For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes. … It is powerful because we have not recognized it. — The Gospel of Philip
Bring to mind the “bad people” of the world — the murderers, rapists, child abusers; the greedy bankers, hypocritical CEOs, corrupt politicians, etc. Don’t they seem fundamentally different from the rest of us — as though they are somehow intrinsically morally defective?
The truth is that the aspect of your mind that lets you believe this is precisely the same aspect that allows them to do what they do — and by giving in to it, you reinforce that same capacity in them.
Think back to a time when you skirted your conscience — that is, behaved in a way that went against your own deepest values, but convinced yourself it was okay. In that state, part of you knew perfectly well that you were doing wrong, but this knowledge was carefully hidden from conscious self-reflection, so that it didn’t feel wrong. All you consciously heard were your own clever justifications.
It is precisely this state that has enabled all the evil there ever was, from the tiniest act of unkindness to the most horrific atrocity — and any time any one of us engages in it, we strengthen that same capacity in everyone else. By its very nature, the vast majority of this behavior is hidden from our conscious minds. We only see the very tip of the iceberg.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. —Author unknown
Reflect on how it feels to mock and shame your enemies. Part of you knows that you are not fundamentally superior to them; that any harm they cause is the result of a kind of self-deception that you yourself are susceptible to. But this is nearly impossible to admit to oneself. Still, your enemy can sense what you’re really up to, making them see you as evil in response. This, in turn, convinces you that you were right about them: after all, only a fundamentally defective person could think that you are the evil one.
The darkness in your mind — the thing that allows you to hide from your conscience — secretly orchestrated this ruse. It telegraphed itself to your enemy while hiding itself from you, specifically to provoke their darkness in a way that would leave you both feeling righteous. It is like a secret handshake between your darkness and theirs.
Of course evil actions should be “judged” — so long as judgement simply means wise discernment. And appropriate action must be taken, even if it requires outwardly violent behavior. But we rarely leave it at that. The darkness in our mind usually finds a way to inject itself into our behavior in a way that we can plausibly deny. We weren’t provoking their darkness — we were fighting it!
But that’s what contempt is: our darkness leaking in a way that feels righteous. To be clear, this means contempt for people. Contempt for beliefs or behaviors can sometimes be wielded wisely. Mockery and shaming aren’t inherently wrong — but we almost always inject them with contempt, turning them vehicles of our darkness.
The hallmark of evil is that the perpetrator’s mind is shielding them from perceiving the life in their victims — be they other people, animals, or nature at large. There can be moments in life — such as in deep meditation, or on psychedelics, or near-death experiences — where we glimpse the full depth of depravity possible in a mind. It is a profoundly harrowing experience. There, we discover that it is exactly the same trick that has enabled our own contempt for others. Hating them is how we hide our own self-deception from ourselves, thereby ensuring that we never heal the one bit of darkness we actually have power over.
Nothing is more painful than being shown how I’ve been shoving my fellow beings deeper into the abyss while claiming not to know what I was doing — smothering their inner Light by pretending they don’t have any. Every bit of news that triggers my contemptuous outrage is actually a place where my own unkindness has leaked out into the world, enabling me to judge it from afar. Again, the key word is contemptuous — there is nothing wrong with outrage itself.
The darkness needs us to see ourselves as different and special — because once we do, the rest is all but guaranteed. Ironically, simply by seeing ourselves as fundamentally good people — in contrast to those who are fundamentally bad — we will necessarily license ourselves to engage in some subtly self-serving behavior that we will not recognize as such — and by doing so, secretly license those “bad people” to do the same. We then judge them for it, reinforcing the whole cycle without any awareness of our own complicity.
This is how the darkness spreads.
And no wonder, for even Satan masquerades as an angel of light. So it is not strange that his ministers also masquerade as ministers of righteousness. —2 Corinthians 11:14-16
The darkness in of all of our minds together behaves like a singular distributed malevolent entity. The Christians know it as the Devil, and the Buddhists call it the Ego. It is why some believe in an evil global conspiracy. It is the primordial conspiracy; the one to which all the rest owe their existence, and to which they all ultimately filter up. Every attempt to destroy it without being free of it ourselves only strengthens it, causing us to externalize it even harder, in a vicious cycle.
There is no substitute for evicting the darkness from your own mind first. Until then, you are always liable to run into this trap. We all think we would have been fighting the Nazis instead of being one of them — but to the degree that we can still feel contempt for them (or anyone else), we’ve got it backwards. That is the surest sign that we’re susceptible to going down a dark path ourselves.
The darkness is like a parasite — and like all parasites, it can be evicted. What lies underneath —what you ultimately are in your innermost being — is an infinite Love for all of Reality. Not a gentle, passive love, but a ferocious compassion that excludes nothing and forsakes no-one. It can manifest as fearsome wrath when necessary to protect the Whole, but its root is always Love; never malice or contempt.
This Love is all of Reality: One Life, peering through countless eyes, longing to come Home to itself; to remember itself. That is what you are — what everyone is — which is why your deepest longing is to be of service to the Whole. This is why any harm you cause others, or Nature herself, ultimately harms you; and why forsaking them ultimately only forsakes yourself.
To be clear: there are people whose infection runs so deep that naively “trying to see the good” in them can backfire. Thus, pretending to see their Light when you can’t, or believing they have none, both lead to tragedy. The only solution is to learn to actually see it — a capacity that awakens naturally as you unveil the Light within yourself. The more you do this, the more you are able to subdue their darkness without accidentally reinforcing it. A mind free of self-deception simply cannot feel malice, contempt, or self-righteousness, no matter the circumstances, because it sees where these inevitably lead.
I know this may all sound bizarre, but part of you recognizes this truth. Find that part of you and trust it above all else. Everything that distracts from this inner knowing; every justification for contempt or self-deception; every excuse to close your heart, is a whisper from the darkness. By remaining unwaveringly connected to this source of Good within, you not only heal yourself but contribute to the healing of the world – achieving far more in the true “fight against Evil” than all the cunning strategies your darkness could ever devise.
May all beings be free of suffering and its causes. Amen.