The Law of Divine Compensation

Anger is a second category of thoughts that deactivate the power of the Law of Divine Compensation. Anger is an emotional impurity that hardens the heart and closes the mind.

I am not denying that there are many understandable reasons why we get angry. Perhaps you find yourself in debt, underemployed, or unemployed through no fault of your own. Someone may have unfairly fired you, lied about you to a superior, stolen money from you, or exploited you for financial gain. Despite trying to be as responsible as possible, you were simply swept aside by circumstances beyond your control.

Those things do happen. And it is natural to feel angry when they do.

Even then, however, love is the answer. Without love, the universe cannot program itself to compensate for whatever might have been taken from us. If we do not let go of our anger, it can block the miraculous universe, empowering the idea that we were victimized and then recreating the scenario in which we are.

We were not created to be at the effect of lovelessness either in ourselves or in others. As it says in A Course in Miracles, “The Christ in you cannot be crucified.” The material self can be wronged, but the spiritual self cannot be. Feel your feelings, yes, but be self-aware enough to know the difference between processing and spewing. Feeling your feelings is healthy; holding on to them longer than you need to is self-indulgent. Express your anger in a safe environment, and then know when it’s time to stop verbalizing your pain.

It doesn’t matter if someone tells you that you “deserve” to be angry—you deserve, of course, to feel whatever you want to feel! But the only way to experience miracles is to think about situations in a miracle-minded way. Holding on to anger hurts no one but yourself. As it says in A Course in Miracles, “Do you prefer to be right or to be happy?” Is your goal to summon co-complainers who join with you in the thought that you were victimized, or would you prefer spiritual companions who join you in knowing that as a child of God you can’t be victimized?

The universe knows if you were hurt and is already on the case to make right whatever wrong occurred. Your anger, if it lingers, throws a wrench in the machine of the miraculous universe.

Let’s say your financial good was blocked by someone, or by forces outside your control. You were not necessarily the cause of what happened to you, but you are responsible for how you contextualize it. Yes, whatever happened, happened; but what happens now is up to you. You can respond from ego, ensuring pain; or you can respond from spirit, ensuring a miracle.

The level of woundedness is the level of illusion. By identifying with this level, we experience effects at this level. Something has the power to hurt us to the extent to which we believe in its power. If we believe in the reality of a wound, then we will feel really wounded. The healing lies in remembering what is real.

Lovelessness is not ultimately real. It exists within a three-dimensional reality, but you are more than merely a being of the mortal plane. In remembering this, you rise above the chronic suffering that plagues this world. You are lifted into the immortal realms, where anything that isn’t love falls away from you naturally, and you suffer no more.

Will this take time to express itself? Yes, perhaps. But how quickly your thinking changes helps determine how quickly your mortal circumstances change.

This doesn’t mean we’re foolishly denying that something bad occurred; we’re simply denying its power to ultimately affect us. Anger, if it exists, must be acknowledged by all means, but acting on it dysfunctionally is precarious at best and destructive at worst. We should feel our anger, accept that it is there, and then surrender it to the Holy Spirit for transformation. Then, instead of putting our energy into deriding what is, we become capable of affirming and creating what could be. Something miraculous happens when we say, “I am angry but I am willing not to be. Dear God, help me see this situation differently. Amen.”

Sometimes we’re angry with people we don’t even know. Many feel understandable anger at banks, politicians, Wall Street, and all those who have grown rich—or served only the rich—at everyone else’s expense. There is legitimate moral outrage regarding today’s economic environment. But moral outrage does not have to include personal anger.

Martin Luther King Jr. was outraged by legalized segregation, but his nonviolent temperament lifted him above personal anger. Mahatma Gandhi was outraged by the British colonization of India, but his nonviolent temperament lifted him above personal anger. Notice how in both cases, the fact that these men were lifted above the lower energy of anger empowered them to be even more effective at eradicating the conditions that outraged them. Nonviolence didn’t mean they looked away from the problem; it meant they looked through it to a realm of possibility that lay beyond the conditions that angered them. That ability—the miracle-worker’s spiritual authority, if you will—gave them the power to invoke the world they wished to see.

By holding on to my anger, I am attaching myself to the realm in which I can be made angry. I am seeing someone outside myself as the source of my loss, thus dooming myself to experience the loss. In a perverse way, it’s as though I am idolizing the very people who hurt me. For if I’m thinking they can take away my good, then I must be thinking they were the source of my good! I must be thinking they’re more powerful than God, since I’m thinking they can permanently remove from me what God wills me to have.

BEYOND OUR ANGER lies our capacity to forgive. Forgiveness is looking at people with the spiritual knowledge of their innocence rather than the mortal perception of their guilt.

Forgiveness is indeed a different way of thinking, in that it surrenders the very aspect of mind that we think protects us from further hurt. But the ego’s “protection” is precarious, at best. I don’t “protect” myself when I lash out in anger. Forgiveness is a radical act, but it is certainly not weakness. By forgiving, we do not grant victory to those who wronged us; instead, we surrender the aspect of mind that is blocking divine correction. Not forgiving, then, is granting victory to those who wronged us, in that we allow them to shape our reality. Anger, defensiveness, martyrdom, and so forth do not attract miracles. Mercy and compassion do.

To place a problem into the hands of God is to pray that our thinking about the problem be changed. If only love is real, and only love has dominion over us, then our mistakes and the mistakes of others can affect us only if we choose to hold on to them.

We forgive, then, out of self-interest. I forgive you because I want out of my pain. I forgive you so that I can be free of what you did. I see beyond your mistake to the love in you so that I can see beyond the mistake to the love in me—because only then can I have a miracle. The universe will immediately reprogram itself to send us miracles, when we remove the barriers to our willingness to love. Forgiveness is the most powerful key to new beginnings.

None of this is always easy. It’s hard when thirty years of your hard work is thrown to the side in a cold, calculating business decision made by someone half your age. It’s painful when someone you’ve trusted steals your money, lies about you, or throws you under the bus. But anger and condemnation will only delay the healing. As hard as it might be at times to summon up the willingness to love, A Course in Miracles says that our “little willingness is everything.” When we’re willing to see the innocence in another person even when he or she has behaved without love toward us, we activate the Law of Divine Compensation.

Then the flow of miracles automatically begins. The flow will come in whatever form best compensates for the original error, including—if that will serve you best—far more money than you originally lost.

Should you seek legal redress for any harm you were caused, if indeed that was the case? Perhaps, if that’s what you internally feel guided to do. But unless you seek to forgive as well, no amount of money will heal your pain. No matter how much worldly justice you’re accorded, you’ll still feel a wound to your heart. External justice will do us little good if we remain internally victimized.

It may be, in fact, that the most loving thing we can do is to redress a wrong done at our expense or at the expense of someone else. Committing ourselves to a path of love does not mean we ignore the importance of justice. We must always act for justice, because justice is of God. But we seek to let go of the internal tension that blocks the flow of love.

It’s often said that we can be bitter or we can be better. If we carry anger and blame forward, we will inevitably become bitter. Bitterness is hardly the personality trait that someone out there is looking to hire, partner with, promote, or invest in. Our clinging to old wounds might inspire sympathy for a time, or even temporary support. But it will not inspire invitations to start over, from other people or from the universe itself.

Dear God,

Please help me to forgive my mistakes of the past.

Please help me to forgive those who denied me my good.

Please show me the innocence inside us all.

I am willing to see that only love is real,

But the pain of circumstances holds a grip on my heart.

Please flood my mind with divine perception,

That I might see through the veil of illusion

And be free to begin again.

Thank you, God.

Amen.