Apr 23, 2022
Vladimir Putin and the Redemption of Evil
Lifting the Veil on Great Cover-Up
The Great Cover-Up
Like so many people, I have sought all my life to become loving, pure, and good: a thoroughly moral human being. Now the ugly shadow side of such a quest is The Great Cover-Up of Evil. This cover-up involves, at its core, projecting evil onto others and declaring that “they are the problem— not me”.
Anyone but me.
The stomach-churning realisation that begins to dawn as one investigates one’s shadow is that:
“I too am the problem. I too am complicit in the most hideous acts of human evil and violence. Even if I don’t go around raping or killing anyone, my actions — and inactions — are such that they directly contribute to suffering just as painful as that caused by those most immoral and repugnant of acts. Truly, there is a devil in me, and he has hidden himself with the most ingenious cunning: he has disguised himself as an Angel of Light”
To speak at a collective level, we are all the problem. We co-create the problem of evil when we pretend there isn’t one — or that we aren’t contributing to it (because we are the good guys)!
Our ignorance and denial of the darkness is what creates the darkness.
This leaves us in a weird and counterintuitive situation: we are both the good guys and the bad guys. Our own worst enemies, and our own saviours.
But in thinking that we are the good guys exclusively, we are unconscious of our “complicity in evil”, as Jung calls it. This psychic blind spot allows us to effectively destroy ourselves, others and the planet without even knowing it — or, more precisely, knowing it fully well at the deepest level, the level of the heart and soul (a.k.a universal consciousness, or the Light), but ignoring that level — denying our truest or highest self— and instead locking ourselves into all-too-convincing rationalisations of why we are actually doing good all the time, and not doing anything evil at all.
To do this, we had to become disembodied beings: we dissociated from awareness of the body, which is constantly screaming messages from the heart and soul. These messages could be telling us anything from “Stop! This is wrong!” or “Don’t do it” all the way to “Go for it, this is your chance!”, “I love you!!”.
But, for our youthful (or immature) souls, to actually act on those messages was too painful or terrifying, so chose to ignore them — and had to compensate by convincing ourselves with a cascade of rational arguments. For most of us, it is still too painful and terrifying.
And so it was that we retreated up into the head.
The Great Melting
Embodied practices such as meditation and movement allow us to experience the Great Melting: the sinking of hard and rigid head-level awareness down into the liquid loving flow of body-awareness — a flow that is eternally united with the Great Flow, the living spirit within all matter. We gradually muster the courage to become fully present in our body, every moment, even when it means intense pain, grief and heartbreak. Because responding to and acting on those difficult feelings is the exact movement that allows us to become conscious of evil, in particular our own capacity for it, and to become creative actors working to mitigate the suffering caused by evil.
In the Great Cover-up of Evil the heart is silenced and suffocated, the soul is gagged and left for dead in the desert of despair. Who is left but the living dead, the hungry one, the evil one, who seeks only to fill the hole within himself, who sees only the objects of his desperate desires — those all-too seductive and convincing paths to self-preservation in extremis: immortality.
The evil one is a fallen angel. And along with so many of us in today’s world, the mention of evil brings to mind one man in particular: Vladimir Putin.
Put in is quite clearly a pathological, murderous, and chillingly cold-hearted individual. He appears without feeling or humanity — and yet, the media tells us, he loves the Beatles. This is highly disturbing: how could such a monster enjoy the art we love and cherish so dearly? What’s going on here? I find it easy to tell myself: he doesn’t really love the Beatles — he’s a dead robot! But what if he enjoys them in exactly the same way we do? What if those songs and melodies really do speak to his soul — but his soul is so battered, distorted, and immobile on the barren ground that it cannot muster any energy to move against the forces of evil that Putin’s body and mind are so inescapably wrapped up in?
The life-affirming moment comes when we realise that, unlike countless others who are unable to act or move against evil, WE CAN. It then becomes our duty as able and agile souls to work for the good of all souls, no matter how distorted, lost, maimed or depraved they have become. I think this is exactly why Jesus garnered a reputation for associating with lawbreakers, prostitutes and harlots — he was drawn to the fallen angels.
Jesus — prophet and messenger of the Light, living symbol of universal love and consciousness— invited us to love and forgive even our enemies, even those who have turned evil — who trespass against us — for they have fallen into deepest suffering, a pit from which only our collective compassion and solidarity will lift them.
That compassion is only realised towards the “evil other” when we realise it towards our own “evil self”. Indeed evil can be summarised as all the myriad ways that we turn against ourselves — and thus against others.
By this view, we are not punished for our sins but by our sins.
“Evil is its own punishment, while goodness is its own reward” — Richard Rohr.
Fully and unconditionally compassionate towards ourselves, there is no part of any ‘other’ that we cannot hold in love, compassion and forgiveness.
Once we recognise the fact of universal suffering, there is no longer any being that we cannot stand in solidarity with — even the most evil.
Even Putin. Even Hitler. Even the devil himself.
Redemption
My highest and most aware self — the ‘Christ of my soul’— loves Putin and all Russian soldiers — for as a modern incarnation of Satan he has cast himself out from the kingdom of heaven (the heart-kingdom of eternal universal unconditional love), and as such he is suffering unimaginably — and only compassion will redeem him.
By turning towards the suffering of evil, I realise that it is deeply affecting my life and psyche, and that ignoring it is limiting my freedom. The current presence of evil in the world is warping and distorting the free flow of life energy through my body-mind-identity-complex — and it affects everyone around me in a similar way. I cannot flourish unless everyone is flourishing — and neither can you. Thus we gain freedom when we turn towards the suffering of evil, bringing it into the light of consciousness, and seek to begin acting compassionately, from a position of solidarity, towards its perperators.
We are all held captive — all crucified — in our own utterly unique way, often far more subtly than a physical execution. Christ’s death is a mirror to the capture, desecration, torture and attempted execution of our soul by the forces of evil. By accepting this situation and loving all perpetrators — all who trespass against us — including the lost, broken and evil parts of ourselves (our own ‘fallen angel’ or the ‘Satan of the soul’) those internal and external evildoers lose their power — because their power feeds on our unconsciousness. Since our crucified soul is conscious of everything in existence (for there is no suffering whatsoever which does not register on the human heart), consciously reconnecting with it reveals our true nature as unvanquishable, immaterial, eternal and divine. But for this liberation we must necessarily pay the price of facing — and even feeling — the world’s suffering in its entirety.
With faith in the divine truth that we are not ultimately defined or limited by this one body, personality and identity, we realise our deepest self as the universal which is one with God, is no other than infinite divine love. This faith allows us to sacrifice the body for the good of all. It is a sacrifice made in love and joy because it comes from a place of infinite divine abundance of life. From God’s perspective, which Jesus clearly inhabited, there is nothing lost in the sacrifice of the body, even if this results in physical death. Thus he invites us to inhabit this perspective on our own life, self and body and to give them away, out of love, to all suffering beings. In doing so we are liberated from our delusional attachment and identification with the physical body — we realise our true self which is beyond perception, comprehension or description.
Love Saves the Day
To love evil is to love ourselves in our wholeness. To love our wholeness is to actualise that wholeness which is both our humanity and our divinity in one. Indeed, the two are utterly inseparable: our transcendent spiritual nature and our immanent material nature are in no way separate but are utterly interdependent.
The mind-created duality between the human and divine is itself part of the Great Cover-Up of Evil that allows it to propagate so ferociously within the human psyche. What we seldom realise is that human evil reflects and expresses divine evil — and vice versa.
Evil operates due to unconsciousness — or more precisely, due to our unconsciousness of unconsciousness — and the horrific situation so rarely perceived by modern humanity is the equivalent unconsciousness of the human and the God.
We suffer as the Gods suffer, and they as we. We carry out the deepest evil just as they do. And yet we love as they love, create as they create. Our dreams are the dreams of God.
Again this speaks to the utter inseparability and co-dependence of the divine and the human. A war on Earth is a war in Heaven — because Earth itself is a heavenly paradise, only one that has been desecrated and denigrated beyond all recognition. A spell in the forest will reliably rekindle in us a vision of the sacred paradise, the garden planet, Eden.
To re-spect (that is, to re-view, to look again at) the Earth, ourselves and all beings as divine enables a restoration of the material, human realm to the divine realm: a re-cognition of our unconsciousness, our delusion, our evil — and thus the evil side of God — allows the full extent of the good side of God to be similarly revealed. Holding the full extent of good and evil within our awareness allows us to see beyond, to realise a transcendence of the two.
Thus we see that the ego and the Self (God) awaken in tandem, in parallel, co-arising and co-liberating one another from the grip of evil through an unshakeable mutual love, mutual compassion, mutual kindness.
God suffers in all of us, in even the most evil and lost of beings — even in Putin, Hitler, Mao and Stalin — and to have solidarity with those beings is to have solidarity with God. It is to forgive the fallen angels and hereby present them with the eternal invitation to join us in the utter freedom of unconditional universal love — that is, the uninhibited self-expression, or ecstasis — of the soul in its highest, most conscious, most sublime and perfect nature, which is one with God in all.
To Putin I say: Come home, brother. Come home to love. Come home to your family and the utter mystical glory of being alive on planet Earth. Give up the fight within your soul. Listen to the Beatles — all you need is love.
