The Nature of Evil

In my view, evil is not a separate spiritual force. It is non-attunement to consciousness that gets amplified by our fears, our reactions to pain, and our innate drive towards power and dominance. Most harm is not caused by horrible people, only people behaving horribly because they are disconnected and blindly reacting to stimuli. Unfortunately, the more power someone has, the more harm they can cause with their disconnectedness.

Where most traditions externalize evil, I invite us to take ownership of the harm we cause, to seek its roots, and to consider evolving to transcend. I am absolutely in favor of accountability, both within ourselves and for our neighbors. But accountability needn’t come with dehumanization, as we see particularly tragically in the American criminal “justice” system.

In an excellent essay on the topic, Shon Hopwood, a lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University writes:

In sum, if you were to design a system to perpetuate intergenerational cycles of violence and imprisonment in communities already overburdened by criminal justice involvement, then the American prison system is what you would create. It routinely and persistently fails to produce the fair and just outcomes that will make us all safer.⁵²

American criminal justice is based on a premise that severe punishment makes an effective deterrent. But it does not. Empirically, and logically, it is obvious it does not. People still commit crimes, despite knowing there will be dire consequences. People go and face those consequences in dehumanizing, brutal conditions, and then they come back into society and commit more crimes. Our system neither deters a person from committing a crime in the first place, nor from committing more of them after being punished.

If instead we start from a premise that increased attunement to consciousness is an effective deterrent, we see a strikingly different picture emerge. A 2013 study of the effectiveness of mindfulness practices for prisoners found: “Specifically, the researchers saw improvements in self-esteem, reductions in negative affect, decreased recidivism rates, and a correlation with decreased impulsivity among incarcerated individuals.”⁵³

What we can see is that a more attuned world would not be without wrongdoing. But it would give us the chance to help wrongdoers learn from their mistakes by increasing their connection to consciousness. The result would be fewer actions driven by fear, rage, ego and unconscious patterning; fewer repeat offences; and the opportunity to shift from punishment to rehabilitation.

In sum, there are clear and powerful downstream effects of tuning into consciousness. You know this already. You’ve felt it when you chose to forgive someone you didn’t have to; when you helped someone without any expectation of getting something in return; and when you were authentic and honest, when silence or agreeableness would have been much easier. Shared consciousness isn’t a theory. It’s a way of living that we already recognize. Shall we choose it more often?