Good and Evil:

[Triton]

Good and Evil:

Another Christian bias one has to meet constantly in psychology is the
notion of evil. Again, in the Greek world there was no particular
principle of evil, there was no devil; evil was not separated in that
way from good. There was ignorance, and there was ugliness, and so on
and so forth, in Socratic thinking, but every single God has a mode of
being destructive. Dionysus could be the liberator and Dionysus could
be the destroyer and, what's more, the two sides might be going on at
the same time. Can you imagine for one moment Christ the Saviour also
being Christ the Destroyer? Both. That the God of Love might also be a
killer? Both. Like Dionysus or Apollo or Aphrodite. That's intolerable
for us. The Christian mind can't admit, can't allow, a destructive
possibility co-present or co-terminous, as they used to say, with love
and goodness and salvation. Christianism has to use defense mechanisms
and deny and split and project the destructive aspect on to the enemy -
the heathens, the Jews, the Catholics, the Reformers, the terrorists….
And then tries to get the part back it has split from, by converting
it or loving the enemy or turning the other cheek. It's trapped in its
own defense mechanism. It's made a dogma of splitting, which it
glorifies as "The Problem of Evil." Now the Greek mind was subtle
enough to see that things aren't split. Everything is mixed. There is
no good or evil, or rather there is good-and-evil, because shadow goes
on everywhere and isn't a separate principle. But Christianity likes
the childish mind, it is a religion of the child archetype, so it
stresses being simple, which means originally being single not subtle.
Christianity wants a "single-eyed" vision -Paul, or is it Jesus
himself, who says that? This separates the destructive side out and
sets up as an independent idea called "evil." Then the individual
person begins to see pieces of himself as evil, and he separates them
from parts called good. Repression. The shadow, and so on and so
forth.



The patient is constantly asking himself what is wrong, what he should
be guilty about, trying to correct himself -get rid of the evil-
instead of just paying attention to what is actually going on in
detail the way you would with any phenomenon in nature. A great big
wave pounding the surf: it's not good, its not evil. You just look at
it, feel it, ride it, or step back. Say you come across a fox in the
forest: you'd stand very still and watch it. You start off with
curiosity, interest, amazement, enjoyment - but the notion of evil
makes you step away from what is happening. You say, Is this a good
omen or an evil one, is this a good dream or a bad one, was it right
what I did or wrong? And you have stopped being attentive to the
image, what is actually happening, and you are inside your mind doing
a subjective examination of motives. You are back in the ego and have
left the fox altogether. Guilt always reinforces the ego, it's the
neatest defense mechanism the ego has. Under the guise of attacking
yourself and humbling yourself, you are back in the old ego of the
Christian culture looking at psyche through moral glasses. [James
Hillman - Inter-views]