Stepping Into the Darkness

One of the "loopholes" in my philosophical belief system when I was younger (and at this point in my life, that means "almost middle-aged"! ) was whether or not there was an evil force in the universe equal to God who served as man's adversary. He was the original "bad guy," and the human race seemed to be caught between these two invisible forces - one of good and one of evil. People, as the pawns in this universal power play, followed either Jesus or Satan.

I was surprised, when I started really studying the Bible instead of just reading it, to discover that Satan existed, according to the Jewish tradition, for thousands of years before Jesus of Nazareth was born. He's always been a key player in the six-thousand year history of the Judeo/Christian religions, and he makes his first appearance early on in Genesis when he tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. If we choose to, we can look at the Jewish/Christian histories as the ultimate example of good vs. evil - like Star Wars, without the spaceships.

My inner truth says that there is no power in the universe equal to God, but my outer experience has confirmed - time and time again - that there is a dark side to life that is anything but God-like. The Christian perception that we are caught in the midst of a major power struggle between two equal forces - helpless victims of invisible forces fighting each other for our souls, and having one isolated lifetime in which to choose which force to follow - is one that I simply can't accept. If God is the Creative Source - if God is the beginning and the end of it all, and everything that exists is a part of God himself - then it must have been God who created evil. Seemed logical to me.

As I walked a little farther down my personal path to spiritual understanding, I came to realize something else: God doesn't really "create" anything in definitive form. He creates potential, and that potential is "made real" in one of two ways: either through a natural growth cycle (as in flowers and trees) that takes it's own course according to the natural order of the universe as governed by Universal Law, or through conscious manifestation into something specific as defined by the life form who is manifesting it. This whole concept gets really confusing, and when "The Seth Material" was first published back in the 1960's, one of the concepts that made it so controversial was the idea that nothing really "is" except God. Everything physical is false; we've created it by putting enough energy and emotion behind our thoughts to make it real. This is the concept that "creating our own reality" is based on: we have an idea, we believe in that idea, we feed emotional energy into that idea that gives it substance, and it becomes reality.

So - back to my original question! - where does "evil" fit into the picture? All we have to do is look around, and we have instant confirmation that it is there, and it has been made real to any definition. "Evil" has as much - or even more - power in our lives than "good." Those light-hearted souls who contend that evil does not exist - who proclaim that "bad deeds are only the result of bad choices" - are failing to recognize the power behind this idea made real. Everything in God's universe has a counterpart, and it is this duality that offers us - as spiritual beings in physical form with the option to choose what kind of person we want to be and what kind of life we want to live - the opportunity to exert our free will at all. Why would God give us the option to choose without giving us, at the same time, options to choose from?

Did God create evil so that we could choose between it and good? That's not the way God works, especially if He only creates potential, and it's up to us to become "co-creators with God" by manifesting that potential into something real. If everything is of God, and everything is raw potential, then my logical conclusion would be that God creates energy - neutral energy - that we, in turn, manifest into "light" or "darkness." It isn't that evil is a force separate from God; it's that evil is a human choice to use God's creative energy for less than spiritual purposes.

Every world religion uses the phrase "the light" to refer to the state of being that comes from working in a position of spiritual awareness and an open connection to God; every world religion uses the phrase "the darkness" to refer to the shadow life that comes from closing off our connection to God so we can't see the people and events in our