Justice II

Balancing an offense to the good cannot be achieved by human contrivance because offense itself is a human contrivance. We “take” offense. We “give” offense. And we “take” vengeance, or rather “give” it — but we cannot “take” justice. Justice and vengeance are relative, just as balance is.

It would be better to learn balance from nature, which is a cycle, than from human beings, who live and think linearly — and reach dead ends from doing so. It would be better to refrain from desire, from the desire to make everything perfect — which is the desire behind vengeance but also behind most people’s notion of justice.

Refraining from desire, we would look for the cause behind everything, and finding a cause we would remove from ourselves the sense of offense. We would not “act” and “react.” We would see only now, this moment, and only seek to understand why this moment is what it is, how it came to be, what it will become, and what we want to be when it passes. There would no longer be injustice or vengeance in our eyes, our minds, our hearts. We could let go, a process perhaps best undergone in solitude. Only then would we be ready to see justice as a certain equanimity in all beings.