involved in duality you are unable to solve the
problem. You begin to negate, deny, evade, repress whatever is destructive in you. Consequently,
you are partly unaware of your destructiveness and totally incapable of seeing how it manifests. In
other words, you are forced to act out the destructiveness indirectly -- with very damaging results.
Thus your guilt compounds because the evil you hoped to eliminate only increases when it is
repressed and acted out indirectly.
In this dualistic approach you become split within yourself, for you reject a whole part of
yourself that is the source of essential, potent creative energy without which you can never be a full
human being. Your sense of awareness dims as you repress the undesirable part of yourself. The
less aware you are, the weaker you become, and therefore more confused and less able to solve this,
or any other problem.
The pathwork is, of course, primarily concerned with facing these undesirable parts in order to
remove the self-imposed blindness. You will find again and again that such confrontation, rather
than bringing the devastation you fear, wakes up vital energy and makes you a more integrated
person. The problem that still remains for all of you, however, is how to cope with the undesirable
material that begins to manifest.
Meditation is most important, for without the greater mind, the little mind is unable to bring
change. But it is also necessary to have clear concepts and outlines. Your mental concepts must be
more accurate, aligned with truth, otherwise false ideas, or even vagueness, will create a block. If,
for example, you conceive of the greater intelligence within you as having power to make the
destructive force disappear, your meditation and request for help will remain unanswered. Any
vague and hazily misconceived process will set up a stumbling block.
Most religions take a dualistic approach to the great question of evil, seeing it as a force
opposed to good. The dualistic approach reinforces your fear of yourself and your guilt; therefore,
it only increases the chasm within your soul. The energies of fear and guilt are used to force yourself
to be good. The blindness, compulsion, and the artificial concept of life that accompany this forcing
create self-perpetuating patterns, with many negative ramifications.
On the other hand, there are also philosophies which postulate that evil just does not exist; it
is an illusion. This philosophy is as true as its religious opposite, which recognizes the danger of
evil, its life-defeating power, and the unhappiness and suffering it brings. The postulate that evil is
an illusion is true in the sense that there is innately only one great creative power. There is union,
for all is one in the consciousness of those who have transcended duality.
As is so often true, both of these opposing teachings express great truths, but the
exclusiveness with which they are conceived and perpetuated ultimately renders their truth untrue.
The denial of evil as a reality leads to wishful thinking, further blindness, and the denial of the self; it
decreases rather than increases awareness. A false picture of reality is created -- the reality of the
present state of humankind.
I recapitulate. To deny evil on humanity's present plane of consciousness is as unrealistic as to
believe that two separate forces exist: one good and one evil. Such a belief implies that the evil
force must be destroyed or whisked away, as if anything could be made to disappear in the universe!
You must struggle between these two alternatives to find the answers. This lecture is an attempt to
help you.
Both views of evil lead to repression; yet acknowledging evil also leads to the possibility of
further destructiveness. It might lead to justifying and condoning truly undesirable things, such as
self-righteous acting out. In such a case it is the guilt that would be repressed, creating further
splitting and duality. Let us now try to find a way to deal with this problem that can avoid either one
of these pitfalls. Let us try to reconcile these two general approaches to evil.
You have all experienced how threatened, anxious, and uncomfortable you feel when you are
confronted with some of your undesirable attitudes, traits, and characteristics. This reaction must be
understood in a much deeper way. Too much is taken for granted and glossed over by simply giving
the reaction a name and then letting it go at that.
The meaning of such fearful, uncomfortable, anxious reaction is plainly an expression that
says, "Such and such should not exist in me." All the defenses you have so painstakingly erected
serve to protect you not only from the evil of others, but primarily from your own. If you examine
the cause each time you feel anxious, you will always find that, in the last analysis, you are
apprehensive of your own evil, regardless of how threatening another person or an outside event
appears. If you then translate this anxiety into clear-cut words, thus verbalizing your inner thought
that certain attitudes or feelings "should not exist in me," you can then confront your attitude
toward evil in a much better way. For the evil itself is not half as damaging as your attitude to it.
We shall come back to this later.
From now on, instead of habitually evading, which breeds emotional illness, problems, and
suffering, catch your fear and the thought behind the fear: "I should not be that way." If this fear is
ignored, the problem becomes worse.
Our aim on this path is precisely the knowing and acceptance of the evil. The word
"acceptance" has been used a great deal for lack of a better one, but the meaning often gets lost
behind the word, so we must pay more attention to how this acceptance comes about. For only
when acceptance occurs in the right way can evil be incorporated and re-formed in the truest sense
of the word. You can then transform a force that has gone awry. Most human beings totally forget
or ignore the fact that what is worst in them is essentially highly desirable creative power and
universal flow and energy. Only when you truly realize this, my friends, will you learn to cope with
every aspect of yourself.
Almost all human beings, with very, very few exceptions, cope with only a small part of
themselves. They accept, know, and only want to know, a relatively small part of their total
personality. This limitation is, of course, a terrible loss. Not being aware of that within which is
undesirable in its present manifestation shuts them off from what is already clear, liberated, purified,
good. It also prevents most individuals from loving and respecting themselves because they have no
real perception of their divine heritage. Their actual, already manifest goodness seems unreal, even
fake, because they refuse to tackle the destructive elements in themselves. But what is even more
important and fundamental is that shutting off this undesirable part causes it to remain stagnant and
paralyzed so that it cannot change.
The price of recognizing and accepting the destructive, evil aspect of the self seems high, but
it really is not. By contrast, the price of denying it is enormous. You may grope in confusion until
you find a way to accept your destructive impulses and desires without condoning them; to
understand them without identifying with them. You must learn to evaluate such impulses and
desires realistically, without falling into the trap of projection, self-justification, self-righteous
exoneration while blaming others on the one hand, or, on the other, of self-indulgence, denial,
repression and evasion. Such understanding requires continual inspiration from the higher forces
within and deliberate requests for help in awakening and maintaining awareness of these destructive
aspects and of the proper method to handle them.
Whenever you are in an unpleasant mood, a threatening situation, confusion and darkness,
you can be sure that regardless of the outer circumstances, the problem arises from denial and fear
of your own destructive attitudes, and your ignorance about how to handle them. Admitting this
brings immediate relief and deactivates these negative powers almost instantly. Learn by what steps
you can incorporate this power rather than shut it off.
The first step must be applying the theory that destructiveness, evil, is not a final separate
force. You must think about this not merely in general, philosophical terms. Rather, you must take
the specific aspects of yourself that make you feel guilty and afraid, and apply this knowledge to all
that is most distasteful in yourself and others. No matter how ugly some of those manifestations are
-- whether it be cruelty, spite, arrogance, contempt, selfishness, indifference, greed, cheating, or
something else -- you can bring yourself to realize that every one of these traits is an energy current,
originally good and beautiful and life-affirming.
By searching in this direction, you will come to understand and experience how this or that
specific hostile impulse was originally a good force. When you understand that, you will have made
a substantial inroad toward transforming the hostility and freeing the energy that has either been
channelled in a truly undesirable, destructive way, or become frozen and stagnant. Articulate clearly
the insight that these ugly traits, whatever they may be, are a power that can be used any way you
wish. This power -- the same energy that may now manifest as hostility, envy, hatred, rage,
bitterness, self-pity, or blame -- can become a creative power to build happiness, pleasure, love,
expansion, for yourself and others around you.
The list of negative traits could be extended, but that is unnecessary, for they are only
variations on the same theme. You all know these things in yourself, or at least you have begun to
know them. Still, after all this time, it is not yet possible for any of you to truly understand that what
you dislike most in yourself is essentially a highly desirable, creative power. You dislike it because it
is not desirable in the form it manifests at the moment. In other words, you have to learn to
acknowledge that the way the power manifests is undesirable, but the energy current behind this
manifestation is desirable in itself, for it is made of the life-stuff itself. It contains consciousness and
creative energy. It contains every possibility to manifest and express life, to create new life. It
contains all the best of life, as you experience it -- and much more. So, too, the best of life that has
revealed itself to you contains the possibility of the very worst. If you can envisage the possibilities
of all life manifestations, because life is a continuous flowing, moving, ongoing process, you can
never become fixated on finalities, which create error, confusion, duality.
You will see that by denying the evil in you, you do greater harm to the whole of your
personality, to your manifest spirituality, than you realize. For by denying it, you inactivate an
essential part of your energies and creative forces, so they stagnate. From stagnation, putrefaction
follows. Matter putrefies when it stagnates, when it can no longer move. The same is true of
consciousness: it putrefies when it stagnates. Life is a continuously flowing process. When it
stands still, death temporarily manifests. Since life is eternal, the death can be only temporary. This
applies not only to human beings, to entities, but also to matter and energy. As long as the energy
flow is arrested, death takes place and lasts until the energy flow is released again. This is the
manifestation and yet another meaning of death on this plane of consciousness.
The principle also applies to an object: when it rots or disintegrates, the energy within it has
been arrested. This arrested energy must, at some point, start flowing again -- perhaps long after
this particular manifestation.
Matter is always a condensation and manifestation of consciousness and energy. The way the
energy flows -- or does not flow -- and the form it takes when it condenses depends on the attitude
of consciousness "behind," or, rather, intrinsic to a particular aspect of creation.
By the same token, destructiveness is another erroneous form of consciousness. It must lead,
either directly through acting out and giving it direct expression, or indirectly, through denial, that is
stagnation, to a negation of life. This is why some supposedly negative emotions are actually
desirable. For instance, anger can further life and be directed against the negation of life. Denial of
anger turns into hostility, cruelty, spite, self-hate, guilt, confusion between blame of others and
blame of self, and is thus a destructive energy current.
Death will become superfluous, will be overcome, when energy is no longer stagnant, when it
is allowed to move. This can happen on the level of mind first, when evil is understood to be
intrinsically a divine energy flow, momentarily distorted due to specific wrong ideas, concepts and
perceptions. Thus it is no longer rejected in its essence but assimilated. This is precisely what you
find most difficult to do. In fact, you find it so difficult that you tend to forget even those aspects in
you that are already free of distortion, evil, and destructiveness, that are really liberated and clear,
that are good and beautiful and divine.
All your striving and goodwill is beautiful. Even your pangs of conscience, notwithstanding
the misplaced guilt, spring from the best and most beautiful manifestations of consciousness. You
will deny, ignore, fail to experience this best in you as long as you deny, ignore, fail to experience the
evil in you. You distort your concept of yourself when you deny any part of yourself, no matter how
ugly it may be in its present form.
The essential key to totally integrating the evil is understanding its original nature and the
indwelling possibility that it may manifest again in its original form. This must be the aim, my
friends. As long as you try to become good by denying evil, by forcing yourself to be what you
cannot yet be, and what you can in fact never be, you remain in a painful state of inner split, partial
self-denial, and paralysis of vital forces within you. I say "what you can never be," because if your
expectation is to destroy or magically whisk away a vital part of yourself and not to accept the
intrinsic desirability of all the creative energy contained in even your most destructive aspects you
cannot become whole. Cultivate this altered attitude.
The new attitude of acceptance does not mean condoning, excusing, or rationalizing your
undesirable aspects. Quite the contrary: it means fully acknowledging them, giving honest
expression to them, without finding excuses or blaming others, but not feeling hopeless and self-
rejecting about them either. This seems like a tall order, but it is certainly possible to acquire this
attitude if you make a sincere effort and truly pray that guidance be given to you for this very
purpose.
When you no longer negate your ugliness, you will no longer have to negate your beauty.
There is so much beauty in every one of you that is already free. You actually manifest beauty that
you totally negate, ignore, fail to perceive and experience! And I do not mean only potential, as yet
to be developed beauty; I mean beauty that is really present.
You can think of this and pray for awareness, as you pray for awareness of the ugliness.
When you can perceive both, not just one, exclusive of the other, you will have made a substantial
step toward a realistic perception of life and of yourself that will enable you to integrate what now
tears you asunder.
By keeping both your beauty and your ugliness in mind at all times, you will also see both
sides in others. You tend to completely reject and negate people whose destructiveness you
perceive, and react to them exactly as you do toward yourself. Or you emotionally react to their
goodness and inner beauty, while unrealistically overlooking their ugly side. You cannot yet grasp
the presence of duality in yourself, and therefore neither can you see it in others. This creates
continual conflicts and strife. Only by accepting the duality can you truly transcend it.
No expansion of consciousness, no integration and transcendence is possible when
consciousness is dimmed, when awareness is blocked. Awareness of the evil must be blocked off
when it is viewed as if it were totally unacceptable, when you fail to realize that evil is only a
distortion of a divine creative power current. Such distortion and lack of awareness cause you to
deny and paralyze the creative process itself.
Every once in a while I refer back to the main sources of distortion and destructiveness:
selfwill, pride, and fear. Offhand, it may appear odd to claim that these three traits are more
responsible for evil than the evil traits themselves, including spite, cruelty, envy, hostility, and
selfishness. How can pride, selfwill or fear be more destructive than, say, hate? The answer to such
questions is really simple. The overtly destructive attitudes are never the real evil. If you truly
acknowledge them, you remain in the flow. The greatest hatred, the most spiteful vindictiveness, the
worst impulses of cruelty, if honestly and squarely admitted, neither acted out irresponsibly nor
repressed and denied, but fully accepted, will never become harmful. To the degree they are seen,
faced, and admitted, such feelings will diminish in intensity and must sooner or later convert into
flowing, life-giving energy. Hate will turn into love, cruelty into healthy aggression and self-
assertion, stagnation into joy and pleasure. This is inevitable.
What I say is no mere theory. Many of you have experienced this conversion of emotions
whenever you chanced to hit upon the right blend of self-acceptance. But you have to grope for this
realization again and again until it becomes second nature and is no longer forgotten. When you
blindly and self-righteously act out destructiveness, you do express evil. By denying its existence,
you stagnate vital creative energy, which putrefies in you. By squarely recognizing the evil, you
neither act it out, nor deny it. This releases your creative energy flow.
Pride, selfwill, and fear are all forms of denial and are therefore more dangerous than the evils
they deny. My friends on the path have experienced how true this is: To the degree evil is properly
faced, self-acceptance, self-liking, new energy and deeper love and pleasure ensue. But pride,
selfwill, and fear make this healing attitude impossible. Selfwill is too bent upon its own insistence
that it is unwilling to accept present reality. It wishes to be already in a higher state of
consciousness; it wants to be better than it is now. But it fails because it is impossible to grow out
of something one is too self-willed to admit. Selfwill creates rigidity and rigidity is contrary to the
flow of life. Selfwill says, "I do not accept reality as it is now; it must be my way, and I insist that it
is." This attitude makes admission of the momentary truth impossible.
Pride says, "I do not want to have such ugly traits in me." Truth, however, requires both
flexibility and humility. It also requires courage. Fear assumes that acceptance and
acknowledgement of the ugliness will make this ugliness overwhelming. So fear also denies the
justified faith in the benign order of Creation. If truthful admission of what truly exists would mean
doom, annihilation, danger, chaos, the logical sequence of this assumption would then be that the
world is built on deceit, pretense, negation. Even though such thoughts are hardly ever actually
articulated, for they are senseless, many individuals unwittingly build their lives on these
assumptions. Their attitudes express this underlying life-orientation.
To give up selfwill does not diminish the free spirit of self-expression. Neither does it
diminish your genuine dignity when you give up the pride that hides the evil. Evil does not
overwhelm and take you over when you choose to abandon the fear of it. Quite the contrary is true
on all these counts.
It is never a destructive impulse itself that presents the real damage and harm, but always the
attitude toward it. This is why people who incorporate and accept their negative aspects find to
their immense surprise the contrary of their apprehensive expectation: their self-respect and self-
liking will increase.
So this is, my friends, what you have to learn. A lot of ground must still be covered by every
one of you, even though the words sound all too familiar. So far you are nowhere near actually
putting these words into effect. The more you do, the more joy will increase in your life, the more
instrumental you will become in shaping your fate -- not through ego control but through your real
capacity to create with the life-energy at your disposal. The key is learning to encounter the
destructive force so that you can transform it back to its original nature, thus incorporating it into
your whole being.
Are there any questions?
QUESTION: As this lecture says, there are things in me that I feel are wrong, evil. Yet I
enjoy them; they feel pleasurable. But I feel guilty. For instance, I overspend money. I negate that
aspect of myself completely. Can you help me?
ANSWER: This is a good example. I hope to hear many more personal problems like this, so
I can help you specifically with them.
Now, what you describe is so typical. You negate everything about your destructive impulse.
You are thus confronted with an insoluble predicament: either you give up all pleasure connected
with overspending and irresponsibility in order to become decent, mature, realistic, self-responsible
and safe, or you take pleasure from the negative trait but at the tremendous cost of guilt, self-
deprivation, insecurity, and fear of not being able to run your own life.
Once you see that behind the compulsion to overspend and be irresponsible is a legitimate
yearning for pleasure, expansion and new experience, this predicament will cease to exist. In other
words, you must incorporate the essence of this wish without acting out the destructiveness of it.
You will then have much less difficulty putting the wish into effect in a realistic way that will not
defeat you in the end. You are now stuck in battling with one of these typical either/or problems.
How can you really want to give up irresponsibility if responsibility implies living on a narrow
margin of pleasure, and confining your self-expression? Since you do not really want to give up the
irresponsibility, you feel guilty. Thus you reject that vital part of you which rightfully wishes to
experience the pleasure of creation at its fullest, but does not yet know how without exploiting
others and being parasitic. If, however, you can fully accept the beautiful force striving for full
pleasure underneath the irresponsibility and value it as such, you will also find how to give it
expression without infringing on others, without violating your own laws of balance. You will not
have to pay the needless cost of worry, anxiety, guilt, and inability to manage well. You only pay
that when you sacrifice peace of mind for a short-lived pleasure.
The pleasure will be deeper, more lasting, and totally free of guilt when you combine its
rightfulness with self-discipline. If you can reconcile desire for pleasure with self-discipline and
responsibility, you will express the inner knowledge that says, "I want to enjoy life. There is
unlimited abundance in the universe for every contingency. There is no limit to what is possible.
There are marvelous things to be experienced. There are many beautiful means of self-expression. I
can realize them and bring them into my life if I can find another, not self-destructive way to express
and obtain them. The very need for self-responsibility and self-discipline in their most profound
sense will make increasing joy and self-expression possible. Without these traits, I must remain
deprived and in conflict." The discipline will be much easier to acquire, the willingness to do so will
grow, when you know that you have a perfect right to use it for the purpose of increasing pleasure
and self-expression.
My dearest friends, I have given you new material that requires a great deal of attention. Bring
it to bear on your own specific situation. Opening up your innermost being to applying this
material. Do not apply it only theoretically, in general terms, but see really where you deny what is
in you out of fear and guilt, thereby paralyzing the best in you.
To those of you here who are discouraged and feel hopeless about yourselves, I can say only,
you are in illusion and error when you feel that way. Realize this and ask for the truth, which is that
there is no reason for hopelessness, and difficult periods need only to be understood and worked
through to make them stepping stones for opening your lives further and bringing more light and
self-expression into them.
Receive the love and blessings, my dearest friends, be in peace.