04 Three Purposes In Operation

The first purpose is to let the doer-in-the-body learn what thoughts are, their meaning and how the physical world is built by them; that it is responsible for its thoughts and will be rewarded and punished for them and that it can attain conscious immortality only by thinking.

The second purpose is payment. Therefore a doer pays and is paid in the equivalent of what physical actions and conditions it caused or permitted.

This does not mean that if a man beats a boy the boy will sometime beat the man, or if a wife nags a husband that the husband has formerly jarred the person
now his wife. It means that the man who put the stripes on the boy will himself suffer stripes, but not necessarily from that boy, and that the present husband has nagged someone, but not necessarily that same woman.

The third purpose is the adjustment between the desire of the doer and the exteriorization, the balancing of the thought.

The adjustment must be made by the doer understandingly; not necessarily with knowledge of the past, but with an understanding, for example, that a certain suffering is merited, and so must be borne willingly. This decision makes the adjustment, and that thought is then balanced.

Usually a man refuses to take that attitude. Thoughts are created and accumulated without an adjustment being made.

So these thoughts become the hard circumstances that envelop so many. In each of these thoughts the balancing factor causes exteriorization after exteriorization. Little is learned and few adjustments are made out of the multitude of accumulating thoughts.

The three purposes are interrelated. By paying and receiving payment a man learns about his thoughts and his duties. Without payment he does not usually learn.

In most cases he does not learn even by being made to pay repeatedly. He must continue to pay until he learns what he should do or not do in a particular case. Even after he has learned what is wrong he has not learned well enough to resist temptation; therefore the condition of the world is what it is. But there is a bright future ahead if people are willing to learn and to adjust.

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