When you are discussing the nature of good and bad, you are on tricky ground indeed, for many, or most, of man’s atrocities to man have been committed in misguided pursuit of “the good.”
Whose good?
Is “good” an absolute?
In your arena of events, obviously, one man’s good can be another’s disaster, Adolf Hitler pursued his version of “the good” with undeviating fanatical intent. He believed in the superiority and moral rectitude of the Aryan race. In his grandiose, idealized version of reality, he saw that race “set in its proper place,” as the natural master of mankind.
He believed in heroic characteristics, and became blinded by an idealized superman version of an Aryan, strong in mind and body. To attain that end, Hitler was quite willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity. “The evil must be plucked out.” That unfortunate chant is behind the beliefs of many cults, scientific and religious, and Hitler’s Aryan kingdom was a curious interlocking of the worst aspects of religion and science alike, in which their cultish tendencies were encouraged and abetted.
The political arena was the practical working realm in which those ideals were to find fruition. Hitler’s idea of good was hardly inclusive, therefore, and any actions, however atrocious, were justified.
How did Hitler’s initially wishy-washy undefined ideals of nationalistic goodness turn into such a world catastrophe?
The steps were the ones mentioned earlier, as those involved with any cult. Hitler’s daydreams became more and more grandiose, and in their light, the plight of his country seemed worsened with each day’s events. He counted its humiliations over and over in his mind, until his mind became an almost completely closed environment, in which only certain ideas were allowed entry.
All that was not Aryan, really, became the enemy. The Jews took the brunt largely because of their financial successes and their cohesiveness, their devotion to a culture that was not basically Aryan. They would become the victims of Hitler’s fanatical ideal of Germany’s good.
Hitler preached on the great value of social action as opposed to individual action. He turned children into informers against their own parents. He behaved nationalistically, as any minor cult leader does in a smaller context. The Jews believed in martyrdom. Germany became the new Egypt, in which their people were set upon. I do not want to oversimplify here, and certainly I am nowhere justifying the cruelties the Jews encountered in Germany.
You do each create your own reality, however, and together you create the realities of your nationalities and your countries, so at that time the Germans saw themselves as victors, and the Jews saw themselves as victims.
Both reacted as groups, rather than as individuals, generally speaking now. For all of their idealisms, both basically believed in a pessimistic view of the self. It was because Hitler was so convinced of the existence of evil in the individual psyche, that he set up all of his rules and regulations to build up and preserve “Aryan purity.”
The Jews’ idea was also a dark one, in which their own rules and regulations were set to preserve the soul’s purity against the forces of evil. And while in the Jewish books [of The Old Testament] Jehovah now and then came through with great majesty to save his chosen people, he also allowed them to suffer great indignities over long periods of time, seeming to save them only at the last moment, and this time, so it seemed, he did not save them at all.
What happened?
Despite himself, and despite his followers, Hitler brought to flower a very important idea, and one that changed your history. All of the most morbid of nationalistic fantasies that had been growing for centuries, all of the most grandiose celebrations of war as a nation’s inalienable right to seek domination, focused finally in Hitler’s Germany.
The nation served as an example of what could happen in any country if the most fanatical nationalism was allowed to go unchecked, if the ideas of right were aligned with might, if any nation was justified in contemplating the destruction of others.
You must realize that Hitler believed that any atrocity was justified in the light of what he thought of as the greater good.
To some extent or another, many of the ideals he held and advocated had long been accepted in world communities, though they had not been acted upon with such dispatch. The nations of the world saw their own worst tendencies personified in Hitler’s Germany, ready to attack them.
The Jews, for various reasons, and again, this is not the full story, the Jews acted as all of the victims of the world, both the Germans and the Jews basically agreeing upon “man’s nefarious nature.” For the first time the modern world realized its vulnerability to political events, and technology and communication accelerated all of war’s dangers. Hitler brought many of man’s most infamous tendencies to the surface. For the first time, again, the species understood that might alone did not mean right, and that in larger terms a world war could have no real victors. Hitler might well have exploded the world’s first atomic bomb.
In a strange fashion, however, Hitler knew that he was doomed from the very beginning, and so did Germany as far as Hitler’s hopes for it were concerned. He yearned for destruction, for in saner moments even he recognized the twisted distortions of his earlier ideals. This meant that he often sabotaged his own efforts, and several important Allied victories were the result of such sabotaging. In the same way, Germany did not have the atomic bomb for the same reasons.
Now, however, we come to Hiroshima, where this highly destructive bomb was exploded (August 6, 1945), and for what reason? To save life, to save American lives. The intent to save American lives was certainly “good”, but it was at the expense of the Japanese this time. In that regard, America’s good was not Japan’s, and an act taken to “save life” was also designed to take individual lives.
At what expense is “the good” to be achieved, and whose idea of the good is to be the criterion?
Man’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. Politically, many today believe that Russia is “the enemy,” and that therefore any means may be taken to destroy that country [This dialogue was published May, 1979].
Some people within the United States believe fervently that “the establishment” is rotten to the core, and that any means is justified to destroy it.
Some people believe that homosexuals and lesbians are “evil,” that somehow they lack the true qualities of humanness [and therefore need not be treated with normal respect]. These are all value judgments involving your ideas of the good.
Very few people start out trying to be as bad as possible. At least some criminals feel that in stealing they are simply righting society’s wrongs. I am not saying that is their only motive, but in one way or another they manage to justify their activities by seeing them in their own version of the good and the right.
You must realize that fanatics always deal with grandiose ideals, while at the same time they believe in man’s sinful nature, and the individual’s lack of power.
They cannot trust the expression of the self, for they are convinced of its duplicity. Their ideals then seem even more remote. Fanatics call others to social action. Since they do not believe that the individual is ever effective, their groups are not assemblies of private individuals come reasonably together, pooling individual resources. They are instead congregations of people who are afraid to assert their individuality, who hope to find it in the group, or hope to establish a joint individuality, and that is an impossibility (emphatically).
True individuals can do much through social action, and the species is a social one, but people who are afraid of their individuality will never find it in a group, but only a caricature of their own powerlessness.
SESSION 852, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, May 9, 1979.
Copyright © 1981 by Jane Roberts, 9:39 P.M. Wednesday. Published with permission from current copyright holder, Laurel Davies-Butts,
To be continued…
Every thought is a suggestion, a blueprint for action.
Seth seems to know far more about us than we do. Don’t you agree? His grasp of human thought and feeling is so amazing, practical, and empowering, it astounds me.
Roger/Pete Peterson – https://realtalkworld.com
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having (creating) a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Value Judgment verses Value Fulfillment
Instead of money, power, and privilege, would love, truth and joy be better, more stable measures of success? The first set of values isolates us in the material world of separation, scarcity, and competition, while values like love, truth, and joy, not only acknowledge our oneness with and separation from from All That Is, they recognize us as both products of creation and creation itself.
All That Is thinks, feels, acts and reacts; therefore, we ARE. As we think, feel, act and react, we create. To change who we are and what we create, we must change what we think and feel, how we act and react. There is no other way.
When the accumulation of money, power, and privilege serve as our primary goals, when is enough, enough? When do the ends stop justifying the means? On the other hand, when we choose love, truth and joy to serve as our primary goals, they provide us with a stable moral compass. Anything less is either unacceptable or something we need to improve. Not only do these moral standards encourage us to live for the love of Being and Creation, they encourage us to look within and without for the best to express.
Every thought has its own validity and is important for fulfilling the greatest possible potential of All That Is. How else can we learn the difference between what like and don’t like, what works for us and what doesn’t, what makes us happy and what doesn’t, in our oneness with and separation from All That Is, as both products of creation and creation itself. How else can we create what we want if we’re unable to experience what we don’t want? As multidimensional, vibrational beings of aware energy, it’s all good, because we are eternal and there is something to learn from everything.
“How you define yourself and the world around you forms your intent, which, in turn, forms your reality.” – Seth
In other words, we create reality from what we choose to think and feel about ourselves and All That Is.
If we don’t consciously choose our beliefs, we unconsciously absorb them from our surroundings.
If our beliefs create reality, can we afford not to question them?
The more we love and understand ourselves, the better we treat ourselves and the world.
Bless us all with love and understanding!
The secrets of the universe lie hidden in the shadows of our experience. Look for them!
Affirm what you believe!
