Evil.

Every religion, every theology, must confront the problem of evil.  Why do people suffer.  Why do they experience pain?

Pantheism’s glib answer is that since they are God, they suffer because they want to.  Everybody, being God, gets precisely what he, or she, wants.  If they experience pain, it is out of desire. 

Or, since everything is (in) the mind of God, it is just an illusion.  Maya, the illusion of the universe, by a part of God, which has forgotten it is God.  Or more correctly, pretended it has forgotten.  This since everything that it does, that God does, is pretence, or pretend. Or play.  Lila.   And without purpose, or meaning.

This pretend is of varying sincerity, varying degrees of immersion, or depth, into the world of Maya, or illusion. And this immersion, to its degree, is evil, so far as it is separation from God.  But again, all separation from God is illusion, for how can a part of God be separate from God? 

But this immersion, to its degree, allows for its punishment.  If that is its choice.

It also allows for its pleasure, if that is its choice. Easy for someone who is not experiencing particular pain or deprivation to say.

 But the glib answer does not satisfy those mired in Maya, those Faces of God who sincerely pretend they are separate from God.    For these one must provide some answer of greater imperfection. 

And the truth must be imperfect, because if it were not imperfect, it would not be true. This is because if any theodicy, any defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in the face of evil, was true, which so explained everything evil, would rationalize evil, would in a sense justify evil, and so excuse evil. All evil would be done for whatever greater good was articulated in the theodicy.*  Thus not evil at all.  An ‘evil’ act would be impossible.  But from what we have said above, evil is the work of God. Though the work of God is not all evil.  But that is just what we were informed by our glib answer.

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So we deal with imperfect truths, imperfect beings in an imperfect world.

There are those who claim it is just an absence of good, rather like cold is an absence of heat.  But we know of men who do evil, or who seem to, and apparently not because of an absence of good.  We know of those who actively harm and destroy others, for their own profit.  Or pleasure.

Is genocide the mere absence of good?  Yet those who practice it say they are just ridding the world of evil.

Evil begins in the mind, and as is is inflicted on the world.

We can say this:  One always does what one thinks is best.  That even those who do evil think they do so for some higher good.  Even if that higher good is the fulfillment of their own selfish wants, a self they regard as higher than those they may harm. 

But this comes about from a distorted view of reality:  A disparagement of the world.  A belief that the world is inferior, and to be exploited.   A belief that one’s self is greater than the world, and should be glorified.

But this comes about through a distorted view of oneself. A view that is unbalanced.   Because once, when one was very young, one was the world, one identified with the world, and this is remembered as true.  This identity then became a part of the unconscious, as the conscious mind separated itself from the world, and took on its more mature characteristics. 

At best one can only imagine the self as equal to the world, the self and the world, the self and the higher self, in balance.  For when one imagines the conscious self as greater, one imagines the unconscious self as lesser, and the greater one imagines one’s conscious self to be, the lesser the image of the unconscious self.  Then the greater the separation, and the more one must seek to compensate

Now there are many different worlds that an infant may experience, as it grows into and through and out of the stage of identification with its world.  It may bask in love. It may endure anxiety and stress.  It may suffer hate or indifference.  Each of these worlds has its own possibilities for evil, should it be affirmed or discredited in the mind of the child. 

For sometimes, then, the mind was taught to denigrate the world, to count it evil, and inferior. But with the memory of being the world, so the mind was taught to denigrate part of its own unconscious self, who had been, and in a sense, still was, the world.  Thus to count its own unconscious self as evil, and inferior.

For unconsciously counting itself evil, and deserving of punishment, and remembering the identity of the self and the other, it punishes the other, in proportion to its own feelings of how evil it imagines its own unconscious self to be.  But there may be no limit to this, because the other is no longer identified with the self, and the self doesn’t fully feel the punishment it inflicts on the other.  Punishment which it itself craves. So in the pursuit of justice on the self, punishment, which may be out of all proportion, is inflicted on the other. 

And so we come to the idea that those who are taught the world is most evil, may inflict the most evil upon it.  And this evil may be inflicted on love, or in anxiety and stress, or through hate or indifference. 

And, should a world of hate or indifference be affirmed in the child, that is a possible source for evil also.  For the adult may then seek to recreate that world of hate or indifference around it, and to do so, will inflict the pains it experienced as an infant, as its mind first separated from the world.

And if the child, once it is separated from the world, is taught that it is evil, and deserving of punishment, it may do things to bring this punishment down upon itself.  Yet at the same time, it may feel that this punishment is undeserved, and so nurse resentment. Unless it is taught that the world, ie its unconscious self, is also evil. Then it will feel this punishment is deserved.

There is more, of course, but it is clear that evil is the teaching of evil, and the evil deeds that result from this teaching.  The teaching of the separation of the self, and the world, from God. 

So transcend!  Undo this evil that has been done to you!  Be God!