Saturday, February 24, 2007

The nessecity to depict evil..

I know this one is going to sound too philosopical but could not help coming to this conclusion. I have seen a lot of english movies involving paranormal events.. like Constatine etc. The lastest in this 'series' is the movie Ghost Rider. The movie is fantastic with amazing special effects and stuff. The plot is absolutely shit. A total dharmendra movie. The common point in all such movies and indeed many action movies is to show the presence of evil. And in the end evil is the one side which has to loose. Take Ghost Rider.. the rider in this case is shown to be a horrific creature ( a flaming skull is hardly attractive ) but still fights on the side of 'good' does all the things a hero does.. you know, save the innocents and stuff like that. Since these movies come from the west I guess they are based mostly on the christian philosophy. Evil is always personified as an external agent. It is powerful and can only be overcome by:Love, Self-Sacrifice,Faith and other such qualities. To me this is an extremely elaborate way of refusing to accept the fact that whatever one calls 'evil' is extremely subjective and that oneself is responsible for it. Come to think of it greed, lust, survival etc. are all natrual tendencies, but are termed as evil. I am not saying they should not be, all i am saying is 'good' is transcending these qualities which occur natrually due to instinct. Then the question is why is it so hard to accept that we are responsible for our actions and that good and evil cannot be defined objectively ? Good and evil are just opposites of each other whatever they may contain and they are not external agents. Just saying keeping faith will destroy evil is utter stupidity.. since there is no evil out there trying to get you. If there is no evil out there, keeping the faith in the opposite of evil which is also out there is meaningless !! Faith is a wonderful thing don't get me wrong, but faith should be kept for better reasons than defeating evil !!
If one can accept that good and evil are not two absolutes but are both inside the human head.. then one can be a much more rational person who can appreciate life. This does not need a lot intellect, it just needs common sense and honesty enough to test this hypothesis.
So i say it is nessecary to depict evil and to show that it loses because of this inability of the western people. In the hindu yogic tradition there is no such thing as evil. In the indian religon(s) evil is not personified. Of course we have demons and ghosts an ghouls, but they are not the equivalent of satan. They are other beings just like humans and gods. None of them rules existence. The whole point of this regligion is to get one to transcend one's mind and not to play around with games like who has more souls.. god or the devil.

1 comment:

BAIN said...

Reading this reminds me of a piece i heard about "Reki" (is it spelled that way??) a practice of healing people through faith and blah blah....

The author (quite respected in Reki circles) had actually stated that any injury or health problem constitutes a _negative_ energy and we must be conduits of channeling _positive_ energy to that person in pain.

Apart from a good laughter any physicist will have by reading about concept of "polarized energy" , there is big mistake here, +ve and -ve are _just__notations_; They don't mean anything other than being opposite of each other.

I guess thats what core concept of your post is.

BTW: That sealed the deal for me about reki being just one more faith fraud.

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just your regular guy who dreams too much. i read a lot don't remember it all though.. swim, trek, yoga.. think and read more.. that about sums it up..