Essay

Good VS Evil

by Silvia Hartmann

An essay on decisions, living neither in eternal darkness nor the searing light and on re-uniting with the true experience of this world.

I remember, a long time ago when I was still a small child, I made a very conscious and very precise decision to be evil.

It was a decision, make no mistake.

It was weighed in my mind, I contemplated the pro’s and con’s of the entire situation, all the evidence that was at my disposal one way or the other and then I made the decision.

It was an enormous relief, mixed with some sadness too and some anger, but the sheer relief that such decisions bring with themselves was enormous.

It’s nice to know where you belong. It makes you feel a lot less lost, a lot less lonely.

But, as is so often the case with such decisions, there is a price to pay.

It seems to me that this price is a loss of individuality, of freedom, of choice and in the end, of ability to be, have and do certain things.

You could call it a kind of slavery but we will come to this later.

Now, you may wonder, why a four year old child would make such a rather life setting and determining decision and what such a choice may be based upon.

This first came to my attention in consciousness some years back during an EFT intervention for what alone, I can’t remember. I was really struck by something though and have since mentioned it numerous times to my friends in the course of a conversation, because the question as to what actually is good and what is evil, and where you stand in the “War of the Heavens” has a great deal of bearing on how you conduct many aspects of your life, as well as what you might expect as overall profits, when the final reckoning is made.

What is Evil?

There are two very divergent philosophical starting points for what evil is and how a human gets to be evil.

One tends to talk of evil as you would talk of a mountain, say, or a certain type of weather – it’s an existing reality in the universe and it’s just there, not a lot we can do about it other than hoping it doesn’t happen where we happen to stand at any given time.

This worldview also includes the possibility of being born evil; indeed, the more radical types tend to take this for granted – being born evil by the very virtue of being born at all, that is – and that one must strive to overcome this evil and get to be good.

The slightly more modern way of thinking about this also includes evil as an existing force but here, we’re basically born good but then something evil comes along and it can make you evil by touching it, interacting with it, inviting it in and so forth.

So, if we take our none-too-hypothetical four year old girl, we could start by wondering if she was born evil and failed to have this driven from her in time through lack of care by her supervisors, or we could wonder if she had been a “good little girl” but something happened to take her down into the inevitable pits of hell.

I was quite fascinated by her decision, so I endeavoured to gain her trust and talk to her, find out just what her evidence procedure was before she arrived at her decision to “walk the shadow path” – even the fact that there actually was DECISION and THOUGHT in the picture at all was indeed, most intriguing to me.

One piece of evidence was the fact that she was regularly referred to by her supervisors and caretakers as “Satan’s daughter”. Now we, looking across this time span from the now and here to the there and then, might begin a discussion on whether these people were qualified to make such a pronouncement or whether they simply knew more about her than we ever will; for the girl in question it is quite possible that she would have not thought in such a way and simply accepted the fact as a given.

There is a scene in the movie, The Omen II, when a disciple reveals to the young boy that he is the Anti-Christ whilst he is at boarding school. The boy is understandably somewhat disturbed and traumatised by this announcement, having thought until then that he was just a child, more or less like the other children around him. However, he comes to accept the fact and when he does, his turmoil ceases and he resigns himself to his new career.

One could set to musing at this point how often this happens in real life, in real terms. How many Anti-Christs walk amongst us for this very reason, for such an occurrence (or two, or three, or four, or five ...) and who, just like the little girl back then, found a great deal of relief and cessation of fear, doubt and insanity their final submission to their own “inherent evil”.

However, this would not help us in this case, so let us return to our real life case history and ask this little girl, “What exactly does it mean to you, being evil? What do you mean by that?”

She would look straight back at you with her serious brown eyes and tell you a big list of evil things that she had done, if she would trust you to just listen and take her at her word’s value, which is not something that grown ups do a lot of amongst themselves, not to mention when they are communing with children.

She would tell you that she had stolen chocolate, lied about it afterwards so she wouldn’t get beaten, climbed a tree in a brand new dress, taken a bite from an apple and thrown the rest away, crossed a road when the little red man was showing, held her pen in the wrong hand, deliberately drew outside the lines of a colouring in picture, spat out her spinach, cried when she should have been silent, and as she speaks on and on and on, you really begin to wonder just how much crime there can be in such a young life, and you have the notion that there may be some things she’s not telling you about that are even worse than what she’s confessing here at such speed and rate.

Now, you would ask her, “And did you not know what you were doing was bad, wrong, evil?”

And she would tell you that she did.

“Why did you do it then?”, you might ask in astonishment, and the little girl says, “It felt good at the time. I liked it.”

And here’s the next piece of evidence.

Bad is bad when it’s bad, but when you actually like bad, things get nasty, slimy and tricky. When you are asked to show remorse but you don’t feel it. Or you just say you do just so it’ll stop – so THEY will finally stop and leave you alone. You lie and that’s good then. Only it’s bad ...

Ah, but this is all getting far too complicated. Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, it’s easy right? God or the Devil, simple enough choice. Let’s go at this the other way around.

Ask her what “Being Good” means.

This is what she said.

“There was this girl called Susie. She was horrible. She punched and kicked me and broke my toys and said bad things to me when no-one was watching. When the grown ups came, she stopped and smiled at them. They liked her. Her clothes were always clean. Her hair was always combed. They told me that Susie was good and I was bad and I should be good like Susie. I hated her. I didn’t want to be like her.”

What else does it mean, being good?

“It means you don’t talk and you don’t say anything. It means to be silent. It means to sit still and never move. To never make your clothes dirty. To do as you’re told. Not get angry.”

Who else is “good”?

“My mother and father. And Mr Smith. He beats his wife and steals from work. His children are afraid of him, especially at night when he is drunk. He is a good man. My father says so.”

Well, there we have it. Bad feels good and good feels bad. Perhaps a few more beatings to really drive the devil out of this child?

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. The exorcism did not occur, and there’s this moment in space and time where a four year old decides that she is evil.



What happens next?

Well, now you can lie in peace.

When asked if you are sorry, you can look them straight in the eye and say, “Oh yes, I’m very sorry. I’ll never do it again.” and sound entirely convincing if you want to avoid the beatings.

Or, of course, you can just proudly look them in the eye and say, “Fuck off, I’ll do it again given half a chance!” and at least stay true to yourself or should I say, your decision, and this time when you get the beating, at least there’s a sense of justice about it because you really did it yourself, it was your decision, your doing, your just deserts and even in the pain, there is now a sense of control.

It is, indeed, an interesting procedure.

It creates some very interesting, very dangerous people.

When you are evil and you know it, you can walk in places where “the angels fear to tread”.

You can challenge, you can question and you can say, “No. Not like that.”

You can start to paint outside the prescribed lines in earnest.

You can discover new things and you can be creative. Really creative. Scarely creative. The kind of creative that Susie would never dare present her teachers and her masters with because it would make them feel uncomfortable, threatened and it would rock the boat that keeps them all afloat on the icy black seas of reality.

But, as I observed earlier, there’s a price to be paid.

The Cost Of Being Evil

I have observed a number of people deciding certain things which are structurally quite similar, and in some fields it’s called “Coming out of the closet”.

I love that term to bits. I’ve been wanting to come out of various closets for ages but I’m not sure just which one to come out of!

See, if I was to “realise” or read, “decide” that I was a lesbian, life would interestingly become a lot easier all of a sudden.

There would be a whole host, a cascade of ready-made hand-me-downs instantly at my disposal, to help me decide what clothes I should be wearing, what music I should like, what friends I’ll have, what pubs and clubs I will go to (and which to avoid), special housing associations to welcome me and even poetry awards I could apply for.

There would be this invisible MASTER that I can turn to in moments of crisis – the “Who the hell am I???” types of crisis – to tell me how to decorate my home and what books I should or should not be reading, what political persuasion I would like to engage in and anything else really I might need to worry about.

As it is, I haven’t really decided such a thing.

Nor have I decided to be a “classic heterosexual sex kitten” or a “raving ugly old feminist” for that matter. “Mother Superior” also doesn’t hold much appeal for me, and neither does “elegant vampiric salon hostess”.

Hey. One day I might find a closet to come out of, but you know, the older I’m getting, the harder this is becoming. Perhaps I’ve played with my self concept a little too much, made it too elastic, found that I can be all of those things and essentially remain none of them, and now I’m finding myself a masterless slave, thrown back upon just what I’m not sure to help me decide what things I like, what I should wear and how I should behave.

This “lifestyle MASTER” of any kind of ready made category is quite well known amongst teenagers and ugly feminists; we shake our heads sadly at the Ku Klux Clan or fundamentalist Muslims who take the lifestyle master to the extreme but it’s there alright, and the worst part about it is just as in BDSM, the intense “relief” someone experiences when they give up the daily struggle to make up their own minds and instead, experience the true bliss of servitude and knowing just where you stand, and who you are.

A choice between being “good Susie” or “evil Silvi” is just such a lifestyle choice, if only we would know it.

Like any other category decision, fashion-, political-, or religious based, it creates a kind of fortress landscape within our own self concepts and whatever we get to do, be, think, eat and create becomes defined by and within it.

There are certain things that Susie can never do, and there are others that Silvi cannot – areas out of bounds, like a shadow divide between a land of day and night, where half creatures live in each and neither can enter each other’s realms in eternity.

It is a very unhappy state of being for all concerned, for Susie longs for some of the things, events, manifestations that can only take place on the shadow side or, should we say, in shadow time; some of things, events, manifestations, emotions can only be had for Silvi on the sunny side of the street and both may stand and stare, their noses pressed up hard against the glass, the grass always being somewhat greener on the other side for one, and for the other, what you cannot have seeming so much more precious than that which is in easy reach and always available, just for the asking, just for the wanting.



Stepping Across The Divide

Now, something happened to our little girl who decided that she was evil.

Evilly, she decided at some point to find out if, when you put your mind to it, you can do more good as an evil person than a good person doing good, and found that you could.

This caused some chaos in the simple order of things and some big problems with the lifestyle master which ceases to function when you start to rock the definitive foundations just a little.

How can you do good if you are evil?

How does that work?

How can you do evil if you are good?

How does THAT work?

There are a number of ways to process such a stalemate.

The simplest way is to just STOP trying to define what exactly good and evil might be.

After all, one man’s evil is another man’s good and vice versa, so how can any man EVER know what’s what and be sure they are right about this?

Every mass murderer, from Pontius Pilate to Adolf Hitler, was convinced they were doing good.

The guys running the killing fields in Korea were doing it for the good of the unborn children, so that they might have a better life.

Their victims didn’t think them good, to be sure.

Victims usually don’t, may they be the Christians who were eaten by the lions or the witches burned by the Christians.

Thou shallt not kill.

(Apart from, if you’re a soldier and you were ordered to; in self defense; if it’s an accident; if the person you’re killing is generally disliked, feared or hated; if they are an aristocrat/jew/German/Muslim/Christian/Apache/etc.; if you’re insane with PMT at the time; if it’s for the “greater good” ...)

Think too much about these things off your own bat (as opposed to not thinking at all and following a lifestyle Master who prescribes such things to you and relieves you of this unpleasant murkiness), and soon enough you begin to really lose a sense of just what is good, and what is evil, in the now, in the long run, who decides this, how it’s measured, how it works.

When you take out what is good or evil, you’re kind of left with “what is”.

And what is?

What is this?

What are we doing here, what’s the point of being here at all, how do we conduct ourselves, how do we make decisions, based on what?

Based on WHAT?



Discovering The World

As I’ve said, in the simple good vs evil decision a landscape is created, an entirely artificial distinction that exists nowhere but inside our own minds, as to where you can go and what you can do.

This becomes a person’s own personal prison and in a way, their own personal “hell” – whether it be a bright hell or a dark hell, it matters not really, in the end. (*little word game there – hell means “bright” in German from which the term derives, one of those strange things related to the fact that Lucifer means “bringer of the light” in Latin and originally referred to the Morning Star).

A bright hell or a dark hell, it matters not.

After wandering about in both for a while, carefully cloaked against the fall out of those dimensions, I must have made a decision at some point to stop this and to get out of hell and into the real world.

There’s this amazing planet, this fantastic eco system. Of which people are a part, as are their very strange neurologies, a totally undiscovered country in every sense of the word, metaphorically and otherwise.

There’s the sun in the sky and at night, the moon, the stars, the milky way.

Rains, ice, heat.

Seasons that change. Comets that come.

Thunderstorms and hails of frogs.

It is a most amazing place.

Perhaps, I thought, perhaps it’s time to get out of our mindgames and stop trying to think that we know what’s what at all, stop listening to musty books and aged scholars repeating the Chinese whispers of the ones who went before them, knowingly, unknowingly, who cares in the end, and start making a personal contact with this world in which I find myself.

To learn about it, not second hand through anyone else, but just to learn with my own eyes and ears, my skin and my other senses, to just watch it like you would watch a troupe of strange creatures in their habitat you stumbled upon quite unexpectedly.

To learn about the world, not so I can teach others or tell them this, that or the other, but just for me.

So I find out some things that make sense for me, for MY OWN RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS MY LIFE ON THIS PLANET.

Who can teach me about the sunset?

Oh, but for sure, I can spend years and years studying available descriptions of sunsets, astronomy, astrology, umpteemology for all I care, but in the end, who gives a toss?

Who can teach me about the sunset?

No-one can.

No-one can teach you, either.

It’s your sunset.

Indeed, it’s your sun. Your moon and your wind, your pain and your body, your feelings entirely, this is your world.

YOUR WORLD.

Totally, and exactly at the same time as it is mine – no shortage, no division, no loss, no matter how many of the 6 billion stare up at the sky and stand there, staring up at it and it being THEIR OWN SUN as the planet turns through a single rotation on it’s axis.

It is your world and whether you know this or not, your decision and your creation as to whether you want to be in hell until you die, or whether you want to start coming out of hell and carefully, slowly, cautiously if you will at first, make this world your own again.

This world is not about anything other than your own experience and your own life. When your life ends, the world ends too, truly and profoundly.

This your world will end when you are no longer there to observe it.

That is very true and no matter what “other people” say.

When a small child holds up a hand in front their eyes and says, “I’m gone.” – THEY ARE.

What has this to do with good and evil, you might wonder.

It has everything to do with it.

Understanding that you are neither and both REUNITES you and gives you the ability to see the world again for what it is – see it, feel it, touch it, and experience it with all your senses, all your neurology and all you are, not with half of what you are, or that half you decided you were going to be.

Choose good and strive for good, and you will lose the dark side.

Choose the evil and strive for evil, and you will lose the bright side.

Neither can exist and be anything other than true damnation and less than half of the truth.

Susie and Silvi aren’t good or evil respectively.

They are human.

That is the resolution and not the end, but the beginning, the awakening to a real life, the one and only real life YOU can ever have, in direct communication with all-there-is, learning directly from the all-there-is, and being all-you-are.

Next time, you help an old lady across the street, don’t think you did something good.

You did something human.

Next time, you hurt another with a cutting remark or the lash of your whip, don’t think you did something evil.

You did something human.

Know it, remember it, and hold it clearly in mind should you ever be called upon to judge yourself, or another.

Herein lies freedom.

© Silvia Hartmann 2002