It strikes me this morning that we live in a world beset by confusions of principle.  As I mature (I prefer this term to “getting older”) I am more and more aware of evil’s influence in our world and the discord that it brings to our world.  I live in an industry that has been dominated by greed for decades and has consequently failed.  Inspirational music may be one shining light in the ashes of its decline, but sometimes I wonder how such a pure and noble idea such as music can be so riddled with chaos.

Stepping back as I have done over these last 5 years of Watchfire Music and investigating the whys and wherefores of this demise has taught me that it was an industry that needed to fail because it was in many ways corrupt.  Greed was king.  Artists were treated horribly by the people in power and money took precedence over music so much that the industry became a jumble of confusion.

Record stores closed, new innovations like the Internet were paid little attention, an industry where the creative artist stood at both its center and circumference was run by lawyers instead of creative people and even the artists got sucked into this chaos of greed and began to value the almighty dollar more than the almighty song.

Greed, at this moment of thought, strikes me as the reigning terror of not only my world, but the rest of the world’s confusion as well.  This comes as no surprise to anyone, I’m sure.  After all, it is considered one of life’s seven deadly sins.

Everywhere I look around me I see the influences of evil trying to confuse us into buying into its charms, its energies, its seeming power.  In the last two weeks we here in NYC have been ‘attacked’ by 2 natural disasters – first an earthquake, then a hurricane.

Let’s reconsider the term “natural” here.  What’s natural about all these disasters?  Don’t be duped for a moment into believing that it’s just nature taking its natural course.  It’s thought that controls the universe, not nature.  And disaster is not “natural”.

As I watched the hurricane bear down upon us and prepared both mentally and physically for its onslaught, it struck me that a hurricane was nothing but ego raging across our world, shouting, “Pay attention to me!  I am mighty. I am destructive!” and sucking in its energies from all around itself, running around in a vicious circle of self-destruction and, along the way, destroying everything in its path.

I worked on handling ego in my own personal life and as a result, the hurricane had very little influence upon my life.  In fact, I slept through it secure in thought that its so-called powers were simply imaginary.  I’m not being naïve here.  A couple of decades ago I was in a hurricane in Antigua that was incredibly impressive and destructive, but, at the time, I received it as an entity to contend with, be frightened by and in the end, hide from.  I got sucked into its evil spell and was seduced into its dominance.  It was not a fun experience.

This time, many years later, I had the maturity and perhaps the wisdom to see it as it really is – simply ego’s misinformed impression of its own importance trying to suck us all into its illusionary power.  I refused to be sucked in.  I resisted its spell and refused to give it credence.

The end result was that our lives did not touch.  I refused to acknowledge its supposed existence and it could not draw me into its swirl of confusion.

The same principles can be applied to marital confusion, to the sad state of affairs of political confusion in our country today, to financial confusion, to sexual confusion and to worldwide greed.

In the past decade I’ve taken on a new understanding of this word “ego”.  In the first 4 or 5 decades of my life it really meant to me little more than a confusion of conceit.  However through my readings, mostly of the works of Eckhart Tolle and several others, I have come to understand that, for me, this word and its implications need be looked at and handled on almost a daily level.  I’ve understood that my ego is really my confused mortal thinking and really the mind of my own confused material self, trying to dominate and run the show.

It is not I.  My ego is my confusion, but it is not I.  My spirituality and all that surrounds that and emanates from that comprise who I really am.  My ego is trying to be, claiming to be me, swelling up in its self-importance, raging like the hurricane and sucking into its path all the energies it can to stay alive, but in the end will burn itself out in its self-imposed path of destruction just like all hurricanes.

This is the mortal dream.  In the end, the ego does die.  The ego is really my mortal self, trying to stay alive and run the show, but it’s a hopeless cause.  In the end it will die survived only by my spiritual man.

We, as a people, must not be frightened by evil.  We must learn to stand tall against it and refuse its presence in our lives.  Of course that means that we also cannot give its seductive pleasures place as well.  If we are seduced, well then, the simple law of life is that we must pay the piper.

We all like to test this theory over and over in our lives hoping that 2+2 do not, in fact, equal 4, but fortunately this simple law of life is true.  The good we do equals the good we receive and the bad we do equals the bad we receive.  Life balances out.  In the words of John Lennon, “Instant karma’s gonna get ya’.”  It’s just the way it works.

So what do we do about it?  We resist evil.  We minimize ego.  We see through the hurricanes to the great truths of life and stick to them.

We consistently spring clean our lives and do periodic mind checks on the integrity of our thought.  We re-balance our pleasures and hold to the fundamentals of goodness that we know in our hearts.  We wake up each morning with resolve to do it better, get it done, and treat everybody along the way with respect and yes, here comes that word again, love.  We love our fellow man and demonstrate it moment to moment throughout our lives.

We give.  We give and we give and never stop giving.  We give of our energies and our talents, our time and yes, our money.  In short, we do positive things.  We live positively.  This is our resistance to evil.  This diminishes the path of the hurricane.  Being positive balances this mortal dream and puts ego in check.  If we get real good at this and we simply get real good.

Pretty simple stuff here, but not always easy to do.  There are a lot of temptations out there, greed being one of the biggest.  Need to lose weight?  Check greed.  Need to improve your financial stability?  Check greed.  Need to improve your marriage?  Check greed.  Need to succeed?  Check greed.

One thing for sure:  Evil always succumbs to goodness.  Goodness is ultimately all and evil is nothing.  Take advantage of this fact.  Goodness works.

Give it a shot.  It’s your life.