AUSTRALIAN MYTHOLOGY
“You are My beloved child. You are the highest creation of My hands.”
Do these words refer only to one nation, one religion or one chosen group of people? Or do they refer to every human being and to our entire civilisation?
If every human being is a child of the same Creator, then the divisions between superior and inferior people were not created by God. We created them ourselves. Colonisation, capitalism, nationalism, religion and political power have often been used to divide humanity into those who are considered more valuable and those whose lives appear to matter less.
How can such divisions be reconciled with the words of the prayer?
We also speak about free will. But free will without feedback would produce nothing but anarchy. If everyone were free to harm others without experiencing the consequences of that harm, no civilisation could survive.
Therefore, free will cannot exist alone. It must exist together with the Law of Consequence.
I do not believe that this law exists merely because somebody taught it to me. I have experienced its operation in my own life. For me, it is not a religious belief. It is knowledge born from personal experience.
TWO SYSTEMS WITHIN THE HUMAN BEING
I do not believe that stupidity is a sufficient explanation for human behaviour.
A human being operates through an intellectual system and an emotional survival system.
When a hand touches a hot surface, it is withdrawn before conscious reasoning has time to analyse what is happening. The reaction is automatic. Its purpose is protection and survival.
Something similar happens when our identity is threatened.
Every society develops its own collection of beliefs. A child grows within those beliefs and gradually begins to identify with them. They become part of the answer to the question: “Who am I?”
When somebody challenges these beliefs, the emotional system may interpret the challenge as an attack upon the person’s identity. The person then defends the belief as though defending their own existence.
This does not necessarily happen because intelligence is absent. It happens because emotion takes control before reason has been allowed to examine the complete reality.
We select fragments that confirm what we already believe. We ignore, reject or sometimes cannot even hear the information that threatens our identity. Then people holding different beliefs begin to fight one another.
This alone is enough to create many of the divisions that exist in our civilisation today.
People often know themselves only through the shallow pool of beliefs created by the environment in which they were raised. They defend the boundaries of that pool because they have not yet discovered the depth of their own value.
GOVERNMENT AS THE MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIETY
A factory has a maintenance department. Its purpose is not to rule over the machinery but to understand how the whole system operates, identify the causes of failure and maintain the conditions in which every part can perform its proper function.
Government should be the maintenance department of society.
A government is also a regional organisation, but it possesses something that an ordinary organisation does not possess: the legal power of compulsion. It can collect taxes, create laws, command people to serve in war, restrict movement and use courts and enforcement agencies to impose its decisions.
Because government possesses this power, it also carries an exceptional level of responsibility.
When a government creates a decree that harms thousands or millions of people, that decree can become a weapon of mass destruction. It does not need to explode like a bomb. Its destruction may operate through poverty, isolation, fear, deprivation, family separation or the removal of people’s opportunity to develop normally.
Cuba has lived for decades under restrictions imposed by a much more powerful neighbour. The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis shows how inherited identities, fear and historical pain can become a mechanism through which both populations continue to experience destruction.
Australia has its own examples. I remember watching a television discussion involving Jordan Peterson. Whether one agrees with every conclusion he reaches is not the essential point. He possesses an exceptional depth of understanding within his field, just as an outstanding physicist possesses depth within physics.
What shocked me was the shallowness with which some members of the discussion responded. Instead of exploring the complete structure of his argument, they appeared to select fragments that could confirm what they already wanted to believe.
I do not describe this as stupidity. I see it as emotional self-defence. When people have built their identities upon the established values of their society, examining those foundations can feel like losing themselves.
The refusal to see reality is one of the great causes of human suffering.
RESPONSIBILITY WITHIN A SYSTEM
A harmful institution operates as one connected structure, but this does not mean that every person within it carries identical responsibility.
Responsibility is individual.
It depends upon what a person understood, how much authority they possessed, what choices were available to them and what they personally added to the harm.
The example of a kapo in a concentration camp makes this distinction clear. One person might have performed unavoidable duties while trying to reduce the suffering of other prisoners. Another person in a similar position might have added personal cruelty and used the position to harm people.
They belonged to the same structure, but they did not create the same consequences.
The same principle applies to governments, courts, police forces and every institution possessing power over human beings. A person does not become completely innocent merely because an order came from above. Neither does every employee become equally responsible simply because they worked within that institution.
Each person is responsible according to their own measure: their knowledge, freedom, authority, decisions, actions and omissions.
Human law divides people according to legal categories, positions and institutional membership. Divine law, as I understand it, measures only what each person actually created.
“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” should not be understood as permission for revenge. It describes precision and proportionality.
You experience what you created—no more and no less. Nothing is added through hatred, but not one dot of the consequence is omitted.
Human beings do not need to take revenge, because the Law of Consequence does not depend upon human anger.
THE REHABILITATION OF THE HEART
The word “hell” has often been used to frighten and control people. I understand it differently.
I do not see an eternal torture chamber created by an angry God. I see a rehabilitation centre in which a person must eventually understand the complete consequences of how they used their free will.
A court decision may be written in several minutes, but the pain created by it may continue for years.
I go to sleep thinking about my other half. I wake up thinking about my other half. Between my daily activities, I continue to experience the same separation and pain.
The consequence of a decision therefore does not end when a judge closes the file. Its effects continue to live within another human being.
In the rehabilitation of the heart, understanding cannot be intellectual only. A person must fully recognise the reality that their decision created. This is not revenge. It is education through complete understanding.
If I created one measure of pain, I am responsible for that measure. If I added forty further measures, I must understand all forty. But I am not responsible for pain I did not create.
The purpose is not eternal condemnation. The purpose is restoration—the development of the understanding that was missing when the harmful decision was made.
THE UNIVERSAL RECIDIVIST
When somebody repeatedly harms other people, society may classify that person as a recidivist and isolate them to protect others.
What happens when an institution or a government repeatedly creates mass harm? Can an entire system become a recidivist?
If the same law of free will applies everywhere, the Universe also has the freedom to withdraw its support from a person or structure that repeatedly uses freedom to destroy others.
This isolation does not need to mean that God attacks or tortures anybody. It may mean that the support which allowed the destructive structure to continue is gradually withdrawn, leaving it to encounter the natural results of what it has created.
I do not claim that I understand every biological or spiritual mechanism through which this happens. I am describing the structure that I have experienced and come to recognise.
Free will is never freedom from consequence.
THE BODY AND OUR BELIEFS
The same distinction can be seen within the individual human body.
Strong willpower can force temporary change. A person may discipline and punish themselves in order to lose weight. As long as the pressure of willpower remains, there may be visible results. But when that pressure disappears, the body often begins returning towards its previous condition.
It is like holding down a spring. The position changes while force is being applied, but when the force is removed, the spring returns towards its starting point.
A lasting transformation requires something deeper than continuous self-punishment. It requires understanding and changing the beliefs, emotions, habits and conditions that keep recreating the original result.
The body can reflect our inner beliefs, although beliefs are not the only influence upon health. Biology, inherited characteristics, illness, nutrition, poverty, stress, medication, sleep and environment also matter.
Therefore, the condition of a person’s body must never be used as proof of their moral value or spiritual guilt.
The essential point is different: when we address only the visible consequence, we may temporarily suppress it. When we understand and change its cause, the result can change naturally.
THE EMOTIONAL PRISON
Fear, shame, guilt, rejection, grief, helplessness, loneliness and despair can imprison a human being within an extremely narrow field of vision.
A person in despair may still possess intelligence, ability and many possible paths into the future. But the emotional system prevents those possibilities from being seen.
The possibilities have not disappeared. They have become invisible from within the person’s present state.
When somebody wants to jump from a bridge, their free will does not remove my responsibility to try to save them. Preventing an irreversible act is not necessarily the destruction of their free will. It can be the creation of time—the opportunity to make a decision after the storm of despair has passed and a wider reality has again become visible.
How many human possibilities have been lost because people remained trapped in the resonance of fear, shame, guilt and hopelessness? How much happiness may still exist in the darkness beyond the limits of what they can presently see?
THE SOURCE OF GIVING
God has everything and can do everything. Therefore, God does not need to take value from one human being in order to give value to another.
God does not need fear, jealousy, humiliation or competition in order to distribute goodness.
But goodness does not mean permitting every action.
When somebody harms others, restricting that person’s ability to continue the harm can also be an act of goodness. The purpose is not revenge or rejection. It is the protection of those being harmed and the education of the person who has not yet learned to use free will responsibly.
Only a person who possesses a strong inner sense of value can truly give without needing repayment in the form of superiority.
A person who does not recognise their own value may try to obtain it through power, victory, possessions, status, belonging to a supposedly superior group or diminishing somebody else.
A person who knows their own value does not need to make another person smaller in order to become greater.
My sense of value does not come from somebody praising me or granting me a position. I discovered it through the experiences and facts of my own life. I do not need to fight for permission to exist, and I do not need to prove that I am better than another person.
I can share what I possess because sharing does not reduce who I am.
Human beings do not harm others because they have discovered too much of their greatness. They harm others because they have not yet discovered a greatness that can exist without reducing the value of somebody else.
Perhaps this is the meaning hidden within the words:
“You are My beloved child. You are the highest creation of My hands.”
These words do not separate humanity into superior and inferior groups. They restore the value of every human being.
When people truly recognise their own value, they no longer need to build an identity from domination, division or the suffering of others.
Free will then ceases to be an instrument of anarchy.
It becomes the conscious ability to create without destroying.
