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By Root 1065 0

concept of catharsis from Greek tragedy, it was thought that only by deeply frightening the audience could they open up and feel pity. Catharsis is a form of purification. In this case it was arrived at second-hand, by having the audience see fearful actions in the life of a character on stage. But this form of trickery doesn’t always work. You can go to a horror film today and come out of the theater completely unmoved, the higher brain muttering, “I’ve seen those special effects before.” (In the same way, televised news, after fifty years of displaying gruesome images of war and violence, has done little more than inure its viewers to such images, or worse, turned them into entertainment.) Discharge is natural to the body, however, and simply by observing these shadow energies, we give them access to the conscious level of the mind.

People assume that the dark side of human nature has unstoppable power; Satan has been elevated into the equivalent of a negative God. But when it’s broken down, evil turns out to be a distorted response to everyday situations. Imagine yourself sitting alone at night in an empty house. Somewhere else in the house, there’s a noise. Instantly you recognize the sound of a door creaking open. Every sense goes on full alert; your body freezes. With difficulty, you resist the urge to call out, and yet a tremendous anxiety has leapt out of hiding. A robber! A murderer! Everyone has suffered through these agonizing seconds before the creaking door turns out to be a loose floorboard or the entry of someone coming home unexpectedly. But what really happened in that moment of dread?

Your mind took an insignificant bit of data from your environment and caused it to take on meaning. In itself, the sound of a creaking door is trivial, but if you unconsciously harbor fears of being attacked in the dark—and no one can help harboring such fears—the leap from a bit of sensory data to full-blown anxiety seems automatic. But in the gap between the noise and your reaction, an interpretation crept in, and it was the intensity of the interpretation (“Someone’s breaking in! I’m going to be killed!”) that created the danger.

What I’m suggesting is that evil is born in the gap between body and mind. There is no powerful ruler of the kingdom of evil. Satan started out as a moment of sensory input that got wildly out of hand. Take the fear of flying, one of the most common phobias. People who suffer from it usually have a vivid memory of when it began. They were on a flight and suddenly, just as with the creaking door, some noise of the plane or a sudden jolt made their awareness grow supersensitive. Insignificant sensations like cabin vibration and the rise and fall in the pitch of engine noise suddenly felt ominous.

Between these sensations and the reaction of fear there was a gap that lasted a fraction of a second. Tiny as it was, this gap allowed an interpretation (“We’re going to crash! I’m going to die!”) to attach itself to what the body was feeling. An instant later, the typical signs of anxiety—sweaty hands, dry mouth, racing pulse, dizziness, and nausea—added to the persuasiveness of the threat.

Phobics remember their first moment of uncontrollable panic without being able to take it apart in steps. Therefore, they don’t see their reaction as self-induced. That fear was a by-product of the following ingredients:

Situation: A normal situation is infused with something unusual or slightly stressful.

Bodily response: We experience a physical reaction that is associated with the stress.

Interpretation: These physical signals are labeled as signs of danger, and unconsciously the mind jumps to the conclusion that the danger has to be real (the unconscious mind is very concrete, which is why nightmares seem as threatening as actual events).

Decision: The person chooses to think “I am afraid right now.”

Because these ingredients fuse so quickly, they seem to be a single response, when in fact there is a chain of tiny events. Every link of the chain involves a choice. The reason we can’t let raw sensation