The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [60]
The fleeting gap between sensation and interpretation is the birthplace of the shadow. When you go into the gap and see how intangible everything is, the ghosts begin to disperse.
Because terrorism now weighs so heavily on people’s minds, the issue of mass evil cannot be avoided. The two most troubling questions are “How did ordinary people agree to participate in such evil?” and “How could innocent people become the victims of atrocities?”
The Stanford Prison Experiment and our discussion of the shadow come close to answering these questions, but I can’t give one answer to satisfy all comers—any time evil is brought up, we find ourselves visited by our own shadow. What could I have done about Auschwitz? a voice inside us says, usually in guilty, accusing tones. No answer will ever reverse the past, but it’s important to realize that no answer should be expected to.
The best approach to mass evil is not to keep remembering it but to renounce it so completely in yourself that the past is purified through you. My best answer to “How did ordinary people agree to participate in such evil?” lies in the pages you’ve just read. Evil is born in the gap. The gap isn’t anyone’s private possession. The gap contains collective responses and collective themes. When an entire society accepts the theme of “the outsiders” who cause all the trouble, then evil has everyone for a father and mother.
Yet in every case of mass evil, there were thousands of people who didn’t identify with the collective impulse—they resisted, escaped, hid, and tried to save others. It’s individual choice that determines whether you latch on to the collective theme and agree to play it out.
The second question, “How could innocent people become the victims of atrocities?” is more difficult, because almost everyone’s mind is already closed. The questioner doesn’t want a new answer. There is too much righteous anger, too much certainty that God turned his back, that no one wanted to risk their own lives to stop the enormous evil being done to others. Are you certain of these things? Being certain is the opposite of being open. When I ask myself why six million Jews perished or why equally innocent masses perished in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Stalinist Russia, my motive is first to release my own sense of anguish.
As long as I am overcome by anguish or righteous anger or horror, my ability to choose has been shut down. What I should be free to choose is purification, a return to innocence made possible by the shock of what happens when innocence isn’t nurtured. You and I are responsible for our participation in the elements of evil even though we don’t act out those elements on a mass scale. Believing in them keeps our participation going. So it’s our duty to stop believing in “harmless” anger, jealousy, and judgment of others.
Is there some mystical reason why an innocent person becomes the target of evil? Of course not. People who talk about the karma of victims as if some hidden fate is bringing down a rain of destruction are speaking from ignorance. When an entire society engages in mass evil, outer chaos reflects inner turmoil. The shadow has erupted on a mass scale. When this happens, innocent victims are caught in the storm, not because they have some hidden karma but because the storm is so overwhelming that it engulfs everyone.
I don’t view the relation of good and evil as a struggle of absolutes; the mechanism that I’ve been describing, in which shadow energies build up hidden power by depriving a person of free choice, is too convincing to me. I can see in myself that dark energies are at work, and being