Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. —Author unknown
What is kindness? It is the only thing that actually fights evil. Everything else just makes it worse.
The deepest part of you can perceive yourself in literally everyone and everything, strange as that may sound — yet you hide this knowledge from your conscious mind, so that you don’t have to feel their suffering. It is this same shielding that enables the “bad people” to do what they do: their minds block them from fully perceiving the life in their victims — be they other people, animals, or nature at large. This is the secret mechanism behind all the evil there ever was.
Any time any one of us employs this shielding, we lower the threshold for everyone else to do the same — no matter how noble our intent. For example, when we witness evil, we often feel compelled not only to stop the evildoer, but to harm them — quite apart from any good it will do. This is very difficult to admit. We tell ourselves that we’re acting for “the greater good,” but part of us simply enjoys seeing the “bad people” suffer.
Which of these is our true intention — the good or the harm? Does it even matter? So long as our cruelty produces some benefit — which it actually might — who cares if we also get to feel a bit of glee from subjugating our enemy? After all, it is a private pleasure that has no bearing on the outcome. But this is a dark lie.
Not only can our target sense the malicious intent, but something in us secretly wants them to. We are telegraphing our hidden malevolence in order to bait them into behavior that will force us to escalate, while hiding this knowledge from ourselves. We want to be forced to unleash the full extent of our righteous wrath, because nothing feels better than violently punishing evil.
Part of us knows this will only drive the darkness deeper into their minds, thereby increasing the net animosity in the world; and that any benefit will be temporary and superficial — yet we conceal this knowledge, writing it off as unfortunate collateral damage. But it isn’t “unfortunate” at all: it is secretly the whole point.
And no wonder, for even Satan masquerades as an angel of light. So it is not strange that his ministers also masquerade as ministers of righteousness. —2 Corinthians 11:14-16
Evil is a kind of mind-virus. We recognize it easily in others but never in ourselves. It compels us to treat them with contempt, never realizing that this only conveys that we’re under the sway of the very delusion we’re viciously judging them for, thus compelling them to return the favor. It is like a secret handshake between our darkness and theirs — which, in truth, aren’t separate at all.
The Darkness behaves 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 as real as anything you can touch. It is why we sometimes suspect the existence of an evil global conspiracy. It is the primordial evil conspiracy; the one to which all the rest owe their existence and to which they ultimately filter up.
It relentlessly drives us toward Armageddon — situations where everyone is violently proving how righteous they are. It is why the US may be headed toward civil war, and explains bitter divorces where each side feels like the exclusive victim / hero. Nearly the whole world is caught in its terrible sway, evil provoking evil at every turn, without anyone recognizing its true origin, deep within the crevices of our psyches.
Every act of unkindness we’ve ever perpetrated on anyone; all the hardness we carry in our hearts; has only ever been in service of humanity’s ultimate nemesis.
To be clear: there really are people who knowingly serve the Darkness, and who conspire to cause great harm. They must be stopped, even it isn’t “nice.” But to the extent that we perceive other people as fundamentally defective, or ourselves as intrinsically superior — in short, contempt for people as opposed to their behaviors — we are falling into the ultimate trap. Any action taken from this place necessarily darkens the world.
The vast majority of such behavior feels absolutely nothing like evil. It simply feels like “business as usual.” We find all kinds of ways to justify self-serving behavior, using the sorry state of the world as an excuse. Corporations cheat us, so who cares if we skim from them? Our political opponents are morally defective, so why shouldn’t we mock and shame them?
It is not that skimming or shaming are inherently wrong. But we disregard that quiet voice warning us that we are lying to ourselves. The more we lie, the more we lose the ability to even detect that it is a lie. The “little voice” gets increasingly drowned out by clever justifications, which we fail to recognize as such — because why would our own minds lie to us? This is the trap in which modern humans are caught. We have abandoned our inner knowing in favor of clever judgments. After all, it cannot be objectively proven, and so it might as well not exist.
Every time any one of us makes this mistake — which happens far more often than we realize — we are strengthening the same capacity in everyone else. The dark lies that politicians use to foment wars are made of the very same “stuff” as the lies we tell ourselves. Again, not just the same kind of stuff. Each act of self-deception gets woven into the very fabric of our reality, accumulating in the body politic, reconfiguring itself, eventually erupting in the form of atrocities that we feel absolutely no connection to — and which then serve as justification for more.
Without recognizing our own role in all this, it is impossible to do actual good in the world. Instead, we will continually buy into whichever narratives sound best — never recognizing that no matter how “good” they are, we are secretly just feeding the Beast. If you really want to know whether a cause is “good” or not, you cannot simply evaluate its contents. You must be able to feel into its origin. So much suffering could be avoided if we only learned to recognize this.
The entire fight against evil comes down to recognizing this “deeper knowing.” For it is only by seeing how cleverly the darkness has manipulated our own minds that we begin to recognize just how deeply the “bad people” are stuck — and exactly what we can do about it.
For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes. … It is powerful because we have not recognized it. — The Gospel of Philip
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 from time immemorial, and it is more than you could hope to clean up in a single lifetime. The pain is beyond what you can fathom; more than 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 couldn’t have if only you had been totally honest.
The guilt is overwhelming. But then it dawns on you: the only reason it hurts so much is that you never actually wanted to be this way. It is only profound confusion that enabled it. Your whole being is absorbed into that part of you that never wanted to hurt anyone; never could want such a thing. Then, suddenly, the full mass of darkness lifts from your mind. It feels almost like 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. This Light is what you ultimately are — wonder of wonders — and surprisingly, so is everyone else.
In fact, 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 convincingly seem 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. It is impossible to benefit ourselves at the world’s expense, because we are the world. How crazy to think otherwise! How foolish to judge others for not seeing it, when we couldn’t see it yet ourselves! In fact, this is the only way we could judge them.
Such a silly game we play, with such tragic consequences. We are continually shoving each other into the abyss to prevent others from waking up, because we’re not ready to wake up ourselves. Seeing this, we lose all desire to “get away” with anything. Why would we want to? How did we ever think we could? How much lighter people would feel if only they saw this.
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 Light in the “bad people,” but chose to smother it anyway — believing 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.
You now see how others could sense it despite your astonishingly clever attempts to hide it. At the very deepest level, your mind is not separate from theirs, nor from the world at large. It’s not that others can read your mind, per se, but your inner motivations inevitably weave themselves into your “outer” reality; the two being fundamentally inseparable. The deepest motivation of all is to stand firm in your Light, instead of giving in to the array of clever voices that tell you that they are good. You see now that everything comes down to this single decision: to never again confuse the darkness for the Light.
This is a choice you make in every moment, whether you know it or not — and it is these choices that determine your impact on the world. Others can sense your choice at a subconscious level, and it influences their own. Your decision to stand firm in the Light sets an example for them. Your unwillingness to forsake others under any circumstances slowly undermines their capacity to hide from their Light, whether they consciously realize it or not.
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 toward anybody for any reason, having thoroughly seen them as weapons of the Darkness. Yet such people are not weak. They are unafraid to fiercely confront the darkness in others. This is true kindness.
Being free of darkness themselves, such people are immune to its sinister charms. This enables their accusations to penetrate the minds of others, instead of triggering the defense mechanisms normally provoked by our contempt. It is as though they are surgically targeting the darkness itself, instead of the confused beings who unwittingly harbor it. This sometimes requires harming the beings themselves, but this is not the main point — and this subtle change makes all the difference in the world.
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 their 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. We began as undifferentiated Light, but then made the mistake of subtly turning away from it. Then, fearing that we’d lost contact with our absolute goodness, we went out seeking for it relatively — that is, at the expense of “others.” This simultaneously created those “others,” who we then felt compelled to violently defeat, in order to prove our own goodness and thereby return Home. But this just made things worse, and the whole thing 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. As such, it can never be defeated by more absence. Yet make no mistake: it still behaves like a sinister presence. The darkness you see your enemies is the very same entity that exists in your own mind, and it 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 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,” Facebook threads full of casual cruelty and callous comments about “Darwin awards” — each is a breeding ground for our collective Demon.
It all seeps into our physical reality, slowly 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 perpetuates it. This is in no way suggesting that we are all equally complicit. Nonetheless, we each have a profound role to play in leading humanity back to the Light.
We’ve been led astray by a society that points us in precisely the wrong direction to accomplish this. 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. Genuine kindness does not have to be nice. It need not take any particular 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. Its profound integrity prevents the darkness in others from finding the “hook” in our own mind that it normally uses to justify itself. 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 we can see the Light in others when we can’t. Doing so can backfire miserably. Thus, both pretending to see the Light in others and overlooking it are harmful. The only solution is to learn to actually see it, which happens naturally as we uncover our 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.
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.” Contempt for beliefs or behaviors can sometimes be healthy, but contempt for people never is. To the degree that this potential is still present, we are susceptible to sliding down the dark path that has enabled every genocide, without ever realizing that we are. All that is required is the right — or wrong — confluence of circumstances. It happens faster than you can imagine, and you do not want to find yourself there.
There are vast and subtle networks of causality that we are normally unconscious of, and that secretly drive the fate of the world. Everything we do makes a difference, in ways that we can hardly fathom. 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 sometimes looks fierce. 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 only ask that you 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.