Kopperregel nr 8

Påvirk ikke andre til å gjøre noe galt.

Pir Zias kommentarer:

If you have spent time with children you will have noticed that children are fascinating. Part of the fascination is that the various attitudes and behaviors that form the deep structure of our adult personalities are revealed in their simple purity in children.

One sees among children, for instance, the tendency to delight in vicarious mischief. A child would like to cause a bit of trouble but doesn’t want to take the blame. So the child suggests the mischief to another child and then stands back to watch the drama unfold from the sidelines, as innocent as ever.

But, of course, we adults never do anything like that, do we?

Consider the tragedy of war. It is not the troops on the frontline that are responsible, so much as the chains of command, the governments, and ultimately the societies that sanction war. If people saw the devastation of war first-hand, more often than not attitudes would be different, and military policy would be different. Mischief is easier from a distance.

The Prophet Zarathustra taught that it is not enough to refrain from causing harm at the level of action. There are three levels. There is action, but prior to action is speech, and prior to speech is thought. A thought descends into words and then words descend into acts.

There are stages in the incarnation of one’s intentions. Sometimes we refrain from the outermost expression of an act, but we have prepared all the conditions for the act inwardly. All that remains is to carry it out, and if we do not carry it out, it will be communicated to another, either consciously or unconsciously. Thus we are responsible, even when outwardly restrained.

We often forget the degree to which our influence exerts itself. The universe is a palace of mirrors. How then can it make sense to harbor within our own thoughts and words that which we would not wish to meet in the world?

The law of resonance is real. We often feel insignificant in the face of the enormous forces at work in the world and conclude that our choices don’t matter. But this kind of apathy only perpetuates the world’s inertia and despair.

We have a choice. Zarathustra himself made this crystal clear. Each moment offers a choice. Your choice fills you, flows out from you, reaches others making choices, and weaves its way into the very fabric of manifest reality. A brilliant thought, word, or act can radically alter the course of human history. It has happened, and will happen, again and again.

Let us be cognizant of our influence, recognizing that our thought, speech, and action will have an effect of the whole flow of human destiny.