We think that hating “bad people” is a sign of the good within us, but it’s actually a sign of something much darker.
People are only able to cause harm due to a particular kind of self-deception. Part of them knows perfectly well that they are doing wrong, but this knowledge is carefully shielded from conscious self-reflection, so that it doesn’t feel wrong. All they consciously hear are their own clever justifications. It is a state of profound delusion; one that we rightly abhor — but the truth is that every one of us knows this state intimately well ourselves. We have all skirted our conscience before, pretending either that we couldn’t hear it or that we didn’t have to listen. Part of us knew exactly what we were doing, but we couldn’t quite admit it to ourselves. Our examples may differ in degree, but not in kind.
When we encounter another person in this state, we somehow don’t recognize a fellow human in the grip of a powerful self-deception that we ourselves are highly susceptible to; no, we see them as fundamentally morally defective — as though the “badness” is somehow intrinsic to their minds. But this is an illusion. What’s actually happening is that the darkness in our own mind is luring us into seeing them this way, so that we will viciously attack them for it. This will drive the darkness deeper into their minds while giving us plausible deniability. After all, we were only trying to fight evil. If they became worse as a result, it can only be evidence that we were right about them after all: they are indeed fundamentally defective, and must be stopped at any cost.
This is why we enjoy mocking, shaming, and contemptuously judging our enemies; the “bad people.” Simply by pretending to be fundamentally superior to them, we are telegraphing to them that we are under the sway of the very self-deception that we are viciously judging them for. This makes them see us as evil for precisely the same reason we see them that way — and not by accident. The darkness in our mind is extending a kind of “secret handshake” to theirs; a tacit agreement to keep this world bound in darkness while leaving us humans none the wiser. We may be enemies on the surface, but under the covers, our darkness is secretly allied — because the darker the world gets, the less we realize that we’re harboring it, thus causing us to unwittingly intensify the process.
This is an incredibly difficult thing to admit to oneself. Any time we feel even a trace of malice, contempt, or self-righteousness toward anyone for any reason, our mind is secretly plotting a course to darken the world without our conscious knowledge — and it always finds a way to do so. But this knowledge isn’t technically unconscious. It is completely accessible to our conscious mind, but we somehow choose not to notice it. This choice to engage in self-deception is infectious. It invites others to engage in their own unique forms of it. If you can only learn to see the part of you that already knows this, you will suddenly understand the secret mechanism behind all the evil there ever was — and you will begin to recognize your own role in ending it. Humanity is badly lost, and it is only by finding our own way out of the abyss that we learn how to lead others out instead of secretly shoving them deeper in.
It is impossible to overstate the cleverness of this ruse. It is why we sometimes suspect the existence of an evil global conspiracy running the world from behind the scenes. The darkness in our minds is indeed conspiring, behaving more like a singular distributed malevolent entity, manipulating all of humanity from beneath our conscious thresholds. The Christians know it as the Devil, and the Buddhists call it the ego. You can treat it as a metaphor, but it is also as real as anything you can touch. It is the primordial evil conspiracy; the one to which all the rest owe their existence, and to which they ultimately filter up. It keeps our attention fixated perpetually outward, on the evil “out there,” so that we never notice its insidious presence “in here”; the one place where we can actually defeat it. Every attempt to subdue it externally without being free of it internally only ends up creating more, in ways that are normally invisible to our conscious minds — but that we can learn to see.
It is surely true that “the elites” are playing us common people against each other to take our attention off of them, but the Devil is playing a much bigger game; one in which even the elites are merely pawns. It wants us to hate them, to take our attention off of it. But if hating them isn’t the right approach, then what is? To understand this, we must first go deeper.
There can be moments in life — such as during psychedelic trips, near-death experiences, or deep meditation or prayer — when you are confronted with the full depths of your own self-deception. You are shown every single instance where you skirted your conscience; every act of lying to yourself for your own personal gain. You are brought face-to-face with all the harm you’ve ever perpetrated since time immemorial, and it is far more than you could hope to clean up in a single lifetime. The pain is beyond what you can fathom; more than you think you can bear. How widely and quickly it spread! How many it affected! The darkness exploited your fear and pride, enabling you to do things you otherwise couldn’t if only you had been seeing clearly.
But slowly, it dawns on you: the reason it hurts so much is that you never actually wanted to do any of this. It is only profound confusion that enabled it. Your whole being is then absorbed into that part of you that never wanted to hurt anyone; never could want such a thing. And then it happens: the full mass of darkness is suddenly lifted from your mind. It feels exactly like you’d imagine being freed of a demonic possession. Beneath it is a Light so vast that it defies description; an infinite Love for all of reality that excludes nothing and forsakes no-one. You never truly departed from this Light; indeed, never could, because it turns out you are the Light — and, astonishingly, so is everyone else.
You ultimately are everyone and everything else, just pretending that you’re not. One consciousness, peering out through countless eyes. There are many ways to say this, all of which sound absurd to the rational mind. But when you fully unveil the Light in yourself, you automatically see it in everyone else — including those who seemed not to have any. This is what the darkness is trying to hide. Everything we do to each other — or to Nature herself — we ultimately do to ourselves. How crazy to think otherwise! How foolish to judge others for not seeing it, when we weren’t able to see it yet ourselves! Such a silly game we play, with such tragic consequences. We are continually shoving each other into the abyss to keep the game going, because we’re not ready to wake up ourselves. Seeing this, we lose the desire to “get away” with anything. Why would we want to hide from the Light? How did we ever think we could? The sooner we see this, the better for everyone.
The strangest part is discovering how you simultaneously knew this and yet somehow didn’t. You convinced yourself that your unkind behavior was “for the greater good,” even as you knew better. You could always perceive the inner Light in the “bad people,” and you chose to smother it anyway — knowing that if you compartmentalized this knowledge carefully enough, nobody could blame you for it, because you yourself would no longer know. Yet others could somehow sense what you were doing, and it gave them an excuse to pin the evils of the world on you. It is only now that you see how they were only lost in the same confusion that you were, that you are able to truly forgive them. You discover the surprising sense in which nobody actually wants to harbor the darkness — or rather, how their apparent desire to harbor it is simply a reflection of our own desperate need to externalize our own. We should practically thank them for becoming the scapegoats that we needed.
You see for the first time how others could sense what you were really doing, despite your astonishingly clever attempts to hide it. At the very deepest level, your mind is not truly separate from theirs, or from the world at large. It’s not that others can read your mind, per se, but your deepest motivations inevitably weave themselves into the fabric of your “outer” reality; the two being fundamentally inseparable. The deepest choice of all is whether to stand firm in your Light or give in to the impostor. It is a choice you make in every moment, whether you know it or not — and the cumulative result determines your ultimate impact on the world. Others can sense your choices at a subconscious level, and these subtly influence their own. Our culture has convinced itself that this is mystical nonsense, despite it being right under our noses. We do this so that we can harbor our demons while pretending this has no consequences. The more we heal as a species, the more this worldview evaporates.
There is no way to force others to see any of this; force being a manifestation of the same fundamental mistake. Those who are most powerful at inducing this realization in others are simply those who hold it most strongly themselves. They are literally incapable of feeling malice, contempt, or self-righteousness, having thoroughly seen through them as horsemen of the darkness. Yet they are not weak. They are unafraid to fiercely confront the darkness in others. Being free of darkness themselves, they are immune to its sinister charms. This enables their accusations to penetrate other minds, instead of being deflected by the defense mechanisms that the rest of us unwittingly trigger. Their attack therefore finds its mark — which is the darkness itself, and not the confused being who unwittingly harbors it — even if the being needs to be harmed in the process. This is all very difficult to describe, but part of you knows exactly what I mean.
In the same way that your darkness can extend a secret handshake to theirs, your Light can do the same. It is nowhere near as violently pleasurable as attacking the darkness, but infinitely more valuable. This process can take a long time to unfold, and require many iterations — but it is the only way that darkness is released from our world.
If we ultimately are the Light, how on Earth did we get to this place that looks nothing like it? This process is extremely tricky to convey, because it doesn’t fit into our culture’s standard metaphysics. You could say it all began with a subtle turn away from the Light. Then, fearing that we’d lost contact with our absolute goodness, we went out seeking for it relatively — that is, at the expense of apparent “others.” We felt that we had to make them bad, and then violently defeat them, to earn our way back to our original goodness. But this just made things worse, and it quickly spiraled out of control. This is the apparent reality in which we now live.
The hardest thing to communicate about this story is that it does not unfold in what we normally conceive of as linear time. In a profound and surprising sense, every moment is the very first. Thus, every instant is an opportunity to rediscover our primordial Home, a place we never truly left. Each time we see this, we increasingly discover how our judgements of others are actually pointers back to an unhealed part of ourselves. As we heal ourselves, we discover how to heal our relationship with the “other,” until it slowly dawns on us that there was never truly an “other.” The more we see this, the more we vow to hold the Light for these seeming others, even when — indeed, especially when — they cannot hold it for themselves. Far from being a burden, we discover that this has always been our true purpose; our deepest calling. Every encounter with evil becomes an opportunity to strengthen our commitment to the Light.
Looked at this way, kindness is anything that brings us all closer to remembering the truth, and evil is anything that pushes us away from it. Forsaking others is thus always a form of evil. It is a form of forsaking ourselves, because we are not ready to come Home yet. If this language feels too religious for you, feel free to find your own framing. In the end, there is only one truth anyway.
Unlike the Light, the darkness is not a real entity. It is a profound absence masquerading as a presence. It is ultimately only our willingness to turn away from our Light, instead listening to our agendas and justifications. As such, it can never be defeated by more absence. Yet make no mistake: although it is an absence, it still behaves like a sinister presence; a parasite of the mind. The darkness you see your enemies is the very same entity that exists in your own mind, and that provokes you into seeing theirs as intrinsic. It manipulates your perception at such a fundamental level that you simply cannot fathom that you’re being fooled. You’re certain that you’re seeing reality as it is. It is an impossibly clever trick.
It is difficult to overstate just how much of our civilization is built on the shaky foundations of our aggregate self-deception. Every time any one of us skirts our conscience in any way, we contribute to the universal bank of darkness. Revenge fantasy films, YouTube videos of “Karens getting owned,” vicious Facebook threads full of casual cruelty — each is a breeding ground for our collective demons. It all seeps into our physical reality, poisoning it. Everything from our unhealthy air, water, and soil, to our myriad societal ills and the climate crisis, is ultimately an external manifestation of a sickness within. As long as we perceive this sickness to exist only in others, we will never discover the hidden aspect of our own minds that secretly enables it, continually confusing our contempt for our authentic good. This is in no way suggesting that we are all equally complicit, by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless, we each have a profound role to play in leading the world back to the Light.
We’ve been led astray by a society that points us in precisely the wrong direction to accomplish this, although that is nobody’s fault in particular. Our power does not lie in lording our superiority over others — including the “bad people” — but in discovering our surprising commonality with them. This is not some kumbaya sentiment, either. Again, genuine kindness has nothing to do with being nice. It can be fierce or even violent if necessary. It can take almost any form at all. Its only defining characteristic is that it is utterly free of self-deception. It does not misperceive evil as being intrinsic to any mind, and this seemingly-subtle change makes all the difference. The profound integrity of this act prevents the darkness in others from finding the “hook” in our own that it would normally use to justify itself, and is thereby weakened. Although we may still be enemies on the surface, our Light is becoming allied. We are beginning to remember how this whole game actually works.
To be clear: it does no good to pretend that you can see the Light in others when you can’t. Doing so can backfire miserably. Thus, both pretending to see the Light and overlooking it are harmful. The only solution is to learn to actually see it, which happens naturally as you uncover your own. Similarly, it is astonishingly easy to lie to ourselves about whether our violent behavior is radical kindness or merely self-deception. This is how the darkness sneaks in. Perhaps the clearest measure of our own ability to deceive ourselves is how much contempt we are able to muster for our enemies; the “bad people.” To the degree that this potential is present, we are susceptible to sliding down the dark path that has enabled every atrocity there ever was, without ever realizing that we’ve done so. All that is required is the right — or wrong — confluence of circumstances. This happens faster than you can imagine, and you do not want to find yourself there. You will have to confront it, sooner or later.
Everything you do makes a difference, in ways that you can hardly fathom. There are vast and subtle networks of causality that we are normally unconscious of, and that secretly drive the fate of the world. If we pay attention only to the surface activity, we miss out on the bulk of what actually shapes our reality. Evil can look sweet and pretty, while kindness may look nothing like our naive interpretations of it. It is impossible to know which is which — and easy to convince ourselves otherwise — until we have done the deep inner work that eradicates the core confusion. We each catch glimpses from time to time, and it is our duty to carry those glimpses into the world as best we are able. I wish I could tell you that I have completed the journey myself, but alas, I am a mere fledgling. I am still liable to mess things up royally, and I hope you will hold my feet to the fire when I do. I promise to do the same for you.
May all beings be free from suffering and its causes. Amen.