Beyond Good and Evil

Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, 

we keep trying to slay them in the outer world. 

And we find that we cannot. 

For all the darkness in the world 

stems from darkness in the heart.

(Marianne Williamson)

What exactly are you signing up for when one day you decide to become a light worker? A light worker is a spiritual traveler whose mission it is to bring light to humanity. This is a worthy mission, yet, embedded in it lies conflict. If it is your mission to bring light to the work there must be someone else who somehow blocks it. So when you sign up for the job as a light worker, know that you will likely bump into someone who will give you a headache. The battle of good and evil is probably something you can't escape.

I remember a few days I spent at a seminar when I felt attacked by a dark force. It seemed to be coming from a woman, completely dressed in dark, who seemed to be sucking the energy out of me. I literally experienced a psychic attack. When I mentioned this occurrence to my co-author Su Zhen, she only responded, "sounds a little like Star Wars to me." She was absolutely right. To the day I don't know whether this attack was real or whether I imagined it, but the moment I had decided to step out of it, the conflict was simply gone.

Around that time I observed something else; opposite to my office there was a crow, literally staring at me. I took it as a symbol of my shadow that I hadn't yet incorporated and true enough, a long journey of deep and often painful soul searching followed. I had a hunch that all this shadow work came to fruition when the painting left my floor one day and when I - while being on a family vacation - saw hundreds of crows nesting right outside of my window.

Every spiritual traveler has a choice. The job of a light worker sounds prestigious but you don't have to sign up for it. You can be whole instead; a friend of darkness and light, sun and thunderstorms, pleasure and pain. Everything and everyone is God speaking; goodness as well as evil can propel you to the next level; you can literally float on the surface of duality every step of the Way. A spiritual traveler can be above good and evil.

The Tao Knows Best

The Tao doesn't take sides,

It gives birth to both good and evil.

The Master doesn't take sides;

She welcomes both saints and sinners.

(Tao Te Ching)

Socrates was more than the philosopher that the European Renaissance wanted to see in him. He was a mystic as well. He had an inner Voice - a daemon as he called Him - that could be quite mischievous at times. I recall one story were he went up a hill to a festival with friends but when he heard his Voice telling him to turn around, he promptly did. Later he learned why that was a good decision after all; his travel companions were suddenly surrounded by pigs and many of his friends found themselves covered with mud and had to go home as well. Socrates could have warned the others like every good Christian would, but his Voice didn't tell him that. The Tao is beyond good and evil.

I have discovered a very similar feedback from the Tao. Don't get me wrong, we spiritual travelers are here to heal and unite and not to cause mischief. Yet if someone crosses our path in a hurry there is simply nothing we can do to stop him. Yes, we warn and we advise, but if the resistance on the other side is too strong the Tao will always tell us to step aside. After all, a little mud along the way can be a good eye-opener too. The Tao always knows best.

Holy Indifference

Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do. With unified consciousness, however, all anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill.

When your mind has overcome the confusion of duality, you will attain the state of holy indifference to things you hear and things you have heard. When you are unmoved by the confusion of ideas and your mind is completely unified in deep samadhi, you will attain the state of perfect yoga.

(Lord Krishna, Bhagavad Gita)

It is hard to walk the spiritual path the Bhagavad Gita recommends. Actually, being stoic about the ups and downs of life brings is not even the hardest part. The toughest part is that it is so easy to confuse this divine state Lord Krishna describes with a forced lack of emotion and a repression of what really matters to you in the name of spirituality. Yet, it is possible to reach that unified consciousness the Gita refers to - a state of perfect harmony with the Way. When you see the seeds of decay in success, and the beginnings of a renaissance in failure, how hard is it to have an an even mind about things? When you at-one, it would never occur to you to question the perfection of the Way. The holy Now is beyond good and evil, success and failure. It is just perfect as is.

Authentic Love and Authentic Power

I remember once a professor of moral philosophy asking, do we really have the right to look down on BDSM (the practice of sadomasochism)? After all, if one loves to get abused and the other is happy to abuse, who are we to judge them? Actually, I have a hunch that this is the direction that we as a society are taking anyway. Many of us "liberal" folks would say, well, if this is their notion of fun, so what. Some like it spicy and hot, some like it not.

Yet most spiritual travelers will also ask when it comes to BDSM, so where is the love in this stuff? That is certainly true, but where is the love in the stuff that we sometimes think,  sometimes say and sometimes do? Yet, we think what we think, we say what we say and we do what you do anyway. Even if we were to repress the dark stuff  in the name of spirituality, the negative energy wouldn't go away. It would just linger in the dark chambers of our being, ready to pop out once a blue moon. Fact of the matter is, we have to accept the yin and yang of life, the beauty as well as the perceived ugliness. We have to make our choices, have to let life define the notion we have of ourselves.

You may say, but what about self-improvement.  Sure, you can put yourself in a different environment. Sure, you can hang out with new friends, and sure you can learn to say more positive things. But understand as you are trying to become a better you, you naturally will violate something deep inside that minds what is going on. A  spiritual path is really a desire to be free and a desire to experience love wherever we are. Sure, you have the right to look for Heaven on earth, and you know what, you are sure to find it as well. Where there is a will, there always is a way. We even have a name for it - Tao. Life is designed to bring you home, back to the Source.

Yet, as sure as there is a Tao, as sure it is that you will stumble at times. You walk towards the light and your demon forces you to take a step back; you step out of the light and your angel encourages you to choose love instead. No matter what you to, the yin and yang of your soul will follow.

Taoism is this study of yin and yang. A step towards darkness is viewed as such, just as a step towards light is viewed as exactly that. A Tao master would state matter-of-factly that many of the the submission fetishists are people who use power excessively in their day-to-day operations. You find judges, police, business executives, college deans. So they just play out yin symbolically in their sex lives to compensate for all the yang that happens  in their day to day activities. You may find that repulsive, but it  is as it is.

Walking the Tao sets you up for the optimal experience of love and spiritual maturity. Be mindful of everything you do, say, react to, in the same way as you observe everything that is going on in your environment. Monitor but judge not. Let the yin and yang of psychology unfold to the fullest moment by moment so that you will be free of conflicting energies when you come home at night. Draw the sword once in a while when it is necessary and push back when you face unreasonable demands. Don't wish to be good, figure out a way of living that allows you to be good! I have no advice to give you how you should live your life, I just claim that authentic power and authentic love are always at your disposal. Empower yourself and enjoy the love that always surrounds you.

Disengaging with the Dark Side

The Holy Spirit teaches thus: There is no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made of the present.
(A Course in Miracles)

Yogananda, one of the sages who brought Hindu spirituality to America, reported that during one meditation session he saw the devil in all his might. He said that he of course knew that this image was nothing but a phantom, but boy, did it feel real to him.

When you tell someone that we have an angel and a devil on our shoulders, he will probably instinctively know what you are talking about. We all have stared evil in the face just as we all have personally met angels. For many of us, good and evil balances out and most of the times we end up doing the right thing despite ourselves. We have learned some lessons the hard way. We also have support from cultural institutions like the values of our parents and mentors, the social pressures coming from our work, our neighbors and the community, we can always count on the support from family and friends, etc. And once in a Blue Moon we let our animalistic side roam free in a somewhat damage-controlled setting only to return to our normal world with a hangover the next Monday morning.

A spiritual path is quite different from this world of balances and counterbalances. It is a journey into a new world full of light. As a spiritual traveler you are on a journey that teaches you to see the world with new eyes. You are encouraged over and over again to put the ego's dark glasses down and face the blazing light. The transition to this new world is mostly fun and eye-opening but now and then a little rocky as well. After all, there is still a part in you that screams, "you got to be kidding me", but somehow you have to manage to bring him along wherever you are going.

The most important insight on this spiritual journey is that your so-called dark side doesn't really exist. It is nothing but hot air very much as Yogananda discovered for himself as well. Yes, it is something you imagine but it isn't real. Your mind zooms into the fantasy, names and labels it as bad, and then you start attacking yourself for this mental phantom. An inner war starts this way. Instead of using your energy to understand your unity with your environment, you waste your energy by attacking yourself. So the real issues never really get resolved but the inner wars consume all your energy and leave you in a zombie state.

Mostly everyone gets caught in this duality. Until you get to this realization that the internal struggle between good and evil isn't real, the Star Wars movie will keep on playing in your head. A spiritual traveler eventually recognizes the trap. Just view the demonic force inside as your fuel tank and the angelic perception of your life as your healing force. That's all there is. There is nothing else to do. Just embrace life and accept who you are. Wherever the Tao treads, duality shrinks into nothingness. You can experience this as well. Just disengage from your mental phantoms and see what happens!

By Christian and Su Zhen

On Good and Evil

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. 
(William Shakespeare)

I work in the investment business as some of you know and I always used to think that I have friends and foes. The other day it struck me that I wouldn't say this today anymore. Let me give you an example: say I want to give a presentation, express my view and there is someone who competes with me for my spot. Suddenly I am forced to postpone my presentation and, given the limited availability of presentation slots, have to do it a month later instead. Well, as chance has it, the message of my investment recommendation is much more timely that way and my audience is finally ready to receive it. So who can say whether an interruption of your agenda is good and bad? Does it even make sense to judge the mind set of the colleague who may have inconvenienced me at one point?

Traveling the Tao is to learn that the notion of 'good and evil' is just not useful. Everybody has a role to play in this magnificent theater play called life. The 'villain' has as much right to receive an Oscar as the 'hero'. All you have to do is to make your subconscious journey a conscious one. That's what the Tao will do for you. It brings your subconscious agenda out in the open and suddenly there no longer will be good or evil, wrong or right. There will only be an action that is true to your Self and one that isn't. Once you have reached that stage you will suddenly see  that everything is perfect as is

Beyond Good and Evil

I once dreamt that I was on vacation with my family and I was walking by myself in a small village when the news broke out that the entire prison population had escaped out of a near-by institution. Immediately my thoughts went to my kids and wife, but I figured that they were at a safe location. There I already saw a small group of convicts walking behind me and heard one saying "hey, look what we have here, fresh meat". I figured that meant that they wanted to rape me so I started running into a house, and they came after me. When I was on the third floor, I felt how one guy grabbed me and all I could think was "this is going to hurt", we fought and we both flew through a window landing on a balcony. I took a close look at him, he was white, had an enormous muscular body and a face like a demon. Despite his massive body, I was able to keep him at arms-length eithout much effort. Then I woke up.

In hindsight I am neither of the two, even though I would love to associate with the protective family father than the escaped convict who runs around raping people. After the dream I felt peaceful because I realized that I had reached an important psychological break-through. My demon was out in the open and I had the power to keep him at arms- length.

Today I experienced a satori moment when I realized that I am beyond good and evil, beyond the ying and yang. At that moment of connectedness with the 'beyond', you just are and that is all. You  have transcended the one you aspire to be, as well as the one you are secretly afraid you might be. You just are and the struggle is over at this special moment.