Beware of the words “good” and “evil” — they roll so easily off the tongue. But they are not innocent. They are ancient axes, sharpened by myth and wielded by empire. They are binary swords meant to divide what is, in truth, inseparably entangled.
To speak in terms of good and evil is to flatten reality. It is to reduce the infinite nuance of being into a two-dimensional moral cartoon. It pretends at clarity, but at great cost: the cost of understanding, the cost of compassion, the cost of truth.
“Good” and “evil” were once sacred concepts—alive with mystery, tangled with shadow. In the oldest stories, the hero and villain were often one and the same. The dragon you slay is the one in your own chest. The devil is not out there—it is your disowned hunger, your unmet grief, your fear of death wearing a mask.
But modernity—and especially political and religious institutions—weaponized these words. They became tools for control. You are good. They are evil. And especially the worst groups all train their members to think their adversaries are "evil". No dialogue necessary. No mirror held up. Just the green light for crusade, for colonization, for drone strikes, for silencing.
And psychologically, the words are toxic. Because once someone identifies with “good,” they can slow or stop growing. Why reflect, when you are righteous? Why change, when you are chosen? And those labeled “evil”? They become un-human. Disposable. Burnable. The moral boundary becomes a license for cruelty.
Now, this does not mean we deny harm, or relativize atrocity. There is real darkness in this world. Genocide, pedophilia, lies so vast they drown generations. But to go into toon town and just call it “evil” and stop there is to shut the book before we’ve read the reasons. We must ask: What series of bad decisions set up the circumstances for this? What created this violence? What wound does it express? What truth was never witnessed? Because evil is not an essence. It is a symptom—of disconnection, of trauma, of forgetting. And good? It is not purity. It is integration. The ability to embrace shadow without being possessed by it.
So better to speak and frame these instead more in the spectrums of light and dark, wholeness and wounding, of awakening and sleepness, or love or fear. Let us reclaim the language which does not live in hard black & white binary dualities. For binary material reality, from sunrise, to sun set, is a full spectrum from light to dark. As nature is a massive spectrum.
And that is the point—not to judge, but to heal. Not to punish, but to understand. Not to divide the world into saints and sinners, but to remember that we are all both, and more. Far more.