The prison of the good
It has been said that the good "sanskaras" can be a medium for maintaining the limited self. When a person looks upon himself as good, he is experiencing self-affirmation through identification with an opposite. It is a continuation of separative existence in a new form. This new house which the ego constructs for itself is difficult to dismantle because self-identification with the good is often more complete than self-identification with the bad. Identification with the bad is easier to deal with, because as soon as the bad is recognized its grip on consciousness is lessened; but to loosen the grip of the good presents a more difficult problem, since the good carries a semblance of self-justification.
The ego changes identification with the evil for identification with the good because the latter gives a greater sense of expansion. But sooner or later, the aspirant perceives the good to be no less a limitation. The difficulty concerning evil is not so much in perceiving what it is, as in dissociation; the difficulty concerning good is in perceiving that it is a limitation. This difference arises because animal *sanskaras* are firmly rooted, owing to ancient origin and long accumulation; but it is important to note that the good binds as much as the evil.
- from "God to Man and Man to God" by Meher Baba
Compare with Yeats, from 'The Sorcerors', below:
IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers, and come across any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of magic have been but little practised.
- W. B. Yeats
