The Devil Inside

I sometimes wonder how people will feel reading my thoughts 5000 years from now. Will they laugh at my naivete or will they see nuggets of wisdom. The answer is probably both. When you read the story of Adam and Eve, the idea of seperation from an external God and devil strikes us odd today. Is there really a force out there that wants us to do evil things? Well, this concept somehow doesn't feel right. But then, we probably have all discovered in us the voice that wants us to go in the opposite direction that our spiritual path would lead us to. We now call this voice ego rather than the devil, because we now feel the struggle of seperation versus oneness right inside ourselves.

My Russian colleague told me that if you touch wood you also want to spit over your right shoulder, because that is where the devil sits. Actually, I wasn't surprised, the right stands for our so-called rationality, please do not spit to the left, because that's where your intuition is located.

The Course in Miracles emphasizes the duality in us for pretty much for all choices: ego or God, fear or love. I have observed this duality in me as well. I do not want to bore you with my idiosyncratic shadows, but I did observe in me one day that these shadows are exactly the mirror images of my spiritual path. When you look closely, you will see that following your dark desires you will always throw dirt on your stainless path. Or to use Neale Walsch's figure, you think you are headed to Boston, but you suddenly realize that you are going full-speed south! The good thing though, once you realize this game, the struggle is mostly over. After all, why would you deliberately go in the wrong direction?

Don't fear the force inside yourself. We called it devil when we were children and just to scared to look. It takes a bit to disentangle the desires inside yourself, but it can be done. I also believe that it gets easier once you have realized the wolf in sheep's clothes. Look our for symbols in your life and always get vigilant when something doesn't feel right while you are doing whatever you are doing - especially when this feeling only lasts a micro-second. You will see that this force always throws dirt on whatever is holy to you.