On Pedophilia and Oneness

Content warning: This post contains references to pedophilia, which may be upsetting for some people. Apologies if so. ❤️

This post was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend about the spiritual teacher Fred Davis, who – about 40 years ago when he was a teenager – indecently assaulted some of his younger nieces. This created a bit of a storm within the spiritual community: some coming to Fred’s defence; others lambasting him and saying he shouldn’t be allowed to teach spirituality.

Well, Fred, after spending much of his life as an alcoholic, and at times being homeless or in mental institutions because of this, finally joined Alcoholics Anonymous to try and fix his drinking problem. He did fix it, and ended up becoming a much-in-demand AA guide for others who were trying to do the same.

As part of the 12-step program in AA, one of the steps is that you need to connect with and apologise to all the people you have wronged in your life. Fred did this, and obviously one of these things was writing to his nieces to apologise for his actions. He offered to talk to them too, if they wanted to. Four years later, a couple of them did, and they recorded the conversation and gave it to the police. Despite this being some 30 years in the past at the time, the state where Fred lived, South Carolina, had no statute of limitations for sexual offences, so he was brought before a judge and convicted of the crimes. The judge took into account his recovery from alcoholism and the good work he was doing being a guide for others to do the same, and sentenced him to weekend incarceration for a period of 90 days in jail, registration as a sex offender, and some other strict provisions for five years. Some may say this was too lenient, but I’ll let others be the judge of that. Fred wrote a blog post about this back in 2014 when it all came out, which can be found here, and it is an interesting insight into the nature of what happened. I recommend reading it:
https://awakeningclaritynow.com/glass-houses/

Which brings me to the topic of this post, and WHOAH, what a heavy topic it is. Probably the heaviest topic you could possibly discuss: An adult taking advantage of a young, innocent child for their own gratification, thereby causing untold grief and trauma to the victim. Like I said… heavy.

So where to start with such a topic? How to start with such a topic?

I have always found myself in a peculiar situation whenever the topic of pedophilia comes up. I obviously feel great remorse for the victims and the amount of suffering they must have endured as a result of their experiences, but I always also felt something else simultaneously: compassion for the perpetrators. I always felt, wow, this is considered the most reprehensible crime you can commit in society, and this person just committed it. That must be a horrible thing to experience, regardless of their guilt.

This is not to say it’s not a horrible thing that they did – it is. It’s just to say: these people were so mentally unwell that they committed what is considered to be one of the worst crimes in society. And pedophilia, it must be said, IS a mental illness: There is no biological reason why an adult should be attracted to a pre-pubescent child, it makes no evolutionary sense. Therefore, the cause must be a psychological illness which has made them act in this way.

Which leaves us in an interesting position. Most people who are mentally unwell are usually treated with compassion, even those who commit crimes. I myself committed a crime during a psychotic episode (assault), and I was treated (mostly) with compassion and understanding. But not pedophiles. Oh no, their crimes are just too egregious to have any compassion for whatsoever.

I think this is wrong. I think every person deserves compassion and understanding regardless of the crimes they have committed. And yes, this too includes Hitler, the one person who is often singled out as the example for the most evil man in history.

The reason being: I consider all life as one, you see. Not just as an idea, but as a fact. So I consider anything anyone does to another person that is harmful to the other person as a sign of a kind of mental illness on their part, a misperception about the nature of reality. If they saw clearly, I argue – if they saw truly that life was all one, then they would not have done it. But they weren’t seeing clearly, therefore they had some degree of mental illness.

In fact, I consider 99.99% of the population to be to some degree mentally unwell. If you look into your own life, I’m sure you can find examples where you’ve acted a bit crazy or a bit irrationally. Sure, you may not be as mentally unwell as some people, but it’s still a sign of mental illness. In this sense, I consider everyone who doesn’t clearly see the oneness and interconnectedness of all life as, to varying degrees, mentally ill. This includes myself. I haven’t yet reached a point where I see life as all one all the time. I have had glimpses of it, which is how I am able to write this, but I don’t walk around all day seeing oneness. There’s still too much mental activity clouding my seeing of this simple fact.

And it is a fact, even just from a logical point of view. When you think about it logically, life has to be all one, ultimately speaking, because it all comes from the same source. It is a logical impossibility that there could be more than one source for existence. Why? Because if there was more than one source, then it wouldn’t be the ultimate source, it would only be a relative source. If there was more than one, then there would have to be another source from which those two sources sprung. You can’t have a split at the base of existence. This is where the philosophy of nondualism is so accurate and so valuable. It is not the only truth, there are still other relative truths – but it is the truth. This is why it is called in Hinduism: advaita vedanta – which translates to “not-two”, and “the end of the vedas”, indicating this is the highest teaching.

But please don’t take offence to what I’m saying either. I’m not labelling you personally as mentally ill, I’m just saying it is the nature of the mind, because of the way it evolved, to often misunderstand things. You see, as I’ve mentioned numerous times in my blogs, our minds really did only evolve for basic biological functions and to survive in the apparently physical world we inhabit. It didn’t evolve to understand reality, only to survive and reproduce in it. There’s some great work done by the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, where he computer-modeled evolutionary scenarios to see which conditions would win out. To his surprise, the one determining factor in evolutionary success was survival – i.e. passing on your genes – not perceiving reality as it really is. Here is his Ted talk on the subject (20 minutes), called “Do we see reality as it is?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY He ends the talk with the quote: “Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth; it’s about having kids.”

So how does all this relate back to pedophilia, you might ask? Well, as I mentioned, I think we are all, to some degree, mentally ill, because we do not see reality accurately. Some of us function well in this survival-oriented paradigm, others function less well, but in neither case are they seeing reality accurately. And this I believe is where all harm stems from: not seeing things clearly. If Fred Davis, or Hitler, or anyone else you want to mention, saw clearly at the times they were committing their crimes, they would not have done them. Why? Because they would see that it was really just another aspect of themselves they were harming. As the nonduality teacher Gary Weber once said, “It would be like cutting off your own hand – it just wouldn’t make sense so you wouldn’t do it.”

So I believe everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness. Not because their crimes don’t matter or the victims suffering doesn’t matter – it does, and people should still be sent to prison if they commit these acts in order to protect others and to act as a deterrent for others. But everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness, because when we harm another it is only ever because we are not seeing clearly. We are acting from a deluded perspective, and thus are deserving of sympathy, not hatred and judgment.

What a world we would live in if people saw those who committed heinous acts as deserving of understanding and compassion rather than hatred and derision? A much nicer one, I think.

Something else came up when I was talking to my friend about this, and that is the idea of “what you resist persists”. Eckhart Tolle – another great spiritual teacher – once said that he thinks a big part of the reason there is so much pedophilia in the Catholic church is because of their demonization of sexuality. If you demonize something, you often, in a strange way, make it somehow more appealing. Just like the illegalization of drugs. If someone says you can’t do something, you kind of want to say, “Oh yeah? Why not?” Tolle noted that the suppression of sexuality in the Catholic church often led to it becoming distorted and manifesting in perverse ways. I agree with his judgment on this (although I accept there are most likely other factors too, but I don’t want to make this post any longer than it already is). [Important note: I just want to be clear here: I am *not* saying that we should accept pedophilia and then it might go away; we should *always* as a society say that pedophilia is wrong and immoral, I am only talking here about the demonization of sexuality in the Catholic church (and, to a lesser extent, society as a whole) which has led to sexuality manifesting in perverse ways.]

The spiritual teacher Adyashanti once said this too: “Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.”

I think the same goes for things like pedophilia. In the case of the Catholic church, they have resisted human sexuality to such a point that it has become a taboo perversion for them, rather than a natural expression of love and unity (or whatever else you want it to be, so long as it’s done with mutual respect and consent).

But it’s not just the Catholic church who do this: we do this all over society. Imagine a society where instead of demonizing and hating pedophiles, we treated them with understanding and compassion. Imagine the effect that would have on the pedophiles themselves? If you’re told by society that you are the lowest of the low, beyond forgiveness, you are more likely to act in that way. If society instead treated them with understanding and compassion, the would-be pedophile might instead think, “oh, I am just mentally unwell, it’s not that I’m an evil person”, and they would be much less likely to commit the act in the first place – they would seek help and feel supported.

This is not to say it is wrong to feel anger, or wrong to feel sadness when things like this happen. That is a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. Anger and sadness are legitimate responses to bad or unwanted situations. So I’m not saying don’t feel anger when things like this happen. I’m just saying, look to see if you can’t also find the part of you that contains forgiveness. The part that has understanding and compassion. The part that knows this person acted out of their own illness, not out of a conscious decision to harm another person for no reason.

Thanks for reading, and as always,

In love and light,

Will.

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