When I was growing up, reading fantasy, a child without the skills to successfully consider and resist the tyranny of culture and the effects of collective and individual ignorance, the battle seemed to be between good and evil. I now see, with eyes a bit more open, the real battle being between reason and superstition, wisdom and ignorance, illusion and reality. For good and evil themselves exist as concepts in a context of superstition and ignorance, and thus cannot be the ultimate battle, the ultimate question; for good and evil, as we know them, may not, or rather, most likely do not, exist.
Good vs. Evil may be the ultimate battle for the religious and pious, those of credulous belief-faith, but it is not of the world. Good and evil, morality itself, may be a game of humankind, but it is humankind’s alone, unjoined by nature and the universe. Morality is one of the final obstacles of humankind in its quest for understanding; morality gets in the way of people being able to see things as they really are, undistorted by their own constructs and illusions.
Thus, the final frontier, the real battle, is between you and your ego-self, of how you see the world and how you could, and maybe should, see it.
The battlefield is you yourself, and is joined when you honestly and openly ask yourself why you do what you do and believe the things you believe.
Reality is beyond good and evil, for that is a battle of illusions.
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From my personal notes, 10/29/99.
