Quoth Forrest (one wonders why he was named after the Fort Pillow villain, and founder of the KKK; another time): “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”. Any readers I may have are no doubt familiar with that. What is this really, though? A box of chocolates is not fully random: it is a system defined by the theme of chocolate.
In my own lurching way, that is my warning that this blog, too, wanders hither and fro, although not in a fully random way. Obviously, there are recurring themes and words.
Among them, good and evil. Since I use this blog in part as a sort of therapy–wandering is therapeutic for me–I will offer a shade of personal information. I have been sick for two weeks. Not enough to keep me from working, but enough to sap my enthusiasm. This never happens to me. My health is normally excellent. The last time was 15 years or so ago, when I was working a job that I think was literally killing me, and I got the flu, and no choice but to lay in bed for 3-4 days, which I never did even in childhood, at least that I can recall.
I think sometimes illness is thrown at you (let’s not worry about agency here) as a last obstacle when you are on the verge of a qualitative breakthrough. I had mine this morning, and expect my sickness to fade fairly quickly. (let’s hope!!!!)
I don’t want to discuss the details of that particular breakthrough, but will offer some other insights that came to me.
The most important was this: I don’t think we can ever fully purge ourselves of evil. I think we carry it with us everywhere. No one is immune from evil thoughts and evil impulses. No one is perfect. Yet, in important ways we are separate from both our good and our evil impulses.
The image I have is that of a room of statues and objects–to use a Harry Potter theme, let us imagine what I recall was called the Room of Requirement (whatever the storeroom was called where Malfoy was tinkering with the Vanishing Cabinet). Think of all your thoughts, and all of the actions they led to, in the course of a lifetime. Imagine them still, flickering with life, but frozen. Every bad thought you ever had is there. You can see them. The fumes of black smoke that emerge from the top of your head when–in your opinion–someone just did something stupid in traffic. A good example for me was how angry I was–the violent thoughts I had–at the refereeing of one of my kids ball games the other day. This sort of thing can never be eliminated fully, without eliminating life itself.
It is possible to cram oneself into a box–or more accurately to BE crammed into a box, but that is not living. If you have no room to move, you vanish, you cease to exist as a vital human being. This is the case in societies which mete out draconian punishments for moral infractions. Many Islamic societies would be perfect examples. You can’t be GOOD in such societies, because the same spontaneity that leads to genuine generosity of spirit can also lead to negative emotions of greed, anger, spitefulness, and all the others.
What I think our task is is not to deny our negative emotions–they are there whether we want them or not, and whether we acknowledge them or not–but rather to integrate them into our awareness, to watch them develop, bleed (they are always a sort of wound), and then fade. As we grow as human beings, we see them more quickly, and can “defund” them, stop feeding them, more quickly. They will always be there, but we can just let them float like momentary clouds over the sun on a wind-swept day.
Last night I dreamed I was speaking–interacting may be the better word–with Rumi. He had a line I made note of many years ago: “Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both, you don’t belong with us.” I asked him if he had evil in him, too, and he showed me some dark images (frankly, of the sort that pepper your local Redbox), frozen in shadow. These were impulses he had had while living.
Then I went up a level, and light was everywhere, and he was playing with his wives and children in Heaven. It was happy.
Then I went up one more level, and was in the light of God. The only way I can describe that feeling is that it scratches an itch you didn’t even know you had. There is this ineffably wonderful smell, and a sense of belonging and contentedness none of us will ever know in this lifetime. Actually, the line before the one quoted above is: “the cure for pain is in the pain”. That is relevant. If the reason why is not immediately obvious, think it over.
The point here, and the reason for the title of this post is that ALL OF THOSE WERE HIM. He was all of that. He could (can, in my view) see all of that, know all of that, be all of that, consciously.
It seems to me we all need to recognize that we are all fractured in some ways, and perhaps always will be. I can’t claim to know how the universe works, but plainly, as I discussed in dealing with the experimental work of Janet (I think I did that post; I had been reading William James brilliant “The Principles of Psychology”–just skip Freud entirely, and devote yourself to his work), we all have multiple “minds” even on Earth. Freud called it the Unconscious, but I think James is right to point out that it appears more congruent with the evidence to say that the less integrated among us have multiple conscious selves. Under hypnosis, they exhibit autonomy of consciousness.
All of this is a bit disorienting, no doubt. I think what ties it all together is a tendency towards love. Things are splitting and rejoining in this world all the time. What I am describing is one direction, one possibility of movement. The other of course is unity.
Few thoughts. Hope they make sense and are helpful to someone. Feel free to email me if I messed with your mind. This is a bit deepish.