“The Kingdom of Heaven is similar to a fishing net, which was launched into the sea and caught beings of all kinds. When it was full, the men pulled it to the beach and collected the most developed (good) and left the immature (bad) ones behind. So, shall it be in the consummation of the times: the messengers shall go forth, and shall separate the wicked from among the righteous, and cast them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” ... for there will be a final separation between the wicked and the righteous.
But after all, who is good and who is bad?
If there were no radical difference between good and evil, there could be no eternal life for some and eternal death for others, for each man's ultimate destiny is the result of his free will.
Certain spiritualist groups declare good those who observe certain canons established by these groups and consider bad those who do not obey these rules. This criterion, however, is very relative and changeable, and cannot affect the ultimate destiny of the human being.
Others consider good ones who do good to their fellow men, and evil to others. But this is a criterion which also does not represent the essence of the human being. We can do good to others without being good ourselves. We may even do good for vanity, ostentation, selfishness, and other reasons unrelated to the true being good.
Many are beneficent, not for the negative reasons identified above, but for positive reasons; and identify doing good with being good.
However, strange as it may seem, mere external acts or facts do not necessarily represent internal values; they are neutral things in themselves; no act or fact is intrinsically good or bad. What gives them value or not is an internal attitude created by the free will of man. It is only the reality of Being that determines the character of Acting. It is this inner attitude of Being that can be good or bad. Acting is an overflow of Being.
The Being is from the central Self, the Acting is from the peripheral ego, of the tyrannical ego.
Being is the Essence or Source, Acting is Existence or Channel.
In this sense, Jesus said, "The good tree bears good fruit, the bad tree bears bad fruit; it is by the fruits that the tree is known." But his words have only a symbolic meaning, for in Nature there can be no distinction between good and bad because they all have a reason to exist ... all nonhuman beings play the role assigned to them by the Creator. Jesus, therefore, refers to the character of the human being.
From the inner attitude of being good come outward acts of doing good, acts which in this case are ethically good, not just morally praiseworthy. Although common language identifies ethics with morals, they are distinct concepts.
Acts are ethically good when they are the spontaneous overflow of a truly good attitude - and this attitude corresponds to harmony between individual consciousness and Universal Consciousness, which may be called God or Divinity. On the other hand, evil is an act that arises from an evil reaction, that is, from the disharmony of individual consciousness with Universal Consciousness.
Outwardly beneficial acts are compatible with an internally bad or otherwise neutral reaction. These beneficial acts do not necessarily prove the good being of its author. Not all externally moral acts are internally ethical. Attitude determines acts - but acts do not determine attitude.
Albert Einstein, that great scientist-mystic, visionary, humanist and universal, stated that: “The discovery of the laws of Nature by science can make man erudite, but it does not make a man good. A good man is one who realizes the values that are within his conscience because from the world of facts, which is science, does not lead any way to the world of values, which is conscience. Facts do not produce values, because values come from another region.” A fact is an act, value is attitude. Value or attitude is the creation of free will. Where there is no free will there is no value or attitude.
External acts, beneficial, without an internal, good attitude, may be moral, but they are not ethical. Ethics is an overflow of mystique, and mystique represents the harmony of human consciousness with divine consciousness. An internally evil man, out of harmony with God, can be externally a benefactor of humanity.
Morality does not prove mystique, but mystique reveals itself in ethics. Morality is an artificial arrangement from ego to ego, but ethics is a natural and irresistible overflow of the mystique, the inner fullness of the Self, just as the fruit is the manifestation of the vitality of the tree. An orange not born of the orange tree is an artificial, fictitious orange, a pseudo-orange (morality); only an orange born from the orange tree is a true orange (ethics). No man, with all his science and technique, can produce a true orange; only the orange tree (mystique) can produce the real fruit from within its soul, of Life, and Life is God.
Mystique is being good.
Ethics is doing good, born of being good.
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