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GOOD AND EVIL: A PRINCIPLE OF POLARITY Life's great challenge: Navigating between the energy polarities good and evil.
Can metascience (a combination of 21st century science and traditional wisdom) offer us any better insight into the whys and wherefores of positive versus negative behavior? I would like to suggest combining new concepts from quantum mechanics and the millennia-old Hermetic Principles may be helpful. [The subject of good and evil relates to the Principle of Polarity, one of seven Hermetic Principles.(1) They comprise a basis for scientific study allegedly given to humans by an advanced being (AB) more than 6,000 BP. He is known by various names, including Thoth or Seth in Egypt, Manu in India, Hermes in Greece, and the Serpent of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. They account for complexity in the universe and in humans not explained by the four laws of physics and other modern scientific principles.(2)]
The articulators of this principle believed that every facet of the universe exists with two poles. As a coin has two sides, any temperature can be seen as lower or higher. An "up" can exist only with a "down," as a positive charge can only exist in relation to a negative one. The same principle applies beyond the physical plane. An IQ score one calls high may be considered as lower by others. My strong sexual expression may be relatively weak on another's scale. Expressing love by one may be seen as meddling by another. Thus, we have no absolutes; all things exist on a gradient from one pole to another. If this seems to make everything relative, remember that many people think it is "good" to kill a person in an electric chair, but "bad" to help a terminally ill person commit suicide. While the content or the energy form may change, the dynamics remain the same. Let's temporarily try to leave value judgments aside and consider behaviors as the expression of positive or negative energies. When one of a pair of photons is forced to spin in one direction, the other turns in the opposite. And when one person increases the force on another to behave a certain way, the other spins in the opposite direction. In families, as well as in society at large, excessive control leads to excessive rebellion. The Yin/Yang symbol has a dot of white in the black area and a dot of white in the black area to illustrate that anything which is more one kind than the other still has something of the other in it. Within each of us the shadows mirror the lights. The Principle of Polarity has other characteristics that apply to this discussion: The creation of one pole brings into existence the other. (A flow of electric current generates a magnetic field and vice versa.) One pole's power requires an equal force in the other. (The behavior of a "Miss GoodyTwo-shoes" stimulates mischief by boys.) The phase shift from one to the other can be instantaneous. (Exquisite pleasure very easily crosses the threshold to pain, as laughter can quickly dissolve into tears.)
Any system over time manifests an impulse to equal vectors (a measure of strength and direction) for each polarity. For example, extremist Puritans had to act out the compensating impure energies within themselves. Their chosen outlet was to conduct witch hunts. The cause of witch hunts, or pogroms against Jews or any other group, lies not in the behavior of the victims, but in the unrecognized destructive energies of those who consider themselves totally good. The form or content of polarized social behaviors may vary, but energy equivalence is always the result. The extent to which the '60s and '70s contained excessive amounts of an open, giving energy (whether time, love, sex, or social forgiveness), equal energy in the '80s and '90s was devoted to protection and acquisition (whether property, financial success, or social judgments).(3) This is why extremes in any area always cause the arc of the reverse pendulum swing to be large. Those who would lead in relationships or in nations must understand that, as in physics where an action begets an equal reaction, attempts to control are always reciprocated by movement toward freedom. You can't have one without the other. Gandhi and King could not have mobilized so many people if the energy of oppression had not been so great. As the degree of government interference in individual lives increases, the energy of resistance builds up. Suspicion by a lover of a partner creates the need to assert that one's independence. One extreme leads to another in either case. All this means that the more we repress the normal dissipating/destructive energies within ourselves, by only allowing the expression of conserving/constructive charges, the greater the likelihood of subsequent antisocial, "evil" behavior.
The spiral of progress, whether for an individual or a whole society, depends on continual shifting between the positive and negative poles. Testing one's range of emotional energy and learning from experience requires this freedom to shift from one side of a point to the other. Since we can never have one polarity without the other, we must identify the optimum range for creativity and growth, and keep ourselves within those changing limits. It's like getting forward progress from the two polarities of a sailboat. You can get too close-hauled (taut sails) and flounder dead into the wind or you can fall away (loosen sails) too much where the wind pushes you sideways. Navigating in that continually fluctuating medium path is the only way to get progress from the polarities of the water below and the wind above. Such is the challenge of navigating between the energy polarities good and evil.
The United States' current political and religious approach to "evil" is 90 degrees off course to deal with our rates of criminal violence, school shootings, hate-based crime, road rage and all forms of self-abuse. Adding to our already excessive number of laws, developing new controls, adopting so-called "zero tolerance" policies in schools, conducting the "war on drugs" (which is really a war against people), and preaching commandments and other "thou shalt nots" all have the impact of increasing the negative energy charge in their targets. Energetically, the reason proponents are so emotionally attached to such draconian measures is that acting on them permits a release of their own negative energy. (Child abusers and child punishers differ only in degree.) By creating more jobs for makers and enforcers of laws and regulations, we have given some people filled with internal destructive energy an official way to dissipate it. (Many in these professions correspond to the Catholic Inquisitors or Nazi SS agents in times past.) The answer is to find ways for everyone to release his or her negative emotional charges before they build up to the point of behavior that violates others. In the most common terms, all it takes are creative outlets for everyone to work off steam before the internal pressure is blamed on someone else.(4) __________________________________________________________
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