Justice Without Judgment, Gary Zukav and the Earth School

There are intellectual, and spiritual, encounters that flip us inside out. Gary Zukav, who is the author of ‘The Seat of the Soul’ - a 36-year-old bestseller that somehow feels timeless - is one of them. I’m reading the book for the second time. The first was about three years ago, at the beginning of my true spiritual awakening, when it blew me wide open. And recently, I listened to a podcast episode of his that struck me as particularly provocative, so I want to share some reflections with you.Zukav became a global reference in personal growth and spiritual development largely because of his long relationship with Oprah Winfrey. She says he changed her life; he says the same about her. For years, he became one of the thinkers she most often brought to her show and not by accident. He talks about spirituality with the clarity of a scientist.The episode opens with a disarming sentence:“The universe doesn’t judge.”Written on a mug, it could be a cliché, but Zukav takes it somewhere else entirely: if the universe doesn’t judge, then the concepts of “justice” and “injustice”, as we use them generically, collapse. Not because “anything goes,” but because everything that happens is, in his words, “appropriate to the soul that experiences it.”🎙️Listen To The Podcast Episode For More Depth On This Topic, Here Or On Spotify: When The Spiritual Meets The CourtroomThis particular episode struck me for reasons that go beyond spirituality, it touches something at the core of my work: criminal justice. I spent over a decade covering criminal justice in the U.S., dealing with victims, trials, systems that fail, tragedies that never should have happened and witnessing devastation and trauma up close and perhaps that’s why Zukav’s framing caught me off guard.He does not say suffering is desirable, does not deny the existence of harm or evil, nor does he argue against accountability. What he says is that every choice generates consequences, and those consequences become our lesson in what he calls the Earth School, the school of life, where everything that happens is neither fair nor unfair, but simply the natural consequence of choice.Zukav argues that the universe doesn’t operate through judgment, not in the way human institutions do, not in the way courtrooms do, and not even in the way we do when we say: this is unfair, this is unjust, this shouldn’t be happening to me. In his view, the deepest form of justice is non-judgment. The thing we call “karma” is, he says, “the universal, impersonal teacher of responsibility.” And here’s where he goes further: karma unfolds not just in this lifetime, but in the next.This is not empirically provable and he never pretends otherwise, but it makes sense: every choice carries an energetic imprint that eventually returns, even if not immediately, even if not in this life.Covering Epstein, El Chapo, and the stories that break usThis idea collided with my years covering cases that felt incomprehensible: from Jeffrey Epstein to ‘El Chapo’, extremely violent crimes and murders, massive fraud and scandals, tragedies, loss and accountability. I’ve heard “That’s not fair” more times than I can count: from victims, defendants, families, even prosecutors.Nothing in Zukav’s framework minimizes these experiences. Everything that reaches your life - even the painful, devastating, senseless - is “appropriate to the person experiencing it,” he says. Not because they deserve it, but because it serves their evolution. Zukav suggests that fairness isn’t the point, learning is. It’s a difficult idea, until you sit with it and then it becomes strangely stabilizing.Fear, Love, And The Only Two Choices That MatterZukav returns again and again to one simple question: from where do I respond, fear or love? He says something simple and brutal: “Justice is the lack of judgment.”If justice is the absence of judgment, then what we call “injustice” may simply be a misunderstanding of how the universe teaches. Choices create consequences and consequences create growth. Fear generates more fear, while love generates clarity. Judgment generates more judgment, especially toward ourselves.Judging someone, he argues, doesn’t only affect them, it affects us, because judgment creates consequences that eventually return to the one who generated them. In the Earth School, everything we emit comes back.What happens in court is only one layer of justice: the human layer. The deeper layer is internal, personal, spiritual, and far older than our institutions.“Nothing Occurs In Your Life That Does Not Serve Your Spiritual Growth”Zukav repeats this like a mantra:“Nothing occurs in your life that does not serve your spiritual growth.”You may not agree and, years ago, I wouldn’t have agreed either. However, today, I think he’s right, not in a fatalistic way but in an empowering one. It’s not about destiny but about accountability - for instance Madonna, whose spiritual life I analized in another post, has said many times that she wouldn’t have pursued her path if it weren’t for the traumas she experienced early in life.What Zukav is really saying is this: we always have the freedom to choose our next response, and that love or fear are not emotions, they’re decisions. A world with “new consciousness”?Zukav often says his work is part of “an unprecedented new consciousness,” a new world being born. Is he right? Because in this chaotic world it doesn’t always feel like it. We’re living through polarization, disinformation, extremism, and systems under strain, but he argues that evolution is messy and that crises accelerate clarity and that fear rising to the surface is part of a transition to a more conscious collective.Are there indicators of rising collective awareness? There are small ones: mental health conversations, trauma literacy, restorative justice experiments, shifts toward meaning-driven work. There is certainly no empirical measure of “global consciousness” but, being in my forties, I can say this: we have far better tools for introspection and healing than our parents or grandparents ever did.A final thoughtThis is one of Zukav’s gift: a concept of justice that moves beyond blame and into existential responsibility, not judicial. Maybe that’s why The Seat of the Soul feels more relevant today than when it was published. We live in a world obsessed with punishment, spectacle, and moral certainty, yet profoundly disconnected from meaning.If you want to change your life, Zukav points to, change the choices you make from fear into choices you make from love. Everything else follows, in this lifetime or the next.Zukav is one of our greatest teachers and, honestly, I should listen to Zukav every single day. It’s astonishing how quickly we lose sight of our own essence.If you found these reflections meaningful, I go deeper into them on the Atlantic Lens podcast, available here, on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify:Independent reporting, sustained by readers. Subscribe to Atlantic Lens for new posts: free or paid. Get full access to Atlantic Lens by Marta Dhanis at atlanticlens.substack.com/subscribe