I have had some personal experiences with evil. I have always believed that humans need to explore their dark side and not repress it. I believed that in repressing our dark nature, we would be making the situation worse. I felt that embracing it would allow us to gain something useful.
I had undergone trials of evil. I have checked my journal entries and the dates of my trials of evil are February 17, March 28, August 20 2002 and April 14, 2003. During these trials of evil, I experienced pure evil, a pure egoism in my thinking and in my feeling. It did not affect my will. I am not sure exactly what allowed me to have these experiences. I think I wanted to experience pure evil and I believe it was possible the spiritual world felt I was mature enough to handle these trials. I was able to live in it and let it work through me but at the same time it did not take a hold of me. Having this experience was extremely pleasurable. It felt good and made me feel good having this evil run through me.
I would feel this cruelty and coldness. I felt destructiveness and wanted to torture people. During my last experience, I felt a destructive darkness. It made me feel powerful. When I accepted this feeling, it seemed to go away. I began to realize the superficial power of evil.
I believe that if we deny our capacity for evil, we can never be truly human. I feel that in admitting our capacity for error, we become more human.
Another personal experience I had was in the summer of 2004. I went out with someone for a drink. I would spend time chatting, observing the person and observing my surroundings. When I was observing this person, I suddenly felt this wave of evil coming from his eye region. He was not talking about anything negative; it was just a regular conversation. For a couple of weeks, I first began questioning if that was my own evil reflecting back but I got the feeling that it was not and I realized that it was this person’s evil. I do not feel this person is absolute evil. I do not believe that a human can be pure evil. This person may have been 98% good and I accidentally discovered the 2% evil.
I do not look upon this person with hatred or fear. I feel compassionate for this person. I think this person can transform this evil with some inner effort.
References
Movie
The Corporation
Scott Peck
People of the Lie
Rudolf Steiner
The Ahrimanic Deception - lecture
The Apocalypse of St. John - 12 lectures from June 17 – 30 1908
The Concepts of Original Sin and Grace - lecture
The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers – lecture
Evil – a collection of lectures
How to Know Higher Worlds
The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric – a collection of lectures
Peter Tradowsky
Christ and Antichrist: Understanding the events at the end of the century and recognizing our task
1 comment:
Paula,
I must commend you on your courage in posting your essay on Evil from an Anthroposophical point of view. Well done--a great piece of writing.
It is somewhat rare to come across someone who ingests knowledge and wisdom and then returns it to the world out there, transformed by their own being. So many people just repeat things without living through them in thought and deed. I wish for more people to find the courage to share knowledge with others in a wider context. You make good use of YouTube and blogging--great modern tools for this.
The quote from "Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts" is one of my most cherished, too. I show it here again:
"Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe. It arises in man as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. He alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy, who finds in it what he himself in his own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst."
This, to me, is the best definition of Anthroposophy.
I have questioned the meaning of life since age nine and I have been seriously interested in Anthroposophy since my teen years, studying and living it as much as possible, while keeping myself firmly grounded in current and modermn life in all its trappings and daily craziness. It is often a lonely road.
Keep with the courage to present things that may seem unpopular. You appear to be quite true to yourself. It shows in your comedy You Tube videos and your other blog postings.
I have just recently started blogging. Check it out at "Love of life, life of love". It is still in its infancy, only a few weeks posted now. I have big hopes for it. I hope to tie it in with my other writing more and more.
Stephan
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