Transpersonal Evil

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” – Unknown

Richard Rohr is someone whom I hold in high regard as one of my spiritual teachers. I have never met the man, but his work and his teachings always seem to find their way to me at the appropriate moment. Do you experience anything like that with a teacher or mentor? It’s trippy! It feels like the resonant frequency of my current state of consciousness draws his message in and shows me a perspective on life that I had been obscuring from myself. It is almost as if I am dreaming and conjuring up the teacher and the message that I need for the next leg of the dream (but that is a topic for another day). This week, I was listening to Rohr’s lecture series titled “Sermon on the Mount” when he shared a quote, followed by a teaching, that had a profound impact on me. I felt compelled to share.

“Evil people didn’t kill Jesus. Conventional wisdom killed Jesus.” – Richard Rohr

The literal meaning of this observation is powerful, but the metaphorical meaning has profound implications regarding the world we live in today. The truth of it is right there. The story is widely known. The metaphor is complete and powerful. It is not evil people who commit the greatest evils in this world, although it is true that evil people commit acts of evil. It is good people, following conventional wisdom, who have waged total war against one another, engaged in genocide, participated willingly in countless atrocities, and cheered on the execution of the men and women who have tried to spread the message of unity and love over the ages. Conventional wisdom is the medium through which the darkest forms of evil operate, and we seem to have a collective amnesia about this fact. Thus, we repeat it over and over again.

“History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.” – Karl Marx

I am not here to preach any worldview or opinion on current events. The world already has enough polarization and dualistic thinking. I suppose my purpose here is to offer a call to action: to think about Rohr’s comment and contemplate your own relationship to conventional “wisdom,” because only through ignorance can wisdom be transformed into evil. I am asking you to take responsibility for your own consciousness so it cannot be hijacked. I think that was ultimately, among other things, what Jesus was asking of us too—that we try to see things for what they are. Jesus fought against the establishment and the prevailing system of his day. Among his many roles, he was an anti-establishment revolutionary. The system creates the rules, enforces the laws, sets the moral guidelines, controls the information narrative, and thus forms the foundation of conventional wisdom.

What is the conventional wisdom of today? Where is it trying to lead us? Are you part of it?

You might recall seeing a very famous picture of a Nazi rally in the late 1930s. It shows thousands of people with their arms raised in a salute to Hitler, but there is one man with his arms crossed, scowling and refusing to go along with it. It is a metaphor for critical thinking in the face of mass hypnosis. We all think we would be that man, but as that image accurately shows, he was one in a thousand. Hitler was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938 (announced January 2nd, 1939)—a powerful metaphor for conventional wisdom. I am already into highly provocative territory, so I am going to stop there and leave it with your consciousness to grapple with what this all means in today’s world.

But I will leave you with another thread to follow if you are interested in going deeper. This concept of transpersonal evil is not new. Paul Levy covers it better than anyone in his three volumes on Wetiko.

“Wetiko is a Native American concept of a seemingly malignant spirit that is known by many other names in many traditions. It’s a psychological force within the unconscious mind that predisposes us toward unwholesome impulses such as the thirst for power and control, greed, and jealousy. It can manifest itself in selfishness and a lack of empathy. And, in a materialistic culture such as the U.S., where there is a deep denial of the nonlocal quality of consciousness, we often get blindsided by it. It feeds off polarization, fear, and the terror of others. It cripples our evolutionary potential and has a vampire-like quality that takes energy for its own benefit without giving anything of value back. It’s like a collective nightmare whose roots are found in the human psyche.” – Paul Levy

The good news is that this transpersonal evil (wetiko) is powerless against higher states of consciousness such as unconditional forgiveness and unconditional love. Those teachings sound familiar.

With unconditional love,

The Way