Creating dichotomies splits reality where it cannot be split, and establishes conflict of energies where integration of energies is what is needed. Fragmentation happens, and it always creates problems. The problems, however, are not solved by codifying the fragmentation as a permanent condition.
“Evil” is not a cosmic force of permanent standing alongside an equally separate good. This literalizing creates a duality that blinds you to the nature of energy and its proper use. Consciousness, deriving from the Divine always, is good. When you do not understand its true nature, or become forgetful of its source, you fragment that which cannot be permanently, or finally fragmented.
If you believe in a reified, permanent evil you cannot understand the essential goodness of consciousness or energy. What we call the “shadow” side is the unintegrated aspect of your own consciousness. The shadow and its contents are not static, but shift as consciousness shifts. Acknowledging the shadow is not acknowledging Evil with a capital E. Instead, it is acknowledging your need to be aware of, and to integrate, split-off parts of the self that represent energy and insights you need for your own wholeness.
When the shadow goes unacknowledged and is reified as a separate and independent cosmic force, it creates problems for you, for you do not see what you need to see to achieve a necessary phase of wholeness in your evolving. For example, it is easy for you to condemn others who, operating out of ignorance, create disasters in your world. Many of you assume that terrorists, with the beheading of innocent hostages, embody acts of pure, unadulterated evil. What are the terrorists doing? They are using an ideology of good and evil to justify acts that are clearly barbaric. What you may not realize is that if you see the terrorists as agents of Evil with a capital E, you are taking a step in the same direction.
Need we remind you that your bombs in Iraq have killed and maimed numerous innocent people? Are these acts then “good” because they are aimed at annihilating “evil?” Your own unacknowledged shadow is just as dangerous as that of your “enemy,” in fact more so because it lurks behind you, intimately poised in the moment. Now we are talking about energy and its use, so the danger is quite real. Unacknowledged negative energy, especially when it is rationalized as good against a reified evil, can kill and maim. It can also make you sick, directly undermining your own wholeness.
Good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, body and spirit, being and nonbeing – whenever such dualities are given cosmic status or are considered to be permanent conditions of being, you are asking for trouble. Whenever you label others – any others whatsoever – as Evil with a capital E, you are cultivating fragmentation, conflict, violence or the misuse of energy. Indeed, at such moments it is precisely the time to look at your own shadow, and see what is hiding there. It may be waiting to catch you in a moment of weakness, ready to wreak havoc with energy in need of recognition and integration.
What about the seeming evidence for “evil forces” such as dark spirits, demons, etc.?
My friends, read what we have taught you about the imagination and its use, and about your field nature. Do you wish to empower such forces, hypostatizing* them by your own beliefs? When you do so you project your own shadow outwards, joining energy links with others of similar beliefs, co-creating and energizing the very forces you fear and wish to defeat. To be blunt, not only are Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists unwittingly in league with each other, any of you are also in league with them whenever you knowingly or not, reify or hypostatize evil, granting it substantial, independent being. In each case the irony is tangible and potent, for such “Evil” exists only by reason of the individual or mass belief in it. The displaced shadow, whether of an individual, a tribe, or a nation, whether of traditional religion, cult or new age sect, is energetic and will affect the one or the many whose shadow it is.
What we are counseling is not an unrealistic denial of the many “evils” you experience and witness. On the contrary, we counsel a tough honesty and lucidness, a willingness to face squarely your own shadow, to see through artificial dualities to the actual use of energy that is obfuscated by such literalized beliefs. It is only by understanding the most basic terms of being, including the creative capacity of consciousness to shape energy in a given field, that you will truly evolve and begin to experience the peace and wholeness you all seek.
(*hypostatize: “to ascribe substantial or distinct existence to; to consider as real.”)
©Harry C. Stafford
