THE GREAT SWINDLE

CONTENTS

• Polarities

There is a fairly prevalent view in the world today that life, and every individual human being in it, has a positive side and a balancing and equally negative side.

It is a view that the entire universe is dominated by two opposing forces of 'good' and 'evil', which forces wage their battle against one another within our souls, as well as throughout creation.

In this view, the negative side has some deep, dark, diabolical force behind it which is shrouded in mystery and is forever trying to rear its ugly head in the world and in our souls so as to inflict injury on ourselves and on those around us.

It is the very 'Devil' within us, and we must be forever on guard to keep it contained and under control within us, and to prevent it, in all its wily ways, from deceiving us and jumping out and hurting ourselves and our loved ones.

And, according to this view, one of the purposes of life is for us to finally learn how to rise above the temptations of that devil within us, and to totally beat it down and into submission to our will.

The people who accept this view of "reality", when they do something which is unacceptable to others or themselves, can honestly say, 'The Devil made me do it.'

This BELIEF is yet one more Grand Distractor.

It is simply not  TRUE, no matter how many preachers might swear otherwise, and regardless of how many people might be offended by our denying any validity to it.

There is no independent 'evil' force operating within us, or anywhere else in the universe.

We have no dark or diabolical 'side' to our personalities. None of us.

We are all perfectly capable of negative and destructive thoughts, feelings and actions. But that isn't due to some perverse force or entity in the universe or within ourselves.

What actually sets up those negative and destructive thoughts, feelings and behavior is nothing more mysterious or sinister than our own IGNORANCE and FEAR within us.

If there is a 'Devil' in us or in the world, that is what it consists of - the same IGNORANCE and FEAR which fuel the Great Swindle. It is nothing else.

We are IGNORANT to the extent that we don't understand REALITY, ourselves and others. That lack of understanding results in our being FEARful of life, ourselves and one another. And, the combination of our IGNORANCE and FEAR can generate all kinds of negative and destructive thoughts and emotions within us, which can easily translate into destructive actions, to ourselves and to others.

We do  suffer from the effects of this IGNORANCE and FEAR. Everyone does, to one extent or another. Being human, there is no way any of us can escape from their impacts on us totally.

But, there is  something we can do to eliminate the destructive effects of our IGNORANCE and FEAR.

One thing we can do is to recognize this particular Grand Distractor for the erroneous view of "reality" that it is. We can acknowledge and accept the FACT that it is only  IGNORANCE and FEAR that cause us to be negative and destructive, and not some perverse 'force' within some negative 'side' of our personality.

There are polarities , both in fundamental REALITY and within each of us as a part of REALITY, as discussed in our earlier section on Romantic "love" and in Polarities - Complementary Opposites.

But, as pointed out in those discussions, these polarities are in the nature of 'Yin' and 'Yang' or 'maleness' and 'femaleness', and cannot properly be viewed as 'right' and 'wrong' or 'good' and 'evil'.

They are both necessary, and complementary to one another. Neither is preferable to the other.

If we will but recognize and accept this REALITY, we can stop blaming ourselves or others as being somehow inherently 'flawed' or 'weak' or 'evil', which only makes the problem worse, and start focusing on the TRUE culprits - IGNORANCE and FEAR.