“One Tibetan monk… who had spent more than 18 years in a Chinese prison labor camp… told me that on a few occasions he really faced some danger. So I asked him, ‘What danger? What kind of danger?’, thinking he would tell me of Chinese torture and prison. He replied, ‘Many times I was in danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.'”
– The Dalai Lama
There are no ‘evil’ people in this world, only those who are absolutely certain that their vision and version of reality is singularly correct, and who are totally unwilling to open up to possibility, to meet others in vulnerable intimacy and joyful doubt. ‘Evil’ is simply tunnel vision, a painful constriction and rejection of the flowing wholeness of life, a forgetting of our true nature as vastness and capacity and the total absence of a separate and solid ‘person’. It is a fearful holding-on to stories and opinions rather than a expansive letting-go into the liberated ocean of consciousness…
There are no ‘evil people’, only those who secretly live in fear of life and who act out of that fear.
Evil is simply ‘live’, backwards. It is backwards living. A lost innocence, a cosmic ignorance…
This recognition is the beginning of great understanding and even compassion for those who we rush to judge and label as ‘evil’.