Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth (V.v.18–27)
above: Sketch, Light and Darkness/ Lucifer and Ahriman; R.Steiner
Bluebeard. French educational card, late 19th or early 20th century.
Preface: Largely humming to myself as I do out here on the Sea of Tranquility: all still, all sand, just the odd speck of gold, I must today post a longer and more probing piece if I am to spin out the cogetations for the coming week. Scuse any theological overtones. It isn't a theistic piece. It's only sound in motion. Just enjoy the pictures otherwise.
Do not fear: Evil is only as wicked as evil does.
The devil wasn’t born yesterday. That much is clear. They say children are born innocent, but I think the Devil pulls a wry grin at that naïve hope, seated in the rocker beside the cradle, as he gives Rosemary’s baby another gentle push with the tip of his pirate boot. Just as there is no telling a man by his shoes anymore, there is little to go on but motherly intuition when it comes to telling how good a baby is. But if we only think in terms of a DNA check list this notion becomes absurd: as if all babies which are not chromosonally "alright", are not good and therefore evil.
In a dualistic world there is an either/or side to it,
but pointless to follow through on while we tend to condemn all that is not good. Good genes, can harbour evil intentions. And conditions set the blood well in advance to genetics. To think in terms of nurture is to get stuck on surmountable details (if only we try). The conditions meander and flood a far larger patch of time and space. Steaming down around us from the cosmic order.
Even more to the point, bad is good too. How else to know the divine or the spiritual side to life if not by contrast? The godliness, for which we need not be theist to recognise it, allows for evil. This is a very basic philosophical doctrine as "catholic"(original) as the Church Fathers. More exciting to me is the hope that more and more people will begin to sense that intangible reality that makes something grow and recognise it as the touchstone for Goodness. Or the miraculous in its geometrical and chemical composition (a piece of water/or chemical music).
If innocence is a state of ignorance, basically,
then evil lies along side it as something fairly innate as a negative potential waiting to bud. It is going to surface inevitably once you start to get to know yourself. And in that process will be pretty well contained. It is more a worry when you do not consciously face that music, which ought to sound pretty bad. But there is little accounting for taste with us hard of hearing species.
When you don't accept or understand the necessity of suffering and illness and overall dis-ease you are going to have a bad time of it. Evil is not necessarily meant to doom your fate, but raise you to meet your true potential. The rest is a matter of perception. This process might feel bad, or it might not. Evil people do not necessarily know they are evil, after all. The brave tend to grit their teeth and bear it (and maybe look a bit grimm for it). More often than not the bystander will fail to read on the face of it what intent underlies the work that is being done. One needs to build up special faculties of distinction, especially if one is to assist in this work (therapist, teacher, healer, correctional officer etc).
If we could get our heads around the general purpose of evil as a challenge to colour in the shadows that dance in the flames of your weak intent, as much as it is to temper the glare of the blaze, we might finally start to learn something about the full human potential.
We could start to make the most out of a less than optimal situation.
Sometimes we have to wait for winter when it snows, and the shadows turn green and purple in the sources of sun and reflective light. In summer, you will find the shadows like pesky flies around your lordship of the heart. We tend to call that a mid-life crisis. In the flood of attention (mass hysteria) we up the ante and may get the kind of evil we prefer to reserve the word evil for (something inhuman, but is it really that: non-human, alien to mankind? Hardly, or how would man be able to stand it and live it out?)
Evil is nasty at times, for real. It can come as a compact packet of Darkness or a repetitive pattern to drive you crazy. It can sit like a depression or fester like a canker. It can also be a bolt of lightning fizzing in your veins like an oversized line of coke. It is a manifestation of Karma, and as such a hindrance to the play of light: that there might be colour. To let your true colours shine through you need to become a good person.
Bear in mind, esoterically speaking, you could call anything not done well and wholeheartedly: poor or bad and consider it a landing pad for lesser demons - like microbes to a dish cloth. I certainly don't mean to conjure up anything too concrete with the word "demon", like science fiction lizzards and snakes with a thousand teeth. Although sometimes you may get a rough idea about other forms of consciousness (including evil) by studying a relatively more sophisticated film script or premise (Ex Machina, 2014, or the Matrix Trilogy, 1999-2003 and Life, 2017). Hitchcock's the Triffids did a pretty good job already.
How intentionally evil can a plant be? But we have already brushed upon the pivotal idea that evil is a lack of intention, precisely. So to vegetate is extremely dangerous. To compensate for one's shortcomings and insecurities, too. What esle makes a bully, and what else to call the cruel bullies on the school playground.... May we see, however, that evil and blame are not so easily cojoined at the hip, and we should be cautious to hold people fully accountable for their actions. The eye for an eye culture or rubbing your nose into it does little to speed up the evolutionary process of consciousness. It works like a culture-dish for the bacterium of evil.
The Zodiac by R. Steiner
Bad choices do not detract from good ones.
That is how objective one must try to be. It helps to think of evil not as something a person is but something a person does. It becomes very tricky, however to still not speak of an evil person after many heinous crimes have been committed, only they still love their dog..... Still, we must advance to the point when we can name the very disturbance within causing undesirable behaviour evil. Disorder becomes that landing pad. And to remedy must become to make a person whole. One cannot alter their dress for them and slip them back into for an all new and improved life. Life changes you act by act; it may take a life to transform evil into good;
but what I really would like you to see is that it could take a life of evil to transform anything at all for good.
In a nutshell: Christ (to name but one teacher/preacher, healer) encouraged people to spot the demons in themselves and if they came to him he'd pull them out without a fuss. Times change, and you now - largely - have to heal yourself, (no point seeking a faith healer) but we can still take his advice not to sit in judgement of others, and most certainly not cast any stones, for you are sure to break your own glass house if you do.
Good and evil were the fabric of his reality, as they are for you, and that's what he hoped to show and why referring to his supposed words makes for poetry. The poem reads: He was happy to be alive, He didn't mind meeting either good or bad along the way. It's all only life. He is I (hence capitalised in my book).
It is astounding that there is life,
and is the only Way we have. The Tao of good and evil are both walkers who have made it this far. For , indeed, I have crossed a bridge in my life, that makes entities out of pretty much all energies. Not the same as personification. It is hard to see it differently anymore. Once you are sufficiently an I-Am-That-I-Am (the most profound mystery) you cannot become any attribute so easily anymore. I am no longer good or bad or pretty or useless or lovely or even mother or daughter or friend or neighbour. Roles become jobs from 9-5, and do not call after hours. But this brings out the streams of consciousness with "lives" of their own. As live as wires. As conscious as the star disturbed by the flower you plucked (Thomas Traherne).
It's a coocoo life a lulu life
A moody magic voodoo life
A coocoo life for people who want to love.
"Crazy Life", Gino Vanelli
We wouldn't have to compare good and evil if we could cut straight to the chase and only speak of love. But we first have to bring evil down amongst the people and make it sit comfortably in you and me; where it is anyway. There it may show up as a lack or an excess; where more is no longer less, and good is no longer good enough. We have to embrace it as a living reality that exists where we fail to love.
Die Hohe Priesterin, II, Baphomet Tarot.
Evil is never abstract. Neither is goodness. These can only be experienced immediately. The exposition on evil, “The Devil” by Jeffrey Burton Russell is very lucid on this point. He personifies evil off the bat by identifying the Devil. Anthroposohpical science does the same, with Lucifer and Ahriman and the evil anti-solar Beast, Sorath, to name but the captains. In this vein, I perceive Autism as an entity, too. As such it coexists as a term for a neuro-cognitive, psychiatric impairment on a physical level.
As a modus, Autism is an enemy of man’s creative higher faculties, and a threat to his evolution as sapiens. It forms the disorder proper, but its main focus is to slip into our human program and pass for normal until societies have been reduced to automated, calculating systems which contain consciousness as in an anthill. Neatly organised, ever expanding, but remaining underground. Expansion is the work of brilliant engineering, but is it original enough and thereby creative enought to make it the hub for love? Or will it lead man into the valley of darkness as homo sapiens and out again as homo roboticus?
My own theory in practice
Between 3.33 and 6.29 I must have slept and it must have rained. Some conclusions are easy to draw. They follow a strict law of perspective. A linear one.
I wake to find an answer hovering overhead. I shuffle over to my noteblock and pencil and hold my breath, that I might not chase it away. This is a rare and shy bird of the night.
The notes I scribbled, half supine, are tricky to decode once I am seated at my desk with a breakfast tasse au chocolat.
In the wee hours of the night I strained myself to push the all too famiar Sisyphean rock up the ramp of my mount of self-loathing. I know its every crease and dimple. Its ridges and sharp angles, where it rolls less evenly. At its peak I pause for a moment of triumph which I know cannot last: the law of Sisyphus. This posting here, in an obscure corner of the universe, on this site which is not entirely a stub, and where free speech is encouraged (excuse me while I wipe my eyes for a minute. I am laughing not crying, but there is not much in it) is meant to force me to clear out my bottom drawers stuffed to the max. With each sheet I pull out it becomes a deliberation to burn or post. It sometimes seems like my left hand knows not what the right hand has done. But that splice must have something to do with being a Gemini. Or being on the verge of a split personality. Nah, I'm not that interesting. It seems to come with the terrain, if Merton is anyone to go by.
I have to sleep some more on whether to work out my notes farther and describe the seething anger that practically asphixiated me most of the night; the lack of respect; the little difference I have ever made, when it mattered most (the world hardly needs another chauvenist materialist) and as a mother I should have done more (to protect my soul and believe only in love as a beacon). I have to take down more notes on why my motherhood has been so futile, and everything my son has done he could have done without me, wasting my time instead, and now also robbing me of my words with this subject I cannot speak freely about.
It is not about my motherhood, nor about my son’s autism. But that’s the book in which I have to write down the rumours that I pick up on the nature of evil and how it is becoming consolidated in a gross forgetfulness (negligence) of the meaning of being human. How it is turning the milk of la tendresse humaine sour, in the colour of money.
I was much consoled to read that Thomas Merton says:
One or two who understand how to read the pictures of the birth we give to the lives we hold will suffice for me, too.
I understand already that only the oppressed can ever get as angry as I can get. And only they who have smacked freedom will ever feel that easily oppressed by something which should be contained behind the barrier of another personality. But I suppose also in motherhood I have gone a bridge too far. A life of freedom is not free of charge. Far from it. It easily costs you an arm and a leg and a back and a child. It doesn't free you of oppression and tyranny either. Some entities are extremely smart in vying for your attention (your energy their food). But if you are only good for love what else can you do?