After shifting my attention away from negatives for a couple of years, I was walking into a coffee shop one day when this exclamation suddenly popped-in: Wow! I don’t believe in right/wrong, good/bad anymore!
This really shocked me! The feeling of astonishment continued as I exclaimed, I can’t believe it! Me, the objective, principled, logical, reality-based thinker! How can I not believe in right/wrong?!
Yet, despite my surprise, I didn’t immediately throw it out as totally crazy nonsense. Instead, this pop-in stayed with me through weeks and months of wondering.
I remember asking myself, Then how do you view mass murder, Hitler, or people who out of blind anger viciously beat someone as we see in the movies?
Years before this book when I studied objective philosophy I held the view that evil must be destroyed or else it will keep destroying. When the World Trade Center in New York City was blown up I was filled with righteous tension. I believed, The evil must be destroyed!
At the same time whenever I felt such righteous tension, along with the superiority of judgmental fervor that accompanied it, my body and mind felt intensely bad about the world and about myself. But to me then, feeling bad was worth it; the tension, stress, and fear of righteous hatred, didn’t matter – I had to do the right thing.
So how did I justify embracing the “kill bad guys” belief with such certainty?
I used word-tools to label them bad and not like me. I called them evil destroyers, and therefore considered them not worthy of life and as less than human. I did what Hitler did to the Jews, what American slave owners did to African Americans, and what those who destroyed the World Trade Center did to the United States. When we define our enemies as nonpeople, we feel justified in doing to them whatever we define as right.
Now I see that I was my destroyers. My reaction to destruction of the World Trade Center carried the same energy as those who destroyed it, the same energy as Hitler and the same superiority-based energy as abusive slave owners throughout history. I was using word-tools to narrowly limit my view of human beings just as the destroyers and enslavers did. I was my destroyers because we all placed our labels, evaluations, word-tools above life.
And this creates a back and forth that has occurred throughout history: bad guys attack us; so we attack them; then they attack us because we attacked them; then we attack again, etc. Through all this, everyone is tense, fearful, and filled with hatred as they use word-tools to redefine each other as bad and not like me.
We maintain and embrace a we-not-them viewpoint by putting our this-not-that word-tools above life.
This finally presented to me as a simple choice: let go of evil, bad, and not like me, along with its associated violence; or continue the tension of thinking I should judge and then counter their evil actions with my good actions. Either feel good by letting go of the never ending negative energy, or continue to feel bad by holding onto it as I ignore the ongoing tension.
Over the months that followed, my shock, surprise, and confusion began to shift and what started as a pop-in became the strength of a realization that was accompanied by a feeling of gratitude. As I applied it each day, I continued to realize more clearly the damage I did whenever I made words more important than life itself.
Then I wondered: How do we improve the world situation without embracing the idea that we must destroy the destroyers? Don’t we have to fight the bad guys? Shouldn’t we execute murderers? How else will justice be done? My answer at the time was: I don’t know.
But I do know that the “kill the killers” viewpoint hasn’t worked for me, just as it hasn’t seemed to work throughout human history. My guess is that the feel-bad tension it caused in me is also experienced by killers who seem eager to start a fight and fighters for “righteousness” who believe they will establish justice by killing as retribution.
While I’m in the “killing-energy” state, I am too tense to see that approving of that energy creates more of it. I don’t see that embracing it by appealing to justice uses circles of words that disconnect my energy from life. The evil I tell myself I’m trying to rid the world of actually grows and becomes stronger because my reaction carries the same seed as the evil I claim I’m fighting.
Defining human beings as bad or evil is misuse of word-tools. It is a form of unconsciousness that assumes there is no reality outside of what we can put into words. What we fight only gets stronger because we start from the unwarranted base of believing that negative judgment, blame, and punishment are valid. Our unconscious embrace of judgment arises from, or at least is made possible by, mistakenly using concepts such as bad and good for something these word-tools are totally unsuited for.
I’ve seen it inside myself, during the destruction of the World Trade Center and anytime I lose my temper with another person. I’ve watched tension-filled fears create a fight for “right” that’s like a corrosive element inside me and people around me.
As I sensed that my righteous moral justice carried the same energy as that of the killers throughout history, I wondered, Are we all lost in the same confusion?
It’s obvious that feeling killer energy does not equal the action of killing. I may feel the energy of a killer while I’m yelling at my sister in anger. And though I may hurt her emotionally with my raging, I certainly have not ended her life in the way a killer ends a life.
Yet if I look inside myself when I experience killer energy, I feel the destructiveness firsthand. The evidence is inside me, if only I will look. I think of looking at this evidence inside me as a form of self-science which I have learned to take even more seriously than the body of science outside me.
I also remind myself that the body of science outside me has recently shown that everything and everybody emits energy. Energy is emitted from one body and it flows out and impacts others. Bad energy from me floats out and affects what’s around me. Although scientists have proven this, it is easy to dismiss it as hocus pocus, especially if I hold to the beliefs that I am separate as if in a vacuum and righteously superior as if I own the truth.
So again I ask, if I continue to embrace the judgment mentality of right/wrong good/bad, am I not embracing the same process and emitting the same energy as Hitler when he declared the Jews to be bad and worthy of destruction?
What I know is that I no longer see the point of continuing the tension these judgments bring. For me it goes against life energy and against a feeling of gratitude for life itself.
I see the destruction of right/wrong good/bad inside me, and I see it outside. As I release myself from the hold of this energy of righteous superiority, I find peace inside. Now, after experiencing Connectivity with people and with Source, I see the potential for peace outside me as well.
I was glad to experience two more pop-ins within the months that followed: “Selectivity” which means taking action with a nonjudgmental, emotionally neutral energy; and “A New Kind of Right”. See these sections in Parts 2 and 3 respectively.
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