TAPE 5: MEETING EVIL
Lynn: Thinking, feeling, willing, the relationship to the "I am," and
the ideals of truth, beauty and goodness are to be utilized. We need a
new relationship to them.
Ground Zero gave us an extraordinary opportunity to look at the
relationship of the human soul, of the human spirit, to the human
experience...an opportunity to look at life on the entire planet...each of
us as individual human beings...and how we all intend to build our moral
imagination of the future and take responsibility for it.
Lynn: ...then you can begin to explore the relationship to an evil deed.
There are four relationships to an evil deed.
There is the relationship of the one who does the evil deed, the doer of
the evil deed. I refer to that individual as the perpetrator.
Then there's the one to whom the evil deed is done and who I refer to as
the victim. When you look up the definition of victim, most
dictionaries refer to it as the one who was killed. I would like to
suggest that we are victims when an aspect of what we ourselves (or
myself) feel has been killed...that I no longer have access to it.
Something has been maimed, destroyed, pulverized, lost, taken away in
some profound experience.
So we have the perpetrator... and we have the victim. Most people looking
at evil deeds stop at those two relationships...but there are two more.
The first one is the relationship of the witness. The witness is the
one who testifies to what took place. It's very important to witness.
It's very important to be able to recall and bear witness to a deed.
The fourth relationship is the relationship to the uninvolved, the one
who has no relationship to the story, to the drama of the evil deed.
These four relationships, when they are understood, allow each of us as
individuals to move through the experience of each of those four
relationships and come to terms with the evil that, through the deed,
impacted everyone. The responsibility is not to judge but to experience
all four of the roles.
