Some Thoughts Worth Mulling

I’ve actually been listening to one of my favorite mentors, Alan Watts, and came across a wonderful talk about something Carl Jung had come across. Watts hooked up with Jung in 1958 and was greatly impressed.

The one concept that Jung and Watts spoke about was the concept of Good and Evil as it relates to the Self. The current event at the time was the trial of Adolf Eichmann and Jung, at one point, had been accused of Nazi sympathies because of the concept of Good and Evil that he had come to understand.

Jung had come to realize there was no definitive concept of it. He believed we were all a composite of both Good and Evil and that actually, if we were not to come to an awareness of that, we would seek to punish others that we saw the evil in ourselves in.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that and I think Alan Watts and Carl Jung might have been on to something. They were looking at some of the great atrocities of our world and realizing that the people responsible were convinced of the Good they were doing. The greatest Evils were done by people who were convinced of the Good of what they were doing.

Jung discovered, and Alan Watts agreed, that only if we can acknowledge the co-existence of Good and Evil within all of us can we come to an accurate realization of ourselves.

Bad people do good things and Good people do bad things and we are all just a mish-mash of both. The great tragedies occur when we conclude we are either totally Evil or totally Good.

Self Knowledge that we are all a combination of both, always, is true enlightenment.