A strong sense of justice is a quality often attributed to the highly sensitive and / or gifted. Witnessing some unfairness can trigger strong, even compelling sensations and emotions. But is it really a sense of justice? Justice is something human-made, strongly tied to time and location. Laws define what is just and what is not, but that is very relative. Neither are moral expectations universally valid. What is legal or morally acceptable here and now may be illegal or immoral just one country away or a year later. Isn't human-made justice, being so tied to time and place, too relative and sometimes too arbitrary to activate a "sense" involving physical and emotional sensations? Justice itself is also a difficult concept when you get into the details: is justice always just? Is revenge just? Is inequality unjust? Who has the one, final, clear answer to these questions that makes sense without needing lengthy explanations laden with words? So this "sense" of justice might instead be connected to something deeper: to a sense of balance. The focus on laws and moral rules of fairness may conceal deeper balances beyond human-made "justice." An analogy may be helpful. When the body is out of balance, it can fall. The body notices this with its sense of balance and its "proprioception" (perception of its own position and posture). It immediately triggers movement reflexes that restore balance. You were just beginning to stumble. And within a fraction of a second, a leg has come forward, positioned itself under your falling body and is now carrying it again. The consciousness is too slow and has not been invited into the process at all. Only afterwards does our consciousness understand what the body has already completed. It can now provide eloquent comments on what happened. But the action is over. The "sense of justice" would then actually be a kind of sense of balance, but not a physical one. Perhaps it is activated when an imbalance occurs in the fabric of the world. This would mean that behind this sense there is a deeper connection to the world, to the many flows and interactions and networks and life energies that are constantly traversing life and sometimes get out of step. The interpersonal netting and the realms beyond require a delicate balance that is easily disturbed. • For example, when someone behaves selfishly, he or she creates a disturbance in the flow of things and values. The action of one is at the expense of the other. This is an imbalance. It can trigger further events. • Or a child sees a dead animal in nature and is inconsolable and desperately wants to bury it - as if some heartfelt natural order were to be restored. • Another child grows up in a dysfunctional family and tries to somewhat repair the interpersonal fabric. It may do so by being overly cheerful (everybody‘s "little sunshine"), by some serious disease, or by exhibiting behavioural problems. They are various sidetracking strategies to draw attention away from the family divisions and divert from the conflicts. The child has felt that something needs repair and responds, but loses contact with itself in the process, since it has hooked its own being and behaving to outside factors. High sensitivity is primarily an environmental sensitivity. It perceives minimal changes in the environment. And giftedness may include an increased cognitive acuity on the world, providing a higher resolution picture of what is and what could come. The "sense of justice," which in reality would be a "sense of balance," could feed on perceptions of the environment on deeper levels. Something in the very fabric of the surrounding world is hurt, perhaps barely perceptible to others. The subtle balances of the world have been disturbed and the disturbance could expand and ferment if nothing is done. That calls for the balance to be restored. To stay with the first example: A small initial selfish action by one person may lead to further actions and events and perhaps retaliations that build up to a split in the group. The sense of balance, called the "sense of justice," provides a premonition of this outcome. It communicates: Recapture this imbalance before it expands and does further damage. And if that is not possible, at least try to mitigate the imbalance or its outcome. Considerations on the very nature of the world netting or world fabric the imbalance has been created and stored in and is moving through are entirely up to the esteemed reader. However, many highly sensitive and gifted people and others experience this sense as downright compelling, sometimes painful. It may be that they play an important role in keeping the fabric of the world in balance. Otherwise, it would probably not signal itself to them so clearly and sometimes cause them such discomfort. If this privileged connection exists, it may help explain why being in nature can be so invigorating: nowhere else can we have such a sense of being part of something of a far greater magnitude. The question is whether they also act out of this perception to actually restore balance. For perhaps they do indeed have a role of stewardship of the fabric the world is made of. See also: • Coaching for HSP - and what High Sensitivity is • Coaching for the highly gifted • Contact info: Ask your questions or make an appointment • Why this Coach Alexander Hohmann? • Blog & Articles