“The Devil,” or Evil (as a force), is the ancient part of your mind that sees other humans as rivals and wants to hunt, abuse, and sabotage them.
This part of your psyche was forged in a hostile landscape where it learned to steal and kill to survive.
It is this ancient fragment of your mind that turned us from cautious herbivores — hiding in burrows or clinging to trees — into opportunistic omnivores, eating anything smaller and slower than ourselves, and finally into apex predators.
As our population grew, eventually, the biggest threats to our individual well being became 1) scarcity, and 2) other humans.
And so hate and evil were born. Cain killed Abel so he could pilfer Abel’s abundance.
This jealous, spiteful, fearful, violent fragment of our personality, if left unchecked, drives us to take despicable actions.
It will stop at nothing to get what it wants.
Here’s the thing:
It’s a useful mechanism.
This is the well of primal rage that gives a mother the strength to lift a car off her child, or gives a father the courage to charge a bear armed with nothing but a shovel to protect his family.
But it’s also the pit of darkness that drives the worst of us to hunt, torture, and kill our own kind.
This ancient piece of our minds must be controlled, or it will rip civilization apart:
Riots
Wars
Murder
Crime
Abuse
This is what religious scholars refer to as evil.
It’s not some powerful adversary pulling spiritual strings to trick us into doing things we “shouldn’t.”
“Temptation” is internal.
It’s something we do to ourselves with our own minds — a biological decision-making process that’s older than Ego itself.
Older than the first human concept of God.
Here’s the dark truth:
Your mind is capable of terrible things, and it knows it, so your rational mind is in perpetual negotiation with your predatory mind.
This is why sometimes people are horrified by their own actions, or they live in denial of the things they’ve done.
There is a part of themselves they have not integrated. Instead, they’ve locked it away.
But when the “jailer” — the rational mind that resides in the prefrontal cortex — goes to sleep, the wild predator takes control:
In moments of a heightened emotional state (fear, anger, lust)
In moments when the thinking mind has been subdued by intoxicants (drugs, alcohol)
In moments when the thinking mind has been deprived of something essential (oxygen deprivation, starvation, hypothermia)
“The Devil” is a personification of an internal mechanism — the monster that lurks in our own minds.
And the war between good and evil?
It isn’t happening on some other plane.
It’s happening in your mind.
With every decision you make.
And so in your mind is where you must train and fight for virtue — lest your own humanity be consumed by the savage predator caged inside.
“Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.” ―C.G. Jung
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