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*cue Darth vader theme*
I’ve been thinking recently about the dark side of humanity.There’s just this side of us that wants to be bad…that can be as innocent as eating a candy bar when we’re trying to lose weight or as horrible as wanting to kill someone who’s betrayed you. Can any of us deny that this side is in all of us no matter how good intentioned we might be? In christianity you are essentially taught to fight and repress that part of you but these days I wonder if there are better ways of dealing with it? Are there healthy ways of dealing with this so called “dark side”? Could our overall repression education and lack of dealing with it be the reason why people do so many terrible things in the world?
I really don’t have any answers here but I’m interested in your thoughts.
I think the healthiest way of dealing with the shadow side is to accept it. Like, observe it, as Buddhism holds, but don’t identify or judge it. If it’s not an extreme impulse, like an intrusive thought demanding you kill someone, letting it come and go seems to be the best way to go. If you focus on the shadow or ignore it, I think you automatically lose balance…
Yea that’s a good one, existence versus nothingness, I think that’s the real battle, that’s going on. In the Bible the book of John touches on it in chapter 1 verse 5 ” The light shines in the darkness. But the darkness has not understood it.” Two very different and opposing things and neither is able to be totally dominate over the other. I don’t think what’ s going on is a good verses evil in a literal sense like in the Stars Wars movies, or Jesus verses satan. But the laws of physics working out towards finalizing themselves. Cosmic evolution. What we call evil is a product of that. Were effected through quantum entanglement , both good and bad. Meaning any event of chaos or harmony anywhere in the Universe effects everything in the Universe and depending on what the laws of physics are for a particular entity,will determine how it will react. For humans we do what we define as good or evil. Here is a good book , on the topic.
I like to use the word harmful instead of evil. I don’t believe in any evil power causing people to do harmful things. I think the source of harm is either fear and ignorance or mental disease.
I think that empathy is very important and if reason is informed by empathy we have a much better world. In other words, if humans learn empathy and learn how to skillfully love each other there will be a whole lot less suffering in this world.
I think it’s more important to know how to think than to be told what to think. For most of our history rules have informed the masses. As the world gets more complex I think we are going to need a model of self regulation and self responsibility. I think it’s important for everyone to operate from a knowledge of the bigger picture, rather than having people rule over everyone and telling them what to do.
My son did an interesting experiment with a game he wrote. In the game you controlled the bouncing ball with the amount of noise you made. He called the game Screamo Ball. So the louder you are the higher the ball goes on the screen. In his speech class he had the whole class play at the same time. Interestingly the games in which there was no leader telling everyone to go louder or softer scored higher than the groups who had a leader directing them.
There seems to be a natural order to the world the emerges when we stop trying to control everything.
If you want to play his game you can try it out at this link.
@Al Cruise, Stuart Clarke looks interesting. Thanks.
@Richard, Screamo Ball! Ha ha ha awesome! I like it! It’s as good as breaking dishes!
@SavageSoto, these days I tend to lean towards what Richard writes here about “harmfulness coming from fear, mental illness, lack of education and then empathy, knowing how to think, seeing the bigger picture…”
I guess then, were does fear come from? Why should that
trait even be there?
I think that, harmful,fear, evil, chaos are one and the same. If someone takes a gun and kills someone , or instead that person was killed by a tornado, that person is still dead. When he is killed by another person, we suggest fear , lack of empathy, mental illness, etc. When he is killed by a tornado we know it is because warm air meets cold air and the laws of physics cause an outcome of a dangerous high speed funnel cloud. Hence choas results. But we look at the deaths very differently. Once you separate the human reasons for causing harm away from science then you are going into the realm mythology, religion, etc. and as history shows us fear and causing harm get worse.
I think fear is an evolutionary side effect of consciousness and ego. I think that having feelings is part of an awakening process which provides a framework for ego and consciousness. Feelings seem to be a complex summary of the subconscious and the subconscious seems to be this part of ourselves that is able to quantum compute things and summarize it in feelings and images.
At this point in time we have no mechanistic explanation for consciousness and if there is still room for transcendence it would be here. The fear of the loss seems to be something that overwhelms a fair number of people. I would consider religion a good thing if it gave us ideas and methods to rationally moderate our fears without destroying other people.
What I observe is when people make up a story about reality and they don’t have all the facts or the intelligence to make good choices, they often rely on fear to inform their actions. To me fear is an emergency measure to be used when one is backed into a corner by a predator. This instinct has often been taken advantage of by priests of various religions through stories of imaginary predators such as Satan or evil spirits, etc. Fear is a very effective motivator.
I think we have to learn more about reality and stop relying on others to tell us false stories.
There is a book called The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by the late guru Debbie Ford (I have the e-book version). She talks about bringing our bad personality traits into the light and how we can use them to reach out potential. It was a really deep book and forced me to look at less than pleasant attributes in a healthier way. I really understood somethings about myself that help me realize when I need to take action or move on from a situation.
I think it is also important to realize we have a dark side b/c it does not permit us to look down on others. When someone does something wrong, we can say “He/She is a monster” and I probably still do that. But I try really hard not to and realize that if I had the life they did or the mental health issues they did, that could be me. It is unifying in a way to realize we all are capable of good and bad.
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