When I started writing this chapter, I was thinking about the difference between the bright summer nights that come after dark winter. I pondered where the boundaries were, when bad turns into good.
That brought to my mind the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And then I started thinking about the evil, all our ideas about it, how we see it, how we ponder on it and make it into stories and fairy tales.
Evil has been with mankind from the beginning, just like all the ideas about good. And if we are to believe everything we have heard and read about good and evil, Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise, then we have to believe that the distinction between good and evil is the most evil, because it was what launched their expulsion from the garden of Eden.
So I began to think, what this meant, whether that, which caused they were driven out from the garden, would be the key to how to get back. As you can see, I had now come far from the speculations I set off with at the beginning. But I decided to keep going and see where it would lead.
If we look at the beginning of the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, with the end in mind, then we can see that the reason, they were driven from the garden, was the distinction between good and evil. When Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree it opened up some kind of sense in them so they saw difference between good and evil and for that they were expelled from the garden. And so it has been for all of us ever since. But what would be the entrance back to the garden? When looking at the reason why they were expelled from it, would the entrance then not be to combine good and evil as one, instead of separating it, as they did, as we are still doing. To see and understand that good and evil are in fact one and the same could be the entrance to Paradise.
Can we combine the two? Well, we can at least try.
It is a fact, that there would be no good if not for evil. For they come as a pair and cannot be apart. How else could we know the one if not for the other? All the pleasure that comes with brighter days is a direct continuation of dark and cold winter. Where are the boundaries between positive and negative? When does evil become good?
The answer is ‘never’. It is never good or bad. Is it?
Nothing is ever good or bad, never. No matter where we look, what we see, what we do and say, it is never good or bad; or rather it is neither good nor bad. It is only our view of a situation and people. And even though most of us can agree on something as evil, it is still our opinion, our idea and nothing else. We just think it is. We confuse our ideas with reality. We divide everything into two opposite poles, yes and no, good and evil, etc. And we give it all kinds of strange names. Thus we never see the truth for the lie.
Everything just is. Thus, as it is. Good and evil does not come into the equation until we do something with it. Try to change what is into what is not. And that goes for everything that comes our way, including us.
We just are, like everything, neither good nor evil, neither one nor the other. And we will not accept it. It is not enough for us to be, without conflict and struggle. We dare not. So we try to hide it, do something with it. Express an opinion, become important, judge, something. We try everything we can, to change what is, into what is not. And that is an endless and hopeless struggle. Because we cannot change what is into something that is not. It should be obvious to us all.
The sooner we realize that good and bad are our creation, our idea, and nothing else, the sooner the struggle ends. And when the struggle ends we are free within ourselves as well as outside, in the world around us.
Then we are without a struggle. Then we are peace, within and out. Then we walk into the garden, of Eden. That is Paradise.