A proof of the inviolability of karma (Part 5)

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

8 Law enforcement 401: inner civil war

In this section I will cover the anatomy of the civil war we choose to fight when we choose to war with our conscience.

I’ll start by describing the primary means by which our conscience fights the war that we have chosen to fight & give a few examples of the various ways in which this manifests itself.

I’ll then use inductive reasoning to illustrate how - when it comes to violating karma – every action has an equal but opposite reaction. I will give concrete examples of the most common ways in which we attempt to fight the war with our conscience and illustrate the means by which our conscience seeks to counter these and punish us further.

8.1 How our conscience wages war

If we consciously try to subvert karma by intentionally seeking to find joy for ourselves in a fashion that takes joy from (causes suffering to) others our conscience will work tirelessly and subconsciously to sabotage our efforts and will punish us in exact proportion to the degree to which we act in disharmony with it.

It will work to prevent us from achieving the goal that we seek.

If we achieve the goal it will work to prevent us from experiencing joy from doing so.

If we experience joy it will work to ensure that we experience the appropriate retaliatory measure of guilt.

It will punish us relentlessly for the rest of our lives until we take action to right the wrong that we have wrought.

How can this possibly be?
Read on …


If I ask you to picture in your mind someone who seemed to have it all but was absolutely miserable who comes to mind?
What are your thoughts about this person?

If I ask you to picture in your mind someone who seemed to have absolutely nothing or was treated very badly by many people but who seemed to be radiantly happy, who comes to mind?
What are your thoughts about this person?

Isn’t it true that the circumstances of our lives, by themselves, do not determine whether we are happy or unhappy?
Isn’t it true that it is how we choose to think about them does?

Ponder the truth that all non-physical pain is entirely self-inflicted.
Is not the same true for joy?

Do we not have the ability within us to search for and find the positive in anything and to generate happiness for ourselves?
Do we not have the ability to be happy even in the midst of tragedy?

We do. However, there is an unforeseen force that constraints our ability to do so.
If our conscience believes that we deserve to suffer then it will work incessantly to ensure that we do.

Think for a moment about how your mind works.
Have you ever wondered about how you choose to think the thoughts that you think?
Have you ever noticed how one thought reminds you of something else which reminds you of something else and this pattern of association generates a chain of interconnected thoughts that we call “thinking”.
When you are focused on one thought it can be associated to potentially thousands of other thoughts in your mind, but for some reason you chose to focus your attention on one particular thought that it reminds you of more than the others.
You choose one train of thought instead of another.
That choice presents a new set of associations and a new set of choices.
Have you ever wondered why you made that choice of which next thought to think?

Could it be that the emotions that we are feeling are influencing our choice of what to focus on?
Could it be that the stronger the emotion the more influence it has on directing our focus?
In so doing could it be that our emotions are subconsciously pushing us towards a particular train of thought?

If we are in disharmony with our conscience and we feel guilt will that not influence our choice of what thoughts to think?

If we intended to cause suffering we will feel guilt and that emotion will influence the choice of our thoughts.
If we intended to spread joy we will feel joyous and that emotion will influence the choice of our thoughts.
The thoughts that we think shape our perception of our reality.
And our perception of reality changes the way that we relate to the world.
And the way that we relate to the world and the people in it creates our reality.

Our conscience is the unseen hand that works behind the scenes to determine how much joy or suffering we should experience. It does so by subconsciously influencing the thoughts that we think to steer us in the direction that it believes that we deserve to go.

Remember that karma is about “intention”.

If we genuinely intended to give joy to others then we will expect to share in their joy in return regardless of how they respond to us. If they mistake our good intentions for bad ones do we tend to beat ourselves up for their mistake or do we tend to laugh it off?

Our conscience is the force that shapes how we allow ourselves to feel. If our good intentions are reciprocated with cruelty our conscience steels our resilience to the initial cruelty because we know in our hearts that it has not been earned. Thus our conscience will not allow us to feel pain. (That is, unless we subsequently choose to hurt ourselves by creating a victim story.)

Conversely, if we genuinely intended to cause harm to others but they misinterpret our bad intentions as good ones and are happy are we able to feel sympathetic joy with them? Why not? Is it not because our conscience will not allow us to do so?

Karma is not about deeds, it is about the intention behind the deeds.
All that matters is our intention.

If we intend to find happiness for ourselves by brining happiness to others, our conscience will work to make sure that we are happy regardless of the reaction that we get.

If we intend to find happiness for ourselves by bringing suffering to others, our conscience will work relentlessly to sabotage our efforts to do so and inflict on us the suffering that we intended for others.

The primary means by which our conscience acts to control us is by influencing the choice of thoughts that we think. This influence enables our conscience to practice self-sabotage subconsciously in a variety of ways.

8.1.1 Negativity

If you are not completely convinced of this, try this exercise …

Picture in your mind a person who you would consider to be excessively negative on a persistent basis.
What are your thoughts about this person?
Now picture in your mind a person who you would consider to be excessively positive on a persistent basis.
What are your thoughts about this person?

Now answer this question: Between the two people who do you trust more?

Is it possible that you are subconsciously aware of the fact that people who are excessively negative in their thinking might be in disharmony with their conscience and that you should be careful about trusting them?
Could it be that a person’s outward behavior of negativity is an unforeseen ripple effect of being in disharmony with their conscience that subconsciously advertizes to the world: I am not to be trusted!

One of the consequences of persistent negativity is the “law of attraction”.
We attract what we focus on.
Our focus becomes our reality.

This is one means by which our conscience subconsciously gives us the punishment it believes we deserve.

8.1.2 Anxiety

We may subconsciously communicate our guilt to others even in the midst of professing our innocence.

If I ask you to picture in your mind someone who appears to have a higher baseline state of anxiety than usual who comes to mind?

Do you trust this person or are you on your guard in their presence?

Is it possible that emotional instability is one means by which our conscience seeks to subvert us by warning others that we are not to be trusted?

Persistent anxiety is another form of “subconscious confession”.

8.1.3 Discomfort

Have you ever wondered why it makes us uncomfortable to keep secrets, or be less than 100% open and honest with others?

Lying is difficult and even more difficult to do convincingly. When our body language does not match our words we appear incongruent.

Even if people do not recognize this on a conscious level they do realize it subconsciously.

And these subtle incongruencies will ensure that people will not trust us.

Our conscience is the force behind the incongruency.

While we are consciously trying to deceive people, our conscience is screaming at them not to trust us by whatever means it can.

8.1.4 Pyrrhic victories

Did you know that the majority of people who win the lottery end up in bankruptcy?
Did you ever wonder why that might be?

Have you ever noticed that savoring something that you know you have truly earned is a more joyful experience than savoring something that you have not?
Did you ever wonder why that might be?

By influencing our choice of thoughts our conscience works against us to ensure that we will not enjoy the object of our desire if we have not earned it.
The intensity with which it works against us will vary in proportion to the degree to which we intentionally caused suffering in order to obtain it.

Our mind is always selectively interpreting events.
Our conscience will work to influence our thoughts to selectively interpret events in order to cause ourselves the same kind of pain that we’ve caused others.

The Buddha said …
“Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing you will be successful.”

8.1.5 Denial of love

The ultimate irony of our habitual decision to stay disconnected from others is that this connection is the very means by which a state of happiness can be persisted.
In Greek mythology Tantalous was punished by the gods for his crimes by being forced to stand in a pool of water from which he could never drink because each time that he bent down the water would recede.

Such is the nature of our relationship with love when we are in disharmony with our conscience. The instant that we open up our heart to feel love we are vulnerable to thoughts which cause us great pain if we think them.

While we may “taste” the enduring happiness that love brings it will be forever beyond our reach until we move to make peace with our demons.

So although we desire love we also fear it.

This “denial of love” may well be the ultimate weapon of our conscience.

Our habitual pattern of choosing immediate gratification ultimately leads to an inability to experience the enduring joy that we truly desire.

8.1.6 Trauma

Ponder the truth that all non-physical pain is entirely self-inflicted.

Have you ever wondered why there are such huge differences in the way that people react to trauma?

Two different people who experience the exact same type of trauma can react very differently.
The range of reactions can vary from the extremes of laughing it off to total devastation.
Isn’t that curious?
Why might that be?

If we react to trauma by feeling devastated is it possible that our conscience has been just waiting for the opportunity to pay us back for the unhappiness that we have inflicted on others and has seized on this opportunity to do just that?

At the beginning of this paper I asked you …
“How certain are you that the people who caused your injustice are responsible for your suffering?”

By any chance was the type of injustice you experienced similar to that which you believe you inflicted on someone else?

It is possible that you subconsciously put yourself into a situation where you could be hurt because you deserved to feel the same sort of pain that you caused?

Ask not “How could they do this to me?”
Ask instead “Why am I doing this to myself?”

8.2 How we wage war with our conscience

In this section I’ll describe the typical ways in which we respond to the pain of guilt once we’ve made a decision to war with our conscience and highlight the often unseen ways in which our conscience seeks to counter each of these tactics. The tactics covered include: getting angry, running away, getting depressed and lying to ourselves.

8.2.1 Fight or Flight

I refer to the most common means that we use to do battle with our conscience as “tactics” rather than “strategies” because the term strategy connotes planning and thinking. But it is precisely the lack of thinking about the consequences of the recurring decision to war with our conscience that characterizes this choice.

There is a physiological reason for this. When we are in a state of anxiety and are gripped by the “fight or flight” response our body shunts blood out of the brain and into the extremities to gear us up for a fight or flight for our lives. It clogs our arteries with cholesterol to reduce the loss of blood in the event of an injury. The loss of blood flow in the brain demonstrably lowers our IQ for the duration and hinders our ability to make good long-term decisions. And it kills our ability to empathize so that we might destroy our foe without remorse. This behavior enabled our ancestors to survive in a predatory environment. But now that all of our predators have been eliminated it serves only to encourage us to war with each other and thus destroy ourselves. A trait that was once favored by natural selection has now become disfavored due to the changed environment in which we live.

The fight or flight response is the way we are programmed to respond to very high anxiety without regard to its cause. It may have evolved in response to the fear of the pain of being physically attacked and eaten, but the same response can be triggered to handle the fear of the pain of guilt that has not been faced.

8.2.2 Fight

Above all we are driven to avoid pain.
Guilt can be very painful.
When the fear of pain becomes overwhelming the “fight or flight” response can be triggered.
Getting angry is the choice to fight.

When we have caused harm to someone and don’t want to accept responsibility we may choose to find a way to actually anger ourselves.
Getting angry does have the effect of temporarily numbing the pain because it kills our ability to empathize and our empathy is the source of the pain of guilt.

Getting angry can feel good because it can make us feel powerful.
It can give us courage to do things that we would not otherwise do.

But, in the words of Robert G. Ingersoll …
“Courage without conscience is a wild beast.”

And we know from our own life experiences that Benjamin Franklin was correct when he said …
“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.”

When we are angry we do stupid things that we later regret.
We may attempt to shift the blame to the victim.
We may lash out at them in the hopes that they will reciprocate.
If they return the favor they will give us the gift of a reference upon which to sustain the delusion so that we can convince ourselves that we are the victim instead of the victimizer.

Getting angry is the means by which internal disharmony gives birth to external barbarism.
Getting angry almost always makes things worse.
It is when we are in this state of mind that we do the things that become the greatest regrets of our lives.

When the anger subsides and our conscience wakes from its slumber we almost invariably find ourselves in even greater disharmony with our conscience and suffering from an even greater pain of guilt.

8.2.3 Flight

When the fight or flight response is triggered, the alternative to fight is flight.

If the person whom we hurt is in our environment, then their mere presence will be a constant reminder of our guilt and every time we see them the pain will return.

Looking into the eyes of someone whom we’ve gravely injured without cause is excruciating.

So we are driven to escape the pain by putting them out of our mind altogether.

We are driven to avoid all contact with them either directly or indirectly.
We may distance ourselves not only from them but from anything that reminds us of them - including all the tribes to which they belong.

Common friends are sacrificed and we retreat into the safety of a smaller tribe.

There are serious drawbacks to this tactic as well.

One of which is that it gives birth to a “fear of thinking”.
We can develop a fear of thinking because we know subconsciously that our conscience will be working against us to force us to the think thoughts that will cause us pain.

Of all the things to develop a fear of, thinking has to be one of the worst.
This is the means by which bad decisions made at a time of high anxiety become habitual.

Another ripple effect of the choice to run is that it requires us to further shrink the circle of people that we can safely empathically connect with.

In part this is a voluntary choice to avoid being reminded of what we have done.
We distance ourselves not only from the people that we’ve hurt but everyone who will remind us of them and might lead us to think those painful thoughts again.
This includes not only people who are directly connected to our victim but also people of good character who do not behave in that fashion.

In part this is an involuntary choice.
Word will inevitably spread about our character causing others to distance themselves from us and increasing the tension between the “us” and “them” tribes that we have created.

The end result is that we are forced into a smaller circle of people who will accept us.
By necessity they will be people who are in a similar type of disharmony with their conscience and tend to re-enforce our unskillful decisions instead of encouraging us to do the right thing.

The choice of flight is a choice to retreat in the battle.
It is a choice for the immediate gratification of relief from pain.
And like all such choices it further entrenches the conditions for a more enduring unhappiness in the future.

Both fight and flight sink us deeper into the pit of hell that we have dug for ourselves.

8.2.4 Depression

Fighting or fleeing gives us temporary relief from the pain of guilt but these high intensity states cannot be sustained for long periods of time. The pain of guilt will return in the form of persistent anxiety.

If we are still unwilling to make peace with our conscience there is another highly effective strategy that we can choose to reduce the persistent anxiety. We can choose to “depress” it by becoming depressed. We do this by shifting the focus of our attention away from the person that we’ve hurt to ourselves. In so doing self-loathing can be transformed into self-pity.

The relief from unrelenting anxiety that self-pity offers is intoxicating. It feels very good to feel sorry for ourselves. It really is like a drug – a pain killer. We crave more of it.

Much like drugs and alcohol, self-pity is an opiate. It has real short term benefits that can lead us to get addicted to it. If the addiction is strong enough we will avoid thinking about the long term consequences.

The reason self-pity works is that it reduces the influence of our conscience by reducing our ability to empathize with others. Self-pity is about becoming self-absorbed for an extended period of time.

Staying depressed enables us to maintain a prolonged war with our conscience with greater ease. It offers a means of switching off our empathy for others by staying self-absorbed without the intense drawbacks of persistent anxiety bubbling over into the desire to fight or flee.

What we may not be cognizant of is the unseen force that is continuing to extract punishment from us.
Our conscience is continuing to influence our choice of thoughts.
We have not stopped our conscience for extracting its pound of flesh we have merely decreased the rate at which it extracts its toll from us.
But we don’t see that because we are so focused on the immediate gratification that we have achieved.
The intensity of pain may have diminished but the pattern of thinking remains self-destructive.

The draw backs of depression are obvious.
If we are depressed we are not happy.

The long-term consequences of this pattern of thinking are devastating.
When we choose to feel self-pity we are choosing to see ourselves as a helpless victim at the mercy of the world.
Nothing could be more dis-empowering.
This habitual pattern of thinking can completely destroy our self-confidence over time.

The more frequently that we choose this option the more that self-pity becomes the habitual conditioned response to even the slightest hint of anxiety. This is sometimes called “learned helplessness”.

This leads to an inability to live our life to the full.
We are unable to chase our dreams.
We are unable to set goals and strive to meet them.
We are unable to do all of these things because we have taught ourselves to “give up” whenever we encounter even the smallest obstacle.

This is but another means by which our conscience works subconsciously to ensure that we do not attain what we have not earned. Because we have sought to find happiness for ourselves by taking it from another our conscience subconsciously acts to restore balance by ensuring that we will have less happiness in our present and our future.

8.2.5 Self-deception

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

~Mark Twain

Our addiction to the opiate of self-pity and desire to hide from the truth can, over time, lead us to tell the most outrageous of lies to ourselves.

We may be tempted re-write history in our minds to change our role from that of victimizer to victim. In so doing we can get our self-pity fix.

To maintain a state of war with our conscience for an extended period of time it is crucial that we find some means to morally justify our behavior to ourselves.

When we choose not to live in harmony with our conscience we invariably seek to weave our contrived moral justifications into a shield of self-deception to protect ourselves against its incessant attacks.

We seek out people who will help us re-enforce the falsehoods which enables us to blame others instead of taking responsibility.

The long-term consequences of self-deception are devastating.

When we make a conscious decision to avoid the pain of guilt by lying to ourselves, we lay the foundation for irrationality because the tangled web of lies we tell ourselves must be sustained in order to avoid the pain.

When we lie to ourselves we shatter the very foundation of our internal integrity and create the conditions for the unrelenting pain of the fear that our beliefs may be revealed as untruths.

Each time we engage in self-deception the fragile edifice of untruths grows like a stack of cards that can collapse upon itself at the slightest breeze. The potential for cognitive dissonance increases and we develop not only a “fear of thinking” but a “fear of truth”. This further increases our baseline level of anxiety.

By choosing self-deception we are once again choosing the immediate gratification of avoiding the pain of facing our demons at the cost of creating the conditions for even greater long-term pain for ourselves.

All of the belief systems to which we cling that divide us into warring tribes spring from and are sustained by a desire to avoid a pain that we fear and this is often the pain of guilt. We can strengthen the shield of self-deception by joining together in tribes with others who wish to accomplish the same goal and use our collective resources to help re-enforce each other’s delusions. All of the moral codes, ethical systems, laws, rules, regulations, ideologies and belief systems to which we cling exist solely for this purpose despite our conscious beliefs to the contrary. To the extent to which we can summon the courage to face our fears and abandon our individual war these tribes and their belief systems will wither and die and the world will know peace.

8.3 Conclusions

All of the tactics that we use to battle our conscience have one thing in common…
They help us to achieve a temporary respite from our pain at the expense of greater long term unhappiness.
It is the same “immediate gratification” pattern of thinking which got us into trouble to begin with.

For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.
For every decision we make there are consequences.
Every effect has a cause.
Everything we do has a ripple effect and we are usually oblivious to many of the ripple effects of our actions.

When we choose to war with our conscience we are suffering from the delusion that our conscience can be defeated.
We are suffering from the delusion that whatever resistance it offers can be countered and contained.
Both are untrue.

Our conscience is resilient.
The irony is that both we and our conscience are driven to fight by the same desire to be happy.
But our unconscious mind knows things that our conscious mind does not.
The difference is that our conscience knows with absolute certainty that we cannot be happy by causing harm to others and that real enduring happiness requires caring about and bringing joy to others.
No matter how many battles it loses it will keep fighting us until we get with the program or perish.
And the harder we fight it the harder it fights back.
It will never surrender.
It will never relent.

Ripple effects cannot be contained because they are unforeseeable.
Each action we take to contain one spawns a series of others.
It’s like each time we try to plug a hole in a sinking ship several more holes are created, many of which are unseen.
The very act of forcing us to expend energy containing ripple effects is one of the means by which our conscience wars with us.

Moreover, resistance to pain increases the pain itself.
What we resist persists. What we embrace dissipates.
This is true of all types of pain including the pain of guilt.
The more we consciously choose to war with our conscience the greater the amount of the pain that we subject ourselves to. Our choice to flee from the pain instead of facing it with courage causes the small monster to grow into a big one – from a gecko to Godzilla.

The inner civil war that we fight is like a split personality disorder that we all suffer from.
The only way to achieve inner peace and happiness is to end the war and integrate these personalities.
Ending the war means living in alignment, in harmony, with integrity and congruency.
It means having the courage to keep our heart open at all times despite our fears.
It means following our heart in everything that we do.
The only way to end the war is to surrender to our conscience because our conscience will *never* surrender.

In this section I’ve used inductive reasoning to illustrate the typical ways in which we seek to fight our conscience and demonstrated some of the ways in which our conscience seeks to counter each of them and to strike back. These references may serve to increase the strength of our belief in the invincibility of our conscience but they do not, by themselves, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that no strategy can ever work. That is exactly what I will prove in the next section when I illustrate how our brain is constructed to prevent any attempt to defeat our conscience from succeeding.


Part 6: Law enforcement 501: The neuro-science of karma