Understanding Evil
things you may not want to hear
I have spent much of my life trying to understand evil, both human evil and the more demonic forms as well. Some may say there is nothing to know. It just is, and we’re stuck with it. But I have spent long hours reading the works of theosophists, philosophers, psychologists as well as the perspectives of the Bible, psychic mediums, and channelers. It is complex, and important, and fundamentally wrapped around the truth of our existence. You may or may not like the answers I provide, but I hope you consider my words and choose to believe or not. It will be a happy ending, I promise, but nevertheless… proceed at your own risk. 💙Pernoste
Endless
Called by the yearning sky, I struggle to hear, but I disbelieve the voices. I drift between helplessness and fighting my way free, … not wanting to fight. The uninvited hours are endless, yet too fast, demanding of me everything. Though I rejoice, I yet grieve, the battles with evil, the parts of me I have lost and some things I find… Still, I’m called again by the yearning sky, and I learn there’s more than just endless.
by Pernoste
Have you ever thought about Evil?
Of course you have. What human being in his or her right mind hasn’t thought about evil, or considered the possibility that they have encountered evil in some way. I’m talking about the whole range of evil, from people who joyfully, deliberately and knowingly hurt you, to violent criminals who kill people or harm them grievously, to psychopathic murderers immersed in their own inner hatreds, to demons, and, lastly, to the Devil.
Does the Devil cause all the evil in the world, or do we even need to blame the Devil for the troubles we’ve brought?
Of course, early psychologists wanted to paint humans, in their expected way, as born without any moral framework. Are we born with the full potential for evil? Psychologists early on suggested that people developed morals and goodness in stages in their lives, first from simply avoiding acts that lead to punishment, then to internalizing moral social standards of the day, and finally developing and acting on their own personal set of moral principles. Maybe this was more about the self-importance of psychologists than in understanding the truth.
The truth is, though, that we are born good.
Didn’t need a psychologist to realize this, but in studies involving the earliest testable ages of children, babies have been shown to have a preference for good people and not bad people.
It appears to be an innate thing in humans from birth. Goodness.
Human Evil
But other psychological theories of human evil may make some sense.
· One is that the elevating of a major moral principle into something sacred is what can lead to evil, i.e. there is a dark side to moral conviction. Think the atrocities associated with communism, fascism, religious fanaticism etc…
· Or perhaps evil is best described by another concept that the perpetration of terrible actions is a reaction to inner woundedness, leading to harm to others. Abusive parenting is a prime example of this, often an “inherited” trait, sadly.
· A third theory is that evil is a form of narcissistic autism, caused by parental abuse and neglect, making one domineering and selfish and unable to empathize with the pain of others. Some world leaders, politicians, and ultra-rich powerful people come to mind.
· Lastly, a fourth theory is that everyone, even ordinary, “good” men and women can be induced into behaving in “evil” ways with the influence of some negative social pressure or challenge. I think of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment in 1971.
Yes, sadly, there are precedents for all these things, and probably these are all true to some extent.
Of course, as expected, biological neuroscience research suggests that moral behavior involves the same types of reasoning, emotion, and motivations that people use for any other decisions in their daily lives. That means that people may actively decide to be bad. And people are easily capable of thinking around cultural standards and laws, meaning it is not necessarily culture and laws that keep us under control.
Full Evil may be a different matter though, a glitch in one’s biology, a dysfunction, or an inability to understand or experience goodness.
I believe these may be true, as well.
Demons and the Devil
When one considers evil, however, you can’t exclude demons and the Devil, can you?
I remember, as a child, the cartoons in which the character has an Angel on one shoulder and the Devil on the other. Each vies for power and authority in guiding your decisions. As a spiritual person myself, I can’t deny that there may be positive and negative spiritual influences around us. It is the central core of belief for prayer, for spiritual beliefs, for the Bible.
So is it like many of us learned at a young age, that Angels fell from heaven to become the demons and Satan himself? Is life truly a battle between good and evil, with Satan plotting with his legions of the damned to corrupt our souls?
I am a Christian, but not in the conventional sense, that is I don’t believe everything in the Bible as literally written, and many of my understandings rely on additional sources. I also understand that mortal humans edited and translated and shaped the messages in the Bible for the purposes of controlling the masses.
My spiritual beliefs tell me that God (you can call the Creator, God, the Universe) is inherently good, and created everything…. is everything.
So could God have created evil and the defective Angels who lusted for power and for the daughters of men? I don’t believe any of that. That is a human story trying to understand divine mysteries from the perspective of the lives of men and women. I’ll explain why I believe this in a brief summary of a clever argument I’ve heard that, I think, captures a fundamental truth.
Does cold exist? You would say yes, probably. Yet, it only exists as an experience, not as a thing, in itself, for cold is merely the absence of heat. Heat exists, not cold.
Does evil exist? You may say yes, or at least acknowledge that “evil” things happen. I say no. It is when we fall away from God (or from the innate goodness within us) that evil may flourish. God exists, and evil is only the absence of God.
The things you don’t want to hear
This is the part where I discuss a lot of things that people won’t believe or don’t like at all. That’s OK. I’m not asking you to believe anything. I trust you to walk away from this, thinking as you wish to think. Maybe you can chuckle at my foolishness, or maybe you can marvel at my insights.
I will take credit for the first, but not the second.
Everything within this article is a consolidation, a synthesis. It’s a work in progress, from lifetimes of considering, of reading, of research, of experience, of meditation. It is a distillation of the important things I understand to be true, standing as well as I can upon the shoulders of enlightened Souls, committed Channelers, Spiritual researchers, my own Spiritual Guides, and my own inner Knowing.
As I’ve said before…. I think too much.
Firstly, I must say that multiple lives, deaths and rebirths (Reincarnation) are an important consideration with regard to understanding Evil. If you have patience, I can explain.
I am a believer in reincarnation, the systematic cycle of birth and rebirth that we experience, to grow as souls. This is something that has been seen and experienced by those who have crossed over prematurely and returned, something that has been revealed in the memories of young children. Researchers have devoted their lives to studying reincarnation and using children’s memories of previous lives, with confirmation of details they couldn’t possible know. [I recommend reading about Dr. Ian Stevenson and his life of reincarnation research.]
The Big Questions:
· Why are we born, over and over, into this place, God’s creation, to experience good things and evil things?
· Why do some good people have such bad lives and some bad people live wealthy and powerful lives?
· Why do children die tragically?
· Why must we suffer psychopaths, murderers, pedophiles, rapists, thieves, abusers, anger, and hatred so much in life?
· Why not just one life?
· What exactly are we learning? Why not just good things?
· Why must we experience evil?
Yes, God moves in mysterious ways, and maybe we will never completely understand. But this is not a satisfactory answer.
I too, had difficulties with these concepts when I was younger, but consider this.
If you are born and reborn, over and over, then you don’t actually die. You are an immortal soul. This means that the place you are now is likely not your home, but some place you go.
There are a couple of analogies that may suit:
1. Our world is a school, in which we advance life by life rather than grade by grade.
2. Our world is like the Theatre, and we are the actors taking on many different roles over many different lives.
We are either young students or new actors, learning our ways. Personally, I prefer number 2, which captures more fully the concept.
So where is evil in all this? I’m getting there.
First, there are some concepts that I must capture for you regarding learning.
CONCEPTS IN LEARNING
How do we learn best? I would say a supportive environment, strong and smart teachers, and stressful challenges, and tempting distractions to overcome (to test our mettle), generally provide the best way to learn. There must be self-motivation to learn, and a willingness to work hard, even through difficulties. Time is important, as well, as one of the pressures that keeps us on our toes and moving forward.
In contrast, if you were learning in a very soft environment, with no pressure and guaranteed success (good grades), no matter how you perform, most people probably wouldn’t be motivated to learn much at all, except those few things that are really interesting for them.
So would you be surprised that reincarnation is the fundament of this school of learning we know as the Earth. The world is perfectly, and painfully, set up to get us to learn as deeply and quickly as possible. Even Time is an artificial construct created for us at this stage of our spiritual existence. [I’ll write more on that another time, haha.]
Many of us have gone through hundreds, or a thousand, lives. Others may be relatively new here. Each one of us works with our Spiritual advisors to decide which life and life experiences we will have in each incarnation, before we born. To re-state, we are ultimately responsible for all the things, good and bad, that happen in our lives.
“I didn’t ask for this. I would never ask to suffer like this,” you might say.
The world is a mirror, reflecting back upon us those things that we have decided to learn in this life. And we will often be hit by the same challenges and problems over and over again, until we wake up and figure out how to change. We may even face very similar lives, over and over again, to learn these lessons or to explore different responses to our experiences.
This is the hard part to internalize for anybody who has experienced harrassment, or hardship, or lost a loved one, or suffered at the hands of evil. It doesn’t seem fair, and it’s not. But remember, life is not what you think it is. You are an immortal soul playing a role for which you are prepared.
If you take a role in a play, and you die in that play, you don’t really die. If another character in the play dies, you will see them backstage after the show. It is much like our lives. We live in a very long play, taking on many roles (lives), learning many perspectives perhaps, as an individual, a parent, a child, a spouse, and grandparent. We also learn that at some times we are the tyrant, the fool, the genius, the thief, the teacher, the benefactor, the abuser, and the abused. The difference (as compared to the Theatre) is that we live behind the “Veil of Forgetfulness” (making us a blank slate for each life) and have “Free Will” (each life free to make choices toward the good or the bad).
In the end, although it seems so long here, on the other side it is not like a long time at all. There is no such thing as Time, after all.
LIFE CHOICES: GOOD AND EVIL
We are reincarnated in groups, often overlapping with each other through multiple lives. You will be a woman, a man, hold many professions, have many deaths, and you will not only be the leading actor or actress in your life, but you will also be the bit player or the antagonist or the co-star in other people’s lives. You may also agree to explore the negative side of things. Some of this is dependent on your evolving polarity toward the dark or the light.
The dark is ultimately a spiritual dead end, but it is still a path that can lead to a certain type of growth. The end goal of our teachings, however, is to ultimately be on the path aligned with good, and with God.
Few choose the dark path for long, but there are some. Many explore a little bit of the dark side just to understand persecutions they may have experienced in other lives. It may shock you to know that you may, in some other lives, have agreed to take on a negative role. Indeed, we accept, at times, to be the hard lesson for others or even take on a larger role as a bad guy.
I hate thinking this at all, but there are times when we agree to be born into a life with severe psychological problems or a violent streak or alcoholism or drug addiction. In these lives we may commit many terrible acts. We do these things for each other to create the right balance of dark and light for spiritual learning of others. Perhaps, other times, highly negative souls are used in this manner instead. These are ones that choose the dark path.
But here is the most surprising thing of all. Although demons and devils actually do exist in some fashion, they are not created by God. They are created by us, by the human collective consciousness. Some negative souls know this, and they master the use of the collective consciousness to create demonic beings to help them to acquire power and wealth, while they also stifle the good souls in the world by creating misery to take our spiritual energy.
LESSONS FOR A NEW WORLD
So, what are we trying to learn here? To be Good? To get rid of our dark side? I don’t think it’s that simple, nor is there a value judgment regarding learning. We are just here to learn the limits and limitlessness of our souls. And our Angels coordinate all of this, putting lessons (and also helpers) in our path along the way. In the long run, as we all grow and learn, Evil will cease to matter, and it won’t survive.
What can you do in life to progress and learn better? Importantly, you need to start looking at adverse events in your life in a different way. Naturally, you need to react as you will, feel the grief or anger or sadness, but you also need to ask yourself, “If I’m supposed to learn from this experience, what is it I am to learn?”
As an example, I had difficulties in dealing with authority, which created problems at times professionally as a scientist. I repeatedly was harrassed and belittled by bosses even though I was always a high performing and very creative scientist. Finally, I decided to change how I thought about my bosses, and I stopped rebelling against authority, working toward being more collaborative and supportive in my interactions with my bosses.
Magically, all my problems with bosses dissolved once I realized I needed to pay more attention to working within my job hierarchy, understanding not only what I do but how I fit into the larger collective of my job. Basically, I was the one not respecting the needs of my bosses to be a part of guiding my work. From my perspective, I thought I was just trying to show independence and to not be a burden to my boss. I was wrong.
This is how Karma works, you will keep facing things about yourself until you deal with them. Once you do, Karma will bring other things your way to better understand and address.
How does one deal with experiences with evil, in particular?
It’s not easy to deal with terrible situations, of course, but minimally it can be an opportunity to learn lessons in taking better control of your life (not to blame yourself but to be smarter to avoid such situations), or to learn to open yourself more to friends and family for support (dealing with the aftermath), or to realize your strength of mind and spirit in weathering challenges, or to reconcile a past or past life in which you committed such evil against somebody (understanding the pain of such evil actions in your heart). Getting lost in the trauma and grief for too long and not doing such thinking and learning will stand in your way.
We each have Angels looking over us, and sometimes bad things that happen prevent worse things that would happen without the lesson. Sometimes the lessons learned will change the nature of our next life, eliminating an important lesson that has remained unlearned for many lives.
In time we will all step into our birthright as creative souls, capable of wondrous things. But until then, we do not consciously control our creative powers, and we create the things of our collective nightmares, our biases, our hatreds, and our judgments. This brings them to a certain form of life, with their ability to affect those susceptible to them.
This means that the biggest lesson in life, is to be kind. Be forgiving. Think as much with your heart as you do with your head. Be kind when you don’t need to be. Stop judging those around you or pretending you understand somebody because of their political beliefs or religion or race. We all, each one of us, have a beautiful soul that is so much bigger than anything.
As we evolve, live more in our hearts, so will the bad things (and even evil) disappear. Living in kindness will one day change the world.
Thank you so much for reading. I hope you decide to read some of my other solo and collaborative philosophizing and poetry here and on Medium. 💙Pernoste
Defining Spiritual Faith in a Life of Distraction
Insights from a Scientist with a Poet’s Soul
Words of Wisdom from an Alien (includes my occasional co-author)
Introduction to Pernoste & Dahl (includes my occasional co-author)
Joy Enough in the Little Finger (by my occasional co-author)
