The Darkness of the World

Over the world lies a structure of darknesses. Not as if a horde of demons lived upon it, but rather in a natural dynamic, like a candle casting lights and shadows. But the evil in the world does not lie in the world: Evil is born within us.

The thing is, our system of thoughts makes no sense at all when set against the intuition with which we create good. We don't really think; we let ourselves be swept along by the lowest winds, which mostly only know how to tell stories of darkness. Hardly any of our efforts are consciously constructive; they are reflex actions answering to fables of fear, struggle and personal survival.

When, gullible to every impulsive reaction, we live focused on, even obsessed with, the darknesses; when, as we walk, we stumble over what we consider injustices; when our sensitivity, in the fall, is left shaken and hurt, our system of judgments magnifies before our eyes what in the world was darkness but in us is read as evil.

Having thus mistaken the way we weigh our perceptions of the world, we blame the world for the consequences that, without wanting to but without preventing it, we are bringing upon ourselves.

And what do we do about the evil in the world?

We do nothing, because, in our need to believe ourselves good, we regard this evil as something we take no part in. We don't allow ourselves to know that evil lives inside us, and so we cannot change it.

It is an endless circle: Create evil, lie behind a mask of goodness, then point at the characters we painted as villains, and by hating them, excuse our own evil under banners of legality, righteousness and justice. This is the wheel that turns our system of thoughts.

How, then, will we change the world?

Not by winning any war, not by pulling off any revolution, not by punishing any villain, not by defeating any darkness. Confusion will never calm confusion, for that maneuver is reserved for clarity alone. God will regain his throne in the world when he forgives the devil from the heart and recognizes that they are one.

Reason's call is to observe. Little by little, to clear up the picture of what is happening in the world, so that darkness first loses its traces of evil and then loses its blinding power entirely. And the only way to do this is by looking at what happens within us, not only at how we are judging the world, but also realizing that everything that happens, outside and inside, is no more than an illusion perceived by a consciousness that transcends the very concepts of light and darkness.

Every stirring of evil that leaps up in the moments when we surrender to the fables of darkness, every gust of raw sensation tied to fear, struggle and survival, can be neutralized in the emanations of this consciousness awakened by serene determination.

The key to the matter is the persistent focus of equanimity.

You mean that, faced with the cruelties of the world, we should stay idle?

No. Intelligence gradually learns to tell impartiality from resignation. Our impulsive astral body, the source of our instincts, will always keep moving, honoring the nature that is an indispensable part of our wholeness, of our humanity. Observation from consciousness, also called reflection, can balance these movements, but not by creating stillness: it does so by actively tearing down our system of thoughts, which has no real foundation.

Darkness will never cease to exist, but it can be transcended through the art of understanding. And understanding is an act so simple that we cannot perform it; we can only court it and invoke it by staying in balance.

Equanimity opens no door to any evil because it never shut that door, because it never bought the story that any evil exists. Balance is kept, then, by watching the world while also knowing how to ignore it, that is, knowing how not to be dazzled by its play of light and shadow. This is the fruit, not of concentration, not of repression, not of punishment, but of the joyful contemplation of the essence of being, in the most complete renunciation of the self.

How could any fable in the world touch the eternal emptiness that, in essence, we are?