A Sickness of the Will

     

  No choice is made without an incentive. A reason for it being made, no matter how senseless or illogical the choice may seem to outside observors, and whatever controls the incentives to your choices controls you to some extent. 

Imagine informing people of the full depth and scope of the consequences of their choices as well as the nature of the choices they made. If we were given such an awareness and understanding, where we knew the nature and impact of what our choices were and the full long term effects of the consequences of our choices, I'm sure we would never make extremely poor decisions.

        No one willingly chooses Hell if they truly know what it is. What leads to these decisions, what truly leads a person down the path of destruction, is a blindness. A corruption of our incentives and our ability to discern and choose between good incentives and incentives that cause us to do destructive or wicked things. 

It's like a "sickness of the will." Our will's discernment is blinded when we do destructive things, and our incentives to our choices have been corrupted to where things that lead to suffering for us and brokenness in our lives are made to be enticing and seductive, even pleasurable, to where we don't recognize the danger or disregard its seriousness.

The bible talks about being "a slave to sin" where we are driven even against our own better judgement to engage in destructive and disorderly behavior even when our awareness understands the negative nature of those choices. Its almost like we take a back seat to these impulses and they take over our bodies and minds and make reckless decisions that can have heavy consequences.

When our will has been overthrown by bad incentives and corrupted desires, we, in a sense, are no longer our true selves. Our true selves were made to be lucid, clear thinkers who are fully in control of our person. If our will is sick, or our desires corrupted and our mindsight blinded, we are no longer who we are supposed to be. We are hijacked beings, hijacked by impulses. Hijacked by bad ideas. Hijacked by seductive yet destructive incentives. 

Evil, to me, is a sickness of a person's ability to make good choices. A sickness of the will. And like any sickness, it is rarely entirely the fault of the sick for being sick. The vast majority of the time a sick person didn't choose to be sick. That's true with this "sickness of the will." Everyone used to be a young person, and I bet if you ask every 5 year old if they wanted to end up in prison when they were older or end up in Hell when they die, I bet you wouldn't find a single one who would say yes to those questions.

When you recognize that evil is like a disease of the person's will or decisionmaking faculties, you recognize that wrongdoing, or "sin," is a product of this sickness or corruption that gets put in individuals, and this should induce a high level of compassion for the mistake-makers in the person who realizes this. A healer doesn't see a sickness as the fault of the sick. They couldn't. That's why God can give sinners and mistake makers such grace and mercy that most people couldn't give. 

He understands evil and sin as a sickness of the will and treats it more as a doctor to a patient rather than a judge to a criminal. A healer has to give mercy every time they operate, and that's why they have a better sense of justice than any other position of power or authority. A Healer is the oddest position of power, for in doing their job they have to approach their subjects from a place of humility instead of a place of dominance or authority. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to do their job at all. 

One thing I have recognized is that if you gave people lucid clarity and lucid understanding of their world and lives, and give people healthy rationality and reason, none of us would make the wrong choices. In a sense the most irrational thing a man can do is evil and destructive behaviors. Especially when you give a man full knowledge and understanding of the consequences of those decisions.

A healthy mind makes good decisions naturally. A sick mind or spirit makes bad decisions unaware of the nature or consequences of them.

You make a mind healthy, you make a person wholesome in their actions.

God first and foremost is a Healer. The greatest thing a healer can heal is healing the broken will of broken people.