It's one of the best-known stories, and it comes from the Quran itself. When God created man and had the angels serve him, one of them rebelled and refused to obey. That was Iblis. He said: I won't bow to Adam. He's made of clay and I'm made of fire. In other words, Adam is beneath me, so why should I bow to him?
It's a lovely story with a lot of symbolism in it, whether you're an atheist or a believer. You don't have to take it literally. What matters is that we can take two sides from it that explain what "the devil" means, or what the devilish part inside us is: how we act, how we think and how we see things.
The first side: arrogance and comparison
The devilish mind always finds its worth by putting others down. It sorts people: he's like this, I'm like that, so I'm better than this one or that one. That's where the ego starts, and with it vanity and pride.
It's never wrong to tell things apart and know our own worth. The mistake is getting dazzled by it, taking it too far, and concluding that, in the end, I'm better. That hurts us too, because we end up defining ourselves the same way we defined and belittled others. One day it turns on us without our noticing.
A two-room house and a four-room house
Picture yourself happy with your life: a two-room house, a modest income, a car. Then you visit a friend you haven't seen in years, and he has a four-room house with a garden, maybe a newer car, and a driver too. Naturally you feel tiny and your pride cracks, and he hasn't said a word to put you down. Nobody has touched you.
What turned on you is your own mind. The way of thinking that used to make you happy has become the source of your misery, without anyone looking down on you or saying something you don't like. So be careful not to get too dazzled by appearances, by who you are and what you own. It's one of the most common human problems: a poison inside that destroys you while you don't even feel it.
The second side: forgetting the origin
Iblis wasn't only taken in by appearances, judging and comparing. His other problem was that he forgot where things come from: that clay, fire, air and water all come from one source, one energy that we call God. We can't see it with our eyes, but we know it's the foundation of the universe, and that without it the universe would fall apart.
Even science has started to admit, a little shyly, that there's something big it doesn't understand. Instead of saying "there's something hidden I don't know", it gave the phenomenon a scientific name. Scientists noticed that about 95% of the universe's content is something we can't see directly, only through its effect on how stars and galaxies move, and they called it dark matter and dark energy. "Dark" because nobody knows yet what it actually is. I'm not saying science has proved anything about God. What strikes me is that science itself now admits there's something there we can't see or understand.
The devilish mind gets dazzled by appearances and forgets that we all come from one place. We come from it and we return to it in the end, like it or not. In reality we're all brothers, sisters and loved ones. But that mind inside us lures us into a trap: we build false borders and walls between us that divide and scatter us for nothing. They don't do us any good, yet we cling to them, because they give us a sense of "I", a separate self in our heads.
Why is love so hard these days?
Because love breaks those walls, and it breaks the ego inside you. That's the hardest thing for any of us: getting past our inner walls and truly connecting with someone else. It's why we say love is blind, and why we say people "fall" in love, as if it were an accident.
For us, the ego matters most, above everything. So when something like love pulls you out of it, to become one with another person and move in harmony with them, the ego feels it's falling and getting weak. And that brings us to one of the strongest cures for the devilish mind, for the arrogance, the comparing and our forgetting of our origin and our soul: love.
Invest in love
The smart person, in my view, is the one who invests in anything that has love in it: their work, their relationships, their way of life. When the heart beats with love again, the mind calms down and stops feeding you anxiety, fear, resentment and hatred toward anyone, even yourself.
Modern science talks about "emotional intelligence": understanding your own feelings and other people's, and knowing how to handle them. I see it as an intelligence of the heart, innate and God-given, that makes life smoother and kinder, and never at anyone's expense. You actually start to enjoy giving something that helps others, instead of using them, hurting them or climbing on their shoulders.
So if you want to walk the right way in life, in harmony and balance, invest in love. Its absence from your life is the biggest loss, and a sign that you're heading toward the negative, devilish mind, the one that will destroy you before it destroys anyone else.
If you'd like to try something today: notice each time you catch yourself comparing yourself with someone, from above or from below. Don't try to stop it. Just say quietly to yourself, "that's the ego." And once a day, do something small for someone without expecting anything back.