Is balance between good and evil necessary when seeking spiritual awakening?
Lot of books on spirituality these days claim how it is important to maintain the balance between “good“ and “evil“ side on the path to spiritual awakening. Sometimes an author (who may claim to be a guru, a spiritual being, or even a non-physical entity passing on its message) may appear to be knowledgeable and can also use occult/esoteric terminology, and sometimes they may even say something with deeper meaning or something you could find useful. These bits and pieces of usefulness may mislead a seeker who is looking for depth if they make conclusion about the value of the overall message based on that. Unless of course they have enough of inner experience with esoteric matters that would help them recognize the superficiality. If a person has this ability to discern, then they won’t only notice problems with such statements, but will also feel that the book/message overall is missing depth.
It is very popular these days to believe in the need for balance when it comes to spiritual progress, and the strong purporters of such beliefs point at symbology such as Ying/Yang as their justifications, as well as to nature. It’s true that balance is strongly embedded aspect of our universe, and nature itself can be a great source of inspiration, strength, healing, and even spiritual instructions (some patterns in the trees, waves, plants, etc. in themselves hold a teaching of a higher creational aspect). At the same time though nature is cruel, mechanical, and enslaving, and it keeps all beings under its command, bound to the physical dimension through the robotic subconscious elements which all creatures of the Earth possess.
Spiritual awakening is something else. As spiritual masters and sages have said, when moving towards awakening one is in fact liberating oneself from nature, from the subconscious drives such as lust, pride, anger, fear etc., and that requires a decision to sacrifice these dark aspects for the light to shine in us. You cannot have half the light and half the darkness and expect to achieve spiritual freedom, which is the freedom from Samsara (wheel of life, continuous return to this physical plane), because in order to achieve such freedom one needs to sacrifice the darkness for the light. Thus, if your goal is the complete spiritual awakening, the decision must be made about which of these two you want.
For most people interested in spirituality, the complete awakening is not the goal, or at least on the deeper level they are not interested in it, while on the surface they may have convinced themselves that they are. And then it’s easy to justify oneself with the ever present notion of the “importance to have good and evil side balanced“. Another issue is that people are so unbalanced in favor of the darkness within that it would take years and years of hard work to even reach the real balance. Yet people think that they already have it, and that the only thing they need to do is to meditate, keep calm, and indulge less in the things they know are animalistic. In this way the spiritual work never even starts for most people, because they are too afraid of replacing their dark side with that of light.
The full awakening means to transcend nature, to transcend the emotions, thoughts and desires that keep us chained to this physical reality. By working in that direction we slowly free ourselves from nature’s grip, and then knowledge, wisdom and higher inner states of the Being become our guiding star that pushes us in the direction of the spiritual.
HDP, September 2015.
The whole point of spirituality is to transcend duality. The darkness of the egos and the light of the Being are all managed by only one same thing and may seem incompatible, but in fact, they are not. That’s why in Hinduism the destructive aspect is regarded and not denied. Everybody is on their own journey, in their perfect appointed time. There is no rush or goal to achieve, everything just is. If you think there is a decision to be made then your mind still thinks dualistically. It’s all a paradox, a divine comedy, it’s not one or the other, right or wrong, left or right, ego or the self. That is why in the symbolism of Yin and Yang, there’s is a little circle of yang in yin and a little circle of yin in yang. It is always together and despite having clear polarities it is never separate. Realizing this is true freedom
at the same time I understand what you’re trying to say too.
Thanks for sharing your view on this, There is a difference between the necessary balance in various things in our dimension, the higher ones, and also what comes beyond dimensions. The mindset of “everything just is” is a classic one of some Buddhist branches, but without efforts we would never achieve anything worthwhile when it comes to spiritual development. The egos have their role in the physical existence, but the time comes when they need to be transcended, and that time is different for each individual. Even though major symbols have their uses and deep meanings, such as Yin and Yang that you mentioned, people often used them to justify their own understanding of reality, which could be very different to what original message was/is. To awaken is to transcend both good and evil; to go beyond that symbol of Yin and Yang.