Encountering Satan by Jordan Peterson

 On Page 180 of his book, 12 RULES FOR LIFE AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS, Jordan Peterson offers a quote from Carl Jung that suggests that one is not really conscious and aware of the good, even if one is committed to being good and ethically, a meaningful existence, if one is not living in complete truth about the existence, from deep in one's nature, the presence of hell as well as the presence of heaven: "'No tree can grow to Heaven,' adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, unless it roots reach down to Hell.'"

My response: One cannot get to or know heaven unless one knows and has experienced the presence of evil in the world, and has combatted it earnestly, whether victorious or not. One has not digested gathered fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil lest one eat the entire piece of fruit.

On the bottom of Page 180 and 181, Jordan reveals how soldiers in combat come to know or expereince the presence of Satan, not abstractly but directly and personally in battle: "Soldiers who develop post-traumatic stress disorder frequently develop it not because of what they saw, but because of something they did. Involvement in warfare is something that can open a gateway to Hell. Now and then something climbs through and possesses some naive farm-boy from Iowa, and he turns monstrous, something terrible. He rapes and kills the women and massacres the infants of My Lai. And he watches himself do it. And some dark part of him enjoys it--and that is the part that is most unforgettable. And later, he will not know how to reconcile himself with the reality about himself and the world that was then revealed . . ."

Jordan here ascends to the level of moral genius, he is a moral giant. To admit that Satan and Hell exist, to admit that any of us, at any time, are capable of being a sadistic, homicidal Auschwitz guard and enjoying it--that is when complete, conscious, voluntary and rational conception of what every ordinary human is capable, from the worst torturing imaginable, to self-sacrifice in the scale of a Christ-like adoption of responsibility--this is the gamut of moral standing that any of us is capable of--this is ontological grasping of what it is to live alert, and our wrenching experience in the world is the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that we have just eaten.

Jesus and God--by whatever name that you give the deity that you worship and follow--forgive even the worst sinner, if he admits his sins, asks forgiveness, and forthrightly does penance, and works to turn his life around.

We cannot protect ourselves potentially from committing great evil, unless we accept our depravity, and use Mavellonialist strategies to enable us to avoid the moral quagmires feeding up from Hell.