What Is Good and Evil? The battle b/w Heaven and Hell?! The Moral Opposites in Human Self-Aware Mind [part 2]

Today, we are contemporary humans with much understanding of how things work and why things work the way they do. So, we know what causes earthquakes, storms and volcanic eruptions. We are quite aware of the reasons behind all these natural phenomena that are in fact cyclic processes involved in the very mechanism of life of our planet. Indeed, all these do harm living things on the surface of Earth, but if there were no earthquakes, storms or volcanic activity Earth would have been a dead planet.

That is, planetary processes involved with the very life cycle of Earth are not conscious acts committed with the purpose to harm humans. What an obvious deduction indeed. Earthquakes, volcanoes, rains and winds are all part of the life of this planet, so it is inadequate to designate these as “evil”, because these are not deliberate acts against, say, humans. It is only our subjective perception, quite naturally, since humans along with other living creatures do die in earthquakes, storms and so on, thus we interpret these as evil and think of these processes as the will of gods and spirits. Usually, humans perceive these “evil acts of nature gods” as manifestations of divine anger, which perception is quite peculiar as a psychological mechanism, because it shows that unconsciously humans always had had this sense of guilt before themselves and what they do.

So, our primitive interpretation of nature phenomena as “evil” is utterly inadequate and not applicable to nature at all.
Furthermore, let’s analyze if animals are evil then. Animals do eat humans sometimes and many other animals most of the time. Humans are animals too and for a predator there is no difference between a human prey and another animal prey. In nature it is “eat or be eaten” and this is the way life is. Life on Earth is a closed system, which means that everything is interconnected into a circular cycle that sustains itself. Some animals eat vegetables, other animals eat meat. There is nothing wrong for an animal to kill in order for it to eat and thus survive, quite on the contrary – this is the cycle of life in nature!

Only we separate ourselves from all other animals, but animals do not make this distinction, so if a carnivore has the chance to hunt down a human – it will, because human is no different from all different animals it would hunt down and feed on. It is ridiculous to blame an animal and call it “evil” because it attacked a human – it is instinct and it is the way life is. If an animal is threatened by a human it will protect itself and again you can’t blame it, because it would be foolish and subjective! I want to make it clear, if anyone happens to decide that I mean to say it is a good thing to be eaten alive – I reckon it is not a pleasant experience at all. What I say is that survival instinct is not “evil”, it is life. Evil is a human notion that was created by our active human minds and universally applied to everything, without us realizing how deeply subjective such a projection is.

Thus, Earth is an active planet and her planetary processes are not by any means conscious evil acts, just as animals do not kill because they are evil, but because they follow their instincts to survive. So, what is evil then and where does it come from?

At this point of our brief analysis we can turn to the intro quote again and reflect on its meaning once again.
The notion of evil began from ancient people’s interpretation for all the things that had harmful and negative effects on humans. Later on, this notion expanded and evolved into an ever increasing cosmogonic complexity until the spiritual world was completely divided into good and evil realms that were constantly into competition with one another.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all acknowledge the metaphysical existence of one major dark figure that stands in opposition to the good god, this is the basis of monotheism – the good god opposed by an evil one. In fact, polytheism shares the same mythological conceptions with their pantheons of good and evil gods.

In general, humans thought that all the negative actions and bad deeds of human beings were ultimately governed by evil spirits that influenced humans to be evil. The image of the Devil is a composite image that unites all the negative qualities in humans and is held responsible for all the evil in the world. Indeed, our primitive lack of responsibility and limited self-awareness led to the need of such an image that was to be used as an excuse and justification for humans’ irresponsible and negative actions.
The human psyche is a vast informational dimension that is mostly hidden from our conscious minds, so that the reasons for our moods, thoughts, actions and behavior on the whole remain mostly unknown to us. Confronted with the impenetrable darkness of our unconscious mind we are just like a toy in the hands of a force that is beyond our control and this is the way those early humans felt as well. So they needed an explanation for what they could not explain, an explanation for what lied inside themselves. Self-knowledge as an occult teaching was formed about the same time, but the prevailing ignorant and primitive mass preferred the simpler explanation of evil spirits and demons. Thus humans dubbed their intrinsic lack of self-control and their mindless behavior as the work of devils who were conspiring against humanity, ever tempting the poor innocent humans into sin and crime.
Ignorance is the easy path of the primitive mind. And I do wish to emphasize on Primitive.
Also lazy and passive mind.

Because, we Homo Sapiens have the amazing “consciousness” quality to our minds and we are able to rationalize our actions and think in advance. Unfortunately, our herd instinct gathers people in groups united under political ideologies and religions, large groups where the individual is merged with the mass and the individual responsibility diminishes. Our world is divided in groups.

Just look around you and observe. Wars, aggressive behavior and conflicts on all levels from the personal to the international prevail in our human relationships. We do evil on ourselves and on each other. Religion blames it on devils and demons, but in reality evil is in our minds, humans are evil and negative human actions have evil consequences. All the rest is simply an excuse for the lack of self-control, self-awareness and responsibility, an excuse that the primitive mind readily takes advantage of. Sin is the summarizing old notion of the mindless and unconscious human behavior. All the evil in this world comes from what humans do and religion turns a blind eye to the very lack of rational and conscious behavior of its followers that regularly pray to their misconceived divine images for forgiveness and redemption. But true redemption comes from within, when the person consciously betters himself and herself towards higher self-awareness and deeper understanding.

The pictures of demons and unnatural creatures awake a primal and irrational fear in human minds. In medieval times, stories about evil spirits, devils and witches were widely used for teaching purposes to scare children so that they listen to their parents and be obedient. Nowadays, millions of adult individuals still rely and believe in these stories like retards. Please, do not offend, but this is the naked truth. Instead of trying to better ourselves consciously and live in harmony and higher awareness with one another we constantly search for justifications and excuses for our own ridiculous and negative behavior.

It is time to advance in our minds. It is time to leave our primitive past behind and move on towards a brighter future of higher awareness and global unity where people will cooperate with each other, live in harmony and understanding for the collective benefit of all!
Heaven will not come into earth from the sky, but only from within us. When humans take the next step in their spiritual evolution and transform themselves into mentally advanced beings with a higher level of self-awareness only then heaven will come to earth. If we truly realize this we can make a change. Heaven sleeps in our souls, in each and every one of us and waits. Waits to be awaken and realized. How long will it wait depends on us and if we do not change our ways it may never come to pass.
There are no divine beings in firey chariots coming to save us, we must realize this childish illusion of ours. We must save ourselves or perish like narrow-minded and foolish creatures that destroyed themselves. Humans cry to be saved from themselves, how pitiful indeed.
We are both slaves and masters of ourselves, you get born in the first state and the second is achievable only through conscious realization.
Evil has only one master and one slave – both are myself! And all demons live in man and die with him.

In summary, evil is the lack of awareness in man, evil is the negative behavior of the primitive human. All demons and devils have the face of man and the ancient battle between good and evil is fought nowhere else but in the human mind a.k.a man fights with himself – the light of willful, self-aware consciousness battles with the darkness of the unconscious mind of instincts and behavioral automations.

Who wins in yourself depends on YOU.

That’s it, the naked truth stripped of all illusions and childish fairy-tales. Have you ever wondered, what the nature of spirituality is?

In Memoriam R.I.P our beloved cat Pisan. He left this world after 15 yrs
spent in our family. Go in peace, my little brother, life is just a moment!



.. a moment, that is worth making the most out of it, the most good, the
most sensible, the most enduring! S p i r i t u a l | L o v e

To be or Not to be.. Aware? About Good and Evil, God and Satan – The Moral Opposites of Human Mind

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity - idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious and political idols.” A. Huxley


Good and evil – this is the most fundamental pair of opposites in humanity’s spiritual and social cognitive perceptions. The notion of good and evil, as all things in our human cosmogony and existentiality views, initially developed from a quite trivial distinction that Homo Sapiens began to acknowledge tens of thousands of years ago. This was the most simple perception that death, pain and injury were bad things for a human to experience, thus everything that brought about any of these was naturally perceived as bad, treacherous and evil. There are no living beings that perceive death and pain as something good indeed, but Homo Sapiens had a marvelous brain that allowed us to develop these basic perceptions into complex cognitive models situated at the base of our spiritual views and human mythology.
Death has always been an unexplainable part of life that both drew people into its mysterious nature and scared them away with its inevitability. Archaeology and anthropology observe burial rituals as the earliest evidence for ritualistic behavior of ancient human tribes tens of thousands of years ago. Death and the unseen side of reality associated with it was the very first spiritual cult that laid the beginnings of human spirituality. Long before religions began to occur, humanity’s spirituality revolved around shamanism and the purpose of shamanistic practices were to communicate with death ancestors, whose spirits lived in nature and animals.
Death has not been considered evil by that time, the way much later religions considered it and was not associated with evil demons, but rather it was perceived as a transition from this world to another invisible aspect of reality that humans communicated with through shamanistic practices. The belief that ancestral spirits lived in animals was prevailing for long time and later influenced much of human mythological concepts and religions with zoomorphological deities, like Egyptian and later Greek and Roman mythologies where we see human and animal images in a symbolic symbiosis. It is interesting to note, that our notion of angels and demons is also fundamentally influenced by these ancient spiritual concepts of supernatural deitification that was symbolically perceived as a fusion between human and animal – that is why angels have bird-like wings and demons are often depicted with goat and bat body parts. Of course, the visual representation of christian mythology was established and dogmatized mainly by medieval artists like Michelangelo and Da Vinci.

Long before major religions today were conceived and established, humanity began to develop and expand their spiritual views, filling the world with invisible spirits and supernatural forces that were behind everything inexplicable.
The forest was a dangerous place to be for the primitive human, especially at night when human eyes were of no use. Darkness was especially frightening for the ancient humans, because in the dark you cannot see what lurks near by and danger can stalk you unprepared.
Gradually, humans filled the forests with helping spirits who guided the hunter and traveler by day and ill-intentioned, delusive spirits that wandered in the forests by night. The psychological division of good and evil began to take root in human spiritual interpretation of the world around. The most fundamental division – that of light and dark was naturally the very first mythologized human perception, driven by the most pragmatic reasons.

The duality principle is present in every aspect of the Universe and is no wonder that human spiritual perceptions are also based on it. Day is opposed to night, cold to warm, weak to strength, sound to silence, life to death and so on. The world seems to be entirely based on the cyclic balance between opposite states. Of all the opposites that surrounded humans, none seemed to be more chaotic and inexplicable than the opposite emotional states that were constantly taking place in the human soul. Humans are very emotional beings, perhaps we are more of an emotional beings than rational ones. And namely our uncontrollable and unpredictable human emotions that drive our behavior were a complete mystery for the ancient human mind. Primal humans, thousands and tens of thousands of years ago, were perplexed with their own selves and dazzled by their emotions that took such a strong grip on the mind that humans were simply left with no other choice but to obey whatever the emotion demanded. The uncontrollable and demanding nature of human emotions is very much the same today and humans are pretty much slaves to their emotional urges just as much as they have always been. Self-control is the domain of very few individuals who now and then were persistent and strong enough to tame and master their own selves.

For the ancient human mind the unseen and chaotic nature of human emotions were perceived as the very will of spiritual entities acting upon their souls. Thus the notion of spiritual and ghostly intervention that took place inside human minds began to take shape.
For it was the greatest mystery as to how come you feel well and happy at one moment and at the next heavy emotions oppress your being. How come emotional affection was suddenly unleashed and you fell desperately in love to such an extent that your whole perception of the world changes. How come anger kicked in so unpredictably and a human was simply unable to neither stop it nor control it. All these were questions that began to bother ancient people’s minds and answers were needed in order for an explanation to formed that had to serve as an answer to all the generations to follow.

We discussed lightly the genesis of religious thought here and there in previous lectures and another one dedicated entirely on this topic is coming ahead, so we shall not discuss it here, although it is a part of the story, just as human evolution also is. Every element must be observed and taken into consideration in order to grasp and understand the Big Picture.

Human spirituality evolved from the way humans perceived the world and themselves. Moreover, human spirituality is a reflection of our human souls. As obvious as this notion is, as if humans today still do not comprehend and realize it, considering all the religious zeal and fanatism that prevail.

It is just so obvious that evil is associated with darkness, fire, anger. All the things that bring fear and are beyond the control of average humans. Our perception of our emotions as “forces” that had a will of their own was so persistent that it integrated in our very language and expressions. Anger was perceived as something that possesses and puts you under its will, just as love, but in the negative scale of the evolving human morality. All emotions were perceived as possessions that had a life on their own. Thus it was not long until humans began to interpret their emotional states as interventions from the spiritual world. The negative emotions were assigned to evil spirits and the positive ones – to good and helping spirits. This perceptual separation was to become the very foundation of all religions that were to come.
Because from then on gods were destined to always come in pairs – good gods and evil gods, always inseparably together.

It is a known quality of human psychology to project its emotional states onto the surrounding world, thus quite naturally our mythological notion of evil was associated with everything that brought fear to human mind. Much later on, evil was to serve as an excuse for the lack of personal responsibility and rational actions. In medieval Europe it was enough to say that the Devil made you do it and you were free of guilt and responsibility.

Human beings are controversial creatures that are primitively aggressive and cruel, while in the same time loving and compassionate. Of all the mysteries in the world there is no bigger mystery than human mind. The emotional duality of human mind gave rise to the spiritual and moral dualities that became the foundation of human society.
Good and bad are simply part of life. You live your life in a precarious balance between your emotional controversies that also reflect on your relationship with the world. All human relations are haunted by ups and downs that seem to be beyond rational control.

Religion, just as human psychology, seems to also be beyond rational control. In our primitive past people explained their behavior with the influence of good and evil spirits acting upon their poor innocent human self. However, it is utterly shocking when you realize just how much contemporary humans continue to use all these ancient models and “understandings” to guide their life and views on the world.
Religion is old and modern humans are supposed to have advanced in their minds so that they achieve a deeper and more conscious understanding of themselves and the world we live in. Instead, we observe a complete mental stagnation and even degradation, which is quite a pitiful sight. What is even more disturbing, is that we seem to not be able to realize the very nature of this religion that chains the development of human consciousness. I mean humanity as a whole, because separate individuals with deeper insight were always present, unfortunately for them they were usually quite alone. However, the psychological mechanisms behind humanity’s need for religion go deep and involve profound factors that lie in the very base of human psychology. Just as a teaser I will mention the need for a parental, authority figure that forms in the child’s psyche and stays with it for life. Ponder that for a while.

Speaking of good and evil, let’s continue our exploration into the supernatural and see exactly what evil is, how it came to be and what it really signifies.
By our collective perception “Evil” is a wide term that addresses everything that causes harm particularly to humans. In time, the notion of evil has become a widely used reference in our everyday language expressions and cognitive perceptions.
In general, evil is not just a religious notion, but it is our perception of an act that causes harm in any way. However, there is an important factor that defines evil, that is evil signifies a deliberate and purposeful act with negative consequences. Now, in order for an act to be deliberate and purposeful this act must be committed by a conscious entity that acts autonomously by its will.
In our primitive tribal past people widely used to subject to deitification nature and natural phenomena like weather, volcanoes, earthquakes and so on. Most of these nature gods were perceived as treacherous, their actions expressed in terms of strong winds and rains, thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions or earthquakes were perceived as evil, purposed to harm humans. Another perception was that such nature gods were not solely evil, but angered otherwise good gods who had to be quartered for mercy and forgiveness via prayers or sacrifice so that the angry gods relax and seize their havoc.

[Continues]