The phrase bringing the evil-doers to justice has become one of the shibboleths of the current Bush Administration. Its constant references -- direct and indirect -- provide continual stimuli that cannot but lead to strong responses, both at home and abroad, calling to mind our most deeply-seated beliefs in injustice. These include both those in our personal world -- the unfair things people have done to us -- as well as those in the world at large -- the various injustices committed by people opposed to our values and interests. If we are to understand our reactions, we must first understand what we mean by evil-doers and justice. Let us examine each one separately:

I. Evil-Doers

By those who commit evil we mean those people, groups, and governments who have behaved in ways that are deemed by the reporting parties to be beyond the “ordinary” meanness of everyday life. To be sure, evil has no one definition, for its meaning shifts depending on which people, groups, or governments use it as means to justify their thinking, prejudices, and policies, not to men­tion as justification for their own evil as seen through the eyes of their victims. Evil's relative nature is thus reflected in these very disparate justifications for actions specifi­cally aimed at inflicting harm on others.

Few would deny the evil and viciousness perpetrated by some Sons of God over others, even though, again, we may certainly disagree on who belongs in which category. But, as Jesus reminds us early in the text: “Frightened peo­ple can be vicious” (T-3.I.4:2); and who in this world can claim to be without fear, to be exempt from the classifica­tion: “everyone who wanders in the world uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear” (T-31.VIII.7:1)? Is it not true, as A Course in Miracles teaches, that we are all here in this world, in this body, because of our fear-filled belief in a non-existent retaliation from the ego's non-existent god? And is it not true that the very fact we experience our­selves within a body testifies to the ego's underlying thought system that told us that we have indeed pulled off the impossible: the “sin” of separation that demands our punishment for having taken God's place on the throne of creation? Having insisted on regime change to enshrine our specialness in self-importance, we believed we accomplished such usurpation at the expense of the Regime of God, an evil that demands our sacrifice:

Who usurps the place of God and takes it for himself now has a deadly “enemy.” And he must stand alone in his protection, and make himself a shield to keep him safe from fury that can never be abated, and vengeance that can never be satisfied.… And now there is no hope. Except to kill.… An angry father pursues his guilty son. Kill or be killed, for here alone is choice. Beyond this there is none, for what was done cannot be done without. The stain of blood can never be removed, and anyone who bears this stain on him must meet with death (M-17.5:8-9; 7:7-8,10-13).

But the ego does offer us hope of escape from our blood-stained minds; not in truth, but in its fevered, insane, and magical dream of smoke and mirrors. The master magician convinces us that what we do not see is not there, and what we do see is there. Thus is the body made to conceal the thoughts of evil and fear in the mind; thus are other bodies made to be the repository of the evil we have repressed and then projected outward. In such a way, our magus tells us, we shall be free of all stains of evil, now to be found in another and punished by the wrathful War-Father our all-loving Creator has become. This is clearly spelled out for us in Lesson 161 in the workbook:

The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear. Thus were specifics made (W-pI.161.2:5-3:1).

And what we wish to see specifically is hate, but in another:

Hate is specific. There must be a thing to be attacked. An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed. When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death… (W-pI.161.7:1-4).

Or, as the following passage from the text explains:

They [your eyes and ears] were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sound.…and what they see and hear they but report. It is not they that hear and see, but you, who put together every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence, and make a witness to the world you want (T-28.V.5:4,6-7).

The you to whom Jesus refers is obviously not the person we think ourselves to be, but the decision-making self that is the dreamer of the world's dream. This dreaming mind is the source of the body, the dream's hero that thinks it sees and hears, in order to witness to a separated world outside the mind, wherein dwell the evil-doers who deserve punishment for our sin.

In other words, we see our feared evil in someone else because we need to see it there. Only in that way can we magically hope to be free of it:

Forget not that the witness to the world of evil cannot speak except for what has seen a need for evil in the world (T-27.VII.6:2).

This single sentence goes to the heart of the article: We see the witness to evil in the world -- a multitude of injustices -- to fulfill the ego's need to abdicate responsibility for our own evil thoughts. In this way we magically hope that Heaven's justice will fall on the evil-doer's head, and not our own

It is thus clear that the evil we perceive outside -- and remember that perception is always an effect of projection, and therefore only an interpretation (e.g., T-11.VI.2:5-6; M-17.4:1-2) -- is not an objective reality, but a subjective wish born of the need to be free of our mind's perceived evil. To paraphrase the text: The world's evil is a witness to your state of mind; an outside picture of an inward condition of evil (T-21.in.1:5). This passage summarizes the dynamic well:

If you did not feel guilty you could not attack, for condemnation is the root of attack. It is the judgment of one mind by another as unworthy of love and deserv­ing of punishment.…the mind that judges perceives itself as separate from the mind being judged, believing that by punishing another, it will escape punishment (T-13.in.1:1-2,4).

Through this projection, following the mind's law that projection makes perception (T-21.in.1:1), we perceive a world in which others are judged to be evil, automatically allowing us to be good. The ego thus attempts to convince us that the world we perceive is a world of differences; a difference that basically comes down to you being guilty and I innocent. Continually proving this is the purpose of my ego's life, for only thus can I avoid certain annihilation as the ultimate fate demanded by my secret fear that I am the true evil-doer, not you.

Borrowing from the Course's question posed by Jesus early on in the text, we may ask: Who is the evil-doer who is living in this world? (T-4.II.11:8). And therefore our answer, derived from Pogo's wonderful line: It is us. But the us is the mind that projects a physical/psychological self with which we identify, thus disguising the fact that we are indeed a mind. More specifically, it is the decision-making part of our split minds; the part that chooses the ego over the Holy Spirit, and then defends that choice for separation by denying it ever happened. And so the mind itself succeeds in making itself mindless. By project­ing its decision for sin and evil onto others, rooting its identity in the world of separation, differences, and limita­tion, the mind has firmly identified with the body.

In this system of thought, therefore, we survive by “a splitting off and separating from” (T-28.V.1:2): We split off our perceived evil through repression, and then separate from it through projection. Evil is now seen outside, and good inside. However, since the mind of God's Son is one, each of us is doing exactly the same thing to each other. And so all members of homo sapiens are both good and evil, right and wrong. There is a story common to many spiritual paths that nicely expresses one unified aspect of our self. In its Eastern form it goes like this:

Two disciples come separately to the Master com­plaining about the other. The Master hears the tale of the first and says: “You are right.” Next he hears the second, and responds: “You are right.” A third disciple, overhearing the discussions, says to the guru: “Master, you have just listened to two mutually exclusive points of view and agreed with both of them.” “You are right, too,” replied the Master.

All are right, because from their own point of view, dic­tated by the ego, their world cannot not be right since, again, projection makes perception (T-21.in.1:1).

And yet all that has truly happened is that the Sonship of God -- created totally at one with the Oneness that created it (T-25.I.7:1) -- is now perceived to be separate, divided into two warring camps of good and evil, innocence and guilt. Again, within this thought system of separation and differences all parties are correct from their own insane perspective, and wrong within God's, for “God thinks otherwise” (T-23.I.2:7). That is why Jesus says in an early workbook lesson:

…remember that a “good world” implies a “bad” one, and a “satisfying world” implies an “unsatisfying” one (W-pI.12.3:6).

The world of opposites, however justified we believe our perceptions to be, is not the world of God's Oneness, and therefore cannot be real.

Once we have made this world of opposing forces of good and evil; one to be preserved, the other to be destroyed, we spend the rest of our lives -- ersonally and collectively -- defending our perception through the implementation of what we call justice.

II. Justice-to-Destroy

Justice as the world knows it is based solidly upon the concept of evil and sin, which in turn rests on the belief in the reality of differences, as we have already seen: There is both a sinner and a sinned against, each dependent on the other for its identity. The concept of difference is cru­cial, for the mantle of punishment falls upon the victim to levy on the guilty heads of the victimizing evil-doers. This follows the ego's formula for salvation -- one wins, another loses -- and reflects the prototypic thought that gave the ego existence: the Son wins, the Father loses:

For in this world it seems that one must gain because another lost.… For every little gain must someone lose, and pay exact amount in blood and suffering (T-25.VII.11:2,5).

Thus the spilling of blood -- literally or figuratively -- becomes inevitable, because someone must pay the price of retribution for our “secret sins and hidden hates” (T-31.VIII.9:2). Such retribution is considered by the world to be just, the power of which allows one to control the other in justified vengeance, even when, the ego tells us, the other is God Himself. In this insane thought system this very God has seemingly joined in, becoming as insane as His Son, and no less vicious in His dispensing of jus­tice. Indeed, His wrath becomes the mother of all ven­geance, as the ego would have us believe:

…God becomes impatient, splits the world apart, and relegates attack unto Himself. Thus has He lost His Mind, proclaiming sin has taken His reality from Him and brought His Love at last to vengeance's heels (T-26.VII.7:4-5).

An understanding of the dynamics of the ego helps us see that the world's justice expresses a pseudo-power: the ego's “power” that seeks only to dominate and destroy, in a most maladaptive attempt to secure its own existence. True justice, on the other hand, is real power, for it reflects the power of God to heal all the separated ones, not just a self-selected few. The reason probes the root of the prob­lem, and paves the way for the Answer.

III. Justice-to-Heal

A Course in Miracles describes justice as the correc­tion of what I have termed the ego's justice-to-destroy, which, as we have already seen, rests on the belief in dif­ferences: the difference between another's evil and our goodness. True justice undoes this false belief by empha­sizing the sameness underlying all seeming expressions of difference:

What teaches you that you cannot separate denies the ego. Let truth decide if you and your brother be different or the same, and teach you which is true (T-22.VI.15:6-7).

Such correction is not possible without first recognizing the ego's need to separate, and the purpose behind it. Once that need is exposed to the light, we can more easily choose the right Teacher to instruct us on what we truly want: the ending of the insane dream of separation and return to the Oneness of Heaven, which the forgiving and sane dreams of the Holy Spirit engender.

Stated another way, we have to reframe the problem so that the answer can emerge. Rather than seeing the problem as the evil residing in another, inevitably leading to the solution of one or the other -- the justice of vengeance or punishment -- we recognize that ultimately the problem of evil is a perceptual one, seen first within, and then projected without. The Holy Spirit's justice-to-heal therefore rests on the healing within, thereby freeing our perception of all projections, allowing us to learn that our mind and our brother's are one (T-22.VI.14:3). If I perceive evil in my mind, I must perceive it in you. If, how­ever, I see good within, I must likewise see it in you. It cannot be that we are different.

When I see and judge evil in others instead of hearing a call for love, that is my cue to ask Jesus for help, that he may guide my vision within to see the source of my projected judgments. Only then can I truly bring the darkness of my evil to the light of Jesus' truth. From a self- and therefore outer-perception of evil, darkness, and sin, I see the truth of light, joy, and peace that lies just beyond the ego's defenses (W-pI.93). I am then taught that this light shines equally in all God's Sons, without exception -- in “good” and “evil” alike. As that wonderful lesson states:

Thus are our minds restored with them [our thoughts], and we acknowledge that the peace of God still shines in us, and from us to all living things that share our life. We will forgive them all, absolving all the world from what we thought it did to us. For it is we who make the world as we would have it. Now we choose that it be innocent, devoid of sin and open to salvation (W-pI.188.10:1-4).

From such cleansed perception, healed of all thoughts of separation, do we look out on a forgiven world, recog­nizing only the Holy Spirit's response of justice-to-heal. Any perception that does not reflect the Oneness of God's Son must be illusory. In our physical world the only true perception possible is this reflection. Here, in a delusional world miscreated by those made mad by guilt (T-13.in.2:2), we can yet share one perfect perception: All separated Sons share the same wrong mind of guilt and hate, the same right mind of forgiveness and peace, and the same decision maker that chooses between them. All of us are thus the same: 100% hate, 100% love. True jus­tice looks past the illusions born of projection to the light of truth. What is overcome is not projected evil, but the perceived inner evil that comes from believing we are sep­arate. And such “overcoming” is the correction of the insane belief that the Son of God is separate from his Source, and separate from other Sons. Thus we read:

How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way.… Reality opposes nothing. What merely is needs no defense, and offers none. Only illusions need defense because of weakness. And how can it be difficult to walk the way of truth when only weakness interferes? You are the strong one in this seeming conflict (T-22.V.1:1-2,6-10).

Thus our defense rests in our strength as Christ, now iden­tified in ourselves and shared with all:

In truth you and your brother stand together, with noth­ing in between. God holds your hands, and what can separate whom He has joined as one with Him?… God rests with you in quiet, undefended and wholly unde­fending, for in this quiet state alone is strength and power (T-22.V.3:4-5,8).

As an aid to seeking Jesus' help when confronted by perceived injustices, one can think of Dr. Martin Luther King's inspired words of seeking to find the moral center as the means of resolving disputes. Similarly, A Course in Miracles asks us to go to the quiet center (T-18.VII.8:2), in which love does not oppose. It is that state, in which no one is seen as separate or different from anyone else, that truly becomes the reflection of Heaven's Oneness. It is that place of rest (T-18.VII.8:1) that becomes our home away from Home, the home of true justice. From that still­ness, in which love abides, we are able to hear the plain­tive cries for help that had been concealed by the raucous shrieks of cruelty, evil, and hate. Within each of us separated ones lies a little child -- feeling orphaned, abandoned, and without hope of ever returning home -- desperately calling out for a comforting hand that would lead it down the gentle path of forgiveness. To hear that call in one is to hear it in all; to deny it by ears blocked with angry calls for justice -- however justified these calls may seem to be -- is to deny its presence in oneself. Why, Jesus asks us in A Course in Miracles, would we seek to withhold salvation from our brothers, when such withholding denies it to ourselves?

And so, when the government bombards us daily with the rhetoric of bringing the evil-doers to justice, and the search for peace seems futile, to say the very least, that is when we need the experience of peace. Yet it cannot come within a dualistic perspective in which there is a perceived conflict between two or more parties -- individuals, cultures, governments, points of view, etc. Peace can come only from a position above the battleground, within which, once again, all participants in the conflict -- the “good guy,” the “evil guy,” the observer -- are seen as the same. That is the vision the miracle brings:

Each miracle is an example of what justice can accom­plish when it is offered to everyone alike.… Because it does not make the same unlike, it sees no differences where none exists. And thus it is the same for every­one, because it sees no differences in them. Its offering is universal, and it teaches but one message:

What is God's belongs to everyone, and is his due (T-25.IX.10:4,7-10).

What belongs to everyone is the Oneness of His Love, give to His one Son in His creation. Exempt anyone from this Oneness, and we have exempted the whole of the Son­ship. If we wish justice dispensed to us, then we must give it. That is the law of God as reflected in this world. Only then can we be sure that if we act in the world it will be as a reflection of the Holy Spirit's justice of sameness, itself a reflection of Heaven's Oneness. And make no mistake, nowhere in A Course in Miracles does Jesus suggest that we not act in the world; only that we not act alone. That is the meaning of this lovely passage from “I Need Do Noth­ing” on the quiet center:

Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return.… This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent (T-18.VII.8:1,3).

Our actions, therefore, are born of the Holy Spirit's princi­ple of salvation:

…no one can lose for anyone to gain. And everyone must gain, if anyone would be a gainer (T-25.VII.12:1-2).

We act therefore without malice or judgment, without a desire to punish or hurt, but simply to express in the symbolism of our words and actions the message of forgive­ness and peace, a message that comes from Oneness, expressed to a Sonship perceived as one.

All of this makes no sense if seen from the battle­ground. For within the limited, not to mention distorted, perspective of the world of separate bodies, such percep­tion of all people being both innocent and guilty is incom­prehensible. The “evidence” of good vs. evil is incredibly weighted against such all-inclusive perception. Yet from above the battleground, where Jesus asks us to join him, it all looks so different. Attempted alone, his vision of jus­tice can never be attained:

Justice is the Holy Spirit's verdict upon the world. Except in His judgment justice is impossible, for no one in the world is capable of making only just inter­pretations and laying all injustices aside (M-19.1:6-7).

Thus we should undertake our practice of justice with humility, the humility that says:

Let me not forget myself is nothing, but my Self is all (W-pII.358.1:7; italics omitted).

That Self is God's one Son, whose living and loving Oneness is reflected here by the perception of shared interests. Thus do we see all people calling out for the same love they feel they attacked; all people calling out for the same answer that tells them their attacks are for­given; all people calling out for the same peace that alone can heal pain and suffering, and restore to their shared awareness the Love of God, the power of which corrects all error and softly leads to the “peace that passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), the “peace that is not of this world” (M-20.1:1).

Only through true forgiveness can the evil-doer within ourselves be brought to the justice of Heaven, God's Final Judgment which embraces all His children in His Love:

You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure. Therefore awaken and return to Me. I am your Father and you are My Son (W-pII.10.5:1-3).

In such forgiving judgment does the theoretical under­standing of justice-to-heal become part of our daily and lived experience: Pogo's us not only contains the enemy, but also our one Friend (W-pI.194.9:6), and each of us, without exception, is an integral part of His loving One­ness and kind justice.