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Apr 16, 2004 I think that for the most part, people understand that life is made up of benevolent as well as malevolent aspects, even though we don't particularly like this fact. The silver lining that we all are told to look for surrounds the dark cloud. The stars that have held the gaze and the imagination of humankind for aeons are only visible in the darkness of night. And so, daily life has its ups and downs, as do relationships, jobs, health, etc. Recently, I've seen the depths and the heights of life in the events that have occurred -- good news and bad news abound. Fortunately, the quest for meaning in life is not hindered by the extremes that we encounter. Dr. Stephan Hoeller, noted Gnostic scholar and expert in the work of C.G Jung, states that the "...fact still remains that only conflict leads to meaning, and only more conflict brings yet greater meaning. The experience of meaning -- which is what gnosis is all about -- is not equivalent to lack of suffering...."(1) This has been a tough lesson for me to understand. To be honest though, I don't think that many Westerners understand the inevitability and the necessity of good and evil in life. Many of us have been told that God, on whose side we should be, only creates good things and is the author of only good events in life. This worldview is dangerous to our psyches, and it is not founded in truth. In the Book of Isaiah, God states "I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things."(2) ... Conveniently, this verse is skipped over by many ministers in the Orthodox and Fundamentalist communities. Eastern religions have never had a problem with this paradox (as represented by the yin-yang symbol of Buddhism and Taoism), and, as I'm discovering, neither have the Gnostics of the West. Abraxas, the Aeon/Archon of Gnostic tradition that represents this union of opposites, is a good example of this understanding of the fundamental nature of good and evil. C.G. Jung stated about Abraxas that "To see him means blindness; to know him is sickness; to worship him is death; to fear him is wisdom; to to resist him means liberation."(3) In speaking of Abraxas, Pistorius, a character in Hermann Hesse's book Demian (a notably Gnostic book of fiction), says that "he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world."(4) For many of the people of the world, grieving and joy are both accepted parts of the same reality. Not so in the West. Because verses, like the above-mentioned passage from Isaiah, have been glossed over or ignored completely by ministers of Western Fundamentalist and Orthodox religions, their adherents are understandably confused when bad things happen to good people. We believe that if a person lives life according to a set of rules (a.k.a. they live "the Good Life"), they should encounter fewer problems. A few years ago, I was having a particularly hard time in life, and I couldn't understand why I couldn't progress in my job or in my social life or in my spiritual life. A friend of mine, who comes from a Fundamentalist Christian background, suggested that I must have some sin in my life that was keeping God from blessing me. According to this belief, God could only bless me if I was pure. Conversely, if I wasn't pure (i.e. without sin), I could be guaranteed problems. Whether I had sin in my life at the time is without question, but it's also without question that I will never be sin-free in this life. This logic doesn't stand up to reason when one can easily see the wicked of the earth prospering and progressing in life on a daily basis. By denying that God has created both the prosperity and the disaster, we have denied the very evidence that is presented before our eyes daily. Dr. Hoeller calls this the "philosophy of the excluded middle."(5) I think that this philosophy is the root of the overpowering grief that many people feel when some good aspect of their life comes to an end, whether it be a job loss or the onset of a sickness of some sort. To us there is something really unfair about life when we believe that by being good nothing bad should happen to us and then something good that we've known is no longer ours to enjoy. William Blake, mystic and poet, reminds us in his poem "Eternity:"
He who binds himself to a joy Recently, I have devoted quite a bit of my mental energies to catch when I say the word "should." It is by demanding that life should be a certain way that we sabotage our own lives. By building expectations of this life, I know that I am only diverting spiritual energy away from that which I can control. Shaking my fists at Heaven is a practice in futility. In the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita (The Lord's Song), the main character, Arjuna, finds himself in a dire situation similar to our struggle. Well actually, his situation could be considered an extreme example of the struggle that humanity faces when it comes to staring Evil in the face. He realizes that he must enter into battle against and kill many of his kin, and he cries to Sri Krishna:
Not this world's kingdom, Sri Krishna replies that "Feelings of heat and cold, pleasure and pain, are caused by the contact of the senses with their objects. ... They come and they go, never lasting long. You must accept them. A serene spirit accepts pain and pleasure with an even mind, and is unmoved by either. He alone is worthy of immortality."(6) So, as I face the ups and downs of life, I have to keep this in mind. I have to change my perception that life "should" be perfect and that I "should" be exempt from suffering to the realistic understanding that life wouldn't be life without those vicissitudes. Kiss the joy, but let it keep flying. ------------------------------------------------ Notes: 1. Hoeller, Stephan A. The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. The Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, IL USA. Third Quest Printing, 1989. p. 156. 2. The Holy Bible. New Internation Version. Isaiah 45:7. 3. Jung, C.G. The Seven Sermons to the Dead. The Third Sermon. 4. Hesse, Hermann. Demian. Perennial Classics, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1999. p. 95. 5. Hoeller, Stephan A. Ibid. p. 100.
6. Prabhavananda, Swami, trans. Bhagavad Gita.
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