The muddled mystic

I have studied esoteric lore since a young age. Firstly through my own tradition and culture, which led me to explore the texts of other faiths and mystical movements. By my 40’s my exploration was focussed on Kabbalah and its teachings. The key, what brought it together in a much more experiential manner, occurred I engaged in a more deeply and more shamanically based teaching and it all fell into place.

I began to experience how it worked – not perfectly, of course for I am human and limited by my constraints. But I began to understood in a deeply resonant fashion. The words began to live. I had attained some wisdom.

The difficulty was what to do with it. As I became more deeply steeped in these teachings, so I seemed to become less grounded, less able, in the “real” world. It confused me how we all are bathed in the light, yet continue to seek and toy with the darkness and chaos. How there is a deep longing in us for the darkness, almost an embedded need.

The sages say that we are born with two inclinations – one the good inclination, the other the evil. We have free choice in this matter, and can follow the path of the good or choose the evil path. Then one of the masters pointed out that most of us are benonim – walk the middle ground, with some bad and some good.

He obviously was embracing the relativistic model, which says that the important thing is your intention, your goal. What are your true thoughts on the matter? Are they good? Or are they evil? In fact, he is merciful enough to ask whether most of your thoughts lean towards the good or towards the evil – for to be perfectly good is attained by only a few righteous souls. No one can be truly evil, for everyone, everything that exists in Creation has to have a spark of Divine (Creator) light in it.

In the light of that analysis, I have done little evil in my life. I am not monogamous, which is looked at as a sin in our culture – due to the commandment against adultery. Though it was in a polygamous society in which the stricture not to sleep with a woman who you are not wedded to. Abraham and Jacob had non-adulterous relations with woman who were not their wives, but their wives maidservants. This was a time were sex was not the issue, but offspring. When Jacob slept with ??? on the road, thinking she was a harlot – which seemed to be acceptable behaviour – for that was not what was the issue at hand, but that she became pregnant out of wedlock. That is what branded her a harlot, not seducing some guy on the side of the road. Nor was he in any way culpable – until she proved that it was him. It was not about love – that she loved him and wanted him, but about the child and inheritance rights. This was a world in which sex was like any other natural event of the human existence. It was about the material rights in this world expressed through children – the most important event in a person’s life, as it meant that there was a possible future. It was a time when the pulse of life flowed strongly through our veins.

We are at a conundrum now. We have enough people on the planet. We do not need more – and might need less. Yet we still believe that one of our basic rights and needs is to bear children. It has gone from an imperative to a right. All the energy of this life force is no longer needed to only procreate – it needs to be channelled into other directions, for if it is not diverted into positive actions, it will become expressed in negative ones. The rapist is not seeking sexually fulfilment in his life.

It is stepping from adolescent to adult behaviour, taking charge of our future as a collective. No longer deluded that anyone can exist on his or her own. To become more aware of all it takes just to exist on this earth as a human being from all the resources that are needed – food, water, air, clothes, shelter, energy, transport for the basics; then entertainment, work, education, etc., etc.

The structure cannot survive with a tiny few having more than a vast majority of people. That is just not right. In fact, it might be downright evil. You decide. Remembering that whether you are part of the elite or part of the disenfranchised economically, that might taint your response. Because it is natural for a system – just like a living being, because in fact all our systems are in the end run and fed by human beings – to want to survive, and do everything and anything it needs to do survive. However, this system is killing us.

And the trans-humanist agenda is not a solution. It is saying that the human is unnecessary in the system. It becomes a system of power, and thus, not a system for humans.

Of course, the first and most important goal here would be to distinguish between good and evil. Though that could be relative – as we see often enough in our world. When good is fighting evil, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two in the heat of the battle. Is it acceptable to do evil things for a good cause? Is it acceptable to do the same evil things that evil does in the battle against evil? To an established order, those that threaten its stability are branded terrorists and looked at as evil, because they kill innocent citizens. Though these people, who rose up against an order that has been established by tyranny and fear, and are fighting for freedom and human rights, are not truly evil.

And the truly pertinent point, if you are willing to do evil, to lie and kill and manipulate, the innocent suffer and can be controlled through fear. Thus it comes down to intention - what is the ultimate outcome of what you are doing.

Accepting that humans are both good and evil, the only way out of this connundrum is to believe in a force of Good - which we call G-d! Then, to practise this Good. For it is what each individual does in that moment of choice that determines his and in the end our future, that will be our destiny.

So is it your thoughts? Or the reason that you do these terrible things that determines whether they are terrible or not? Is it just the circumstances and the reasons you do these things that is the ultimate criterion of good or evil? If I do it “for God” - as I perceive Him – is that good? Even if I kill and maim and torture and hurt and enslave other beings? Is that what God wants from us? To kill one another? To hurt one another? Is that God’s plan? His purpose for creation – a fight club, where millions fight and die? If that is the case, it is reaching absurd heights. For no longer will there be wars or battles between peoples and nations, it will just mean annihilation – perhaps for that nation, or perhaps for the entire humanity. A number of flashes in the sky is what for many will be there last moment, while for many others a slow, bleeding death – lingering for many years, till we are all gone.

We are living in a world run by a lot of sabre rattling madmen. Though to upset everything, it requires one of these megalomaniacs to create a terrible (terror-able) scenario. There is only one motivation for people of this ilk, and it is power. That is evil.