Part E: What I believe
The devil is none other than the will turned away from God. When the will turns from the One, it becomes its own devil. —Meister Eckhart
I’ve marked this part off, and I should say what the mark means, because the obvious reading is wrong. It doesn’t mark a change of subject. Everything here is on the same road as everything before it, further along, and I got there by looking the way you looked in Chapter 1, for longer and with help. What it marks is that I can no longer give you a way to check what I’m saying. I can’t take you there from here. Up to now every claim came with a way to check it, in your memory or on the street. From here the checks run out, and what’s left is the road itself, which is practice, not pages. So the limit is on the book, not on you. If you look and don’t find what I describe, that’s a finding, the same as in the interlude, and it counts. Nothing practical in the book depends on this part, and Part F stands on its own.
14. What remains
In section 12 I said that what’s left when the hiding is removed is care, and I derived it from the fact that you can’t give a stranger that look without first talking yourself into it. That derivation gets you the existence of the thing. It doesn’t get you its size, and its size is the part I can’t derive.
What I found was not a quality I possess. It was not proportioned to me at all. Take away the pride and the shame and the fear—everything that had been doing the hiding—and what remained was not a better version of me. It was not a version of me. The traditions call it the Light, and every word I have for it is worse than that one. It isn’t something you have. It’s what’s there when nothing is being turned away from.
Goodness is simply what remains in the absence of self-deception. Nothing has to be added.
You already know how to find it. Think again of the second stranger: the absence of a story, the cleanness, the sense that he was serving something larger than himself and that you wanted to serve it too. Not because you calculated it. It was just obvious. Or think of the one person who saw the good in you when you couldn’t see it yourself. That’s what you can be for someone.
It is not nice. Kindness, in this sense, can be fierce. It can even be violent, if that’s what a situation requires. Its only defining characteristic is that it’s free of self-deception: it doesn’t misperceive evil as intrinsic to anyone, and so it’s incapable of contempt. It goes after the confusion, not the confused being. The Dalai Lama’s version: if someone is trying to shoot you and you have a gun, shoot back. Just never out of malice. We’ve been taught to picture compassion as the soft option, the thing you do instead of fighting. That picture is one of the darkness’s better pieces of work. It doesn’t have to stop you from being compassionate. It only has to make sure that when you reach for the word, you find something limp, so that the real thing—fierce, clear, incapable of contempt—has no name left, and can’t be remembered. This is what I said in section 12 the book has to give back. Not a new idea. The thing you were recognizing in the second stranger, and in whoever it was that once saw the good in you.
And just as the parasite in me handshakes with the parasite in you, so does this. When someone confronts you cleanly, something in you flickers in recognition, like being reminded it has a partner in a fight it thought it was fighting alone. You may stay enemies on the surface for a long time. Underneath, something else is happening.
I saw this from both sides in the experience I described in Chapter 2. I was shown myself drifting, further and further from the thing I’m describing, trusting the counterfeit more with every step. And I was shown how the people around me responded: most grew more contemptuous the further I went, as I’d done in their shoes. But a handful never did. They made it completely clear that what I was doing was unacceptable and that they’d stop it, and equally clear that they would not hand me over. They weren’t refusing to let me misbehave. They were refusing to let the parasite have me. That’s the difference the book is about.
Mine isn’t the only account of this. A stranger on a forum, after a large dose, fixed on a news story about a child burned alive to clear land, and found what I found: “the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity.” I didn’t write that, and I could have. It isn’t evidence for anything in this book, only a second witness to the experience the book came from.
You have already had moments of this yourself. Moments you helped when nobody knew. Moments you confronted someone fiercely while seeing them as confused rather than evil. Moments you knew—not thought, knew—that something was right, and it cost you, and you did it anyway. Recall them, and notice whether they felt different from everything else.
15. What you are
Sections 6 and 9 stopped at what you can check: a group can be in one trance, and you can feel it from the doorway. I couldn’t say there what I think that is. Here it is.
I’ll start with what happened in the experience from Chapter 2, and I’ll be careful to call it what it was: a perception, not a conclusion. What struck me hardest wasn’t the darkness. It was that it fit together. My darkness and my enemy’s weren’t two things that happened to collide; they interlocked, as though made for each other, each move of mine supplying exactly what his needed. And it did not feel like a pattern I was noticing. It felt like being looked at. Like recognizing a face I’d seen before, and having the distinct sense that it had been recognized before, by other people, who had named it.
I can’t give you that. Nothing in this book is harder to pass from one person to another, and anyone who tells you a perception like that counts as proof is doing what the book warns about. What I can point out is that every tradition that has looked hard at this ended up personifying it. Mara. Satan. The Accuser. That convergence is weak evidence at best, and it’s what you’d expect from human minds that see agents everywhere. I’m including it because the alternative—quietly presenting my metaphysics as an inference from the locker room—would be worse.
One absence
So here is the step past what the opening said. There, I told you that billions of parasites cooperate so well they behave like one thing. That’s as far as you can check. What I actually think is that they aren’t many things cooperating. They’re one absence, showing up in many places.
That’s less strange than it sounds. If there really were eight billion separate darknesses, a locker room falling into step would be a small miracle, and you’d expect it to take some doing. It takes none. And there’s a plain reason: there’s only one thing being turned away from. The same faculty is in every one of us; it’s the one that recognized itself in the stranger’s eyes. So there’s only one way to turn away from it. Every shadow in a valley points away from the same sun. Nobody coordinates the shadows. They’re one absence in many places, each cast by the same light, which is why they line up. That’s the sense in which “the Devil” is one. And it’s the sense in which the parasite is nothing: there is no creature. There’s a hole where the light should reach, and it’s the same hole everywhere.
One light
Which leads to the other half, about the light. There is one thing, looking at itself through countless eyes, pretending it isn’t. When you look at “others,” you are looking at yourself. The nondual traditions have said this for a very long time, and their argument is simpler than people expect: try to find anything that would tell two consciousnesses apart. Not two bodies, not two sets of memories—two awarenesses. There’s nothing there to use. Everything you could point to is content, and awareness is what the content appears in. Two of them would have nothing in them to differ by, which is the same reason two turnings-away have nothing to differ by. I can’t show you that this follows from anything above. I can tell you that you’ve tasted it: when you felt gratitude toward someone who helped strangers you’ll never meet, or gave to something that could never benefit you. When a story about being every person who ever lived landed somewhere real.
One piece of evidence
One piece of evidence, with its objection attached. Roy Baumeister took single incidents and collected two accounts of each: one from the person who did it, one from the person it was done to. The accounts differ in the same directions every time—how long it went on, who provoked whom, how bad it was. In ordinary people, not liars. Both are honestly reporting a world, and the worlds don’t match. The objection: Baumeister could only show that because there was a fact of the matter to check against, so there is a shared world, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I think is narrower. There’s a shared world and there is no shared seeing of it, and we act as though the second follows from the first—so anyone who reports seeing differently must be lying or defective. That assumption is what turns a difference in seeing into a verdict about a person. Most of what we call irreconcilable is that.
And I think this is also what conscience is. It’s why you know something is wrong without being able to say what’s wrong, and why the knowing never budged when you argued with it. The turning-away leaks into the world because you are the world, and it has nowhere else to go. That’s why calling it “unconscious”—tucking it away, out of the universe’s sight—never quite convinced you. There’s nowhere to tuck it. The world can see it because you can see it, because you are it. In the experience from Chapter 2, the idea that I could hide anything at all was seen to be ridiculous. So why bother trying?
Where the fear comes from
This is where the fear from section 13 comes from. The whole thing begins with a fear that makes no sense: the fear of having left what you are. Of having separated from God, Love, the Source—whatever you want to call it. Having lost apparent contact with absolute goodness, you go looking for it in the relative, which in practice means finding someone worse than you. Contempt is the search for your own goodness in the wrong place. That’s why it never satisfies and always needs one more. The clearest statement of this I’ve found is Kenneth Wapnick’s reading of A Course in Miracles: the ego is nothing but the belief in separation, and its one strategy is to keep the guilt “out there.” I got here by a different road. I’ll say where the roads meet.
What follows
If any of that is true, a few things follow, and they’re the things that decide how you live.
You cannot pull a fast one over the world, because you are the world. Every act of hiding is itself what darkens it. Exploiting nature cannot work, however cleverly it’s done, because we are nature. Not as a metaphor. And this is where the question from section 8 lands: whether the not-looking goes all the way down to how we see matter. I think it does. We see reality as a lifeless collection of stuff over which we hold dominion—resources, objects, purposeless matter following meaningless laws—and that is the cold form of turning-away applied to everything at once. Contempt for a person and contempt for all of it are not received as different things by the part of us that receives them. I can’t verify that for you. I can only tell you that from where I stood, they were the same act.
The sharpest form of the claim, the one that makes it metaphysics rather than sociology, is a sealed room. Nobody watching, nobody ever told, no consequences of any kind. You crush an insect, not by accident, but for the small pleasure of it. On any account where this spreads by being witnessed and copied, nothing happened.
I don’t think nothing happened. I think it propagates anyway—not through a channel I’m failing to name, but because there is nowhere for it to go that isn’t already you and already everything. That is unfalsifiable and I’m marking it as mine. What I’ll say for it is that you have a reaction to the sealed room, and the reaction isn’t neutral. We’ve all done the version nobody saw. It didn’t feel like nothing, and the explanation that it should have felt like nothing has never once convinced the part of you that was there.
Everything you do makes a difference, through networks of cause your conscious mind can’t trace, nudging things toward remembering or toward forgetting. This is why what you do when nobody is watching doesn’t fail to matter. Your private integrity bolsters the resolve of strangers you’ll never meet, at the moment they’re about to break. I can’t prove that. I’m reporting it as the thing that, if it’s true, makes it worth staying committed to your light at literally any cost. Not to your idea of the light, which is always contaminated. To the thing itself.
That’s also the definition of good I’ll be working with: whatever brings us closer to remembering what we are. Evil is whatever pushes us further from it. Which is why the greatest gift you can give the world is your own seeing. Until then, some part of you is reinforcing what you’re fighting. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just how it works.
16. The tree and the arch
Section 8 asked you to look at a living thing as inventory and notice what you had to stop doing. I want to push that one step further, and I’m putting it here, in the part marked belief, because the step goes past anything you can check. The check itself you can run, and I’ll try to make it a real one.
Somebody cuts down a tree that has stood for a thousand years, for fun, with no timber wanted and no land to clear. For the pleasure of it. Notice what you feel. It arrives the way the corpse case arrived in section 3: fast, wordless, immovable, and with no victim you could name. The tree has no conscience. Whatever you’re registering, it isn’t that it could have objected.
Now take the life out entirely. Somebody takes a hammer to the Delicate Arch, the stone span in Utah, and brings it down for the pleasure of watching it fall. People would be livid. Ask them why and you’ll get a story: other people won’t get to see it now. The feeling arrived before the story.
The timing doesn’t prove what I’d like it to. Rarity, beauty, and the loss to everyone who’d have stood under it may be part of what the feeling is made of, and those register fast, before any words, without being afterthoughts. And the hammer gives you a man to react to; some of what you feel may be about him. So vary it, and watch what changes. The arch falls on its own one night, nobody’s fault. Less? Different? Now a formation just as beautiful that nobody has ever seen, in a canyon nobody will ever enter, and you’re the one with the hammer, and no one will ever know. Now you learn afterward that the one you saw smashed was a replica and the real arch is fine. Notice which of these leaves the feeling intact and which drains it. If it survives the empty canyon, it isn’t about other people’s enjoyment. If it fades with the natural collapse and returns with the hammer, some of it is about the hand. Run them all. I’m not going to tell you what you found.
Here is what I found, and it’s the step I can’t hand you. The violation lands in exactly the place where the violation of a person lands. Up to now I’ve described the faculty as recognizing life, another center of experience with the same standing as mine, and that is its nearest and plainest form. What I believe is that at its deepest, it recognizes that reality is not other than whatever is looking at it, and that the arch, which has no experience of its own, is on this view not outside the thing that’s looking either. Contempt for the world is the same act as contempt for a person, aimed at everything at once. That’s why section 8 could ask you to check it on the living world with no metaphysics, and why this section can’t. From where I stood in the experience in Chapter 2, they were one act. What I can give you is the arch, and the variations. Run them, and notice that you didn’t need my metaphysics to feel any of it. You only need it if you found what I found.