We have spent many weeks together tracing two journeys. The first followed the path of coming alive through ego, soul, and Spirit. The second traced the long evolution of human consciousness as it climbs, stage by stage, toward ever-widening awareness. Both journeys point upward and outward, toward more love, more awareness, more life.
And yet, if we walk these paths honestly, a hard question rises to meet us: if we are made to come alive, why are evil and cruelty so deeply present in the human story?
Many have observed that evil is live spelled backwards. This connection is more than wordplay. Evil is life turned against itself - aliveness reversed, energy that was meant to flow toward connection curling back toward harm. It is always rooted in fear, in some felt sense of threat, and it often carries a hidden current of self-hatred that gets projected outward onto others. We never wound others from a place of wholeness. We wound from a place of pain.
This is why cruelty can surface at any level of consciousness. Even gurus with advanced spiritual knowledge can exploit or abuse their followers. No stage of development makes us immune. What does seem to shift, as awareness grows, is frequency. The higher and wider our consciousness, the less often fear seizes the wheel, and the easier it is to feel compassion and connection. But the seed of cruelty lives within all of us, and wounds that lie in our depths can be triggered in surprising ways.
At its deepest and most unconscious levels, evil is born of the oldest injuries we carry: the terror of being abandoned, the ache of having no meaning, no value, no purpose, and the sense of being unlovable. When these wounds are stirred, the channels of compassion and empathy are blocked. The person can no longer feel their way into another’s suffering, and so they become prone to causing it.
The contemplative response is not to excuse this, but to understand it. After September 11th, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh spoke beautiful words that arise from the most expansive spiritual awareness:
If I were given the opportunity to be face to face with Osama bin Laden, the first thing I would do is listen. I would try to understand all of the suffering that had led him to violence… because such an act is a desperate call for attention and for help.
To listen first is not weakness. It is the refusal to meet fear with more fear.
And what, then, of hell?
I believe hell is a condition rather than a place, contrary to the portrayals in conservative forms of religion. It’s the experience of being consumed, by personal grief, by trauma, by misery so total that it becomes the only world one can see. It is fear with no horizon or outlet.
But here is the hope alive in a universe powered by love and light. Because hell is a condition and not a place, there are no locked doors. No one is sealed in. Every soul, however buried, carries a light within it. And as I explored in a recent post, at death souls carry into the next world all they have gathered - their learnings and hopes as well as their fears, wounds, and burdens. And there they are met by light-filled grace and by healing allies: loving angels, saints, and ancestors.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition holds a striking image of this. Christ's three-day descent to the dead was not a journey to judge but to illumine, to carry light to those who had simply forgotten it was there. He kindled the light already waiting within them. By that kindling they could move into a greater awareness of Divine grace, and thereby step out of the very fear and pain that had defined their hell.
That, finally, is the answer to these life conditions we find so disturbing. Evil is aliveness turned backward. Cruelty is empathy frozen by old wounds. And hell is the fear we cannot yet see beyond.
But the light is never fully extinguished. It waits in every soul to be kindled. And once kindled, it turns us, again and again, toward living the sacred life.