Perhaps its not or, but and. We have a tendency to differentiate between what we believe is real, and what is real. What is in our mind and what is “out there”. Yet both modern cosmology and ancient spirituality seem to be telling us that perhaps the difference between the two is illusory. Perhaps what we experience is only that which we manifest and hold within our own consciousness. We write, direct, and star in the play. We manifest our virtual realities and then explore them from different points of view, different perspectives. We are the setting, stage, props, much of the cast, and even sometimes the audience. We wish to understand evil, so we manifest evil and explore it. Sometimes we see evil from a third person point of view as something separate from us, something other, sometimes with form, sometimes not. Other times we create and experience evil from a first person point of view, in which it is we ourselves who are that evil. The tricky part is from a first person experience, we cannot really experience ourselves as evil, as seeing evil as evil, almost by definition, we would reject it. From our first person point of view we tend to see our own evil as good, just, and fair. It is only in hindsight that we can see that we had fooled ourselves and that what we had manifested as self was harboring evil. One man’s warrior angel from heaven is another man’s demon from hell. Many a Nazi in the Third Reich would have told us all about what a great and noble thing they were doing for the world. Yet few who look back at history are willing to admit that had they been there, they might have have fooled themselves and gleefully goosesteped along with the rest.