February 11, 2009

• Good and Evil, a Kabbalistic Perspective

  From a Kabbalistic perspective, God is beyond good and evil. (God is everything that exists and everything that is "nothing".)  Therefore, since labeling God "good" excludes evil, it cannot be appropriate, because doing this would leave It deficient.  (Likewise it would be just as foolish to call God evil as it would to call It good.)  Simply said, God encompasses everything, including the totality of good and evil.

  An analogy:  

  The Universe can be viewed as a metaphysical magnet, with one pole called good and the other called evil.  Good is represented by God, and evil by Satan.  The more we engage in certain activities, the closer we are drawn to God, and, of course, the opposite is also true. 

  When an iron filling falls to a piece of paper that has a magnet beneath it, a number of variables determine whether it will be drawn to the positive side of the magnet or to the negative side.  How close does it fall to either side?  How strong is the magnet?  How much friction (resistance) does the surface of the paper have?  What shape and smoothness is the filling itself?

  We ask similar questions about ourselves.  (How close do we feel to God?  How strong is the influence of God consciousness in our lives?  How easy is it to access awareness to God's presence? How much time do we take to explore the deeper meanings of life?  How much are we conditioned by habitual behavior that makes our lives routine and unconscious? etc) When we answer those questions, we get a sense of how connected we will be to the magnet of goodness.

  Notice the iron filling is never positive or negative itself before it becomes magnetized.  We are neither good nor evil in our nature.  We are simply the product of accumulated influences in our lives, plus the most important variable: our free will.  We can place ourselves closer or further away from things as we choose.  These choices influence where we end up.

  Nothing is stationary.  The forces of the universe are constantly tugging and pushing.  Higher consciousness, the light of the Divine, is a powerful source of attraction.  Yet it is balanced by an individual opposing force.  (See Newton's third law of motion.) 

  Nothing is inherently evil, but the power of seduction to draw us deeper into our ego-structures* and further from the Divine lies in everything. 

  The constant tension is universal law.  There is no way to eliminate evil.

  Even the heart of "Satan" has a spark that yearns to be redeemed.  This is important because we learn that our job is not to set up a battleground to eradicate evil, but to search out its spark of holiness.  Our task is not to destroy but to build; not to hate but to find a place of yielding; not to polarize but to discover the points of commonality so that we can work together.

  * Lust, for example, literally means strong desire.  (Associating lust with sexual arousal, as so many often do, completely misses the point, and it baffles me how this misunderstanding can go unchallenged for so long.) The word lust in and of itself does not indicate what is being desired.  Even Jesus said that He lusted.  Luke 22:15  "And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer."  The word bolded above is the same exact word in the greek for lust and also covet.  What I am saying, and what other Kabbalists believe, is that it is important that we choose to use our strong desires for good, moving towards the "God end" of the pole, as opposed to leting our desires control and seduce us.

  ** Note:  This is not my own work.  Ideas, concepts, and at times direct quotations have been taken from various books and websites, the majority of the material coming from the book "God is a Verb". **

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