E05“Defining Evil: Angels, Devils, and NPC’s”

We often confuse our identity—the core essence (our heart) of who we are and how we choose—with our persona, the character we play to fit into the social world. That character is just a mask, rooted in the Latin meaning of the word. But what happens when we lean too heavily into the mask? We become NPCs (Non-Player Characters) in our own lives and, worse, in the stories of those around us.

In this deep dive, we use the parable of The Good Samaritan and a modern-day workplace conflict to reveal the critical difference between obeying social roles and manifesting humanity. It's not enough to avoid doing bad; true goodness, and true identity, is defined by the action we take when confronted with suffering. Learn how to choose discipline over emotion, drop the mask of the NPC, and become a "player" who truly changes the story and provides the antidote to the poison of evil.

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Episode 5 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome, I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest, or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce.

UNKNOWN: 0:31

Spiritual Hot Sauce

SPEAKER_00: 0:38

So I want to talk about identity today, and this is a continuation of what we've been discussing. I think we confuse our identity with persona. In our identity, I think of it as our cardia, our heart, our center, the center of our compass that we've had this continued discussion about. And the center is from the Greek word kardia, our heart, our center, our essence. It's who we truly are. It's how we choose. And north represents our emotions, our wants, our needs, our desires, our passions, our fears. And emotions want immediate gratification. They don't understand long-term investment of behaviors. Now, the polar opposite of that, south, is discipline, choosing to do hard things or make difficult decisions and choices that get us away from a difficult place or get us to a better place or navigate around big suffering. East, we said, is purpose of suffering and things we can't control. And West is suffering and things we can't control that has no purpose, that helps redefine our identities. But that's our compass. And I think that our true identity is in the center of that, of ourself. That's who we truly are, how we choose. Now, persona of how we fit into the social construct, I think, is where our confusion comes in and where we've gotten things kind of backwards. Thank you. A persona comes from the Latin, and it means to wear a mask or to portray a character in a play. And you think about your work, no matter what you do, if it's a teacher, a doctor, a construction worker, or a merchant, whatever it is you do, all the time, energy, and effort that you've put into perfecting that role, it's just a persona. It's just a character you play. But we've put so much time, energy, and effort, it's easy to confuse that start to think of that as your main identity. It's not. It's just a character. It's how we fit into the social construct. What's the social construct? Well, it's laws and social norms that allow us to trade with a much larger group of people than our immediate family. I think of the social construct as kind of a trellis. And if you know what a trellis is, it's made out of wood, metal, and plastic pieces that form a grid or a structure that allows a vining plant to weave in and out of and to support what it does. That's what a social construct is. I think we confused humanity and social construct. They're not the same thing. Social construct is just what supports and allows us to trade. how we interact with commerce. If all cash flow stops tomorrow at noon, then society collapses tomorrow at noon, but humanity remains. Now, whether we know it when we're performing these roles or our personas in the social construct, we're perceived in most people's stories as NPCs. If you don't know what that is, it's a non-player character, and it comes from video games. It refers to a character that is in the video game, but it's not a player. They just facilitate the game and allow it to happen, but they don't change the story. They just have these roles they perform. And in most people's stories, as we perform our roles in society, that's kind of how we're perceived. We're just NPCs. Now, this is where I want to pick up where we were talking about last week, the story of the Good Samaritan. And in this story, I think I'm going to retell a little bit, and I think if we do that, it opens up the concept a little more. But in the story of the Good Samaritan, there's a lawyer who approaches Jesus and asks, how do I inherit eternal life? Now, a lawyer is an expert of social construct. And Jesus asked him, well, how do you read it? And he says, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all your strength. In other words, your mind, body, and soul, all three parts of you, just you have to love God with all of that. It's from Leviticus 19.18. And he says, and love And Jesus says, you're correct, do this and you live. And he says, well, who's my neighbor? In other words, he wants to define it. Who is my neighbor? I guess he's wanting to define the geographical location. I mean, what proximity of where I live determines whether you're my neighbor or not. Is it on the same street or is it in the same neighborhood? Is it across town? I mean, where does it start becoming my neighborhood versus community versus city? And rather than answer and debate that definition, Jesus just gives this parable. And he says, there's a man traveling on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. Robbers jumped this guy and they beat him up. I mean, they beat him really bad. They took everything from him, even his clothes left him bloodied, naked, and beaten on the side of the road. He's in trouble. And he says, then a priest comes by on this road and sees the man. Now, there's a couple of things we need to look at. Number one, the social construct and context in their society is church and state are not separated. They're one in the same. So if you commit a sin, you've committed a crime. So it's all convoluted together. One big thing. The priest in that social construct isn't how we think of a priest. A priest in that social construct has to be of a certain blood lineage. They have to be a Levite, which is one of the 12 tribes, and they have to work at the temple, which is the place where you've committed a sin, which is a crime you have to go to to give a sacrifice to be forgiven. Only you can't directly give it. You have to go to a Levite priest who has to perform the sacrifice on your behalf. That's who this is in the social construct. pretty strong persona. This person, this Levite priest, sees the man on the side of the road, but doesn't stop. He keeps going. Then it says a Levite comes down the road. Now, what's a Levite? A Levite's not a priest, but the Levite works at the temple. And when you come there, they teach you about God. And if you've committed a sin, a crime, they'll help you look up what the sacrifice needs to be. You go get your sacrifice. You come back. And they will get you to the priest so they can give the sacrifice on your behalf to God so you can be forgiven or your crime admonished. Do you see how that works? These are both really strong personas in that social construct. These are the path to God to get forgiveness. But this Levite, he sees the man on the side of the road, and he doesn't stop. But then he says, a Samaritan, a Samaritan comes down the road on this path. He sees the man and he goes to the man. He helps him, puts him on his animal, takes him to an inn, tells the innkeeper, here's money, take care of him, nurture him back to health. I have to go and perform my persona, but I'll come back and I'll pay you whatever the bill is. Just take care of him and get him back to health. And then Jesus says to the lawyer, from the perspective of the man on the side of the road that's in distress, who would he say is his neighbor? The lawyer says, the one that did good. Jesus says, you're correct. Now, there's two things here. Jesus is first defining who your neighbor is. He's saying it's not a geographical location. This person that's on the side of the road is a Hebrew. The person stopped is a Samaritan. They're Two different cities, two different groups of people. And he is saying that anybody that's on the side of the road, in your path, in your journey, that's hurting, if they're a human, then they're your neighbor. The second thing he's doing is defining love by love your neighbor, what it means. And he's saying it has less to do with emotion and more to do with action. All right, now let's step back and look at the whole thing. First of all, we define good as like this. People that hurt other people are bad. People that don't hurt other people are good. And Jesus is saying this isn't true, that the Levites aren't doing good by not hurting other people. They're obeying the social constructs laws. That's it. But they're not doing good. The Samaritan is who did good. In this story, the Levites represent NPCs. They have personas and roles to play, but they're not changing the story. They're just fulfilling their part. That's all they're doing. They're doing neither good nor bad. They're just in the story. Now, I want to share with you a story that's true. This is all true, and it gives you a modern take on this, and I think it helps us get the idea, the concept better. There's this woman, she started a new job. She'd been there for about four or five months. She really liked the job, and she had a lot of co-workers, and she got along with all of them. But there was one particular co-worker who she had to interact with a lot, and they got along really well, at least she thought they did. But she started to discover at this time that that this particular coworker was going behind her back to all of her other peers and was kind of, I don't know, launching a smear campaign against her, undermining her, trying to make her look bad to everyone else. One of the things she was doing was in this role or in this character you'd have to play in this workplace is you were giving a task. And you had 24 hours to fulfill this task. It'd be in your name and it needed to be your name when it was completed. So if it came in at 1 p.m., you had till 1 p.m. the next day. This woman would jump in if it came in at 1 p.m. and she would get it done for her around two or three, really early. There'd be plenty of time left for this woman to get her task done. But this other person would jump in, get it done quick and say, hey, I know you're busy. So I just was jumping in and helping. sounded like a really good teammate. However, what she was doing was going to the supervisor and quietly saying, hey, I don't know if you're aware of this, but all of the tasks she's getting are I'm having to do because she's not doing it, or at least a large group of them. Go look at all the tasks in her name and see how many of them I have done. And now her experience in this situation begins to change. See, the woman that's doing this has a persona or a role she's supposed to be completing that needs to get done. But there's another persona she's manifesting in humanity that's coming from her cardia, her heart. from her choices. This persona that she's manifesting has a name. It means accuser and adversary. And it usually means like from the shadows and being very deceitful about it. That persona's name is Satan. She's manifesting evil into humanity. When you manifest evil into humanity, it's a poison, it's cancer, it spreads. I think we have a hard time identifying evil because Hollywood has given us such a perverted, weird, overt, just... religious, overtoned, bizarre vision that none of us have ever been exposed to, that we relegate that word evil to the worst of the worst in humanity. That's just bizarre. But the truth is, evil happens exactly in this way that we're talking about. And when evil is manifested, it always has the same symptom. It will always produce suffering. So this woman's experience changes, and she begins to suffer. Now, instead of enjoying her job Now it's turning into worry. It's turning into stress. It's turning into anxiety. Well, she's going home every night complaining to her husband and really upset, crying to him. He's a protective husband. He starts getting more and more angry and more upset, more frustrated as this continues and goes along until he makes a really bad choice. He makes a phone call to the workplace to this woman who's manifesting the evil's extension and leaves a message. And he tells her two things. You have two choices. You either A, can go into the supervisor's office in the morning, tell them everything you've been doing, and then resign your position effective immediately. Or I'm going to come find you and I'm going to exact justice as I see fit. And I'm cleaning that up a bit. I've heard the recording and it was a little rough. Now you can't do that. So the police come and arrest the guy. Now the suffering has spread exponentially. Now this poison has followed her home and has gotten much worse. She also has small children. Her children are seeing this behavior, and now they're being taught that when you're angry, it's okay to react this way, that it's okay to lose your temper and do these things. Why is it that sometimes when we are confronted by someone who's manifesting evil, I like to think of it as a devil. I mean, we all wear halos and horns, and most of us, we're just NPCs most of the time. But none of us wear halos all the time, and none of us wear horns all the time. But when we are confronted by someone who is manifesting a devil... that our solution, our answer is to become the bigger devil. All we've done now is spread the poison. Instead of one devil, there's two devils. Now the suffering has exponentially grown. The cancer has spread. And the two children are learning what you don't do, but yet they're being taught to do that by seeing their father do it. Now this woman's experience has really gotten worse. That's the equivalent to thinking if someone's been poisoned, give them more poison to fight the poison. That makes no sense. Why did the man choose to do this? Well, it goes back to where we were talking in our compass, from his heart, his cardia, how he chooses. North being our emotions, our wants, our needs, our desires, our fears, and they want immediate gratification versus discipline, choosing to do hard things to get to a better place. Well, anger is an emotion, and if you let it, anger will take center stage and burn your life down. He was very upset, and he allowed anger to take the rudder, which changed the direction in the course of not only his life, but his family's life. What he should have done is this reaction is normal. There's probably a time for that reaction where it's correct, but in this instance, it's not. He should have chose discipline. He should have walked it off, took a moment and realized there's nothing I can do to fix that situation at work. So putting on horns is not a good idea. What I should do is choose to wear a halo, which is what I can do, which is help her, encourage her comfort and love and create a sanctuary here at home and help get some of this poison off of her. And then he's also teaching his children a much better way to do it. But now we got to talk about all of the coworkers. What's the coworkers? All of the coworkers are NPCs. They're facilitating the story, but they're not changing the story. They're all probably afraid that this woman will target them. I'm sure she has a long history of doing this. But if you have a couple or even just one of these NPCs that choose humanity, that choose from their cardia, their heart, to help instead of just perform their roles or their personas, things could change. And I'm not saying put on horns and create more workplace drama. That's not what I'm talking about. But I'm talking about going to the supervisor and say, hey, I don't know if you're aware of this, that this is happening, and letting them get involved and them address it. If you have one, two, or three NPCs that choose to do this, you can change the woman's experience and you can alleviate the suffering. What are they doing? They're producing the antidote to the poison when they choose humanity from their heart. So what do the Levites represent in Jesus' story? The Levites represent religious NPCs. They'll never beat or hurt the man. They'll always obey the laws of the society, but they're not doing good either. See, they're just portraying their roles, their characters in the social construct. It's very self-serving. We have a lot of modern-day religious NPCs. They portray the character, but they never seem to manifest the antidote to the poison. Again, very self-serving. I think what truly defines us, our identity, is how we choose from our hearts outside of our personas to manifest the antidote to the poison. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you, so please reach out with questions, comments, and or concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information and if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce then please share it with others I would appreciate that we'll see you next time