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CHAPTER 8:

Seeing No Evil

The solid, solid universe
Is pervious to love;
With bandaged eyes he never errs,
Around, below, above.
His blinding light
He flingeth white
On God’s and Satan’s brood,
And reconciles
By mystic wiles
The evil and the good.”
— Emerson.

“If thou thinkest evil, be thou sure
Thine acts will bear the shadow of the stain;
And if they thought be perfect, then thy deed
Will be as of the perfect, true, and pure.”
— After Confucius.

After much practice in forgiveness and having cultivated the spirit of forgiveness up to a certain
point, knowledge of the actual nature of good and evil dawns upon the mind, and a man begins to
understand how thoughts and motives are formed in the human heart, how they develop, and how
take birth in the form of actions. This marks the opening of a new vision in the mind, the

commencement of a nobler, higher, diviner life; for the man now begins to perceive that there is
no necessity to resist or resent the actions of others towards him, whatever those actions may be,
and that all along his resentment has been caused by his own ignorance, and that his own
bitterness of spirit is wrong. Having arrived thus far he will take himself with some such
questionings as these: “Why this continual retaliation and forgiveness? Why this tormenting anger
against another and then this repentance and forgiveness? Is not forgiveness the taking back of
one’s anger, the giving up of one’s resentment; and if anger and resentment are good and
necessary why repent of them and give them up? If it is so beautiful, so sweet, so peaceful to get
rid of all feelings of bitterness and to utterly and wholly forgive, would it not be still more
beautiful and sweet and peaceful never to grow bitter at all, never to know anger, never to resent
as evil the action of another, but always to live in the experience of that pure, calm, blissful love
which is known when an act of forgiveness is done, and all unruly passion towards another is put
away? If another has done me wrong is not my hatred towards him wrong, and can one wrong
right another? Moreover, has he by his wrong really injured me, or has he injured himself? Am I
not injured by my own wrong rather than by his? Why, then, do I grow angry? Why do I resent,