Where is Evil?

"This, however, raises the moral issue that has concerned Owen Barfield and is, as well, the subject of Clyde Kilby's paper [The Ugly and the Evil]: man's responsibility, in his use of the facutly of imagination, for the kind of world he creates. Kilby writes that ugliness is nature deformed, its very being changed. Evil and ugliness are not merely negative states, states of lack, but states in which there is positive destruction of form. When ugliness is considered analogous to evil, art is not dissociated from life; metaphysics and morality are related. For it is ontological deformity that constitutes ugliness: a thing ought to be like it is. In this correlation of the ugly and the evil, Kilby echoes Barfield's concern for the deformation of nature, unless man makes himself responsible for it. At the same time, he echoes the sense of several of the papers that the modern mode of consciousness is dangerous - a common madness-single vision."

Shirly Sugerman in the Forward to Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, which she edited.

I've wondered why evil rarely shows up in the work of Barfield and Steiner. I've wondered why the Old Testament of the Christians depicts such a violent past, while Barfield and Steiner describe pre-history and very early history very differently. There is almost no violence in the story of the evolution of consciousness. There are Lucifer and Ahriman, that's true. I don't understand those two figures at all, so they may be the answer to the riddle of the missing violence. So one reason I've missed the moral note in Steiner and Barfield is that I've not looked in the right place.

There is a more immediate reason, though, why the violence is invisible. It goes like this: My thoughts don't have any immediate effect on objects in the physical world, that I can see. Yes, I can move my hand - by my thoughts alone - and my hand can play the guitar. But whatever I think about the guitar will have no effect on the guitar - I can't play music on it with just my mind. So my thoughts are unreal because they don't - and  can't - directly effect the physical world. They are the prototype of the video game: unrelated to real life, and therefore without need of restriction. You can race, and strategize, and kill as much as you want, because it's not real.

But consider this: what I think, does greatly effect something: my thinking effects the thoughts themselves. I can change my thoughts. Very much. I do it all the time: I daydream where I make up scenarios that have never happened in outer life. I misinterpret something someone said to me. I imagine a new layout for my bedroom.

So imagine just for a moment that it was a real place where your thoughts are formulated. You don't realize it as you're forming your thoughts, but imagine that it's true anyway: Where your thoughts are unfolding is a real place, and your thoughts are real in that place.

Now review some of your more recent thoughts - the deliberate trains of thought, the daydreams, the mental reactions to people, the thoughts that preoccupy you the moment you wake from sleep. Imagine that those thoughts are real in a real place.

Do you start to see the violence?