Black & White

More from Steve Hagen's How the World Can Be The Way It Is:

Let's return to our problem of good and evil and make use of the common white hat/black hat analogy which originated in the old movie Westerns. In these movies, the good guy wore a white hat [first aspect], whereas his mirror opposite, the bad guy, wore a black one [second aspect]. We have one of the simplest, most clear-cut mirror oppositions...

But what is the True Opposite (third aspect) of both of these fellows? It's the man who, metaphorically, wears no hat at all.

The person who wears no hat is the person who's not taking sides - the person who does not see himself or herself in opposition to others.

The black hat/white hat view of good and evil can make an entertaining movie because the moral lines it draws are so simple and obvious that the story remains easy to follow right through to its poignant finish. In real life, however, the lines are infinitely complex, and the story has no ending. The black hat/white hat theory of good and evil doesn't reflect our actual experience of life's moral difficulties.

The common view, of course, is to think: we are good, and evil is out there. We label those other guys out there as evil because we're already assured, through our tacit assumptions, of our own goodness. Yet we unwittingly do what they do. They build their weapons to defend themselves against us, and we build ours for the same reason. They claim God is on their side and so do we. Our everyday sense of good and evil thus only helps to generate conflict.

As long as we behave like this, it's clear that we still do not understand the nature - the sameness - of what we are calling good and evil. Good - True Good - does not resemble evil in a mirror.

True Good, as we can sense in our hearts, must exist in a totally different way...

True Good - those actions that spring from an awareness of the Whole, from just seeing - is utterly beyond any everyday sense of good and evil, or right and wrong, or pleasant and unpleasant. It's the appropriate action at the appropriate place and time, free of selfishness, attachment, conceptualizing, and even (as we normally think of it) intent.