Good & Evil

by Dr Patrick Quanten MD

Life is like a shuttle moving from right to left and from left to right unceasingly. What is good and proper today, is evil and obscene tomorrow. Negative and positive are linked in a never-ending battle, so it seems. Certainly good and evil can not be conceived other than together. Good can only be judged by the evil it is connected to. So, it appears as if there is neither good per se nor evil per se..

Life is made up from interdependent, interacting dualities and impartial judgement can not be reached without knowing both sides of a question. All philosophies based upon the occult sciences accept that the ultimate truth is neither this nor that, but that it transcends over all opposites, over both good and evil.

For illustration, an officer appointed to enforce the law may be obliged to commit the same acts as those for which the common citizen is punished. In order to punish theft, society steals from the thief his personal liberty; in order to punish murder, the state itself commits murder; the "third degree" method is employed to extort confession in much a similar way to that of the Spanish Inquisition in its enforcement of ecclesiastical law. The acts of those who wilfully break the law are regarded as evil; the same acts performed when enforcing the law are regarded as good. The incentive behind the acts is the real determinant not the act itself.

Speaking from the viewpoint of social psychology and anthropology, there is no socially, religiously or traditional fixed standard of morality historically known. What one age or religion or society has deemed right in morals another has decreed it to be wrong. The history of European morals since the days of Plato records very violent swings from one extreme to another.

King Solomon, regarded by his contemporaries as the very incarnation of wisdom and justice, "had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines". Polygamy was thus legal in his time among the Jews. It is still legal among the Moslems, whose faith is based upon and evolved out of that of the Jewish people. Today, in most western countries, polygamy, or bigamy, is punishable by long years of imprisonment. In Buddhist Tibet a plurality of husbands is legally allowable; in Christian England, a woman who claims more than one husband is chargeable with crime. Throughout Europe and the Americas, adultery, though frequently sworn to in divorce courts and found very useful, goes unpunished; in Arabia it receives capital punishment.

Not only is there no one world-wide standard of right and wrong under which mankind live, but most of mankind is subject to two standards of right and wrong, that of their religion or church and that of their nation; and between them there exists irreconcilable and far-reaching differences. Then again, there are far greater differences between one canon law and another, such as that of Islam, of Hinduism, and of Christianity. Even within a single religion, where one would expect uniformity, there are numerous serious divergences, as, for example, between the canon of the Church of Rome and that of the various non-Roman Churches of Christianity. This condition also prevails among antagonistic Islamic sects; and, to a certain extent in Hinduism, as between one caste or religious school and another.

A still more striking illustration of the remarkable inconsistency between the theory and practice of what men call right and wrong, presents itself in the social phenomenon of war. In times of peace, the state penalises forgery, perjury, theft, arson, destruction of another’s property, assault and battery, and murder, and even threats to commit any of these acts; but in times of war it compels each of its military trained citizens, under penalty of death, to commit any or all of them. It trains its cleverest young men and women to practice every act of deceit and dishonesty which may be required to obtain military secrets from neighbouring states, employing any of the variants of eroticism and prostitution, including homosexuality. However, if apprehended within its own territory, similarly trained foreign citizens will be either imprisoned or shot. There appears to be no crime in the world which a nation’s secret service will not sanction, especially in time of war.

Plato recognised the evils of democratic governments, where it is not the right or justice which always prevails, but the will of the philosophically untrained majority. That is a grave mistake to assume that the minority is always wrong. It is therefore very unwise to accept without question the verdict of the people, whether expressed by a jury in a court of law or through the ballot box, as to what is justice, right or wrong, good or evil. So long as mankind is more selfish than altruistic, the majority is unfit to dominate the minority, who may be much the better citizens.

As the word morals, in the sense of custom, indicates, moral conduct or morality is that which any particular society has grown used to and has accepted as customary. Thus, for certain societies infanticide, or head-hunting, or killing of the physically unfit and aged are a good, and for other societies an evil. Until all people agree upon uniform customs, there can be no one moral standard. Without taking into account the motive initiating an act and the social environment in which the act is done, no right judgement can be reached as to whether any act is good or bad.

The theory that a good end justifies evil means is fallacious, because it assumes that good alone is desirable. What is really desirable however, is neither good nor evil. In the realm of nature, the negative is quite as necessary as the positive. No universe could be constituted of absolute positiveness; if the atom lost its negativeness, it would not be an atom anymore. If animals did not kill other creatures for food or destroyed plants and trees to still their hunger, there would soon be no animals.

It ought now to be clear that there is no fixed standard of morality, even in any one nation or religious jurisdiction. Instead, there is universally a condition of chaotic confusion as to what mankind should or should not do or believe to be proper and right.

Throughout uncounted millenniums, even now, majorities have maintained that if society is to be held together there must be the jungle law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. As a result the world today is probably more given to serious crime, particularly in the legalised form of war, than at any epoch in known history. Humanly instituted laws have also failed to make man good or brotherly or wise after all these millenniums. Men has sown in law-courts and on battlefields, and reaps the new harvest, time and time again; and the sowing will continue in the same way until they recognise, individually and collectively, that there is a Higher Law, irrespective of nationality, race, religion, or social status, and equally, of everything that lives. Until such time men are held in the bondage of the world as it appears, and consequently they will continue to use terms as moral and immoral, right and wrong, good and evil, and enact laws to preserve virtue and to destroy vice.

One can only reach this Higher Law if all earth-based barriers, whether regarded as resulting from good or from evil actions or thoughts, are removed and one transcends worldly belief systems. The external Universe, as a whole, with its hypnotic glamour, its sensuous enticements of sights and sounds, odours and other stimuli, resulting in what mankind call good and evil sensations, thoughts and actions, must be transcended, left behind without a glance.

The conception of death as an evil and the conception of life as a good, illustrates better than most other dualities the illusion of all mental concepts and of all dualism. There is neither death per se nor life per se. Death and life are, as concepts, different parts of consciousness manifested in a worldly existence. They have, like good and evil and all other worldly-conceived dualities, no absolute existence. It is only the mind in its most limited aspect which conceives death as being an evil and life as being a good.

Man dies daily when he sleeps, and yet he is not dead; and that death which comes at the end of every lifetime is merely a longer sleep than that which comes at the end of every day. The content of the nightly dream-state is pretty much the product of the daytime waking state; the content of the dream-state of death is, in similar fashion, the product of the waking-state of life. And neither death nor life are either good or evil, only if the observer makes them to be so.

Good and Evil are intrinsically a unity.

Nothing is per se good or per se evil; all dualities are hallucinatory concepts of the mind of the individual. They only have a relative, not an absolute or true existence.

Hence, doctrines concerning a state of absolute evil called Hell and a state of absolute good called Heaven, are also entirely relative and illusory. Salvation lies beyond good and evil.

Accordingly, all standards of morality founded upon any such doctrines are unstable, for ever changing, like the mundane mind of their creators and advocates, and therefore, unsatisfactory.

Not until mankind shall transcend dualism and phenomenal appearances, and realise the natural at-one-ment of all living creatures, will they be able to formulate a sound standard of morality.

Dr Patrick Quanten MD

March 2000