Speak No Evil – Philosophy

 

Why is there so much evil in the world? To bemoan the evil so prevalent today is to fail to take account of our part. The walls we build around ourselves create an illusion of separateness. Our egos dwell there and crave power, authority, and dominion – stings of the serpent’s venom. The fundamental duality of good and evil is then taken as a law unto itself. Although it will not be stayed in its course, on a large, cosmic scale, evil derives from a blockage of a circulation of vital energy. Here, in this post, I’ve decided to address evil through quotes that I have come to admire on this topic. I hope they will be useful and interesting to the reader.  Eve

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From the viewpoint of the initiate seeking wisdom, evil is dissipation, a scattering of one’s energies and attention, whereas good is that which leads to spiritual concentration, that is to unity.

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A permanent idea of good and evil can be formed in man only in connection with a permanent aim and a permanent understanding. If a man understands that he is asleep and if he wishes to awake, then everything that helps him to awake will be good and everything that hinders him, everything that prolongs his sleep, will be evil. But this is so only for those who want to awake, that is, for those who understand that they are asleep. Those who do not understand that they are asleep and those who can have no wish to awake, cannot have understanding of good and evil. And as the overwhelming majority of people do not realize and will never realize that they are asleep, neither good nor evil can actually exist for them.

-G. I. Gurdjieff.

 

Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too much to give it up.

– Mohandas K. Gandhi

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The idea of sacred medicine teaches us that the universe is conscious only to conscious man, and that there are states of being in which universally active forces can reach my body from within my body. These forces cannot act upon my body from without, except as my body is part of organic life on earth with its great cycles of life, death, fertilization, and decay. The ego cannot battle against that either in nature or in the body. body. …

Man in the state of egoism is crushed by the universe, both actually and in theory. The ego alone, with all its bodily habits to support it, lives in a hostile universe because it constantly fights to preserve itself. It is a euphemism to speak of the universe of modern science as unalive, non-living. We call it a dead universe because we are unable to bear that our state of consciousness evokes a hostile universe. Traditional man was clearer about the enmity we gather when we live severed from a higher consciousness. It is a lawful enmity to be sure, not directed to me personally, but it is a genuine enmity and to communicate this, it is not so far from the mark to speak of evil spirits and of punishment.

– Jacob Needleman