I think I’m caught up in form.
How do you define evil...murder?
And then you said something about betrayal, stealing—
this is all form.
Evil is very culturally defined.
So President Bush calls the terrorists, the 9-11 people, evildoers,
and Al Quaeda evildoers, bin Laden is the
Well, it’s not just the killing, it's the killing of innocents, etc.
But the Muslim world calls us evildoers.
The Ayatollah called us the Great Satan; America was the Great Satan;
and we were the great evildoers.
I don’t think there is an objective definition that would meet everybody’s criterion.
In a sense, evil is like cosmic sin almost.
It would have to be more than just murder.
It would have to be something that's calculated, vicious cruel, unkind;
but it's very, very cultural.
So the people in Japan, in 1945, would have seen
the dropping of two atomic bombs as evil on our part,
That's not how we saw it.
So it's very, very cultural just like beauty.
The ways people define it stems from
their need to see evil.
There's a need to see evil in the world;
a need for there to be evil present in the world.
It doesn't matter how I define it, as long as I'm the one who defines it.
So I am aware of what evil is.
And the only reason, only purpose, is to be able to say,
“I am innocent because you are evil.”
Because in the ego thought system, it's always one or the other,
which means God’s Sons are different.
And what the bottom line in the ego’s perception of difference,
indeed, one could say the bottom line in the ego’s religion of differences,
is that there are people who are innocent and people who are evil.
People who are good and people who are bad.
And if I can demonstrate who the evil ones are, who the bad ones are,
that automatically must mean I am different from them.
Because that's what the ego's thought system is—it's one or the other.
Beginning right at the beginning, it's God or me.
If God is real and is perfect Oneness; I cease to exist.
If I am real as the prototype of perfect individuality,
then God’s perfect Oneness cannot be real.
It's one or the other.
And that's the basis of our trick against God.
If I can prove to God who the evil ones are,
and I prove it by all of my suffering,
then that person will be judged by God as evil and will go to hell
and I must then be judged as innocent,
because it's one or the other.
By seeing it in them, we do not have to see it in ourselves.
Of course, all this has to do with the ego’s favorite dynamic of projection.
And in order for projection to work,
I have to be able to find some object that is suitable for the projection
of the evil that I really believe is inside of me.
Most of you are familiar with, and certainly because I quote it all the time,
the opening line from Lesson 93 in the workbook:
“You believe you are the home of evil, darkness and sin.”
Now in one sense the church had it right
that we all carry within us the stain of original sin.
Where the church had it wrong, from the perspective of the Course,
is that this had nothing to do with God; this has nothing to do with reality.
This only has to do with our nightmarish dream.
But within that Dream which we are all sharing
we believe we are the home of evil, darkness and sin.
And no one is without that stain.
There's that wonderful passage in the manual near the end of the section,
“How do God’s Teacher’s Deal with Magic Thoughts?”
which discusses this cosmic battle that we believe rages on within us between God and ourselves.
That's where that famous line comes: an angry father pursues a guilty son. Kill or be killed.
And that's where Jesus talks about, actually quoting from Macbeth,
that the stain of blood is on our hands and will never be undone.
Whether one subscribes to the specifics of Freud’s theory or not,
the universality of the Oedipus complex—
—we all want to kill our fathers and lie with our mothers if we’re sons,
and if we’re daughters you want to do the opposite—
the fact of the matter is that Freud was talking about
the original, within our lifetime, special love and special hate relationship.
And if we want to possess what we need,
and therefore we want to kill off anyone that stands in the way, all rivals.
That's the original authority problem; we want to kill the father;
and the original Father that we want to kill is the original Father we believed we killed.
That's what set the whole miserable ball rolling,
and that's the core definition of evil, from the ego’s point of view:
I destroyed Heaven; I killed God, took His life and made it my own.
So now I have life and God is dead.
Not only do I have life, I now become the creator of life.
That's what Jesus means in the text when he talks about how the ego is "self-created."
It believes it created itself because it has usurped the role of the Creator.
We've kicked God off the throne, we've destroyed Him, and now
we sit on the throne and now we proclaim ourselves to be God.
That's the Course’s version of original sin.
And again, that's what In the ego thought system is equated with evil.
It's a pretty horrid thing that we've done, and it was not done accidentally.
That's the real horror, that's the real evil.
It is not something that just happened.
It's something we chose and that we continually choose,
saying the body is real; saying I would kill God all over again.
I am killing God all over again.
That's what Jesus means when he says,
If you knew that your special relationship was a triumph over God, would you want it?
Because implicit in that statement is that that indeed is what it is.
Every time you indulge your needs for specialness,
to get something from somebody else to satisfy your need,
whatever that need is, physical and/or psychological,
you are saying to God: I don’t need you. I need this one.
I’m on my own. I've made my own universe.
And I have made my own rules, and my own laws.
what the Course calls the Laws of Chaos.
And these are the laws I follow, and these laws are the substitutes for your laws,
which I have now abolished, and obliterated.
So each and every time we indulge our specialness and get what we want,
that triumph over the other person is simply that shadowy fragment
of the original triumph over God that we believe occurred.
Of course, in reality it never happened.
But that's the original sin, that's the original guilt; that's the original belief in the reality of evil.
If I exist, evil must exist as well,
because what allowed me to come into existence was not only the evil thought
but the evil act of selfishly
getting what I wanted from God at His expense;
at the expense of His Son, because not only is God destroyed
but Christ is crucified, within the ego thought system.
In reality, of course, nothing happened.
So that's the bottom line in the Course: evil does not exist, because the ego does not exist.
The body does not exist. The world does not exist. Separation does not exist.
But within the dream, these are very real.
And what you have to do is you have to go back inside yourself and see that I'm the evil person.
Not in reality, that's not how God sees me,
but that's how I have seen me and if I do not look at that,
I'll be continually projecting that belief in evil out.
What you must do, which is what forgiveness does, which is what the miracle brings about
is bring the idea back to its source.
It never left its source, but you think it left.
Which means you have to see the evil that you perceive and have made real outside
is a projection of what you've seen and made real inside, in your mind.