When we embark on a spiritual path, turning over the stones of our inner hidden beliefs and defenses to uncover the untruths they hold, we typically run into a ton of inner resistance. This is our Lower Self not wanting to expose and overcome itself.

Just under this resistance to facing ourselves is the fear that we live in an unjust, meaningless and chaotic place. This fear—and the hopelessness that comes with it—gives rise to a specific kind of pain: the pain of injustice.

Our pain of injustice—of believing in a senseless world—puts a negative spin on things. It strengthens our Lower Self attitudes and behaviors. The guilt we feel for our negative and pessimistic attitudes makes us feel like we don’t deserve the good life, replete with total justice.

The battle going on is just this: maybe we live in a thoroughly just world and just can’t perceive this yet. If so, our perception of things can be corrected and restored. On the other hand, a universe in which injustice is allowed to happen—evil can win—well, that can’t be corrected. That’s a thoroughly dismal prospect.

After embarking on this path, though, we find a perplexing phenomenon: once we clear our resistance to facing our Lower Self traits, working through their consequences and painful effects, we experience profound relief.

The puzzle pieces fit. Things fall into place. It’s like a weight lifts off our shoulders.

What’s happening here? It’s because in that moment, we have a personal experience that life is, in fact, fair. Life is completely just.

The fight against injustice lies inside ourselves

The fear that we live in an unjust world creates one of the most unbearable pains felt in a human soul. Let’s look at how to unwind the pain of injustice.

Consider that whatever exists in the macrocosm—the world at large—also exists in the microcosm—our own self. The first place to look, then, to create a shift is in our own psyche.

There is no way around it: we’ve got to do our own inner work. If we spend our lives fighting injustice outside ourselves, we’ll never see the distortions of truth that live in us. And they must live within us. If they didn’t, the outer chaos of the world wouldn’t light a fire deep in our bellies.

On a spiritual path such as the one outlined in these teachings, we need to peer into all the hidden crevices of our soul. This is the route that brings true security.

It wipes out the pain of injustice by establishing connections between cause and effect inside us.

We can’t believe in a fair and just universe until we plainly see how all our actions—including thoughts and intentions, feelings and attitudes—result in definite effects. We shift from seeing the world as a random land of arbitrary events, to spotting how our actions roll up into life’s larger processes.

The war we’re really fighting is within, with our Higher and Lower Selves at odds. Our Lower Self is all about justifying and rationalizing and projecting and blaming—all of which keeps our negativity snowballing.

But any time we seem to get away with acting out our Lower Self, the shallow, momentary triumph covers over a deeper despair about living in a meaningless world.

What goes around, comes around

As long as we’re living in these bodily shells made out of matter, we are not going to be able to make all the connections of cause and effect. Many will remain invisible to us, though we may intuitively pick up on some of the links, some of the time.

To understand that connections we can’t see really do exist, we’re going to need to have faith. But true faith is, at least to some degree, experiential.

We come to true faith by increasingly uncovering the links of cause and effect that are buried inside ourselves. This expanding movement toward wholeness calms our fear about feeling the pain of injustice; it heals the wounds caused by our own fear.

Think about how it feels to witness some cruel event in which the perpetrators seem to get away with it. Or maybe when a truly good deed—such as genuine love and giving—is met with some undeserved blowback or fails in some way to produce just rewards.

From time to time, we’ll be able to ferret out deeper connections that reveal perfect justice at work. But often this requires time. The unrolling of time will make the connections obvious, eventually bringing more truth to the surface.

But in the immediate moment—and this is equally true for big issues and little ones—we are in the dark. And the unrolling of time may extend beyond our lifetime.

This is what spiritual scriptures refer to when they talk about the reality of ultimate justice—we may not see the whole story until after we’ve left our bodies behind. Often, there is a place and time referred to after death when everything will be revealed.

We’re typically not crazy about this idea, because it conjures up a punishing eye-in-the-sky deity—an unmerciful ruler who will bring justice down upon our heads. This notion came from ancient beliefs that confused God with the kind of cruel leaders we found on Earth.

The true meaning of the “final judgment” though, is that we will finally see how all the puzzle pieces—of absolutely everything—fit together to form one beautiful picture. Then we’ll see the faultless justice embedded in each of God’s spiritual laws.

It’s not fun that we each have some negative karma to burn off. These spiritual laws are totally going to hold our feet to the fire. But any price we must pay for infringing on God’s laws is far outweighed by the joy we feel when we discover that, wow, this is a fair place after all.

Once our eyes are opened to this, we will joyfully undertake whatever we must go through. Living in a trustworthy universe has so much more value than skipping out on paying off a debt. Our relief over seeing cause and effect will more than offset having to pay the price.

Although, sure, we’re still going to resist being accountable for our infractions. But on a deeper level, we’ll be profoundly relieved to see the bigger picture: every teensy weensy particle of consciousness creates effects that come back around.

This can go one of two ways: we can create positive circles that work in a life-affirming way, or we can create negative vicious circles that deny life. The effects go like clockwork according to the cause.

The giant recorder

How exactly does it work that everything gets accounted for—including our secret intentions and less-than-noble attitudes—even decades later? How can a person be judged for how they lived their life, after the fact?

There is an important principle at work here, and understanding it will help us open the inner valves on our intuition.

People are made up of an inner substance—sometimes called a soul substance—that reflects every bit of our life. Nothing gets glossed over; no aspect gets lost in the corner.

Everything that has any significance—our thoughts and feelings, our intentions and actions—gets imprinted onto this substance, along with all the ramifications. The upshot of this is that everything’s available for review.

As such, a person’s whole life can be looked at from every conceivable angle. We are an open book. Each of us has this built-in recording device. This drives a hole through our grand illusion—one of our many—that if we keep our thoughts to ourselves, they won’t hurt anybody, including us.

We go so far as to resent others if they react to our unspoken intentions, thinking our secrets are safe with us and shouldn’t count. But the recorder is always running, capturing everything.

There are spiritual laws regarding the timing of effect-follows-cause. Sometimes it happens quickly and sometimes it happens slowly. But it always happens. Generally, the more highly developed an entity is, the faster effect comes after cause. Often, the less developed will only make the missing connections after their body has been shed.

Nothing is missed

As noted earlier, what happens in the microscopic happens at the macroscopic. Thus the planet has a soul substance too, and everything that’s ever happened on Earth is imprinted there. Our history can be read as one immaculately kept record.

Since this world recorder is outside the bounds of our 3D time and space, certain future possibilities—what’s most likely to manifest—can be found there as readily as transcripts about the past.

Clairvoyant people with certain gifts are able to tap into parts of the world record. Keep in mind, though, that the limited consciousness of such a person can allow misunderstandings to cloud their visions.

Just like our personal soul substance, the world substance is infinitely malleable. They are both made of the same stuff, and nothing gets past it—nothing that has already happened, nothing that is currently happening, and nothing that will ever happen. It’s automatic that it all gets imprinted.

The recording includes the raw event along with any hidden motives and secret intentions. It even registers the precise balance of ambivalent feelings and the truth behind any decision we make.

It notes the alternatives we choose to act on—as people and as a planet—so there can be no obfuscation of what went on. On the surface we may be confused and in the dark, stuck in arguments and dissension, while deep below, our hidden levels of awareness are running the show.

Nothing is missed.

If we could see all this with clarity—all our intentions and all cause and effect—it would eliminate our pain of injustice. We would see, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that we live in an infinitely just creation where no error is possible.

This is what is meant by the Judgment Day talked about in religious circles. It hints at this notion of ultimate justice. But in our limited and negatively skewed view of life, people have inferred an unfair, arbitrary rejection of who we are, instead of a fair and grand assessment. That’s humanity’s typical state of affairs, projecting our unloving attitude where it doesn’t belong.

In the end, though, divine justice is nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of everything an individual expresses. Then the inevitable consequences are both the measure and medicine for helping a person heal and expand into wholeness—that is to say, holiness.

Dissolving the pain of injustice doesn’t come cheap. We have to work for it, through the struggle of our work of self-knowing. This means we have to get over our resistance to looking within and discovering what is hiding in the cracks. We will need to take responsibility for what we find.

Tearing ourselves apart

Our struggle stems from the fact that our will is trying to go in two opposite directions, tearing ourselves apart.

We fear and resist this grand accounting that overlooks nothing. But it is also our deepest longing to have exactly this piece of knowledge—to experience the truth of this full and fair reckoning. Only in this way will we heal this intense wound of believing that this world is wholly unreliable and there really is no justice for all.

What we ardently oppose on the surface, we vigorously long for within. When the outer self wins, our inner selves are in despair. We may feel this only vaguely or at other times quite keenly, but without awareness of what’s going on, we’ll never understand it clearly. In misinterpreting our despair, we blame everyone but ourselves for our pain.

Our task is to feel this pain caused by the belief we are puppets in an unjust world. Once we hone in on this specific pain, we can face the struggle around healing this pain—that push-pull inside attempting to go in two opposing directions.

The only relief possible comes from doing the thing we resist the most: linking up the causes we ourselves set into motion with their effects on ourselves and others.

Once we remove this inner wall of resistance, it will seem foolish to have erected it in the first place. It will be such a relief to see the orderliness of creation—the infinite mercy and justice woven into all that is.

Plus, we’ll get a renewed sense of ourselves as an integral component of the fabric of life. All we desire, strive for and accomplish has an impact, whether we realize this or not.

We don’t need to fear or resist this reality. We only do so because we think our destructive aspects are our ultimate essence and final reality. If that were true, it would indeed be unbearable.

That alternative is what the dark forces whisper into our ears. They want us to remain in pain and confusion, disconnected from the greater reality of life.

If we stay in the dark, we’ll rail against the pain of an unjust universe. We won’t see the beauty of God’s creation and the justice that permeates it all. We won’t see the truth that—really and truly—it’s all good.

And so we need to pray. We need faith in our ultimate goodness at our core, which will show itself only when we are able to see the darkness that is covering it up. Over and over, this is the step we need to take.

This step requires courage. We’ll find the strength to have the needed courage as we become aware that we matter. By simply existing, everything we do makes a difference.

It all matters

Our thoughts do not befall us. We are the director of our thoughts. With our thoughts, we create. They direct the flow of our feelings and choices.

It’s a total illusion to believe that by not deciding our own thoughts or deeds, we don’t make a difference. We often even doubt that our choices have an impact even when we do make an effort. Then how much more do we doubt the effect of lukewarm withholding, or of not taking a stand, or not seeking out the truth.

The reality of the situation is that all our inactions have just as much impact as what we do. It’s all registered in our soul substance, including our hidden motives for lacking motivation.

All our attitudes and feelings that accompany any decision to not act are noted and recorded. Every thought sends out rays of energy that create according to their nature. We are already co-creating our current reality.

Adopting this vision of ourselves as constant creators can lend a new dignity to our lives. It can motivate us to choose to be an agent of the divine, searching for disturbances inside ourselves that block the beauty, wisdom and truth that are ready to flow through the instrument of our being.

Or we can follow the path of least resistance, which always aligns with the dark forces. Whether we consciously know that that is what we are doing, matters not at all. We’re still doing it, and it is no less harmful.

Life is all about changing, and we can transform the worst in us to the best in us, forever and always; our soul substance is infinitely malleable. We can overcome our Lower Selves, and find new self-esteem.

By harnessing the courage and maturity to face whatever negativity is still in us, we restore our faith in Christ, in justice, and in goodness. Our souls can be restored to their original vibrant condition.

Our key is always to look at our level of fear and anxiety. To whatever degree we feel these, we will feel the pain of injustice. To that exact same degree, we are unaware of the effect of our Lower Self and its consequences.

Conversely, to the extent we can name our fears and look directly at the pain of injustice gnawing at our insides, we will overcome our resistance to seeing how we disconnect from the turmoil wrought by our Lower Self.

This is the doorway through which we can remove a burden of fear and the pain of injustice. We’ll gain a new security that all is, indeed, very well.

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Adapted from Gems: A multifaceted collection of 16 clear spiritual teachings, Chapter 8: The pain of injustice and the truth about fairness