Every outer evil inevitably attracts from our own depths parts of ourselves that resemble it. To engage evil is therefore a spiritual act, because it will require of us the rare courage to face our own most ancient and intractable evils within. It means abandoning one of the greatest and oldest lies: that the world is made up of good people and bad people. There is a double movement of psychic energy. We identify someone else as evil and unconsciously project our own evil onto that person. But the person or system that we call enemy also evokes the evil within, like a piano string set vibrating by a piercing scream. This two-way traffic or projection and introjection, if not halted, eventually becomes a form of mimesis, where each party begins to imitate the other.
What is so very painful in the spiritual discipline required to face this inner darkness is that some of it may not be redeemable. I would like to become nonviolent from the heart, but there is a killer, a torturer, a coward, and a dictator in me that would like to keep me in psychic detention forever.
— Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence