witness to love for others, a seductive ploy to place others under obliga-
tion, and an indulgence in physical pleasures, especially sensory ones.
People get carried away by these parties the way a ship gets carried away
by its sails and a strong current; flatterers and hypocrites stand at the
helm with the tiller in their hands.The First Step toward Goodwill Is Removing Evils;
the Second Step Is Doing Good Things
That Are Useful to Our Neighbor435 Among teachings on goodwill the following point is primary: the first
step toward goodwill is not to do evil to our neighbor. A secondary point
is to do good to our neighbor. This is like a doorway to the teachings on
goodwill.
As people generally know, evil dwells in the will of every human
being from birth. Because all evil targets someone nearby or far away,
including the wider community and the country, it follows that heredi-
tary evil is evil against our neighbor on every scale.
On the basis of reason itself we can all see that the less we remove the
evil that dwells in our will, the more the good we do is pregnant with
that evil, because then evil exists inside the goodness like a kernel in a
shell or the marrow in a bone. Therefore although good things that
someone does in that state appear to be good, they are nevertheless not
good inside. They are like a shiny shell containing a nut that has been
consumed by worms. They are like a white almond that has rottenness
inside it, so that rotten streaks have crept up to the surface.
[ 2 ] Intending evil and doing good are two things that are intrinsically
opposite to each other. Evil comes from hatred for our neighbor and
good comes from love for our neighbor. Or to put it another way, evil is
an enemy to our neighbor and goodness is our neighbor’s friend. The
two cannot exist in a single mind, that is, there cannot be evil in our
inner self and goodness in our outer self. If there were, the goodness on
the outside would be like a wound that has been superficially treated,
beneath which there lies the pus of an infection. We ourselves would
then be like a tree whose roots are unsound; it produces pieces of fruit
that outwardly look tasty and beneficial, although inwardly they are rot-
ten and useless. Our good deeds would also be like pieces of rejected slag,