This essay belongs with my posts on THE SHADOW
“Evil” is by far the darkest and heaviest word in the English language. It belongs at the nucleus of a cluster of other words like Devil, Satan, chaos, darkness, death, night, violence, hell, hate. It is an abstract noun, an abstraction that manifests itself in historic, literary and mythic images like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Mr. Hyde, Iago, Caliban. The list is as endless as the list in our pantheon. Evil is the name we have given to all that is negative, and destructive of life, the most sacred and precious of our experiences.
Diametrically opposed to this word is another word, Good, which is at the nucleus of another, and what we think, unrelated cluster of words like God, cosmos, heaven, light, flight, life, day, love, virtue, kindness, selflessness, compassion. It, too, is an abstract noun, embodied in images of angels, saints, heavenly hosts, heroes. Good is everything that is positive, that supports and nurtures life.
We see this division into two opposing tendencies reflected all around and within us. Black and white, night and day, death and life, tomb and womb, chaos and harmony, heaven and hell, fire and ice, war and peace, body and soul, mind and matter. These oppositions are mirrored in the best of our art, which exists because of this contrast, and which is sustained by the contraries of good and evil, silence and sound, stillness and movement, space and form. Physiologically, too, we are sustained by diastole and systole, inspiration and expiration.
Psychologically it manifests within us as conflict between virtue and sin, acceptable, law-abiding behavior, and those emotions that are termed reprehensible by our family, clan, religion. All of these conflicts are reflections of the dual world we inhabit.
The reason why we see this division everywhere is because life, and we along with it, are comprised of and exist because of this duality. They are the warp and the weft of the fabric of existence. Without this distinction and difference, life as we know it would not exist. Life is created, sustained and destroyed and created again by these contraries. Life is the flower of this churning. As William Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.’
Not only does this duality exist, but it is good that it does. We can say that even evil is good since it is necessary and without it nothing would be. It is this that gives meat to our experiences. Without this contrast we would have nothing to think, feel, write and read about. Without it life as we know it would be boring and insipid. We are fascinated by this contrast. We talk about it, we read all about it. This is what makes news. This is what makes history. This is what fires creation. This is what makes all the characters in literature and in life interesting and worthy of attention and study.
Though in nature, and in an abstract way in humanity in general, we can admit the necessity and even the desirability of evil, of the dark side of experience, when it comes to ourselves, and to the world and people immediately around us, it is hard for us not to judge, condemn and punish, and even attempt to destroy it. We learn the distinction between these two early in life. We are given models to follow and models to eschew. We learn that one kind of behavior is acceptable, and the other not. One is allowed to be expressed, the other repressed. One is rewarded, the other punished. In most cultures, clans and families, the line between the two is linear and rigid. The thinking is split down the middle, dualistic, with Satan, darkness, evil, night on the one hand, and God, light, good on the other.
It is understandable that we desire good, and condemn evil, since we perceive the latter as being destructive to everything that we value and hold most sacred. It is necessary to our survival to make this distinction, to be for the one and against the other. What we term ‘evil,’ whether it is within, or without us, can destroy us. We can become its victims, or its perpetrators. Both have destructive ends. Dividing the world into good and bad is a way to make sense of the chaos of life. Judging our experience is a way of clarifying and simplifying it. And this becomes necessary when we realize that life as we know it, civilization, society, depends upon this simplification and clarification. To be pro-good and anti-evil gives us a definite direction, one that is creative and bears fruit materially, intellectually, spiritually.
But it is important to understand that too rigid a distinction between good and evil can also destroy us. This preference of one over the other is a purely human trait. Nature is an amalgam of the two. What we term good and evil are both expressions of the one energy that permeates and powers life and existence. We need both of them for our survival and our spiritual progress. In order to become whole, to transcend duality, and fuse them into one, we also need what Blake calls ‘the Demon’s light.’
There is no better example of this than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I give literary examples instead of actual ones because our evil characters leave behind few words of analysis. Our writers are the ones who catch the pulse of life, all of it. Writers sing life whole.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde embody good and evil. Hyde comes into being because Jekyll has too rigid a definition of good and evil. Dr. Jekyll, the scientist, labors during the day for ‘the furtherance of knowledge and the relief of sorrow and suffering.’ Nine-tenths of his life is a life of effort, virtue and control. His high views, derived from his interpretation of religious values, of what is good and right, make him advance ‘infallibly in one direction, and in one direction only: on the moral side.’ He does not allow himself a ‘certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many,’ but which he finds hard to reconcile with his imperious desire to appear to be good and virtuous. Hence he represses his pleasures with a ‘morbid sense of shame.’
This separation of what Dr. Jekyll considers undesirable pleasures and his moral being causes a deep abyss in his psyche between the two, the good and the evil ‘which divide and compound man’s dual nature.’ The over-exertion of his energies in one direction produces the tension that brings about his tragedy.
Jekyll discovers a chemical concoction that allows him to ‘express the lower elements’ of his soul. He drinks it, and feels strange sensations, ‘something indescribably new, and from their novelty, incredibly sweet.’ He feels younger, lighter, happier in body. Hyde has come into being. Freed from the constraints of his good self, he feels heady, reckless, and delights in ‘the solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.’ Hyde is cruel, and graduates from small acts of unkindness and cruelty to becoming a murdering monster.
We see the tremendous tension within Dr. Jekyll between his will to subdue the evil part of him, and his desire for a freedom that will allow him to be all that he is. It is his conscious and willful refusal to participate in feelings and pleasures that he perceives as evil that commits him to ‘a profound duplicity in life.’ Because Dr. Jekyll has denied himself, in the moderate doses, the simple pleasures that he considers ‘evil’ or ‘wrong,’ he is propelled into the forbidden zone with a force he cannot control. The tragedy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is caused by too rigid a division between good and evil. By desiring one and repressing the other, by deliberately and consciously preferring the one and avoiding the other, he has in fact made them two literally separate and irreconcilable wholes, further apart than they actually are, and needed to be. Thereafter he plays out the tragedy of the two which leads, predictably, to tremendous suffering and eventual suicide.
When we deny those parts of ourselves that might be termed ‘bad,’ we set up a resistance within ourselves that gathers force and power and ultimately blooms into full-blown evil. Bad is only the beginning of the continuum that ends in evil. Or even if we don’t graduate into evil by this type of thinking and repression, by denying ourselves the ‘bad,’ by trying to excise and destroy it, by trying to be too goody-goody, like Jekyll, and not allowing ourselves the pleasures of life which from a certain strictly puritanical ethic appear evil, we sow the seeds of a great conflict and sorrow. In believing in good as good and evil as bad, in courting the first and banishing the latter, we are allowing ourselves only half of the experience of life.
What we term good is often only another name for acceptable, and evil is often the label given to that which does not obey procrustean laws and rules. Our societies and our civilization, which are dependent upon obedience and a collective ethic for their survival, often employ too narrow an interpretation of religion, too heavy a reliance on virtue in order to excise parts of our total being, to attenuate our wholeness.
What we term evil or dark is an inextricable part of ourselves. We are human, we are made of flesh and blood. We have lusts, hungers, needs, mouths and orifices, appetites, to fulfill which we often kill, hurt, maim, eat. To eat is to kill. We are all part ‘evil.’ We live in violent times, and as much as we may condemn, deplore, and disassociate ourselves from the violence, we are a part of it. We contribute to it. We participate in the most forbidden of our appetites, the appetite to kill. We cause it. Every time we pick up the paper and read the gory details about murders and school shootings, we indulge in evil vicariously. Our curiosity about and fascination with it link us to it indissolubly. In Sanskrit the members of an audience of a play are not passive witnesses of the drama, but are sahridyas, of the same heart, as the protagonist.
Something in us will always be propelled towards violence and bloodshed. It haunts us in our dreams, it stares at us from the paper every morning. We cannot exorcize it. We haven’t been able to throughout our history. Evil is here to stay.
Perhaps the greatest fallacy of logic that we commit is the either/or fallacy. It is invariably less a question of either or than and and. Life is an interplay between these two contraries. Without either good or evil we cannot be whole. Our ideas can be very narrow, our vision very limited. The human will with all its striving in the face of chaos, or what appears to be chaos, is often impotent against the great Is. Evil exists despite all our efforts.
It is, of course, very hard for the mind, for our conscience, for that part of ourselves that wants to believe we can and must control ‘evil,’ to accept this premise and this reality. The mind is discontent with it, and is torn between free will and determination, between its ability to change life as it perceives it, cruel, inhumane, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ and accepting the great Is in its entirety. This discontent, too, is, no less than the instinct for evil. And a good thing it is. Acceptance and discontent is part of the duality of our experience, and without these contraries there would be, as William Blake says, no progression.
Without evil we exsanguinate and emasculate ourselves, without good we tend to glory excessively, as Hyde did, in cruelty and blood. A healthy human being acknowledges and accepts within himself both of these elements. Prospero’s reference to Caliban in The Tempest comes to mind: This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. Even Jekyll feels no repugnance at the image of Hyde, but rather a “leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.” Like the Merlins and the Prosperos, not above revenge and the instinct to defend themselves by borrowing some of the power of evil, we need to accept, embrace, subdue, then let be, and let go our calibans.
The heroes we worship are whole, total beings who embody this marriage of good and evil: King Arthur, Robin Hood, Cuchulain, Siegfried, Shiva, Indra, Ulysses, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, revolutionaries, freedom fighters. Guru Gobind Singh. They, too, had instincts that led them to destroy their enemies. They too judged and condemned, jumped into the battle and fought it tooth and nail on the side of ‘good’. In order to do so they donned the mantle of evil, employed its energy. They, too, decapitated, disemboweled, destroyed. Without this dark energy we would be entirely at the mercy of the forces of destruction.
But unlike the Hitlers they are heroes because they keep the contraries in balance. Balance is the key here. The East understands this better than the West, for everywhere in the East we find symbols and signs of this balance, this marriage. There is, for example, no word analogous to the abstract noun ‘evil’ in Hindi and Sanskrit. The closest words are ‘bad,’ ‘cruel,’ or ‘destructive.’ There is no concept of a disembodied evil. There are demons, asuras, and they ultimately serve good, and strengthen it. Shakti, energy, and its manifestation in Kali, and Shiva, Mistress and Lord of Dissolution and Destruction, are perceived as positive symbols of an inexpugnable reality, and worshiped. The Chinese word for the dark energy is ‘yang,’ which does not compare with evil. There is no better example of this balance than the yin-yang symbol, the circle containing equal parts of each, each needing and containing the seed of the other, the line separating them not rigid and linear, but wave-like, flowing, merging, almost invisible, as if they were contiguous, touching, like lovers nestling within the confines of the One.
One. The bilateral vision integrated, like Shiva’s third eye, perceiving the indivisible whole: the one circle of the waxing and waning moon; the one globe, as of the earth, containing the contraries in her womb, like twins; the one sphere on whose axis occur the extremities, on whose diameter occur the opposites; the one energy that emanates as two seemingly separate expressions that morph into each other somewhere along the cyclical journey, merge and separate and merge again.
One. And all of it, Good. The word good means, ‘together, in a body, to come or bring together, to unite, join, fit.’ Like William Blake says: “Good and Evil are here both Good and the two contraries Married.”
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