Evil Robed In Goodness
Question: According to the method of integral upbringing, a person is not supposed to be shown bad examples. But in psychology things are a little different: A person talks about his misfortunes and begins to evaluate what he is doing wrong. Essentially, a person is getting in touch with his evil, bad side, which he then tries to correct.
Answer: Our approach is absolutely different: Evil does not exist! There is no evil in the world! Even though all of nature appears evil to us, it is only because we use it incorrectly. If we use it in a different way, it will be absolute goodness. And we can also use egoism for good, and not bad.
When I play against my own egoism, meaning begin to evaluate and work with it as with an instrument of my ascent over it, it becomes my starting point, the guideline according to which I measure myself: how much I ascend and change.
I regard my egoism as a negative essence given to me, which I must properly robe into a completely opposite intention: to use it all for bestowal, love, and connection. Then egoism will constantly be of help to me; it will constantly push and goad me, pull me somewhere aside, and I will constantly work on counterbalancing it by finding ways to rise above it. This way it will be my help “against me.”
We know that any tracking or any developing system must consist of two opposite forces. And these mutually opposite forces achieve the best possible result, the common denominator by balancing each other out.
This is why the egoism in me must be balanced out by the desire to rise above it, lean on the environment, the help of the neighbors, friends, and the entire community in order to rise above it. These two systems—society, the environment on one side and my egoism on the other—are helping me. And it is as if I am standing between them and am raising myself this way.
Ultimately, I examine my egoism, reveal the qualities in it that can help me grow above it, use it for bestowal, advancement, joy, and helping others, and then it becomes the force, the mass, the matter, I am working with. I am in no way destroying it! It keeps developing in me, and I welcome with joy all the nuances of its development.
A modern person greets it with sorrow and grief: “Me again! What did I do?!” But it is not me. It is nature revealing itself in me this way—an enormous egoistic nature that reveals itself in us specifically this way so we would keep uniting over it.
This is why egoism is an engine that moves us forward. We need all its forms, all its manifestations, even the most horrible ones, so we could robe them in pretty clothes.
This horror remains on the inside, and let it stay there. But when we put a completely different and opposite shell on it, we create a discord, a dipole in every one of our qualities, which helps us increase the strength of egoism and use it for the sake of others in a way which creates a completely different structure called “Man.”
Now is the first time in history that we are coming to a state when we will be able to rise above the level of our corporeal existence (for the sake of the physical body) to the level where we create a completely different, spiritual structure: a common virtual humanity, where everyone is interconnected and mutually complete one another. And this single integrated mechanism, the so-called Adam, which is the prototype of the collective human being in the world, provides us with the opportunity to attain all the forces of nature, all its depths, and use them the right way.
So, by no means do we destroy or neutralize the egoism; on the contrary, we rejoice in all of its negative manifestations, like a sculptor who finds a good material to make a sculpture. Of course he is looking at a lot of work to shape it into a specific form. But he is glad that this material has landed in his hands.
It’s the same with us. The revelation of egoism is the new material with which I can work. And we only need to change the way we use the material and not the actual material—instead of doing something at the expense of others, we need to do it for their sake.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #7, 12/14/11
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