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way, because if there is only one reality, evil has no special power and no separate existence. There is no
cosmic Satan to rival God, and even the war between good and evil is only an illusion born of duality.
Ultimately, both good and evil are forms that consciousness can choose to take. In that sense, evil is no
different from good. Their similarity goes back to the source. Two babies born on the same day may
grow up to commit evil on the one hand and good on the other, but as babies it cannot be true that one
was created evil. The potential for right and wrong exists in their consciousness, and as the babies grow
up, their consciousness will be shaped by many forces.
These forces are so complex that labeling someone as purely evil makes no sense. Let me list the forces
that shape every newborn child:
" Parental guidance or the lack of it
" The presence of love or its absence
" The context of the whole family
" Peer pressure at school and social pressure throughout life
" Personal tendencies and reactions
" Indoctrinated beliefs and religious teaching
" Karma
" The tide of history
" Role models
" Collective consciousness
" The appeal of myths, heroes, and ideals
Every force listed above is influencing your choices and invisibly pushing you into action. Because reality
is tangled up in all these influences, so is evil. It takes all these forces for evil and good to emerge. If your
childhood hero was Stalin, you won t perceive the world as you would if your hero was Joan of Arc. If
you are a Protestant, your life would not have been the same under the persecution of the Huguenots as it
is in an American suburb today. Think of a person as a building with hundreds of electrical lines feeding
countless messages into it, powering a host of different projects. Looking at the building, you see it as
one thing, a single object standing there. But its inner life depends on hundreds of signals coming into it.
So does yours.
In and of itself, none of the forces feeding into us is evil. But under this menu of influences, each person
makes choices. I believe that any evil inclination comes down to a choice made in consciousness.And
those choices seemed to be good when they were made. This is the central paradox behind evil
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actions, because with rare exceptions, people who perform evil can trace their motives back to decisions
that were the best they could make given the situation. Children who suffer abuse, for example, frequently
wind up as adults abusing their own children. You would think that they d be the last ones to resort to
family violence, having been its victim. But in their minds, other, nonviolent, options aren t available. The
context of abuse, acting on their minds since early childhood, is too powerful and overshadows freedom
of choice.
People in different states of awareness won t share the same definition of good and bad. A prime
example is the social enslavement of women around the world, which seems totally wrong in the modern
world but is fed in many countries by tradition, religious sanction, social value, and family practices, going
back for centuries. Until very recently, even the victims of those forces would see the role of the helpless,
obedient, childlike woman as  good.
Evil depends completely on one s level of consciousness.
You can bring this message home by considering seven different definitions of evil. Which one do you
instinctively agree with?
WHAT IS THE WORST EVIL?
Seven Perspectives
1. The worst evil is to hurt someone physically, or
endanger their survival.
2. The worst evil is to enslave people economically,
depriving them of any chance to succeed and
prosper.
3. The worst evil is to destroy peace and bring about
disorder.
4. The worst evil is to entrap people s minds.
5. The worst evil is to destroy beauty, creativity, and
the freedom to explore.
6. The worst evil is often difficult to tell from good,
since all of creation is relative.
7. There is no evil, only the shifting patterns of
consciousness in an eternal dance.
The vast majority of people would probably choose the first two definitions, because physical harm and
deprivation are so threatening. At this level of consciousness, evil means not being able to survive or earn
a living, and good means physical safety and economic security. In the next two levels, evil is no longer [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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