As soon as our children are old enough to talk, we begin the ritual chant: Don’t to talk to strangers.  Like every other parent on the planet, we must figure out how to make three-year-olds understand there are “bad guys” who want to hurt children. By the time our children turn four or five, they know about the existence of evil. By the time they become adults, they will know that evil exists everywhere.

There is no way to avoid this knowledge, especially not in our post 9/11 world.  We all have heightened awareness now.   We continually read about evil in history books and today’s newspaper.  We find it in the rich nations and poor countries, big cities and small towns, a plague on every society in every corner of the earth.  And at least once in our lives, we are likely to be touched by evil’s destructive power as victims of abuse or crime or war. 

Evil challenges us not only in creating a secure world in which to raise children, but also in creating meaningful lives for ourselves.  It requires us to wrestle daily with questions of how we can possibly accept -- let alone live peacefully within -- an existence that roils with such horrors. 

Thus far, the Western approach to these agonizing questions has been to insert as much distance as possible between evil and ourselves.  With our religions we have created unholy devils on which to cast the blame for dark deeds, and a host of prayers and rituals to keep it at bay.  With our sciences we have discovered mental disorders and illness and invented drugs and treatments and hospitals to keep them at bay.  And with our governments we have built prison after prison in which to lock up those of us who seem susceptible to evil and keep them out of sight. 

We have done everything humanly possible to push evil away, get rid of it, banish it.  And yet, it remains with us still.

See no evil

The problem of evil is a particularly thorny challenge for the New Age. Since we have loudly declared that “All is One,” we cannot possibly disown evil.  We have no choice but to recognize evil as part of Spirit, part of God, a darkness that lurks in the underside of light. 

This position can be difficult to sustain.  Indeed, it is the “evil is an illusion” assertion that draws the most heated attacks from critics of the New Age and others who prefer to battle evil as a separate foe.  Wendy Kaminer, for example, describes the New Age’s “refusal to acknowledge evil” as “offensive gibberish.”   

I think Kaminer is correct in that it is clearly offensive to “make light” of evil.  And if the New Age is going to assert that Spirit is the only reality, then it must meaningfully account for the darkness we see daily in the world.

Even more importantly, it must empower us to adress evil effectively so that it may no longer flourish.

In the eye of the beholder

In the New Age, as in any idealistic system of thought, there is only Spirit, there is only God.  Some idealists will say this means evil does not exist at all, and our perception of it must therefore be an illusion.

But it might be more accurate to say that evil is less a mistake of perception than a by-product of perception. 

It is, after all, the nature of perception to divide experience into polarities.  As Watts noted, contrast is built into “the very nature of awareness,” and all things must “be experienced as good/bad or plus/minus in order to be experienced at all.”  As finite creatures, we exist in a relative world where everything is inevitably better or worse, according to our particular point of view.

Yet, as Watts also goes on to argue, our perception of two distinct forces does not mean that these forces are distinct in reality.  Describing the nature of human perception is not the same thing as describing the nature of all reality. 

From a perspective of infinite reality, polarities are meaningless.  Human perception might need to create bad in order to delineate good, but this division is completely arbitrary.  Each person places it where he or she likes, according to cultural convention or family history or personal taste or any combination thereof.  That is why in some countries it is okay for a woman to be rewarded for sex with money, while in other countries a woman may be punished for sex with a horrific death.

Hegel’s dialectic

Mystics who have transcended ordinary human perception unanimously agree that reality is not divided into two forces. Reality is One, and within this One lies both negative and positive energy, both darkness and light.

Still, we must ask, why must there be darkness?  Why can’t all be light?  Why does spirit unfold in such a way that the negative so often sweeps across the face of the world, knocking us all down, again and again?

It was Georg Hegel, the brilliant German idealist, who described the process of Spirit unfolding as a process of “dialectic.”  Separation and union is the essence of creation, said Hegel.  Spirit must be able to divide in order to be able to join together and give birth to the new.

According to Hegelian idealism, as the “one” descends into the “many” forms of matter, it splits into multiple fragments.  Some of these fragments are positive and negative, which allows them to push and pull against each other, separating and joining in new patterns, creating more forms, more reality, more experience. 

If energy were somehow to reach stable equilibrium, there would be no more push and pull, no more flow of energy, no more life, period.  For matter to come alive, there must be a continuous flow of energy racing from the positive to the negative and back again. 

This rhythm is the essence of being; all life beats to this alternating pulse.  The negative, said Hegel, is an intricate part of -- and even necessary to -- Spirit becoming.

The evil that men do

Let’s say we theoretically accept the dialectic nature of life and acknowledge that all is One.  Let’s say we agree that there is no separate force, no dark lord intent on our destruction.  We would still have to contend with the effects of evil. 

Slavery, war, murder, oppression -– all these still exist, devil or no.  We still have to deal with the malignancy that steals across the human heart and compels someone to knowingly hurt others.  And we still need to figure out what to do about it.

Letting go of the definition of evil as a force separate from us is the first, most vital step.  Why?  Because this assumption is in itself the source of much evil, allowing us to demonize our fellow man and treat them as objects of fear and hatred.  Worse, the assumption not only allows us to hurt others, it actively encourages us to “battle” against evil by killing those we have perceived to have wronged us.  Thus, we ourselves become the evil we are trying to destroy.   

History bears this out, over and over again, from the Nazis and their concentration camps to the suicide bombers and terrorists of today.  In trying to “destroy” the evil out there, we only end up destroying ourselves. 

But the moment we stop disowning evil, the moment we recognize that evil is not “out there” but “in here” with us, then we find ourselves in possession of the power to change things.  In that moment, we are able to see clearly that at the root of every abominable act perpetrated by a human being is a human ego lashing out, an ego blinded to others by its own pain and anger.   We see that we are all bound to the law of karma.  Negativity breeds negativity, and if the world brings suffering to a child in the beginning, that child will grow up to bring the world suffering in the end. 

But karma also gives us the opportunity to escape the negative spiral.  It allows us choice.  We may choose to meet negative energy with positive energy, choose to meet pain and fear with love and compassion. 

When we can do this, when we no longer require revenge for our pain, we remove evil from the world.  As soon as we are able to accept and forgive others, then, in that moment, evil is no more. 

The problem of pain

I absolutely believe it is in our power to banish evil from our lives.  I believe we can collectively decide at any time to see differently, choose differently, live differently.  But even if we were to create such a miracle together, that would not save us from suffering.

I think the problem of evil ultimately boils down to the problem of suffering, the problem of pain.  More than anything, we do not want to feel pain.  More than anything, we want to live in a world where no one, especially those we love, will suffer pain.

Of all the difficulties life throws our way, pain is the most difficult to reconcile with the notion of a loving God.  Why, oh why, does God allow us to suffer?  I have sat with my child in the hospital and despaired over the question. Why are the innocent so often allowed to be hurt? 

I have found comfort in the idea that perhaps God allows us to feel pain for the same reason that I allowed my toddlers to leave their cribs even though I knew they would fall and hurt themselves many times during the day. 

Yet, if I could, wouldn’t I design a world in which a child would not suffer pain each time she banged her head?  Maybe not.  If she was unable to feel pain, she’d have no reason to learn to duck his head when she crawled under a table.  Without pain, she’d have little motivation to learn this important lesson.  Without pain, she might come to even greater harm.

“Unless the organism can feel pain,” Watts wrote, “it cannot withdraw from danger, so that the unwillingness to be able to be hurt is in fact suicidal, whereas the simple retreat from pain is not." 

Sadly, in our unwillingness to feel pain, and our efforts to anesthetize ourselves against it, we end up bringing much greater suffering to ourselves and those we love. Alcoholism, drug addiction, food addictions –- these are just a few examples of pain avoidance turned sources of suffering. 

We Westerners have forgotten, or perhaps have never truly realized, the value of pain.  In modern America especially, we assume that a pain-free life is a promise of democracy and have therefore become a society of litigation and punishment.  We believe that if someone causes us any pain or difficulty, even unintentionally, he or she must pay. 

This is progress of a sort, for we have finally realized that it is wrong to hurt each other.  But we have taken this realization to the illogical conclusion that it is wrong to be hurt or feel pain at all.  The result is that all our suffering has become senseless, pain without redeeming purpose.

The first noble truth

Pain is braided into the very experience of being alive; a natural feature of biological life.  In the grand drama of God’s self-exploration, we will all be hurt, we will all be broken, we will all die.

“The earth must be broken to bring forth life,” Campbell wrote.  “If the seed does not die, there is no plant.  Bread results from the death of wheat.  Life lives on lives.” 

This may seem an absurd way to look at pain that is the result of senseless evils like rape and murder.  These horrors certainly do not bring forth life.  But it is not the events themselves that are meaningful, it is what the events cause to happen within us. 

“Evil facts,” said William James, are “possibly the only opener of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”   We learn courage by coming face-to-face with fear; we learn to love by overcoming hate.  Through the negative we are brought to the positive.  Evil, as much as awe, brings the heart to God.

Many people approach their philosophy or religion as a way to help them escape their pain.  A good belief system, however, will not insulate us from pain, but help us better yield to it. 

Thus, the Buddha’s First Noble Truth:  Life is suffering.  To truly accept pain as part of being alive the beginning of all wisdom.  And only from this beginning will we learn to transform the negative to the positive, turn straw into gold.

The love of fate

In the New Age, we have learned that to reject the pain and ferocity of life is to reject life itself.  To say “no” to one little detail is to unravel the whole.  We need to say “yes” to all of it so that we may learn what it has to teach us.  We say yes not only to pain, but yes to the challenge that evil throws in our faces:  the challenge to accept, to forgive, to love, and to heal the ruined souls that bring evil into the world.

This acceptance is captured by Neitzche in the words amor fati, or love of fate.  No matter what happens, we accept that we are being given something we need to learn.  No matter what happens, we accept it as an opportunity we are privileged to have received.  We say “yes” to it all, for as Campbell again explains, “The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

The New Age tells us that if we say “yes” to it all, and “participate with joy in the sorrows of the world,” then we have found the whole, the One, the universal life.  In saying yes, we gain a larger context, and we see that we are not alone with our pain. 

We move from the individual to the universal.  We move from my pain to the pain, from my drama to the drama, the whole of six billion individual dramas happening all at once.  And from this universal perspective, we gain a bittersweet understanding that pardons all, accepts all. 

As Campbell writes of the mythological hero who endures many trials, “The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source,” and with the “horror visible still,” he sees an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love.  And he knows that no matter what he endures, his essence is eternal, indestructible, and always safe.

Still, no matter how strong these arguments, they are bound to sound hollow when the shadow of evil looms over one’s life.  No amount of expounding on God’s purpose can console the woman who must bury a murdered husband.  No shift in perspective will ease the pain of a child suffering from abuse.  No set of beliefs can save us from pain, and certainly no philosophy can take the place of human action in the effort to prevent evil from flourishing.

The problem of how to live in a world with evil is surely the most difficult problem we will ever encounter, and try as we might, we may never come up with satisfactory answers.  But surely that is as it should be.  It would be wrong to become comfortable with evil; wrong to ask that we not be disturbed when it strikes. 

The problem of evil can and must continue to challenge us, each and every day.  As Jung also pointed out, "The serious problems of life, however, are never fully solved.  If it should appear that they are, this is the sign that something has been lost.  The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly."

Go to A New Moral Standard .