Chapter 5: The Way Through
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How do you find the way back, then? Not with the tools you’d normally reach for, because the parasite is using them. It doesn’t only speak in my voice. It shapes what I see. I didn’t reason my way to my enemy’s being rotten; I looked at him and saw it, as plainly as the color of his shirt. That’s why no amount of thinking got me out. The mind I would have checked it with was the one it was running, and every argument sharpened the picture and made me surer I was seeing clearly. This is how decent people end up living in a world where the other side is simply evil, and why I’ve never seen anyone argued out of one. What got me out was never a better argument. It was someone who looked at me without the verdict, and the moments I caught the turn before the story arrived.
And it isn’t only about enemies. At the low grade Chapter 4 described, it’s my ordinary state, and it tints everything I see, the way tinted glasses do: after an hour you don’t see the tint, just a darker world. I don’t notice contempt; I notice that people seem a little slower today, the news a little stupider, the driver ahead a little more selfish. And the thoughts I’d use to check are tinted the same, which is why thinking my way out doesn’t work. That’s how most of us live.
The parasite borrows everything it uses. What it can’t borrow is the knowing itself, because the parasite is only that knowing’s shadow. So there is only one guide you can trust: the part of you that knows. There’s no test from outside for whether you’re hearing it. Being honest with yourself just means letting in what you already know, and only the part that knows can tell you whether you have. It’s also the very part you drift from, so the further you’ve gone, the more quietly it speaks. That’s why the way back so often begins with someone else’s help. The reasoning mind can serve that part but can’t replace it. The problem comes in when it convinces us it can. The part that knows whether our behavior is evil can’t prove it, and the part that can prove doesn’t know.
One trick the darkness uses to win is to get us to pin down what goodness is, to formalize it, so that we can act on it without looking. No rule for the good holds every time, because the good isn’t a rule. We can then obey the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit, and never suspect what’s happening. That’s what an ideology is, and I don’t mean a bad one. Every ideology began as care, written down so it could be carried. But anything written down can be obeyed while disconnected from the source of care, and you can’t tell, because the ideology feels like the care when you’re not looking. The problem was never following it blindly; nobody thinks they do. It’s that it can be followed without looking.
Care gets written down in a thousand ways, which is why moral codes differ so much across centuries and cultures. We then conclude morality is made up. But what differs is what people believe, and belief isn’t where the knowing lives. If your wrong in Chapter 1 went the way my contempt did, you believed your reasons and knew anyway. The reasons were wrong; the knowing wasn’t. A code can contradict that knowing, as the reasons did, without changing it.
None of this is against rules. Rules can express goodness and serve it, and we need them: a contract, a precept, a grievance procedure exist because people who were sure they had us fully in view didn’t. What a rule can’t do is contain goodness, or certify that the person following it is still turned toward anyone. That includes this book. Every check in it is a clue for looking, not a rule; followed without looking, it would be one more ideology.
The darkness can also work the other way. Instead of pinning the good down, it lets it go: who’s to say what’s good? You get to decide. That sounds like humility. Part of me knows it’s a sham, but can’t say how it knows, so I decide that part doesn’t know. The darkness never had to talk me out of the good. It only had to make it mine to define.
Caring is not knowing what to do. The guide tells you that others matter. It doesn’t tell you what to do. A person fully turned toward others can still be wrong about everything else, and make a mess. Knowing what to do is a separate thing, and unevenly distributed. What the guide gives you is the one stance that doesn’t feed the darkness, and the one stance from which wisdom has a chance. That’s also where the reasoning mind belongs: in service of the guide, it’s how care gets anything done.
Fighting someone with contempt and fighting them with integrity can both “work” if you only take into account first-order effects: stopping them or shutting them up. Some part of me knows that in one case I’ve left the world a better place, and in the other, a worse one. But that knowing cannot be admitted into evidence.
This scales. We have projects and agendas that are motivated by the self-serving part of us, and they create apparent good but hollow out the caring in everything they touch. Picture a venture that can prove, with numbers, that it does enormous good, run by people who treat their workers, their customers and the town it sits in as inputs. Beside it, picture a grandmother raising a child nobody else would take, who will never be counted anywhere. The venture’s good is on its spreadsheets. What it does to everyone it treats as an input isn’t, and neither is what the grandmother does. Which of the two is leaving more care in the world? My answer is the grandmother, and I can’t prove it.
One test for any plan for doing good, grand or small: does it need you not to look at what it costs here, now, because the good it does later will make up for it? It rarely feels like contempt. It feels like arithmetic: what my work does to a forest is fine, because a dollar of what I earn can plant two trees later, and I’ll surely donate it. The arithmetic is the side that argues. If the plan needs it, it isn’t coming from the part that cares, and it probably won’t do what its proof says it will. The cleverer the mind the parasite is running, the better the trap. In a brilliant person it can build something the whole world admires, and nobody will be surer of its goodness than the person who built it. That’s why the test doesn’t ask how good the plan looks; it asks what the plan needs you to stop seeing.
There’s one clue you can use today. When you’re acting from contempt, notice how sure you are that it’s good. In my experience the real thing doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t need to be sure. It’s what’s there when someone is fully in front of you, and you’re not sure of anything except that they matter. And as long as we’re sure that our enemy is bad—which is to say, rotten in some inherent way—the certainty that contempt is good is all but inevitable.
Here is how to tell the hatred of the harm from the verdict in yourself, because they arrive together and the verdict dresses like the hatred. Start with the hatred of the harm. It’s the part that can’t stand to watch people get hurt and wants it stopped. Nothing here asks you to feel that less; it’s the most trustworthy thing in you. Now watch what happens the moment the harm gets a face. The heat changes. It stops being about the harm and starts being about the person. You want them to know what they are, and something in you would be disappointed if they got better. (One exception: if you lived with someone who hurt you, you may have heard he’s better now before, and distrusting it is sight, not this.) That second heat feels like the first one, only more serious. It’s the parasite, speaking in your conscience’s voice.
So the check, which is Chapter 1’s pill in a form you can use daily: if the harm simply stopped tomorrow, with nobody punished and nobody exposed, would you feel relief, or robbed? That question is most of the practice. Ask it of whoever you’re carrying. The first several times I found nothing. Then one day I caught it.
A second check, for the causes you hold. Keep the analysis, the genuine care, the valid critique, and give up only the permission to feel contempt for the people on the other side. Would you still want it?
Nice can be worse than useless against evil. If the choice really were between stopping a harm with contempt and letting it happen, stop it. But the contempt is a second harm, and it has to be counted too.
There are two meanings of “judgment.” One is wise discernment, and the other adds a verdict about the person. The same split runs through “punishment” and “outrage”: each has a sense that answers the harm and a sense that needs the person to hurt. The difference isn’t hard to see. And part of us keeps the two blurred on purpose, so that when we’re caught doing the second, we can claim we were only doing the first. The coach who called a twelve-year-old worthless in front of his team says he was holding him to a standard.
Fierce is where the darkness finds it easiest to get in. From outside, fierce and dark look alike, and it counts on our not wanting to tell them apart. But we can tell, from the sending end, if we’re willing to look: that little something extra, added to the fierceness on its way out, that you knew they’d feel. I’ve almost always believed I was doing the clean one, including when I wasn’t.
Here is what the healthy version sounds like. That was out of line, and it stops now. It aims at the darkness in a person, never at the person, so it carries no malice. And the same words with the extra: That was out of line, and it stops now, followed by the half-second pause to watch it land. I don’t think you understood what that did to her. With the extra: I don’t think you’re capable of understanding what that did to her. You lied to me. With the extra: Of course you lied to me. Each time the difference is one word or one pause, and each time you know, on the way out, which one you sent. And the clean one does something the other can’t. Fierce and turned toward, I’m not only stopping him. It’s as though the light in me is reminding the light in him that it has a partner in the fight against what has him, and I can do that while still fighting the man.
Now the part I most want to get right. You don’t have to believe that “bad people” are under the control of a parasite, or that they don’t want what they’re doing. You only have to notice what happens when you believe the alternative: that they are equivalent to their darkness, or that they want it. You can’t help but hand control to your own. That is the sense in which the frame is useful. It isn’t a fact about them you’re being asked to accept. It’s a stance, and you’ve now watched the opposite stance recruit you.
But merely believing they’re possessed fails too, in the other direction. You’ll be nice. Believing someone has light when you can’t see it, as a stand-in for looking, is its own kind of not-looking, and someone deep in will use it against you. The only thing that works is to actually see it: the turning-away as turning-away, and what’s underneath it, for real, which is the fear from Chapter 3.
Think of someone you once despised and later came to see differently, without their having changed. Maybe you’d since been through something like what they were up against. Maybe you’d caught yourself doing what they did. What changed wasn’t them. It was how much of your own turning away was in the seeing. And the reverse, which you can check today: on a day when you’re tired and self-justifying, everyone looks worse. How much innocence you can see in others measures your own freedom more than their goodness. That’s why seeing all the way into somebody far gone may be the work of a lifetime, and I don’t have it, and why the near end is available now: catch yourself wanting them to be what you’ve decided they are, and notice, as the verdict settles, that something in you was after it. That isn’t a reason to doubt what you see when someone is dangerous; seeing that is sight, and you act on it.
There’s a trap in this too, and it’s the one I fall into most: contempt for the people who still have contempt. I once caught myself enjoying snide comments directed at flat-Earthers. Then, later, I found contempt for people who make snide comments directed at flat-Earthers. The friend who “isn’t there yet.” The beginner’s question, heard with a patient smile. And pity, which passes for compassion and is contempt with a soft face: it needs them to stay below me. Equanimity can do it too, when it’s a way of filing someone under deluded and feeling nothing more. So can practice itself: the sigh at my own mind on the cushion, wandering again, the same verdict pointed inward. The question I put to myself: would I be glad if they got there before I did? The second stranger would have been, and that’s the difference between a saint and a scold.
Go back to the second stranger from Chapter 1, the one who caught you and left you more yourself. You use the recognition he called on all the time, and you’ve never once had to define what it recognizes. Think of the news story that restored your faith in humanity: a stranger who dove in after somebody else’s child, a town that took in people it had no reason to take in. You felt gratitude, and none of it benefited you directly. You didn’t calculate what it was worth. Or the person who gives, quietly, to something that will never come back to them, and something in you thanks them for it. What were they aimed at? Not your good, and not theirs. Could you say what it is? Did you have to work it out, or did you just know, the way you knew it in the person who caught you? That’s what I’ve been calling the light: the thing that, when someone is aimed at it, you know it, and when they’re aimed away from it, you know that too, and you can’t define either. I think we all know the distinction. We just don’t trust that we know it.
One more thing about love. Think of the last time you defended someone you love by tearing down the person who wronged them. Your sister’s ex. The teacher who was unfair to your kid. The loyalty was real and warm, but riding on it was contempt, the need for the other person to be worthless. It may feel like being turned toward one person and away from the other. That’s the claim from Chapter 2 in the flesh: love at someone else’s expense isn’t love. And it scales. Every cause you’ve ever fought for had people on the other side of it, and the test is the same: could you fight for yours while they stayed in view? If the fight needed them out of view, the cause was doing the same thing, whichever side it was on, and that’s what fighting for justice by hating the bad guys is.
There’s a mirror image of that, and it’s the one a spiritual life makes easiest. Contempt keeps the person who did the harm out of view. Niceness keeps the person who was harmed out of view: it’s all confusion, he couldn’t help it, said serenely while someone is still bleeding, because looking at them would mean acting, and acting costs. Kindness keeps both in view, and that’s why it so often has to be fierce.
So here is the measure: this one is like me. Whoever you can’t say that about is where to look for the darkness still operating through you. (The person who hurt you is the exception Chapter 3 made, and it stands.)
Turning toward has no target. It’s what’s left when nothing is in the way, and a face is where you notice it first. What the traditions call awakening is the same state with nothing held out at all: not a bigger act of attention, but the covering removed, and the part of the covering this book is about was one thing.
You often don’t get to choose whether the contempt arises. What is yours is how fast you catch it afterward: days, then hours, then sometimes in the moment. That can be trained, and it’s the one part of this that effort improves. When you catch it late, there’s usually someone to go back to, and often the repair is no more than letting them see that you see them now.
And when you do catch it in the moment: look at the contempt itself, not the person. Where is it? What’s it made of? In my experience it doesn’t survive that, because there was nothing there to fight. It comes back, and you look again; the first several times you may find only a tight chest and the story. The tightening is worth learning, because it usually comes before the story does, and it doesn’t argue. The traditions also have practices built for the person you can’t stand: lojong’s drive all blames into one, and tonglen, taking in their darkness on the in-breath and sending them what you’d want for yourself on the out-breath. So does the Gospel, in its plainer instruction to pray for those who persecute you. They’re worth taking to a teacher.
Every act of integrity, every choice to care when nobody is watching, leaks out into the world, just as a flash of darkness does. None of it stays inside you. Somewhere, somebody you’ll never meet is about to give up on the part of them that knows. The pressure on them is the kind you felt from the first stranger, and they’re a breath from deciding that the part which knew, and couldn’t prove it, isn’t worth listening to. Whether they hold is made, in a way I can’t trace and won’t pretend to, of what the rest of us have done. That’s the sense in which every last thing you do matters, witnessed or not.
There is a battle between good and evil, between light and darkness, and it is the one the myths were about. It is fought in your every thought, word, and deed, and nothing you do is outside it. Fight it with everything you have. But the moment malice, contempt, or self-righteousness enter the picture, it’s fighting for the darkness.
Out there, fighting it means force if it takes force. In here, it means looking. And know what winning is. It isn’t the darkness subjugated. It’s the darkness looked at, in your own eyes first, until you see that there was never a second thing there: only the light, turned away.