Failure is not optional

Screenshot anime Minami-ke : Kana is a failure!

“But I am a failure as a human being.”  But I did not really know that until I was put to the test.

I was not really surprised to be tried. You see, I may be foolish, but I am not entirely ignorant. Having lived and learned and even occasionally listened for decades now, I know that there are consequences to things on the spiritual plane. Teaching others, for instance, leads to certain backlash from the Satanic Force, a subset of the General Law that keeps most of us in place. I have explained this already, which is part of the irony.

For a materialist, life is very simple. It is also very random. For the spiritually curious, this combination of simplicity and randomness dissolves and forms a new and different pattern: Horizontal causes and vertical causes.

People tend to think vaguely, which is why we have the gray zone of cause, reason and purpose, words often used interchangeably even though two of them mean very different things. For instance, we may say: “There is a reason for everything that happens . For instance a large lump of ice fell from a roof, hit a woman in the head and killed her. The reason for this was gravity.” That is certainly true, but not really what people mean when they say “There is a reason for everything that happens.” Usually those who say this mean purpose, not cause, although both of these can go under the name reason at different times.

Instead, today I will use the concepts of “horizontal cause” which is what we usually mean by cause – in the example above, gravity. The other concept is “vertical cause”, which is what the materialist perceives as randomness. So a person happens to be at a certain place at a certain time, entirely by chance, and something bad – or something good – happens. Most marriages these days happen in this fashion, for instance. Whether they later turn out to be a good or a bad thing is primarily a matter of vertical forces, that is to say, the forces that work between Heaven and people, or Hell and people. (Obviously I am not talking about Heaven and Hell as actual locations that you can reach by traveling, but as spiritual attractors. Any other meanings are outside the scope of this text.)

If we live remote from all spiritual thought, vertical causes are hard to register. Things seem to happen randomly. Occasionally common sense can point out that something happens because of our choices: We choose not to pay our bills, and they are collected. To some people even this causation is too vague, and they remain mystified when unpleasant things happen to them: The bills are collected, friends stop being friends, others are promoted instead of them etc. They lack the capacity for self-reflection, so even basic karma is lost to them.

Conversely, people who live in a steady state of self-reflection and see things in the light of Heaven: They notice karma that seems straight out supernatural. To their materialist friends, these synchronicities are just coincidences. Indeed, the definition of synchronicity is meaningful coincidence; but it is not meaningful to everyone. The materialist will say: “You read too much into it, it is just a coincidence.” The challenge about this is that there are indeed coincidences that are just coincidences, and people who read too much into them. That way lies madness. Indeed, it is a classical symptom of some of the most troublesome psychoses, so it is not without reason that people are wary when you start talking about how everything is a Sign filled with profound meaning. Crazy people do this as well, and it is not easy for the bystander to tell the two apart.

There are however certain laws in vertical causation. And one of these is that when you rock the boat, you will be tested. When you start revealing the hidden rules, the forces that stabilize the human world will act to silence you. In religious context this is the Satanic force, and it works on different levels. The most personal of these is inside us. When we try to be good, we experience a surge of temptations. (Those who try to be evil will experience a surge of temptation to good, but this is obviously rather rare.) If we try to be spiritual, we are tempted to coarse sensuality. (Which does not translate simply as sexuality – food works great too, binding out thoughts to the material plane, and so do various other comforts.)

The Satanic force also attacks from the outside, whipping up people against you in various ways. They do not necessarily attack you at first: They may express their concern, explain that acting the way you do could hurt your career, the way others see you, your romantic opportunities where that is relevant, or hurt the feelings of your loved one. This will often be enough to make people fall in line. But if not, outright aggression can also happen. The history of the saints and prophets is a bloody one.

***

But I am not a saint or prophet. I am just a curious person who has picked up things that are really too big and strange for me. I don’t live in a world where the passing of a cloud has a deep spiritual significance. So all the Dark One has to do to bring me down is stress me a bit, like for instance have my Ingress alarm go off while I am surrounded by beggars and pickpockets, and immediately I will start planning the Next Great Genocide. That is just the kind of person I am.

So I am not surprised that I am put to the test, and I am not surprised that I fail it. Talking about things that are above my pray grade will naturally cause such things to happen, through the laws of vertical causation. It is unfortunate, sure, but all is not lost.

You see, when you scrape the varnish, you see what’s hiding beneath. And there is some good in this as well. Even one of the robbers who was crucified along with Jesus realized his mistakes in the end. There are exits to Heaven even from the gates of Hell. You don’t actually need to be a hardened criminal to pray “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” – in fact, most criminals don’t – but sometimes getting a glimpse of the abyss within is a good thing. If you can get that without actually ripping the beating heart from the chest of your fallen enemies, so much the better. Light send it stays that way.