A conversation with a Buddhist teacher from India turned to the Buddha’s illumination. “The Buddha,” he said, “was attacked by Mara, but the Buddha came to see that the evil was within him.”
“Do you mean to say that evil is only within the individual?” I asked. The Buddhist teacher was confused, but instead of questioning, he tried to have it both ways by saying, “there is no duality.”
The problem of evil is a very hard nut, one that no philosopher, East or West, has cracked. Spiritually and philosophically illuminating the nature and operation of evil has become a matter of survival however, for the individual and for humanity.
We can’t place the locus of evil solely within the individual. An experience I had with unvarnished evil 36 years ago in the Soviet Union taught me that.
My encounter with evil came during a trip to the Soviet Union a year before it fell. I was invited to the USSR and flown to Moscow in mid-winter. For the first two weeks I found the Russian people in the capital, and in what was still Leningrad, very warm and hospitable.
Diplomatic relations were warming as well. Citizens of the United States had only been allowed to stay with our Cold War enemy in their homes some months previous to my visit, and few of the many Russians I met had had any direct contact with Americans before.
My Russian partner and host had been touted as a leading businessman under Gorbachev’s perestroika. After a few nights in the bosom of Andrei’s family, I felt very at home in their spacious Moscow apartment.
But I began to suspect that this fellow was way too powerful after we dined a few nights in Moscow’s best restaurants that the average Russian was not allowed to enter. The places positively reeked of nomenklatura.
Late one afternoon Andrei announced that it was a special occasion, the 13th birthday of his eldest son. That’s the point of entry of a boy into manhood in the male-dominated Russian culture.
We had an excellent dinner and an enjoyable evening, which included a couple of drinks. Of course a drink in Russia is nearly half a glass of vodka, followed by ritual toast making. Russians claim that the long toasts—little speeches really—keep them from becoming too inebriated.
On the way back I sat in the front with the driver, while Andrei, his wife Vera, and their two boys sat in the backseat of the roomy car. Vera, who knew very little English, incongruously said something about evil.
Off the top of my head (a big mistake in responding to that subject), I said, “Evil can’t touch you if you remain with your fear.”
Until that point, I had not felt a single moment of homesickness or fear in the strange land of Russia in the dead of winter. But my feelings of warmth and fellowship were shattered the next moment.
I heard a metallic voice, which seemed to emanate from well behind the car. It came through Andrei, and it simply said, with a tone more malevolent than can be described, “Is that so?”
I’d known strong fear before, but the instantaneous terror I felt was far greater than any fear I’d ever experienced. Suddenly the lovely red curtains that had encircled me were ripped open. Before my eyes flashed scenes of incalculable suffering and death—scenes of gulags, of mass torture and executions.
I felt like I’d been instantly transported to the backside of the moon, and that I would never get home. Even the Stalinesque architecture, which appeared just ugly and remote to me before, seemed to speak of evil. And the grimy snow that lined Moscow’s grim streets mocked my winter memories growing up in the Midwest.
Without thinking, I held fast to the fear, and rode it like a rollercoaster for the next half hour, unable to speak. The immense challenge passed, and I was transformed.
Shortly after I returned to the West Coast, a philosopher friend asked what would have happened if I hadn’t done what I said. One of two things, I replied. Either I would have been shattered into a million pieces, or evil would have taken possession of me completely.
When I returned I saw that darkness permeated America as much as Russia. Today it’s furthered by arrogant white men spouting warmed-over Marxist claptrap, claiming they speak for “the people” in a war against “the system.”
Americans, including progressives, are world-class deniers and avoiders of the darkness within them. It’s incredible how extremists on both the right, which holds power, and the left, which covets power, are alike in this basic way.
It’s no longer possible to avoid collective darkness and evil. The accretion of darkness in consciousness is destroying all space, inwardly and outwardly. Yet arrogant fools on the left bypass the spiritual dimension altogether, projecting the unseen darkness within them and echoing Trumpers’ hateful demand that the entire system be burned to the ground.
We all have our own share of darkness, inherited from the generations before us and accumulated in our own lives—what we blithely call “baggage” in America.
The content of that dark matter, composed of all the unresolved hurts and hatreds within us, has built up generation after generation. And the totality of it in human consciousness is the collective darkness of humankind, some of which has intentionality. That is the source and meaning of evil.
What is the remedy? Observing, questioning and remaining with the darkness within oneself, one is constantly learning, and that turns the tables on evil. When even a small minority of people live that way, evil will no longer rule America and the world.
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