antireconciler
it's a nuclear device
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2007
- Messages
- 866
- MBTI Type
- Intj
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- so
Heart wrote about evil in her blog and it made me think more about it how it works.
Quoting Paul Levy, heart wrote:
I take Levy to mean that in order for evil to have power over us, it has to exist in unconsciousness. If we were to see it and shine the light of consciousness upon it, so to speak, it cannot have power over us any longer. In other words, to consciously grasp evil is to deal with it on equal terms such that it loses what equates to possession over you.
Healing, then, allows the energy that was formerly tied up in this dynamic to be released and for us to use that energy in more productive ways. The implication is that the energy that was formerly tied up in this dynamic was our own. To free up used energy is to gain the potential to use such energy back from something, which means it was ours to begin with, and thus that we were the ones fueling our own possession to begin with. Clearly, this is not something we can do consciously. To be conscious that you, in part, are your OWN possessor, is identically to be free, and as such, actual enslavement is only possible if we believe our possessor to be something external to ourselves. Healing, thus, is the removal of the seeming externality of the identity of our possessor, which brings it to be, thus, internal to ourselves. This transformation of a perceived external force which affects us and of which we have no control over, into an internal one, I have elsewhere called the process of Absorption.
As it stands, this doesn't quite make sense, because our own capacity for evil is always something perceived within ourselves. In other words, the external possessor is actually also internal and in this way, you hear of people "fighting" themselves. Fighting requires two parties, and even though we are only one person, we still make sense of such statements when we hear them.
So, we acknowledge evil as a force within ourselves, and yet, if we also understand everything before us our being conscious of it, and evil as not before us or on equal terms with us at all, but fundamentally hostile, then now we have good reason to posit an "unconsciousness" from which such forces can be said to arise.
So much for understanding our current understanding. Let's see if we can't do better. It is a curious fact that to bring anything "into" consciousness is to understand it in some way or another. Understanding is an expression of our own power before what stands before us in consciousness. Understanding is an expression of mastery. The unconsciousness requires the opposite, and thus, evil is by nature a force which is unknown to us, and therefore, unpredictable. This is why a snake is such a fitting image for what we know as evil. It is slippery and elusive, and more specifically, it is slippery and elusive to our understanding.
Now, the consequence of this is that we admit evil as something which we do not understand. It is a very short step away to saying that evil is something misunderstood, and that changes things for us. If understanding evil is to understand that we are the ones fueling its apparent possession of us, and that of itself, it has none, then we see that any inclination on our part to speak of it otherwise is a misunderstanding. In other words, to even suggest that evil has any of the properties which make it characteristically evil brings with it our admission that we are misunderstanding: that we do not know what we are talking about. All this accomplishes is to undermine our authority. The result is that we can say nothing of the true nature of evil unless we are to admit that it is not actually evil at all and rather, something we do not understand.
To say simply that we do not understand something, however, itself takes the understanding that we do not have to understand, which implies itself, surprisingly, an understanding! In other words, whatever that which we don't understand turns out to be, we have at least enough understanding to know that it does not merit our fear. If you remember, our bringing something from the unconsciousness to conscious awareness has precisely the same effect. It takes what is unknown and asserts its inability to have power over us. That is, to simply say that we don't understand something and to understand that this carries over even into our inability to know whether it is something that means us harm or not, is IN THAT VERY EXPRESSION the understanding that it cannot injure us, and thus to deal with it on equal terms.
Do you understand what this means? It means that to surrender your belief that you know enough about something that is evil to know that it is evil is also to UNDERSTAND it, and thus to bring it into conscious awareness. Look, I'm telling you the key to bringing anything unconscious into consciousness. That's the implication here. But none of this is any secret. What am I saying except that one may bring anything into understanding provided that understand that he knows nothing of the evil nature of what he perceives, and that he understand that whatever it is he perceives, it is on equal terms with him. These two conditions are one and the same. Either one follows from the other.
But let me repeat. Again, to bring anything evil into understanding, surrender your understanding of its evilness. Cut short your belief that you can understand what is evil about something because that effort must by NECESSITY lead you nowhere. You have already gone in the wrong direction if you try to understand what is evil, because you cannot understand what turns out to not be evil at all if you set out to understand how it is evil. The evil is not there for you to understand because evil and understanding are OPPOSITES.
I implore you, surrender your understanding of the knowledge of good and evil. Its fruit NEVER nourished you.
Do you understand that the knowledge of good and evil is nothing more than knowledge of your own vulnerability? Why do you cling to knowledge of what you know nothing about if not for your fear that that which is before you can injure you? Surrender your knowledge that you can be injured and must be resilient against evil if you are to survive. Do you see how it is our resiliency AGAINST evil that MAINTAINS evil for us? That it is our knowledge of how to defend ourselves that keeps us defenseless? None of this is understanding at all if it does the opposite of what it was made for! Don't you see how the knowledge of good and evil does not serve you at all, and rather, quite the opposite, does you a disservice? Whose voice but the serpent's are you listening to if you know anything about evil? How can you ever understand what enslaves you except by understanding that you are not enslaved at all? That you are victim to nothing? That you and you alone gave everything you see all the meaning it has for you and that therefore YOU ARE THE MASTER? Oh, the irony if you thought standing up and proclaiming that you are the master went against divine mandate! I tell you the truth, that mandate never came from heaven! What have we done except encourage you all along to be strong and invulnerable? Do you think we would say that you may only be strong by fighting evil? Don't you understand that fighting vulnerability first ACCEPTS vulnerability? We never wanted that for you. We never did. We only ever wanted your glory, your strength. We wanted you to be strong WITH us. Only in wanting your strength WITH us could we proclaim our OWN strength. And we ARE strong, and we ARE strong WITH you. We are magnificent together.
Harry Potter might have gained something from Voltemort when he told Harry, near the end of the Sorcerer's Stone, "There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it. Together we'll do extraordinary things." But Harry could not trust Voldemort and why do you think that is? It is because Harry was afraid for his own injury, and if not directly, than through the injury of his friends, which, as you see, he projected upon them to justify himself. His friends have no such vulnerability. Only he thinks they do. And do you think it would have been naive of Harry to trust Voldemort? That Harry should have enough ability to distinguish between good and evil to prevent him from destroying himself by trusting Voldemort? What's this? Weren't we just saying that we have neither need nor ability to defend ourselves who are, if we understand truly, invulnerable? Do you think things change now? Do you think the logic and reasoning that went into all of this simply bows to such sophisticated understanding of how Harry might protect himself? Have you learned so poorly? Has sound reasoning had so little flourishing in your mind? Harry is not naive if he trusts Voldemort. He is invulnerable, and if he trusts Voldemort, he KNOWS it. He has expressed the one certain thing in this existence, and that is, EXISTENCE ITSELF.
LIFE IS CERTAIN.
Forget this, and you are lost.
Quoting Paul Levy, heart wrote:
heart said:
I take Levy to mean that in order for evil to have power over us, it has to exist in unconsciousness. If we were to see it and shine the light of consciousness upon it, so to speak, it cannot have power over us any longer. In other words, to consciously grasp evil is to deal with it on equal terms such that it loses what equates to possession over you.
Healing, then, allows the energy that was formerly tied up in this dynamic to be released and for us to use that energy in more productive ways. The implication is that the energy that was formerly tied up in this dynamic was our own. To free up used energy is to gain the potential to use such energy back from something, which means it was ours to begin with, and thus that we were the ones fueling our own possession to begin with. Clearly, this is not something we can do consciously. To be conscious that you, in part, are your OWN possessor, is identically to be free, and as such, actual enslavement is only possible if we believe our possessor to be something external to ourselves. Healing, thus, is the removal of the seeming externality of the identity of our possessor, which brings it to be, thus, internal to ourselves. This transformation of a perceived external force which affects us and of which we have no control over, into an internal one, I have elsewhere called the process of Absorption.
As it stands, this doesn't quite make sense, because our own capacity for evil is always something perceived within ourselves. In other words, the external possessor is actually also internal and in this way, you hear of people "fighting" themselves. Fighting requires two parties, and even though we are only one person, we still make sense of such statements when we hear them.
So, we acknowledge evil as a force within ourselves, and yet, if we also understand everything before us our being conscious of it, and evil as not before us or on equal terms with us at all, but fundamentally hostile, then now we have good reason to posit an "unconsciousness" from which such forces can be said to arise.
So much for understanding our current understanding. Let's see if we can't do better. It is a curious fact that to bring anything "into" consciousness is to understand it in some way or another. Understanding is an expression of our own power before what stands before us in consciousness. Understanding is an expression of mastery. The unconsciousness requires the opposite, and thus, evil is by nature a force which is unknown to us, and therefore, unpredictable. This is why a snake is such a fitting image for what we know as evil. It is slippery and elusive, and more specifically, it is slippery and elusive to our understanding.
Now, the consequence of this is that we admit evil as something which we do not understand. It is a very short step away to saying that evil is something misunderstood, and that changes things for us. If understanding evil is to understand that we are the ones fueling its apparent possession of us, and that of itself, it has none, then we see that any inclination on our part to speak of it otherwise is a misunderstanding. In other words, to even suggest that evil has any of the properties which make it characteristically evil brings with it our admission that we are misunderstanding: that we do not know what we are talking about. All this accomplishes is to undermine our authority. The result is that we can say nothing of the true nature of evil unless we are to admit that it is not actually evil at all and rather, something we do not understand.
To say simply that we do not understand something, however, itself takes the understanding that we do not have to understand, which implies itself, surprisingly, an understanding! In other words, whatever that which we don't understand turns out to be, we have at least enough understanding to know that it does not merit our fear. If you remember, our bringing something from the unconsciousness to conscious awareness has precisely the same effect. It takes what is unknown and asserts its inability to have power over us. That is, to simply say that we don't understand something and to understand that this carries over even into our inability to know whether it is something that means us harm or not, is IN THAT VERY EXPRESSION the understanding that it cannot injure us, and thus to deal with it on equal terms.
Do you understand what this means? It means that to surrender your belief that you know enough about something that is evil to know that it is evil is also to UNDERSTAND it, and thus to bring it into conscious awareness. Look, I'm telling you the key to bringing anything unconscious into consciousness. That's the implication here. But none of this is any secret. What am I saying except that one may bring anything into understanding provided that understand that he knows nothing of the evil nature of what he perceives, and that he understand that whatever it is he perceives, it is on equal terms with him. These two conditions are one and the same. Either one follows from the other.
But let me repeat. Again, to bring anything evil into understanding, surrender your understanding of its evilness. Cut short your belief that you can understand what is evil about something because that effort must by NECESSITY lead you nowhere. You have already gone in the wrong direction if you try to understand what is evil, because you cannot understand what turns out to not be evil at all if you set out to understand how it is evil. The evil is not there for you to understand because evil and understanding are OPPOSITES.
I implore you, surrender your understanding of the knowledge of good and evil. Its fruit NEVER nourished you.
Do you understand that the knowledge of good and evil is nothing more than knowledge of your own vulnerability? Why do you cling to knowledge of what you know nothing about if not for your fear that that which is before you can injure you? Surrender your knowledge that you can be injured and must be resilient against evil if you are to survive. Do you see how it is our resiliency AGAINST evil that MAINTAINS evil for us? That it is our knowledge of how to defend ourselves that keeps us defenseless? None of this is understanding at all if it does the opposite of what it was made for! Don't you see how the knowledge of good and evil does not serve you at all, and rather, quite the opposite, does you a disservice? Whose voice but the serpent's are you listening to if you know anything about evil? How can you ever understand what enslaves you except by understanding that you are not enslaved at all? That you are victim to nothing? That you and you alone gave everything you see all the meaning it has for you and that therefore YOU ARE THE MASTER? Oh, the irony if you thought standing up and proclaiming that you are the master went against divine mandate! I tell you the truth, that mandate never came from heaven! What have we done except encourage you all along to be strong and invulnerable? Do you think we would say that you may only be strong by fighting evil? Don't you understand that fighting vulnerability first ACCEPTS vulnerability? We never wanted that for you. We never did. We only ever wanted your glory, your strength. We wanted you to be strong WITH us. Only in wanting your strength WITH us could we proclaim our OWN strength. And we ARE strong, and we ARE strong WITH you. We are magnificent together.
Harry Potter might have gained something from Voltemort when he told Harry, near the end of the Sorcerer's Stone, "There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it. Together we'll do extraordinary things." But Harry could not trust Voldemort and why do you think that is? It is because Harry was afraid for his own injury, and if not directly, than through the injury of his friends, which, as you see, he projected upon them to justify himself. His friends have no such vulnerability. Only he thinks they do. And do you think it would have been naive of Harry to trust Voldemort? That Harry should have enough ability to distinguish between good and evil to prevent him from destroying himself by trusting Voldemort? What's this? Weren't we just saying that we have neither need nor ability to defend ourselves who are, if we understand truly, invulnerable? Do you think things change now? Do you think the logic and reasoning that went into all of this simply bows to such sophisticated understanding of how Harry might protect himself? Have you learned so poorly? Has sound reasoning had so little flourishing in your mind? Harry is not naive if he trusts Voldemort. He is invulnerable, and if he trusts Voldemort, he KNOWS it. He has expressed the one certain thing in this existence, and that is, EXISTENCE ITSELF.
LIFE IS CERTAIN.
Forget this, and you are lost.
