How have your notions of what is good and what is evil
changed through your life?
All our concepts change, at some point people believed
that the world was a flat surface.
It seems conceptions of good and evil are dependant on
your individual situation in place and time. Though they do
seem to exist, how you look at things really plays a role
in how you interpret what they are, and also how you react
to them.
Paramahansa Yogananda said that Real Good is what brings
you closer to Truth, to God. Real evil is what takes you
further from realizing this Truth.
Yogiraj Gurunath says when good things happen, it's
blessings ripening and a chance for spiritual growth. When
difficulties come, it is an opportunity to purify and lighten
our load. From this perpsective, it's 'all' Good.
When you look at a rock up close, you may see the cracks
and ants or bugs on it. Go up on a tree and you may still
see the shape, but not the ants. If you go into the
clouds, you'll see something else alltogether. Another reminder
that really depends on your degree of awareness.
Instead of focusing on what is sin and getting down on
myself, I've chosen to focus on what is True and walk that
path. Like in the Buddhist precepts, the first one is no
killing, but turn it around and that can also mean cherish
all living beings.
Paramhansa Yogananda said that in the movies there is
always the Hero and the Villian. Without the villian we
would not know who the Hero is. If you turn around however you
will see that both Hero & Villian are creations of one
beam.
As a society, do we need conceptions of good & bad?
It seems yes, because different people are at different
stages of perception. A child for example may need the
context of rules before it can grow to think and fend for
itself. At some point however, these concepts need to be
transcended.
It seems cruelty comes from a person who is unhappy and
miserable.
My questions are, isn't it evil what happened in Rwanda?
In Sudan? In Nazi Germany? When someone robs and murders
another?
There was a chinese monk who visited here a few years
back, when similar questions were raised to him, his response
is, when you wipe the table with a sponge, you are killing
millions of beings, is that evil?
Often the words good & evil have gotten confused, for
example when they are directly associate with constructive
and destructive.
Definitions of good & evil can get circular, we each
have to look for it in ourselves to understand their roles in
life.
If you look at the rainbow, you can take the biggest
magnifying lens and try to get up close and try to see where
orange ends and red begins. You will never be able to do
so. If you take five steps back however, you will exactly be
able to tell where one ends and the other begins.
It seems the concepts of good & evil have to exist
together, that is, you cannot see evil unless you see good.
We all seem to agree that good and bad are both sides of
one coin. My question is, why are we so fascinated with
looking at this coin?
Once I came in to see a movie towards its end. A man
was hitting another man and I was thinking "wow, what a bad
person" but it turns out I was seeing the Hero subduing the
villian. Similar to life, we mostly are only watching one
scene, but what would we feel if we were able to see the
whole picture?
On Jun 12, 2006 Nipun wrote :