For the Triumph of Evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing by Palden Jenkins

This is an interesting subject. Really we're talking in a moral area, and when we're talking in terms of human morality we're talking about subjective choices which each of us has to make on our own path through life. Therefore my morality might not be the same as your morality, but if there's anything to be gained from the insights I'm about to share, then that's good. Each of us carries the responsibility to carve out our lives as well as we can.

The question here is about the nature of evil, and also about what can be done about it. I'm not one who believes in evil as such, but it seems to be there anyway. I'm one who looks on evil as the word live reversed. The notion of evil is clouded by our cultural value judgements set in motion by a Christian or ecclesiastical past going back centuries. We have been brought up with the idea of good and evil, although we don't think about it all that much. There are some misunderstandings as a result of past history, and these are ideas subscribed to today because we have developed a kind of standardisation of thought and values which we call 'civilisation' – and this has grown more and more total and insidious over recent centuries.

As a result we have developed an ever-increasing need to pigeon-hole things in specified ways, which make us feel intellectually or cosmologically comfortable. Good and evil, or good and bad, are very convenient boxes to put things into as a way of dealing with an increasingly complex universe. This expanding universe we are presented with, this big bang of issues we've become aware of (particularly since the dawn of the mass media age after World War One) has been going hell-for-leather in recent times. There are as many new ideas to take in as one is capable of taking in – it's going as fast as anyone can encompass. This is quite exciting – it's almost a historical catharsis of ideas and change, in a chaotic way.

There is something we could call goodness and something we could call evil. Goodness, if we file it down to basic components, has something to do with being in harmony with the overall scheme of things. According to modern neo-Taoist metaphysical thinking, if one is in harmony with the larger scheme of things then things unfold, develop, grow, complete and work through in wonderful ways. Lao Tzu looked on the life-process as a flow, the Tao, which goes through all sorts of changes and modulations. The Tao is the essence within and behind all change – and there's one thing that is constant, and that's change. Impermanence. By knowing the nature of the Tao and of change, and by aligning ourselves to it as much as we can, problems thereby are overcome, and solutions are found – whole sates can function well.

The basic Taoist and Confucian idea of things was that the emperor had a relationship to fulfil with celestial forces (the Heavenly Emperor), and the mandarins had a relationship with the emperor, and members of society had a relationship to fulfil with the mandarins, and the individuals within families had particular relationships toward the heads of families, and it was a very worked-out system of developing harmony with the universal flow – a kind of theocracy. In theory, it's wonderful – though it depends on how this is practised, and with what levels of ongoing spiritual vigilance.

So goodness is something which leads to outcomes which are experienced to be generally favourable. This is not necessarily in a narrow sense of me winning and you losing – it's more in the sense of the fullness of life going well. This is something we always crave: we spend our time trying to fix our lives so that everything will go okay. The problem here is that many of us omit to realise the ways in which we ourselves can cease being part of the problem and thus become part of the solution – we institutionally evade any truth which exposes our own part in creating the problem, and we tend by custom to blame others or circumstances for the difficulties we encounter. This is not really a quest for goodness – it's a narrower quest for personal rightness (and a campaign to avoid or bounce back others' apparent wrongness). Day after day we put a lot of energy into this. It's the first thing we think of when we wake up in the morning – which is one reason why morning meditation can be helpful. Successful meditation unlocks us from this loop. However, the issue is awareness, and meditation is but one way of cultivating awareness.

Aligning ourselves to the nature of spirit, to the way of change, to the essence of things, to the messages from deep in our heart, generally tends to make life easier, better and more productive all round. There's a certain magic to it which you notice when you're 'on a roll' through life – it's as if all the traffic lights turn green just as you're approaching them, and you meet people in interesting 'chance' ways, and all the right things slot into place, and things you do seem to fulfil a function for other people, and everything just seems to work just right – until we start thinking about it and complicating things! These flows do happen. Some call it luck – though I would point to the etymological connection between the English word luck and the German word glück, which means 'happiness'. Happiness tends to create flow.

This alignment is something which it is necessary and advisable to develop as a habit, so that we come into a new kind of stability in living in a new reality, a reality which is much more dimensional, elastic, magic, free, colourful and feelingful. So, that's what I understand to be goodness. Goodness isn't necessarily comfortable or easy – it's truth, it's reality, it's what you get. How we interpret what is going on for us is a very major issue here – it makes the difference between happiness and disaster. It concerns how we grasp what's happening to us, what we read into it. This makes all the difference between happiness and despondency.

So goodness can sometimes appear to be things which go against us, and we're then challenged to look at things in a completely different way in order to see the goodness that is there. If we work on the basis that anything which happens to us must have meaning, then everything which happens to us is good. So the question then arises: how are we dealing with things? What happens when your partner doesn't come home and doesn't ring up? What happens if the weather isn't right for what you're planning? What happens if you run out of money before the end of the month? What happens if your seventeen year-old daughter tells you to get knotted? What happens if someone dies on you? What if you get ill? How do we interpret these things? What do we read into them? How long does it take us to get what's happening?

This has to do with our capacity to change perspective, to shift our centre, our 'assemblage point'. You can get cancer, and that could be the greatest thing that ever happened in your life. My partner and I have just had a miscarriage a month ago, and it has become a tremendously positive experience – though difficult to face, and painful for her. We chose to take it that way. This is not censorship or editing reality – it's to do with feeling reality to the fullest, seeing it from the greatest possible number of angles. If you get ill, then feel the feelings that go with it, for the more you're able to feel the feelings, the more they come up and out, and the less they disturb you in the longterm. Then you can get on with the real business of life.

This is an opening-up matter, where we're turning up the volume on our inner energy and process. We're making life more intense and if necessary more uncomfortable, at times. We're looking at things in a grippingly real way. Most of us are programmed up with the idea that "I wish I had more money" or "I wish I had more... something!". We look at a rich, powerful or gifted person and we enviously identify with their situation and wish we were like them – but it's not like that! If you're gifted or a millionaire, it doesn't make you happy – it just changes things around! The issues are different – that's all. Whether you're claiming the dole or have a private helicopter, it doesn't make any fundamental difference with regards to happiness. What matters is what we make of those circumstances and how we interpret our lives as we have them. This is a key to our capacity to go with the flow of things – at least, as quickly as we can.

I'm not talking about everyone needing to be perfect and super-aware people – I'm just talking about how we can train ourselves to get it that bit faster each time. When you get the symptoms of a cold, there's a point where you can detect the first symptom of it – that particular feeling which, when you are tuned into it, you know it. If you do the right things at that moment, you don't need to get ill. If you disregard it, you fall, and other processes take over.

This is a question of getting closer to grasping what is actually happening at any moment. The business of goodness is thus not necessarily the easiest or most pleasant thing. It can come in all sorts of guises. Similarly, the great gifts and wonders of life can also have their cost. The narrower judgement of good and bad thus become inoperative. Or at least, we have to not give 'good' and 'bad' the same credibility we perhaps once might have given them. Reality is elastic, and things change so much. It's guaranteed that, whatever we believe now, we'll change that belief later – and we'll most likely forget that we're hypocrites!

The Saxon mystical notion of wyrd is interesting: wyrd is a bit like the Tao. It's the flow, but wyrd refers to twisting, to the way things turn upside-down. Reality can be turned on its head quite quickly. The funny thing is that as soon as it has done so we tend to behave as if it has always been like that. A classic example is that we nowadays tend to like Russians and count them as equals and fellow humans, but in fact only twelve years ago we were thinking of them as greatcoat-wearing, suppressed, downtrodden, mechanical, snow-bedriven sub-humans! We never thought they could fall in love or get constipation in exactly the same way as we do! So there has been a twist of reality here, in recent times. Nowadays we care about Russians, when for decades we chose not to. At present we don't care about Islamic fundamentalists – and that will twist in the course of time. Fundamentalists will probably be moral teachers for us in the West in coming decades – they are so dedicated, and have such B social values of solidarity and charity that it shows us up.

Good can have many guises. It does have something to do with the unfolding-process of the universe, and anything which is 'good' presumably hastens, allows and encourages the unfolding of the universe, the release of the inevitable, or the crossing of important thresholds. History, looked at from a certain psycho- spiritual viewpoint, constitutes a battle between different psychological tendencies in human consciousness. It's a vast fairy-story about the way in which those psychological tendencies are embodied in the different lobbies, ethnic and social groups, characters, figures and situations of society and history. All of these matters get acted out. History is a role-play game involving billions of people. It's the ultimate movie – and I'm sure God gets a few laughs from it!

From this viewpoint we humans reach choice-points of different levels of intensity and dimensionality – major and minor ones. It's a choice as to whether to pass a law or not, or to go to war or not. The choice point we have before us today, in summer 1995, is nuclear testing – humanity is offered a choice-point on this issue. There is an awareness that, if we don't make a choice now, it could set off a series of subsequent events which will remove our choice and can create outcomes we might not be at all happy about. So there is a semi-conscious need to put issues under the microscope to make them into a social debate, a social issue.

On the Radio Four programme 'Call Nick Ross' this morning [a BBC phone-in public opinion programme] it was quite a historic one, about Greenpeace and whether they should be allowed to do the style of extra-parliamentary campaigning they do. The interesting thing was that Greenpeace was getting attacked because they make a news-blitz on something, and they go for dramatic publicity stunts. That is not liked, because people like to think that we are sensible, rational people and we don't like being blitzed by these environmental cowboys. However, the standpoint of being rational and sensible is in itself a relative standpoint which can be disproven – if we were truly rational, the world would be a very different and safer place. In this sense, Greenpeace and what they symbolise represents a goad on public conscience.

In the early eighties, the nuclear disarmament movement was looked on as the 'loony left', when nowadays the ideas they propounded are being accepted by the mainstream. Yet Bruce Kent of CND had his phone tapped. He was looked on as a potential traitor and national security risk. Yet the man was advocating disarmament and ways and means by which war might be stopped! He was officially regarded as 'thumbs-down', and most people believed the prevailing hawkish ideology – Evil Empires, and all that – and went with it. Now, in the 1990s, everyone has done a twist – suddenly they're against nuclear testing. Unfortunately they have not fully acknowledged this change – it's important to acknowledge and own our changes and to remember how we have been before, in order to monitor our progress.

Let's have a look at evil. I give thanks for having been involved in Buddhism for a decade, for they don't have concepts of good and evil or even of 'God' as such, and it's a wonderful way of de-schooling yourself from Western metaphysical thinking. From a larger viewpoint there isn't any such thing as evil, because the universe is all One. For the creative power which set the universe into motion, there is no question as to what will happen for the universe: the universe will complete its whole multidimensional cycle of existence, and everything will be sorted out and brought to its conclusion. This is true – it's basic stuff. Everything which starts comes to a completion and an end, and everything which has existence has meaning in some way. There is some sort of sense to it all, even when we don't perceive it.

This being so, if we were to acknowledge the existence of such a thing as evil, it exists in a smaller sense than the creative power, the central intelligence, the cosmic heart of the universe, whatever that is, God, Allah, IT. Evil exists in a lesser sense, because the Creator, however you view it, embodies and encompasses all that exists. So, what then is evil? It would presumably be the contradiction of goodness – it's anything which seeks to make things difficult, to block flows, to shut down creative developments, to make things unbeautiful, to give people the horrors, to disempower – that is, if you look at evil as a counter- reflection of the unfolding creative power of the universe, as a counterbalancing force.

There's another clarification that's necessary here. We often talk about light and darkness, and these terms are bandied abroad like nobody's business. People use these terms to create excuses to do all sorts of things, whether holy or horrible or a mixture of both. Perhaps yang and yin are the best terms, because they have no value-judgements to them, no confusion around them. We tend to think light is good and dark is bad, though if we think harder about it we recognise that light and dark are both necessary parts of all experience, of all life. So what's this mix-up? Where's the unclarity here?

If you identify light with the male and darkness with the female, there's trouble. If you're a woman and you're looking into the essence of female life, the female spirit, the Goddess, the divine being within your female self, you have to come to terms with the notion of darkness and realise what it really is. There are two different kinds of darkness here. One is a hidden, secret area within, a world or set of worlds in its own right. It's a place we visit in our imagination and dreams, something funny that we can sense when we're walking down a dark leafy lane on a November night. It gives a frisson of something which can even make us run for our lives, or it can put us into an altered state quite quickly. It's what men meet when they get involved with women – a deeper, hidden, shady, mysterious, unfathomable depth.

Men and women who don't get into contact with this tend to have dry and shallow lives which are unfulfilled. It's carcinogenic. This can be scary – this is where dragons and witches and hooting owls and bats live, and the media play on these images quite a lot. And it's a place where great treasure is to be found, a whole area of therapy and healing. We can go down into the depths to find our nuggets of gold, to find important secrets, truths found in our deepest, darkest, lowest or quietest moments. Like when you're ill, and you're feverish, out of your body and suffering – if you go with it you can go down into a deep-down place where much can be revealed.

If you are suffering misfortune and go down deep into the dumps, you reach a rather unique, highly- charged feeling where you're totally internalised and completely incommunicable. You don't even know what's going on. Explanations don't work, yet there are answers to be found there. Those are the dark times, and from those times come visions, the most profound moments of truth. From those times can come the turn-around, the light at the end of the tunnel. It's the dark night of the soul. This is an important area of experience, and people on a spiritual path who deny this inevitably come a-cropper, because it creeps up on them anyway and it acts out of them anyway. Many are the people who identify themselves with the light, yet they unconsciously act out the most horrendous ego-trips and dubious values.

You see it in its most extreme forms in terms of religious fanaticism. Our friends in Japan, the Aum Shinrikyo cult, were not only into the apocalypse, but also they were seriously trying to bring it on by nerve- gas bombing people in the underground and creating chaos and suffering. We all go through our holy-Joe phases and start damning others who smell of fish-and-chips or smoke cigarettes or who want a good screw – we have to acknowledge all of these areas. Why? Because that's our unacknowledged darkness oozing out – and unacknowledged darkness, kept down by guilt, embarrassment or fear, is dangerous.

Darkness is thus two kinds of things. There's that healthy kind of darkness which is an inherent part of reality. We live on a planet where half of the day is dark and half is light. Therefore our souls have chosen to be in a kind of existence which interplays darkness and light. If we didn't want to be involved in that particular movie we would live on another planet which didn't have that day-night and seasonal business going on. Thus we have elected to be involved as souls in a particular kind of world where we get that kind of alternation, and in a country like Britain, quite a seasonal country, we elect to get an emphasised whack of it as well. This oscillation is thus an interplay, the yin and the yang interwoven into each other, and the seed of each other is in the centre of the other – they are so interwoven.

There's another aspect too. There is imbalanced light and dark: light or dark which do not recognise the existence or validity of the other. This is where we come to the question of evil. Evil is a way in which life-energy and creativity get blocked up. How are they blocked up? On Earth, and amongst people such as we, there are two major regulators of this, two deciding factors. One is called fear, and the other is guilt. Guilt is about the past, and fear is about the future. Guilt is our reminder-mechanism which reminds us of ways in which we have erred, gone against the flow and thereby created outcomes which we land up regretting.

Fear arises out of anticipation that if we do certain things, the consequences will be untenable or even terrible. Fear arises from the notion that we are separate beings, and that the most important thing in life is self-protection and furtherance of our own interests – to the exclusion of others' interests. This is the programming we're brought up with, and our whole civilisation is geared to this. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to this programming is regarded as either a fool, a criminal or a saint. But us lot, we don't believe those kinds of things – me comes first! Even if we're on a growth-path we can motivate our growth-work from fear of what might happen if we didn't. It's a tricky one! There is, therefore, such a thing as imbalanced light and darkness. Imbalanced light is pious superiority, being 'civilised' (not like those dirty, primitive, unprincipled, un-British people) – or it is proud and condescending.

However, it's not the lightness or darkness which matters here – each of us has our own nature and changes – it's the imbalance, the unintegratedness of it all, which makes for problems. This is the mess we Europeans got into in medieval times, when we bought into the idea that life involves siding for God or siding for the Devil. 'God on our side' – and off we went to war, killing people for God, even Crusading to reclaim the Holy Land from the infidel.

Imbalanced darkness we see all around us in the world today. We're also seeing examples in the 1990s of things possibly coming back into balance by degrees. Just yesterday, for example, we had the Unionist marchers in Ulster, confronting the Catholics in the streets. Mercifully, they each decided to desist at the last moment – a rare thing for dogged Ulsterfolk. They got to a certain situation and they knew that if they went one step further there would be big trouble. They saw, they knew where the abyss lay, and they stood back half-an-inch. They stood there and growled a bit and then started talking. They came to an arrangement which everyone was grittily dissatisfied with, but on the other hand, they stopped the old pattern. There was a high level of choice within that. That was amazing. This was a case of Christians suddenly understanding the nature of the Christian teaching: love your enemy as you love yourself. Why? Because your enemy is teaching you something about yourself.

However, the problem is that, if a person gets hurt, if life deals them a hard deal, they tend either to have it out on the world – like Saddam Hussein – or they go self-destructive – collectively, Albanians have this problem. Yet, a hard deal is every single person's karma: whether you're an urchin in Rio or whether you're Prince Charles, everyone still gets a hard deal in some manner or form. We all get hurt. If we get hurt to a certain degree, there's a point where we go inside ourselves into a vortex of self-awareness, self-interest, where it's fight-or-die, kill or be killed. There's no compassion or redemption there. When we get into that kind of space – all of us do it – we lose perspective of the larger scheme of things and we fail to understand where others are coming from and what's really going on. We go off on a side-track, but we believe that it's so important that we can't let it go, or that we're right or others are wrong. That loss of perspective is imbalanced darkness – getting caught up in your stuff to such a degree that you get lost, you lose your sense of proportion.

Our sense of proportion comes up every now and then and says: "I've been through these kinds of things before, and I made it last time, and it will somehow be alright now". Or, "No matter what happens, isn't it really great that birds still sing?". Or something inside you just knows, "I've got to take a rest, take care and get back on track". Your soul is saying, "Dingaling, come on, come on, change! Do that twist!" Frequently we're confronted with a situation where, there we are, motoring along through our lives, and we have all our explanations lined up about what we're doing and what we're intending and why all this has to be how it is, and then it all goes wrong, bang, bang, bang... We're suddenly in a mess. Life doesn't go right, and then we start lashing out and lashing in, and we can get ourselves into a right old pickle. That kind of loss of perspective is, if anything, precisely that evil we're talking about. What we do about that is where our choice lies.

How? When you're in state like that you can do anything. You might regret it later on, but in that moment you can do crazy things, thinking you're right, acting in ways which are actually avoidable and unwholesome. If you're even slightly aware, you know at that moment you can create outcomes you don't want to happen. It can be the smallest move when you're driving your car, or something in your relationship with your son or daughter or husband or wife: you say or do just one thing, and then you think, damn, I've messed up. As a result, something has changed, and bombs can't be unthrown.

We've got to a situation with our government and with many public figures where they have made so many blunders, faux pas and visible lies that people become hardened to them, so that each time there's a repetition, everyone says "Ah well, that's just more of the same old thing, isn't it?". It reinforces a culture of cynicism. This develops into an apathy and disenchantment which can affect the choices and behaviour of millions. It manifests as crime, litter, corporate rip-offs, rapes and a distancing of government and institutions from the people in the streets. So, in such situation we can omit to make choices which would actually make us happy and glad – and we might even vote for more suffering!

One positive choice I think Britain could have made in the early 1980s was unilateral disarmament. Immediately I mention this, all of the reasons are trotted out about why this could not be the case – all the reasons why disarmament would have been a bad thing. However, it's worth re-examining that one. What might actually have happened? Britain might be a very different place to live in now. There's an equal chance it would be richer than poorer. It's likely the British would have a much greater self-respect and sense of national identity and purpose than we have now, because we're now straddled over a gap in which we fear making positive choices. We've made an institution of it, so that we now have elections which change nothing. We all just think, "Well, it's more of the same, isn't it?". We don't even complain or try to change anything. We give up. We just lie in our morass of confusion, which arises from brave choices we didn't make earlier. We can thus get ourselves into a state where we forget what we're doing and omit to look at the consequences of choices we've made or not made.

There's an interesting case shocking America at present. A lady who murdered her two kids, who strapped them into the back seat of her car and drove it into a lake without her in it – and then she went out and claimed that a black man had stolen the car and taken the kids! That's nuts, but before judging, we must understand. She obviously has quite a difficult history – she had sexual abuse from her father and bad relationships... This woman got herself into a state where she was so self-preoccupied that she did something which was infinitely regrettable.

We as a nation have done these kinds of things throughout history. We had a B wave of it in the 1980s during the Thatcher period, where we allowed ourselves to subscribe to something we knew was a lie. These situations are in the end regrettable, and many such instances are retrospectively revealing themselves. We had the Brent Spar oil platform case, for example, where everyone realised, "No, you can't just dump these things in the sea". At last, someone realised! When people were shouting about these things in the Seventies, no one paid the blindest bit of notice. So, nations and the human race can go bananas as well as individuals.

Gurdjieff used to call us 'mad machines' – we behave like machines, yet there's absolutely no logic to it at all. We're absolutely stark raving bonkers. Essentially, the majority of humanity knows that we are plummeting toward great global danger. We know that, and we've known it for at least thirty years – you don't have to be particularly intellectual or well-informed to know that. You just need to look at the sky and observe, look at the streets, get a sense of the feelings from people. We know this is the case, that we are leaving a terrible inheritance to our children and grandchildren, and some part of us accepts that as given. A majority know and accept this. It's crazy! However, we are schizoid – we live a double life where we'll entertain a belief but behave differently. It's quite a shock for many foreigners who visit Britain: they can't equate how much Britain is a right-wing, isolationist country, yet the British are very nice people, sociable, sharing a lot, polite and helpful. It's a funny schizoidness, and other countries have their own ways of being schizoid too.

This schizophrenia is a psychological mechanism which allows us to get away with things we would actually regret. However, it doesn't work in the longterm, because sooner or later reality presents us with situations which grate against our world-view. So we get our Brent Spar platforms or President Chirac and his nuclear bombs, or whatever issue is emerging in the public domain. There are big explosions too, such as Chernobyl, which can rock the whole collective unconscious considerably. Certain things which come up in current affairs can be symbolically tremendously potent things, such as the Freedom and Democracy movements of 1989, or big oil spills, or the outbreak of a war or the latest horror. What's then next horror going to be?

One of the characteristics of our time is that we do know what the situation is but we don't know where to start to correct it, or we're afraid to start, or we're waiting for someone else to start... or something. Perhaps we're waiting for such a large-scale, shocking, compromising world situation that we are forced to act. If, suddenly, someone woke up and said, "Hey folks, love your neighbours, and let's change the world", they would get shot, ridiculed, disbelieved or jailed. Jesus would be crucified yet again – in a thoroughly modern way, of course. Yet such a person would be challenging us to recognise that we have wittingly gone through centuries avoiding truth. That's a difficult thing to come to grips with. That's a revelation of enormous proportions.

So we perhaps prefer unconsciously to wait for the Big One, which presumably will wake us up and cause us to act properly to redeem our past and make constructive use of the global situation we have. This is the hope, yet here we are, approaching the year 2000, and we're not looking at these issues. The year 2000 means little, except statistically, since Jesus wasn't even born on Year One – our dating system is 5-6 years out of sync! We're developing major techniques of escapology for the year 2000, in order to make sure we waste an historic opportunity to rethink. There are many people trying to make it into a big PR stunt and a massive booze-up and firework party, with some nice new buildings to boot – but to celebrate what? This is actually an opportunity to review our history of at least the last thousand years, the period during which European civilisation grew and flowered and now is declining.

Our own millennium is ending. There's another thousand years coming, and is it going to be the same? Are we still going to have the National Lottery in 2900? What will the jackpot be? What will matter then? What's reality going to be like in 250 years time? How will we perceive things? Who will our neighbours be? How many of us are going to be around? What's life going to be like? Are we going to be happy? Younger people amongst us stand to be alive until the 2060s or 2070s: what's life going to be like then? That will the world we're giving to our grandchildren be like?

Incidentally, the 2060s are likely to be a decade which is past the crunch-point of current human history, which is likely to be between now and that time. If you can teleport yourself forward to about 2070 you'll be able to see what happened, what global decisions we made – and their consequences. Visualise yourself in the 2070s, and it might be you, standing there in your next incarnation – seven years of age and looking around, wondering what's going on around here! I would encourage you to spend time fantasising about the different aspects and possibilities for the future, both 'bad' scenarios and 'good' scenarios and something in between – the realistically likely scenarios. This is an important thing to do at this time, to get a sense of what the choices are, and what the outcomes of these choices might be.

The majority of the human race is not evil. The majority is perfectly decent and okay. There are many hurt people who do things as a result of their pain, but they're not necessarily bad-hearted, and many might have a chip on their shoulder or and axe to grind, but they're not necessarily bad people. Many of what people judge to be the worst types – junkies, criminals, terrorists, gays, hobos – can be the best people around. They've been though it, just like healed cancer-patients have been to hell and back. They've seen the worst. They've been where other people dare not go.

I myself don't believe that the majority of humanity is bad. The problem is that the human race is hurt. Everyone is so hurt, it's going to take a lot of healing. At present there are 5.6 billion souls who need it, rising by 100-200 million each year. Even by the manner of birth of many souls coming in today, they're getting a hard time right at the start – though some humans are manifesting wholesome and remarkable births. So, a lot of the problem in the world is because humanity is hurt. Bosnian Serbs are no worse than we are – it's just that they've got themselves into an almighty screw-up they feel they can't climb out of. But they're no worse than you and I, and if we were in their situation, the chances are that our nation would do similar things – and it has done!

Our nation is the cause of strife in Ireland, strife between Jews and Palestinians, between Indians and Pakistanis, of problems in China, problems between many ethnic groups in Africa. We, the Great British people, or our ancestors at least, have been direct causes of these ills. So we carry quite a historic burden of earlier errors which we do need to acknowledge, though something more than acknowledgement is necessary as well. I'm not talking about feeling guilty or bad – I'm talking about making it good, returning the energy in a way which is of genuine benefit. We Brits need to become global healers, to redeem our national karma. We have given great things to the world as well: the British people are partially responsible for seeding what we now look on as the Global Village. The Global Village has its horrors, but it has many advantages too. One part of that is a spiritual awakening which is dawning amongst a significant minority of people on planet Earth at present – and that is intimately connected with airplanes, telephones, faxes, cars, TV, films and so on, which we've played our part in initiating.

People in the world who genuinely are moved to make things seriously worse are very few in number, but they are genuinely setting out to stop things moving forward, to block the awakening of humanity, to make sure we don't get happier. And such people have loud voices and a lot of power. Only a small minority motivates and drives this 'evil', though many people, if not most or all of us, perpetuate it and allow it to happen.

My partner is a very dedicated lecturer, who gets herself into a tangle because the management of colleges nowadays is such that if you really are dedicated to teaching you can't really do it! The education system is not set up for the education of humanity in the truest sense – it is set up to cause humans to be able to fit into the machinery as effectively as possible without thinking about their life-purpose. My partner is a very awake person, yet she's faced with a dilemma which means that she will not be able to be a lecturer for very long, and that will be a loss to the education system and society. Her job doesn't square up with her sense of integrity – and many people have this problem in some way. We have to make moral choices concerning the extent to which we compromise our integrity in order to survive in society and the system we live in, as defined at this moment. It's a tricky integrity-question.

During the Thatcher period, those of us who were campaigners and consciousness-raisers had to keep our heads down, to make sure we wouldn't go into unnecessary trauma over getting discriminated against and penalised. A very small number of people can have a surprisingly large negative effect on humanity, simply by reactivating old habitual programs which we have allowed ourselves to become habituated to – like fear and guilt. Fear and guilt just need a few neat soundbites to get themselves reactivated.

In 1989 things got interesting, and change overwhelmed the controlling order of things in some lands. Things happened anyway, regardless, with many new truths coming out in all countries, with a realignment of geopolitics and an acceptance of new values such as womens' equality or minority rights, or ecological ideas, which had been regarded as extremist or subversive views until that time. They suddenly became mainstream and acceptable. 1989 was a year of awakening, with its tragedies, but it was a year of forwardness. When the Berlin Wall came down, millions of people got caught up in the emotion and momentousness of it all, and they cheered for something that they would usually have nothing to do with at all.

People were saying yes to a deeper spiritual or human aspiration – the dream that we each may be free, self-determining, wise enough to make clear choices about our lives and with each other. And with democracy, we seek to come to consensual agreements with one another where it's a win-win situation for everyone. Those are human ideals and necessities which lie in our DNA – they're part of our programming, and we are programmed to achieve that state, sooner or later, as a central part of fulfilling our human potential – we'll get there somehow! It's just a matter of how complex of easy we make it.

We are faced with a time where this question is sharply coming into focus, and life is saying to humanity, "Okay, you can either step forward or you can suffer a lot, even render yourselves extinct – which do you want?". This bottom-line choice renders things dreadfully simple. It gives us a choiceless choice, yet we do have to make this choice – and we keep on evading it! We get excited about Muraroa Atoll in the South Pacific for a while, but once the excitement and media coverage are over, we carry on as normal, with but small adjustments.

After 1989, people were getting encouraged. They were beginning to feel as if "We can do it! Change is possible!". There was a feeling of empowerment, which was growing Ber. This had to be stopped. So what mechanism was used to stop it? The Gulf War. This might or might not have been intentionally set up, but it was nevertheless a manifestation of our tendency to want to slam on the brakes. "Things are getting too exciting here – run for the shelter of normality!". War is historically normal.

We do it also when we fall in love – we create relationship difficulties with the very people we once loved dearly. If someone gave you a million pounds, you'd say, "What's the hitch? What can go wrong with this? I don't deserve this". We have this spoiling programming which comes up when we're happy and things are going well. We somehow believe that bliss is impossible or an unreliable fantasy. Whether the Gulf War was intentionally set up or a horrendous fart of the world unconscious doesn't matter too much – but it certainly did shut down the energy instantaneously. When those bombers started flying, we were back to normal! Safe territory – declare war!

We get these awakenings arising throughout history, and they do raise collective consciousness, and there is a net forward movement. But it's slow. We're not a hopeless case, but the question is, are we going at the correct pace in order to meet the dire situation we're in? How much can we afford to carry on with our wars, our pollution, with the affluent slavery of our wage-debt society, with our addictive over-consumption, with ignoring the Big Questions? How long can we keep up this act? What does it hang on?

It actually hangs on this question: for the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing. It's a pertinent notion for our day, and it was spoken by a thinker who was active just before the French and American revolutions, during a time of rising hope and aspiration. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. What an amazing thought! Two hundred years have passed since that invocation was cried out. What happened?

The big question thus is, how can we fix things so that we trick ourselves into facing facts? How can we go critical, so that we make choices which set off an irreversible process of wholesome change on planet Earth? That's what folks like you and I are craving, on some level. That's why we got born in this time. Surely, you don't want to see our world go down the tube? Actually, you'll probably be happier when the chaos starts! It will bring up fear, and there will be plenty of wobbles, but you'll probably be happier, strangely. That's another twist of reality. However, from our current viewpoint, where we have to think about next week's mortgage payments and about keeping mother-in-law happy, and all the rest of it, inducing change is a difficult and risky thing. Yet, in our schizoid way, we still wish things would be different.

Sometime, we're going to meet a point in time where this duality becomes intolerable. It happens to us as individuals: we have our own personal apocalypses, our showdowns with full-blown reality – and there are going to be more, coming faster, stretching us further. Don't expect it to be otherwise! That's what's happening today. Yet, we're still confronted with the problem of living in a world which still subscribes to anti-life beliefs – and I'm not just talking about abortion! This concerns the trees in the fields and the air we breathe and the state of society and the relationship of all humans alive today – and our sense of divinity.

We're approaching some point in time where it becomes intolerable for this crazy movie to go on any longer. It's likely to come in the form of a series of world events which are so stunning and shocking that they take the ground from underneath our feet – and I'm not just talking about the tectonic changes some people seem to want. This is what our Western culture is programmed with, a notion of apocalypse. This is something we have created. We have created it through going through history ignoring major issues and putting them to the side, so that there is a whole big shadow behind us, manifesting in all sorts of different multiplex ways.

Polluted thoughts create a polluted world. Dark thoughts created a dark world. Painful thoughts create a pained world. Apocalypse is inherent in our cultural programming – it's a very male notion, parallel to an orgasm. It's a catharsis of good and evil, all coming out in a rush. It's a break-out of the horrible stuff of humanity. It's a recognition that we're a bunch of murderers, fascists, sinners, pitiful waifs. Yet we are also divine beings – loving, compassionate and creative. So our situation is maintained by opinion- formers and conditioning-reinforcers and other enforcers, and we still choose to go along with it.

We have demonstrations every now and then, in which we build up sufficient steam to change something – such as veal-calf transportation or excessive road-building, recently. Such pressures do change things – multinationals change their policy and governments nibble their nails. But it's piecemeal and patchy, focusing on single, small issues. Our situation does need people to stand up, to do something. This is important. Many of us walk around feeling there is nothing much we can do. Why is it that many of us are aware there is a problem, and feel there is nothing much we can do? We're aware it's getting more and more acute: how do we find ourselves in this schizoid situation?

It's because it is our own internal conflict. This is a conflict for each and every one of us. The conflict is also going collective. This is the critical issue today. The issue of our time is no longer about personal growth and awakening. If you didn't do personal growth between the 1960s and the 1990s, you missed it! There comes a time when it's too late, and we must move on to something else. The issue is now changing to social issues and social evolution or transformation. Why? Because it is human society as a whole which is causing the damage.

Nature is alright. God is alright. Humanity is alright too, but it's blocking up the works. This isn't because humanity is evil or bad – it's because humanity has learned to obey its chosen masters, its chosen psychology, without questioning it. Though the questioning is now increasingly arising. Our psychology is becoming clear. We're reaching a situation where each of us is being challenged to stand up and speak our truth.

We return to our starting point: for the furtherance of evil, all that is necessary is that good people acquiesce. Good people go along with the enormous hoodwinking which is afoot. That's how we're destroying the world. Yet the 'bad guys' can easily be overcome when confronted with four billion people. There are daunting issues around this – it's a romantic notion to think of people rising up and taking life in their hands, and yet it's not that easy. After the revolution, what do we do then? However, we have chosen to come into life to be part of such a process at this time. We all chose to be alive in this time, even if we don't remember choosing. If we sought a more comfortable life, we would have been born in another time – and perhaps we did. Perhaps, in that time, we craved to have things different from what they were. Now that things are indeed different, perhaps we should give thanks, because there's an enormous opportunity.

The difference is, today, that if we don't make our big choice, we'll just blow ourselves up or annihilate ourselves by an exciting variety of means. Previously civilisations fell, but this is a potential planetary downfall. The threat of death does twist our arms, getting the adrenaline going, stimulating action. Ugly annihilation, the prospect of watching your kids melt, does goad us into action. We live in interesting times.

I've made choices to put myself on the line in all sorts of ways, and it's not comfortable and easy, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if security, social respect or a healthy bank-balance are what you seek! But it needs to be done. Someone must do it. I'm not saying you ought to put your life on the line – we each must work in our own sphere and make our own choices. However, I encourage you to look at the questions I've raised fully and make sure you're happy with yourself over these issues. If you are, great, and if you aren't, do something, before you find yourself regretting what you've done with your life. You can become more happy if you feel you're making a worthwhile contribution.

We all need to be able to say to ourselves, when we're lying on our death-bed assessing our lives, "I've tried, I've learnt a few things, I've done my best, I've made some mistakes and I feel okay about it all". If you can say this to yourself, you've done what you came here for. If it looks as if you won't be able to say that to yourself, you're still now in a position to change things around. No one can tell you what you need to do – it's a personal calling from within. It's not mysterious or distant – we all have a calling. Many of us received it during our childhood – I wanted to be an airline pilot, but now I find myself taking people on consciousness-journeys!

If in doubt, just remember to watch out for those moments when you're offered bigger-than-normal choices, and make sure you make wholesome decisions for wholesome reasons, from an honest place, at the time when they're called for. When choice-points come, be aware, clear and honest with yourself. In that way, you shorten the path and increase solutions, releasing the karmic log-jam on planet Earth. Everything is interdependent on everything else and nothing can budge until something else budges. So budge something – whatever is in your reach to shift.

We're at a creaking, wrenching time of history where we have big decisions to make. We're doing quite well, but we need to pull out the stops. This is about perpetually asking searching questions. When shall we choose to go over the critical point? Do we feel ourselves to be an active part of this process, or are we waiting for some prophet to tell us when it's going to happen? When will a photon belt bathe you with light? When will the archangels come? Sorry, they won't! We are the archangels, and they're waiting for us to be ourselves! We are the choosers in our own world.

Evil is dissolvable. We deal with evil by understanding, bringing light into the nature of a situation. When someone is standing hollering at you, hating you and arguing, stop thinking about what's wrong with them, and put yourself into their clogs and understand. By doing this, you won't feed into the conflict. A war won't happen, and solutions might come quickly, and if they don't, it might not matter, or it might be part of a larger learning-process. We all need to do something. Because, for the triumph of evil, it is necessary only that good people do nothing.

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© Palden Jenkins, 1992. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail: