The Search For Enlightenment

With details of the release of the three kidnapped women in Cleveland, Ohio still emerging, I was interested to hear an interview with one of the kidnappers neighbours this morning. Ariel Castro, one of the three brothers who have been arrested for the crimes, was a school bus driver and just a regular guy, according to people who knew him (or thought they did).

The neighbour, understandably shocked by the incident, said that he was questioning himself, because he had not seen the dark side of the man he had known for a year or more.

Of course, this is an extreme example of the fundamental darkness of an individual, but we all have a dark side, it is just that some of us supress it better than others. So should we really be shocked when occasionally we are exposed to the evil in others? Even Adolf Hitler loved Eva Braun, there is good and bad in us all.

I am as delighted as anyone that this story has a happy ending, of sorts, but none of us should be in any doubt that there are plenty of other stories out there, just waiting to be told.

Evil, or what we call evil, has its part in the very core of our make-up. Self-improvement, or human revolution as it is called in Buddhist circles, is the only way that it can be suppressed to the point of extinction.