Justice in Gehenna

The good die young.
The rich get richer.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

Is the world ruled by law? Justice dispensed according to a law of cause and effect?

Seriously, what do you think, yes or no?

Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, you does less time for a fraud that costs ten thousand investors their life savings than you do for selling an undercover agent an ounce of crack cocaine. And you won’t do hard time, either.

If you buy a company in Ohio, fire the workers and move their jobs to China, you make more money than if you don't.

If you drop a bomb on an Iraqi grandmother, throw the wrong guy into a cell in Guantanamo, or distort the available intelligence to start a senseless war, chances are, you’ll retire on a pension.

These things are true. Indisputable phenomena. The question is, why?

Most of us believe in a God of righteousness. We believe this God has laws. We believe the laws are just. We believe there exists a law of cause and effect that applies to human actions – what they call in the East, a law of karma. This is a universal belief. The whole world believes in a justice of one form or another.

Why on earth would we believe that? I’m not denying that justice seems to prevail sometimes. But other times it surely doesn’t. If it’s a law, why isn’t it reliable? If the world is just, why don’t we SEE more justice in operation?

Let’s say you’re dumped on an island with a bunch of people you never met before. You have no idea how you got there. You just wake up one morning and there you are. Not being the nosey type (or particularly sociable) you decide the best thing is to just go about your business, keep you head down, and fend for yourself.

You build a little hut and enter survival mode – hunting, fishing, eating coconuts. Everything is alright for awhile, but then unpleasant things starts to happen. You go spear fishing one day and when you get back, the coconuts you gathered that morning are gone. A couple days later, the extra spear you made is missing. And a couple days after that, there’s a guy there WITH the spear – telling you he’s taken over your hut, and you’d better get the hell out now unless you want to fight him to the death for it – which he seems eager to do. So after a minute, you swallow your pride, turn tail and head off to start work on a new hut – and a new spear. But no sooner do you get yourself settled, than the pattern repeats itself. Except that this time, instead of one guy with a spear, its two guys, and the time after that, it’s five guys. And pretty soon, it becomes clear to you that this particular island is populated by a bunch of lunatics and criminals – and they are starting to band together. It seems your basic choices are to fight for your rights (individually or in some form of group), find a better way to hide, or give up building huts and become a nomad. Unless, of course, you could find a way off the island.

This is not a baseless story. A year ago, I spent a couple weeks on Molokai, the least developed of the Hawaiian islands. Molokai is known (among other things) for having the highest sea-cliffs in the world, with waterfalls cascading two thousand feet in a sheer drop to the sea. While I was there, we took a boat around to the windward side, where the cliffs are. It’s a beautiful, but forbidding place, of high winds, a heaving sea and crashing surf. As we headed around the point into the full force of the wind, I saw what looked like ruins, perched on a spit of isolated flatland that lay at the foot of impassable cliffs, the only access being by sea. It looked like some kind of settlement, and I asked the boatman if that’s what it was. He nodded, and I asked him why anyone would live in such a God forsaken place.

He smiled. “To get away from the wars,” he said. And I thought about that.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, (Gehenna posted here April 24, 2008), the world is our island, and the message of Jesus Christ, Bhagavan Krishna and the rest of the saints and sages throughout the ages is, “If you want to find happiness, get off the island.”

"My Kingdom is not of this world," Jesus said (John 18:36). “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth …. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” (Matthew 6:9-20).

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells his disciple, “O devotee: Get away from My ocean of suffering, death and misery!” (Ch XII, Yogananda’s translation)

Now the truly peculiar thing about the island we live on is, we can leave any time we want to. There’s no forbidding ocean around it, no mighty wind, no crashing surf. True, people will try to talk us into staying – our family, coworkers, friends. They’ll tell us we’re crazy. And they’ll mean what they say. They’ll have our best interests at heart. There will be no reinforcement. Our culture will engage us, dissuade us, entice us. But the bottom line is this: the only thing that can keep us on the island of this earth is our desire for the things we think we can get here and our fear of giving them up.

Now, suppose you were a just and loving God, and for that very reason, you had created this island with its mélange of troublesome inhabitants. (You could call it hell, or Gehenna, for example.) And suppose further that a principal characteristic of the inhabitants you had created was that you had given them something called “free will” – the apparent ability to decide what they would do and not do, based on their own perceived self-interest. Of course, having created this island and these inhabitants, you would know that the only hope any of them would have for achieving lasting peace would be to get the hell off the island and move on to a place where the inhabitants had learned to identify their self-interest with the interest of a larger group. But having given the inhabitants free will, there wouldn’t be any way you could force them into doing it.

Now taking all that as given, the question is, what would “justice” look like on the island?

The answer is, it would look pretty much the way it does on earth. Virtue would apparently be punished and vice rewarded, because the real punishment would be getting what you wanted (this would motivate you to stick around and suffer some more) whereas the real reward would be getting disillusioned (which would motivate you to get out of the place for good).

This is why the great masters agree, the best thing is not to get involved with the world. Renounce it. Give it up. It is fundamentally irredeemable.
I admit, it’s a hard truth, but then, when was truth ever easy.