06-09-2021
“It can be hard for us to conceive of people who actually intend and “get off” on performing acts of evil, but our difficulty in seeing this is due to our lack of, in Jung’s words, “imagination for evil.” Our inability to imagine that such people actually exist serves evil, as it gives them the cover of darkness and obscurity that they desperately crave.”- Paul Levy
You all know about the Three Wise Monkeys or Three Mystic Apes (Koizumi Yakumo/小泉 八雲), a Japanese pictorial maxim of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
In Japanese, this maxim reads “mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru”, in which the “-zaru” is a negative conjugation on the three verbs, matching zaru, the modified form of saru (猿) “monkey” used in compounds. Thus, “見ざる, 聞かざる, 言わざる” becomes “見猿, 聞か猿, 言わ猿”.
This maxim, this “teaching”, leads people to refuse to face the reality of evil, and reject to see the truth about evil. This teaching is designed to keep people ignorant of the reality and truth concerning evil by programming them for the automatic denial (auto/self-denial) of evil. This teaching is thus a programming of the mental pattern of self-denial and self-deception.
Another version includes the fourth principle of “do no evil” or “sezaru/せざる”, demonstrated by the fourth monkey crossing its arms or covering its genitals, symbolically meaning: “Conceal your natural pleasure and simple joy of life. Pretend in order to be accepted by and to conform to society. Don’t be natural and authentic; otherwise you will be rejected and ostracized.”
Thus, not only people stop seeing, hearing, speaking, or doing (real or believed) evil but also they start rejecting and hiding (real or believed) evil within. It is not that people lack the imagination or the ability to see evil but that they self-deny their imagination and their ability to see it.
The mental program of self-denial and “willful” ignorance (“ignoring”) is now running automatically in the minds of people.