It’s not ignorance that hurts so much as knowing all those things that ain’t so.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The Roman Catholic Church community is suffering from a seemingly ubiquitous disease threatening its very existence—pedophilia. Pope Francis, desperate to explain how this could have happened, has recently explained that it was Satan who caused the Cardinals, Bishops and priests to sexually abuse children. The children who were taught that the Church would nurture and protect them were particularly vulnerable to being victimized by the pedophiles who hid their crimes behind the power granted them by virtue of their office.
The truth is that the “evil” within the Church came not from a super-human fallen angel from outside the community but from the structure of consciousness inherent within the Church. The naïve Pope, desperate to project blame outside the Church, has joined the enablers of an egregious “sin.” He has given voice to “The Great Lie.”
Many of us find the myths of the world’s religions involving allegorical folklore and associated superhuman creatures to be explanations of the world’s physical phenomena by the primitive human mind and wholly inappropriate in explaining the reality of human behavior in the modern human community.
Nevertheless, many people have a core belief in the existence of evil. Hence, a major source of human energy in the human community is fear, including fear of Satan. No Satan, no fear. So one solution in reducing the energy of fear in Global Village communities is to remove the belief in evil and the existence of the Devil.
What is the source of the belief in evil? It is in the story we tell ourselves about the nature of reality itself. What is that story? Our story, our worldview is composed of beliefs, attitudes and values. Our narrative also was created by the human intellect to answer the Three Great Questions, namely: Where are we? Who are we? and Why are we here? (2) To profoundly change our self-created story, we must construct our story around the truth, not the great lie.
The truth requires that we make three critical distinctions. First, we must distinguish between the two fundamental choices we have in worldviews, namely, Oneness or duality. That is to say, all of Creation is interrelated, interconnected and interdependent. Creation resembles a web rather than trillions of discretely separate components.
Secondly, since our worldview determines our identity, choosing a narrative based on Oneness will give us a life-enhancing True self-identity rather than the fear-driven, self-destructive false self-identity that many of us currently have. The delusional false self just happens to embody that fallen angel invented by virtually all religions or belief systems in every human community in our world today. Choosing Oneness as our narrative we experience an identity that does not believe in the existence of the other, does not believe in an evil being or for that matter the existence of any people who threaten us because they have a different religion, skin color, sexual orientation or culture. No other. No fear.
And finally we come full circle to the last Great Question. We have answered the First Great Question Where am I? with Oneness; the Second Great Question Who am I? with a True self-identity; and now we explain the Third Great Question Why am I here?
This last question is asking how we should express ourselves i.e., how should we behave? How does our belief in evil express itself in our everyday behaviors? Any so-called evil that exists in the human community is created by us expressing our resistance or “reactions” to what is happening in our lives. “Evil, then, is a far deeper thing than the moral codes [precepts] conceive of. It is anti-life. Life is dynamic, pulsating force; it is energy and consciousness, manifested in many ways; and there is no evil as such unless there is resistance to life [reactions]. The resistance is the manifestation of what is called evil.” (1)
The behavior we express when we are in resistance to life is called a “reaction.” The behavior we express when we accept what is happening in our life is called a “response.” Our True self can easily live in harmony and in response to life in the human community. Few people have now made the critical distinctions between truth and illusion by responding profoundly to the Three Great Questions. By learning to choose response over reaction we can transform our identity and transcend the suffering that began when we chose to believe in the story based on the Great Lie.
Insight # 53: There is no evil and suffering unless there is resistance to life.
Link:
- “Evil” in The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol I (2018), by Roy Charles Henry, in print and on this blog.
Reference:
- Zweig, Connie and Abrams, Jeremiah. Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1991, page 91.
- Henry, Roy Charles. The Trilogy: Where Am I? (2012) Who Am I? (2013) Why Am I Here? (2014).
