Theos-Talk Archives (February 1996 Message tl00030)

>I am honestly confused by contradicting moral imperatives.
>
>(1) The Masters teach, and I firmly believe, that to interfere with an
>individual's free will is black magic and produces awful results every time
>for all concerned.
>
>(2) The Masters also teach us to defend people from unjust attacks, to
>repudiate hypocrisy, to lead clean, pure, giving, honest, compassionate
>lives.
>
>How are we to lead pure lives defending people from harm and injustice, and
>yet allow maximum liberty and freedom for each incarnate Monad to grow and
>experience and learn as it sees fit?  What to do when these vehicles of body
>and prana and lower mind just don't behave the way we want them to?
>
>This is a central legal dilemma in America and in any free nation (Sweden is
>among the freest and most permissive, from what I know).  But beyond the
>merely legal dilemma, what is the moral imperative here?
>
>Rich Taylor, U.L.T. San Francisco
>

I think there are several points here.

1) The statement is, interfering with another individuals "free will" is bad. I
have also read that action refered to as black magic in early theosophical
literature. I think most of the difficulties here with this concept are
semantic. That is - what do we mean by FREE will, free WILL, FREE WILL,  MAGIC,
and by BLACK magic? Depending on the answers you come up with, you get
different perspectives.

For example, in the "magickal" perspective (with the k), there is a difference
between someone's will and their Will, or True Will. The former (little w will)
refers to the will of your ego. The Will (big w) refers to your True Will,
which is the Will of the Higher Self (sometimes called your Holy Guardian Angel
in the magickal tradition). In some theosophical models, the Higher Self is the
Soul, and the monad is the Spirit.

Now, the analysis gets interesting. If you interfere with someone's True Will,
you incur karmic effects, probably negative karmic effects. But if you
interfere with their will, you also incur karmic effects - but this may be
"good" karma. (Unless you are trying to eliminate all karmic acquisition, then
you might see this as bad also).

However, lack of action is itself action - and so you incur karmic effects by
your lack of action. And, maybe the other individual's True Will (from their
Higher Self) is to set up a situation so that you will ACT - and your action(s)
are to enhance your growth as an individual.

It may be that someone's True Will is in opposition to their will - in fact,
this is common when a person's ego resists the path of growth that is set out
for them by their higher self. So maybe their True Will is to enable a
situation that will induce you to act in a way that is in oppostion to their
will, thus enabling the personal growth of both of you. But how can you tell?

Therefore, the answer is to pursue growth through various practices to
synchronize your ego with your Higher Self, so that you can listen to your
Higher Self and thus learn to do your True Will. This leads into the 2nd point.

2) Resistance to Evil is the Path of the Warrior. In the modern New Age
thought, most new agers view the Warrior with disdain. Yet this is the path of
resistance to Evil. (I think that most new agers are moral relativists to the
core and kind of don't believe in Evil with a capital E).

If you are to resist Evil, you have to be able to listen to your Higher Self to
do the True Will of you Higher Self. That way, you avoid the trap of having
your little ego making egotistical decisions about what is evil, and what you
are going to do about it. A major portion of grief comes about because people's
egos, with their little wills, decide what is evil and what is not, and make
violent choices about what to do about it. Thus we have the list of horrors of
the historical record. Organized religions play a big role here, but any
organized "-ism" can get in the same trap - Communism, Facism, even Capitalism
(although capitalism tends to avoid genocide, as that eliminates potential
consumers & workers).

So the answer is simple. Learn to listen to your Higher Self, do the True Will
of your Higher Self, and you can resist Evil and avoid big time negative karmic
effects (usually). Of course, the simple solution is usually hard. It is hard
to listen to the Higher Self, hard to work on putting the ego in the
submissive, obedient role; hard to get the ego to do what it may not want to do.

Regards,
john.d.tullis@ac.com