23. ATONEMENT

The nature and intentions of our actions are acknowledged and understood in the immensity of
the cosmic Court of Justice.

                  The Court is perfected.  It is not like our earthbound courts, ruled by bias,  prejudice,  conservatism,  suspicion,  contempt,  arrogance,  pomposity,            and often a punitive vengeance.

The Court presides in the light of those perfectly balanced and dispassionate laws
which are the laws of karma :

~   That which comes to us is that which we have properly earned,
throughout our long lives.

~  As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

All possible factors in our deeds are understood and contemplated.
Considered are the impositions of our childhood,  wealth or poverty,  ancient history,
cultural constraints,  our life opportunities,  tragedies,  duties,  coercions,  our age,  our sex.

Our age.   Our sex.

As human beings we are no different from any other of the Earth’s advanced species :

there is an evolutionary imperative for the world’s men to compete fiercely for guardianship
and sexual rights to the world’s women,  to ensure the birth of their own young.

                             But we are one of the extremely few species,  in which the aggressive and usual act of exclusion of younger males by the older,                          may be carried out deliberately and  inexorably to the point of destruction.

                        Within our prevailing cultures,  our middle-aged and older men choose,  systematically and repeatedly,  generation after generation,                      to orchestrate the killing of a portion of the younger and most able-bodied of our sons :
their sexual competitors.

This is the awesome heritage of being born a man.

The high peril of your sex is your intoxicating, genetic knowledge of power,
and speed, and penetration ;
and your wild risk with the enraged and terrible thrill of attack,  and killing :
in order, profoundly, ancestrally, to gather to yourself the largest and most secure dominion
for progeneration.

It is a powerful man indeed of middle age today,  who can forge an opposite path from
this livid compulsion to attack our ardent male young.

*

And thus it is that the Older Man has mighty responsibility and command within his life-review :
his vantage point of his own many decades,  and of past centuries.

He stands within the Eye of the Court,  to account for his life-time’s learning :

his life-decisions either to continue felling his people’s sons in waves throughout his years ;
or to restrain his firepower in acts of potent fatherly love.

And thus it is that the Younger Man’s failure to recognise the nature of his aggressive actions,
and the enormous unsought consequences that can explode from his inexperienced moves  ~
all these consequences, in the Eye of the Court, are considered justly :

in the light of the immature and inadequate learning that gave rise to them.

It is the quality of the intention, not only the finality of the action,
which is the stringent task of Judgement of Self.

*

*           *

*

There is a word which offers passage from bitter self-condemnation.

*  It is Atonement. *

Atonement is the restoration of the moral balance in our collective actions and intentions.
It is not grief,  nor self-recrimination,  nor sorrow,  recompense,  pity,  self-flagellation,
sympathy,  rage or despair.

It is quite simply the planning and carrying out of a newly-conceived higher purpose,
in the illuminating dying glow of past mistakes now clearly understood  ~
to the point of balancing the harm once done,  with newly made good ;

~ and then,  going beyond.

The sublimity of Atonement,  as compared to simple compensation,  is in this last :

It is to carry one’s recompense beyond what is merely due ;
and to undertake a continuing path to acts of ever-widening goodness,
of ever Higher Advancement.

Therein lies liberty,  grace,  and ultimate peace of mind.