I’ve been on the spiritual pathway nearly all my life. And if there’s one thing the pathway shows you, it is the beauty of existence. So, this article has been a very hard one to write, but probably the message of it an even harder one to learn, it took me decades.

There are so many layers to existence, and we tend to confuse them. On one level, everything is one, and there is no good and bad. Everything is part of the same whole. And if this is where you’re at – if this is your true reality and you respond to pain the exact same way you react to pleasure, you can stop reading right here.

There is no good and bad, I do believe this, on some level I experience it too. But we also do live in a dual world. Imagine you like apples. Just imagine the joy of biting into a fresh, juicy, crunchy apple. If you now started to believe that all apples are the same, they are equally glorious, and equally enjoyable, would that be true? Would you treat a fresh apple and a rotten apple the same? Why then do we try to do this with people?

If ‘good’ people exist, then ‘bad’ people exist too. If good intentions exist, then bad intentions exist too. If people reach out and help each other, people also go out of their way to hurt others. Both sides exist – partially in the same person as parts of one personality, but also outside, there are people who will go out of their way to try not to hurt others, hurting themselves in the process. And there ARE people who will do anything for selfish gains, even if it meant others would get hurt. And there are also people who will hurt others simply for the fun of it. Undoubtedly, all of us hurt other people. But some feel bad about hurting others, while others – if they feel bad at all, feel bad because it made them look bad, or feel like a bad person.

And not only did it take me many decades to come to terms with it, but when I finally did, I realised that I had always known, deep inside. I’ve been called naive, the sort of person who only saw the good in people, I firmly believed that everyone was good deep inside and what made them ‘bad’ was the trauma they went through. It is an easy trap to fall into when you do a lot of self-work and see the wounds behind your own misdeeds.

But no, it is not trauma that separates the good and the bad. There are people who have been through the worst hell and yet emerge like butterflies, bringing joy to the world; their blood if anything, stains their wings and adds to their beauty. And there are people who use their pain as an excuse to hurt other people. They exist. And until we acknowledge that, we have no way of protecting ourselves against them.

When I woke up one day to the truth of this, I realised that I had always known, deep down, always identified the people who were comfortable hurting people and carried no remorse for this, but I let them in anyway, because I judged myself for seeing what I saw in them. ‘There are no bad people, it’s just their pain‘. No. It’s not. We feel like less spiritual people if we simply call out evil for what it is, but the real spiritual approach would be to see it for what it is, without judging or hating it. Refusing to acknowledge their existence is blindness.

What I didn’t expect was that this reflection allowed me to trust more in people who genuinely cared about me. Ignoring our gut feeling about people works against us in both ways – we trust people we shouldn’t trust, and we don’t trust enough the people we should. Ultimately in relationships, there is always scope for being wounded, but when we open our eyes, we can steer away from those who approach with negative intentions.

Of course, straight away jumping into the ‘I am a good person’ belief is also silly. Maybe what will help is taking a deep, sincere look at our own feelings and coming to terms with what lies inside. If we judge the bad behaviors or people, then we cannot identify those within ourselves and heal or transmute them either. We all have certain percentages of everything, but also we all do fit into categories too.

So, How do we deal with this then?

OK, so assuming you agree, and then proceed to run into someone who is clearly comfortable hurting other people, I believe the seeing of it itself allows us to create distance, the rest often happens on its own.

Generally speaking, I’ve learned that it is risky to associate with them, because many times they can make themselves extremely useful (or trigger us in other ways where we are drawn to win their approval to reinforce our identity), so the temptation of taking their help can over-power our warning bells, we tend to push that aside thinking ‘oh but they’re nice to me’. It’s a trap.

Practicing consciously choosing our emotional safety above all else really helps over time, to prioritize people in our lives that sincerely contribute to our well-being.