The Last Days

Last night my wife and I watched “The Last Days,” a 1998 documentary about the final months of the Holocaust, when the Nazis were bullrushing Jews out of Hungary and into the gas chambers just as fast as they could (the Germans knew the war was lost but Hitler was hellbent on exterminating as many Jews as he could before the door closed on him).

The film led to a rough night of sleep. For a time I sat on the edge of my 8-year-old son’s bed, staring at him, wondering how I would react to the Nazis kicking in my door, tearing my family from my arms, exterminating them. How could a man look into the face of a child and dispatch him or her to the gas chambers?

Could I find the Christ behind the eyes of such killers? Could I find the killer within my own?

These are important questions for those who believe we are One. After all, it is quite easy to imagine ourselves having a bit of Jesus or Buddha in us; quite another to picture ourselves herding women and children into gas chambers. But if we are One, then both images not only are possible, both are actual. How to reconcile the two?

As I lay awake last night it came to me – as it has so often these past many months – that all of the answers lie in the degree to which we are living conscious lives, which is to say, how often are we looking to the light within vs. our own human/egoic wants and needs. I saw that all of human behavior lies along a spectrum and to a greater or lesser degree each of us is capable of the most depraved and most enlightened thoughts and behaviors. That a man conditioned to expect little of himself will lead a life that fulfills that conditioning.

The German people behind the Holocaust were conditioned to look outside themselves for answers to their fears – to look at Jews and gypsies, Poles and Russians as the enemy. They readily accepted the unconscious conditioning espoused by Hitler, who proclaimed, it’s not your fault, it’s theirs. Indeed, how much easier it is for any of us to find fault in our neighbor, a spouse or a friend, than within ourselves. The deeper our unconsciousness, the more we disappear into it, the darker we grow and the easier it is to commit unconscionable acts against others. At some point the fear runs so deep that we literally will do anything to avoid the pain within.

Unfortunately, history proves that the majority of humanity chooses to exist in an unconscious state and in that choosing confirms its willingness to perpetuate human-borne madness. Case-in-point: Even as the National Holocaust Museum in 1993 was opening its doors to the public with the oft-stated mission of reminding future generations that “never again” would humanity permit a Holocaust, “never again” arrived just months later in tiny Rwanda where upward of one million men, women and children were hacked to death in a 6-month orgy of violence while the world sat and watched or changed the channel.

So how do I reconcile the Christ and killer within? By recognizing the degree to which I raise my level of conscious living. If all of human consciousness lies along a spectrum with the Christ at one end and, for wont of a better villain, Hitler at the other, each of us at every moment of every day faces a choice to live a more willfully-conscious life (a gift commonly known as “Free Will”). And depending on the choices we make our lives move in one direction or the other along that spectrum.

Most of these choices, mercifully, are small: Do I overcome the argument from last night and tell my wife I love her even though my ego is whining “No! She was wrong, not me!” or do I give her the silent treatment and grow the darkness between us? Do I find common ground (attempt to walk in the other guy’s shoes) or do I insist on my way?

Other choices are huge: Do I stand with my Jewish neighbor as the Nazis kick in her door, placing my own life on the line?

Each choice speaks volumes as to what your life is all about. Do you exist to satisfy your human ego and its endless wants and needs? Or do you find a higher calling behind your existence, something that drives you toward the light within? One set of choices, large and small, intensifies the light, moves you closer to the higher self, to One; the other increases the darkness and all that such darkness entails.

In other words, which image do you want staring back at you in the mirror: the Christ or the killer?