Evil is gratuitous cruelty


Evil is gratuitous cruelty without tangible benefit to the doer. Where does such behavior come from if in its extreme forms it carries no readily apparent evolutionary or other reward? I think it comes from the limited ego declaring wild-eyed war against the unity of the limitless universe, which our natures ultimately long for union with, back to the bliss and safety of the womb. The universe knits all relative things into the web of an unknowable absolute.

Individual identity is just the illusion that a collection of personal memories contains some intrinsic, durable substance to it. But identity is like a tiny transient wave on the surface of the ocean. The wave is just an instant's crest of some mysterious yearning impulse of the whole, expressed at the surface fleetingly, then resorbed into the whole. The ocean remains after the wave is gone, the wave transforming back into endless, unmanifested potential. The ocean is the true nature of the wave. And the ocean doesn't come and go like defiant little waves. It just is.

So then evil is like a war-cry by the wave declaring that it itself—individual identity, ego—does have substance and is a separate entity, with an intrinsic reality in and of itself. It is a desperate, angry rebellion against one's own real nature as ocean, not wave, and that is the root of evil. It only leads to nightmare. The most violent act of assertion of ego over the harmony of unity is murder, the ultimate evil. But milder forms of evil—and even just selfish ego-clinging—are also acts of rebellion to varying degrees against our real universal nature.

So don't assert ego. Don't be evil or semi-evil or just bad. Be good. Try consistently, and that progressively becomes you. Make the ego die slowly now to allow the benign, eternal universe—the genuine you—to accept you gently back into the warmth and peace of union. The universe will take you anyway, but you can find some of that peace now or you can resist—and suffer—until the end, then go kicking and screaming. Through spiritual practice—self-examination and meditation—you can release your ego-identification, with a growing measure of bliss as you let go, rather than be severed from your ego in a bitter final moment of terror. Liberate yourself from your ego identity. Shift your identification from the illusory little self to the real whole Self—awareness of being beyond thought—and then you can really live large.


— Gabriel Fenteany, April 5, 2016



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