13/36 - Overcoming evil with Love

Here is the thirteenth account in my series of experiences that do not fit with the spacetime model of materialistic science. Thirteen is NOT unlucky! It is sometimes called ‘the angel number’, signifying a time of change and spiritual growth empowered by relatedness. The thirteenth gathers and feeds a diverse twelve into the loving unity of mutual wholeness. It is only ‘unlucky’, or disabling, for those who turn away from unity and wholeness.

This current account has for good reasons been delayed until now. The twelve events already described have started to explain why five decades of thoughtful reflection and experimenting have now birthed a process model of consciousness and the material world rooted in the undivided love that diversifies and liberates wholeness into ever-renewed life. I then realised, when planning the next account, that the other 24 accounts include some on how I managed the impact of evil intent that has passed down through several generations of my birth family. That gave me pause for thought.

Compassionately reporting these events is still carefully needed, however. They are the evidence that justifies heralding a new Kuhnian paradigm of experiential thinking into education, supported by New Science and the arts, and replacing old superstitions. Hopefully, the communities of science and the humanities may also be drawn closer into alignment when seeing through matter to the embodied Life that manifests through matter.

The subject of evil and its corruption of life and love needs presenting in the fullness of the numinous light I experienced in the story at 8/36. That ‘light’ is the presence of loving kindness underlying a relational reality that holds all together despite change. One thing I have learnt over these years is that evil cannot remain in the presence of the love of God in people’s inner hearts. Some people may find that idea challenging, and perhaps distressing. If so, then choosing to learn the Emotional Logic method of a healthy grieving process can start a renewing personal growth that comes through stronger when making this paradigm shift. The ‘EL method’ revolves around understanding love in a new way. I have already reported, in event 12/36, how a woman felt an evil drive ‘jump out’ of her when she merely contemplated prayer with a loving God, much to her and my surprise as her GP. Immediate psychosocial improvement followed. The evil dynamic cannot remain. It ‘sticks’ to doubt first, then magnifies fear and other loss-related emotions out of proportion to the social reality of situations. Stability is restored naturally to life by a Golden Ratio proportionality in the proposed triune cosmological model. Loving connection releases evil’s resonant grip and makes it depart with a rebuke. Light shines in darkness. The darkness cannot comprehend it.

The incident: a self-motivated anointing with Holy Water as a child

My family was full of tensions. I do not need to go into detail. I explained some in 8/36 to account for why I was suicidal at the age of 13. I was re-motivated to live by experiencing that numinous light while planning the suicide. Several years earlier, just prior to starting Junior School (I must have been about 8) we had moved house and I transferred to another school in Beckenham, in South London. Next door was the large Parish Church. I made a number of friends at that school. One of them, John Pike (Where are you now, John?) and I decided to do something risky, and go into that church one lunchtime, ‘Just to see…’. I remember it clearly even now.

The huge stained glass West window illuminated the scene, a church deserted of people but light and somehow full. We walked around in silence, both experiencing something that we never even talked about afterwards, as is often the way among boys. A knowing look is enough. It must have been a ‘high church’, because set into the south wall was an ornate font with water, still. The sense of peace was palpable, I recall. There was a quiet welcome.

I suggested to John that I might anoint myself with that Holy Water, and he enthusiastically agreed that he would too. An inner opening moved my being on doing so. It invited physical movement also towards the West window. So, with the cool of the water on my forehead I turned to face it, and saw through the images to something huge beyond, which this side of the glass and stone I could not touch, but I could nevertheless talk to. Not out loud, but in my inner silence I said, “I have a sneaking feeling that I am going to need you.”

The answer came with the light, which for much of our lives is veiled in the world.

Relational Realism

This is the 13^th piece of experiential evidence about the reality of the relationality of love spanning through and beyond time and space and material substance.

Enlightenment science assumed the reality of matter’s solidity as the essence of our relational experience, because it reasoned only by experimenting on and observing ‘it’. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant mostly agreed that our conscious experience of ‘it’ could not touch ‘the thing in itself’. We live, they claimed, in a phenomenal myth of interpretive ideas.

But there was a counter movement. It is not taught in schools yet, but it is now resurgent in academic and ecological movements, because it resonates with the New Science of interior movement in adaptive living systems, and in the quantum depths of atomic nuclei. The philosopher-creatives like Leonardo da Vinci, and the later Goethe and Schiller, brought science and aesthetics into a living harmony. The same creative messages are to be found in relational triune spirituality (when seeing through the divisive trappings of religious fossilisation).

We are in a paradigm shift that moves beyond the dualist divide of material and mind, to rediscover an organic living wholeness unfolding in the relational reality of ecologies. Life has a stabilising harmonic beauty of Golden Ratio proportionality. This emerges from the quantum depths shared by material substance and our ‘knowing conversational processes’.

The corruption of love

Utter relationality, of course, whether conscious or not extends down through the generations of a family. Said non-judgementally, qualities of that love impact from parent through children into learnt values that pattern childhood’s growth into adulthood and on into the way new parental roles are learnt when they in time have children. And so love’s qualities roll on, like thunder echoing off clouds that may veil the light, or like light’s refractions through crystal colouring and inspiring every creative aspect of life.

Through the Emotional Logic Centre (elcentre.org) we teach that people only grieve if they have loved. This applies to every aspect of life that people have valued and feel a bond with as part of their identity, not only to the intense bereavement of losing a prime partner. So, grief is not the end of love. Grieving is love on the move, searching to reconnect when pushed out of a comfort zone by change. Love’s peaceful joy mode shifts into love’s actioning and yearning grief mode, moving people by its very unpleasantness to explore or temporarily hide to reflect. Daily disappointments and hurts generate grief emotions such as shock, fear, anxiety, detachment, anger, guilty self-questioning, yearning, risk-taking, depressive emptiness, and sadness. These states of being-doing are not meaningless. They have useful purposes within an integrated, healthy adjustment process. They empower people to move towards or away from difficult situations in different relational ways, thus to manage the risk of losing, and recovering, anything personally valued in life. You can read fifteen true stories about how the Emotional Logic method has worked for people in different settings.

However, the healthy adjustment process built into love’s grief mode can become corrupted. It can twist around on itself. People can grieve about having grief. Instead of harnessing the preverbal information about personal values in grief’s emotions into a partnership with verbal reasoning to move on, they may narrow the process into an emotional inner spin. This sucks in just two or three of the seven potentially healthy states of behavioural adjustment. This emotional trap is called ‘a whirlpool of loss emotions’ in the Emotional Logic method (or a whirlwind, or a sandstorm, or an entanglement). This corruption has isolating psychosocial and behavioural consequences. For most people, however, when handling small daily setbacks and hurts, these twists in the process feel more like getting an uncomfortable boot-full of water when slipping off some stepping stones into an eddy in a shallow stream (of life) that has to be crossed. It’s not ‘the end of the world’, but remembering the experience can make people feel unsteady and cautious when they face new situations. The method we teach is how to get back up onto the firm ‘emotional stepping stones’ to get across the stream, restoring love to its joy mode to share with others.

Evil as the choice to magnify and corrupt someone else’s grief

It is normal that people who are grieving may sometimes want others to experience their grief, ‘so that they know what I am going through’. It is a ‘bargaining strategy’ to recover connection when feeling isolated, but it may be difficult for others to bear without a good dose of grace and empathic understanding.

Sometimes, however, that relational dynamic goes a step further. By wilful, intentional choice, sometimes people feel a vengeful desire or urge to make someone else suffer. Here we are edging towards the Emotional Logic interpretation of evil, but we are not there yet. Revenge is a personal choice that any one of us is at risk of making under dire circumstances. Evil is an intentional choice to go a step further… to oppress someone else, and to keep them under your own power and control, possessing them, removing their liberty, taking what you want from them. When understood in the Emotional Logic way of love’s two modes, this ambition can be achieved by first wilfully magnifying their grief mode of loving, and then secondly preventing those grief emotions from fulfilling their inbuilt healthy and loving purposes to restore connections that would otherwise restore love to its joy mode of peaceful harmony. Evil isolates, controls, and sustains hurt. We see it in slavery, abuse, drug dealing, bullying, cursing.

Evil is not an impersonal force. It is also not an opposite to good. Evil is the choice to corrupt the power of love, having no substance of its own. It steals in jealousy from the synergy of love, like a parasite. To change, evil just needs to learn how to give a bit…

The source of evil searing through the generations of my family

My Flemish mother was brought up in Ghent between the two World Wars. Her grandmother lived in their family home, wearing black all my mother’s early life in mourning for her husband, who had been killed on the last day of the First World War after spending four years in the trenches. As many people did in those tragic years, her grandmother tried to contact the dead and eventually became a locally renowned clairvoyant. Before the Second World War she was training my mother to be her assistant, but my mother did not want this. At the age of sixteen, during the Second World War, she left her home in occupied Belgium against the will of her family to become a nurse in Antwerp. There, after several years, as the British and Allied forces pushed northwards she met my father, who after the War whisked her off to London and married her. My mother’s grandmother was furious at losing her assistant. I shall tell the story in another account of how the discernment came to me of the curse that she spoke over my mother and her descendants. I checked out the truth of it with my mother, from which by grace we are released. It is quite a dramatic story, but one that needs to be told later in the context of God’s light.

The message I wish to bring now from these accounts, of self-anointing in the church and deliverance from a curse, speak of the transformative power of ‘word’ spoken remotely, but spoken from the inner heart. Personal choices are made in the inner heart. The structure of the cosmos is stabilised by an innately healing process that activates by relational responsiveness – from the inner heart. It is possible to appeal from the inner heart in silence, and relatedness is re-made. The effects of these dynamics reverberate vibrationally in patterns through wholeness. They can resonate with others remotely. An echoing void can be filled as people trust in the light.