Darkness and evil have been a focus of mine most of my life.  For the first few decades I saw it “out there” only and then began seeing and experiencing its presence in the deepest parts of my soul.  This is not to say that I became “evil” as such at any time, but I began to realize that the “shadow” of Carl Jung was present with us all, including even in our most pious ambitions and behaviors.  I’ve lived long enough now to see this abysmal ugliness come to the fore in my country in a most egregious form where standards of moral and spiritual propriety are routinely scoffed at, disrespect for our fellow humankind is rampant, and organized religion exists often only in a bastardized form. 

A friend sent me only yesterday a link to a 19^th century evangelical Scottish pastor, George MacDonald, who was also a writer of fantasy literature.  I was immediately intrigued with him, looked up his Wiki-quotes, and found the following, “A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”  It made me think of earlier days in my life, and in tendencies I still have, and in certain dimensions of our country’s political leadership.  Recognizing this “beastliness” of our nature is often addressed in spiritual traditions under the rubric of “sin.”  But MacDonald recognized that the closer one has devolved into beastliness, the least likely is he to acknowledge this to himself or others even with a simple note like, “I was wrong.”  The beast cannot acknowledge any fault because he is driven only by his appetites without any filtering by self-reflection.  He knows only what his appetites compel him toward.