The Problem of Evil: No Problem for the Mystics
The modern discussion around the Problem of Evil takes place primarily in the context of the widespread monotheistic Abrahamic religions, and poses the challenge:
Why does evil exist, if there is an omnipotent, wholly benevolent God?
Some version of the question has taken place in most religions and cultures, in some form or another, since an attempt to explain evil and/or suffering is ultimately unavoidable for anyone who proposes to build a map of the ultimate context and meaning of our existence.
However, the framing of the question of evil as a “problem” is directly related to the Abrahamic concept of a benevolent monotheistic God, and its seeming incompatibility with the existence of evil. In a nutshell: If God is so great and good, then how come evil?
David Hume famously summarized Epicurus’s discussions of the topic in a trilemma, as follows:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?"
Theologians and philosophers have responded to the problem of evil with various solutions or arguments, collectively known as theodicy. Nevertheless, it continues to be considered a problem by those who are already skeptical of God and religion.
The approach to the problem of evil that I am most interested in and would like to discuss here is not any standard monotheistic response, but the mystical one. It is the perennial mystical tradition(s) which I find most compelling as a map of existence, and so I’d like to discuss how the question of evil is handled in this transcendental, mystical context.
Image Credit: Alex Grey
Mysticism in a Nutshell
The words “mysticism” or “mystic” are used pretty sloppily by the wider culture, and could refer to anything from fortune telling to Kung Fu. However, in the modern psychology and philosophy of religion, the term has a much more specific meaning.
Mysticism properly defined is a category of experience which people periodically have, in all times, places, and religious contexts (mystical experience), and the traditions and culture which arise from it. The experience itself is one of the individual person merging with God, or the absolute, infinite, or transcendent, however that is conceptualized.
Image Credit: Alex Grey
Of course, the details of this definition and how to study the phenomenon are debated ad nauseum, as is the custom in academia, but this is the general concept.
A common thread in this thinking is that there are degrees to which the individual may either encounter or directly merge with God, thereby losing the sense of individuality, which may be considered to have been an illusion in the first place, as with many Eastern traditions.
When I talk about mysticism as a context for the question of evil, I’m not just talking about the experience, but the philosophies and models which emerge from it, collectively known sometimes as the Perennial Philosophy, or Perennialism. This is a name for how we conceptualize the universe if we use the mystical experience as the primary reference.
The Perennial Philosophy
by Aldous Huxley
In this great spiritual classic, with great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine.
Basically, if you view the common elements of all religions, particularly the inner esoteric, initiatic, monastic portions of all religions, you find many common patterns, indicating an origin in a universal mystical experience had by mystics in all times and places.
When it happens here or there, now and then, this seemingly universal experience either creates or revives the esoteric tradition of any given religion, and perhaps creates even the exoteric or “outer” part of the religion, as a sort of simplified version of the esoteric truth in metaphor.
A Mystics-Eye View of Evil
A variety of approaches to the question of evil have been used by the mystical traditions, which have generally not considered it a problem, at least in the sense that Epicurus, Hume, and others have seen it as problematic. It’s not considered a logical contradiction of God, because the mystical concept of God is quite different from the monotheistic one.
The mystical God is one that is derived from direct experience or first-hand accounts of mystical experiences, rather than scriptural authority. The description and understanding of God which emerges from these experiences is notedly less anthropomorphic and “personal” compared to most monotheistic religions’ ideas about God.
Of course there are variations in different mystical philosophies as they appeared in different cultural contexts, from the ancient Yogis or Taoist mystics, to the Christian Mystics, Kabbalists, or Islamic Sufis. However, a common thread is there, and I believe it can best be summarized as:
There is nothing but God, and God’s dream. There is nothing but God dreaming.
Anything that seems not to be God is God’s dream, and this seeming-not-to-be is an illusory appearance. At a deeper level, there is just God, a sort of infinite consciousness behind everything, dreaming everything. You are that, I am that, everyone is that, from the lowliest bacteria to the highest super-being, because there is nothing but that.
I touched upon this concept of God at greater length in my article If Infinity is Real, Only God Exists, if you’d like to read more. For now, let’s assume this as our context, and see how it changes our view of the problem of evil.
Evil? No Problem.
There are various ways to approach the subject of evil from a mystical context.
For starters, if the world that we experience is “just a dream,” then that would imply that evil or suffering is also a dream, or rather a nightmare. It doesn’t really contradict the nature of an infinite, mystical God, because an infinite mystical God isn’t considered to be a cosmic “person” with magical powers that would necessarily be expected to stop evil from happening.
In fact, in some sense, suffering or evil may serve an important purpose in God’s dreaming.
If the phenomenal universe is God’s dream, then is evil just a nightmare?
Of course, consideration of this question brings up many other questions, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the perennial traditions. What is even the purpose of the dream? Did God create it with purpose in mind? Does it have an intentional structure? These are all good questions, and I can’t honestly say that all perennial traditions would agree on their answers.
However, speaking from my own consolidated, distilled model of the mystical concept of God that has drawn from many of these traditions, I would say that the universe does seem to have a purposeful structure, and evil may play a very important part in it.
Mystic Metaphors for Evil
Some mystical traditions still allow for a personal aspect to what is otherwise a mostly “impersonal” concept of God, by most people’s definitions. In other words, while God does transcend the dream in an “impersonal” way, God also appears within the dream in a somewhat more personal Creator-God way that any theist would find familiar.
If God is merely “impersonal”, then evil is of no consequence, and thus there is no problem. However, in the case that God is both impersonal and personal, the same question arises: why would the personal/creator aspect of God allow evil? There are many ways to answer this.
Firstly, evil would not be considered a problem, for the same reason that we don’t consider evil in a work of fiction to be a problem. In fact, it’s practically essential; without the villain, the book or movie would be fairly boring. This brings up an interesting point: evil makes things interesting. Evil conjures fear, and creates the necessity for heroism.
However, one might object that evil is not so “interesting” when one is the victim of it. This may be true, but we’re not asking why the victim would allow evil, we’re asking why God as Creator would allow it. So, the answer may simply be that God, at that level, knows it’s “just a dream,” and that in the grand scale of things, the dream with evil is ultimately more interesting than a dream without it.
This also brings us to the question, if evil is accepted as a part of the dream, then what is the point of the dream?
Image Credit: Warner Brothers Studios
Let’s make the dream metaphor a bit more tangible: imagine you were given a new, fully immersive, sophisticated form of virtual reality. In this new VR device, you actually forget that you are in VR, while you’re in it. There is an endless library of VR experiences or “games,” and you get to play as many times as you want.
While you may choose the most pleasant, fun, and easy games at first, I’m willing to bet that eventually, you would want to do something a bit more dicey. You’d want to up the ante, to push the edge, and you’d choose something more scary, or exciting, perhaps with a villain, which would provide you with the opportunity to play the hero. You might even want to play the villain, too, at some point.
This can help us imagine why God, knowing this Creation to be a dream, might choose a dream containing evil.
This metaphor has its limits, though, because playing a video game is ultimately a pointless, arbitrary activity. The only “point” is enjoyment. But is that true of God’s dreaming this universe? Let’s take the metaphor one step further: What if the ultimate point of this VR video game is to overcome the amnesiac mechanism, and remember that you have an existence beyond the virtual game world?
Image Credit: Marvel Comics
Evil’s Advantage for Consciousness Evolution
The Vedantic (Hindu) traditions are, in my opinion, those which have most faithfully preserved or perhaps maintained the purest form of mysticism. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they have many persisting and culturally accepted lineages of actual mystics up to this very day, rather than the sparse scattering of often persecuted mystics we have elsewhere in the world.
One hallmark of their teachings is that the overall teleology or trajectory of God’s dream is not simply to ferry people across the weary waters of physical life and death into a happy afterlife or Hell, as we often find in Abrahamic traditions, but rather that there is an ongoing process of soul evolution through reincarnation in various bodies, so that each soul gradually reaches a higher and more awakened state.
This was beautifully and poetically described by Swami Vivekananda in one of his many lectures:
This unselfish task, which our sweet nurse, Nature {or Prakriti, God’s drea}, had imposed upon herself: She gently took the self-forgetting soul by the hand, as it were, and showed him all the experiences in the universe, all manifestations, bringing him higher and higher through various bodies, till his lost glory came back, and he remembered his own nature. Then the kind mother went back the same way she came, for others who have also lost their way in the trackless desert of life. And thus is she working, without beginning and without end. And thus, through pleasure and pain, through good and evil, the infinite river of souls is flowing into the ocean of perfection, of self-realization.
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
All the nine published volumes of Swami Vivekananda's works are available here. All proceeds from the sale of this book are donated to Advaita Ashrama, founded by Swami Vivekananda.
A spiritual genius of commanding intellect and power, Swami Vivekananda was instrumental in the spread of non-dual Hindu philosophy in the West.
So, if there is an evolutionary trajectory to God’s dream, how might evil serve to catalyze our progress along it?
Scaring Godself Awake
In the mystical, and especially the Vedantic conception of life, God’s dream is essentially composed of a dualistic drama, and suffering is a result of being caught up in that drama, the most fundamental duality of which is the belief in a separate self. I, me, mine is the nature of the dream drama that serves as a kind of inertia keeping us asleep, and seeing beyond this illusion of self to our unity with all, and ultimately God, is the way out of the predicament.
One of the Vedantic answers about suffering and evil, given directly by Vedantic mystics even in relatively recent times, is that it is essentially corralling us towards a return to God. This dream of Maya is in many ways beautiful and alluring, but ultimately it can never give us what we truly long for: Union with God (or conscious realization of our inherent Union with God).
So, we get trapped in the net of Maya, allured by it’s pleasures but ultimately suffering from their direct cause-effect results. In this perfectly balanced dualistic dream, every worldly satisfaction carries the seed of its corresponding suffering, and so we go back and forth, up and down, on the sea of cause and effect.
We may stay stuck in it for quite some time, partially satisfied by it’s lukewarm pleasures, and only mildly stung by lukewarm sufferings. Like a picture whose forms become clearer with greater contrast, the increase of polarity of pleasure and suffering can make the true nature of the dream become apparent to us more quickly, thereby catalyizing our awakening to our true nature, as God Dreaming.
When the day finally comes that we seek after permanent, eternal satisfaction, we turn our pleasure-seeking towards the ultimate pleasure of Union with God, God-realization, self-realization, by whatever name you call it.
In this context, evil may be quite instrumental in perpetuating or catalyzing this effect. By being ensnared into wrongdoing and its consequences by the delusion of the dream, we inadvertently propel ourselves and others towards seeking God, by making worldly existence less mild in its fluctuations, less lukewarm, and thereby rendering it’s true nature as illusion more apparent.
On one level, the existence of evil provides us the opportunity to be heroic, to sacrifice ourselves for others; on another level, this heroic sacrifice merely serves as a prototype for the ultimate sacrifice of selfness itself, the merging with God in the mystical experience that requires death of the small self-concept or ego.
Conclusion
Does this mean we should enthusiastically embrace evil? Of course not; within the realm of this dream, it still makes sense to be heroic, to address evil in the world. However, if we are asking the “ultimate questions” and trying to understand why God would allow evil, then the mystical perspective makes it perfectly understandable, at that level, as I hope my little romp into mystical theodicy has demonstrated.
Why Evil Matters
by Alex Tsakiris (of Skeptiko)
Why does science use quotes around “evil”? Why do we settle for religious answers? And if evil is around us, and maybe within us, what can we do about it?
From an irreverent voice in alternative science reporting comes a novel look at a powerful force driving our culture. Alex Tsakiris shares what he's learned interviewing some of the world's most respected frontier scientists and spiritual thinkers.
