Good and Evil. The recognising of Evil... Can I hurt? Can you?

Mirror of Good and Evil by AntonellaB

There is only one good,
namely knowledge,
and only one evil,
namely ignorance.

Plato








Can any of us become Evil?
What makes us Evil?
Is Good and Evil just part of our nature and in need to simply be understood and accepted as part of all of us?

I know big questions but the kind of that has been playing in my mind...

Hearing about the killing of children and their families this week in Syria, the recent accident in the UK of a fire in a house that killed all the 5 or 6 children but not the parents and having them now on the news being accused of their deaths, made me wonder about all of this...

Then this week as I am facing my own troubled moments of my own darkness I have my daughter watching one of her favourite film: 'The Lovely Bones', and asking me why the killer does that?

I found myself saying that we don't know - it is hard to imagine what is going on in his mind, but he looks like someone very empty and in need to fill that with the killings. The killings give him a high that lasts for some time as he lives off the memories but with time wears off just like any drug does and he is back in the empty space and in need to kill again.

But what makes one of us become capable of doing exactly that? That is my inner question. Of course, there will be many answers and there are so many layers to it. We complex beings 😉

I feel that one of the reasons is the lack of awareness of our own darkness, as I said in the past we tend to avoid it and not accept it in us and then it can take over and be played/acted out, in situations like the killings in Syria.

Is too easy to judge what kind of man can do this, but what about their own despair? Their own traumas living in a country at war with themselves for the lack of freedom and with no human rights or basic needs met. I believe pain creates pain. It takes someone in pain to inflict pain on another. There is no other way. Anger, rage, frustration, despair all come from a place of defending yourself from further pain! It is self-preservation, is an instinct it comes mostly from the unconscious.

And that is my point, for some time. The need is to bring it all to the conscious level, to know about it, to see it, to understand it, to accept it and give it attention. Yes, that pain needs attention, the wound needs to be healed! Pretending all is ok, and even if it is not, there is not much you can do, so you just have to carry on. It might work for some time, might be the right thing to do for some time to but it will never be the answer.

Only when we stop and really listen to what is going on can we learn about ourselves and what we are about and what we need to do.

Yesterday in a dream an answer for one of the reasons some of us hurt, came to me. Abusers, the kind of people who lose their temper, hit their child or their partner and then say sorry and go and help with the healing of their physical wound.

What came to me is the child or the partner is like an extension of them. They are in pain when they hurt, the other is now in pain just like them, so not stronger or better but the same. When they help with healing of the wound and they give you attention, what they are really doing is doing that to themselves. Doing to you and them what was not done to them in the first place.

I was full of goosebumps when I shared this realisation with my partner yesterday. It makes sense. This is why mothers make their children ill to have attention and to be the 'carer', the good perfect mother they wished to have! For example.

But there are others and I am no expert or detective or psychiatric doctor to diagnose or even try to understand it or justify it. But I am fascinated with this and the need for us all to have some awareness and understanding.

This is a vivid understanding our society needs to have. The enlightenment and the forever bliss so many of us wish or dream of is simply an illusion and a utopia. The reality is here in the world we live in and in the pain we all carry. The answer, as Plato said so many centuries ago, is in knowledge instead of ignorance. And that is my message here: we need awareness and understanding. Only when we accept, embrace and even feed our own demons can we be in control of the evil in us and chose consciously to be Good 😀 x

PS: And as the picture above expresses, our actions are only expressions of the good and evil in us. That in itself it is blind because it is in the unconscious. Life and the world is simply our mirror. 

Good vs Evil by www.isabelcastano.com

I end with this picture that to me represents the choice we all have to bring our own masks forward to the conscious and show our true self!