Alan Louis Charles Bullock (1912-2004) was one of the foremost British historians. His book, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny”, caught the attention of the world for its exhaustiveness and pondering on the meaning of evil. He said: “If evil means anything in this world, it means the corruption of people to behave in an inhuman way.” He would know. He was reported seeing the most obvious evidence of evil in the Nazi death camps. Of course, since Nazi days, the world has witnessed comparative horrors even though Nuremberg trials were intended to prevent subsequent such mass killings. Hate and its manifestation was let lose in some other places in what was to be known, for example, as Bosnian Serb massacre or the genocide in Rwanda. Can we easily forget 9/11 which anniversary was marked only last week suffused with sad and terrifying memories of the attack on the World Trade Towers in New York by Osama Bin Laden’s minions? The establishment of the United Nations Organization today known simply as the United Nations (UN), succeeding the League of Nations, followed to forge understanding among nations another attempt to prevent future holocaust. The UN charter, therefore, sets out to maintain international peace and security; to protect human rights; deliver humanitarian aid; and support sustainable development and Climate Action. How far has the UN gone in achieving these laudable objectives, especially in checking evil and what would have happened if the UN had not existed? The 193-member states are having the yearly meeting at present in New York during which speeches are being made and voluminous papers are ritually presented.
How far we human beings and organizations, global or regional, have gone in proving right Prophet Isaiah’s prediction and warning unwarranted remains to be seen. The great prophet had said: “Take counsel together and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand: For God is with us.” God being referred to in the prophecy is the Holy Spirit, the Will of God and Whose Name is Imanuel. All in Christendom are quick to tell us that we are in the Age of the Holy Spirit; the proverbial End-Time and He is to appear when mankind has reached its wit’s end. We now know through the enlightenment of these times that the signs of His time comprise perplexities, distrust and conferences that lead to nowhere. In his exceedingly invaluable work, A Gate Opens, Herbert Vollmann says: “It is the great time of perplexity, in which one conference follows another, when distrust is everywhere, unrest and great uneasiness, when hopeless confusion spreads ever more.” He goes on: “…it is a time when it becomes physically manifest that nothing that is not resolved and carried out according to the Will of God can last; all else must perish, ‘it must come to nought.’”
Horrors of death are in all parts of the world. Only on Tuesday, a family of four was shot dead in their home in Illinois. Between our own South East and Middle Belt, 38 soldiers were killed in less than a month. The devastations resulting from the Ukraine- Russian war and the war in Sudan continue. Imagine it: There have been 174 school shootings with injuries in the United States since 2018; 15 with injuries or deaths last year, the most gruesome since Education Week publication began tracking the incidents since 2018. The statistics was 35 in 2021; 10 in 2020; 24 each in 2019 and 2018. Permissiveness is on the rise as well. A dress code has just been introduced in the United States Senate which allows whoever among the Senators to wear shorts, jeans and shirt on the floor of the Senate. Senator Tommy Tuberville, a former football coach, commenting said: “It bothers me big time. You get people walking around in shorts; that doesn’t fly with me.” A lady Senator, Shelly More from West Virginia called the relaxed rules “terrible.” Another lady Senator mocking the Republicans that control the Upper Chamber on the rule, said: “I plan to wear a bikini.”
Many a man can’t but wonder: Where does evil come from? The question arises from a conclusion borne out of conviction that evil does exist. Lance Morrow, the distinguished journalist and columnist of Time Magazine spent some time reflecting on the nature of evil and to what end is it perpetrated. In what was captioned, “Evil: An Investigation,” he said of Bosnia which he visited in 1992, “… it struck me at that time as an extremely evil place. It struck me as an atmosphere of evil, evil has descended upon this place. And I had a palpable sense that people were doing terrible things.” In one of his essays on Evil, he asks: “Is there more evil now, or less evil than it was five years ago, or five centuries ago?”
Evil is certainly on the rise, and it will go on escalating and soulless until it burns itself out, until its minions exterminate themselves. Man has always wondered about where evil comes from. But reflected as he has on the question, the answer seems ever elusive. Some believe that, like good, evil is a Creation work without which life on earth would be unchallenging, drab and monstrous. They equate both poles of the good-evil continuum with the day-night counterpoise. Some others assume that evil came into the world with the fall of Lucifer, a once wondrous beauty to behold, who was actually charged with the supervision of the flowering of man in this world, but who went his way and dragged a great many weaklings to the murky swamps. Very few, it would appear, seek the roots of a solution in man and the exercise of his free will, that inalienable attribute of his spiritual nature which obliges him to live the way he wishes, a choice for which he bears personal responsibility — however, an attribute without which he will not be man.
Good portends beauty, luminousity and lightness, but evil scum, darkness and heaviness. The fact that each goes by a different name suggests different ancestry. For the name expresses the nature and essence of the bearer. Good, therefore, cannot give rise to evil nor can evil come out of good as is assumed in some circles, since like begets like or, put differently birds of the same feather flock together.
Creation is a work, which like all works, natural or man-made, is not without a purpose. The Author of the Creation work stands outside His work as an artist outside his carving or painting. But His work bears His Will, in this case to provide an opportunity for the flowering of the human of the human species. After all, does a seed germinate and come to flower which is not immersed in the soil under the right conditions of temperature, moisture, air and nutrients? Creation lives, sustained by radiation connections with its Author. In these connections lie mediated powers which the growing seed grains may tap for their strengthening. The human spirit seed grain stood pure in the beginning, using this pure power aright and reaping bountiful beautiful harvests in the Law which obliges reciprocal experiencing in the excise of the free will. But that was before. Due to various reasons, the knowledge of how to tap aright was lost and consequently his harvest like sowing turned evil.
That knowledge of how to tap aright was simultaneously lost with the eclipsing of the knowledge of Creation which arose from the Fall of Man. Man fell when he cut off himself from all help with self-inflicted damage to his pathfinder. Man, who as his language admonishes him, is not his body. Man whose body is his tool is a spirit. The body is the tool or vehicle of the spirit and the spirit manifests through the body. It was willed that it affects the body through powerful radiations, impressed through the blood system on the hind brain from the connecting point with the body at the solar plexus. The hind brain is the spiritually receptive part of the brains. It receives messages in pictorial form and passes them on to the frontal brain or the seat of the intellect, as I explained last week. The frontal brain decodes and makes earthly meaning out of the pictures such as dreams. The frontal brain draws from its environment in reverse manner. Man is in a state of balance when both parts of the brains are functional. When as is the case today, one is over-cultivated at the expense of the other, the equilibrium is lost and man is cut off from promptings, guidance or information from higher Light Realms. The spirit is trapped in materiality which negates the purpose of his sojourn on earth — a spiritualized and complete man, the man who, according to higher knowledge, “has furthering and ennobling effect on the whole Gross Material Creation.” That is the secret of the seemingly inexplicated material suffocation confronting us human beings today. With severance from help, man begins to reason upside down which may be expressed eloquently and for which he invites applause, but is empty, lacking in upbuilding substance.
The fall of man happened when the frontal and back parts of his brains developed disproportionately, the frontal but more known as big brain bigger from overuse, the back or small brain atrophied from little or no use. He thereby went ‘out of balance’. Nature loves symmetry balance. We do not speak of big eye and a small eye, a big arm and a small one. Likewise, a time there was when both parts of the brain were of equal size. A reminder of that time plays back even today at a definite stage in the development of the forming body in the womb which growth rapidly traverses in nine or so months all epochs of human history. In a state of mental balance, the inhabitant of the body intuitively draws higher and noble features from connections with his high origin. It can be seen from the foregoing that to trace the origin of evil, we must permit ourselves knowledge of other correlation of life. When a person does good, thinks aright to benefit others, his goodness is reinforced by rays from luminous realms in On High. The author of goodness thus becomes strengthened in goodness, happy, unfettered by pressure, and joyous and full of warmth. But an impure thought brings deposit on the soul, casts shadows and darkness around it. The thought is strengthened through attraction from similarly unworthy conduct by others. The author, connected by radiation threads, is linked with his dark thoughts. The expanded shadows envelop him, and increase with every unworthy act. And a time comes when the soul becomes dark such that it is cut off from help and enlightenment. He is completely on his own, impervious to correction, ennobling values dead to virtues. With narrowed horizon, he becomes callous, vicious, uncaring, unfeeling, calculating and cruel. Wrong doing becomes a propensity and evil. The origin of evil thus remains with man himself who uses the neutral power streaming from On High out of self-will, to do evil and produces evil forms and correspondent ugly forms for himself in the beyond. Envy for instance produces the form of a snake as his garment with his human face impressed on the figure. For many the figures are unbelievably weird. And so the Lord, Jesus Christ, said: “It is that which cometh out of the man that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts…”
When man became dark, he became thereby a tool of Lucifer whose self-will brought about his downfall. Evil is alien to Light Realms, and totally strange to the Creator Who is an embodiment of goodness and purity and from Whom all virtues flow down to this earth. There are, therefore, no two powers, but one, which is why goodness always overcomes evil and Light triumphs over Darkness. What has made evil to be widespread is that thoughts of hate, murder, lust, avarice, debauchery, and envy to mention but a few pervade the world. Such is the conduct of a majority of mankind that he has made his world homogenous with the Dark World, called nether region more widely referred to as hell where aberrations are the order of the day. A bridge has been built down there.
As revealed in higher knowledge available on earth today, the consequences are that more than 50 percent of human beings on earth at present do not belong here. And that is talking in general terms. In many places we can reckon with more than 80 per cent. In the present time there is an awakening through the pressure of the Light on all that is dead, or in slumber such that the aberrations are animated. The higher the degree of the animatedness the higher the rate of evil, in acceleration and intensification, while the good soars, floating protectively and as if in an impenetrable armour from minions of Darkness and their arrows of evil doing. Once the majority of mankind change to doing good, concerned with what is honourable and noble, the societies will change in reciprocity, gradually at first but open afterwards, with all dross gone, in a flourish of beauty and splendour. In the words of Goethe: “He, who desires good, should first of all be good.”