The Devil in My Heart
WORLDS WITHIN
Life is not only black or only white. It comes in a very strong shade of grey which keeps alternating between lighter grey or dark grey. The darkness in our heart casts its shadow much beyond, without our awareness sometimes. And this has always been so from the very first moments of humanity. Humanity probably was born with equal amounts of goodness and evil millions of years ago, when the sole purpose was to survive against the fiercest of predators
while battling the vagaries of nature. That was not the time to be soft, and aggressive fierce behavior was the only tool to persist, after all we were no different than the wild animals in the forests where only the mightiest rule.
Gradually over time with civilization, education, knowledge, a sense of morality developed. With the development of intellect and l ogic, the wildness in humans got tamed. Much more could be realized with the power of mind. People learnt and erected huge cities to protect them from nature, trade germinated between various groups and it led to prosperity and economic security. From an individual to a family (direct influencers), to a larger group of friends (ones who might have helped the family in some way), to a city (of similar minded people), to nations (a collection of cities) the bonding developed. Development of religion also led to a wide spread calming effect whilst creating more close knit groups across the globe. But the seed of evil in our heart was always there, surfacing time and again in the form of mass genocides, religious crusades, so called pseudo patriotism during times of World Wars and today we see religious fanaticism becoming leading source of terrorism. The idea of a benevolent God, supposed to bring peace and unite humanity, is surprisingly leading to clashes across the World.
So who invented this idea in the first place, of course humans, but was it Devil himself who planted this idea into the human psyche, probably he outsourced his work to the humans themselves with this notion of a very personal God ! We humans just need an excuse to unleash the hidden devil in our heart.
What is the root cause of all evil in the world ? In one word it is just “self”. When the image of this self gets distorted, elevated, degraded, mutated all sorts of evil emanates from this self only. It is a misplaced notion of a dissociated being, separate from others, either superior or inferior to others that brings all this imbalance and chaos. When the immutable self starts reflecting itself as the ego all sorts of bondage appears, with bondage comes suffering and disillusionment and finally the reaction of a confused self to escape this depressing mirage leads to transference of self suffering to others. The actions of this suffering soul lashes out to eliminate others around it, akin to a wild stone age man blindly hitting out with his bludgeon all around him.
Moving away from nature has created such an emptiness in our lives that the bewildered self keeps hoarding, accumulating things to fulfill it. Never realizing that it is neither able to satiate this emptiness nor stop the tipping of the scale in the outside world which is getting permanently scarred by this ever expanding greed of each and every human being. Consumption of materials is consumption of self, the sooner this is understood better it would be for the whole World and humanity’s existence.
We are forced to be good. Our children, nature etc all conspire to keep our morality in check. We are surrounded by goodness and brought up to believe in the inherent goodness in our hearts. But is there really a morality compass which always keeps our divergence in check? Looking objectively at the Universe without, it seems the Universe does not have a morality compass, it is we who believe that good is rewarded and bad perishes. Morality, goodness, benevolence seems to be mere constructs of the human mind. The observable Universe exists more like a long dead cold corpse of the overall existence, existence as we know it through our brief lifespan in the gargantuan time scales of the Cosmos.
The destruction brought about by COVID proves that there is only chaos if we step out of our regulated path…. A single mistake can be the harbinger of downfall of human civilization. We have always been on the edge of destruction since our recorded history began. Much more due to our own doing as against nature conspiring to overthrow our empire!
Our belief in a benevolent God might help, to some extent, in terms of regulating civilization and bringing order into the chaotic world, but it is too overwhelming a variable to embrace fully with our limited understanding.
However, everyone does get a chance. When we are born we find ourselves surrounded by softness, sweetness, beauty and innocence, which, unfortunately, instead of embracing, we trade to grow up and become the nightmarish zombies we are today, marching to the abyss of assured destruction!!
The eternal search for the pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow continues. The whole human race becomes a species of materialistic automatons blinded to the normal obvious pleasures, blind to the real beauty of the rainbow the race continues.
The rainbow flickers, shimmers and disappears, yet the sheen of gold rules and the seven colors fade into oblivion.