Resolving The Problem Of Evil

“Bring forth what is within you, and what you bring forth will save you. Do not bring forth what is within you, and what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Attributed to Jesus

After taking my seat on a lawn chair at streamside, I saw where the smell was coming from. A coyote had left a fresh pile of scat directly in front.

Coyotes are rarely seen in the narrow, three-mile long stretch of the park that runs through town, but having seen their scat before in wilder areas, there was no mistaking it.

They’re very smart animals, and this one was probably just marking territory. But did the coyote also sense something of a meditative presence left there, and feared the unknown like humans do?

Before I knew it, an hour and half had passed. As long as one can completely quiet thought through passive awareness gathering sufficient attention to ignite a spontaneous movement of negation, one isn’t lost and can bring the benediction.

At the peak of the meditation, when the mind had grown wholly still and present, a trio of river otters submarined by, heading upstream. River otters are as rare as coyotes in Lower Park, but here they were, totally adapted to the environment, as agile and fluid as the rippling stream itself.

At the same time, they also seemed out of place in the middle of town, with vehicles, bikes and people going by on the park road above the steep bank, just 15 meters away. Making out their rippling shapes below the surface in the shallow stream, I wasn’t entirely sure they were otters until one climbed out and sat on the base of a tree across from me.

Researching them when I got home, I learned that otters can be quite vicious. In a tour de force of anthropomorphism, one writer referred to otters generally as “necrophiliac, serial-killing fur monsters.” He added, “there comes a point at which rational people have to put adorable hijinks aside and recognize otters for what they are: disease-ridden, murderous, aqua-weasels whose treachery knows few bounds. They're merciless hellspawn who use their intellects for great evil.”

Such projection of the human condition is hilarious. But so successful has the 30-year philosophical and scientific project of blurring the fundamental dissimilarity between humans and the rest of nature, that it’s necessary to unequivocally state the obvious: there is no evil in nature except the darkness generated by the mind of man.

The problem of evil has vexed philosophers and theologians for millennia. From a direct confrontation with it in the former Soviet Union to a neighbor threatening my life because “you’re more than liberal,” I’ve encountered it to the point of boredom.

Evil metaphysically exists, and cannot be psychologized away. At the same time, seeing evil in supernatural terms has only been good for Hollywood.

The problem of evil has been irresolvable because of the belief in an omniscient God. For untold centuries people have asked, how could an all-knowing God whose essence is love allow evil to exist?

Let’s drop the childish belief in an omniscient deity, and begin to question the existence of darkness within us in the context of man’s evolution and alienation from nature.

When one sees that evil exists and operates beyond individual consciousness and control, one no longer fears it. We fear evil because we have externalized and supernaturalized it. But though the devil and demons are real, they are very human.

Evil is the cumulative, collective darkness of man, plus intentionality, flowing through self-ignorant conduits. That doesn’t deny individual responsibility; it heightens it, because one feels responsible for the totality of darkness within and streaming through one.

Darkness is the inevitable by-product of “higher thought” because humans are willfully or ignorantly self-centered instead of diligently self-knowing. Evil is the concentration of collective darkness plus intentionality, which pours through porous cells of individual consciousness.

In short, people make or allow themselves to be puppets of collective darkness. Even the most extreme conduits, like Putin, Trump and Netanyahu, are not the sources of evil, but marionettes acting out of collective darkness.

We are not individuals in the sense that society, at least western society conditions us to believe – separate, autonomous entities with “agency” conferred by free will. There’s no such thing as free will, because the will is never free. There’s another meaning to the word individual however, which relates to its root – an undivided human being.

Taking total responsibility for the darkness that exists within us, which is inseparable from the collective darkness of man, we grow as self-knowing human beings. We may not be able to change the world, but we are no longer conduits of collective darkness.

The closest to the truth of how evil operates that I’ve seen depicted on film is “Fallen,” with Denzel Washington. Though the movie lapses into theological mumbo-jumbo, the permeable nature of collective darkness as it passes through unaware people is portrayed with frightening accuracy.

The existence of darkness and evil is no great mystery to me, but the prevalence of it is. Things have gotten so bad in the world that cumulative, collective darkness now saturates human consciousness.

Sapiens is not incrementally progressing, becoming wiser and living more harmoniously on the earth and with each other, but becoming more fragmented as we continue to fragment the earth. And humans are inwardly dying en masse.

There is a remedy. To set aside knowledge and really feel, “I don’t know,” one is in a state of learning without accumulating. When we begin to non-cumulatively learn from facing, questioning and remaining with our own darkness (as hatred, fear, anger, etc.) we turn the tables on collective darkness, because the last thing Darkness wants us to do is to be self-knowing and learn from it.

My feeling is that if only a million people were non-cumulatively learning through self-knowing, it would spell the end of the rule of darkness and evil in human consciousness and the world.

Martin LeFevre

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