The pain of injustice contains much more than can be expressed by this word “injustice.” Because our pain is not just about injustice that is happening to us in the here-and-now. It includes a fear that we live in an unfair world where destruction can happen—and there are no safety valves…
It’s the fear that there’s no rhyme or reason to anything, and that nothing we do—good, bad or otherwise—will have any effect on the outcome…The pain of injustice distinctly results from feeling disconnected and leads to feeling disconnected. There it is. When we can’t connect results with their cause, we panic, and this fear of meaninglessness sets in…
We often think of ourselves as being oh-so-very broadminded. But in truth, our field of vision is often too narrow for us to see how everything connects. Quite simply, not all of the cause-and-effect dots are visible to us, in this one lifetime; there are gaps in our perspective…
We need to go back to considering this point that whatever exists in the macrocosm—the world at large—also exists in the microcosm—our own self. So the first place to look at creating a shift is in our own psyche…No other way around it, we’ve got to do our own work. Otherwise we’ll spend our lives tilting at windmills outside ourselves, and never see that the distortion of truth must live within us. For if it did not, the outer chaos of the world wouldn’t light a fire deep in our bellies…
So 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 ourselves…The war we’re really fighting is within, with our dual nature of Higher and Lower Selves at odds…We want someone to ally with our Higher Self and help us find our way out of the dark…We want to trust that the universe is fair…
Think about how it feels to witness some cruel event in which the perpetrators seem to get away with it…From time to time, we’ll be able to ferret out deeper connections that reveal the perfect justice we are witnessing. 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 us…
The true meaning of the “final judgment” 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…So yeah, it sucks 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 of discovering that, wow, this is not an unfair place after all…Once the wool falls off our eyes, we will joyfully undertake whatever we must go through, because living in a trustworthy universe has so much more value than skipping out on paying off a debt.
So how exactly does this work that everything gets accounted for?…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…So each of us has this built-in recording device, which drives a hole through our grand illusion—one of our many—that as long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves, they won’t hurt anybody, including us. No dice…The recorder is always running, and it’s capturing the whole ball of wax…
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…Nothing is missed…
If we could see all this with clarity, 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. But such awareness can’t come cheap…
This means we have to get over our resistance to looking within and discovering what is hiding in the cracks. And we will need to take responsibility for what we find…Our struggle stems from the fact that our will is trying to go in two opposite directions. On the one hand, we duck our heads in the sand, fearing and resisting this grand accounting that overlooks nothing. On the other hand, it is our deepest longing to have exactly this piece of knowledge—to experience the truth of this full and fair reckoning…
So what we ardently oppose on the surface, we vigorously long for within…The only relief we’ll find comes from doing the thing we resist the most: linking up the causes we ourselves have set into motion with their effect on ourselves and others…
All we do and desire and strive for and accomplish—it 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 bits are the whole pie—our ultimate essence and final reality. If that were true, it would indeed be unbearable…
But 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. For if we stay in the dark, we’ll rail against the pain of an unfair 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, Scout’s honor—it’s all good.
And so we need to pray. We need to find 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…We’ll find the strength to have the needed courage if we become aware that we matter. By simply existing, everything we do makes a difference…
Our thoughts do not befall us. We are the director of our thoughts. And with our thoughts, we create…The reality of the situation is that all our non-actions have just as much impact as what we do. It’s all registered in our soul substance, including our hidden motives for having no gumption…
All our attitudes and feelings that accompany any decision to not act are noted and recorded…We are already co-creating our current reality…This new vision of ourselves as constant creators can lend a new dignity to our lives. It can motivate us to choose to be an agent on behalf of God, searching for disturbances inside ourselves that block the beauty and wisdom and truth that are ready to flow through the instrument of our being. Or we can do the devil’s work. Whether we consciously know what we are doing, matters not a lick. We’re still doing it, and it is no less harmful…
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; many will flat out remain invisible to us…To understand then 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 faith by increasingly uncovering the links that are buried inside ourselves.
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