God and evil

God is in everything, but we have to know that here on earth everything is relative. God is in filthy water, God is in poison, but if we drink it we will die. God is in everything, but God has also given us wisdom. We have to use our brain, our own conscious judgement.

In the field of evolution, everything is proceeding towards a better, more fulfilling and more illumining existence. We started our evolutionary journey with limited knowledge. God was at one time inside our mineral life, plant life and our animal life. He is now in our human life. And when we lead a divine life, He will be there too. We are in the process of evolution, marching and running towards the highest Truth. When we were animals, at that time we used to kill and destroy, we used to do many wrong things. But according to the animal standard, we were perfect because the very nature of animals is to destroy. God was at that time in us, but now as human beings we are trying to lead better lives. We feel that evil has more than played its role in our past. This so-called evil was necessary for a particular period, but now we feel the time has come to transcend our animal nature We are moving away from ignorance and entering into wisdom. God was in that very ignorance and now God is acting through our evolving wisdom, our knowledge. God is above evil and good.

From the spiritual point of view, there is no such thing as evil. What we call evil is actually error. In our strict Indian philosophy, we do not use the term evil; we call it bondage or error. This error can be a pathfinder. When we get a little more knowledge in comparison to our old standard, we discard our former understanding as evil or ignorance. Let us say we get a thorn in our foot. We feel that this thorn is evil, but we need another thorn in order to remove the first thorn. Then we discard both thorns.

Once error starts its journey, it makes mistakes right and left like a mad elephant running amuck. But this elephant will one day calm down. Today what we call error, tomorrow that very thing we can transform on the strength of our own inner urge to see and grow into something more perfect, more divine.

From the strict spiritual point of view there is no evil, only experiences, limited experiences, the experiences that bind us. Now we are trying to transcend these experiences and have only divine, liberating experiences, experiences that expand and enlarge our consciousness. We are in the process of inner evolution: we are growing out of desire and entering into aspiration. When we go beyond the barriers of desire and enter into the domain of aspiration, we see that God is in everything and, at the same time, He is beyond both good and evil.