[Luminous]

Humble Janitor, thank you for this thread. This whole thing has been on my mind for years. For what it's worth, here's my take.

We do live in a world of duality/polarity, and the great majority of us experience it (historically) within the limits of our five senses. We're starting to expand that, however.

I do believe that the source from which we came is neutral, and there good and evil do not exist fundamentally. What we see as evil in the world, though it causes great destruction, only arises to test us, challenge the assumptions we make about what we are.

Let's look at Hitler as an example, though this theory can be applied to any evil issue: serial killers, child abuse, even poverty, and on and on.

From the U.S. point of view, we were only 60 years past the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves when the Third Reich came to power. The South was still quite bitter about their loss, and African Americans were still treated in this country as something less than human. In Europe (and correct me here if I'm wrong), there was already a long-seated mistrust of the Jews, an old undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Otherwise, how could the Third Reich's desire for a "perfect race" latch so completely onto the genocide of the Jews as the correct path to take to that end?

So (bear with me a moment) at the time of the Third Reich and Hitler, there was already a strong undercurrent of racism in both the U.S. and Europe, and probably other places in the world, too. Hitler spoke to that general xenophobia and was accepted in Germany as a messiah.

And the U.S. didn't join the effort to take him down right away. I believe one of the reasons for that was because our own racism/xenophobia was running so deep at the time.

So we have this strong, unquestioned current of hatred for those not like us flowing in the psyche of society at that time. Hitler, though responsible for his own actions just as all the rest of us are, could never have risen to that magnitude of power without such a strong current.

He brought that current of racism to a head, leaving horrible destruction in his wake. We were obligated to come to the collective point of having to face that racism inside ourselves, and then having to make a decision how to deal with it.

I would like to make the suggestion that at that point in time, because we were blind to that hatred within us and what it could cause, Hitler served the dark purpose of WAKING US UP.

If we as a world hadn't gone through that, I'm not sure the Civil Rights movement of the '60s in the U.S, or the end of Apartheid in South Africa would have occurred in the same way they did.

Don't get me wrong. I know we still have billions of miles to go before we achieve true equality in this world. And I absolutely disagree with everything Hitler was in every way. But without the horror he caused, I feel we would still be asleep on that issue.

Was he necessary? He didn't have to be. It was our own shadow that brought him forth.

And to me, that's what evil in the world is: a call to wake up to what is unexamined in us, a challenge to evolve as a species. The trick is to catch it before the situation becomes so desperate and horrific.