The Dark Side: An Introduction

At this point in human history it is vital that we consider the nature of evil. Naturally enough this is something that few people really want to do. Sure, there are plenty of us who are happy to discuss the matter, so long as the culprits are kept very much over there. I mean, after all, isn’t evil the thing that is perpetuated by psychologically damaged childhood traumatised monsters, while the rest of us are left to suffer at the hands of such people?

Well, no. This is not how it is at all. Evil lives much closer than you think, and it accompanies you wherever you go. It manages this not because of it has some extra special magical ability. It is always with you, because it is you. Yes, you read that right. You are evil. And so am I.

All humans are evil, because humans are dual beings, composed of a machine we might call the Body-Mind-Feelings, which uneasily co-exists with the real self, the Soul.

The Soul, the part of us that lives forever, has no fear, cannot feel pain and does not die. The Soul, because it originates from somewhere outside space and time, is not worried by any of the things that the Body-Mind-Feelings occupies itself with. The Soul is not concerned about money, looks, or whether it is liked or disliked. It doesn’t get tired and it doesn’t get downhearted. The Body-Mind-Feelings on the other hand experiences all these anxieties. While the Soul is naturally strong, the Body-Mind-Feelings are inherently weak.

The Body-Mind-Feelings lives in a world governed by entropy. Entropy is a scientific term which relates to the process described by Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. Don’t worry, we aren’t getting technical, this is easy. Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics simply state that everything falls apart, and the more you put things together the more they fall apart. Entropy states that over the long term everything degrades, collapses, wears out and breaks down. This is why you can buy a toaster and then need to buy another one three years later, the day after the warranty runs out. This is why you cannot find a peaceful happy state of mind and remain there, indefinitely, because something in the world will happen to disturb that state. And this is also why, at least in the physical body, you cannot live forever.

In this world of entropy things are forever going wrong. Well, I say wrong, but the reality is that things are behaving exactly as they always have, that is to say, they wear out, break down and decay. This is the world that the Body-Mind-Feelings inhabits, a world that did not start to decay with the advent of capitalism or global warming, but a world that has been decaying forever.

This is the background against which humans try to conduct their lives, and one of the major coping mechanisms that we have come up with is to deny this reality. Rather than seeing things as they really are we prefer to believe the opposite. Instead of the reality of decay all around us we continually assert that all is progress and improvement. Redevelopment of the local High Street with new pedestrian and cycling areas is deemed as progress, conveniently ignoring the fact that in twenty years time what is new today will look shabby and worn out and will need ‘improving’ once more. We score temporary, short-lived victories against entropy but are destined always to lose the war.

Entropy plays a long game, while our Body-Mind-Feelings are lost in fascination with what’s happening today. So, the Body-Mind-Feelings can easily convince itself that society is somehow improving and progressing because the Body-Mind-Feelings has no long-term memory. The Soul does remember however, and it knows that the only thing we learn from history is that we fail to learn from history.

It is often said that humans are social creatures. Well certainly the Body-Mind-Feelings part of us is social, because by itself it is incomplete. However, by seeking relations with other Body-Mind-Feelings it is looking in the wrong place. Its real companion, its Soul, is close by, but for some reason, the Body-Mind-Feelings more often than not rejects the Soul, preferring to seek union outside itself. This is why the quest for love is so often doomed. We are looking for love in the wrong place, on the outside.

This desire, this urge to unite with others is both the joy and ruin of human life. The Body-Mind-Feelings does not really know what to do; it needs guidance. This is what the Soul is for, to provide that guidance, but by turning away from its Soul the Body-Mind-Feelings must obtain that guidance from elsewhere. The only place it can then turn is to other Body-Mind-Feelings humans, whereon you have a situation with the blind literally leading the blind. This is human society where the one-eyed man is King and where evil is born, among all the people who are disconnected from their Soul.

Without the presence of the Soul no one knows what is right for them, still less what is right for others. Yet everywhere on earth the human race stumbles around, the blind leading the blind. Experts, who can’t even be consistent within their own field, let alone say anything that makes sense in a wider context, pontificate all day long about what other people should do, while having no intention of following their own advice. Yet in the absence of anything else we defer to them. All the while the Soul is desperately trying to get a look in, but with little success. Through this process evil is seeded and then grows.

Arthur’s Teachings on the Nature of the Dark Side

My late teacher Arthur very much believed that there was only one evil in the world, and that was men. This is the only part of his teachings that I never pushed hard out into the world, and on the one occasion that I did, at a gathering of truth seekers in Birmingham in 2010 I thought I might be lynched. But it wasn’t that experience, or my inherent existence as a man, which caused me to doubt the evil of the male. On the contrary in fact, my life has delivered many instances of male cruelty and female kindness. I had witnessed throughout my education and working life a million instances of how women and men behaved differently and how men’s behaviour, particularly within groups, was often flat out destructive. Indeed, if I am honest, I had taken part in that. I knew the evil that men did, and I maintain – though I know this comment will not be welcomed – that most women have zero clue what men do, say and think when women are not around.

However, Arthur also spoke of everyone – men, women and children - having a Dark Side, a force which resides inside them and conspires to turn them away from the Light. From the Works of Arthur Norris Volume One, published in 2012 but written by him in the early 90’s.

“Men and women both do evil, but the male dark side is more unbalanced physically and emotionally than the female. Men relish destruction and conflict. They want it. They seek it. Who invented the spear and what is it for? Look at a daily newspaper or watch the TV news and just see for yourself. High profile incidents of female crimes are just exceptions to the rule and are as nothing to the daily abuses perpetuated by men. Who invented the gun and what is it for? The obvious is always true. Every single evil activity can be traced back to the actions of a man or more likely, a group of men. Who runs all religions? Who are the bankers and politicians?

 The answer to all these questions is men. The perpetrators of evil deeds are almost exclusively men.

Truth does exist and the male has a long-standing and serious objection to truth. He wants to hide it because it will always have a negative effect on him and expose him for what he really is. Women always hinder male ambitions.

 Male greed is the source of all the evil in the world. Greed for money, power, sex and control. But God is sorting this out. Power is being taken away from the male and being given to the female. The closed mind and bigotry of the male has proved to be too destructive, and we are headed toward a world where power and authority will be shared 50-50.

 And for the sake of balance, women are not perfect either. Jealousy, possessiveness, a wilful ignorance of the evil of the male and a failure to step up and take responsibility for their lives are defining characteristics of the female Dark Side. But nonetheless, if your life is cut short ahead of its natural time, the overwhelming likelihood is that it will be at the hand of a man.”

 To fully understand what Arthur was saying here it is important to put it in the context of the world in which he lived. Born in 1933, Arthur grew up in a stereotypical English working-class family, where the beer was warm and flat, the food was awful and the weather grim. Men did their National Service and women stayed home and looked after the house and children. By the time he was 40 (1973) he had a family, a job, a house and was trying to live some kind of useful life in a post-industrial Britain wracked by strikes, power cuts and general social decay. Even when you see documentaries or dramas about this era, I don’t think they capture the full extent of the depressing hopelessness of those times. I was born in 1972 and remember the tail end of this. Difficulties in Britain didn’t start with Margaret Thatcher, in fact she was merely a response to the problems that had been festering for decades. Anyway, it was this Britain that formed his theories. This was a Britain where women would come to see him, privately and sometimes secretly, for Tarot readings, and where the source of misery in almost every household was a drunken, boorish or over-bearing father, brother or husband. While men would resist spiritual development, women seemed to lap it up. Men would go to the pub, or working men’s club, spend their meagre wages on getting drunk, and probably act appallingly when they got home to their family. Though this may not have been the universal truth it was the reality for an awful lot of people. I grew up in a house like this, Arthur lived in a society like this, and he identified men as the cause of it all.

Developing Arthur’s Teachings in Light of Recent Events

One of the key predictions which Arthur got right was how men would have power taken from them. He thought this was a good thing, and he believed that this would usher in a new era of peace and fairness. But he failed to foresee – or maybe did not want to know – that change might simply mean that it would be women, not men, who behaved badly, how women and no longer men, would perpetrate unfairness and how women would set up systems to benefit themselves at the expense of men, just like in the old days, how men set up systems to benefit themselves at the expense of women.

Of course, people who benefit from a system are the ones least likely to criticise it or see its failings. So you would have a hard time assembling many women now who think that the justice system or education system discriminates against men and boys, just as you would have not found many men, fifty years ago, who felt that the justice system discriminated against women and girls. But it did then, and it does now.

Another one of Arthurs key observations was that every woman, in a relationship with a man, is actually in a relationship with two men. There is the man who spends time alone with her, and then there is the man who spends time with his mates or at his club. These two men are wildly different characters, and if most women saw their man in action with his mates or at his club they would run a mile. And this cuts to the core of where, I think, Arthur went wrong.

There is no doubt about it, and you don’t have to look very far to see, that as women have stepped into more and more positions of authority and power things have not got better for everyone. Sure, things have got better for the women concerned, for the women invested – emotionally, financially or otherwise – in this power shift, and maybe they have got better for the men adjacent to them, so long as they agree with the new rules. But objectively, for everyone, while there has been change there has certainly not been improvement. Back in the day, in a grotty old London tube station at midnight you might be unlucky enough to be beaten up by a group of male skinheads. Now you might suffer the same fate at the hands of a bunch of women, out of their minds on drink and drugs. The unfairness is no different, it just emanates from a different place.

This is because it is not just men who are evil. It is humans. Men, women and children alike are dual, split, comprised of the Body-Mind-Feelings which seeks to dominate and destroy, and Soul which seeks to enact its divine purpose on Earth. The defining factor as to which gets the upper hand – the Body-Mind-Feelings or the Soul – is determined by who the Body-Mind-Feelings partners with. When it partners with the Soul then the human being may become complete and whole, less likely to seek redress and solutions outside of itself. But when the Soul is disregarded and ignored, as it increasingly is, then the Body-Mind-Feelings can only pair up with other Body-Mind-Feelings in groups, clubs, parties and associations. And it is these organisations, regardless of their gender composition, where the trouble starts.

The overwhelming majority of people – if led by their Body-Mind-Feelings - will never be able to do the right thing, either for themselves or others. Only when they are run by their Soul does right action become possible. But today the Soul is eschewed in favour of the group. Group identities and group actions are now what people worship, yet they are also the main ways in which evil is now facilitated and empowered in our world.

People go mad in crowds, and only later on, individually, do they come to their senses.

Contrary to popular belief there is no such thing as the collective, or society. These things do not exist except as abstractions of groups of individuals. Everyone is unique, what works for one will never work for another. ‘We’ cannot do anything meaningful at all, though we can, and do, frequently kid ourselves otherwise. It is only through individual agency – actions of the Divine ‘I’ – that improvement can ever occur and entropy be slowed. This is what being Soul Strong is all about, finding the internal courage and fortitude to find out what you must do, and to do it, regardless of what others think or say.

Of course, the ‘I’ that I am talking about must be an enlightened ‘I’ not a selfish ‘I’. This ‘I’, because it is unique, is always being guided on its own course, for that is the way it can best help others. Whenever there are enough Divine ‘I’s in one place then they can easily self-organise, without conflict or competition, quickly finding their right place in the world. Contrary to the ‘we’ narrative, the Divine ‘I’ is not uncaring, it is simply focussed on putting its lifebelt on first, and knows that the problems experienced by unique human beings mostly require unique solutions.

In reality of course this is not the world we live in. The world today is a battleground between those who identify with the lower selfish ‘I’ and those who believe in the power of ‘we.’ Individualism versus collectivism, you might say. But ultimately these factions must wipe each other out because both of them are disconnected from God and the Soul.

Hyper individualists, of the lower, selfish kind, care about nothing but their own gratification, and are happy to let dog eat dog. But collectivists, worshippers of the ‘we’ are no better. Their supposed concern for others is actually a denial of self, and the methods they use, things like socialism and communism are proven to re-distribute only misery and suffering. Both factions are distant from God, and each person will choose their preferred enemy. But in these times the most serious threat comes from the collectivists, who seek to replace spiritual encounters with science, and God with government.

Now, at this point someone might say hang on a minute, we know who the evil ones really are, it’s not the conservatives, the individualists, the collectivists or the leftists. It’s the Illuminati and the World Economic Forum. Except that I don’t think that is a deep enough analysis.

Lower individualists (those who promote the cult of selfishness), collectivists (those in thrall to the cult of the ‘we’) together with corporatists (members of the World Economic Forum), academic and scientific elites (woke university lecturers and Big Tech proponents of censorship) together with many well-meaning spiritual folk are all locked together in an unholy anti-God, anti-Soul alliance. Instead of believing in God they believe in progress.

All these people, and more, believe that humanity and the world can be made better. They may disagree about the best means by which this can be achieved; leftists may say that everything gets better by greater equity and diversity, low individualists might believe that competition is what improves things, but they both believe that the condition of the human race can be made better by the human race. And that is a fatal conceit.

Humanity is the cause of all the problems on Planet Earth. Racism, capitalism, patriarchy or whatever other culprit you want to identify are all results of something deeper. They are all products of humanity’s disconnection from God and the Soul.

At this point someone else will say that religion is the problem, and in some ways this is a justified claim, because for centuries the church was the very last place to look if you wanted an understanding of either God or the Soul. But religion itself is a product our disconnection from God and the Soul, not the cause of it.

The proof of this analysis is unfolding right before our eyes in the world today. Humanity is less religious than it has ever been, more progressive, more equitable, more diverse than ever, and yet the problems of the world are greater than ever. Humanity is guilty, because we have rejected our birth right. We are, in truth, divine beings, living temples to God. But we don’t act like it. It doesn’t matter if we move in packs or if we are lone wolves, without God and the Soul we are simply animals, creating life one minute and destroying it the next. There is more to life than this, and through the work of the Hermitage Hub I hope you will be able to see it.