The effort to be good means there is a possibility of failure. Without evil, there could be no good. This belief tends to create our suffering when it comes to feelings of anxiety, guilt, and conflict. We want to believe that these feelings stem from the opposition to who we want to be. Our sense of conflict would come from an unjust action or an abusive boss, triggering feelings of anxiety. In our efforts to be “good,” we also face internal battles with the belief that we may not be working hard enough, or that we are giving in to temptation. What if I were to tell you that these negative emotions don’t stem from your faults or your bad boss? It comes from a fundamental misinterpretation of good and evil.

The cliché that is true, but rarely used because it has become a cliché, is that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. Conflict doesn’t originate from an action, but from our judgment of the action and the judgment of the person or thing acted upon. There will always be conflict if we believe that good and evil are two separate and opposing entities that are equally real. When we believe in good and evil, our minds become split. Instances of our lives either go into the good pile or the evil pile. If we then think that we are good, anything evil becomes our opposition.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

This war against good and evil doesn’t really wage on the outside, but it’s a constant battle internally due to our inability to be perfect at anything. We split ourselves into two. We have our good self, which is our ideal self. This self tells us that we should be patient, kind, and successful. We then also have an evil side that we don’t like to admit. The evil side isn’t really evil at all. It’s the side that we try to suppress in our effort to be good. This includes emotions such as anger and jealousy, as well as what we consider sins like sloth and lust.

In an effort to maintain our goodness, we start to feel other negative emotions, namely anxiety, shame, and guilt. We tend to position these negative feelings as punishments for not being good. However, these negative feelings are a direct result of maintaining this division of good and evil. Anxiety occurs when we try to maintain our good facade by preventing the evil side from being seen or experienced. Guilt is the internal feeling that the bad side is “winning.” The dualistic trap we find ourselves in is that the more we try to be good, the more defined the evil we seek to eliminate becomes. The devotion to good empowers the evil, which only makes the inner conflict a guarantee.

What if instead of treating good and bad as two separate things, we saw them as two expressions of our awareness, which never changes. They cannot be two separate things because they are closely intertwined. You can’t have good without bad, and bad without good. Instead of believing that anger should be eradicated, we can see it as an energy that can be harnessed for action or observed. Guilt is no longer seen as proof that we are irredeemable, but rather as a reminder that we are not separate from evil, as cutting out evil is akin to removing a piece of the whole, which accepts everything as one.

Is Goodness the Cause of Misery?

On the quest for goodness, we simultaneously harbor an aversion to evil, which only creates conflict and an unending cycle of suffering as we oscillate between this desire and aversion. If we define ourselves as good, we concurrently create a shadow side of what we don’t want to be, along with the fear of becoming it. When we perceive ourselves as inherently good, our unified awareness splits into two warring factions.

It takes a lot of effort to be good. It’s more accurate to say that it takes a great deal of effort to suppress any thought, feeling, or action that might fall into the category of evil. The constant effort to suppress what we believe to be bad creates experiences of anxiety, rigid self-control, and moral exhaustion. The more rigid the ideal of “goodness”, the more intense the misery becomes. Any natural impulse of anger, jealousy, or lust is instantly perceived as failure. Because our idea of being good directly depends on not being bad, any event that reflects our badness, such as a moment of impatience or a selfish decision, shatters our sense of self, leading to guilt and defensiveness.

What to Do About Evil

The trap is then to try to transcend evil. The flaw in this thinking is that good and evil are connected. They are two parts of the same whole. Good and evil are not separate things, but two opposing and interdependent determinants of a single abstract whole. To define good, you must also reference the absence or negation of the same quality. For example, selflessness is the absence of selfishness. Order is the absence of chaos. Protection is the absence of destruction. If the idea of evil were to vanish from the universe, there would be no concept of good, and thus it would become meaningless. These two concepts are mutually dependent, thus making the substance of each concept the same as the other. Transcending evil would become an impossibility.

The other path is transgression. To trangress literally means to step across (a line or boundary). Here, we are looking at the boundary between good and evil and refusing to honor it. Transgression is the recognition that the energy behind good and evil is not different, but unconditioned awareness taking temporary forms. The path to freedom is not about getting rid of what is bad, but realizing that it’s no different from what is good. The practical practice we can bring to life is no longer eliminating any part of our experience that we deem bad. Instead, we recognize the God behind both the saintly and the sinful impulses.

There’s a War Going On Inside

The war between good and evil is an internal war that you will never win. Why? Because you are fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. The enemy we’ve created has been self-generated due to the mistaken belief that the anxiety, self-hatred, and guilt that we feel are something other, alien, and wrong.

Even in spiritual circles, the idea is that I have to kill my ego. When I say this, I’ve made the ego the enemy, when in reality, both I and the ego are the same. When we create an enemy, we also position them as evil. The harder we work to crush, suppress, or kill this enemy, the more energy we dedicate to defining and sustaining its existence. Suppression of anything can never be construed as a solution to erasure when it takes so much energy to suppress. The enemy continues to grow and exist only because we believe it’s separate from who we are.

The evil, or dark side, isn’t evil at all but merely a rejected aspect of a unified self. Everything we decide to reject is evil. As a result, any attempt to destroy this side of ourselves is self-harm. Our dark side is not a separate entity, but the other side of the same coin. The more you fight against evil, the more you fight against yourself.

In truth, every aspect of dark can be integrated into light because they are opposite sides of the same spectrum. For example, envy is simply the repressed desire for value, but it can become ambition or inspiration when integrated. Anger is the distorted signal of a violated boundary, but it comes with assertion or protection for those who experience injustice. These underlying perspectives are already there. The trick is to remove moral judgment from negative emotions. Once we stop treating evil as the enemy, we start to learn how to coexist with it.

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