VIEWS AND REVIEWS
Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality,by John A. Sanford. New York, Crossroad, 1981.
People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, by M. ScottPeck. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1983.
O Lord, I will dispute with thee, for thou art just;
yes, I will plead my case before thee.
Why do the wicked prosper
and traitors live at ease?
Jer. 12:1 NEB
Why, if the creation was good (Gen. l),
is there so much evil in the world?
What is its source?
What is God’s relationship to evil?
Why are some people more evil than others?
What is our responsibility for dealing with evil?
What is the best preparation for responding to it?
How do we develop faith with which to face evil?
These are big questions. You must have asked many of them. There is probably no more evil in the world today than in other ages, but because of our world-wide system of rapid communication we are acutely conscious of it in almost overwhelming proportions. It impinges on us from all sides. It is absolutely necessary for our sanity that we at least find a way to cope with this awareness of evil. But is something more required of us? Are we not responsible for dealing with evil? If so, where do we begin? The following quotations might be said to point the way.
Jesus told this parable:
Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-gatherer. The Pharisee stood up, and prayed thus: “I thank thee, O God, that I am not like the rest of men, greedy, dishonest, adulterous; or, for that matter, like this tax-gatherer. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all that I get.” But the other kept his distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but beat upon his breast, saying, “O God, have mercy on me, sinner that I am.” It was this man, I tell you, and not the other, who went home acquitted of his sins.
Luke 18:10-14 NEB
George Fox wrote:
…The Lord showed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without were within, in the hearts and minds of wicked men… The natures of these I saw within, though people had been looking without. And I cried to the Lord saying, “Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?”
George Fox’s Journal
John L. Nickalls, ed.
More recently, Carl Jung wrote:
Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories to the crime we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. In reality we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be drawn into the infernal melee. None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow… One would therefore do well to possess some “imagination in evil,” for only the fool can permanently neglect the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil… Projection of the unrecognized evil into the “other”…strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of his threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil.
The Undiscovered Self
We are being told by these men that it is imperative that we look within and acknowledge the seeds of evil which are in us. It is easier to do this if we have some understanding of evil and how it begins and how it works in us. Neither religion nor psychology has done much actual study of evil until the last few years. Two recent books which I myself found very helpful are Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality by John A. Sanford and People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck. Strangely, both of these books did give me hope, for they each gave me some understanding of how evil gets started and how to discern it, for it is not always that obvious. They also provided hints of how to deal with it—within and without.
These two authors define evil differently, but I do not feel that their definitions conflict. Rather the two together round out one’s understanding. Each author traces the source of evil—again differently—but again in ways which complement each other.
Sanford defines evil as that which attacks wholeness: “Whatever detracts from or destroys wholeness we call evil, and whatever supports, furthers or maintains wholeness we call good.” In his book he looks at evil in mythology and in folklore. And he traces evil and the concept of Satan or the devil through the Old and New Testaments. In doing this he shows that as we try to be perfect we deny and repress our own shadow side and project it onto others, hereby giving them more power; and because we refuse to accept the darkness within us, it becomes more evil and powerful. Sanford uses Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to demonstrate this later point. In trying to appear perfect, Dr. Jekyll repressed all his mischievous, fun loving side, and it became darker, stronger, more powerful and evil. Jekyll also refused to take responsibility for Hyde and to be open about the Hyde side of his personality. This is the failure to acknowledge the shadow which each of us has. Failure to meet the shadow is one of the main sources of evil.
Curiously, something which corresponds to this happens in the Bible, as Sanford shows. In the Old Testament when God is seen as both light and dark, the Satan is seen as an adversary—sometimes in the service of God—and this adversary sometimes brings a greater consciousness or faithfulness. But as God comes to be seen as only light with no dark side, and people are admonished to be perfect, the devil becomes wholly evil and more powerful. This striving to be perfect and refusing to accept our dark side has caused tremendous, collective projections and heinous crimes done in the name of God, as well as evil committed individually on a smaller scale. Sanford points out that Mat. 5:48 which has been translated: “You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly father is perfect,” is more accurately translated: “Be you therefore ones brought to completion even as your heavenly father is complete.” Unfortunately, Paul, even though he acknowledged his own duality, preached perfection to others, as did the early church and hence Christianity down through the ages.
Midway in the book Sanford writes: “As soon as anyone has recognized his or her personal Shadow, that personality has begun the path to individual consciousness; in spite of its painfulness, that is the narrow gate that leads to life.” This is what Jesus was teaching. It’s too bad the Christian Church has skewed the message. Sanford, of course, is not recommending that we act out all our impulses, but that we own them and bring them into consciousness and the light of day.
M. Scott Peck warns that his book is dangerous, but feels that it is even more dangerous to go on not dealing with evil. And so he has made a beginning, in the hope that the study of evil will continue. Peck notes that evil is live spelled backwards. He goes on to say: “Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness.” He also writes that the “twin progenitors of evil are laziness and narcissism.” He feels that evil is a disease and should be treated as such. The predominant feature of this personality disorder is denial of personal responsibility. Evil arises in the refusal to acknowledge our own sins. Jung and Sanford would call this refusal to acknowledge the shadow. The evil person is very apt to look respectable. This sounds like Dr. Jekyll. Other characteristics named by Peck are scapegoating, which may be quite subtle (projection), intolerance of criticism, intellectual deviousness, desire to confuse, and not “seeing” others. One of the main characteristics of the evil person is that s/he has an unsubmitted will. Peck writes:
There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one’s own will—which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil.
How do people become evil? Peck finds in his work as a psychotherapist that an individual’s evil can almost always be traced to some extent to childhood, but that “evil is also a choice one has made—indeed a whole series of choices.”
Peck has an illuminating analysis of group evil in his book, using as an example the American atrocities in My Lai. He shows us how dangerously easy it is for a group to slip into evil ways. But then he reminds us that:
Triggers are pulled by individuals. Orders are given and executed by individuals. In the last analysis, every single human act is ultimately the result of an individual choice.
and:
It is in the solitary mind of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost… The effort to prevent group evil—including war—must therefore be directed toward the individual.
Here is one of Peck’s hopes for diminishing the evil in the world:
Children will, in my dream, be taught that laziness and narcissism are at the very root of all human evil, and why this is so. They will learn that each individual is of sacred importance. They will come to know that the natural tendency of the individual in a group is to forfeit his or her ethical judgment to the leader, and that tendency should be resisted. And they will finally see it as each individual’s responsibility to continually examine himself or herself for laziness and narcissism and then to purify themselves accordingly. They will do this in the knowledge that such personal purification is required not only for the salvation of their individual souls but also for the salvation of their world.
Peck may appear to be treading on dangerous ground when he talks of purification. Is this a quest for perfection? This paragraph might sound that way, but it seems to me that Peck is here recommending acknowledgement of shadow qualities. If you take the book as a whole, you will find that he is advocating dedication to reality at all costs. This includes the reality of ourselves.
Peck quotes Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon to warn against the danger of concentrating on evil:
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous … To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous.
Rather, “The healing of evil—scientifically or otherwise—can be accomplished only by the love of individuals.”
Peck has something to say about why God permits human evil:
Having forsaken force, God is impotent to prevent the atrocities that we commit upon one another. He can only grieve with us. He will offer himself in all His wisdom, but He cannot make us choose to abide with Him.
Both books are extremely helpful in diagnosing evil, tracing its source and giving us some clues as to how to deal with it. However, it is the appeal of stories which catches our imagination and shows us the way. There are two stories which I have found particularly helpful in demonstrating the way of faith in the face of evil—one from the Bible the other a story of an actual family in modem times.
The Bible story is the one of Joseph in Genesis who was almost killed, then sold into slavery to foreigners by his brothers. He found his way to forgiveness of his brothers and to being able to affirm that the evil that they had meant to do him had, in fact, been turned to good by God.
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom is the story of her own family in Holland during World War II. The threat of imprisonment or death and the horrors of Nazi concentration camp could not destroy this family’s faith; and Corrie’s sister was even able to pray for and to love the guards who were committing evil. Shortly before she died in the concentration camp she told Corrie that she, Corrie,
must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.
Corrie herself said:
Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
The people in both of these stories exemplify the way of love and faith in the face of evil. And Corrie Ten Boom was one who was very conscious of her shadow qualities, even to her own lack of love and faith.
Dorothy Reichardt
Media, PA
The Turning Point, by Fritjof Capra. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982, 464 p., $17.50.
“Without a vision, the people perish.” The Turning Point gives new vision and new hope. It is a book of great importance to our era. In writing it, Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics, proves himself one of the most deeply probing, future-creating thinkers of our time.
In the introduction, which sets the tone of the book, Toynbee is quoted, “While an unchanging dominant majority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking fresh creative responses from newly recruited minorities, which proclaim their own creative power by rising each time to the occasion.”
The book provides many examples of creative response. In order to help with the process we need extensive understanding of the flaws in our present culture and of the needs and potentials of the rising culture toward which our world is turning. The Turning Point meets these needs well. It sets forth in careful detail the theory and structure of our present institutions, how they all are related and interdependent, and how failure to understand this brings about life-threatening mistakes. The book also discusses the changes needed and the directions new development will take. It leaves one with new hope for life on this planet and increased energy for working toward its realization.
Twelve chapters are divided into four sections. Section I, “Crisis and Transformation,” gives an introductory glimpse of where we are and where we hope to go. Section II, “The Two Paradigms,” contrasts the amazing findings of the new physics with those of Newton and Descartes. Section III, “The Influence of Cartesian-Newtonian Thought,” traces its influence upon our view of life, medicine, psychology, economics and the “Dark Side of Growth.” Section IV, “The New Vision of Reality,” shows how the findings of the new physics and the systems view of life give valuable new perspectives on the interrelatedness of all aspects of life and emphasize the power new movements may gain by working together to further the rising culture.
After giving a thoroughgoing analysis of the Newtonian-Cartesian theories and their values in areas where they apply, we are shown their limiting and destructive effect when applied in areas where they are not valid. Capra writes, “It would seem that the concept of mental health should include a harmonious integration of the Cartesian and the transpersonal modes of perception and experience. To perceive reality exclusively in the transpersonal mode is incompatible with adequate functioning and survival in the everyday world. To experience an incoherent mixture of both modes of perception without being able to integrate them is psychotic. But to be limited to the Cartesian mode of perception alone is also madness; it is the madness of our dominant culture.”
Turning to the life affirming potentials, the findings of the new physics and the systems theory are applied and all aspects of the culture work together harmoniously. This is in contrast to the destructive effect of the “growth is beautiful” theory of economics when human values are overrun and even destroyed by the drives to amass wealth and power.
It is remarkable how Capra, a theoretical physicist has so thoroughly grasped and freshly presented the theories and graphic details of fields which are not his own, illuminating them with new insight and comprehension. Economic theory in his hands, for example, becomes stimulating and thought provoking.
In the chapter “Journeys Beyond Space and Time,” which deals with the field of psychology, he shows understanding that is deep, exact and forward-looking. He points out that behavioristic psychology is still operating on the Newtonian model with no comprehension of the deeper levels of consciousness—even denying that unconsciousness exists! The author has deep understanding of the contributions of Freud and Jung as well as the several significant new approaches in psychotherapy and healing.
He discusses models dealing with the transpersonal, including Jung’s depth psychology, Maslow’s “psychology of being” and Assagioli’s psychosynthesis. He points out that in the deep areas of the transpersonal, the aims of therapy tend to merge with those of spiritual practice, that such therapy can reach beyond the realm of everyday life, and that therapists who have “been there and back again” are especially valuable in helping others.
In the last chapter, “Passage to the Solar Age,” Capra becomes a scientist-prophet for our time. Although I felt a bit impatient in returning to the economic and technical considerations dealt with earlier, in presenting the potentials of solar power, I realized their necessity in showing how economic theory and practice must now be shaped by the ecological fabric in which they are imbedded. He emphasized that from the Harvard Business School, “solar heating is a here and now alternative to conventional energy sources.” Its development is held back only by the profit motives of the producers of other sources of energy. A utilities advisor concludes “that from an economic standpoint alone, to rely upon nuclear fission as the primary source of our stationary energy supplies will constitute economic lunacy on a scale unparalleled in recorded history.”
This new vision of reality is based on what is now called “deep ecology,” not just limited “environmentalism.” “It recognizes the role of human beings in the planetary ecosystem”… It has a “new philosophical and religions basis…wherein the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole.”
Capra emphasizes that this concept underlies the philosophy of ancient Taoist sages in China regarding the oneness of all things and their dynamic interrelatedness. It appears also in the Philosophy of Heraclitus and of our own St. Francis, in his “Canticle to the Creatures,” wherein he talks of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon!”
Capra points out that, “The spiritual essence of the ecological vision seems to find its ideal expression in the feminist spirituality advocated by the women’s movement, as would be expected from the natural kinship between feminism and ecology.” It is one of the strongest spiritual currents of our time, which may well play a pivotal role in the coalescence of various social movements and may have a profound effect on the evolution of our culture.
The members of the third world movement are also questioning dominant values and are shifting the definition of “development” from industrial production to the development of human beings.
At the same time the coalescence of third world groups, ecologists, consumer groups and ethnic minorities, into the antinuclear movement, is becoming the most powerful political force in this decade. It may develop a new planetary ethic and direct the cultural tide away from war and destruction to life and wholeness for all the world and life upon it. Seen in this light, political and spiritual movements fuse.
The Turning Point leaves one with the sense of urgency, obligation and hope which brings to mind lines written by Christopher Fry in his play, “Sleep of Prisoners,” written after World War II.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
comes up to face us everywhere
never to leave us till we take
the longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now world size
the enterprise
is exploration into God
where no nation’s foot has ever trodden yet.
While packed with broad learning and incisive analysis suitable for a university graduate course, the book is clearly and ably written for the general reader and all technical terms are defined in footnotes on pages where they first appear. The book would lend itself readily for a study group using one chapter for each meeting. It would provide an understanding of our culture’s problems, suggesting ways in which each of us can contribute to its ongoing development.
Katharine Whiteside Taylor
San Francisco, CA
The Continuing Discovery of Chiron,by Erminie Lantero. Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine, 1983, 189 p., $8.95.
On November 1, 1977, a blessed event occurred in our solar system; look back in your dream journal. You may have dreamed of it. That was the auspicious day when a royal son of a powerful earth-god was born, right before our eyes; that is, the eyes of a telescope trained on a particular area in the heavens.
Erminie Lantero, whom we know as a previous editor and dedicated contributor to Inward Light, has published an exciting book about the discovery of a new planet. Reading it, I became aware that in certain circles there has been almost as much fuss about this planet child as was made about the birth of the new heir to the British throne. The scientific discovery was made by Charles T. Kowal of the Hale Observatories at Pasadina, CA, who had many previous discoveries to his credit, such as asteroids, additional moons for Jupiter, and supernovas in other galaxies. Kowal did not expect to find a planet in orbit between Saturn and Uranus, as current mathematical theory of the spacing of planets did not allow this possibility. Its orbit proved to be very irregular; in its 49-50 year course around the Sun, it crosses the orbits of both Saturn and Uranus. Because of its small size (310 to 400 km. diameter), astronomers soon classified it as an asteroid, not a “major” planet; but astrologers are still divided on this point.
Traditionally, the person who discovers a planet gets to name it. Chiron, for whom Kowal named it, was according to Greek mythology a Centaur, the son of Saturn (an earth god) and grand son of Uranus (a sky god). Such names apparently come to the discovering astronomer as if by inspiration or ex cathedra, “out of the collective unconscious, the collective imagination of humankind, which is continuous with the cosmos as we perceive it. Each planet then becomes understandable through combining the symbolism of its name, astronomical facts about the planet, and historical events of trends germinating at the time of discovery, with continued observation of how its transits work out in individual and collective (groups’ and nations’) horoscopes.”
I am impressed by the author’s skill as a writer, as she guides us deftly into the fascinating environment of the astrologer’s mind. This is “a rare opportunity—a chance to witness the way in which astrologers come to assign meaning to a new planetary body” (quoting the back cover), and commence using it as a tool in modern-day astrological charts. In so doing, she can claim to have made a significant contribution to astrological literature, even though (as she says) she has worked in this field only ten years, having come to it late in life after giving most of her working years to teaching, editorial work or research in the field of religion, mostly church-connected.
One realizes that Erminie Lantero is doing an important work because, as Jung said, the dawn of a new Age always releases new myths (or new variations on old myths) into the collective psyche. She makes an understanding penetration into the Chiron myth, first following the original story through its ramifications in ancient Greek literature; then later (in her final chapter) showing its further development in combination with other myths in the literature of our own century, culminating since 1977 in a spurt of still further evolution “in transition to a New Age.”
Let me say, however, that this is not an easy book for non-astrologers to read. There are parts you may not understand at all without extensive training. Never mind. You don’t have to be a scientist to read and understand something of the double-helix structure of our genes and its exciting implications. Simply put, The Double Helix was about the microscopic world, and this book is about the macroscopic one.
Among the listing of tentative conclusions about the planet Chiron reached by a wide spectrum of astrologers of different schools, gathered partly from their already-published articles and partly by personal correspondence, the author includes her own original position. “Chiron means to me the principle of healing or wholemaking, on any level”—i.e. physical, psychological, spiritual. Perennially, too, he has been understood as “wounded healer.” Some have seen him principally as a teacher of youth. Various detailed examples are given of personality profiles and sequences of events in people’s lives, as related to the position of Chiron in their natal charts and planetary transits involving Chiron. She also records findings by others, such as Dr. Kenneth Negus of the Astrological Society of Princeton, that Chiron correlates with the environmental movement and its leaders (and their efforts to heal the Earth). There is also an increasing tendency among the more psychologically or spiritually oriented astrologers to see Chiron (who in the myth was a priest of the Mysteries) as an inner guide to self-transformation, individuation, or enlightenment.
I was delighted also with an important chronology of world events and trends since the 1940s which are given as astrological interpretation (in chapter 6), in terms of Chiron and the other outer planets. The movements of the planets through the Signs of the Zodiac and the ever-changing meanings they bear as they aspect each other and our earth, as we too circle the Sun, constitutes the “collective archetype of being” through which we all interact. Normally we, as a group or the human family, are not conscious of these meanings, although we experience them subliminally. If you study these planetary motions in relation to each other, and correlate them with prevailing trends and world events, you will see that there is an archetypal fabric which forms a backdrop for our lives as we live them. Time has quality, and time is cyclic. An archetype is a human behavioral pattern, collective rather than individual, which is eternal and keeps repeating itself. If one knows astrology, one sees the eternal present in the stars.
Thank you, Erminie Lantero, for your contribution to this knowledge.
Keith Kinsolving
Washington, D. C.