“You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”“A Late Delivery from Avalon” Marcus Cole
Babylon 5 Season 3 Episode 13
22 Apr 1996, Television
It has been an ongoing discussion that probably the hardest part of following the pathway back to Source or allowing the Law of Attraction to work in our life is the lesson that WE are responsible for EVERYTHING that happens in our lives. We either caused it, or chose it. Since we live in a state of self-induced amnesia, we usually do not remember these choices, actually it is our avoidance of this fact as to WHY we live in that state.
Unless you are a Sociopath or a Psychopath (I can never remember which is which), it is part of human nature to do what one thinks or believes is right. Throughout history, there have been many people that have been tagged by the world as dark and evil and from the common perspective of things, they were; so let us look at two of them.
Judas Iscariot
In several pieces of scripture, mainly from the east, there are examples of people that have been asked to be the "Bad Guy" at the behest of God or some advanced being so that other good could come out of it. We could look into them, but since they are unfamiliar to most of my audience, let's start from one of Christianity's most despised characters, Judas Iscariot.
The version that most people know is that Judas, one of the original 12 Apostles, was the money-keeper and later betrayed Jesus to the Jewish leadership for 30 pieces of silver and after the crucifixion, hung himself.
Among the Christian Gnostics, there has long been a tradition that Judas and Jesus were very close friends since childhood. The story goes that when Jesus was in Egypt, to escape the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, that a possessed child, Judas, was brought before him and after removing the demon, they became fast friends.
Many years later, back in Judea, they reclaimed their friendship and Judas became a close follower and later announced to be one of the chosen 12 Apostles.
The Canonical Gospels all agree that Judas had met with the Jewish Leadership before the Feast of Passover and made the arrangements to turn Jesus over to them, as Matthew says:
Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, and said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.Matthew 26:14-16 KJV
According to the Gnostic tradition, at some point Jesus had asked Judas to do what he did, hence the calm and supportive statement at the last supper, when Jesus announces that someone will betray him, but John gives us an insight when Jesus says to Judas:
That thou doest, do quickly.John 13:27b KJV
A surprisingly supportive and encouraging statement for what Jesus knows is about to begin.
I have always wondered about the statement in each of the Gospels where the writers attribute Judas being possessed by Satan, I guess the writers needed to explain why he did it. It may have also just been a judgment and a need to demarcate "him" from "us". This brings us to what Jesus had to say about passing judgment in general:
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.Matthew 7:1-5 KJV
Keep these verses in mind, we will be coming back to their content in a few moments.
Adolf Hitler
The vast majority of people in today's world do not think that there is much one can say about Adolf Hitler, as far as the "PC" crowd goes, anything in a remotely positive light will basically cause the doorway to Hell to open and swallow you whole. (Since I am about to say less than hateful things, I went to the store and bought dogs and marshmallows, just in case they are right.)
When we look at European History, we find a long tradition of anti-Semitic thought, yet we are still inclined to think that Hitler created this hatred out of thin air as a political ploy. Sadly, it was actually the re-emergence of longstanding animosities between European Christians and their Jewish neighbors taken to drastic and dark new heights of action, though even the killing of masses of Jews was not a new idea in Europe, by both Christians and Muslims.
Adolf Hitler, along with much of Germany, despised the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War with its economic sanctions and crippling reparations. The declaration in Article 231 which placed the blame and responsibility on Germany as the cause of World War I was seen as a national humiliation.
One oft overlooked fact is that the National Socialist German Workers' Party, then called DAP, started as a response to the Treaty of Versailles by a cadre of people who already had;
"...antisemitic, anti-monarchist and anti-Marxist views, as well as believing in the superiority of Germans whom nationalists claimed to be part of the Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk), but he [Anton Drexler, founder of the DAP] also accused international capitalism of being a Jewish-dominated movement and denounced capitalists for war profiteering in World War I.""National Socialist German Workers' Party" Wikipedia.org
The point being that Adolf did not create these mentalities, but used them to his advantage later when he came into power in the party. Sadly, these thoughts were not that uncommon in much of Europe at the time and specifically in Germany. Add to this mix the whole "Master Race" silliness and you have a recipe for a disaster of immense proportions and that is exactly what it turned into, as some 11-12 million plus people would attest to.
A Larger Perspective
From the common perspective, Hitler and his associates turned into one of the deadliest examples of man's inhumanity to man and we tend to pass that completely sane judgment onto the events in Europe under the Nazi Party as well as on the actions of Judas Iscariot toward Jesus.
"A Course in Miracles" has an interesting statement when it comes down to the whole judgement thing:
Schucman, Helen, A Course in Miracles
- When you lack confidence in what someone will do, you are attesting to your belief that he is not in his right mind.
- This is hardly a miracle-based frame of reference.
- It also has the disastrous effect of denying the power of the miracle.
- The miracle perceives everything as it is.
- If nothing but the truth exists, right-minded seeing cannot see anything but perfection.
- I have said that only what God creates or what you create with the same Will has any real existence.
- This, then, is all the innocent can see.
- They do not suffer from distorted perception.
1996, 2nd Edition, "Text" Chap 3 Sec II Par 3
New York: Viking: The Foundation for Inner Peace
If we expand our view to include the perfection of all things in their time and place, as difficult as that seems (especially from our limited perspective), the actions of both Judas and Hitler must be perfect as well. This will drive many to very angry places, we thrive on our ability to judge ourselves superior and others as inferior. We could almost call this "Nazi Light" in that it is in the diminishment of others that we plant the seeds that history has shown us we are capable of.
Here in the United States we like to think ourselves to evolved for such insanity, but are we really? At the same time Hitler was incarcerating anyone he saw as an impediment to his holding of power, what were we doing? We had started rounding up anyone of Japanese descent and putting them into internment camps under the guise of self-protection, albeit Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, but we did not round up German descendants even when it became clear that war with Germany was likely, if not imminent.
Very shortly later, it was not biology but an ideology that we deemed as being less than "us" during the "Red Scare" of McCarthyism. As a nation we had decided that anyone of a differing opinion on the subject of Democracy was a threat and therefor less than, leading to Senator McCarthy's "Black Lists".
Of course we justified it, there were "very good" reasons, it made sense and as a nation we convinced ourselves that it was the right thing to do. We did not think of ourselves as anti-social, we believed that it was correct.
All the world's a stage,William Shakespeare, As You Like It Act II Scene VII
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
Shakespeare wrote this as part of a piece describing the seven acts, or stages of life, ranging from infancy to old age. Many have also used it to describe the basic framework for explaining reincarnation of a single Spirit into multiple lives over the span of time.
There is a certain logic to the idea of reincarnation, that the eternal Spirit continues to learn beyond a single life. In traditional Christianity the idea is dismissed in favor of the idea that one has a relatively short period to make the right decision and if not, an eternity to pay for it. To me, that seems to make the Christian God excessively vindictive for a lack of understanding and acceptance. Of course there is the part of me that would find the traditional view to give credence to the verses where it speaks of the punishments for those who mislead others.
There is the old expression about not judging someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes, it gives you an insight into what is behind the reasoning for their actions.
An Example
One example comes from the "broader view" of sexual permissiveness; in the U.S. we have a large collection of people who just cannot get over the fact that some people have sex outside marriage, as someone once wrote, "Promiscuous is anyone getting laid more than you are."
Now I am not saying that sleeping around is necessarily a good thing (albeit, more fun and better entertainment than most network programming), but what people are really searching for in this activity is happiness, and eventually they will realize that though enjoyable, the joy is fleeting and cannot be made permanent. Ironically, it is the attempt to hold onto these happy, pleasant and enjoyable experiences that make us even more miserable in that as the Buddha said as his 2nd Noble Truth; attachment to impermanent things breed sorrow (OK, technically the 2nd Noble Truth is that sorrow is caused by attachments, but in his later discourses he clarifies the previous statement's meaning. An example of this would be the old adage; even the best sex becomes commonplace after a while).
Some of us learn from our pain quickly, others take longer and some seem to be as addicted to their pains and sorrows worse than any addict to Crack or Heroin.
