Stories of Good & Evil

The more experiences I have in life, the more I realize that everything is made up of stories, from the tales of individual lives to the histories of places and civilizations. Every culture has its own particular legends, and religions are all made up of stories. I think I’ve finally figured out why this is.

In Matthew 13, Jesus, my favorite shaman, is asked, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”

His reply is “…So that when they see they don’t see and when they hear they don’t hear or understand.”

Many scholars have dismissed this as a mistranslation, because it doesn’t seem to make sense: Speaking in metaphors should make things MORE clear, not less, otherwise, why do it? But to me, it makes perfect sense. I’ve always thought it means that we need to comprehend the stories we read and hear with our creative, right brain (not our logical left), so that we can grasp their meaning on a more layered level. Statements of fact can only be grasped with the left brain, but stories and legends give us the chance to go deeper, into places where only intuition can take us. This is necessary to do because no one can really be TAUGHT anything, but we CAN learn if we TAKE the knowledge, interpret it, and make it our own. I think this is why certain stories have been around for so long: They touch something in us that we can’t access any other way.

Some of the oldest stories in the world touch on good versus evil, but you’ll notice that these are complex, and the question of who is the evil one is always equivocal. Abraham planning to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22? He was following God’s orders when he agreed to kill his son. Yet we don’t consider “following orders” to be a valid excuse for war crimes today.

You hear a lot about “evil grays” in the UFO community, but I’ve always found this to be simplistic. I’ve also noticed that this phrase is rarely used by people who have had extensive experience with whoever these beings may be. The experiencers who have gained wisdom through intensive interaction with them seem to have learned that “evil,” and its opposite, “good,” are both terms that are much too simplistic to apply to such complex beings.

In fact, what we call evil is integral to the Communion experience, but not in the way you might think. Over the years, many people have written to us and asked, “How can I meet the visitors?” Others have written with the pronouncement that “only some people are chosen.” But I came to the conclusion that it’s not so much that a few folks are “special” in any portentous way; it’s more the case that only certain people can SEE them. Many years ago, Whitley and I realized that the people who wrote to us about their visitor experiences had often had had traumatic childhoods (sometimes including child abuse) that seemed to somehow “crack open the cosmic egg,” making them able to see and experience things that the other people around them never noticed.

The people who call aliens evil tend to overlook an important fact: If you ascribe to the good-versus-evil dichotomy where one person or being is good, then it follows that the opposite person or being must necessarily be evil, and of course, that can’t be YOU, it has to be the OTHER one, since you are, by definition, always the good one. And this immediately closes of all real understanding of the Other, because you have put him in a box and closed the lid. Since all your burning questions have now been resolved (for the moment, anyway), your brain may be tidily arranged, instead being the jumbled mess of unanswered questions that it usually is, but if you do this, you will not have really learned anything.

Knowledge is a never ending process, not something that can be delivered on a platter to be digested at a single meal. Every professional knows this: Your doctor has his medical degree, but he never stops studying and learning. Your lawyer may have graduated many years ago, but if you ask him, he’ll tell you he learns something new about his profession every day. The best teachers are ALWAYS learning, often from their students.

Knowledge is about walking on a path. You need to gaze far ahead occasionally, to read the street signs and make sure you’re still heading in the right direction, but you need to look down at your feet at times as well, to avoid the dog droppings. “Good versus evil” is a major pile of excrement and everyone who treasures real knowledge should step carefully around it and keep their eyes on the stars that are guiding them.

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.