Martin LeFervre: How Evil Works, Part Two

We must rid ourselves of the illusion that we humans are evolving positively. It simply isn’t so that we are progressing as a species, except scientifically and technologically. But the need to believe it, and our Western conditioning (and perhaps the nature of thought itself) keeps convincing people, against all evidence, that ‘the light is overcoming the darkness’

Beyond our dimension, though inextricably part of the material universe and emerging from human consciousness, are beings that have become either synapses of light, or nodes of darkness. The former are not in conflict with the latter. They aren’t, in other words, two sides of the same coin--‘yin and yang,’ masculine and feminine.

With regard to questions about evil and the devil, we are in uncharted territory. So let’s keep things simple, and go step by step. Evil exists, and it has intentionality. It does not emanate from a single person, but from the darkness in human consciousness as a whole. Logically, that points toward malevolent entities in human consciousness. What are they, and how do they relate to the individual self?

To my mind the self is a node of darkness in the individual. Thought, requiring an organizing principle, probably needs a mechanism of a self in some way. But it is the implicit belief in the intrinsic separateness and permanence of the self that makes it a node of darkness. For anyone with a modicum of insight, these illusions lose their grip. And in the meditative state, the entire mechanism and content of the self dissolve in awareness, at least temporarily.

The unquestioned belief in the actuality and permanence of the individual self apparently congeals into extreme nodes of darkness-- collective selves that completely believe in their separateness, permanence, and superiority. We call them demons, and the top dog among them, the devil.

Even the individual self, however illusory, has great power. Many people live their entire lives in terms of it. How that can be is itself a difficult question, one with which neuroscientists are currently obsessed. Not with regard to the spiritual and philosophical questions of course, but how the brain constructs and maintains the illusion of a separate self.

And that raises the most difficult question of all: Given that the obvious locus of the material self is the individual brain, where do demons and the devil reside? Since essentially we all share same consciousness, are they simultaneously ‘wired into’ many human brains, connected together in an underlying way, and giving rise to the likes of the Bush/Cheney/Rove (now Rice) troika?

Or do they have single hosts at a time? (The mumbo jumbo of exorcism in the Catholic Church notwithstanding, possession happens.) Two of the most evil-impacted men in all history existed at the same time and fought each other—Hitler and Stalin. Given that the devil needs a living host, that would make these two extreme manifestations of evil the work of lesser demons, with Satan hiding somewhere else, pulling the strings.

Evil likes to play the trick of pitting one evil manifestation against the other, to generate more darkness. That is fundamentally what the ‘war on terror’ is about--the evil of the American government against the evil of al Qeda. That’s why even Barack Obama is wrong about the need “to stop fighting the wrong war is so that we can fight the right war against terrorism and extremism.”

Good does not make war against evil, since that would make it part of evil. People have had to fight the expressions of evil at times (the shaky moral scaffolding of ‘just war’ notwithstanding), but those times belong to the past. Treating terrorism as a form of international criminal activity is the only way ahead. Indeed, stripped of all the propaganda, it’s the way governments are operating.

Given that this is the way evil works, it does no good to kill individuals acting out of collective darkness. The evil manifesting through them merely migrates somewhere else in the web of human consciousness. If we are to prevail over evil, the darkness within nearly all of us has to be taken up and illuminated. That’s why self-knowing is absolutely necessary.

To reiterate, evil exists and has intentionality. It isn’t supernatural. Evil neither preceded humans where human consciousness is concerned, nor exists in some immaterial realm.

Evil bores me. The reason I pursue this line of questioning is because darkness and evil are suffocating the human spirit and destroying the spiritual potential of humanity.

I realize these columns raise more questions than they answer, but that’s fine, as long as some people start asking them.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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