It’s important that you recognize these metaphysical laws because not acknowledging them, like not acknowledging the laws of nature, won’t serve you. Human beings struggle so with life because they don’t understand the Truth. They don’t understand the metaphysical laws that govern life: how life operates, what life is about, and what life is up to.

Granted, it’s more difficult to recognize these laws than the laws of nature because many of them operate over a long period of time, even over lifetimes, as with the law of karma. That is the first metaphysical law I’d like to touch upon, since karma is as central to Truth as gravity is to the laws of nature.

Karma is a law. It is often stated as, “You reap what you sow.” But karma is much more complex than those five words imply. They imply that what you do to others, others will do to you. However, that misses the purpose and intent of karma, which is not to punish but to teach.

If karma looks like punishment at times, it’s only because that’s often the most efficient way to teach something and the soul has agreed to experience that teaching method. This is an important distinction. Life does not punish; it teaches. And if it seems to teach harshly, then it has been allowed to—indeed, invited to—by the soul, which is learning through that method.

There are many ways for your soul to learn what it needs to, and it gets to choose how it will do so. It can learn more gently and likely more slowly, or more challengingly and likely more quickly. In either case, the events you experience are solely (no pun intended) designed to heal, teach, and evolve you, not punish you.

Punishment is actually not a very effective teacher. It may teach people not to do something but at a great cost to their spiritual progress and ability to love themselves, to love life, and to love others, which is the ultimate lesson. Those who receive punishment are full of shame or anger and resentment, and this is a hell they must learn to release themselves from.

Because punishment leads to further ego-entrenchment and misery, it’s ultimately counterproductive to spiritual progress. Punishment is the ego’s way to remedy crimes and mistakes, and humanity has yet to recognize its ineffectiveness. Punishment perpetuates pain and negativity and does nothing to heal it.

All crimes, mistakes, and suffering are caused by the ego, so the solution is not to entrench people further into their egos by punishing them but to give them what might help them see that they are not the ego. Love is what heals and brings people out of the egoic state of consciousness and nothing else: love, acceptance, kindness, compassion, and attention. These are the balms that heal.

It’s true that you reap what you sow—in this lifetime or another. Often, the result of what you sow is immediate: You’re unkind to someone, and they’re unkind back. At other times, the result is more long term: You eat too much sugar year after year, and you become diabetic. And some results aren’t met until another lifetime: You treat the poor badly, and you’re born into poverty in your next lifetime.

What may seem at times like punishment from a karmic standpoint is often simply the best possible way to teach what needs to be learned, and often what needs to be learned is compassion. For that, “walking in someone else’s shoes” is often the remedy. Each of you has had many, many lifetimes that were designed to teach compassion by “walking in someone else’s shoes.”

For example, if you lied, cheated, or defrauded someone, being on the receiving end of this at some point or in another lifetime may be the best possible way to instill the compassion needed to prevent this from happening again. When this is the case, your soul will design the circumstances carefully and supply you with the resources and people you need to help you learn from that experience.

Every soul has many lifetimes in which they behaved badly and then reaped the consequences of that. This is unavoidable and the overwhelming experience of one’s early lifetimes. There’s no way to avoid learning through “hard knocks” in this school of life, which brings us to another metaphysical law: Life is a school for the purpose of your soul’s evolution.

Learning is built into life, like gravity. You can’t be alive and not be learning something. Sometimes you learn, or conclude, the wrong thing, and then you have more lessons until you get it right. Life is very patient, and you can take as long as you like to learn what you need to learn. If you understand that life is trying to teach you something when it presents you with a challenge, a problem, or a difficult person, it will be much easier to learn from that experience.

If you don’t understand that life is a school, it’ll be more difficult for you to learn from your experiences. You’ll feel victimized by life, ashamed to have failed, angry, or just confused. But once you see that everything life brings you serves a purpose in your soul’s growth, you can become curious about what that purpose is and use your experiences to grow.

So many of life’s challenges are for honing and shaping one’s character: You learn to be more courageous, persevering, patient, responsible, reliable, careful, kind, loving, wise, and resourceful. Life teaches these things, and it’s the only thing that teaches them. You can’t learn them by reading a book—life is the lesson.

You can learn these things either willingly or unwillingly, either quickly or slowly. If you’re unwilling, learning these things will take longer, but eventually everyone does become more courageous, persevering, patient, responsible, reliable, careful, kind, loving, wise, and resourceful as a result of living many, many lifetimes.

Karma works through others and through life circumstances designed by your soul for you. Others are your teachers by how they respond to what you do and say. They give you instant feedback about how your words and deeds have affected them, which is an opportunity to learn to speak or act in ways that will produce better results.

This doesn’t mean you should go around trying to please everyone, although that doesn’t hurt as long as you please yourself as well, that is, follow your own Heart in how you live your life. But when you treat others well, they’ll treat you well. Your relationships make the law of karma abundantly clear. How you treat others matters, not just to them, but to your experience of them and your experience of life.

You can create a positive experience of life for yourself or a negative one. It’s truly up to you, depending on how you are with others. This matters not only to their well-being, but also to your own. Eventually, you learn to treat others well because it feels good to, which brings us to another metaphysical law.

I will call this the law of love. Love is what gives birth to life, sustains it, and guides it. Love is behind all of it. A loving hand, not a judgmental or cruel hand is behind life.

This is one of those laws that may be difficult to see if you take the ego’s point of view. The ego thinks that life is scary and cruel, but the ego is projecting its own fear and cruelty onto life. The ego is what makes life scary and cruel, not life itself.

Life is kind, life is beautiful, life is benevolent and wise, but the ego is not. It creates the havoc, the confusion, the conflict, the negative feelings, the limitation, and the fears that make up the human condition, the human dilemma. How difficult it is to be a human being! But it is only because you have an ego that this is so. Without an ego, you’d be deeply in love with life, and all you would see is love and benevolence in life’s grand design, which brings us to another law.

There is a design. Life is purposeful, designed, and guided by higher forces. As with the other metaphysical laws, this one is not so obvious, but there are lots of clues nonetheless. If you believe that life is purposeful, designed, and guided, you’ll begin to see that it is. But if you see through the ego’s eyes, life will seem random, unfair, chaotic, and capricious. But it is not.

Your life is purposeful and divinely guided. You are designed the way you are for a reason. You have been given a personality, a physical body, an appearance, circumstances, a family, genetics, and drives that provide the lessons you need and support the life purpose you’ve come to earth to fulfill.

You are a unique expression of God! And God loves you and created you to be exactly as you are. There is an intelligence behind life, and this intelligence is benevolent. Call it God or whatever you will. This is another law, since this intelligence is unwaveringly benevolent and wise.

Imagine what intelligence is necessary to create all that exists and have it function so beautifully as an intricate Whole, with each piece interdependent and intertwined with every other piece of creation. In truth, there are no pieces but Oneness operating as different forms, with all forms essentially connected to each other by virtue of being made of the same “stuff”: consciousness.

Intelligence is a good word to describe the Creator because all you can see and know of the Creator is the result of this intelligence. The Creator is invisible to you; and yet, all that is visible and beyond that is the Creator. This is true for us as well, for those like us who are guiding humanity and exist in another, higher dimension.

Convincing you of these metaphysical laws is difficult as long as you are perceiving life from the vantage point of the ego, which is programmed to not see the truth about life but believes the opposite. What a dilemma! But that is the challenge you’ve been given—that God, masquerading as you, has given Himself/Herself.

For the most part, the ego has been programmed with the opposite of the Truth, and you must discover for yourself that how the ego perceives and what it believes is not the Truth. But programming is not so easy to see through, especially when everyone around you has the same programming, the same misperceptions and misunderstandings.

Fortunately, God made sure that you would see through this programming by causing you to suffer every time you believed something that wasn’t true. Much of the time, you suffer only a little as a result of this programming, but sometimes your beliefs cause you to suffer a lot. How much you suffer as a result of a belief is the measure of how true it is. Little lies, ones that contain some truth, cause you to suffer only a little if you believe them. Big lies, on the other hand, cause you to suffer a lot if you believe them. Or, if you believe big lies only a little, you suffer only a little.

This is how it works, and you come to see this if you examine your thoughts and notice their results in your body. Some thoughts result in negative feelings and a sense of contraction of your energy, while other thoughts are more neutral and don’t contract you. Some of your thoughts even make you feel good, but they’re the exception.

The thoughts that are most problematic are ones that have you at the center of them. This self-reflective thinking is often called the voice in your head, which is how these thoughts are experienced. This voice comments on life and talks directly to you. It passes judgments, warns you of potential difficulties, reminds you of your to-do list, admonishes you, hurries you, chats with you like friend, scares and shames you, tells you how to do things, evaluates how you’re doing, and gives you advice. These thoughts show up in your mind and seem like your own voice or thoughts, or the voice of someone else who’s conversing with you.

This voice is the ego’s voice dressed up in various guises, none of them what they seem: The advice isn’t necessarily wise, the judgments aren’t useful, the fears are made-up, the conversation is vapid, the beliefs and opinions aren’t necessarily based on facts, and the assumptions are often imaginations. The voice in your head, which is also called the egoic mind, is an irrational aspect of your mind that has nothing to do with your intellect or with rational thinking. It is driven by fear, greed, and other base emotions. The voice in your head is the source of all suffering—if you believe it.

The ego and the voice in your head aren’t going away anytime soon, and they don’t have to. It isn’t necessary to get rid of the ego, which is impossible, but to dethrone it. The ego has usurped the true master, the divine self, your true self. Progress on the spiritual path is about regaining mastery from the ego. Who is this you who can gain mastery over the ego? There’s something else here, isn’t there? That is who you really are! That is your divine self.