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The Thirteenth Lesson: Spiritual Cause and Effect205
not only does it temper the wind to the shorn lamb, but tempers the shorn
lamb to the wind.
We have spoken of our interests being bound up with those of others.
This also is a principle of the law of Spiritual Cause and Effect. In our past
lives we have attached ourselves to certain others, either by love or hate—
either by kind action or by cruelty. And these people in this life have certain
relationships to us, all tending toward mutual adjustment and mutual
advancement and development. It is not a law of revenge, but simply the law
of cause and effect which causes us to receive a hurt (when a hurt is needed)
from the hands of some one whom we have hurt in some past life—and it is
not merely a law of reward for good, but that same law of cause and effect,
that causes some one to bind up our wounds and comfort us, whom we
have comforted and helped in some past life. The person who is caused to
hurt us, may have no intention of doing so, being a perfectly innocent party,
but we are brought into conditions whereby we receive pain from the acts
of that person, although he be unconscious of it. If he hurts us consciously,
and still in obedience to the law, it is because he is still on that plane, and is
willing to hurt us, and is brought by the Law of Attraction into a condition
whereby we may receive hurt from him. But even that hurt is calculated to
benefit us, in the end, so wonderful is this law of cause and effect constituted.
Of course, if we once reach the position where we see the truth, we do not
need so many of these lessons, and their necessity having passed, the law
allows us to escape that which would otherwise have given us pain.
The above mentioned condition of affairs may be illustrated by the case
of one who in a past incarnation deliberately won the love of another, for
selfish reasons, and then having gratified the desire willfully threw aside the
other one, as one would a worn-out toy. While not pretending to explain
the exact working of the law in any particular case, we have been informed
by those who have watched these matters from a higher point of view, that
in such a case as above mentioned, the betrayer would probably in this life,
fall violently in love with the person who was the victim in the last life, but