On the Matters of “Life is Fair,” Free Will, Divine Intervention, Personal Responsibility for Societal Change
And other matters raised by or related to those raised by Edward Robson, PhD
Today I had the pleasure to read an essay by Edward Robson, PhD. Dr. Robson’s essay discusses 1) the concepts of whether or not life is fair and people’s views on that topic, 2) our economic systems and the relation between points one and two, 3) karma, 4) fate and whether fairness plays a role, and 5) various implications of the belief held by many, despite all evidence to the contrary, that fairness wins in the end.
I have written on many of the same topics so rather than blow up the comment sidebar, I have decided to construct an essay to answer the questions posed with my points of view and thus compliment, complement, and supplement his fine article, advance the conversation, and hopefully begin a mutual admiration and collaboration society.
My knowledge and opinions on many of these matters arise out of me having undergone an instantaneous spiritual awakening in March 2020 catalyzed by the wholly tragic, unexpected, here one nanosecond gone the next expiration of my lover’s incarnation as Lindsey at the age of 36.
Shortly thereafter, I began regular communications both with her soul and my spirit guides through a very reputable channeler, Ane, whom I have worked with since 2010. See, for example, this story of our communications with the soul of my dear friend who committed suicide and their implications towards suicide prevention.
As discussed in detail in a few of my stories, in particular, my essays on the grand scheme of why souls reincarnate 1000’s of times, though I incarnated this lifecycle as a white male Jew born into wealth (which I did not maintain), one of my spirit guides is Rama, an avatar of Vishnu, so in effect, one of my spirit guides is part of what we call God. Please see these essays:
As one starts their journey from soul to soul with a body [and back again, and so on and so on], you generally have easy lives. When you return to source/heaven/god after every lifetime, you will be given a choice to stay in that realm that you are put in or to go back to the master class [Earth]to attain a higher level. You can make the decision to return to the master class at any time. If you choose to go back to earth, it. would be for the specific requirement to have the goal of growing your soul to get to the next level, only you are not consciously aware of it once you incarnate.
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While not widely accepted in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the concept of the lifecycle and reincarnation as described to and by me is very similar to Hindu and Buddhist teachings. See also these two posts.
So, at the macro level, the meaning of life is to learn — for the soul to learn how to make a human act like a better human. This oft-quoted line correctly states:
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I am advised that there is one immutable condition in every contract — the date of death. The how is very much the product of free will.
I recently wrote an article on the implications of the hypothetical wide acceptance of the existence of that contract clause in each soul contract. I note that my beliefs do not depart that much from generally held beliefs. Often when someone dies, the reaction is “God’s will.” The Jewish religion teaches that the strength of one’s moral inventory (aka shadow work or Step 4 of a 12-Step program) conducted in the 10-day period between the New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) determines on an annual basis whether or not someone will live to see the next annual cycle.
My focus was again suicide — since one’s date of death cannot be cheated in either direction, suicide is more pointless than previously imagined. The other societal implication I have thought of so far would be tort reform — namely, the elimination of unequal valuing of lives based upon one’s determined by a preponderance of the evidence post mortem earning potential. Since one’s date of death is predetermined, there is no time period based upon career and actuarial tables to value a decedent’s life based upon hypothetical post-death earning potential.
Ok, let's start to tie this piece to Dr. Robson’s.
The Questions of the Fairness of Life and Who Causes Fate
I join Dr. Robson in asserting straight off that life is not fair.
The notion of life being fair or not being fair is a human-constructed binary that should disappear from the lexicon along with other contra-spiritual binaries that create irrelevant points of comparison.
Regarding the related phrase, “it is what it is,” I posited then that the problem with the cliche is that it is misunderstood. Perhaps it means life is neither fair nor unfair — stop judging life and comparing your life to someone else’s — your life is your life — your life just is — now live it.
Moreover, we and our gods did not design lives for fairness and a balanced amount of net neutral karma. We designed them to throw ever more challenging tests, obstacles and hurdles in our paths for their ever-higher life-lesson values. I prefer my term, “Lifecycle Improv Scripts” over soul contracts. I view the Lifecycle Improv Scripts as Larry David’s show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, on steroids — imagine 100 writers drafting a lifetime worth of improvisational scripts and the negotiations and debates as to who gets to play what roles in each other’s lives.
I love the irony of this oft-quoted and misunderstood saying:
“Man Plans, and God Laughs.”
This statement is used to diminish the role that free-will has upon our lives — that we cannot defeat the universe’s scripts. The irony is that while our higher powers have to approve our scripts/outlines, we wrote them. So God’s will as used by many is often our free yet predetermined exercise of willpower.
The Fallacy of Original Sin
The doctrine of Original Sin is a spiritually impossible construct designed by the power structures to explain why an omnipotent and nonmalevolent God allows terrible things to happen to good people.
In my story Why is it so Easy for People to Believe the Most Obvious Lies yet Require Proof of God?, I wrote:
Religions have been designed to be believed and thus construct God as a deliverer of human wants if we do as we are told, which God is not. So people either blindly believe in God because the lie of what God is is believable, or reject God because the God defined by religions cannot co-exist with the reality that most people do not get what they want, or are not actually happy, and a world full of seemingly senseless tragedy and really bad things happening to good people.
By trying to assign rationality to the irrational instead of teaching the value of acceptance, the major western religions have constructed an image of God that can only prove a disappointment to people because “God” does not care anything about money, politics, war, famine, or even who lives or dies, and to the extent God affects any such outcomes it is only to keep things from going too far off the improv-script. Thus, atheism exists partially because of the impossible teachings designed to create faith to foster power structures. I love that irony.
In fact, I strongly believe in a Doctrine of Divine Innocence.
I was listening to Aloha Ke Akua and the line “in the image of God” caught my ear, and I started to wonder what the uncorrupted meaning would be. It could certainly refer to souls, and to a baby; after that life takes over — only a newborn is created in the image of god and new borns do not display any masculine vs feminine. New borns are divine innocence.
The Failings of Fallacious Fairness Fantasies
I whole heartedly agree with Dr. Robson that the beliefs of the life-is-fair proponents present clear and present dangers:
Danger #1: Believing in a just world blinds us to the real injustice all around us, which leads to victim plaming,… Money, in most people’s eyes, [being] the way the game of life is scored…Abdicating our responsibility to look out for one another, …Which brings us to the most insidious of dangers in this myth: Danger #2: Believing life is fair makes us supporters of the status quo because if life is fair, then the way things are must be the way they are supposed to be.
Here I supplement Dr. Robson’s essay with my 2 cents on acceptance, which I gleaned and have applied from these 109 words on page 417 of Alcoholics Anonymous (not from the dishonest Eckhart Tolle, whom AA should sue), and thus tweak his conclusion that Danger #2 flows inevitably from the belief.
And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in [the universe] by mistake. …unless I accept life on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.
Serenity and at this moment are the key words to string together with acceptance of life on life’s terms to mean that it is only for purposes of internal tranquility that we should live spiritualy in a series of momentary places of acceptance — we should still hope to change the world, no spirituality demands that we seek to redress injustice and other societal ills.
Dr. Robson agrees, and recognizes another possible implication of Danger #2, after listing a plethora of societal ills (“If billions in the world lack means to feed their children . . .If billionaires pay lower tax rates than their janitors . . .If women do more work, earn less money, get less respect, and are sexually victimized more frequently than men . . .If immigrants, Asian, Islamic, Hispanic, LGBTQIA, and other minorities are harassed and persecuted . . .If female genital mutilation, abortion of female fetuses, dowry killings, “honor” killings, child marriage, and sex trafficking are still practiced openly . . .If the poor are forced into substandard schools . . .If Black family wealth now stands at 16 cents per dollar of White family wealth in the US . . .If opportunity for economic advancement has all but disappeared . . .”
. . . what has that to do with you or me? It’s not our fault the world works that way, and it’s not our job to fix it. We may not understand it. We may refuse to believe it. But it’s what it is
He then proceeds to state:
the alternative to the just-world delusion is to face the dark truth: shit just happens to us all. Which means, if there is ever to be justice in the world, it’s our job to create it. Likewise kindness and compassion.
Patrick Paul was the first I saw to propose with convincing arguments that we should harness the power of spiritual principles to take on societies’ systemic problems.
Patrick wrote in part:
When any single person’s actions seem trivial or inconsequential, we reason that because the individual isn’t solely at fault, and therefore isn’t individually responsible, even if the individual takes some responsibility, his or her actions to solve the problem feel meaningless. Inadequacy becomes the emotional response that justifies not taking responsibility.
If you’re not at “fault” and your actions alone can’t fix the problem, why bother? Why take any responsibility? Indeed, it starts to feel like assuming responsibility is a burden without end. Any sense of responsibility won’t be alleviated because the harm won’t be resolved by you any time soon. Accepting responsibility comes with continuously carrying the weight of the problem.
Spirituality Offers a New Model of Responsibility
Can we create a sense of responsibility that is not rooted in individual wrongdoing? Another model of responsibility would extend to issues that you in your individual capacity believe you did not cause or contribute to them. This is where spirituality meets social and political change.
We need a model of responsibility that says that the problem exists because I participate in a system that collectively suffers from this problem — and I am part of that system. It endangers the entire system, and therefore I have an interest in doing what I can to solve it, even if I am not at fault.
Back to Dr. Robson’s piece:
[An] alternative is to admit the system’s rigged in favor of the lucky few. As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said in 1970, “The haves have declared war on the have-nots, and the fix is in. Prospects for peace are awful.”
Vonnegut was an early one to notice the war, which at the time was just starting to rollout its confirmation bias based propaganda machine. The war opened up a whole new front around 1976 when the last vestiges of the compassionate capitalism that Adam Smith actually promoted were attacked by Milton Friedman and in less than 10 years profit became the goal at the expense of wages and the inequality expansion was off to the races.
I shortformed in March:
The 1%’s have perverted capitalism, and worse they quote Adam Smith out of context. Smith’s Wealth of Nations posited that free-markets would lead to wealth fairly distributed among the citizens based on their contribution [as in a national or multinational economy, after profit motive rearded innovation, wages would rise, eating away at profits]. We do not have free markets. We have markets twisted by laws written by lobbyists for large corporations and too-wealthy-individuals. Capitalism has been perverted into a Darwinian game of survival at the top of the food chain at the expense of others. As spiritual beings, humans are not supposed to act like animals. Our rigged system of capitalism is actually pathologically narcissistic as one succeeds not based upon their intelligence but upon their capacity to manipulate and take advantage of other people.
Edward continued:
The alternative is to give up our faith in money as the measure of a person’s worth or worthiness. To turn off the TV, pull our eyes out of the smartphone, and begin to get acquainted with our actual neighbors. Learn from one another. Learn to help each other. Start to build a new economy in which we help each other thrive, since God’s gone AWOL and the caring’s up to us.
This picks up for me the thoughts of David Brooks in this fine column last year:
The problem with moderates has always been that they don’t have a magnetic idea. Recent moderation has been a bland porridge that defines itself by what it doesn’t like.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
What is the core problem facing America today? It is division: The growing gaps between rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and less educated, black and white, left and right.
What big idea counteracts division, fragmentation, alienation? It is found in Leviticus and Matthew: Love your neighbor. Today’s left and right are fueled by anger and seek conflict. The big idea for moderates should be solidarity, fraternity, conversation across difference. A moderate agenda should magnify our affections for one another.
David brings it home with:
Moderation is not an ideology; it is a way of being. [Emphasis added.] It stands for humility of the head and ardor in the heart. When you listen to your neighbor, you see how many perspectives there are and you’re intellectually humble in the face of that pluralism. When you listen to your neighbor, you see that deep down we’re the same and you hunger to deepen that connection.
Let the left and right stand for endless political war. The moderate seeks the beloved community. That, too, is a magnetic idea.log
I’ve now connected enough of my INTP split screens. Tag your it Edward Robson, PhD. Dialog to be continued…?
In Rama I create,
