Holding Compassion and Justice Together?

I find myself in a strange place in regards to my divorce, holding both compassion and justice together, side by side. They bicker with each other occasionally, as they often encourage contrasting courses of action. It's a weird sense though. I feel like I'm in some kind of irreconcilable conflict with myself.

In trying to make sense of it I keep going back to the Kabbalistic shattered vessel, in that my divorce shattered my reality, and my self-identity, into disparate parts, justice, compassion, and others (though justice and compassion have the strongest voices). I wonder if my desire to re-boot my life through graduate school isn't really just my attempt to re-build those disparate parts into something new, and hopefully better.

It's funny, that seems selfish and frivolous in some ways, as if I'm doing this just for myself. And that wouldn't be an unfair assessment either, yet one of my goals from graduate school is to build my knowledge and skills to advocate for my community, which is laudable, in a more typical moralistic context.

Again, another contrast to hold. If one's goals are sub-consciously directed by self-interest, but consciously directed by benefiting others, what's the root here? Or is it within this balance, of self-interest and helping others, that harmony is found? Perhaps to be truly capable this contrast must be hold together?

Then, what of, in a larger sense, is my moral nature? My morals are built on the conscious idea that their precepts and dictates are of the benefit of others, not me, yet I selfishly hold strict to them. Many would see this is as an unhealthy balance, that I should have both my conscious and sub-conscious mind in harmony, yet the Kabbalistic tree of life speaks differently.

The tree of life is a balance of opposite forces, of passivity and activity, of femininity and masculinity, of harmony and chaos. Why cannot I find my path through these balancing extremes? Isn't that inherent in the Kabbalistic natural world?

Or maybe I'm just finding religious precepts to cling to in order to justify myself.

Food for thought...

- Jason

Justice: Linking Old with New

In looking over my older posts I see I've taken a divergence since incorporating Sacred Therapy into the mix. I've defaulted to the traditional notion of justice. This is most prominent in my previous post (7/31/11), so I've decided to try and address this issue somewhat.

Getting back to my earliest posts, justice can be punitive or compensation. these are it's primary modes of expression, either affecting the affector (punitive) or the affected (compensatory). Justice includes judgement, discernment and balance. Justice is an equalizing force, creating equivalence. Yet what of the connection between justice and determinism? Doesn't determinism have all of the same characteristics of justice in this case? Determinisim, as best described (again here) by Newton's third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Determinism requires discernment - what was the actor and the acted on - and both punitive and compensatory expression - what is the affect of this action on the actor (punitive) and the acted on (compensatory). The only difference I can see is that justice strives to return acted on objects to a non-acted space, Newtonian physics is about acting as change.

Strangely enough, traditional justice is much more like pre-Newtonian physics, where the assumption was that all objects default to a state of rest unless acted on by outside force.

Taking this a step further, if justice were to truly parallel Newtonian physics, then justice's objective would be to determine the new path after the affect, not to return the affector/affected to a stationary position.

Let's take this a step further (or several) though. Let's look at quantum physics. Now we have multiple probabilistic outcomes based on the observer. Let's, for the same of argument, think of justice as the observer here. Justice is still here to determine the effect of affector and affectee interaction, but instead the interaction is predicated on how justice manifests the quantum probabilities. Justice plays an active role in determining the outcome.

What happens when justice is based on probability instead of determinism?

Now, here's the major mind-warp. What happens when God, as justice (probability-based) runs up against the compassionate human?

I think my metaphor brain just melted...

- Jason