Aquainted with Evil - Innocence Lost

As a people, have we changed at all? Have we evolved at all? To loosely quote from one of Castaneda's books; "If you think you've changed a little, you haven't changed at all."
When I think back . . . back centuries . . . back millennia . . . I have little hope left. Little hope for all of us, for mankind as a whole, and for me who is a part of this whole.


For as far back as we can collectively remember through historical writings, art, stories . . . from the beginning of our existence we have continued to make the same ill-fated errors in judgment over and over again. To our detriment, we have continued to be the same 'people' we have always been, regardless of the difficult life-lessons we have experienced, the pain, the sorrow and the obvious karmic outcomes of our doings.

Since our beginning, we have engaged ourselves in wars, religious and political conflicts, prejudices, social hierarchies, poverty, rape, pillaging, addictions, greed, sexual exploitations, immoral and unethical behaviors, ignorance, denial and indifference causing us to be uninvolved.

Sure, we can argue that there also exists 'good' people: generous, caring, concerned, involved . . . just as there has always been.

WE HAVE NOT CHANGED. And that is fact.

A few days ago, the body of a young girl, Emily Sander - just eighteen years young - was found. She was a college student. She had her whole life ahead of her. She needed extra money. She found a popular-by-demand side job in the dark world of pornography; a world that would not exist if we were truly an evolving species. But, unfortunately, pornography does exist (as it always has) and it is raping us, especially our children, of the gift of innocence. It is an ever-growing business and our appetite has become insatiable. Pornography, for one, is destroying the fabric of mankind. I know from my own personal experience and the experiences of friends around me.

And then there is the recent news story of the eight-day old infant girl - sexually abused and murdered by her twenty-eight year old father. We can say, "He is a sick @*%&, " but the questions of "How could he . . . ?" or "Why did he?" should really be a question of "What happened to him that he, one of our own, became so filled with darkness and evil that he would ever have thoughts like that in his mind - thoughts that would lead him to do something so cruel, horrible and ungodly?"

The news continues to report the horrific stories perpetrated by mankind - stories we do not want to hear about, but must know about if we are to fully understand the crisis we are facing in this world.

All I can say, with much sadness and despair in my heart, is GOD HELP US ALL.

December 23, 2012 is quickly approaching. While I'm not a 'doomsdayer' by nature - I am actually an incurable romantic and optimist - I don't know where else we can go, what else we can do . . . except PRAY and clean our own minds and hearts of the trash and toxins that have accumulated within us by means of our mere existence and co-inhabitance among our fellow man in the outskirts of the garden.












Thomas Cole. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (detail). c.1827-1828. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA.