Dark forces, dark matter and evil

The dark forces are dark because they’re not seen, they’re unknown, but not necessarily evil in the moral/religious sense of the word. The dark forces are the polar opposite of the light forces, which are visible to us. We are accustomed to thinking that the dark forces have evil effects, or what we interpret as evil effects in the usual sense of our understanding of the word evil.

Why do we call them evil? Is it because we don’t understand the dark forces? Is it because they work in a way that’s unknown to us, that doesn’t go along with what we’re accustomed to? So much of what we define as evil is just that: it’s what’s unknown to us, what we’re not familiar with and what frightens us because it’s unknown. Maybe the same is true of the dark forces.

Dark matter is much the same thing. It’s dark because it’s known; it’s hidden from us. It’s something we’re not familiar with, don’t see, know very little about. So we call it dark, but not in a sense of it’s being evil, but in the sense that we don’t understand it, we don’t know it, we don’t see it. Anyway, dark matter is an accepted scientific concept, and therefore escapes the moralistic connotation of being equated with evil.

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[the next day]
Good and evil are religious and moral concepts. This is line with what I said last night about the dark forces. Good and evil are polar opposites. We define good in moral terms of obeying God, not sinning, etc., and the moral and religious sense of evil is the devil and sin and things like that.

But if you look at good and evil in a different way, you could say that good is what brings peace and harmony, and evil disrupts peace and harmony. Maybe that’s the best way to put it.

What’s the relation, then, between evil and the dark forces, the unknown? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is none. Dark forces, dark matter, evil… But there is a relation. I’m sure there is, but I can’t put my finger on it just yet.

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[later that night]
If we leave aside the moral and religious sense of the terms, then what we’re really thinking about is peace and harmony in a way that we understand it, in a way that we want it. In other words, good is harmony in the way we understand and look at the world. Evil is disruption because it’s something we don’t understand — the dark forces are something we don’t understand. They work in a way we don’t understand, and they often upset what we define as good, or the forces of the light. And that’s why we equate the dark forces with evil.

I keep thinking about hurting, harming other people. But really grossly hurting them: torturing, killing, war. Extreme conflict, the extremes of darkness and evil. One thing is to call something evil because it doesn’t go along with my beliefs and what I define as the good life or goodness. But how do you explain the existence of something that what, I think, the majority of human beings define as evil?

Or do they? Some people seem to see killing and war as justified, and it’s not evil for them. It’s the dark forces from the way I see it because I don’t accept it. It’s dark for me precisely because I don’t understand how anyone could be comfortable with that way of thinking and being and acting. Therefore, to me, it’s something that’s dark. It’s part of the dark forces. So there’s a constant play between the dark and the light in the sense of how some people define good, how other people define good, and how different people define evil.

It’s hard for some of us to accept, but maybe that’s where it is.

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[and still later]
We might say that the dark forces and the light forces are the objective views of the question, the objective way of looking at it. And good and evil are our subjective ways of defining and describing it. The dark forces behave in a certain way that we don’t understand. The light forces are what we see, what we understand and accept, what we define in our subjective way as good. The dark forces are what we do not understand, what we don’t accept. Maybe we see it but we reject it, we don’t accept it. It’s like that part of us known as the shadow, that we don’t see and don’t want to see and push out of sight.

But the dark forces are still there, and using the term evil is our subjective way of describing them. So there is a play between these opposites, the dark forces and the light forces. And it’s played out through human beings. The conflicts in our cultures, on this planet, in this dimension are the manifestations of the dark forces and the light forces as played out or channeled through us.

And a final thought. The different perspectives on good and evil are related to the different stages of human evolution that exist on the planet today.

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[addendum, after I finished putting it all together, 15 August 2007]
As I reach the end I see I brought up dark matter at the beginning as part of the issue but then said nothing more about it. It’s a concept I don’t know much about, so I guess I need to learn more before I can venture some thoughts on how it fits into the equation.