Confronting Evil

It’s slippery. It’s protean. It feeds on our desires... Yet we must learn to live with it.

Source: Alexandre Dinaut

Evil does not have its own substance; it is a kind of privation or distortion of the good.
—Augustine

The possibility of evil is built into the gift of significant freedom; without that freedom, moral good itself would be impossible.
—Alvin Plantinga

Evil exists. It is woven into the fabric of reality, yet it is not a substance. We must acknowledge this aspect of reality, even if we aren’t always very good at recognizing it. It lives around us. It lives within us. There are evils of degree and kind.

The most insidious forms of evil are the ones we scarcely recognize. This makes confronting evil especially difficult. Where we might confront change or death by overcoming fear, the most significant threat is evil that masquerades as need.

It’s slippery. It’s protean. It feeds on our desires.

As with any confrontation, we should face down evil while in equipoise. Our centeredness helps us be more patient and discerning, which allows us to reveal evil’s contours, for example, when we are engaged in tikkun.

But aren’t those repairing the world doing good?

Hopefully. Yet shortsightedness makes for mistakes. Zeal can make us vulnerable to the idea that an end justifies any means. Sacrificing for a cause can tempt us to abandon our radiative self-sovereignty, a process that requires us to repair ourselves first.

Too many broken people are trying to fix the world.

Everyone is born with the capacity to harm. We must train ourselves to abstain from harming others who have done no wrong to us, or have paid for their past wrongdoing.

Otherwise, there is a word for those who would harm us: enemy.

Evil is not a toxin that poisons or a demon that possesses. Our intoxicating ignorance and defection from doctrine—breaking our covenant—shape our wrongdoing. Why? As cosmopolitan as we aspire to be, a moral community has an extent and a membrane. Within that membrane, we contrive the good and make a covenant with each other and with the All.

Outside that membrane, potential evil lives in various shades. We must take care, though. Our enemies use the same rationale. The difference is that an enemy makes virtues out of vices, refuses our covenant, and is willing to do us harm.

To know one’s enemies is to perceive their evils.

When masses threaten evil in synchrony, we call that an Egregore. When our siblings rise to counter evil in synchrony, we call that a Geist. Our order exists to build an Empire of the Mind from which a Great Geist shall rise to defend our way of life and, eventually, our imaginal cities, which are good.

Why does the All permit evil to exist in the world?

If evil is mostly error and defection from doctrine, it is not like a substance that inheres in things, but actions taken by imperfect people with agency. To be good, then, is to commit to doctrine and endeavor to eliminate error. But we also know that no one is perfect, so everyone will err and stray from the covenant. Indeed, as no one is perfect, anyone who wears a white robe in our temples is a fraud and an apostate.

But that means we have to live in community, accepting some measure of evil in our midst while marking the difference between siblings and enemies—acknowledging gradations. Our order requires paths to adjudication, redemption, and forgiveness. At the end of the day, though, we must be willing to expel or ostracize those who break the covenant or have demonstrated that they are irredeemable.

Yet to don the grey robe is to sit comfortably with the fact of our shadow selves. We are not Pillar Saints, Platonists, or purists. For every eleven bands of the All’s radiance that flow through us, a dark band must issue from the Shadow.

At the risk of introducing a contradiction, the closest comparison is immunity. After a time, our bodies learn to control an infectious disease, but it never quite goes away. It lingers, and we live with it, hoping it doesn’t flare up in an immunocompromised condition. One even inoculates himself by permitting a little bit of a disease into his blood, though not enough to make him ill.

Shadow exploration is spiritual inoculation.

We can break evil into three elements: intentions, declarations, and actions (or thoughts, words, and deeds). Thoughts cultivate evil within. Words transmit ill intent. And deeds can unleash destructive consequences. Once we have broken matters down this way, we can recombine the elements to reveal a process.

Elemental evil is, of course, possible, as one might allow an evil thought to enter her mind, but neither speak nor act upon the thought. But too many such thoughts can be handmaidens of processual evil, in which too many evil thoughts lead to habits of mind that in turn lead to harmful words and eventually deeds.

Paradox resembles contradiction. After all, we just claimed that shadow exploration is a form of spiritual inoculation. But isn’t shadow exploration meant to incorporate evil by way of ritual?

Yes and no.

The man who pours a finger is not the same man who guzzles a fifth. One conducts a ritual. The other abuses. Therefore, whiskey is only as evil as the man who quaffs it.

Consider that one of the prime virtues of our order is moderation. Its vicious mirror is excess. If virtues and vices are practices, then moderation is a practice that can help keep the 11:1 ratio, which is paradoxically sacred.

Those who seek to eliminate evil shall become evil.

In returning to confrontation, consider the process is both psychospiritual and psychosocial. It can be unsettling to recognize evil within oneself. It is perhaps more disturbing to recognize evil within those we love, or in those we trust with power. To witness the sudden rise of a powerful Egregore can be absolutely terrifying. Almost no one is centered when forced by circumstances to confront evil this way. It is better to be in equipoise, but there is no way to avoid being unsettled, disturbed, or terrified.

Once the psychospiritual phase abates, welcome the action phase. That means find the courage to change, critique, convince, or combat. Confronting evil is a psychospiritual breakthrough that leads to an ongoing practice.

The rest is religion.

Eliminating error and endeavoring to follow doctrine is a process, not a decision. But avoiding evil entirely is itself evil, for the Pillar Saint either erupts in decadence or malevolence, or wastes away in asceticism. Attempting to eliminate evil requires renouncing tikkun, because tikkun is an undertaking that will always come with error.

Those who renounce the robe and join an Egregore embrace evil. To don the robe and invoke a Great Geist is not to reject evil but to mitigate it—whether in ongoing psychspiritual stewardship, or as we set about building an Empire of the Mind.

Remember, though, evil is insidious because it does not inhere in things.

In our order, humanity is on a quest to bring harmony to the multiplicity, which is to weave the threefold braid: happiness, harmony, and prosperity. But without confronting evil, no such weaving is possible.

Otherwise, our imaginal cities shall rise on distant horizons.

The ongoing process of confrontation is like tending a garden. The good gardener must prune, pull weeds, fight pests, and give the plants just what they need. The good sibling must cultivate similarly, finding paths of mastery while repairing the world.

So it is and will always be.