"AU"schwitz-Birken"AU"
Retreat - November 2003_11_3-10
Coping with Evil

2003_11_17; updated on 2009_01_15 , re-edited on 2012-03-27-30
I am adding the background of "Finetuning" as used throughout the year of K.i.s.s.-log 2008

This morning - playing as I do twice a day like a coiling dolphin in the pool -
I found an encouraging analogy:

The four little ones came back with me
from our Wednesday 4 o'clock- sunset thermos-tea on the "Titorah".
This is a blood-soaked hill, famous since the Maccabeans,
infamous since that evildoer Bar-Kokhba, pitiable since the crusaders.
Arnon - age seven - suddenly told me:
"So far I understood that numbers from 1-10-1000-1 000 000 are infinite.
Now I see, that also the minus-numbers are infinite."
"That's right, but how do you know about 'minus' ?" I asked surprised.
"Oh, I've known about it for quite some time.
I once asked Abba, if there are numbers under 1,
and he told me about the numbers with the minus-sign before them."

As to coping with EVIL - I believe, that I now know the numbers.
But I don't know yet to put 2 and 2 together,
leave alone handle Einstein's Equation.


Using the concept of time, the God of www.Godchannel.com ,
who is "an evolving God"
claims to be finally able to differentiate between three aspects of evil,
two [metaphors: Lucifer and Ahriman] can be healed and one
[metaphor: The Asuras] cannot.
But all three can only effect us
because of the denial of part of the Self.


So what I'm trying to clarify and sculpt here,
are only the basic conditions for the attraction of EVIL,
and these have to do with the DENIAL of FEELINGS,
i.e. with the DENIAL of parts of SELF.

Since the age of six I was desperately trying to be "good".
"Objectively" I became better and better in being "good",
but I internalized my mother's blaming of how bad I was.


At the age of 31, I read a book, which turned the tables on that aspiration:
Erich Neumann (a pupil of C.G.Jung): Depth Psychology and New Ethics.
(I mention him often, for instance in puzzle piece 17 and on Yom Kippur 2008)
A German immigrant to Palestine he had written it
in the shadow of AUschwitz in the beginning of 1945,
when he could not have known the dimensions of the EVIL
committed there.
"New Ethics" means:
not "to be good", but to be "whole".
If we do not take responsibility for our shadow,
it will raise its head "out there" away from our control.
And he quoted the famous Rabbi Nachman of Brezlav:
"Not : Love thy fellow [re'ekha] as yourself" [Bible,Leviticus 19:18],
but "Love thy evil [ra'akha] as yourself."

I felt, as if the book had pulled the carpet from under my feet.
I started to drown.
And there was no one except Yanina to whom I could even talk to.
Neumann tried to explain, how this wholeness could be achieved,
but I couldn't grasp it then.


It took 8 years more,
until I started to learn about feelings and how to cope with them.
It started with the theory and the techniques of Reevaluation Counseling.

I now differentiate between being 'evil', 'wicked' and 'bad'.

Having observed myself for 60 years,
I find nothing in me that would deserve the term "evil".
But I do find a "wicked" "trait", only one, but it's wicked enough:
I unwittingly enjoy making people feel guilty.
I don't mean open, direct blaming.
I mean surreptitious, "smiling" blaming,
which often can't be even traced or pinpointed by the blamed.
It's even worse than the famous guilt-induction of so many mothers
and one of my mother's favorite proverbs:
"A mother does everything for her seven children.
But seven children cannot do one thing for their mother."

What is teaching about this wickedness,
that it is clearly not a "trait", but a "pattern", i.e. a defense mechanism.
I have been hurt over and over and over again (like everyone else...)
and have not healed this hurt,
have not breathed, sounded and physically moved it.


There is a simple rule:
Whatever painful emotion is not voiced through the mouth,
escapes as fart through the ass,
when I have no control over it.
These stinking farts can be more dangerous
than direct explosions (- also the result of unhealed pain),
because the person who receives the stench
often isn't even aware
of what has been directed against him/her
or doesn't feel justified in reacting
because of the subtlety of the blame.

As to "being bad", I have come a long way in understanding,
that this is not me,
but a projection of a hole in the wholeness of the other person.
But I am responsible for coping with the suffering
that results from such a projection.

In the beginning of our marriage
I once overheard my husband say to someone:
"There is nothing worse than living with a person, who is only good."
And to me he once said:
"Why is it always me who turns out to be the bad one?"

My learning between Erich Neumann and Reevaluation Counseling
let me see,
how I was NOT taking responsibility for my shadow.
Talking in terms of electricity:
the stronger I loaded the plus-pole
the stronger became the minus-pole.
When I finally understood this,
I gathered my children, explained
how wrong my path had been all those years and told them:
"You so often have seen your father yell at me,
even throw things at me or you,
and I, what have I been doing? I have cried. That was all.
You'll now experience more yelling, because I'm going to yell back.
But understand, that this is a way - one way only -
to take responsibility for balancing our relationship."


But it was too late.
If I had been "bad" before in my husband's eyes,
now I became the most abominal devil ever invented.

I could have lived with this, if he could have lived with it.
But his self-respect deteriorated from day to day,
and the less he loved himself, the more he humiliated me.
And the more he humiliated me, the more he hated himself.


That was the opposite
of what my love had intended to achieve.
Love does NOT overcome everything ,
as I had wanted to believe...
It was for love's sake that I finally parted...

This has occurred 23 years ago,
and still I'm creating so much shadow outside of me,
so much hostility against me, such horrifying judgments.
I want people to feel good about themselves,
I want them to love themselves in my presence.
The opposite happens, because the kind of mirror I am for them:
someone who fulfils her dreams, while they don't, for instance....

This is my ongoing failure so far,
but this has nothing to do with being "bad".
It has to do with being not yet healed and whole,
of attracting the reflection of the greatness I deny, for instance...

I hope, I am now able to take a more exact look
at the EVIL of AUschwitz-BirkenAU.

There is no clearcut line between my badness (in the eyes of other people),
my wickedness (my defense-patterns)
and "Evil".

Nor is it helpful to repeat the general statement,
that "the perpetrator is within each of us",
as I heard often during the retreat.
It is true, but so what?

2003_11_17

I am inserting an Hebrew article, which appeared in last weekend's edition (2003_11_21) of the Israeli newspaper "Ha-aretz".
Ruth brought it to the post-retreat of the ten Israeli participants
in the Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat.
The confession of a soldier
4 years after his 3 years' service in Gaza,
mostly at checkpoints - proves my point.

A judgmental approach will not be useful.
The question - as towards AUschwitz-BirkenAU - has to be:

How am I
- by resisting, ignoring, denying, deadening
my own feelings -
participating in the perpetration of the "evil-doers".

[See now - on Oct.26-27, 2009, the quote from "As above, so below"]

It is not that those soldiers are different from other people.
The difference is, that they were placed in a situation,
where they were allowed to compensate
for their denied-deadened feelings
by inventing "kicks",
the kicks of torturing and humiliating human beings,
who - in turn - had deadened their feelings so much,
that they had no strength etc. to not attract the perpetration.
(This is a really bad phrasing, and I am ashamed, but I cannot skip this aspect.)

Does this truth help me
to truly take responsibility
for balancing between the plus and the minus in myself,
for truly "walking to-and-fro with God"?
No! the very next moment I'll judge someone as "bad",
for instance, the terrorists or even the Palestinians altogether,
or the Sharon-Government or even the Israelis and the Jews altogether,
or I'll be hurt by being judged as "bad" by someone else.

Marian's medieval images of Evil
are his way of coping with experiences,
which none of us, who were not there,
can imagine or identify with.
We are therefore not allowed to adopt these images.
We are called to cope with the one reality
which is common to all humans,
be they victims or victimizers,
be they the generation of the holocaust
or the generation of 2003 or of 2012:
the denial of Emotion and Body
in favor of the focus on Mind and Spirit.

The question that I always have been asking,
I never heard someone else ask:
If the Nazis took their "Final Solution" seriously -
why didn't they kill everyone in the gas-chambers right away,
once this method had been developed efficiently?


The answer, that they needed people to work for them, is stupid, to say the least.
Like Pater Staniswov in Harmeze said to me:
"People, who are needed for work, must be fed and kept in good shape."
But the purpose was not the need to get slaves.
The purpose was the need to torture.
And why was there the need to torture?

Simply, because this was the only way,
the deadened feelings could get "a kick" for a moment.

Again, this is not so far away from what people do,
who seek out movies of action and horror.

Their living is lifeless,
for their feelings are are dead.
No one taught them,
how to vibrate feelings physically,
no one trained them to move emotions,
to breathe and sound and move
pain, shame and fear,
humilation, boredom and powerlessness.
That's why they couldn't bear their feelings,
so they killed their feelings,
so they need their kicks.