The Inner Demon
Evil genius might sound like another piece of lingo that casually got accustomed to mainstream parlance courtesy of Phineas and Ferb or perhaps the greater Hollywood industry, but nothing comes to exist without a case in point. There is good and there is bad in the world. The Lord said “Let there be light” and the darkness was separated from it - not destroyed, not erased, but pushed to the other side of a boundary. The darkness remains. It always has. Duality is a characteristic trait that I have stumbled hard upon. I have seen enough people in life to see a pattern, and I have crunched my brain hard enough introspecting my own cognitive biases and what I have observed in others. It’s evident: just like how there is light that holds the ever-consuming darkness at bay, there is just one element that will prevail over evil, and it is as clichéd as it sounds - the goodness in men.
Why Does Evil Exist?
Simple. The anatomy of man, just like a single-celled organism, evolved to care for just one entity: itself. That’s part of being alive, and being alive means staying alive at any cost, should that cost be at the expense of another which is not its own. The biological material is encoded to do one thing really well, no matter what: never cease to exist. At any cost, come what may, always go on. And what is the system that evolved around this prime directive? Procreation. Continuation. The single-minded obsession of genetic code to copy itself for the end of eternity.
Parabrahmam (The Supreme)
Buddhists believe Lord Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree- a sacred fig, Ficus religiosa- at Bodh Gaya. Before that final night, he had spent years studying under the greatest yogic masters of his time, eventually surpassing each of them. He left them all behind. The last ascent he made alone. According to early Buddhist texts, when asked about his teacher, he replied: “I have no teacher, and one like me can’t be found.” The world has largely treated this as the exception, not the rule - most traditions hold that a devoted seeker needs a superior being to guide them up the ultimate climb a mortal mind can attempt. But can a mortal mind truly make that climb? Buddha had access to the accumulated insight of a species roughly 300,000 years into its walk on this earth. He understood matter and anatomy, could pierce the fabric of reality, and could speak at length about all that was and all that would be. The question isn’t whether enlightenment happened- it’s what it tells us about the raw material we’re working with. Hinduism offers a frame: every mortal being is part of the Parabrahma, the ultimate creator and ruler of the universe. You are the creation and you are the creator. Godly particles course through your blood, making the magic called life flow. We may be the apex of the animal kingdom, the most cognitively advanced species evolution has produced, but apex does not mean ultimate. An untrained mind boasts of its own doings; a trained one pauses and sees how small the game of copying genetic code for eternity really is. And in that pause lives the only instruction worth following: be good.
The Human Machine
How do you actually control the human machine to do as you wish? Control the brain. Push it beyond its capacity. Push it like the world depends on it. Counterintuitively, there is a practice that I suspect has worked very well, and here I must reveal my ultimate intention, to share what I have seen work. Draw from forces beyond what is considered acceptable. Push the button until it cracks open. Draw from the dark side. Keep the evil alive. Recognise the duality, tame it. Tell it the world deserves only goodness and that the job of evil is only to supply the energy required to do good.
Christianity says pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth are all sins. Agreed. But imagine what these sins actually do - they give you energy. Mostly negative, yes, but energy that can be transmuted into goodness, energy that can drive you to do good. Greed, pride, and lust are some of the greatest motivators a man can ever have in life. Now don’t let them take control. Instead, use them like sled dogs. The default setting is to let them run wild towards whatever they’re chasing. You tell yourself: I see them, but only I take the calls here. The power to enforce that will come from a place unknown. If there is darkness in this world, there is also god-given light, the goodness which shall prevail, controlled by forces unfathomable to a mortal mind like mine, at least as of this writing.
The Addiction Conundrum
I know addiction of any kind is frowned upon, and man is easy to fall prey to such forces. But such forces carry a weight that nothing else can match. When you learn how to control them and make them submit to your might, you start playing god in a mortal combat for excellence. This is where things get dangerous and interesting in equal measure. The line between “I am harnessing this” and “this is harnessing me” is razor thin. The only honest guardrail I’ve found is this: if you cannot walk away right now, in this very moment, you are not in control. If you can walk away and choose not to, that’s a different game entirely - that’s dominion.
The Anterior Midcingulate Cortex
The AMCC is the part of the brain correlated with tenacity, willpower, and persistence in the face of challenge. Research has found that people with a larger, more connected AMCC tend to demonstrate greater cognitive endurance - “superagers” who maintain the memory performance of people decades younger consistently show more structural integrity in this region than their peers. It sits at the intersection of multiple brain networks, integrating signals from systems governing decision-making, motor control, reward, and emotion. It is, in a real sense, the brain’s hub for doing hard things.
How do you grow the AMCC? Of course, getting enlightened helps, but that’s a thorny long pathway, I suppose. How else? Draw from the dark side. Research has found that wanting to do something badly and having the ability to tell yourself no re-establishes control of the self. But more importantly, under the hood, every time you exercise that refusal, the AMCC enlarges. It is smaller in people who are sedentary or apathetic; it grows in athletes, in people who diet, in people who consistently push through resistance. Do this over and over, and the compound effect supercharges the entire loop.
I have voluntarily practised two things:
Extreme self-love. Admiration of the self and a hardcore belief in my own abilities, which I truly believe are innately born and some hard-trained for, but trained only because some substance already existed. There is no creation from nothing, if I can add.
Extreme self-torture. I know this sounds harsh and a little psychotic. I promise it isn’t as bad as it sounds. The idea is to love yourself so deeply that you practise being hard on yourself as a form of self-love. This again lingers around the duality we touched upon earlier. But the bottom line is this: addiction, when you know how to curtail and restrain from it, when you learn to enjoy the pain that the lack of a pleasure gives you, you start enjoying the absolute control you wield over your own being. And that gives a high like no other. I have knowingly or unknowingly fallen prey to many kinds of human indulgences, but have always ultimately wielded control over my own being. I have seen my soul and body yearn for something, but the pleasure of being in control, of letting that suffering transmute into a pleasure so ultimate that mere words cannot explain it. Later I came to understand the science of how this helps your AMCC grow and actually makes you a more capable and stronger individual. Ever since, I have consistently exploited this loop to my own edge.
Perhaps the single colony of cells that makes us human pushes for continuation and improvement at all cost. The same drive that made the single-celled organism cling to existence - never stop, never yield - is still running underneath all of it. We just built a more elaborate machine around it.
The Bottom Line
There is good and bad in this world, and in you. Recognise the bad. Use the bad to do good. Play it to your advantage. Be in control, you will go a long way. Long live goodness. May the goodness in you prevail, at the cost of the other side.
-G