Journaling the Diabolical: Why?
Diabolical—adj— that which is devilish or bearing the character trait of the devil.
As teastained women diarists sojourning through our assigned generations, our journals’ power comes not only from our capacity to walk in that which is “good” but in discerning and operating against that which is diabolical: evil woven into the tapestry of time and space, able to deceive us into making a departure from our Divine design— and kill us. My mother goes with the Bible’s description of the Beast system; Rastafarians call it Babylon (I do, too)— and between these, I nestle in the comfort of having ANY name for a set of systems whose intentionally blurred, faulty, interchabgeable definitions of right and wrong keep many of us in spiritual entanglement such that by default our doing “right” by/for sake of the system comes at the cost of our birthright. The confusion and perverting of right and wrong is an intentional, violent design: prosecuting the right and praising the diabolical? From health insurance to public schools, it’s what surrounds us BY DESIGN, yet as diarists we are empowered to unravel the densely woven tapestry with the pen, sharpened by our discernment. (TLDR is in bold!)
Why do we need to know the diabolical? Several reasons have borne witness in me over the past few years (feel free to leave your own in the comments):
First, because of our identity as living witnesses. The way our gallbladder produces bile is the way witness exists within us, as an organ, producing testimony and indictment. This chemical process is mechanized by experience, discernment, understanding and sentience. Richer than observation, witness is the synthesis of information from experience that connotes right from wrong and determines how scales of justice must be balanced. Diabolically, society socializes us to suppress our witness, accepting things as they come and to accept them being what they are: a system that poisons witness the way alcohol poisons the liver. Witness demands of you: what will you do with what you are seeing, recollecting, and feeling? Will you set it aside and assimilate or will you realize, step into mandate and indict?
As diarists, we may be quiet and private but we are not silent. Our documentations are the living evidence, compiling a body of proof of what we are seeing and surviving. Living witnesses keep respiratory records of what we see exacted, BY WHOM (the perpetrators/ interceptors/ designers), and the residual impacts that we are capable of observing/ remembering— and to document the owed consequences. Keeping a curious mind available to wisdom and nurturing our understanding of justice, we search into matters— unsatisfied by what’s connoted as “settled”— to dis-cover and compile the wrongs committed then bypassed— and to journal the indictment. We remain vigilant, study history make inquiry that unsettles us, and maintain the character to match: one that does not adopt the traits of the diabolical, host sympathy for it or allow it to converse with our birthright. Comprehensively, our mandate as living witness is a weapon to dismantle the diabolical. We are its opposite: witness is Divine, memory is holy, remembrance is sacred; indictment is glory.
In this way we counter and rattle diabolical belief systems such as christianity, which poses as holiness and disembowels its followers of their witness. Christianity spays and neuters the bearers of conviction, ironing out parishioners’ valid frustrations with society and the troubles in their soul, before dispatching them back as cogs to the machinery in this diabolical world. The church is a maintainer of hypnosis, encouraging followers to use forgiveness as an eraser or thick plaster over wrongs and atrocities that must be accounted for—and does so in the name of jesus. Christianity says “forgive” where it means bury, and “love” where it means expunge— hence its brainwashing destroys witnesses and all who would become them. Many would-be witnesses die as christians, having spent a lifetime swallowing libraries-worth of their own witness testimonies to appease a faith designed to maintain compliance and eliminate those capable of holding the diabolical accountable. Out of esteem for testimony and ancestral memory held in our the DNA of our bones and imaginations, we deny the diabolical around us to to become part of us, resisting anti-witness agents such as christianity.
Everyday, diabolical dynamics, agendas, messaging and actions cast their bids for our souls, vie for our attention and acceptance into ourselves so as to alter (redirect) our Divine nature, making us into inorganic entities programmed to defy our Divine identity. If diabolical things can enter and modify us to function on their behalf, we risk losing sense of the Divine; tarnishing our ancestral mandate. Without vigilance of the diabolical we can experience becoming denatured, that is to say, we can experience spiritual erosion caused by relentless, invisible spiritual warfare perceptible and not, whose main goal is to have us too exhausted to testify; too grieved to become wise, too fatigued to resist it. Lack of awareness of these evils on their haunches wears one out: you don’t know what is siphoning your zeal… Denatured meaning, the steady experience of losing your joy and peace until your personality is survival bolstered by addictions. Hostile environments created by the diabolical are alchemized to strip you like acetone of innocence and goodness that the Divine placed in you, that makes you significant. Diabolical entities operate to stomp the hope out of you; to trigger dissatisfaction and fatigue towards walking in righteousness. They operate to induce flippancy towards your birthright by presenting the diabolical as more tenable than the discipline of being who Spirit designed you to be— that durably vigilant ancestor and descendant holding testimony and indictment.
The diabolical requires obeisance in the very least, and at the most, participation in eliminating other witnesses (each achieved through christianity, btw). At any given moment we are offered a moment to surrender our witness birthrights by succumbing to the terms of this insidious society, and when we refuse, we upset the diabolical works around us. Why? Because those who refuse to buy into and join the diabolical will more than likely become part of its undoing. And this is why we must take on the manner and disposition of a wise living witness, loving ourselves in this regal, dignified state.
(A brief note: Once we can maneuver amidst the diabolical, we can comprehend the motive to the strength demanded of us to walk in this generation. Unmotivated spiritual gifts will be labeled as disease, disorder and syndrome by outsiders if not given DNA by our understanding of the ancient hope we carry. We must know the diabolical to know what is not qualified to save us, to know what is not a suitable piece to become part of our spiritual engineering.)
Furthermore, as living witnesses the onus is that we are able to annotate our times, and this mandates that we know how to decipher good and show no mercy to evil. We must know what should be preserved and what should be translated into witness statement before being blocked from our bloodlines. There are diabolical things that cannot come forward with us BUT that must be transcribed so that our future generations can know the many forms of gins and snares preying upon their lives. It requires disciplining our imaginations, our spirit, and knowing that we cannot participate in everything, do or say anything, or allow anything to enter our eyes, ears and souls. We are a vigilant ilk, and our vigilance is GUARDING our soul’s sensivity to all that’s right and that which is wrong. Divine wisdom preserves our spirit as we maneuver nefarious blood covenants, perverse ideas, irreverence treated as religion, unholy agendas and bent things connoted as upright.
Toni Morrison was impeccable at making sense of history, and served as a valiant, deft witness.
Next, we need to understand the diabolical so that we might be able to make sense of our world. As teastained diarists, through our writing we release into our journals the heaviness and consternation that’s laden onto us through the wrongs, injustices and violence we recall, observe and experience on a daily basis— injustice and violence that is not called such. And this unloading/ releasing often happens without our fully understanding that it’s exactly what we are doing: many of us have never been told that something we’ve gone through was violent or a violation or connected to our history. We’ve sojourned in a strained strength, depleting perseverance, and exhausting toughness that no one has told us unnatural, meanwhile it aids and benefits powers and systems around us (our bodies, minds, energy and labor are exploited)— and we’ve no clue the extent to which this web of relationships is diabolical. Our spirits are made heavy by unnarrated, undefined, un-languaged, unmentioned grievances, hurts, systems, experiences, rejections, etc. And those around us are either incapable of, reluctant to or in opposition to informing us that what’s so bothersome is that we are pushing through the diabolical and it’s going on well-fed by the many pounds of flesh taken from us. To cope, we’re expected to choose a vice (drugs, media, social media, alcohol?), numb ourselves and “keep going”. What do they say across the pond? “Keep calm and carry on.”
On the other side of unloading the weight of cares we carry from spirit to journal is the skillset of being adroit in identifying the presence and the work of the diabolical. The more we can address, define and accost the web of lies and violence berating our minds, the more capable we are of helping others extricate from these same diabolical systems, both spiritual and physical. Don’t condescend the seasons wherein you are given the time and space to lend definitions to indescribable, heavy things. This is where you build multigenerational empathy and skills in the elements of liberation to which you’ve been predestined/ mandated to participate. Defining is an act of AUTHORity. By it, you are able to identify hazing operations, killing devices, and other sinister things occurring in your times, your world.
“ If diabolical things can enter and modify us to function on their behalf,
we risk losing sense of the Divine; tarnishing our ancestral mandate. ”
The flutter of cares that bother us to unreachable depths; the intense, soul-sapping observations that weigh on our minds; the awareness of diabolical dynamics entangled around us and tolerated by those in covenant with the diabolical— these can only be accessed by and testified to with pen and journal. Defining what is diabolical is one of the most freeing exercises you can do for yourself as a diarist: liberating your imagination and self-documentation from giving the evil society around you the benefit of the doubt— that same damn benefit of a doubt that wreaks havoc on your spirit and mind when you know SOMETHING is up, and everyone around you is proceeding as if all is normal. It’s your discernment that’s telling you something’s up, something’s wrong— the temperature is off, something’s demonic, there’s a conspiracy afoot, something’s unjust, something’s DIABOLICAL.
Jobs promote diabolical managers, Christianity refuges diabolically abusive people, the media pushes diabolical messages of Black hoodlum/ whore/ratchet/ buffoon/ criminal, the diabolical nature of white women is forcibly protected with the promulgation of their innocence, and we shop at stores whose products are created by diabolical means. You must know the extent to which your world is framed by the diabolical and then you must decide what your stance is on it. Your decision about how you will relate to that which is diabolical frames your existence and access to the Divine.
Next, we must recognize the diabolical to be able to document indictments: As teastained women living in the colonizer’s empire, indictment is a muscle that their system INTENTIONALLY seeks to atrophy within us. This occurs organically, living in a society where the victims are expected to live alongside the perpetrators. Accountability is delayed, apologies are never given, violence is observed, and hostility is managed but never quelled. These dynamics of allowing the evildoer to have ease while the one who was wronged must live in the consternation and anguish of injustice is what “teaches” generations to never bother with indictment. But indictment is as much of a technology as manufactured injustice. Indictment—the ability to name perpetrators, recite their crimes, and render sentences/ name consequences due— is punishable in the Western system. This place defines “progress” in terms of the witnesses it can kill (from indigenous people to buffaloes to the living waters of the Atlantic Ocean and every stolen African’s body in its depths) and the citizens that agree to its terms of “just move on”. Meaning that remembering evils that have been committed and continue to be committed, connecting the dots to present evils, then responding to this with lived vigilance and the regality of discernment that separates you from your enemies is viewed as “anti”. Those who agree with the system are rewarded, while those who say “wait, I remember what you’ve done and will not forgive you because you are DIABOLICAL” are assigned a different (read: lonely, rejected) path in this system.
On varying levels, many of us have surrendered “it is what it is” style to the inherent evils, backwardness and “quiet” micro-violence embedded in the system’s epidermis so as to not live in friction or “cause too much trouble”. The stance of compliance requires that one ignore the diabolical or else store its poisonous formulas inside of their body in order to “survive”. Society trains us to “forgive” and forget (but really, just forget), and to NOT treat people and systems in the discernment and rage of remembering the wicked, diabolical works they have done and continue to do to us. Under this system, atrocities are merely grave misfortunes that need not be dwelt upon (even a textbook can reduce Transatlantic slavery to “immigration workforce”…). Genocide of peoples is “just” demolition with casualties to be taken casually. Poisoning waterways through leaks, spills and contamination is just a corollary of “progress”. Innocent men are incarcerated and/or executed and only through documentaries and hushed apologies do we hear society say “oops”. To remember and hold the criminals behind these insidious systems accountable is criminal. Remembering is punished through exclusion or death. The vigilance of righteous indignation is responded to with exclusion, cruelty, demotion, and assassination.
And this leads to another salient motive to you, teastained woman, knowing what is diabolical: you must know how to comfort yourself and how to comfort others who are as chosen, significant and designated— the meek who will inherit the earth (heads up: NOT the colonizer, damn all of their allyship and fetish— I didn’t stutter). Comforting other sojourners is a technology more severe and consequential than “encouragement”. Comfort emerges from timing, understanding, and knowing right from wrong. It comes from the capability to identify grief in yourself and in others. Like the diabolical, comfort must be discerned by one who is vigilant and wise because it doesn’t always look or feel like a soft blanket. Sometimes comfort is the illness or death of an enemy. Sometimes it’s the balancing of scales of justice. Sometimes it comes from studying history and realizing that what was sown by one was reaped duly by their descendants and need not be mourned. Sometimes comfort must be rescued by those who’d rally sympathy where jubilation belongs.
Another mandate to discerning the diabolical: you must know who to crucify. Diabolical beings often get off scotch free and are able to live FULL lives, while useful descendants with mandates to fulfill are killed before their times. Why? Frequently the diabolical go unpunished and are then praised while the innocent who APPEAR to be “evil” are mobbed, ridiculed, castigated, rejected, and metaphorically “crucified”. Why? Because society teaches us to rely on aesthetics and feelings to tell us who is diabolical and who is good. The diabolical masquerades and shape-shifts to fit a person or society’s inner narrative of what’s evil and what’s righteous. If you, chosen diarist, cannot discern the chimera from the hero, you pose as a danger not only to yourself but to your generation, present and future. And all your work will be tainted because you will not understand whom and whose purpose finds it to be most useful. Apprehending what is diabolical is apprehending your multigenerational relevance, apprehending that your work is timeless and productive for those beyond you, in response to what announced you before you were born. But no ancestral trustworthiness can ever be attained if you cannot discern and document good from evil. The mad crowd will use emotional reaction to tell you who deserves to be stomped from existence and who deserves to be saved, loved, and protected. This rhetoric informed lynch mobs needing mere heresay to slaughter Black people but white women’s tears being able to save them from due consequences. Separating yourself from the din of trend and algorithmically-acclaimed relevance will keep you flush to that which is your call and response, and from this Divine conversation you will become skilled in determining the traits and atmospheres of the diabolical, even when those around you are praising it to be a new messiah. Your discernment means preservation; it is a life-saving mechanism that you must protect from being corroded and disarmed in a set of systems beckoning to you to “just have fun”, to “not be so serious all the time”, or to drop your defenses. Knowing good from evil will help you discern the betrayer in your midst, the one with impure motives, the one whose energy is off because they are nefarious (“off” energy does not always equate evil, sometimes it’s brokenness, need for healing or recouperation…), the one who reports to the devil, the one who’s sleeping with the devil, the one whose gifts are snare devices, those whose words are sweet but are curses (Black women are tone policed but white women commit DIABOLICAL acts with “sweet” tones and smiles on their faces), those whose colors are bright but whose motives are dark; those who present as friend but subtly behave as poison; those whose smiles designate assassination… etc. Vigilance is a gift to those with the ethic and virtue to save not just anyone in trouble, but to determine who in trouble is SUPPOSED TO BE RESCUED. As future indictors, we must lose the emotionalism telling us to indiscriminately rescue and comfort; instead, heeding and obeying the inner witness telling us to disregard foul stenches, tormented screams and agonizing groans as the sole indicants that one is in need of being rescued. The ultimate test for any teastained living witness is knowing to encourage, comfort, save and preserve the correct lives. In this diabolical world all lives cannot matter— you need to discern which, when, and why in your journals.
Further, the teastained diarist must discern the diabolical so as to allow herself to imagine. Curiosity and a graphic imagination are corporeal to apprehending and understanding the diabolical. Many of us believe this world is inherently good and this belief keeps us trapped in a bubble that enables our mental enslavement. Many of us resist the notions that white folks are depraved, that the Divine9 is dystopian, that most “bad things” are BY DESIGN, and that some “random” evils are not random at all. We don’t want the fantasy to end, and we imbibe entertainment and glorify celebrity and take up vices to maintain our bubble.
But where fantasy ends, your mandate begins. Dissociation and self-infantilizing prevents you from rupturing your comfort zone and peering into the diabolical things constructing reality. Hence many choose to be “babes”, never maturing into accepting their inheritance of bearing witness. Not wanting to rustle feathers comes at the cost of imagination, because imagining what could be going on that is diabolical means shifting your reality. But in order to understand the weapons forming against you, you NEED to imagine the depravity and perversity and violence entities such as colonizers can carry out being at the “top”. Too many are comfortable with keeping their lives in the structure of stability that the system rewards those who do not indict it. The truth is there are many rewards for the wicked, and especially for those who protect the wicked; who don’t use their imaginations to inquire as to how deep their diabolical deeds go. Those who see and then act like they didn’t see are granted a… not “peace” but a… silo in which those of us who see and INDICT do not get the privilege of existing.
Another significance to discerning the diabolical is one’s deprogramming: You have to be willing to have the scales fall from your eyes and to allow your mind to realize how diabolical this world is. Too many times it’s our egos and fears that are propping up the paradigms by which we live and through which we navigate, but it’s the willingness to relinquish these falsities that begins our healing, deprogramming. You cannot fear the tearing of the veil that catalyzes your spiritual awakening (not the kind you see on IG) and the start of your mandate. You cannot allow this system’s insidiousness to keep you in a detrimental cycle of woe and vice and escapism. At some point you have to agree to wake up and step into your purpose.
Reconciling with the extent to which this world’s systems are diabolical will free and break you (in a good way). Once you enter into and remain in the frame of mind that is indictment and understanding, you can’t UNKNOW. Once you know how evil this world is, you cannot escape seeing the reaches of it in everything, everywhere: from the erasure of history to the strategy of depravity to grocery store locations to the design of the projects to the messages in movies. Becoming keenly aware of the brainwashing of religion, the hazing to controlled violence and the initiation to systemic cruelties exacted upon you in workplaces and zip codes is what causes your belief in this system to break, allowing you to forge a path where you can document testimonies from a healed state of mind. From here, you can either choose to dissociate and thus eschew your calling as a living witness— that MANDATE which is Divine and ancestral— or you can obey and begin keeping the chapters of your living witness account in your journal, shedding who you were before you began to apprehend how diabolical the world actually is.
We were not designed to be aloof, but to be vigilant— and vigilance requires a spine (And a graphic, toothed imagination).
Furthermore, the work of deprogramming is sacred, in that it is voluntary and requires obedience. It is initiatory. Everyone doesn’t accept the invitation to deprogram: some are content in their bubble of disconnect, while others garnish enough curiosity to ask what lies beyond the veil between truth and lies. Sojourners who rip the veil and destroy the presentation of reality as provided by colonizers and wicked powers have entered a realm they cannot come back from unless they surrender their voice, their mandate. To comprehend the diabolical, you must be willing to lose your sense of comfort in what you have been told is this or that or true or false. You must be willing to be unsettled, uncomfortable, and again, curious. You need to have patient ears to listen to voices you were told were quixotic, untrue, “crazy”, etc. and you must be willing to believe that perhaps, much of what you have been taught to accept as good and successful and true and well-intentioned is actually the opposite. You need to be willing to create equations whose answers overturn your paradigm.
Next, we must learn and become familiar with that which is diabolical so as to know what NOT to mourn. This system redirects us to process things through our emotions instead of through our Divine Spirit and third eye. Thus, many of us fall prey to the group think of reacting to events and acts intentionally isolated from their cause and effect. In this way, we can find ourselves mourning a warmonger, sobbing for a pervert, showing reverence for a deviant, etc. simply because society says so. The news knows how to communicate what and when, separating action from reaction like oil from water; the church knows how create the atmosphere that draws emotions where emotions don’t belong— where logic and reflection belong so you find you call diabolical men “men of god” and send up prayers for families that should be told their loved one reaped what they sowed. I’m thinking of all the diabolical people christianity has guided its congregants to shed tears for, such as white men like bishop john meares of Washington DC, who did an altar call in the late 80s for his church, Evangel Temple where the altar call was for Black folks to prove their honor to god by exorbitantly contributing to an aggressive building fund, around $5k per person (I learned from elders conversation that some even gave up the deeds to their homes to fund this new building). Hang on, here’s a quote from a 1986 Washington Post article:
“The tension in the church that morning had been mounting for more than a year. Sunday after Sunday, the Pentecostal clergymen who have built up this congregation have been telling their members that it is "God's word" that they should leave their inner-city church and build a 4,000-seat temple in a well-to-do section of Largo in Prince George's County. Encouraged by church leaders, some members have mortgaged their homes, taken out bank loans and sold some of their possessions.
Members of the white family that heads the almost entirely black congregation have also said that they want to work toward ‘racial reconciliation’ by recruiting white members.
They have urged the congregation to aid them with the message: "The harvest is ripe, the harvest is white!"
While generous giving is a tradition in many churches, the fund-raising effort at Evangel Temple is unusual, ministers from other churches say, because temple leaders are seeking to raise so much money in such a short period of time -- $ 5 million in 18 months -- and because a large, fixed amount -- $ 5,000 -- is being sought from each working member.
…The planned move and the demands for money were decided upon by the church's founder, Bishop John L. Meares, who has begun to build a national following through a Sunday morning cable television broadcast.
Meares' sons and his wife, who are on the governing board, joined him in that decision. The family has been supported by a half-dozen black assistant pastors they have trained at Evangel Temple,”
— The Washington Post, 1986
There’s more incendiary information in that article, so please read if you have the time. When Bishop John Meares died in the early 2000s you’d have thought a benevolent king had passed. The megachurch swarmed with Black folks mourning the “man of god” who had swindled their generational wealth and had helped usher nearly 4,000 Black congregants out of Black middle class DC to make room for a white populace. The charlatan of a man had declared himself god’s mouthpiece and required obedience to his dreams and vision at the cost of what should have been Black folks’ home down payments, groceries, and college funds… He passed almost 500 acres of land to his children and their families, while Black parishioners praised god for their participation in the “american dream”. No one had any business mourning him. I would know: this was my childhood church for nearly 18 years.
I’m also thinking of the many in Jamaica who called for the 12 days of mourning the diabolical queen of global colonization, elizabeth. The system’s grip on our emotions must be severed so that we can see things clearly and make connections that snap pieces of a grand puzzle and map of conviction into place with our journals. Mourning is a technology that we must rescue from the hack of this diabolical system.
Another reason to understand that which is diabolical is a reason I cannot fully quite articulate right now due to the constraints of my young age, limited experiences, and insufficient study. For now I’ll simply say that discerning and successfully defining the diabolical brings us closer to being able to tell the future. Diabolical things are backwards things, mandating antiquated minds whose ideas for the future involve anciently-rooted advanced methods of oppression and torture devices, but nothing that sustains life for those of the Global South. If we want to be productive in contributing to the future, it is of my conviction (and that of many Afrofuturists before me) that we ought to know the interminable, deviant imagination that’s been employed to stop us from arriving there, and work backwards to determine what could possibly be manifesting against us behind the innumerable veils, and then reverse engineer our solutions for present and future.
Our journals are the places to lay out these speculative ruminations. As diarists, our routine encounters with revealing silence and spirit’s discourse position us to not only gain understanding but also to receive warnings. Journal entries map out our experiences and memories, and help us to see patterns or know what to avoid— a salient practice that transfers into our perception of people and systems. The mere ACT of keeping a journal as a deprogramming teastained woman sharpens your relationship with elements of future: justice, consequence, proverb, conspiracy, resisting etc.; thus sharpening your capability to say “This is what must come next and how I will prepare myself, live as a witness, and warn those coming after me.”
Finally, we must become acquainted with that which is diabolical so as to know how to stand and pray/speak against it. Now I’m not religious but I still believe in prayer. Since renouncing Christianity in 2016, my understanding of prayer has evolved from simply “talking to” the Creator to casting my cares and returning evil back to its wicked, diabolical sender. Living in a diabolical world disempowers you, engenders a latent hopelessness that deflates the organ of triumph beating in us like a second heart. When we realize that what we see and experience we can send BACK, it changes everything.
There IS reciprocity for the diabolical. We don’t watch it silently, powerless and submissively despondent. We use our pens and our voices to write the witness account that commands diabolical to reap itself.
“Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.”
—Psalm 3:7b
“…the wicked are ensnared by the work of their hands.”
—Psalm 9:16
”Break the arm of the wicked man; call the evildoer
to account for his wickedness that would not otherwise be found out”
—Psalm 10:15
“For look, the wicked bend their bows; they set their arrows
against the strings to shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart.”
—Psalm 11:2
“A little while, and the wicked will be no more;
though you look for them, they will not be found.”
—Psalm 37:10
We need not live in a headspace that frets, defeated and downtrodden because the wicked reign with impunity: SPEAK and COMMAND WHAT THEY DESERVE, what is their JUST DUE. When diabolical systems fall and diabolical people experience tragedy, it is the role of the living witness to announce celebration, declaring the balancing of the scales: for ALL the diabolical has committed, they are now receiving what they DESERVE. This is the response.
We need not live enslaved to the reality that things are constantly in favor of those who are nefarious, violent, perverse, etc.
We CAN command consequences overtake the lives of diabolical folks to the tenth generation.
We are not thralls to dystopia: we are the plot twist, our being in a space where the diabolical is taking place is the beginning of someone’s end, our memory and rage being powerful weapons and this is the AUTHORity we must walk in.
…But only through deprogramming can we arrive to the place where we cease from loving our enemies to declaring that they MUST reap what they have sown.
Discerning good from evil is the difference between life lived in vigilance and a life dependent upon stupor to ward off the discourse of your mandate to be the bane of evil’s existence. Every day (and night), Goodness and the Divine have a dialogue with your spirit towards eternal things, expressed as truth and wisdom and resistance to temptations; while the diabolical corrupts, corrodes and denatures you through the invitation to endless pleasure, the technology of vulgarity, destruction, stealing and yes, killing (remember: traits!). They are at war in your mind, in this world.
The diabolical often masks itself as the opposite, whether through a system like capitalism that falsely claims all can have part of prosperity while a few hoard wealth and the masses are proselytized into diverting their gaze from sweatshops and prison labor footing the bill. Or it looks like a political category such as democracy, pretending its work is bringing equality but speaking the language of bombs, assassinating freedom-fighters, propaganda, fantasy media, installing political puppets, the white nationalist lie of christianity, raping the earth, and genociding indigenous peoples in both hemispheres.
Once we can discern the character of that which is diabolical, we can indict it in our lives and in our journals. But we have been brainwashed against recognizing it. We live in a “democracy”, grew up watching TV without questioning its timing or messages, attended history-eviscerated schools, and went to a church on sundays to praise a god we learned of on these stolen lands. This system has dictated to us who is bad (Black Panthers?) and who is good (Catholic Church?), tailored the imagery and news about protests and serial killers so as to maintain their american dream, and manufactures distraction whenever people begin to stir out of the coma that is that dream.
In all, the diabolical is difficult to recognize because in our world, society, and western culture it is considered ABSOLUTELY NORMAL.
In a society where we are disingenuously encouraged to choose good over evil, it is by [diabolical] design that we aren’t taught to discern the layers and mechanisms as to how the diabolical manifests and masquerades. The ease in which we can find ourselves in diabolical situations and vices, along with the wickedness abounding in the world as a whole indicates that the plenary of us are clueless as to the energy and engineering of devilish things. Yet to understand how the diabolical operates is to discern and be vigilant with regards to the character and outcome of anything around you. We live in an EVIL world, and evil has a pattern, a character, and specific set of outcomes: steal, kill and destroy. The wool over our eyes from Christian values patinating societal messaging tells us that the devil manifests in wars and famines and other “major” horrors.
The subtle details that create miseries we’ve grown to view as tolerable or part of life are the very things we must extricate and examine in our journals. We’re not told the devil is the white teacher that withholds a good grade from your son, or the manager who doesn’t tell you that your work is brilliant as you doubt your qualifications. We’re not told that what’s diabolical is the expectation that you will forgive the atrocity of chattel slavery AND never look into the laws that are still informing the de facto miseries of Blackness today. Diabolical is that you are not told that you are experiencing trauma, functional freeze, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome or CPTSD— and blame yourself for not being able to “get ahead”. Diabolical is that CPTSD wasn’t defined until enough white men were massacred in rich white men’s wars, or white girls kidnapped by sociopathic white men.
Diabolical are those damn “boot straps”.
Diabolical is how autism was a disorder until white boys started being diagnosed; or addiction was criminal until white children found their drug of choice. Diabolical is Black youth’s TV programming hyper-sexualizing them while TV programs with white casts emphasize “family values”, the innocence of white girls and always show 2-parent homes or other solid forms of family units (think Full House). Having to “Play ‘the game’” is diabolical— what is “the game”? The general understanding that rich people will never pay for their crimes is DIABOLICAL.
And these things are not only diabolical by their nature, but by the timeline of their outcomes, the ruining of souls and bloodlines, the assumptions and social ramifications that follow, the schisms that rent some but not others, the insinuations that form, or the ones demonized that should not be in the long run.
Teastained women diarists, these are just the beginning of our mandatory equipment to dismantle the evils in pursuit of the witnesses in these times.
