Chapter Four

I advise you to skip this chapter if you go along with the conventional paradigm that good and evil spiritual forces could not possibly exist.  The next chapter deals with things many people could use in their lives, particularly how to integrate making money and living in a spiritually oriented way.  On the other hand, this chapter discusses things more conventionally-minded people could have problems believing: Alice being terrified that evil forces were coming after her, Alice being burnt as a witch in a past lifetime, and me channeling a voice from a good spiritual being.

 

A couple days after we found the wedding ring on the beach and then got engaged, Alice had second thoughts about our engagement.  She knew that she would not just be marrying me, but also marrying into a lifestyle of following the Flow.  This scared her because she wasn’t even sure that God existed, much less that following divine guidance was practical.

 

Four or five days later, I was leading us in prayer, asking God to help us serve the Universe, when suddenly my voice changed and became much deeper and more powerful.  I was fully conscious and in control of what was happening, but the voice speaking through me came from a deeper spiritual awareness than I possessed.  This had never happened to me before, and I was embarrassed by having a deeper spiritual awareness talking through me.

 

Alice, however, urged me to keep talking. The voice was so full of spiritual power and awareness that she was sure it wasn’t coming from me.  In the next ten minutes the voice told her that she should marry me and help me in my spiritual work, that the Spirit would watch out for us, and that we should start having children together.  After about ten minutes, the voice stopped.

 

Alice had not told me, but after we were engaged, she was apprehensive.  She thought that before she could actually marry me and give her life to following the Spirit, she wanted proof that God existed.  She decided she wanted a voice from God telling her she was making the right decision to marry me.  So she started praying intensely, telling God that she really needed proof that the spiritual realm actually did affect our daily lives.  After I stopped talking, she said the voice channeled through me was answering questions she had framed only in her mind without her ever asking them aloud.

 

After I channeled this voice, Alice was jubilant because she felt she now had proof that the Spirit existed and was not totally separate from the practical daily world.  Before she had wondered about the kind of spiritual things I was involved with, now she no longer did.

 

While I was very glad that Alice now felt fully comfortable marrying me, after the channeling was over, I did not have a good response to it.  During the channeling I was fully conscious and could have stopped it at anytime.  I also was persuaded it was a good spirit talking through me.  But if this happened once, who knew when it might happen again?  I did not want to do it again; I did not want to be a vessel to bring some spirit into the world, no matter how good or wise it might be.  Who wants to be a vessel for some other being?  It seemed an absolutely horrible life having people look up to you wide-eyed for being so great for channeling some spirit.  I liked being me, and using my mind, discovering things, not being used by something else, no matter how much more spiritual it was than me.  If people wanted to look wide-eyed at me for some of the spiritual ideas I had discovered, I was okay with that, but I did not want that just because some spiritual voice chose to talk through me.

 

I also did not like the way Alice looked at me during the channeling and afterwards.  Before the channeling, Alice was an independent spirit with her own energy.  The channeling turned her into a follower because she now thought of me as a great spiritual person.  This worshipful attitude put too much pressure on me, and I did not like it.  She also concluded that the socially conventional way of making money that her parents had drummed into her was wrong, and divine guidance was all that was needed to do well in the world.  This meant she did not contribute her more socially conventional attitude to our relationship and this soon led to big problems over getting money.

 

Being told to have children soon did not faze me in the least.  Part of it was that I was twenty-two, knew no one who had kids, and knew nothing about what this meant in practical daily terms.  But mostly it was that being told to have kids was just another thing I was being directed to do by God or my spiritual guidance.  I had gotten guidance to quit Dartmouth College, go to California, and use all my money to fly across country immediately.  Being guided to do something else did not seem unusual in the least after all the other things I had been doing.  I trusted the spiritual guidance I was receiving, and following it had been working really well.  So it never occurred to me to wonder about this particular message.

 

I knew Alice was my soulmate so I wanted to get married soon. It made sense to do it in New Hampshire, where her parents lived and where both of us had gone to college.  In order that Alice could meet my parents, we spent the rest of her money to get to my parents’ house in Detroit.

 

         At my parents’ house, Alice started doing something very unusual for her: she was staying up to four or five in the morning with lots of energy.  As she wondered why she was staying up so late, she would wake me in the middle of the night asking for my help.  But I couldn’t figure out what was happening and was overloaded with all the weird stuff about channeling a voice for her; all I wanted to do was go back to sleep, and that was what I did.

 

She stayed up to five every morning for over a week before she saw a nearby donut shop offering a night job which lasted until four in the morning.  As we were broke, we realized she should take that job and that was why she had the energy to be up so late.  Even though she hadn’t known about the job, her body was already attuned to having it.  She got the job that day and started working that night.  I was amazed that someone could be so attuned to her right place that her body already knew what she should be doing, even if her mind didn’t know it.

 

After Alice worked for a couple days, she got forty dollars and we left for New Hampshire to get married.  We started hitchhiking through Canada and late one night we were dropped off in downtown Toronto.  Since it was too dark to hitchhike, we needed to find a cheap hotel to stay for the night.  So we started looking for one.  At first walking around was pleasant and enjoyable, but then in one particular place I stopped having fun.  In that place, for the first time, my backpack felt extremely heavy and walking around Toronto felt so unfun.  But as there was no hotel in sight, I kept walking, thinking there had to be a hotel further on.  After fifteen more minutes without seeing a cheap hotel, things started to feel hopeless.

 

We had committed our lives to doing the Universe’s work and the flow was supposed to be guiding us instead of leaving us tired in this strange city.  Flowing was built on the insight that the higher energy enlivens your life and helps you as you do the Universe’s work.  So there had to be a good way out of my troubles, otherwise following the flow wasn’t really practical.

 

Then I remembered Alice staying up till five in the morning a week ago.  At that time, her body was so connected to the larger flow of energy that it somehow sensed she should have a night job even though her mind couldn’t figure it out.  Perhaps something like this sensitivity applied in my case.  Maybe I was lost because I had not been sensitive enough to the energy flows leading me to my proper place.  After I thought this, I remembered that fifteen minutes ago I got very tired at one particular place, and then the trip stopped being an adventure and became unfun.  Could my body be so attuned to my right place that I would get tired just where there was something I needed?  It seemed amazing, but philosophically it made sense and it would explain why I was in trouble now even though I was trying to follow the flow.

 

So we walked back to the spot where I first became tired.  I couldn’t see any cheap hotels, but I did notice a Greyhound bus station across the street.  The first time I had ignored the bus station because we didn’t have enough money to take a bus.  Now I wondered if there was something inside the bus station that could help us.  So we went inside and started looking around.  After a few minutes, I noticed some advertisements for hotels lying on a counter.  As I looked at these advertisements, I realized one of these hotels was just what we needed because it was extremely inexpensive (it was a dormitory at the University of Toronto) and only a short walk away.

 

The next day we started hitchhiking towards New Hampshire.  A couple days later, when we were only about fifteen miles from her parents’ house, we drove right past a wedding dress hanging from a tree at a yard sale.  The dress fit Alice perfectly, and her parents’ bought it for her.  We reserved the Dartmouth College chapel for our wedding, and Alice made her wedding ring at the college jewelry studio.  Also, a friend of a friend volunteered her Vermont farmhouse for the wedding reception and our honeymoon.  Finally we arranged to be married the day before many of our college friends were graduating so that they could be there.

 

Everything had come together for the wedding except for the minister.  It was now the beginning of June, peak wedding season, and we couldn’t find any minister or justice of the peace to perform the ceremony.  Indeed on the morning of the wedding, we still hadn’t found anyone to perform it.  Alice’s brother was frantic because despite having valiantly tried, he couldn’t find anyone to do the ceremony.  But I wasn’t in the least bit concerned.  The flow had helped us too much to have this little detail not work out.  (Plus it helped that I was clueless about wedding things, and so did not realize how hard it could be to find a minister for a June wedding.) Two or three hours before the wedding, Alice’s brother finally found a local fireman who happened to be a justice of the peace, and he officiated at our wedding.

 

While our wedding went perfectly, our honeymoon veered off into totally strange territory.  A few days after our wedding, while we were on our honeymoon in the Vermont countryside, Alice became terribly afraid that an evil force was coming after her.  The first few times Alice was afraid, I thought her fears would soon vanish.  I was terribly wrong.  Her fear became much worse and each night of our honeymoon she became genuinely terrified that some evil force was coming after her.  I tried to talk her out of her fears, but her fear was much too deep to be touched by anything “rational” that I said.

 

The whole thing seemed strange to me.  Why would an evil force, if there was such a thing, want to come after my wife?  After all, what could this young woman have done so that evil forces would want to come after her?  I couldn’t think of anything and neither could she.  But we weren’t considering the things she might have done before she was born.

 

Three weeks later, when we were visiting one of her relatives, one of my wife’s closest relatives yelled at us hatefully.  Alice’s first impulse was to meanly yell back at her relative.  But I convinced her that unless she wanted the relationship to sink into a negative cycle it might never recover from, she shouldn’t yell back.  We went for a walk and I convinced my wife that instead of responding to hatred with more hate, she should respond in an understanding, loving way.  She agreed and we started walking back to her relative’s house.

 

But on the way back, something unusual happened.  The atmosphere suddenly became much thicker and heavier than normal.  It was like we were in an unusual energy field.  Then my wife had an overpowering feeling of something being on fire.  The feeling of fire was so intense that she thought her relative’s house must be in flames.  We hurried back to the house, but it was fine.

 

I thought Alice’s intense feeling of fire must be related to something in her life.  She said, however, that nothing involving fire had ever happened to her or anyone close to her.  Because this feeling of flames was so strong but couldn’t be connected to anything that happened in this life, I started to wonder if her feeling might be connected to something that had happened in a previous life.

 

I also wondered if Alice’s intense feeling of fire was related to her fear of evil forces coming after her.  As these problems hounded my wife, it was clear she needed to work through them if she was ever going to have a good life.  But I had no idea how to help her, and in 1978 there was nowhere I knew of to get help for these seemingly strange emotional problems.

 

I had committed my life to the Universe and doing the Universe’s work, but now my wife was in trouble.  I remembered the charismatic Christians who would pray to God and ask for God’s help when they were in trouble.  Like the Christians, I had committed my life to God.  So I did what these Christians did: I got down on my knees and prayed to God for help.

 

I prayed very sincerely, but I soon developed a feeling that my praying at this particular time was inappropriate (at other times in my life praying has been appropriate and helpful) because I was asking God for help when there were still things I could do to help myself.  I had always had a strong sense that it was only legitimate to ask the Universe’s help when I had already done everything that I could for myself before that it was just impolite.  Since I had a lot of knowledge of how to deal with emotional problems, it was not fair to ask for God’s help when there were still things I could do to help Alice.  I realized that instead of God miraculously helping my wife, we would have to take the much harder and longer route of dealing with her emotional problems.  I didn’t relish the task, but to get to the bottom of these problems, I would have to deal with her deep-rooted emotional problems.

 

As Alice hadn’t done anything this lifetime to explain her deep feeling of fire or make her worried evil forces were coming after her, we were forced to consider the possibility that Alice’s problems may have begun before she was born.  I, however, had a very mixed attitude towards reincarnation.  On one hand, Plato and Pythagoras and other serious philosophers believed in it.  On the other hand, most of the people who mentioned reincarnation in 1978 were overly effusive about who they were in their past lives.  It usually turned out they were Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, or a buddy of Buddha.  I distrusted these people because it seemed they were filling some emptiness in their present life with stories of exciting past lives.

 

I couldn’t risk indulging myself in wishful thinking as eating or having a place to sleep that night depended on making the right connections, and I could only make those connections if I followed the flow properly.  So when it seemed Alice might have problems haunting her from a past life, I had an ambivalent attitude.  On one hand, most of the people who talked about reincarnation were flaky, and I didn’t want to be associated with them.  On the other hand, the hypothesis that her problems from a past life might be affecting her present life would explain her troubles.  I also had no reason for thinking reincarnation couldn’t be true; it certainly might be possible.

 

My wife was in trouble and considering I was going to spend the rest of my life with her, it was obvious that I should find some way to help her.  If thinking about her past life might help, I was willing to do that.  After all, I had seen that so much of society’s paradigm was wrong; society could be wrong about reincarnation too and only the flaky people had realized it.

 

But the few hints we had about my wife’s past life problems were not much help to us.  Moreover at this time, any type of past life therapy was not available.  So we did the best we could: for several weeks we intensely focused and meditated on her problems while asking the Universe to give us clues to them.

 

One night Alice and I started meditating together.  During this meditation, all the energy we had been building up reached a crescendo, and we were propelled by it to a different psychic space.  It was like a veil had been lifted and we became aware of a much deeper facet of ourselves- the part of us that had lived in an earlier life.  At first, we didn’t see or experience anything that had happened in that life, but we both sensed that we were in touch with that earlier part of ourselves.

 

Since an aspect of Alice’s problems dealt with a powerful experience of fire, I asked whether our past lives had anything to do with fire.  As soon as I asked this question, we both had a strong feeling that this was right.  Then the idea occurred to me that in her past life Alice had been burnt alive.  As I asked this out loud, a totally overwhelming feeling came over both of us.  It was a more intense experience than anything we had ever felt before.  Alice could vividly feel the flames going up around her as she was burnt alive and she shook to the core of her being.

 

After some more questioning, it became clear that in her earlier life Alice had been burnt as a witch.  While she was dying, she had cursed the people who had burnt her.  I had watched her burn to death.

 

We were in this deeper space for only about ten minutes.  We received the insight we needed and then lost the connection with that deep aspect of ourselves.

 

As Alice still had the deep feelings of anger and hatred that this event had caused her, it was obvious to both of us that the scars of her burning still affected her.  It was going to take time to work through her problems, and we both felt the right place to do this was a place where we would have time at my parents’ house in Detroit.  So we traveled to Buffalo and walked across the bridge into Canada with the idea of hitchhiking across Ontario to Detroit.  Unfortunately, the border agents wouldn’t let us into Canada because we didn’t have any money.  As we walked back to Buffalo, my wife violently screamed and cursed for hours at the control social authorities had over her life.  I was amazed at how violently mad she was.

 

After we rested that night, we were in a dilemma.  We had no money for public transportation and there were two ways to hitchhike from Buffalo to Detroit.  The clearly superior way was through Canada as it was much shorter, was hospitable to hitchhikers, and was relatively beautiful.  The other way was twice as long and went through the heavily industrialized areas of northern Ohio and was very inhospitable to hitchhikers.  For of all these reasons, even though the night before we had been refused entry to Canada, we still really wanted to go that way.  We decided to try again and hoped that this time we could get through customs.  Instead of walking over the bridge, we decided to hitchhike over it.

 

We hitchhiked for four or five hours trying to get a ride over the bridge to Canada with absolutely no luck.  From where we were standing, we could also see the start of the highway going through the industrial heartland of America.  As we hadn’t gotten anywhere in such a long time, we started to wonder if we would have to go the longer way.  But that deeply felt like the wrong thing to do.  Then I remembered my discovery that when things are not working out, that meant there could be some psychological problem that blocked the flow from going smoothly.

 

I wondered if this was happening now.  After pondering for a couple minutes, I couldn’t think of any problem I had.  But then I wondered if my wife had some problem that would pull us out of the flow.  As part of a family, I was no longer just an individual, and thus it made sense to think I could suffer from the bad karma of someone I was closely connected with.

 

We both knew my wife had big problems as she suffered from a fear of evil coming after her, past life troubles, an intense hatred of social authorities, and had just been screaming for hours last night.  But none of these problems seemed at all related to our present troubles.  So I asked her if she could think of anything that would pull us towards having to go the longer way through the industrialized parts of Ohio.  She looked at the highway going to Cleveland and started bubbling over about how much she hated the industrial heartland of America.  She was so full of deep hatred that I asked her why she had such an emotional response to that part of the country.  My wife said that she always blamed the American industrial complex for what had happened to her father.  It turned out that her father was a former Wall Street lawyer whom she felt had been screwed by the corporate, industrial system.  Because she blamed the system for having broken her father, the industrial heartland represented to her all the worst things about America.

 

I told her she was making a mistake blaming others.  Her father didn’t have to be part of the corporate system; he could have become a small town lawyer (which he eventually became).  Her father had only been involved with the corporate system because he wanted to be rich and get the social prestige that comes from playing the corporate game.  These lower desires tied him into the system and allowed these negative things to happen to him.  It was stupid for Alice to blame the system and act like her father was a victim when he was in the system only because of his lower desires.  Her father was as much at fault for his troubles as was the system.  While there wasn’t much he could do to change the system, he was in control of his desires, and so he could have changed his situation by changing them.

 

The exact same principle applied to Alice.  Instead of blaming other people or the system, Alice needed to see how she tied into a negative situation through inappropriate desires.  Alice had to stop saying it was all the fault of those who had burnt her and she would have to face the fact that she in some currently unknown way had helped contribute to making the situation through her own stuff.  It really did not matter what happened in the past life, what was important was that she not blame people now when things got bad she had to see she was in some way involved.

 

We had been hitchhiking for about five hours and had not gotten a single ride that day, but, literally within a minute, a car stopped to pick us up.  And it wasn’t an ordinary car: it was a convertible sports car with two cool guys in it.  I had never been in a sports car before and on the beautiful summer day the ride over the bridge into Canada was fabulous.

 

But again the border agents did not immediately let us into Canada; instead, they pulled us all over to be questioned by the customs agents.  I told the guys in the car about how we were refused entry into Canada yesterday because we didn’t have enough money.  So the driver, whom I had only known for a couple of minutes, handed me some money.  This time we were let into Canada, gave the money back to the driver, and a few minutes later we drove off in the sports car.  There was nothing holding us to this area anymore, and so we moved on.

 

As we drove into Canada, I realized that like physical ailments, external situations can sometimes be a metaphorical manifestation of inner problems.  Just as I solved the problem of my hurting posterior by looking for the internal problem it was a manifestation of, the same principle can be true for external situations.  Furthermore, our immediate problem with the industrial heartland was part of the solution to the larger problems in Alice’s life.  The Universe was so structured that our immediate problems were deeply related to the larger ones, and we could get insight into both through trying to relate them to each other.

 

A short while later, we got to my parents’ house and tried to connect Alice’s current problems with things she had done in her past life as a witch.  One night, after focusing intently on how my wife thought it was acceptable behavior to yell at other people, I went into a deeper space.  In this deeper space, I channeled a hateful force full of evil, bile, and darkness.  It turned out all the hate, anger, and suffering Alice had caused in the people she had cursed focalized in me, and I acted as a channel sending that energy back to her.

 

Alice was deeply shaken by this evil force coming at her.  It cut right into the core of her being.  Because of this hatred, she realized a fundamental principle that she had never seen before: emotions are like an energy, and whatever one sends out, one receives back.  Thus she realized it was wrong to curse other people or even to get angry at them, because the anger she sent out would eventually come back to her.  She saw it was not free to get angry because she would generate bad karma.

 

Instead of righteously blaming and hating people who hurt her, Alice vividly experienced for the first time the consequences of continuing the cycle of hate.  She understood she was going to have to break the negative cycle.  To do that, she had to stop blaming other people and take responsibility for the negative things she had done.

 

Now that she had seen these things, Alice felt cleansed.  Indeed, she felt like a giant weight had been lifted from her.  It seemed she was no longer tied into a centuries old cycle of hate, and she was ready to face this life in a clean way.

 

 

 

You might be wondering whether or not you should believe in channeling, or reincarnation, or evil forces.  The first two are popular amongst spiritual people, but they are unimportant for my spiritual philosophy, and I do not care if you think they are true or not.  Unfortunately for me, I have had many more experiences with evil forces, and I will tell you why I think evil forces exist.

 

My two experiences with channeling happened in 1978.  In the late 1980s and afterwards, vast numbers of alternative spiritual people found channeling alluring and riveting.  I was mystified by this as I did not understand why so many people were mesmerized by it.  Who cares if something has been channeled or not?  The only important thing was whether some spiritual idea was true or not.   All I can figure out is that channeling claims to offer living, tangible proof there are positive spiritual forces who want to help us.  People can obviously question whether channeling offers any good evidence for the existence of spiritual forces, but I never considered my channeling as this kind of evidence.  I believed in spiritual forces because of a deep feeling I had since reading Plato, my spiritual work, and the way things have worked out in my life since I dedicated myself to God.  A couple voices coming through me for twenty minutes were ephemeral, insignificant matters compared to those vital, everyday things.

 

There were some important differences between my channeling and the channeling that has become popular since then.  First, I never did it again after these two times; so it is not something significant in my philosophy.  Second, I did not enjoy doing it, at least when I channeled the first, positive spiritual voice for Alice.  Third, even if one gets what is really a true message from higher spiritual forces (which I thought I got for Alice), there is no reason to think that will make your life better.  Alice did not react well to me after I channeled, and I did not react well to her reaction.  Both of those things tremendously damaged our relationship and life for years.  Fourth, my channeled messages were not saying philosophical things about the nature of reality, but only things that directly applied to my life.  My channeled force did not pander to Alice and I by telling us how perfect we were or how we should trust our inner wisdom, it told us to do spiritual work for others and have children. (This was when the thought of babies would have never occurred to us as our peers were all Ivy Leaguers, and people of this ilk do not even get married as young as we were, much less try to get pregnant when one of them is still a teenager.)

 

I obviously believe it is possible to channel spiritual forces, but the type of spirituality that underlies the message of popular channelers is extremely worrisome to me.  Many of the most popular channeled beings tell people they can be spiritual without long, focused effort, and they can have all their desires if they follow the law of attraction and realize how their thoughts create reality.  Being spiritual is not as easy as these channelers paint it.  It took me years of focused dedication and clearing away personality flaws and selfish desires before I could open up to my intuition and get help from the Universe.  I do not understand why any mature person would say the spiritual forces give us all our desires.  Sugar daddies in the sky are a bad way of conceiving spiritual forces; instead, I see them as helping us, but only if we are doing things for the good of the world and other people.

 

Channeling would have a much better reputation if the channeled beings told us useful things like the physics behind extremely cheap solar power or if they told us the science behind changing the earth’s atmosphere so that the permafrost in Russia would stop melting.  In this way the whole world would cheer the channeled being for saving us from going into an extremely negative feedback loop causing disastrous global climate change.  But the channeled beings never seem to offer us concrete, useful things like this.  It might even be okay if they told us wonderful new spiritual truths.  Instead, they never seem to say anything different than what one could find in other non-channeled, metaphysically oriented books.

 

I have a much more positive opinion of reincarnation than channeling, but I do not bring it in when I help people with their problems.  Over time, the model that every relationship is an exchange of energy I have realized that one implication of the model is that things only still affect you from the past (including past lives) if you still act or think the same way.  I have also realized that most people desperately want to avoid facing how they are currently acting in selfish or stupid ways.  Because thinking about their supposed past lives allows people not to face their current issues, I tremendously discourage wondering about it and have never used it again when helping anyone.   Instead I tell people to focus on their current issues, as anything important from a past life will show up in the present.

 

While I have never channeled again and don’t deal with reincarnation, I have had many more encounters with evil forces.  A couple years after channeling the evil force for Alice, I had a deep intuitive insight that evil is an active force that tries to increase the amount of anger, envy and hatred in the world because it feeds off this negative energy.  It reinforces peoples’ selfish and greedy desires by making them more compelling and attractive.  It also pushes thoughts into our minds to do dumb or destructive things so that the world is filled with more misery.

 

Evil can be more subtle than just working on our grosser lower desires.  It can be like a dark cloud covering our mind so that we do not see how to relate well to an important person in our lives.  It can put positive feelings of joy and bliss into people’s minds when they are making wrong moves in their life in order to mislead them.  It can make the thought of doing something stupid much more alluring, like it is covering that thought with a glowing light which is flashing “Pay attention to me.”  It is not that evil makes it impossible for people to do well in their relationships; evil just helps make it harder for people to exchange well with others.

 

Why do I think there is an evil force and not just  some thoughts come from our own lower desires and urges?  Because there is a qualitative difference in how a thought from lower unconscious desires feels and how one that has been touched by evil feels.  An evil-reinforced thought is much more insistent and compelling as it glows with attractive energy.  These thoughts are much harder to resist than ordinary unconscious urges, just like there was some evil force or being adding power to these negative thoughts.

 

It should be emphasized that while I understand evil as an active force working in the world, I think evil can only affect a person if she has impurities in that area of her life.  Thus evil can only work with a person’s problematic areas and reinforce or exaggerate them.   Most importantly, people can never use evil influencing others as an excuse to not face up to their own faults.  So while I am writing this, the Catholic Church is involved with another pedophilia scandal, this time possibly involving the highest rungs of the church hierarchy.  The courts have decided that many Catholic priests sexually abused their young parishioners, and to many people it seems the Church cared more for protecting their priests than the abused children.  As I type these words a Catholic apologist is saying that evil is behind these attacks on the Catholic Church.

 

Maybe evil does want to attack the Catholic Church.  (Actually I think it does, but in the sense that the evil force  attacks every one, including organizations and nations as well as individuals.)  But if you ever think that someone is doing something you don’t like because evil is behind them, that is an excuse not to look at how you are contributing (consciously or unconsciously) to bringing about the situation.  Maybe evil is influencing them, but more importantly, it is also influencing you to blame them instead of looking at how you are contributing to the situation coming about.

 

It was very hard for me to accept the existence of active evil forces trying to influence people because in my intellectual set only unsophisticated religious fundamentalists believed in it.  I hated the idea of appearing unsophisticated, so I resisted this idea for years.  One thing to keep in mind, though, is that many intellectually sophisticated people believe in evil, even though they will rarely mention it to others.  In 1993, I was taking a graduate level philosophy class at Syracuse University, and all the students in the class were going to be philosophy professors.  The professor stated a popular philosophical position that science gives us the truth about things and helps us overcome silly supernatural explanations.  He said that just as in the 1600s our culture moved beyond believing in witches and curses and evil forces, so now science was showing us that people did not really have something that was colloquially called a mind.

 

My professor was smug about many things, and he was smugly sure that science had triumphantly overcome superstitious supernaturalism in every right-thinking person’s mind.  Because I believed in witches, curses, and evil forces, and hated the simple view of history which saw it as the glorious progress of science triumphing over superstitious supernaturalism, I then did something potentially dangerous in a class I needed to pass to graduate and in which I was just scraping by.  I raised my hand and said that I rejected his basic premise that our culture had given up the belief in witches and evil.  I said that many sophisticated people still believed in these things.  The professor seemed very surprised.  He did not like me and other things I had said, so he might not have been surprised if I was stupid enough to believe in those supernaturalistic things, but he could not fathom how others in the class would believe it.  But I knew more about the other students in the class than he did, and I said I bet most of the people in the room believed in evil.  He snorted and I asked those who believed in evil to raise their hands.  In a class of twenty, about two thirds of the future professors raised their hand.  So while it may seem that only unsophistictated religious fundamentalists believe in evil, that is far from true, even if you are associated with very sophisticated modern, scientific type thinkers.