The Role of Evil

By Tony Mitton

Nearly thirty years ago I was living at the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community in northeast Scotland. Walking in nearby woods, I was pondering a friend's decision to take his wife and child abroad to follow a charismatic guru who was being touted as the New Messiah. My training had made me suspicious of all such claims and I wondered darkly whether this person was not the Anti-Christ rather than the Crucified One. Clear as a bell into my consciousness came the message, "All is of Me." I was astounded at the temerity of such a claim. It destroyed a large part of my identity, fixated on the struggle between good and evil, which I had inherited from my Christian upbringing and a childhood during World War II.

I did not doubt the truth of the message nor its divine source. It met the test for messages purporting to be of the Light: both its arrival and its content were totally unexpected. Also, the woods had been a sacred grove for millennia. People must have heard such a message since humanity's beginnings. Did not God allow our first forebears to be tempted? In the Bible too, the devil appears before God and obtains permission to tempt Job. In an Arab legend about the creation of humanity, half the souls were foreordained to salvation, the other half to damnation, presumably because they were evil. There is a Hindu story how the King of the Demons had offended the God Vishnu, the Preserver. To restore balance in the universe, Vishnu gave him a choice, to assist him seven times, or to oppose him three.

It is a mechanical fact that without friction, there can be no progress. The image of a car is often used. If there were no friction between the tire and the road, the car would not move. We may see the road as life and the car as ourselves. The friction is what we call evil, because movement is change, and if we are honest, we much prefer to stand still, or only allow progress within a setting of stability. But, reading the fossil record, scientists have come to realize that evolution does not happen like that. It progresses by leaps, usually occasioned by some crisis in the environment. I believe this to be as true on the soul and spiritual levels as it is on the physical.

We can apply these thoughts to the horror of the twin towers in New York and the war on terrorism in which we are invited to participate. There is a body of expert opinion which holds that the larger roots of terror do not lie in fundamentalist religion but in the split between the 'haves' and the 'have nots', wide now and growing wider. This is as true in the United States, where for the past two decades the rich have been getting richer faster and the poorest have seen their standards decline, as it is in the rest of the world. The developed nations seem determined to carry the process further through economic globalization, a euphemism for 'capitalist rule': already corporations can sue states whose laws hinder the free marketing of their products; laws which were put there for the safety of their citizens. At the Asian economic summit in October 2001, the prime minister of Malaysia warned President Bush that the globalization process would drive the poor nations further into poverty. The President rejected the argument, ignoring that it is the relative poverty of two thirds of the world that fuels the terrorists' rage and enlists their recruits.

As television carries messages of Western prosperity to the majority of others who are excluded, the dangers of a spreading terrorism will grow. President Bush has promised a war against terrorism in every nation where it can be found. Osama Bin Laden's organization reportedly has cells in about sixty nations, among which are some, like Sweden, whose laws do not allow arrest or prosecution before crimes are actually committed. How many national sovereignties do we have to cajole or threaten before we can say that terrorism is eliminated? And how can we expect success when our policies are robbing countries of their independence and self-sufficiency, increasing the poverty which is at the root of terror?

There is always a choice. You can get involved in the struggle mindlessly, on the good side of course. Or you can realize that either side will appear good to certain mind-sets and look rather at what the struggle is going to accomplish. Then you can make a more informed choice. From this perspective, President Bush and Osama Bin Laden look like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, leading the Dance of Unintended Consequences, which is invoked whenever a war is declared. And those consequences are likely to involve a breakdown of institutions and systems. At home, air travel is disrupted and the threat of anthrax has affected the mail. Abroad, tensions are exacerbated across the Middle East from Israel to India. If the process goes a certain distance, we can expect a further consequence, the evolutionary leap which occurs when conditions get critical.

This view inverts our normal way of thinking. It suggests that life is a universal principle and that evolution is how it operates. As Goethe put it, "All earthly things are but a likeness," reflections of life forms that are not necessarily physical. So when Earth evolves in rhythm with the universe, we must evolve too. From this perspective we are not currently the innocent victims of vengeful rage, but the primary partners of Planet Earth who are in no way going to be left behind. The view reported from the spiritual world is also an inversion of the physical: we are all immortal anyway, so the death of thousands or even millions is relatively unimportant; what we lose here, they gain there. It seems a rather cold view. Rudolph Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, the Waldorf Schools, bio-dynamic farming and much else, commented that warmth is humankind's gift to the spiritual world.

I do not think that this current upset was ever Plan A, but rather a fail-safe alternative. Rudolf Steiner tells the story of the Garden of Gethsemane rather differently than the one usually preached. Jesus' agony, when the gospel records that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood, was not in anticipation of the ordeal of crucifixion, no great challenge for such as He, but due to the realization that the Kingdom of God would not manifest with his physical death. The crucifixion was to be the culmination of the series of initiations through which he had been passing (an initiation is an evolutionary leap on the personal level, undertaken on behalf of humanity). The three apostles present in the Garden had been with him at his previous initiations, the Anointing with Oil and the Transfiguration. He needed them to be present at the Crucifixion, to share in that initiation and ground the Kingdom on Planet Earth. But they had preferred to argue about who would be first in the Kingdom, and still failed to get the message even when in desperation he washed their feet like a servant. Enjoined to watch and pray, they fell asleep. Jesus foresaw the agony of the last two thousand years and it became his agony.

Paradoxically, the success of the war in Afghanistan is 'threatening' to return us to those conditions of complacency that inhibit evolutionary leaps. The President's declared purpose is to restore us to 'normality', never mind that it requires most of the world's peoples, including some of our own, to live in poverty amid a degraded environment. If my hypothesized scenario is correct, the necessary outcome of the present course will be further and worse 'shocks', of diverse types like the ten plagues of Egypt, till we turn to the path of repentance, reconciliation and forgiveness. We can mitigate a lot of suffering if we embody those ideas in ourselves, for all minds are one mind and we will touch everyone. James F. Twyman suggests that we should 'pray peace' rather than praying for peace.(2) When we pray for peace, we suggest that it is absent, but when we 'pray peace' we invoke its universal presence. We can look to prepare ourselves spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. The last may involve laying in stocks of food and medicines, but always with awareness that there is really no place to hide and that physical survival doesn't really matter. Love and Truth abide, and Grace will see us there, where we will know our true Self.

(1) Earth Changes, Human destiny and Daughter of Gaia, both by Marko Pogacnik, Findhorn Press 2000 and 2001 respectively.
(2) Praying Peace by James F. Twyman, Findhorn Press 2000.

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Tony Mitton has an MA from Cambridge University in England where he worked for an engineering company in Birmingham and served as an elected representative on the City Council there. He lived for five years at the Findhorn Foundation and, after marrying his wife Kathy, came to Tallahassee, Florida, where he was employed in state government, becoming an operations and management consultant. He is now retired and practices there as a licensed massage therapist working with the disabled, and is an editor for Findhorn Press Ltd. of Scotland. He has six children and stepchildren, of whom three live in the USA. He has traveled in over a score of countries and is familiar with five languages. email: mittont@nettally.com.