TrueLife - The Good Spider vs The Evil Wasp

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, Fearers through ruins maze lights my war cry, born from the blade.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphene. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. Wherever you are, wherever you find yourself, I challenge you to look around and find the beauty that is surrounding. that is surrounding you. It's there. I promise you. If you just open your eyes, open your mind, and take a look at the beauty that surrounds you, you'll find it hard not to smile. I promise you.

What a crazy world we live in. I've been thinking a lot about the shadow, about my shadow, about the shadow of our culture, the shadow of the law, the dark side of our conscious beings, It's not so much the opposite of the light as it is the poles apart from one another. It's the recognition of polarity, the recognition of the polarity of life. Not so much the conflict between good and evil. I believe those two things can be harmonized. I think this is kind of what Nietzsche tries to get into when he talks about beyond good. and evil. How can we ever truly get beyond conflict if we choose to see the world in good and evil?

The only way to move forward in this world or to even evolve as a species is to understand there is no absolute good. There is no absolute evil. And the evil that you recognize and someone else resides in your heart, as does the good that resides in you. It also resides in the heart of those you deem evil. I've been talking a lot lately about how we can learn by experience, how we can learn a lot about ourselves by quiet contemplation and watching the environment around us. The spider and the wasp are natural predators. They naturally fight each other. However, you wouldn't call one of them evil and one of them good. It's just that there's conflict. They're naturally going to fight and kill one another.

Neither one is good, neither one is evil. They're natural. We tend to see or label. That's a better word. It comes back to linguistics. These ideas of labels and these basic or unjustified, unthought-about concepts like evil. It's easy. It's easy to claim someone is evil. That's the first step to dehumanizing them. However, to the degree that you condemn the other and find evil in them, you are, to that same degree, unconscious of that same thing in yourself,

or at least of the potentiality of it. just because there are people who are unconscious of their own dark sides, and they project that darkness outward and into the enemy. You know, maybe it takes the form of Jews or communists or capitalists or greed, whatever form it takes. Those that project that darkness say, there, there is the darkness. See, it's not in me.

And because it is not in me, I am justified. in annihilating this enemy, be it with bricks or atom bombs or gas chambers or financial sanctions. You see, it's this dehumanizing, this inability to admit that the evil resides in you. But to the degree which a person becomes conscious that the evil is as much in them as in the other, to this same degree, the person is not likely to project it onto some scapegoat or onto a third party and commit the horrendous criminal acts of violence on people. It can be so tricky to sit down and think about this. We're taught from such an early age via religion and small-mindedness

that when push come to shove, we can label someone evil and then we can attack them. Does anybody think Vladimir Putin is evil? He's no more evil than Joe Biden than is Saddam Hussein, than is Mao Zay tongue or President Z. None. No one is evil. It may not be right, and I'm not singing praise of any one of these people. But to label them evil is too easy. and to label them evil is to project the spotlight of our own anger and our own evil tendencies onto them. Right.

In order to admit, to accept, and to understand the evil in ourselves, we have to be able to do it without being an enemy to it. So how can you possibly do that? It's like you have to make friends with the monster. Does that kind of make sense? If you want the feeling of the unity and the absence of conflict in your life, in your inner dialogue, and your relationships, if you want to integrate your own shadow,

then you must not be ashamed of the things you've done. And that is something that is incredibly difficult to do. because all of us have done things we're ashamed of, we're guilty of. We feel we're not worthy of being loved if we look back on our lives and we see these things that we've never forgiven ourselves for. It's sad to me. So many of us, I heard that depression is being trapped in the past and anxiety is being trapped in the future. But these are both ways of separating oneself from the true path. from true integration.

You know, think about it like this. The behind the facade of even the most together person is a reconstruction of a bum or a, you know, someone behind even the best facade. Behind the facade of Elon Musk the genius, there is. is a father who constantly divorces women and has tons of kid and is probably not that good of a dad. I'm not, I'm just using a hat as a metaphor. He might be an awesome dad. I don't know. Behind the togetherness facade of George Monty is someone who doesn't feel as if they're worthy of living a life filled with love. Behind the facade of all of us, there is.

is a integration problem. Maybe that's why we're here. Maybe that's why we're on this planet is to integrate that. I heard a beautiful metaphor that says that the same way that manure is contributive to the perfume of the rose. So is your prior failings contributive to the final outcome. of who you're going to be. All those things that you've done in the past,

all the anxiety and the guilt and the wrongdoing, those things you're not proud of, those words you said, those acts you did, they serve as fertilizer, as manure, to bring about the perfume of the rose that you will become. I've been reading a lot of Carl Young lately, and I want to share with you one particular speech that he wrote when he was speaking to a very religious group one time. I'm going to kind of jump in the middle of it and end in the middle of it, but I think it's really beautiful. We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

Condemnation does not liberate. It oppresses. I am the oppressor of whom I condemn, not his friend and fellow sufferer. If you truly wish to help, you must be willing to accept the other as he truly is. And this can only be done when one has truly seen and accepted himself for who he truly is. All of this seems so simple, but it is always the most difficult. It requires the greatest act to be simple. That which appears to be simple is quite often the most difficult thing to do.

And so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one's whole life. That I feed the beggar, forgiven insult. I love my enemy in the name of Christ. All of these are undoubtedly great virtues. what I do unto the least of my brethren, this I do unto Christ. But what if, what if I should discover that the least among them, the least among them all, the poorest of the beggars, the most imprudent of all offenders, the most impudent of all offenders? yea the very fiend himself

that these are within me and that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness that I myself am the enemy that must be loved what then then as a rule the whole truth of Christianity is reversed

there is then no more talk of love of long suffering. We say to the brother within us, Raqa, we condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world. We deny ever having met this least among the lonely in ourselves. And had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed. It's pretty powerful, right? And it makes you come to the conclusion that this understanding of the world is good and evil, this simplistic idea that these are good, these are evil, this inability to think for a moment that instead of opposites,

they are extremes of the same, like a magnet has the poles apart, but it's still one magnet. The energy is just going in the opposite direction. And unless we can understand this, unless we can begin to see beyond good and evil, trying to heal this insanity from which our culture of thinking that a human being can become happy, healthy, and whole, by being divided against himself an inner conflict, paralleling the conception of a cosmic conflict between an absolute good and an absolute evil,

which cannot be ever reduced to any, underlying unity. You see, it is our rage against the evil that occurs in this world. It is our rage, and sometimes it oversteps itself. And if we require as a justification for our rage,

a fundamentalist and metaphysical division between good and evil, then we will forever have an insane and schizophrenic universe, of which no sense will ever be made. Beyond good and evil, ladies and gentlemen. It's Thursday. I love you. Let's get up and get up.