“The images that we either consciously or unconsciously appropriated in the course of our lives and which have become part of our stream of thoughts can advance or prevent the development of our fundamental humaneness.” from the Spiritual Path: an introduction to the Psychology of Spiritual Traditions by Han F. de Wit
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Anyone who has spent time looking at Cold Case files on A& E or Law and Order, Special Victims Unit, or Criminal Investigation, would know that there is evil in the world. These shows feature people with minds that have gone awry.
You don’t even have to look only to the reality based Cold Case files, or the simulation of real cases of Law & Order, to be made aware of evil. Just look at the evening news on an ongoing basis. Sooner or later, you’ll hear of a husband (sorry guys!) murdering his wife and their unborn child, (Scott, Lacy and Connor Peterson, Modesto, Calif.), (Charles Stuart murdering his wife Carol, Boston, Mass., and their baby, Christopher, dying 17 days after his premature birth) and others.
Beyond these familiar cases, there are those of the horrendous mass murders committed by John Wayne Gacy (killed 33 men), Jeffrey Dahmer (killed 17 people), Ted Bundy (possibly 100 people) and others like Richard Speck, David Berkowitz, “Jack the Ripper” and so many others.
People committing murder, sometimes only for the sheer joy of it!
Where does this evil come from? God?
Some people would want us to believe that all of man...the good, bad, the innocent, the spiritual...all come from God.
To even write such a statement weakens all parts of me and all that I believe in.
God creating evil in the world...because all of the world is God’s creation?
What a fallacy!
It makes me understand how good men can be made to turn evil, do evil and be evil.
It all begins with corruption of the mind.
That’s where the true problem lies. Not in the reasoning itself...but by the mind becoming corrupt by its own power...its own power to create...and...to destroy. This is the true evil, the true danger to us all... when man becomes so filled with his own concepts and images...that they corrupt his soul.
For some, it may first begin with a true love of and for God.
Then...the permutations begin.
We are made in God’s image. Yes. God is Spirit, and so are we...when we get past the exterior and all the parts of us that make our Spirit hidden. Underneath all that...yes, there is a Spirit. And yes, that Spirit is made in the image and likeness of God.
Spirit is formless, as is God.
If you are Christian, then you may believe that Jesus was God incarnate.
For me, Jesus manifested the highest form of Spirit within man on Earth.
Where does this leave us then?
That since man is Spirit like God, then our mind also is God mind, then our body is God body?
Spirit is formless. It does not have a body.
Our body, i.e. our Physical being, is the dominant and visible part of us, and this is how we celebrate our humanity and this is affected by our experiences in the world.
Our mind, which contains our soul, i.e. our Mental being, also celebrates our humanity and also is affected by our experiences in the world.
So if, as I see it, we are Body, Mind and Spirit, then of the three, our Spirit is the only part of us that is not shaped by the world and our "humanness". Our Spirit remains... from our birth to our death...fully in *God’s formless image.
God is the Creator of all.
Yes, God is the Creator of our humanity i.e. our humanness with unique and disparate personality traits, EGO, tendencies, genes, body shapes, sizes, wit, drabness and everything we constitute as human. As part of this "humanness," God also gives us FREE WILL, which we exercise through our Mind.
Our minds and our body become shaped by the “foods” we feed them from the outer world. But our Spirit is not affected. This part of us remains uncontaminated, unaffected and incorruptible, because it is the only part of us that grows from within, not without.
The “foods” that we feed our Spirit are prayer and meditation. These allow us to connect back to the source of our being i.e. God. The more we are able to connect to Spirit, the greater its effect on our minds and bodies. Our Spirit is transformative. As we feed ourselves more and more spiritual foods, i.e. meditation and prayer, building such intangibles as faith, trust, hope and love, then the less desire we have for the seemingly evil things of the world.
So, how do minds become corrupt enough to commit the atrocities we read and hear about on the news? Total separation of mind/soul...from Spirit.
We’ve all heard people described as “lost souls.” These are the people who in no way seem to have a viable connection to Spirit. They don’t recognize Spirit’s nudges and guidance, because the mind has become so clouded and crowded by the ways of the world. Their souls indeed are lost to Spirit.
For truly well meaning people to then try, in their earnestness, to suggest that all of us, including the evil in the world, is of God is very troubling. It speaks to minds that are becoming corrupted by their own thoughts...suggesting EGO. That’s when the thinking should STOP.
When we become so enamored with our own thinking that we would go against the wisdom of all the ages....then, we need to take stock of ourselves. STOP THINKING. Go back to the base with prayer and meditation, earnestly asking Spirit for guidance. To do less is to be inviting the evils of the world into the Soul.
Jim Jones and his inflated image of his “Godself” took more than 900
lost souls with him to their suicidal deaths in Guyana, South America, my country of birth. The lesson we learned from Jim Jones and that mass suicide should be one we never forget.
We should especially try to remember the Jim Jones’ lesson when we see our thinking getting off track, or when we begin to see our corruptible image as God’s.
One of the joys of this spiritual journey is to be blessed, not destroyed, by the level of our thinking. Another perquisite of this spiritual path is to be enriched, not cursed, by our minds!
Accepting anything less truly is to invite...evil.
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"I was completely swept along with my own compulsion.
I don't know how else to put it.
It didn't satisfy me completely so maybe I was thinking
another one will. Maybe this one will,
and the numbers started growing and growing
and just got out of control, as you can see..."
Jeffrey Dahmer
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Namaste',
Che'
*In the next blog, we’ll explore how hitting the “VOID” and seeming darkness brings us into the “Presence” or Pure Being.
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