Pursuing Wholeness by Alchemizing Evil into Good

At face value, the pursuit of the eradication of evil appears to be a noble and necessary cause. Evil, after all, is a destructive force, and a deadly one. However, any movement that seeks to completely eradicate evil will inevitably become evil. Why? Because evil cannot be completely eradicated. It can only be transmuted.

The very fabric of reality itself, operating as it does according to the laws of physics, prevents evil from being completely eradicated. Consider the principle of the conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. In a similar vein, all evil cannot be destroyed, but can only be transmuted, just as one cannot destroy darkness and would, in attempting to do so, destroy light, as light and darkness depend upon each other to exist.

This basic, essential fact, has been lost in a culture which, since its (institutional) Christian inception has been encouraging its civilians to strive for perfection. Striving for perfection, is, after all, just another way of describing our species’s attempt to eradicate evil. Consider the following mystical reading from Barbarah Hannah, a Jungian scholar and writer in the 20th century whose many books I have gobbled up over the past few years, and whose takes illustrate the folly of this pursuit of perfection

“…perfection is necessarily one-sided, it attempts to develop the light side of man exclusively, to dismiss the dark side as sin which must be resisted at all costs, whereas everything that exists consists of both light and dark…life is no longer satisfied with Western man’s one-sided traditional attempt to strive after perfection in all the Christian virtues, but is now demanding the recognition of certain thoughts which definitely come from the other, the dark side of man.…The impossibility of fulfilling the Christian ideal led and leads increasingly to dangerous feelings of inferiority and neurosis. Indeed, St. Paul himself complained of this weakness in the Christian program: “For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 6:19) How much more problematic this has become in our complicated, over- populated, modern world where the dark side of man seems to be flourishing as never before! Jung became more and more convinced that a satisfactory solution to the contradictions inherent in this one-sidedness could only be found by giving up the hopeless search for perfection and replacing it with a quest for wholeness [emphasis: mine].

It is wholeness, not perfection that we must learn to shift towards in our strivings. And wholeness can only be achieved through the adoption of an integrative, dynamic ecology of practices that presupposes the dual, inter-dependent nature of darkness and light, and which does so in community.

There is much more to say about this and I’ll be exploring this topic in future entries soon so be sure to subscribe.

For A Deeper Dive:

Small Bite: Carl Jung and The Shadow

Big Bite: Striving Towards Wholeness by Barbara Hannah

Up Next: Chapter 2 - Hatred/Oppression: One Hell of a Drug

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