Part 1: The task, the consequences, the methodology & the illusion of injustice
Part 2: Law enforcement 101: the enforcer
Part 3: Law enforcement 201: "in kind"
Part 4: Law enforcement 301: "in proportion"
Part 5: Law enforcement 401: inner civil war
Part 6: Law enforcement 501: The neuro-science of karma
5 Law enforcement 101: the enforcer
In this section I will first prove the premise that all human beings have a conscience.
Next I will reveal the enforcer of the law of karma and describe from whence this force originates.
I’ll then describe the fundamental delusion that gives rise to all unhappiness in the world.
I’ll illustrate how this delusion gives rise to disharmony within, which in turn, gives rise to barbarism without, and is ultimately responsible for keeping our entire species trapped within in the age of barbarism.
Finally I will reveal the reason why the enforcer of the law of karma is absolutely undefeatable.
5.1 The universality & permanence of conscience
Is it really the case that the people who we might consider to be monsters actually have a conscience?
It is. The apparent absence of a conscience in some people is a misperception.
We can be certain that all human beings have a conscience because our conscience has a biological origin that we all share.
Have you ever wondered why so many disparate cultures across the globe throughout the ages have developed moral codes wherein the foundational belief always seems to be some variant of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you?
The reason is because the golden rule is hard-wired into the very neural circuitry of our brains.
What we call “morality” is merely a manifestation of the emotion of empathy. When we empathize with another we feel connected to them in a fashion wherein we feel their joy and suffering as if it were our own.
While we feel connected to someone we naturally “do unto them as we would have done unto us” because we feel as if we *are* them. We are not capable of harming others when we are connected to them because it would be like harming ourselves.
When we do hurt someone and subsequently feel connected to them, we feel their pain as if it was our own and know that we are the cause of it. That horrible feeling we call “guilt” or “remorse” and it creates a powerful and persistent memory that has the power to re-shape our beliefs and the behaviors which flow from those beliefs for the better.
What we call our “conscience” is our fear of feeling that pain of guilt again.
We are programmed by evolution to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
The fear of the pain of guilt drives us to limit the scope of our pleasure seeking and pain avoiding activities to those that will not cause pain to others.
Empathy is an indispensible component of our ability to “self-regulate” our primal pleasure seeking and pain avoiding drives.
When the fear of feeling the pain of guilt successfully influences our decision making process, we act “in harmony” with our conscience.
When a larger fear of pain overpowers the fear of the pain of guilt, we may act “in disharmony” with our conscience.
It is our empathy that enables us to connect.
It is our empathy that enables us to feel the pain of guilt.
It is our empathy that is the source of our conscience.
All human beings – without exception – are wired for empathy.
Therefore all human beings have a conscience.
Empathy is not learned. It is innate. When one baby in hospital nursery begins to cry, the other babies begin to cry in unison because we are all born with empathy.
The fact that people do not always act in harmony with their conscience is not evidence of the lack of a conscience. The fact that some socio-paths seem to never act in harmony with their conscience is not evidence of a lack of a conscience. Rather it is evidence that an even stronger fear of pain exists than that of the fear of the pain of guilt.
Despite what we may think, it is *always* “fear of pain” and not “desire for pleasure” that leads people to act in disharmony with their conscience because “fear of pain” always trumps “desire for pleasure” in our decision making process. (The reason for this will be described when we examine the neuro-science of the decision making process.)
Those who appear to be without a conscience are usually just trying to deceive us with their “tough guy” acts because they fear appearing weak more than they fear the pain of guilt. You can rest assured that beneath the surface of even the worst psychopathic murders is a terrified little boy or girl who feels powerless and out of control unless they are inflicting their will on others.
Unconvinced?
Then consider why our species evolved the ability to empathize to begin with.
Empathy almost certainly evolved as a means to judge the true intentions of potential predators in the vicinity of the tribe.
Imagine our ancestors swinging from the trees in an environment where predators were always present.
Would not those who had the ability to correctly judge the intentions of the predators have an advantage over those who could not?
Those who could correctly ascertain the intentions of the predators would know when to venture out of the trees for food whereas those who did not would either remain paralyzed by fear and die of starvation or venture out when the predators were hungry.
To test if someone really has empathy simply make a sudden and threatening move toward them. If they flinch you can rest assured that they have the ability to ascertain the intentions of others. They have empathy. They must. They would not have evolved if they did not.
Our ability to feel empathy is key to our ability to self-regulate our destructive emotions.
When our species became dominant our #1 predator became each other.
Empathy enables us to ascertain to the true intentions of other humans.
Empathy is what enables us, for example, to detect dishonesty and deception in others – if only subconsciously.
It is clear from our understanding of how the brain evolved that the ability to empathize evolved later than the primal fear-driven motivation system of the reptilian brain. (Mammals have empathy. Reptiles do not.) It evolved as a means to self-regulate our fears to enable us to only be fearful when we truly need to be and to not allow inappropriate fear to prevent us from seizing opportunities.
Our species has now achieved dominance over our predators but we are still saddled with a brain that evolved to enable us to survive in a predatory environment. It is also clear that, in the absence of predators, natural selection continues to favor those with greater empathy and thus a greater ability to self-regulate their destructive emotions. This is true for the simple reason that those who are less able to control their destructive emotions have a higher probability to find and destroy each other. The alpha-male is an endangered species.
Thus not only do all human beings have empathy and therefore a conscience, but our conscience is being strengthened with each new generation by natural selection. This is the reason why we are progressively becoming less and less barbarous and why the end of the age of barbarism is drawing nearer.
5.2 The enforcer of the law of karma
The force which ensures that that the law of karma is enforced is largely unseen.
For millennia it has remained hidden within a fog of confusion.
This lack of understanding has led some of us to identify it as meta-physical being.
The lack of clarity about how it works has led many of us to question its inviolability.
You may be surprised to discover the identity of the enforcer of karma.
It is you!
And it is me.
It is all of us.
We do it ourselves.
But we do it unconsciously.
Karma is enforced by each of us. It is enforced by our conscience.
It is enforced by our conscience whether we are conscious of it or not.
It is enforced by our conscience whether we will it to be or not.
Our conscience acts as an independent personality within us applying constant pressure on us to “do unto others as we would have done unto us”.
If we do not “do unto others as we would have done unto us”, our conscience will work tirelessly to ensure that we will “have done unto us as we have done unto others”.
Karma is the punishment / reward system that we unconsciously use on ourselves to persuade ourselves to follow the golden rule.
The greater the pain that we intentionally cause others, the greater the pain of the guilt that we will feel when we feel connected to them and the more that we will fear connecting with them.
The greater the joy that we intentionally bring to others, the greater the joy that we will feel when we feel connected to them and the more that we will desire to connect with them.
The more we behave in a fashion which causes us to harm others the more we will fear connecting with anyone.
The more we behave in a fashion which brings joy to others the more we will desire to connect with everyone.
The intensity of the emotion of guilt or sympathetic joy that we feel subconsciously influences our thoughts and behaviors and either enables or constrains us from experiencing the happiness that we desire to experience.
Our conscience rewards us or punishes us in direct proportion to the magnitude of our harmony or disharmony with it.
This is how our conscience enforces the rule that we should receive in kind and proportion to what we give.
5.3 The root cause of unhappiness
The fundamental delusion of our species in this age of barbarism is the misguided belief that we can achieve happiness for ourselves by following a course of action which brings unhappiness to others.
Some of us have very strong beliefs of this nature and because our life experiences tend to support them we tend to cling to them even more strongly when we become unhappy.
Yet we continue to be unhappy and we don’t really know why.
In our frustration, we may blame others for our unhappiness.
But this is not true.
Happiness or unhappiness comes from within.
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life;
Not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
~Khalil Gibran
We are not defined by the cards we are dealt by life. We are defined by how we choose to play them.
The longer we blame others for our unhappiness the more we prolong and deepen our unhappiness.
The longer we blame others the longer that we blind ourselves to the very truth that can put an end to it.
It is a truth that we already know in our hearts but we are afraid to hear it.
The strength of our attachment to our beliefs about what will make us happy may be such that we may feel a powerful resistance to even contemplating the astonishing truth that it is our own collection of misguided beliefs about what will make us happy that is the cause of our unhappiness.
The more we cling to them the more unhappy we become but we do not see this because we do not consciously perceive the larger chain of cause and effect. Because we are narrowly focused we see only that acting on these beliefs *appears* to bring us happiness in the short term and this evidence serves to re-enforce these erroneous beliefs.
In order to see with absolute clarity how deeply and irrevocably misguided such beliefs are it is necessary to understand a little bit about how our brain works and why our brain evolved in the way that they did.
Our brain has been crafted by evolution in a fashion to desire pleasure and avoid pain.
We are biologically engineered for the pursuit of happiness.
Every decision that we make is guided by this desire.
We share this basic motivation system with all animals.
Mammals, however, developed the ability to empathize.
And the ability to empathize re-wired our brains to more correctly identify what will bring pain and what will bring pleasure.
Remember that the emotion of empathy evolved as a means to ascertain the true intentions of other beings.
It evolved as a means to self-regulate our fears to enable us to only be fearful when we truly needed to be and to not allow inappropriate fear to prevent us from seizing opportunities.
When we meet someone new we instinctively seek to connect with them to identify them as a friend or foe.
When we sense that we can trust them, we feel safe.
When we sense that they care about our well-being, we feel safer.
The safer that we feel, the more happy that we become.
The more people in our environment that we feel connected with, the safer that we feel and the more happy that we are.
This ability to connect with others and establish a sense of mutual trust is a pre-requisite for enduring happiness because we cannot be happy if we are afraid.
It is empathy that enables us to do this.
But when we mistakenly believe that happiness can be achieved by causing harm to others we are choosing to do battle with our own innate need to connect with others.
We are choosing to switch off our ability to empathize with some.
We are choosing to go to war with our conscience.
But in so doing we are attacking the very source of our ability to be happy.
Anything we do that leads us to switch off our ability to connect with others constrains our ability to attain and maintain the enduring happiness that we desire.
The more people that we harm and the more deeply that we wound them the worse our situation becomes.
But rarely do we perceive this on a conscious level.
The amount of happiness that we are capable of attaining and sustaining varies in direct proportion to our ability to connect with others and sustain those connections.
Also of importance is the depth of the connection.
It now becomes apparent why our species developed the capacity to love.
That which we call “love” is in reality a state of having deep empathy for another person.
By “love” we are not referring to infatuation, or lust, but rather the “true love” that is a deep caring for the welfare of other beings.
That which we call “happiness” and that which we call “love” are just two different words that we use to describe the same underlying mind-state that we are driven to pursue.
If you doubt this, try this simple exercise the next time you feel great happiness…
Pay attention to your thoughts.
Notice that when you are joyful that you have warm feelings for others.
When the joy leaves you, notice what thought triggered the joy to leave.
Was it not some form of fear that caused you to stop thinking about others and to think about protecting yourself?
Love is the means by which a state of joy is persisted.
Love enables enduring joy.
The greater our ability to sustain a state of warm feelings for others the longer the duration of the joy that we experience.
When we decide that our path to happiness requires us to switch off our empathy for another person we are working at cross purposes with ourselves.
The tragedy of the decision to fight empathy to avoid the short term pain of guilt is that it limits our ability to experience the very state of joy that we are seeking.
The decision to choose immediate gratification over harmony with our conscience is a decision to deny ourselves the very state of enduring joy that we yearn for.
When we are relaxed, joyous and free from fear, our ability to connect with others is at its height. Happiness and caring about others are indelibly connected. The physiology of our brain is such that we cannot have one without the other. This is why all beliefs that happiness can be achieved by hurting other people are misguided beliefs.
But we don’t see this because we are so narrowly focused on the immediate gratification we get from doing so. This temporary pleasure serves to strengthen the misguided belief that we are on the path to happiness and blinds us to the larger truth that by defying our conscience we are creating the conditions for long term enduring unhappiness.
5.4 Disharmony within
This delusion that happiness can be achieved by following a course of action that brings unhappiness to others gives rise to the need for karma.
Both our conscious and unconscious minds are driven by the same desire to be happy.
But our unconscious mind knows things that our conscious mind does not.
Unconsciously we are very aware of the fact that seeking to bringing unhappiness to others will only bring unhappiness to ourselves.
It is this subconscious awareness that gives rise to the internal disharmony of the inner civil war that ensues when we consciously seek to find happiness by brining unhappiness to others.
5.5 Barbarism without
Disharmony within gives birth to barbarism without.
The belief that happiness can be achieved by bringing unhappiness to others leads us to do so.
When others act selfishly and intentionally seek to harm us, our lack of faith in the natural justice of karma may lead us to respond in kind.
They in turn may do the same.
In this fashion our delusion gives birth to, sustains and empowers the cycle of barbarism that can grow to consume and destroy us.
It is in this fashion that the delusion that gives rise to disharmony within also gives rise to barbarism without.
This is the root cause of all of the barbarism in the world.
The belief that happiness can be achieved for ourselves by bringing unhappiness to others is the root cause of our unhappiness. This belief gives birth to disharmony within which, in turn, gives birth to barbarism without. To the extent to which we change such beliefs we will bring greater peace and happiness to both ourselves and our world.
The delusion that happiness can be achieved by bringing unhappiness to others is the delusion that we can get away with violating karma. We cannot. Karma is inviolable.
5.6 The resilience of the law enforcer
Why is our conscience undefeatable?
We may perceive that our conscience is working against our desire to be happy, but we could not be more wrong.
Our unconscious mind knows things that our conscious mind does not.
The reason why our conscience is so relentless is because it too is driven by the desire to be happy, but it knows with absolute certainty that the only way to achieve this is to stay connected to others, to keep our hearts open to them at all times, and to do unto them as we would have done unto us.
The more we intentionally act to cause harm to others the more our unconscious mind seeks to move to counter us.
It is resilient and it is undefeatable because deep down it knows with absolute certainty that it is acting in our best interests.
That is the message that our unconscious mind has been broadcasting to us at maximum volume through the emotion of guilt our entire lives.
We need only to take out our ear-plugs and listen.
5.7 Conclusions
All human beings have a conscience.
Karma is the punishment / reward system that we unconsciously use on ourselves to persuade ourselves to follow the golden rule.
The root cause of the disharmony within which generates the barbarism without that characterizes our species in the age of barbarism is the misguided belief that happiness can be achieved by following a course of action which brings unhappiness to others.
The reason why our conscience is absolutely undefeatable is because we unconsciously know with absolute certainty that causing suffering to others will bring us unhappiness rather than the happiness we desire.
Part 3: Law enforcement 201: "in kind"
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