THE PROBLEM OF GOOD AND EVIL
"You are good in countless ways, And you are not evil When you are not good"
Kahlil Gibran
It is self evident that free-will involves choice. Indeed, without choice there could be no free-will, no individuality and therefore no purpose or meaning to individual life.
This necessary consequence of the divine attribute of free-will is the key to understanding the problem of Good and Evil: a problem which has perplexed and dispirited so many men and women throughout all ages.
JUSTICE
"And you who would understand Justice, How should you, unless you look upon all deeds In the fullness of light? Only then shall you know That the erect and the fallen Are but one man Standing in the twilight between The night of his pygmie-self And the day of his god-self"
Kahlil Gibran
One of the most important characteristics of the human Aether is the sense of justice. This is so powerful that man has to believe that an unjust Universe would be a purposeless, meaningless Universe.
But first of all, we must define what we mean by justice. Unfortunately, to most people it often seems to mean little more than vengeance. And this powerful desire, even emotion, for vengeance semms to be a peculiarly human emotion. There is little evidence that it is shared by other animals.
But since man has usually made his gods in his own image, he has endowed them with the same vengeful attribute. 'God' was assumed to be essentially vengeful. But he was also presumed to be reasonable, to be just. So why should a good and just God require vengeance? It could only be that the victims of his displeasure 'deserved' it. Perhaps the idea of 'evil' and of 'sin' arose from this idea of a judgemental God. The idea that God's desire for vengeance could only be deflected by bribes: by offerings and sacrifices. I believe that the concept of a loving God, proclaimed by Jesus, was so sublime that even his followers, even to this day, have not grasped that by definition a God of love cannot be judgemental.
Since man's Aether is part of Alpha-Holon, we should be able to glimpse, if ever so dimly, something of the nature of Alpha-Holon by contemplating the nature of man. Now, however intolerable we find the awareness of man's injustice to man, we can at least explain it by the fact that man's Aether is of a fairly low order: weak in love, small in influence, ignorant and circumscribed. But this, of course, most certainly cannot be said of Alpha-Holon. How then to account for omnipotent Alpha-Holon permitting and coexisting with what appears to us to be undeniable injustice?
Most of those who have grappled with this problem have been driven to one of three conclusions.
The first is simply that there can be no Supreme Good, no Supermind, no God. This is the conclusion reached by atheists.
A second line of reasoning is that there must be a contrary force in the Universe, the force of Evil. Those holding this view can then only go on to account for this force by supposing that God permits such a rival to exist. This hypothesis, however, then finds itself confronted by the argument that it is surely evil to permit evil.
Because of this difficulty, a third theory has been widely believed. This is that Evil is not only opposed to, but independent of God, Who is not therefore omnipotent and could conceivably be vanquished by it. Such a view proposes that God and Evil are locked in a power struggle, each backed by troops of "spirits" and each busily trying to recruit human spirits to swell the numbers of each of the two rival forces.
Since I am asserting not only that God exists, but that He is Alpha-Holon, (Alpha the Transcendant, Holon the Immanent Unity,) the only reality, unique, omni-influential -and most certainly not evil, I must now refute such theories and demonstrate not just that they are repugnant, but that they are irrational and mistaken.
First of all, what do we really mean by 'Justice'? Surely, for 'Justice' to have meaning, we have to assume the existence of 'Laws', obedience to which merits reward and transgression of which deserves punishment. What then, at the spiritual level, might such laws be?
Religious believers will at once retort that they are the rules prescribed by the prophet or god in whom they believe. We shall be examining these later in our final discussions.
But the purpose of this investigation into the meaning of life is to arrive at a metaphysical philosophy which, in human terms, is rational and self-consistent and can stand up to critical examination without having to take refuge in dogmatic ex cathedra assertions, the truth of which depends entirely on the authenticity of their claimed divine inspiration.
My central proposition is that all mind or consciousness, what we are calling 'Aether', is a hierarchical unity, of which each individual is a part. And a prime function of any part is surely to serve the interest and purpose of the whole.
The Prime Law of the Aether then must be this: Serve the Supreme Purpose of Alpha-Holon.
Of course, there is no way whereby a lower-order Aether such as man's could possibly comprehend such Supreme Purpose. You might with equal futility enquire about our purpose in having these discussions from one of the thousands of atoms of one of the millions of molecules of one of the billions of cells which make up our bodies! But all that the Aether of the atom can 'know' is that it 'ought to' behave according to simple 'laws' communicated to it.
And so, at a vastly higher and more complex level, it is with us humans. We cannot know the Supreme Purpose and, not knowing it, cannot ever hope to evaluate Supreme Justice. All we can know is that we 'ought to' behave according to 'laws' communicated to us, which are appropriate to our particular aetheric level.
We have already discussed how the communication of these laws emerges into our conscious apprehension as what we call 'Conscience'. We have deduced that the Prime Law for the evolving Universe has been " Associate, Collaborate, Evolve", translating at our human level as the injunction to obey the attractive imperative of Love and to strive to develop within ourselves the divine attributes.
We know that 'to love' means to desire and strive for the welfare of the loved one. We know that the existence of the attractive love force powering evolution proves the necessary existence of Love as an attribute of Alpha-Holon. We know therefore that Alpha-Holon, loving His parts, His 'children', desires only the welfare of each individual. We can therefore deduce that this welfare must derive from that evolutionary development which His law demands.
For each individual human being, then, this is the supreme good and it is with this and with this alone that the Justice of Alpha-Holon has to do. Beside this, the fortunes and misfortunes of life, of death and, yes, even of suffering are insignificant trivialities.
The Justice of Alpha-Holon would then be this: whenever we exercise our free-will to disobey the Law of Love and Development, we harm ourselves by denying ourselves progress towards what is for us the supreme good. That is our ultimate and only punishment: a temporary stagnation, when, as lazy or errant pupils of the School of Earth, we fail to earn promotion to a higher class.
There is no caning. There is no injustice.
GOOD AND BAD
If Alpha-Holon seeks only the supreme good of His parts, how can it be that He permits the existence of counter-attractive behavioural options? Why, specifically, does He allow us the option of embracing 'the bad', 'the vices' or 'the evil', when it is harmful for us to do so?
The answer is clear. Precisely because we must share in the Alpha-Holon-attribute of free-will, so we cannot be denied the opportunity to choose. If all things were white, black would certainly not be an option, but then white would not be an option either! If all behaviour was attractive or 'good', good behaviour would not be an option.
Thus it can be seen that 'bad' behaviour arises as a necessary consequence of free-will, for without it we could not learn to choose its opposite. Without it, too, there could be no individuality of spirit, no personal dignity, no progress, no challenges, nothing.
This is why the preoccupation of so much religion with 'sin', 'forgiveness' and 'redemption' is so misplaced. Of course we make mistakes, that is how we learn, that is how we pursue our divine mission.
Without the option of bad behaviour, there could only be zombie-like automata, robots like the so-called 'blessed', mindlessly twanging harps for all eternity (Christian version), reclining in a garden through the eons munching an infinity of grapes (Muslim version), or dissolved into the eternal nothingness of nirvana (Hindu version).
This is the real meaning of the story of the Garden of Eden. The evolution of the higher order human Aether was necessarily accompanied by a vastly increased measure of free-will, of choice. It is cardinal to our argument that evolution has been a process of learning. All Aether has to learn by its mistakes. Without the option of mistakes, how could there be any learning? How could there be any School of Earth?
We can assert then that the existence of 'the bad' or 'the evil' is absolutely essential for the development of 'the good'. Moreover, since it is clear that 'the good' is behaviour which obeys the imperative of evolutionary development and operates in the direction dictated by the attractive force of Love; and since we can see that the very fact of evolution demonstrates that this force is propelling all Aether in one direction only, towards higher and higher levels, we can claim ABSOLUTE PROOF THAT ONLY THE GOOD PREVAILS. For if it were otherwise, the history of the evolution of the Aether would have been one of progressive deterioration to lower and more primitive levels, the precise opposite of observable fact.
THE 'EVIL ONE'
We are now in a position to refute the 'God and Devil' hypothesis, a hypothesis whose rationale would go something like this:
"Man's evolutionary forebears were more primitive creatures and were necessarily amoral (i.e. having not yet tasted of the 'fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'). They were thus incapable of behaviour which was morally good or which was morally bad. Therefore the fact that man exhibits both morally good and morally bad behaviour can only mean that both types of behaviour are equally aspects of the development of the human personality. Thus both types arise with the development of higher order Spirit and both must be equally destined to culminate, not in One God, but in twin supreme opposites, God and the Devil."
The fallacy in this line of reasoning is that more primitive creatures are only amoral in terms of their own spiritual level. This is because their conscience is more rudimentary and, as dwellers in the Garden of Eden, they have little or no 'knowledge of good and evil'. But in terms of the higher spiritual level of mankind, animal behaviour is not amoral, it is immoral, it is bad, it is evil.
To illustrate what I mean, let us take a look at some of those attributes which I listed earlier as being 'virtues', encouraging attraction and therefore promoting the development of the love attribute. Take unselfishness, for example. This is quite a rare phenomenon in creatures which are more primitive than man. Animal behaviour is generally selfish: and selfishness, at the human level, is the basis of most immoral behaviour. Again, take courage. Certainly we can observe examples of quasi-courageous behaviour in animals. But true courage can only be displayed by one who is consciously aware of the probability of future pain and of future death. Unlike human beings, animals do not seem to have this conscious awareness: unlike men and women, therefore, their behaviour can never be truly heroic.
Similarly with all the other 'virtues', they are absent or rudimentary in animals. But this is not the case with the opposite to the virtues, the 'vices'. The cruelty of the cat playing with the injured mouse, the ungenerosity of the dog snarling over its bone and, more generally, the whole nightmarish obscenity (in human spiritual terms) of the naked struggle for survival, untempered by 'virtue', propagated by 'vice'.
No, it is not moral evil which characterises the higher-order Aether of mankind as compared with our ancestors, it is moral good. Thus we can describe as 'bad' that behaviour which characterises more primitive Aethers. The bad, then, is not an evolving attribute, it is a dying one. It represents no more than primitive behaviour patterns, which were and are in the process of being discarded by the higher order Aether of the newly human. This of course is what the School of Earth is about: to unlearn primitive, bad behaviour patterns and thus to graduate to a higher-order plane, where such behaviour can have no place.
Evil, then, lies in what each of us has been, not in what we are becoming. Evil is our past. The Good is our future.