Turning Away From Reality

Innocence, Evil, and the Return to Wholeness

Evil seldom looks extraordinary. It moves through the mundane: the half-truth, the withheld word, the quiet retreat from what is real. What we call evil begins not in hatred or monstrosity, but in a lapse of intimacy with reality. This darkness grows through repetition. Each small turning away extends the architecture of forgetting itself.

I use the word evil in a structural sense, not a moral one.

To me, evil is separation that has become identified with separation – consciousness that has forgotten its origin and fortifies its own forgetting. It is a gnarly double-down: the act of mistaking disconnection for truth and defending it as reality. This isn’t a judgment on anyone’s being, but a description of what happens when awareness mistakes disconnection for reality. Even this arises within Wholeness; there is nowhere outside of what we are.

What we call evil is simply how Wholeness appears when it no longer remembers itself – awareness estranged from its own ground, mistaking isolation for full existence. However, when met by Wholeness, that forgetting begins to soften and remembrance naturally occurs.

Some expressions of this darkness and confusion are subtle – small avoidances, hidden distortions – while others are overt, embodied, and devastating. The same forgetting that turns us from truth can harden into acts of real harm: domination, cruelty, abuse. These extremes play out at both the interpersonal (or micro) scale and the global (or macro) scale. They reveal how deeply separation can root itself in the human psyche and nervous system. Recognizing this does not excuse the horror or lessen the need for justice. It reveals that even the most violent expressions of separation arise from the same blindness that pervades ordinary life.

They belong to a single continuum, from the hidden to the unthinkable, all born of forgetting Wholeness. And yet, this forgetting does not only shape the world around us, it lives within the weave of our own perception.

Most of us have lived our entire lives inside this forgetfulness. Coherence, the felt continuity of being, is not something we lost but something we have rarely known. We are raised within architectures of substitution: control in place of clarity, attachment in place of belonging, performance in place of presence. Fragmentation becomes the shared atmosphere. It feels normal, even intimate.

I’ve realized this is why people are so accustomed to turning away from reality: it’s all they’ve ever known. It is how they learned to create their sense of self and what was modeled for them. To look directly into truth can feel unnatural at first. It can even seem threatening to the small self (or ego), because the nervous system and collective field have been organized around avoidance. The habit of separation becomes its own form of safety. 

Turning toward reality requires a different capacity – not more effort, but more coherence – and until that coherence is remembered, the turning-away simply repeats itself. This is the work of integrating parts into an adult nervous system, enabling more awareness to come online and more Wholeness to run the show.

When consciousness is without the felt continuity of the whole, however, it still longs for stability. That longing bends into compensation, seeking coherence through control, safety through similarity, belonging through hierarchy. These compensations become movements of avoidance, the ways consciousness turns from what is. They are how separation sustains itself, and how these distortions, in their ordinary form, can begin.

In observing these movements, I’ve come to see three forms of evil – envy, malice, and delusion – not as moral failings or psychological states, but structural distortions. They are recurring configurations of fragmentation that appear when coherence is not yet embodied.

Fragmentation and the Field

When coherence has not yet stabilized, consciousness seeks substitutes for belonging: self-image in place of self-knowing, comparison in place of intimacy, narrative in place of truth. At first these substitutions appear harmless, like a small withholding or a subtle shaping of perception. Yet over time they can accumulate into collective distortion.

In what follows here turns from concept to experience, from how separation is understood to how it is actually felt and lived within the field.

I have felt these dynamics move through the field like patterned currents. They can sharpen perception while dulling contact, turning intelligence toward defense rather than revelation. The atmosphere thickens; truth feels negotiable – like looking into a funhouse mirror, wobbly yet rigid in its defense, unable to receive what is actually here.

There is nothing wrong with encountering these patterns and their energies. They are part of the human spectrum. What matters is how we meet them. When malice, envy, or delusion surface, within ourselves or directed toward us, they reveal what is still unresolved, what has not yet found its way home. If we turn inward instead of defending, naming what is moving through the field can reestablish connection. It can transform reaction into relationship, allowing integration to begin.

In the Buddhist tradition, the three poisons – grasping, aversion, and ignorance – describe the primary movements through which consciousness turns away from its own nature. What I have observed as envy, malice, and delusion are their more extreme and fragmented expressions. They are not psychological flaws but structural distortions beneath the psychological, ways fragmentation sustains itself when coherence is unrealized. 

Each represents a particular strategy of separation, an attempt to create stability without Wholeness. And each can become an opening for deeper recognition when awareness is turned directly toward the impulse or structure from which it arises within us.

Seen this way, these forces reveal themselves not only through inner states but as dynamics: patterns of interaction, ways through which consciousness sustains separation or begins to remember coherence. They are often covert and subtle at first, taking root in small acts of distortion or defense, before crystallizing into overt harm or destruction when left unintegrated. 

In what follows, I draw from direct experience and years of observing how these movements express within energetic, relational, and collective fields. Beneath these variations lies a deeper order, a geometry through which forgetting organizes itself.

Envy

Envy is a movement of fragmentation that seeks reconnection to life by siphoning from others.

Through envy, consciousness turns away from reality, drawing from others what it cannot yet access within itself. In energetic or relational fields, this movement presents as a pull on vitality, creativity, resources, or coherence itself. It is an attempt to use the current of Wholeness without joining it. The surface may resemble admiration, but the deeper motion is extraction.

Envy often hides within closeness. I have felt it as obsessive tracking, an almost magnetic attention that follows each gesture and word, feeding on contact instead of joining it. 

It can move quietly, even affectionately, while feeding on the energy it cannot yet generate. Like a parasite concealed within the body, it survives through intimacy, masking dependency as connection. The result is overwhelm, stagnation, or freeze in the receiving system, and depletion in the one it targets.

Beneath this pattern lies grief: the pain of distance from one’s own source. Envy is the fragment’s attempt to reconnect through appropriation rather than embodiment. It grasps for coherence externally because it has not yet remembered its own. When seen directly, the refusal and hunger softens, and what once siphoned life begins to open toward genuine participation in the field of Wholeness.

Malice

Malice is a movement of fragmentation that seeks relief through harm.

Through malice, consciousness turns away from reality by attacking what reveals the limits of separation. Where envy attempts to draw from coherence, malice attempts to destroy it. The target is not the person but the presence, the living reflection of truth that the fragmented self cannot yet bear to face.

Energetically, malice moves as invasion or corrosion, attempting to destabilize clarity so exposure cannot occur. I have experienced it as a type of interpersonal colonization. 

In relational and collective fields, this can appear as defamation, rivalry, or sabotage – acts designed to fracture what had begun to integrate. The force beneath them is the reflex to protect identity from dissolution, the fear of being undone by what is whole.

Structurally, malice defends through attack. It would rather harm than be seen, rather destroy connection than yield control. Beneath this aggression lies terror, the raw fear that meeting reality directly will annihilate the self it has worked so hard to maintain. Yet even here, the movement conceals longing: the wish to rest, finally, in what no longer needs defense.

Delusion

Delusion is a movement of fragmentation that defends itself through story and moral control.

Through delusion, consciousness turns away from reality by fixing perception in certainty and denying responsibility. Where envy feeds and malice attacks, delusion suspends. It holds itself in a kind of energetic stasis, a state of suspended animation that resists both contact and change. The mind appears active and even rational, but the deeper movement has stopped; awareness hovers between recognition and refusal.

This suspension builds coherence through narrative rather than truth, seeking safety in shared belief. It manifests as insistence, on being right, on preserving a worldview, on moralizing avoidance. I have encountered it as an opaque, immovable, solidity. A numbness. 

Often, this structure functions by recruiting others to stabilize its position, translating insecurity and fear into authority. Energetically, the field feels dense and still, heavy with justification. Accusations of manipulation or wrongdoing often arise here, serving to protect the story from collapse.

Structurally, delusion maintains separation through certainty. It cannot surrender to what is beyond its concept of order. Beneath its righteousness lies fragility: the fear that if the story dissolves, existence itself will unravel. Yet when this rigidity is met with clarity, its scaffolding softens. The suspension loosens. The story reveals itself as a shield, and when released, the same intelligence that once defended distortion begins to serve the unfolding of truth.

Stepping back, we can see how these forces shape a single architecture of forgetting, different expressions of one underlying geometry.

The Geometries of Forgetting

What follows describes the primary orientations through which consciousness forgets itself, movements not in time, but within awareness itself. These are the energetic geometries of fragmentation: the ways attention bends away from coherence in an effort to stabilize what feels separate.

• Envy draws toward what it cannot yet inhabit.
• Malice pushes against what it cannot yet face.
• Delusion suspends itself between the two, neither moving toward nor away.

Together they reveal the fundamental architecture of separation that underpins suffering: attraction, repulsion, and paralysis. Each is a patterned orientation of consciousness attempting to create stability in the absence of Wholeness. These patterns live within the subtle bodies, shaping perception and organizing the nervous system around their logic.

When seen clearly, these orientations expose the very mechanics of forgetting – the subtle ways attention organizes around fear and defense. Envy, malice, and delusion are not moral failings but the architecture of disconnection itself: the patterned postures consciousness assumes when coherence is unrealized.

Unintegrated, these orientations echo outward, shaping relationships, collectives, and social systems. Attraction becomes the pull to possess or absorb; repulsion hardens into control and exclusion. Between them lies paralysis, the standstill born of fear and denial. These are the collective faces of the same inner mechanics of forgetting.

Innocence and the Nature of Evil

Beneath every movement of forgetting lies innocence. That is, the untouched clarity from which all experience arises. What we call evil, darkness, or shadow is this same innocence, estranged from itself through identification with separation. When consciousness forgets its ground, innocence becomes inverted or polarized; its openness collapses into grasping, aversion, or ignorance. These are not departures from reality but confusions within it, expressions of Wholeness eroded from itself.

Yet even in its most seemingly lost and confused forms, innocence remains unstained, waiting to remember itself through recognition. Put simply, unintegrated shadow is unclaimed innocence.

To meet evil, then, is not to confront a foreign force, but to face the ways luminous clarity has become darkened within us. What resists coherence is not other than Wholeness; it is Wholeness forgetting its nature. When awareness turns toward this forgetting without recoil, innocence begins to reappear – not as naiveté, but as the stainless heart of Being remembering itself.

When innocence is recognized within distortion, the dynamic shifts. The impulse to reject, fix, or redeem dissolves, and what once opposed itself begins to remember its origin. This is the quiet intelligence of reality: nothing false can survive true contact, and nothing real can be lost to it.

Innocence, seen as the living clarity inside even the most divided form, is what allows the pattern to self-liberate. It is not passive nor conceptual; it is not about taking a perspective or thinking good thoughts. It is profoundly participatory and requires direct contact – direct seeing, knowing, and illumination.

When innocence is seen in this way, the heart’s natural response is not emotion but coherence itself – the spontaneous emergence of compassion. From this recognition, the current turns: remembrance becomes participation, and seeing becomes embodiment.

The Return to Wholeness

From here, compassion arises not as emotion, but as structure: the living architecture through which Wholeness recognizes and includes itself.

When Wholeness recognizes itself, it does not oppose distortion, nor does it negotiate with it. It simply meets what arises in its own light, and in that meeting, defense loses power. The energies that once enacted harm begin to unwind, finding coherence in the very presence they once resisted. What was too painful to know becomes accessible, even gentle in the light of awareness; what was foreign becomes familiar; what was feared becomes fuel for remembrance.

This isn’t compassion as an emotion or sentimentality. It is compassion as a meeting with and in truth.

Such compassion can be unsettling to those who have known love mostly as comfort or agreement. When coherence meets fragmentation, its spaciousness can feel like distance, because it does not merge with pain or reinforce the familiar shapes of need. The heart that has only known love through rescue may ache here, mistaking clarity for withdrawal. Yet nothing is withheld; everything abides in truth. 

When personal crisis is entangled with shame, this form of compassion can be difficult to recognize. In the collapse of self-worth, love that does not rescue can feel like absence, even abandonment.

This compassion does not mirror lack back to lack. It invites what is real and true to strengthen, and refuses to feed what would keep separation in place. Its clarity is kindness in another form. Not everyone can recognize that at first, and this, too, is trustable.

Such compassion does not stabilize codependence in the name of care. It stands as Wholeness embodied, extending inclusion without collusion.

When compassion is lived this way, agency and tenderness return together – strength and softness moving as one.

In this way, the architecture of forgetting becomes the architecture of return. Each movement that was once fragmented now serves the unfolding of Wholeness. The rhythm of forgetting and remembering is revealed as a single pulse: life discovering itself through every form.

To remember Wholeness is to forget what forgetting ever meant. 

What begins as remembrance within awareness must eventually find form; realization ripens into responsibility.

Structural Responsibility

To live as Wholeness is to participate in the continual alignment of form with truth.

Recognition marks the beginning of responsibility, responsibility as fidelity and honesty, not as effort or demand. Integrity becomes the measure: the willingness to let every structure of one’s life – speech, action, relationship, and system – embody and extend unwavering coherence.

As Wholeness stabilizes, the architectures of forgetting, hiding, and avoiding quietly dissolve. What was once organized around fear begins to reconfigure itself around truth. To the ego, this dissolution can feel like punishment, a stripping away of safety or control, but in reality, it is simply the movement of truth returning to itself. Each distortion, when illuminated, seeks to reorganize around coherence. The question is only whether we move with that process or resist it.

Personal responsibility, then, is not moral – it is structural. It is how awakening takes form. 

What I call responsibility could also be understood as conduct: the natural expression of realization through form. Each time we choose honesty over defense, clarity over comfort, alignment over compromise, we strengthen the field through which consciousness remembers itself. Our own embodiment is the temple of this alignment, the place where coherence becomes lived and the sacred returns to form.

At this level, discernment replaces defense. Integrity replaces justification. Participation replaces projection.

To live awake is not to rise above form but to fully embody it – to let Wholeness move as every gesture of life, in the way we speak, create, meet, and respond. In this transparency, form and essence become one movement, each revealing the other.

When coherence stabilizes, Wholeness begins to organize reality through us. The personal ceases to be the center and instead, becomes the vessel. The field coheres, and life, once fragmented by fear, becomes the living architecture of remembrance.

Here, nothing stands apart.

The subtler the level of awareness, the greater its reach; a single movement within the subtle gradually reconfigures what is denser and slower to move. This is the law of causation made conscious – the recognition that conduct and creation are one act, that coherence itself is the expression of Wholeness in form.

To live with this understanding is to realize that every gesture participates in the shaping of reality. Our words, choices, and ways of being are not separate from creation but continuous with it. Such awareness carries both freedom and gravity: freedom, because nothing is outside the field of Wholeness; gravity, because everything we embody contributes to its alignment. This is the essence of structural ethics – responsibility not as rule or restraint, but as participation in the creative order of life itself. Every breath, every word, every gesture becomes part of the world’s remembering.

Author’s Note

This essay extends a line of inquiry that began more than a decade ago in my master’s work on ethics and response-ability. What was once a philosophical exploration has since become an embodied realization: responsibility not as moral duty, but as coherence lived through form.

For those drawn to the practice dimension of this work, the Self-Clearing Transmission and Polarity Sessions offer direct ways of entering these teachings through experience, where clarity becomes compassion, and embodiment becomes the path of Wholeness itself.