Turning Around the Battle of Good Versus Evil

For a long time, I've been thinking about how we need a new narrative. I first tried to express it in this short video. A while later, I wrote this. I see the good versus evil narrative as a basic plotline that underlies so much of how we think and behave, so much of what entertains us, so much of what drives us. And I see that core storyline as a large part of what is setting humanity on a course of its own destruction. 

Humanity has been consumed in the battle between good and evil for the modern era. The atrocities within colonialism, slavery and the holocaust happened in the context of this story. We look back now and see the good and evil lines quite clearly, but at the time when those events were unfolding, the violent and immoral behaviors we see now likely felt subjectively like the pursuit of the good by those actors: part of expansion, spreading truth, research.

The lines of good and evil are actually not static at all. They are always in flux, and how they fall in our own mind depends on our perspective. Your personal position in a particular drama has so much to do with how your mind will put together a situation. The attachment you have to a particular benefit flowing to you will so sneakily color your view and set you on the good side, even if a view from another perspective would see you and your actions quite differently. The struggle you're experiencing in a situation also influences your view, making it more likely you'll see yourself as a good martyr and whatever you feel is responsible for your struggle as the evil problem. 

And yet, most of us have experienced how with the passage of time and the maturing of perspective, we often end up seeing things differently than we once did. Where we thought we were a hero, we learn we were hopped up on our own self-importance and didn’t realize how arrogant and disconnected from other people we were being. When we felt worthless and beat down, we look back to realize that our humble actions were quite heroic in how they filled a desperate need.

Good and evil are never objective realities that are clear and agreed upon. Often, they are perceptions split right down the middle with half the people believing a story painting one scene of heroes and villains, and the other half drawing the opposite picture in their minds. We are designed to see ourselves in a story where we are the main character, where we are in the right. So, as we cling to the battle between good and evil, we perpetuate our own delusions.

The narrative of good versus evil has become an overarching lens for so much of our community experience. The endless wars, conflicts and disconnection come in large part from this narrative touching so much of modern society: from advertising dramatizing the problems of our lives and which products or services can triumph over them, to politics where the other side is always cast as evil and needing to be eliminated, to sports and legal conflicts entertaining us with competitive drama, to the growing viciousness of cancel culture attempting to silence voices that are seen as dangerous and wrong by those resorting to cancelling behaviors. 

All the consumption and investment we have in this good versus evil narrative leaves us weary and depressed, anxious and afraid, separate and angry. I sense that to continue allowing this story to dominate our minds and our lives sets us on a course for human extinction, constantly lost in cycles of fighting, of being perpetrators and victims, of being blinded by the polarity in our minds.

I see another option though: flipping the narrative quite subtly to create drastic changes. We can move from the constant struggle between poles to a dance in Oneness. Rather than applying our cognitive powers to try to discern good from evil, we can instead focus our intellectual efforts on distinguishing between our own clarity and delusion. We can celebrate the effort to see all sides of a situation, instead of rooting for and working toward the success of what we deem the good side of any equation.

Instead of pursuing good, which is a subjective conclusion our mind is going to assign based more on our self-image than the objective truth of a situation, we can switch our focus and interest to pursuing clarity. In this process, how our egos attach to being right will become more and more apparent, and likewise will become more and more transparent.

We can train our amazing sensory perception and intellect to learn to explore the many different perspectives that could be held about a particular thing, instead of trying to find and settle into the “right” one. When we observe certain people behaving in a way that is different than we are inclined to behave, we could get curious about what motivates them and why they are choosing to align and move and speak differently than we are. 

What are they seeing that I'm not seeing? 

What have they experienced that makes them act the way they do?

In shifting the inquiry from trying to discern good to one of trying to see clearly, we learn to not only see what is better, but we learn to accept what is more. It is possible to live into what actually is rather than living in an endless fight for something else. Byron Katie has dedicated herself to teaching this idea through The Work. 

Whether fighting for the good, for justice, for change, for a better world, or even just for a win – we are still fighting. And in the fight, we are putting off our contentment and peace until the fight is won. And collectively, clinging to these battles contributes to the divisions in society, to the feelings of isolation, to the difficulties of different ideological groups to connect and work together for common good.

We could, instead, release the fight and be more awake to what actually is. We could learn about this world more, and be intrigued by the diversity of perspectives and the incredibly different life experiences that other people have. We could also have compassion when we see people behaving with cruelty or insensitivity, seeing more a need for healing than an evil person to eliminate. And this storyline doesn't need to be dry or boring or lacking interesting tension. It can be surprising and filled with twists and turns of a quite different flavor.

Obstacles and unwanted circumstances are a part of life, but when we’re not in a fight against them, a labeling of them as evil and needing to be fought, opposed and eliminated, something very different happens. In dropping the fight, we leave behind the anxiety and drama of the destructive crusades that have been the obsession of humanity for so long, and instead we travel through layers of illusion seeing more and more of our world and what this mysterious existence we are all part of really is. What we used to perceive as obstacles can become the fodder for learning and our own evolution, a sort-of Fierce Grace.

As we shift to pursue clarity as our objective, to be open to see that people with a different perspective aren't our enemy, we can transform our overarching narrative into one that's regenerative, redemptive and life-giving. With this shift of the core narrative we're running within, the narrative which drives so much of our storytelling in so many aspects of society, I suspect that we would open the door to all sorts of more life giving and harmony creating narratives and visions. 

I feel deeply that this core change could carry us into a new age of peace and sustainability.

Finding My Voice

A month or so ago, I participated in the second annual Walk for the World organized by Joe Dispenza, and the experience has surprisingly brought me back here: to these writings and this vision I still hold so deeply inside of a peaceful human race. As I felt into the words of the meditation that Joe Dispenza narrates during the walk about "walking into a New World" and "being the change," this New World I saw in my mind's eye was inhabited by a peaceful human race deeply grounded in the truth of unity. And it was a world where I felt fully empowered to express what is true for me; it was a place I felt free to be fully myself. 

It surprised me how different that all was from how I actually felt about expressing what was most true for me in recent times. As I logged back in here and looked at my past writings going all the way back to 2010, it puzzled me how so much time could've passed without me even wanting to write a post. I remembered how writing was such a therapeutic aspect of my being for all those years, something I just craved to do to feel like myself. 

The most obvious reason that I stopped writing is that my life turned upside down around the time of my last post. The degree of change and chaos of my last few years is reason enough for stepping away from writing, and yet, as I reflected on losing my inspiration to write, I could tell there was more. 

My interest has always been in seeing through the things that can divide us, like opinions, judgements and beliefs, and I didn't feel like my perspective was welcome. This feeling started building in the late spring and early summer of 2020. 

After the death of George Floyd sparked protests and demonstrations across the country, my friend, Sally, suggested that we do an impromptu Zoom call of this women's group we were in together to discuss all that was happening and the Black Lives Matter movement. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

The conversation started with us going around pretty informally, sharing thoughts and feelings. A couple of the women on the call, including Sally, were very passionate and upset, and others were more reflective and quiet. One of the quieter women in the circle, the oldest of our group, spoke up and talked about her sense of equality and justice. In the course of her sharing, she said "all lives matter." 

It struck a chord for me. I'd recently watched this video from Kenny of The Free Hugs Project, and I really resonated with what he said here to explain the BLM movement name. But I also knew what the woman in our circle meant when she said all lives matter. She didn't realize the possibility of causing offense by flipping the meaning of that phrase to emphasize equality over the call for attention to a specific group.

Her comment struck a much bigger chord for Sally, and Sally started educating this older woman in our group. The call got pretty tense as she and another woman on the call expressed feelings of offense and shamed what they saw as a privileged attempt to divert attention away from the problems faced by Black people in our country. I tried to chime in as a peacemaker, pointing out what I saw as a very pure and kind hearted intention in what the older woman was saying. Another woman in the group offered a reminder about our intentions for a non-judgmental space in the group. The conversation ended shortly after that, and the next day the older woman emailed and told us that she was leaving the circle. 

She'd been such a warm presence in the group, and her exit changed things. I reached out to her individually to see how she was, and if maybe she'd change her mind and be willing to talk it through more. She said that she just couldn't be in a group where she felt so much intolerance and judgment. I sensed it must have really hurt her to feel so judged by these women she was just beginning to get to know, to be challenged so harshly while she was being vulnerable and talking about something she didn't often talk about. 

Within a couple months, the group dissolved. Something was just irretrievably lost after that one conversation gone bad.

A while later, my friend Sally sent me information on a workshop to work with concepts in the book, White Fragility. I had purchased the book months earlier, after hearing a couple of recommendations. I tried to read it, but I just didn't feel any resonance or attraction to the ideas. I decided to pass on it and gave the book away to Sally. She strongly resonated with it, so much that she was rather aggressively asking me to reconsider my rejection of the book and come to this workshop with her.

I sat with the possibility of going to the workshop for a few days. I looked into the organization sponsoring the program, and it did seem like a great organization. And race issues were ones that I truly cared about and had tried to address in my career and conversations. I wanted to do my part to make the world more just, but this book didn't feel like the difference I felt called to make. To me, it felt divisive in approach, and I sensed a shaming and condescension in the ideology that I strongly did not believe would lead to sustainable peace and resolution. Of course, I could be missing something, but poking around on the internet confirmed that I wasn't the only one having such a reaction to the book. And more importantly, if something really didn't resonate with me, why would I force myself to ingest it? My mind is a sacred place, and consciously choosing what to feed it was, and still is, important to me.

I decided to donate to the organization sponsoring the event in lieu of paying to attend the workshop, and I let Sally know as graciously as I could that I just didn't feel this was the right thing for me. She continued to pressure me, and I sensed she felt it was her duty to educate and recruit me into the philosophy. We talked for a while and even met up at a park a few weeks later, and we just couldn't come to any agreement about it. She was thoroughly disappointed in me for not being willing to walk down this ideological path with her, and I didn't feel like she was a supportive friend if she couldn't trust my intuition about what was and wasn't right for me. 

Soon after this jarring end of a friendship, the second big movement that built my feeling of not being able to freely express myself came with the public health campaign around the vaccine rollout. I did not feel any rush to get the vaccine right away. I'm always wary about putting chemicals in my body - whether they be in foods, medicines, or vaccines, and being rather introverted and in the midst of so much turmoil in my own life, I was in no rush to get back out around people. Lockdown was suiting me and my lifestyle of the moment just fine. 

And yet, the couple times early on that I expressed those sorts thoughts, they were quickly belittled or dismissed with comments like "the vaccine is completely safe, don't be ridiculous" or "I'm happy to do my part in ending this pandemic." There was no room for any sort-of questioning, discussion, or evaluation. There was just a thick assumption which seemed to be held by most everyone around me that the vaccine would solve all our problems, and that there was no viable reason to hesitate. 

And yet, my rebellious mind wouldn't easily conform to that sort-of groupthink. I became interested in getting a broader view, seeing more opinions than just the ones most aggressively being projected around me. I found credible and sensible information about treatments that medical doctors had found success with in practice, and then watched these ideas pushed aggressively out of the mainstream and get labeled as misinformation. I watched doctors with strong reputations prior to the pandemic being stripped of their credentials for even proposing that there might be a way to deal with the virus other than the vaccine. I saw people claiming they'd been injured by the shot and doctors claiming that perhaps it wasn't actually so safe for all people, and in real time, I watched them get cancelled or have their voices suppressed. It all seemed so strange, not at all the America that I had thought I was living in. As the suppressed voices started creating their own ways of rising up to be heard, it started creating these very separate information ecosystems. As time went on and I monitored both of these ecosystems, it became pretty easy to tell which one a person spending their time in.

I started to feel like there just wasn't any space for conversation including diverse points of view anymore. The unwieldy environment of the internet created so much chatter that a powerful misinformation movement opened up to deal with the problem. And it created the new problem of silencing alternative perspectives by labeling them misinformation. Whether this movement was well intentioned, whether it was a sinister attempt to control public perception, or whether there was some mix of the two, the fact remains that this misinformation movement started to change the general feelings around open disagreement. I started feeling as though people thought it was dangerous to think and especially to speak outside mainstream points of view. 

But my interest is in being a bridge builder, writing into that space between different points of view. I love debate, different perspectives, diverse ideas. And I love science. The scientific method relies upon hypotheses and experimentation. Science isn't about obedience to a particular conclusion made by an authority; that's actually the antithesis of real science. Science is only possible when we are willing to suspend our belief in a conclusion and be open to challenge it, to test alternate possibilities.

Those yard signs that say "Science is Real" along with a number of other statements really irk me, even though I resonate with the general sense of respect, kindness and freedom it attempts to convey. By the context, I feel pretty sure that "science is real" is a jab at "climate deniers" and "anti-vaxxers", as they've been so in-affectionately named, and not really about science or the scientific method at all. To me, it is a clear pointer at a faulty thinking that has been poisoning our cultural discourse, one which equates a particular scientific conclusion with capital S Science, attempting to boost that conclusion into a status of undeniable truth. 

And none of that resonates with how I see things. I love discussion, disagreement, and alternative hypotheses, along with my love for this beautiful Earth and the health of us all. For all the places where there are different approaches and perspectives, I think our best route is to share, connect, and learn from one another, even if at the end of the day, we still disagree. Let's not be afraid of people that think differently and feed into the idea that we need to silence and cancel people that come to different conclusions. It's through sharing ideas, having discussions, and conducting open experiments that we will continue to evolve our understanding, learn, grow, and see the most deeply into the truth.

The fear of other perspectives and conclusions, and throwing around labels like "dangerous" and "misinformation" without a lot of care has created what feels to me to be a very touchy and triggering cultural environment. In that environment, I've had no desire to write, or even share my uncensored thoughts verbally with anyone besides a very small circle of trusted people. I've felt inclined to hide myself and my perspective, leaving behind this quote that had always resonated with me so much: "He who cannot howl will not find his pack." - Charles Simic. 

But now, a lot has changed, some of which I detail here. I have the glorious luxury at this moment to not feel beholden to anyone or anything. No job, no pressing family obligations, no career or professional reputation I care about preserving, not even much financial pressure. I'm currently free as a bird, and in that freedom, I want to howl. I want to find my voice again and use it to be the change that I wish to see in this transforming and beautiful world of ours.