Good and Evil. Very Squirrely Stuff. - GODSEARCH Episode 6
Hi, this is Michael Shevak and welcome to God Search. This is podcast number six. Imagine two triangles. One pointed up to the heavens. The other pointed to the earth. One to heaven. The other to hell, good, evil.
That's what we're going to talk about today. Good and evil. It's a nightmare. It's a can of worms. Once you open the can, the worms come out and you can't get the worms back in the can. What you can do is reinvent the can.
Reinvent the can. That's what a God search is about. That's what a God search is about. Taking your very small can with a tight lid and expanding it and expanding it and expanding it until the conflicts begin to become signs of the exquisite truth and the amazing experience of truth that living in God search is all about.
So let's see, how do we start this? I'm telling you, I'm scratching my head on this because it's really hard to figure out how to start on the subject matter because it's going to take podcast after podcast.
If the podcast, if the podcast to figure this out, let's start. All right, let me pray. Okay, great. Let's start with squirrels. Squirrels, they're a little nutty. The whole subject matter gets a little nutty too.
Squirrels steal. They're known for that. This, they steal nuts from each other. One squirrel takes the nut from the other squirrel. The other squirrel doesn't have it. They take a nut from another squirrel and this keeps going on.
And people consider that perfectly natural. perfectly natural and people even use this to justify the normal competitiveness that takes place in human society and free enterprise or capitalism where you're you know you're you're surviving and the other person's not surviving and this kind of contest is perfectly natural and that's what a human being should be but let's get real here in a human world stealing is a really really difficult spiritual thing if i receive at your expense and diminish you the unity that is part of the god experience is lessened if the other person is deprived because i am elevated and i get the upper triangle and they get the lower triangle is that a wholeness is that a human society is that a family that you want to raise your children in Is that a family you want to belong to?
Now, it gets even more complicated. Let's talk about abortion. Scary subject, okay? The whole world goes crazy with this subject. Do you know that there is abortion in nature on the earth? And I'm not talking just subconscious or unconscious abortions, which we usually call miscarriages.
For instance, if a mare, like a female horse, gets, you know, violated by a stallion she doesn't want and gets pregnant and she doesn't want the baby. She has this mechanism in her which is perfectly natural to hunt out in a field.
An herb called penny whorl and eat the herb and she will abort the baby. In nature, there is abortion. Well, human society is going crazy. Should we do that? We shouldn't do that. We should do that. Should we should do that?
Shouldn't we do what's perfectly natural? Well, should we steal like squirrels? Should we abort like horses? Now, I'm not taking one side or another side here. But frankly, I think all of this discussion is totally incomplete and with all due respect to squirrels, a little nutty because we're missing the point.
The point is in human goodness, in the human experience of good and the human experience of evil, it's different than the natural world. It's different. We've already begun to talk about that. We said that there is a natural world for human beings like other animals and we are also supernatural, literally from the Greek beyond nature.
We're not talking superstition. We're not talking, you know, witches and warlocks and that kind of stuff, which is related, but it's not the same stuff. We have a supernatural aspect to human beings.
We cannot be judged exclusively by earthly nature and what's good in earthly nature. We cannot be exclusively judged by what's good for us alone. And this is where you get the global warming nightmare.
Oh, sure, let's go ahead and just do anything we want to the planet as long as it makes money. You know, it wasn't, you know, a couple of decades ago, one of the presidents in the United States started to court what's called dominion theology, where they read back from scripture a total destruction of the world and therefore assumed it was okay to go ahead and destroy the entire world for economic advantage because it was gonna be destroyed anyway.
Does the human being just do anything it wants to further its goodness? without considering the natural world, creation or life. But do we do what's perfectly natural and then undermine human society?
This is where the whole sexual problem comes in. I mean, there are non-cisgender wild and woolly things going on in nature. Well, why shouldn't we be natural? We're natural creatures. And why should that be outlawed?
I'm not saying it should be outlawed. What I'm saying is the discussion of good and evil is inseparable from this discussion, which is kind of like a red team, blue team war, but that's a cartoon, because there are blue teamers that do things that are against the ecology and there are red teamers that are pro-ecology.
It's a nightmare of insanity. The worms are all out of the can. We have to invent the can again. Many, many years ago, a woman who had experienced a tremendous tragedy in her family said to me, how can I believe in God?
There is no experience of God after this tragedy. It was a holocaust tragedy, annihilation of her entire family. And she said, how can I possibly believe that God is there and that the God experience includes goodness?
How can I do that? I can't. Well, my answer in regard to the can that holds the worms is, well, did you ever think that it's your idea of God that is too small, that what has been destroyed is a stupid way of thinking about God?
That what's been destroyed is a narrow viewpoint about God? Now, what is that narrow viewpoint? Well, the narrow viewpoint is assuming that the God of all possible existences of reality upon reality corresponds exactly to the morality that human beings need in our society in order to keep things running with some measure of justice and fairness.
Notice that God is exactly what the human being needs God to be. That's idolatry. We talked about that in the first podcast. You don't take the human idea of God and impose it upon the most sublime existence in all reality that includes everything, including itself, and say, you have to fit my model.
And then when you have tragedies that take place. Every day, little holocausts that take place, broken marriages, children who suffer, deaths in family, you can't fit it together. The model doesn't hold.
The model doesn't hold. The can is too small. And that's what we're dealing with, because these days, everyone is pointing the finger of evil to everyone else, and their cans are so tiny, they're small, and you got to be really careful before you point a finger at anyone and call them absolutely evil.
Now, here is a little bit of a debate. And here I happen to admit my prejudice. Every teacher should be honest about their prejudice. I am prejudiced. I basically adhere to the teaching of Plato. I don't believe there is anything that isn't done for some purpose of goodness, that even someone who does egregious acts, a cannibal, imagine that, is trying to create some kind of good for themselves.
I believe there's good in everything. I don't believe that, I tell you, I've tried. I can't find anything that doesn't have some kind of good in it, okay? Something in it, it may be very small, it may be hidden, but every act has some kind of goodness in it.
You know, I was once studying with a very, very renowned scholar, a mystical scholar, and we were going over a very ancient text that was a profound text. And I was asked what I thought about the text.
And I said, well, the text implies that there is no evil. But the person was completely nonplussed. Of course there's evil, of course there's evil. I said, well, give me an example. There's good in everything.
This is very controversial. That's my personal prejudice. Now I could be completely wrong. I own up. But I can't find anything or anyone that doesn't have something that indicates that there's goodness and therefore God present in this world.
I admit this is very controversial. But then we go to the next subject matter, which is a very difficult one. Is let's suppose I'm wrong. Let's suppose that there is such a thing as the devil. Let's suppose there is an actual competitor that might be equal to God.
Well, if you have that, then what kind of God search are we on if they are equal powers? You see, I don't believe that they're equal powers. Even if you look at the angelology that surrounds it, Lucifer is a creation of God.
Lucifer is an angelic being that gets trapped in its own problems. So whether or not there is an actual devil co-equal to God that is the cause of all this, well, we'd have to discuss this. Now, many people think so.
And I don't find it completely false. And I'll tell you why. There are, in nature on the earth, there are constructive forces that build up molecules upon each other and new plants and new animals all the time.
It's part of the creative force. There are also destructive forces in nature that cause decay, that cause things to become diseased and fall apart. And this is all part of the composting that's part of the nature on the earth that we live in.
It's part of the composting that is part of our life and our death. Human beings, because we have our supernatural ability, have the ability to concentrate the constructive forces in nature and make them even better.
We can take an apple and we can breed it and make it even more beautiful when it began as this little tiny crab apple. And we can breed it and breed it and breed it and just create something that's unbelievably more delicious than anything that...
nature alone could have done. This is technology, this is supernatural ability. By the same token, we're capable of taking the destructive forces that are in nature and amplifying them. We can release from inside of matter the creational forces that were involved in the birth of our universe, and we can concentrate it.
Own it, concentrate it, and of course, create a bomb that is completely capable of destroying all life on Earth. So how can we do that if our ability to take the destructive forces in nature can't progress, if there aren't higher and higher and higher minds involved that could amplify the destructive forces in nature.
Higher beings that are involved in the destructive forces. Higher destructive forces that involved higher beings that are aspects and consciousnesses that are involved in God. We'll talk about this. This gets very rarified and very metaphysical.
We're going to need a lot of sessions to go through this. There could very well be agencies that are destructive. That are part of this world and part of the fabric of this world. In certain tribes that are animistic, it's not unusual to be possessed by certain forces within nature and take them over into you and act them out.
This we know and we've seen some exaggerated cartoon versions of this in movies like The Exorcist. So I'm not saying there is no devil that there aren't destructive beings or constructive beings. This is way beyond my ability.
I'm a mere human being to know completely. But what I am saying is across the board, it's my belief because of my God search. My God search has instructed me on this. That overall everything has, as we said from the beginning, truth in it, unity in it, and goodness in it.
And it all flows through a causal nature that includes our ability to focus in our supernatural way upon it to create more good or less good. And here we have to pay really close attention. Let me give you an example.
Let's go back to the apple. I don't know if you remember, I'm old enough to experience the release on the market of the red delicious apple. And it was perfect. I mean, it was like the apple that the evil queen in Snow White gave her.
It was perfect. It was red. that had the little knobs on the bottom. They waxed it, it was shiny, it was like apple. It was the platonic ideal of apple. And it was sweet and delicious and incredible.
And over the years, if you've paid close attention, the red delicious apple is so overbred and that it's starchy now. It rots fast. We've taken something that was a little apple, we bred it with our supernatural ability to concentrate the constructive forces in nature.
And we did it so much to an excess that say half the time the red delicious apple tastes like a sweet potato, not a sweet potato, a sweet potato. Same thing here, here's another example. Collies are wonderful dogs and people.
Value them for their long beautiful snouts. They're really elegant and they breed them for that So that people have been breeding collies to be more and more and more beautiful according to human desires but Unfortunately, this the snout of the collie comes from bones that are around the cranium of the collie so as the collie gets more and more beautiful to show up in the In the shows The collies get dumber and dumber and dumber This is a very very weird thing about human beings.
You see the issue is not necessarily good versus evil It's not necessarily that It's excess Remember this word excess Whenever we take anything to an extreme we oftentimes create an Evil or something that's unpleasant and an evil if we a glass of water is great But if we take it to an extreme will be hyper hyper volumic and we can kill ourselves when we take Nuclear power is marvelous But if we take it to an extreme and concentrate the destructive force,
we will create a bomb a certain amount of plasticity in Economics you might call it stealing if you're really honest, but that facilitates the exchange in the competition invigorates an economy, but if you take it to an extreme and Create an excess it creates destruction More times than not What we're talking about is not a competition between God and the devil what we're talking about is the fact that human beings beings create excess,
excessive problems, excessive stealing, excessive wantonness, excessive misuse of our abilities. And this is what creates our problems with evil and the incredible destructiveness that we can experience from time to time, excess.
It's kind of like that yin-yang symbol that you see, where you have, you know, two sides, one is black, one is white, and on one side there is a dot, and the other side there is a dot, and on the white side there's a black dot, on the black side there's a white dot.
And in the seed, that in the goodness is the seed of the evil, and in the evil is the seed of the goodness, because you can take even evil and take it to its excess, and you could have an extraordinary experience.
such as after an attempt to eradicate people in the Holocaust, you have a rebirth of a 2,000-year-old dead nation, a complete resurrection of a 2,000-year dead nation of Israel. It's an extraordinary thing.
How does evil take into its extreme birth something which is so extraordinary? How do you get resurrection after death? That is a core teaching in Christianity. It is the core of its of its entire beauty is that there is no limit to even the most implacable evil that a human being can experience, that it is part of an economy which is part and parcel of the God experience.
So we can't unravel good and evil completely here, but we can say that it is only through a God search that we stand any chance of building a can that makes any sense. Why? Because when you are torn between the natural consciousness and the supernatural consciousness, when what you can do with your mind which is dominant over nature and what nature does to try to get you to fold into it and cooperate with it,
when you have these things which are warring within you, there is only one solution, which is to seek something which is higher. Seek a kind of meta or trans-natural transformation of the individual where the human being actually learns how to be kind of a creator.
harmoniously with what exists, meaning we can be completely ourselves at the exact same time as we participate in a creation which is way beyond ourselves. You see, only a God's search where we have the experience of truth can possibly open up a solution to the whole difficulty of good and evil.
Only a God's search where we allow ourselves to grow, to pardon the expression for some religions, to allow ourselves to evolve, only a God's search where we learn how to balance the excesses and bring them into a creative line that invigorates everyone so we're not just squirrels stealing from each other.
Only that kind of God's search can bring us personally and bring to our world. The answer to this eternally difficult question of why do good people suffer and why do bad people sometimes benefit and prosper.
Now, it's my experience on an authentic God search that there is good. And I must tell you, it's my experience that although we go through trials, that even the trials can be turned to good and amplify good.
But that's my experience. Your God search is yours. Your God search is yours and it will be. I can't comment on it. But share your knowledge. Share your experience. Bring it to the table. Teach other people what you experience.
Teach me. This is how we grow. And that's what God search is about. So thanks for joining me here. Okay. I wish you only good and no excess because the excess has caused difficulties. But I wish you the ability to have excess because even that in the process of learning brings knowledge and knowledge can be turned to good for the benefit of yourself and for everyone else.
Now, reach out. Go to your God search. Go to your God search dot com and send me a note. Right. And let's talk about these things. Let's get an active conversation going. That's way beyond the excesses and the polarities that are out there because they are getting exhausting and silly.
Just silly. So thanks for joining me. This is Michael Shevak again. And this is God search. Uncover God. Discover God and recover God if you've gotten lost because evil has entered your life and made it so painful you can't possibly believe that there is actually truth.
Okay. Join me next time and keep the God search going. Thank you.