We live in a world filled with pleasing and unpleasing things, and generally we label things as good or evil, based on how pleasing or unpleasing we find them. But is there really such a thing as good or evil, or are they only artifacts of our own thinking?
The tendency, of course, is to try and fill our lives, as much as possible, with the pleasant things and avoid the unpleasant things altogether. The problem is that most of the time we really don’t have a whole lot of control over the pleasure and pain we experience. Usually, all we can predict or control is our response to the experience, pleasurable, painful, or otherwise.
Yet in our lives we frequently focus more on eradicating the unpleasantness than on simply responding as well as possible to it. This is a serious problem. It’s impossible to eradicate unpleasantness—to destroy the kind of evil life will deliver to us all throughout the course of our lives. We will always whack our toes in the dark, get caught in the rain, meet people we don’t get along with, get sick, and so on and so on. Even living under a rock in the middle of the desert, you may still be crushed by a meteorite or withered by dehydration. The attempt to wrap ourselves in a cozy blanket of pleasant things, people and circumstances, and to wipe out all the evil in our lives, is a foolhardy endeavour. The point is to learn how to respond effectively to them.
Most of the negative effects a bad situation will have in our lives are all in our heads. This is because we spend so much time denying the very possibility of something unpleasant. When something bad does happen, we become filled with righteous indignation—we feel insulted by the situation. Not only does this keep us from dealing with the situation before it gets more difficult to resolve, but it also impairs our ability to learn from it. Rather than looking at “evil” as something to eradicate—which we will never do—we can look at it as something capable of showing us something. There is no such thing as evil, just things we don’t like.
Mostly, we’re talking about evil situations here, but there is no such thing as an evil person either really—only people who are confused, selfish, close-minded, or who just don’t agree with us. As horribly as the Taliban behaved, they thought they were on the side of goodness, just like every other fanatic out there. This is not to say we should let fanatics run wild, just that we should remember we have the same potential for confusion and violence—which is why we must be even more vigilant of ourselves than of our enemies. In any case, learning how to effectively respond to unpleasant situations means, for the most part, simply overcoming our feelings about them (i.e. the belief that a bad situation should not have happened in the first place). What appears at first to be good or evil is really just all in our heads. If we can stop living in denial of a situation, ways of actually dealing with it become much easier to see. This understanding shows up in all the great wisdom philosophies from around the world—from the Taoists to the Hellenists. Consider a line from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad; but thinking makes it so” (Act 2, Scene 2). The Sufi poet Rumi is very fond of telling us that “the remedy can be found in the poison.” The name Lucifer means the morning star—the “bringer of light.” The devil is not the Hollywood incarnation of pure Evil who messes with our lives just for kicks. Rather, he is Prometheus, the guy that shakes up the world and teaches us how to really see. Adversity is our teacher and our guide—an opportunity to grow and learn and become a more compassionate and developed human being. And who said learning and growth were supposed to be pleasant?
