Chapter 15: What It’s Made Of

This chapter is a first draft written entirely by Claude from Aditya's notes and key points, and he has not yet rewritten it in his own voice. If you only want his prose, skip to the section marked "Original material."

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular. —Carl Jung

Chapter 3 showed you the first two ways this hides: I have no darkness, and then I have some, and I’m using it strategically against real evil. Chapter 4 showed the third: the darkness convincing you it’s too horrible to face, so that you’ll keep it hidden, which is what spreads it. It shows you the second layer so that you’ll never suspect the third. You think you’re using it. It’s using you.

Here is what’s underneath all three. Chapter 1 asked why he needed you to be bad. The full answer, in my own case: every bone in my body needed to believe that the problems of the world were caused by something alien to me. Then I could look at what my contempt had made of my enemies and know, with total certainty, that evil was real and that it wasn’t me. And underneath that need was not, finally, a wish to be superior. That’s its shape. Underneath was fear: of being the one who deserves what I’m dealing out, of what I’d find if I looked. Nobody is innocent for wanting to stand above someone. Everybody is innocent for being afraid. The need fed on my fear, my pride, my insecurity, and it never once felt like any of those. It felt like clarity.

Now I have to say what the thing is made of, and I want to slow down, because it can be badly misheard, and the people most likely to mishear it are the ones with the most right to be angry with me. Some of you have met this at full strength. Not the stranger in the street. Something that watched you, learned what you loved, and went for that. Something patient. Something that enjoyed it. If you’ve been in a room with that, you know it wasn’t confusion and it wasn’t a bad mood. It had an appetite, and the appetite had you in view. If you haven’t met it at that strength, you’ve met it at a lower one: a bully, a boss, an ex, a parent who was working you. You changed tactics and they changed with you. That’s the stranger from Chapter 1, and nothing about the full-strength version is a different substance. It’s the same thing with more of a person behind it. I am not going to take that away from you. Everything you felt in that room was there.

Here it is anyway. I don’t think there’s a creature in there. Nothing requires that it be an agent. Everything requires that it function as one. It’s like a parasite in that it lives off a host, and the host is you: your intelligence, your perception, your certainty, your sense of what real evil deserves. It has no supply of its own. It’s unlike a parasite in that a parasite is a living thing, and this isn’t a thing at all. It’s what’s there where the light doesn’t reach.

Now hear how little comfort that is. Cold is nothing. Cold is the absence of heat; there’s no such substance, nothing to point at. And cold kills more people than fire. Nobody freezing to death has ever been consoled by the physics. Drowning is the absence of air. A hole in a hull isn’t a thing, and it takes the ship down with everyone aboard. Absences are not weaker than presences. And this one is worse than those, for a reason that matters. Cold doesn’t want anything. This does, or it does an impression of wanting so good that from where you’re standing there’s no difference. It aims. It waits. It reads you. It gets better at you the longer it works on you. All of that is real, and you felt all of it. It doesn’t supply any of it. You do, and so does the person it’s operating through. It has his eyes, so it can watch you. It has his intelligence, so it can plan. It has his patience and his memory and his read on what you love. Take a whole human being’s faculties, switch the caring off, and aim them. That’s what you met. Something with every capacity a person has and none of the restraint, which is why it looks more than human, not less. That’s why every tradition drew it with a face. It was wearing one.

And if it’s a costume, you’d expect to recognize it on more than one person. Check whether you do. Two people, years apart, nothing in common, and the same thing looking out. Not a similar personality. The same flavor, the same weight, arriving with a sense of oh, this again. If what you’re recognizing were a property of individuals, there’d be nothing there to recognize twice.

So this is what you have to hold, and it takes both hands. It isn’t real, and it has to be fought. Decide it’s a real essence and you’ll fight the person, which is contempt, and you’ve read what that does. Decide it’s harmless because it’s an absence and you’ll do nothing while it eats, and you’ll call your nothing compassion. Both hand it the win. A nothing that must be fought like a something, without ever being mistaken for a something. And there’s a payoff for holding it, which is the only reason it’s worth the trouble. If it were a real essence, it would be in the person, and the only way to end it would be to end them. Because it isn’t, there’s another way in. You can go after the absence and leave the person standing. That’s not a softer option. It’s the only thing that has ever removed any of this from the world.

Which means there is nothing to be ashamed of at the bottom, and shame was its last line of defense. The moment you can look without your worth being on trial, it has nothing left to work with. That’s why the medicine could show me what it showed me. It held me in something while it did. When darkness is exposed without that, we feel threatened and can’t look. Held, we can, and what we find is that it was never ours. That’s what the second stranger did for you, in miniature. It’s what this book is trying to do.