Are you Cain or are you Able?
What is evil? How do we define it? From whence does it come? Take for example a lion. If a lion viciously kills a gazelle, is that murder? How about a dog? Is it evil when a dog kills a cat? What if a dog kills a dog? How about chimpanzees? They, along with other members of the primate family have been documented to commit rape, make war, and use violence to control group members. Does evil find its way into that scenario? A ha! It’s a little trickier to answer that one now, isn’t it? So then what makes it evil when a human does it? Why is this so hard to define? Because we made it all up!
Concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, are all human interpolations to describe the happenings of this life. And the ones that remind us of our own mortality, such as murder or our lack of control, as the case of rape -perhaps the most wanton violation of personal agency- begin to take on a more personal meaning the more we can identify the act with our own desperate clutching to all of the things that - face it - were never going to last. And our ability to control the consequences will not outlive our desire to do so either.
So then we look away from the things that bother us and separate ourselves from the whole affair.
The world is going to pots and the whole thing stinks. And so we disconnect ourselves as if a mere passive observer, but - as it is written in The Upanishads - the eye cannot look upon itself. That is to say, we catch these glimpses of the things people do in their lives that we don’t like because secretly they remind us of ourselves. And we turn away from that too and say That’s not me. Why would you do that? Why I would never… and in that way we have elevated ourselves above the fray and what you are left with is something more akin to living above the law. It does not mean that the laws are not still broken, as the king forgets to put the toilet seat down too. The Pope does indeed pick his nose.
But we lie to ourselves from some place of austerity and tell ourselves that we do not commit the conflagrations on others that we admonish. And this is the vision of Christ that we have! How bizarrely quarrelsome with the mind, because to live up to this iteration of divinity would alienate you from the whole damn thing! This life! This short life and its amazing panorama of happenings. And when you see that you do those things to scale… then you elevate WITH the world.
And the whole thing rises up with you in synchronicity. Such is the case of a magnifying glass. To look at a human from the cellular level is quite amazing! I suggest you do it sometime. Because when you do, you see from one aperture a battlefield… White blood cells fighting off infections, the division and replication of cells whilst programmed cell death (apoctosis) occurs all the same. Viscious… or is it?
But what’s more, as we take the microscope and pan out, if we do so long enough, who do you find but the person? The me. The real me. Sincere [citation needed Jenkinson] to show one’s holes. And you have to accept the evil as it exists inside of you and recognize the double bind you were in all along… that to accept all that occurs you see that evil is only the way we feel about it based on the metrics we use to define it.
And that’s a big weight off your shoulders, because in admonishing the things we don’t like about the world we say the same about ourselves. We all hurt people just in the way that we love people. But it’s not a contest for who can pile up enough brownie points to present at the gates of Heaven and upon doing so be granted rightful entry into the kingdom whilst all the sinners, scoundrels, and non-believers are left behind to wallow that they didn’t get the good news in time. So to tally up the do’s and don’ts, the rights and wrongs, pays dividends for no one.
And in that way, we are both Cain and Abel. Both the divine and the profane. You couldn’t have one without the other and just as we are each an aperture of consciousness, we will find our way into people’s lives as they do ours and play the various roles or personas that upon getting out of your own head you realize was you all along: The trickster, the lover, the sage, the shadow, and the sovereign, all playing a cast of characters meant to fool you into believing you weren’t in a play. Because that’s fun!
It’s why we go to movies or distract ourselves with the gossip around us like a bunch of chismosos, isn’t it? We want to get wrapped up in a story that will elicit the emotions that make us feel the most about things. Which is why horror and suspense are part of that yearning. The things that make us feel alive!
It would seem that in order to see the game for what it is, there must be some structure of socialization for kids; and it’s this paradoxical thing, isn’t it? When we were young our parents and all the adults around us were likely always telling us what? “Grow up! Stop acting like a child.” So we did.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (1 Corinthians 13:11 NKJV)
But then what do we do? We spend all of our free time in the service of trying to reclaim our childhood. All these things that brought us joy… many of them impulses… or perhaps reactions to our impulses. You know… the things we did when we were feeling ways about things. And sometimes we lean into those impulses to reclaim that feeling…
…because it felt good, didn’t it?
…and sometimes people go off the deep end in that bottomless and unfettered pursuit. In the wake of it all, those on the outside who would do so castigate the person on their inability to control their impulses whilst defending their own in a set of double-binds that is stonewalled by two words: not me. And not me gets you off the hook for all the times you couldn’t control your impulses, doesn’t it?
It just goes round and round in that way, and if we think of ourselves as the naughty little scoundrels we often believe others to be, I would ask you what is it that we miss in the scuffle? What question falls off in this non-sequitur of a pissing match? What seeded and reinforced the subjective articulations of universal human impulses? And in that way, we can ask:
What is cultural, what is human, and what is universal?
And isn’t that the deconstruction of the socialization process? Once again, if we are to apply Neti Neti to the question of good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, we can say to ourselves not this… not that… and recognize that so much of it is a farce; how market trends and societal norms key in to and manipulate our innate sense of right and wrong, the BIG ME - as author Rev. Mark Townsend says - that can turn your stomach inside out. Brahman. Tao. The Collective Unconscious. Vibration.
Cultures on the other side of the world have taken different approaches. Take the caste system of India for example. For all of the things that are left to be desired as seen through the eyes of Western minds, it was structured in such a way that someone would be acculturated through their cycle of socialization, raise a family, and then, and only then, when all those attachments were gone would the student begin to strip away the layers of socialization. That is not to say this was and is the model for everyone. Society is meant to control the masses. That always has consequences for the individual that doesn’t meet their society’s prescription. Control articulates itself differently based on set and setting (try and avoid dichotomies such better or worse in this context).
The architects of this structure accounted for and had steps in place in an attempt to prevent this nihilistic crisis of envy (not for the individual, that was going to happen somehow) that envelops a society that has banished its gods and celebrated its own endeavors as the apex of esteem.
You see, it was those years of experiential knowledge of having everything you thought was right, everything you were so convinced of that you had figured out, every line in the sand controverted and crossed over. It can be nihilistic… if life’s end is the goal. It’s low-hanging fruit to look around you and say “everything is fucked” when other people who believe the same but for reasons that stand in the face of what is echo “everything is fine.” That’s just a different way of looking at it.
The sacred texts of India, the Upanishads (and its offshoots and relatives Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism), tell of a different way to look at it, in scale.
The Universe is not always on your side. It doesn’t take sides. Because for it to take sides there must be a winner and a loser. To steal a line from a stolen cliche of something truly divine:
Eywa does not take sides, only protects the balance of life.
Just like each one of us, seeking balance in our lives, starting from our metabolic Ph that finds its homeostasis between 7.35-7.45. Same Same. It’s not that the universe doesn’t care about your plight. That’s nihilistic. It’s you. YOU are how the universe weeps and laughs and inflicts trauma, all… on… itself. So it has to be open to both the heart and the heartache. How else would you get 30 grains of sand from a handful lest you yield yourself and allow its movement? And in that way the saying holds in its paradoxical instructions:
A clenched fist holds no sand.
The idiom suddenly becomes more palpable, doesn’t it?
And if nothing else, if NOTHING ELSE, does it not stand to reason that someone who lives by this practice would come to the ending of his days does so perhaps a little less reactive, softened and humbled by the opportunity to cobble together such a life that includes all of the good stuff and the bad?
Because the people suffering from this crisis of envy, they go through these same experiences. But it’s seen from a COMPLETELY different side of the coke can as such that they think they are not even the same soda, and they miss it all. They just miss it.
Those are the sore losers, living in quiet desperation. They chase one pleasure from another and therefore chart for themselves and those they touch a disastrous course. The bill does come due… often in the nursing homes and progressive care units where the bodies fail but the minds persist. And as they come to their final days, all of that entitlement from a life of it all working out in the end finally meets an arbiter for which they cannot buy, talk, or try their way out of. We can build a fabulous civilization out of lies that say we can control everything… but a good wind will always come along. Death will always come along. And the able-bodied support staff will be there to remind those under their care of what was and what is now.
With the way so many of us in the West see time, culture, death, and ourselves in respect to our position in the world, the most terrifying reminder for some winnowing away in these beds may be this:
Today is almost over. It will be tomorrow soon. What happens tomorrow?