The Problem of Evil in Religious Life

An issue that arises in one’s religious life is the problem of evil. There is always a Satan beside God, and a totally hostile material evil before the religion or the spiritual aspirant.

We are troubled with this existence of evil, and do not know what to do about it. We have been told and are also prone to get convinced that what we call evil is against religion, against what is good, so we go with the conviction that religion is against evil and evil is against religion.

At this point, we have already formulated a picture of the characteristics of evil in our own minds

We have a confirmed opinion of what evil is; and whatever we are convinced of as undesirable becomes an object of dislike, a thing to be abandoned. So someone new or a practicing religious person begins to struggle in his own mind with his attempt of rejecting evil right from the beginning.

The very idea of embracing religion or spirituality is associated simultaneously with the idea of rejecting something. Initially one starts rejecting all things which he regards as evil and which cannot stand before the light of God.

But the struggle is a challenge toward one’s own mental well being because it is not merely a warfare of justice or a battle in the name of righteousness, but a conflict which arises in one’s mind in confronting what is called the evil of the world.

If evil exists, it cannot be destroyed, because that which really is cannot be overcome by any effort. The destruction of something that exists is unthinkable; and if it does not exist, it is futile to try to overcome it.

A thing that does not exist cannot scare one in his daily life. So what does our mind tell us about evil?

We need to ask, is it a struggle against evil; or is it a struggle within our own selves in what we accept as truth on our path.

Though it looks that we are trying to struggle with an idea of evil that exists in us and in creation, in reality it may not be the case.

We may not be fully convinced about the evil nature of the very thing we are compelled to accept as evil under the ordinances of scriptures and religious teachings.

A simple person has no conflicts in his mind. He walks on the beaten track which is very clear before his eyes. But the struggle begins when one starts thinking in a different way, in that he is not fully convinced of what he is told is true.

There are a lot of conflicts between our own inward feelings and our relationship with our environment. This is a perpetual source of trouble for us as long as we are living in this world.

Psychologically, the evil we see in the world is our own perception, every conception of evil starts from within.

The world outside of our consciousness is the beginning of evil that stands against God’s omnipotence.

In religious terms, what is referred to as Lucifer or Satan is the standard metaphysical evil before us, and everything that is undesirable follows according to the teachings from the fall of the first man. The beginning of our problem is our confrontation with the world itself.

 One’s spiritual pursuits ought to be toward the universal omnipresent mystery; the great Self of all things, and every effort of should be made towards the achievement of this goal.

The attainment of wholeness is an impulse from within us which is the characteristic of the universal Self.

Creation is a presentation of a world from a Creator who seems to be standing outside it. The Lucifer that the bible speaks of is the world in front of us.

It appears that originally the world was not an object of perception. It was inseparable from the bosom of the Almighty.

The creation that we see before our eyes was not this form which is before us at present. It was one with God’s almighty greatness.

Similarly, Satan was an angel once upon a time. He was indistinguishable from God’s being. But something happened. Nobody knows exactly how it happened and what actually happened. The angel began to feel a sense of intolerance; and to affirm an importance in the eyes of God or in the presence of the Almighty would be to defy the Almighty nature of God.

The Satan of the Bible is the world that we see in front of us. He is not in hell, in fire and brimstone as literature will tell us. The very thing in front of our eyes is the Satan. And there is no use merely calling names and getting dissatisfied with the circumstances of life. It shall be what it is.

The great problem of spirituality is a reconciliation of ourselves with the evil which is standing before us and which has taken various forms.

Originally it is a philosophical evil, a metaphysical evil in the form of the whole of creation outside supreme consciousness. Then it becomes a cosmological evil, an epistemological evil, a psychological evil, a social evil, a political evil, a business evil, a moral evil, an ethical evil, every blessed evil.

These are all the countless concepts born of evil and we are not going to be saved until we strike a balance between ourselves and this great foe in front of us.

The problem of religion, spirituality, philosophy, is the problem of this indescribable relationship between us and the evil and the immorality of the world before us.

The immoral is a dreaded principle. People are frightened by the words ‘immoral’, ‘unethical’, ‘wretched’, ‘downfallen’, but there is no use crying like this. The so called moral has to reconcile itself with the immoral.

There is no use simply saying, “It is immoral. I shall not have anything to do with it.

We shall have something to do with it; we shall have to confront it and make it our own, it cannot stand outside us as our enemy forever.

 This is why Christ told us that we cannot make friendship with God unless we first make friendship with man. We must first make peace with our brother before we make peace with our Father in heaven. But we are always trying to make peace with the Father in heaven by condemning our brother, who is an evil before us. “

Our neighbour is an evil, and therefore I condemn him in the name of the great Almighty who is my friend. This will not work.

Our religion, as it is presented to us today, has to be shed of its shallow interpretation. It is high time that we abandon the present way in which we present the religions of the world, because of the sorrow it brings along with its deceptive attitudes and the camouflage which it put on in the name of morality and divinity, which is to their the ruin and the harm of society.

We are smiling at God and mocking our own selves, and suffering a sorrow which has arisen because of our idea of morality, ethics, religion, spirituality, God-consciousness.

This is the fate of religion today. And the great yoga, the union that we speak of, is a union with everything that is confronting us as other than ourselves.

The moment we become religious, we close our eyes to the realities of life, condemning others as ungodly, irreligious, immoral, and unworthy of any consideration at all. Here begins our sorrow.

A wholly social, materialistic person is also happy in his own way. He doesn’t bother about anything. Everything is reconcilable to him. He is able to reconcile himself with everything, even with the worst of things in the world, and so he is happy in a way. But we are very virtuous persons, and our virtue is our sorrow. This is again something very unfortunate.

The evil that we speak of is opposed to that which is present in our mind. We are told that there was no ‘other’ to the supreme God.

In the beginning, the One alone was, and that was the state of utter blissfulness. The One appeared as another to its own self. This is the story of every religion.

The cosmological hymns of religions are of a common nature everywhere. If we read any scripture of any religion, it will tell the same thing about the way in which God created the world.

The ‘I’ became a ‘you’. The ‘you’ is the evil; the ‘I’ is the principle of the affirmation of the righteousness of God.

God was the supreme ‘I-ness’, and there cannot be a ‘you’ before God. But we have been told that there was a ‘you’ in the original state of things and, curiously, the scripture tells us that God Himself felt a kind of uneasiness within Himself, as it were, the moment the ‘you’ of creation appeared before the ‘I’ of Himself.

To be religious is to search for God, and to be spiritual is to affirm God’s originality of being. And in this affirmation of religion and spirituality, we cannot condemn anything as an evil but absorb the so-called evil of the externality of the world into the ‘I-ness’ which is the reflection of God’s originality.

Thus, to be religious and spiritually aspiring is not to reject the world but to absorb it into our own selves. The evil unfriendly Satan has to be befriended, and he has to be enthroned in the original pristine form of his being, which was his angelic existence in the Kingdom of God in the beginning.

Unless Satan is enthroned in the Kingdom of God in the very same status he had originally before creation, the problem of evil cannot be solved.

The problem of evil is the problem of the existence of such a thing as Satan. He was not there in the beginning. He became that later on. And the struggle of the world and the urge of evolution is nothing but the struggle of Satan to return to God’s being, a status he has lost, and a status which he has to gain once again.

To the extent we are ‘I’s, we have the divine element within us, and to the extent we are ‘you’s, we have the satanic element in us.

So we are struggling within ourselves, partly as the divine spark and partly as the divine confronting darkness. Light and darkness come together in the field of our own hearts. Light and darkness have come both from God only. They become irreconcilable and it is difficult to ignore their existence because both have come from the same source.

The confronting of darkness as the Satan of the world outside is as much a child of God as we ourselves who are trying to struggle with this Satan.

Virtue is as much a child of God as vice, and vice versa. Therefore, religion is not a process of the abandonment of evil as an undesirable principle, but rather the process of the absorption of the evilness of the so-called evil thing into the righteousness of the Kingdom of God wherein evil cannot be, as darkness cannot be when the sun rises.

Hence, religion is a process of a friendliness of attitude, an establishment of conformity with things and not an abandonment of evil things, because they cannot be, ultimately.

Evil does not exist. Because it does not exist, it has become a problem. If it had really existed, it would not have been a confronting principle. Also, if it had really existed, we would not be trying to overcome it.

But what is evil, again? When we place this question before our own mind, it is a part of us struggling with another part of our own self.

One part of us is the so-called present ‘I’ or ‘you’. The other part is what we are unable to reconcile our self. When we are attracted to anything in this world, we are pulled by a part of our self that we see externally in the world of space and time. Otherwise, who can attract us in this world?

How can a totally contrary being pull us in its own direction unless there is something akin to our in its character? Unless a feature belonging to our self is present in the world outside.

A part of us is present outside. So we are seeing ourselves in the things outside, and calling it an evil.

We are trying to run away from a part of our own self. The evil of the world is a part of our own self, and therefore we cannot run away from evil.

Just as we cannot say that we do not exist, we cannot say that evil does not exist. But at the same time, we cannot say that we are other than our own self. We cannot be something more than, or less than, or different from what we are. In the same way, the so-called principle of evil cannot be regarded as a feature totally alien to our own self.

Thus, the fight with evil is a fight with our own self. It is one part of one’s self fighting with another part of one’s self, the inward, individualized segment struggling to overcome the barrier that is there between itself and another part of its own self in the form of things outside.

The whole world is a part of our self, and with that you are struggling, calling it evil, condemning it, etc. Therefore, we can never overcome it unless we have become one with it. The overcoming of evil is a becoming one with it so that afterwards it ceases to be evil.

When we take to religious practice or to the practice of yoga, we are in a terrible difficulty indeed. Very few can succeed in yoga or even religion or spirituality or anything worthwhile because the moral evil stares at us as an insoluble problem before us, and the ideas of the undesirable which have been implanted in our minds right from the beginning have passed through to obstruct our newly reoriented form of thinking, so even when we think religiously or in a so-called divine way, we are thinking in an old stereotyped fashion only.

The concept of God and religion that we have today is a prejudiced conception which has been engendered by the mental impressions of the past which are in our own selves even now; and whatever the seed is, that shall also be the nature of the fruit yielded by the plant or the tree arising from the seed. We cannot have a new qualitative concept different from the idea we are already capable of from the point of view of the impressions in our own psychic personality. We are big conglomerations in our own psyches. We are a muddle and a chaos. This chaotic muddle is the quagmire from which arises the plant of the so-called religious aspiration, and naturally it is affected in the same way as any other thought can be affected. Hence, we find ourselves in a situation which is literally called the pull between the devil and the deep sea, or the horns of a dilemma.

Here is the explanation for what religions call evil. It has become so difficult to understand because it is a mystery which is pulling us in two ways: wanting to get absorbed into us by way of love, and yet wanting to stand independent of us. This is an irreconcilable, unthinkable and indefensible attitude of things. This is why they say the world is maya. It is an inscrutable mystery and a jugglery. How can we explain this peculiar situation except by the term ‘jugglery’? A jugglery is a peculiar phenomenon which is neither there nor not there. It is not there because we cannot see it always there. It has vanished, but sometimes we can see it also. It is there because we see it sometimes.

Thus, this peculiar relationship of us with the world, with our friends, with our family members, with society, etc., has to be reconciled and cut through before we really become God’s people. We cannot simply shirk our responsibilities in this arduous task. The whole of spiritual life is a series of confrontations and reconciliations with the problems arising out of the notion of evil, external and the undesirable, the immoral, the unethical, the dark principle, the Satan, whatever we call it.