Intelligence agencies are in the business of gathering intelligence—information that is difficult to attain through ordinary means; information that people are hesitant and resistant to give up or share. The successful intelligence agent will employ the tools of motivation and manipulation to get this information. These tools are matched to particular means with which to motivate and/or manipulate people to get them to do what you want them to do. These approaches are referred to with the acronym “R.I.C.E.” Reward, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. Of these four, appealing to ideology is seen as the most effective, and coercion the least. If you successfully appeal to ideology, the “target” will trust you and share almost anything. Coercion is the weakest as, contrary to Hollywood, it may work the first time you use it, but then you destroy trust and will have fewer opportunities for future success with the target. What is Creator’s perspective?

This exposition on motivation versus manipulation illustrates a quite high-level set of circumstances and challenges that will test most anyone severely in their handling of information and actions taken when they are charged with bringing about a change whether in an individual, a group, or a much wider circle. When there is much at stake is when all of the prior learning, gained through growing up with many such challenges on a smaller scale, will pay off. Those who are adept in navigating are the subject of your inquiry, how they come to be that way, and what might the trade-off be, in terms of morality and karmic consequences in their being assigned a consequence by the Law of Cause and Effect—the Law of Karma by another name. It is always watching and recording everything that happens to everyone. Positive influences will be rewarded in some way or another, but negative ones will be the cause of some kind of comeuppance including a possible punishment with a severe consequence of some sort for any misstep in one's actions. So to have a career where the goal of your role, perhaps working for a government agency of some kind or the military, calls upon you to influence others for the benefit of your organization or nation-state, there will be many potential consequences. In all likelihood, this will engender a departure from alignment of the target's self-interest and the goals of the intelligence officer charged with carrying out persuading someone to do something they might not otherwise, and using means to do so that flirt with moral boundaries or break them dramatically, depending on the circumstances. In effect, these kinds of manipulations take place automatically within each and every human-to-human contact. Every human relationship will be a series of interchanges that will influence the parties involved. The makeup and personality of each individual will have a lot to do with how the relationship plays out, whether it is a pleasant one or something more negative and challenging will be a learning opportunity but perhaps a painful one. All of life is a series of maneuvers to find one's way in looking for a good place to be and good people to be with. Carrying out duties that will constitute a rewarding career so one can make a living and have a wherewithal to raise a family will call upon skills for persuading others, and this can be for good or ill depending on the circumstances. So in clandestine activities involving intelligence work, sometimes being able to fit in, blend in with the scenery, go along with a group so as to become accepted is the first order of business, and what better way to do so than think and act the way the others do, and that is a kind of performance. This will at once disarm the other party so as to not see you as any kind of threat, and it allows developing the relationship further to become closer still, and that can pay off over time with greater levels of trust and also a greater exchange of information entrusted to an intelligence officer who is charged with gaining access to particular targets and learning what they can. The idea of carrying out a greater manipulation will increasingly move a person out of divine alignment and, at the same time, generate a negative karmic energetic potential because, in some way or another, they are taking advantage of the situation. Even when done in a positive way, as with reward, it is still a kind of manipulation with an ulterior motive, and while this might go undetected by the other party, it will not be undetected by the Law of Karma. Lying for a living is not a life lived in divine alignment, by definition. Individuals who do so will pay a price, eventually, from the negative karma they create through deception. This is unavoidable because the Law of Karma is unequivocal and quite strict in its reckoning. There will be consequences, eventually, for such conduct. Partly, it will depend on the outcomes, whether it truly causes harm or not, but you are not off the hook when simply holding an intention for a deception to take place. We are not talking here of the so-called "white lie" where a falsehood might be entertained to spare someone's feelings rather than be blunt and perhaps hurtful to say what one really thinks, if that is unnecessarily harsh and unnecessary to be so forthright. In a sense, people who are vulnerable to manipulation, through an appeal to their ego, have a built-in liability that will, in part, represent a karmic liability that will likely be addressed at some point in bringing around to that individual some sort of releveling, a life lesson of some kind, to teach them their ego can get them into trouble when it is put in charge too greatly in an inappropriate way. Even the most innocent of vulnerabilities when being subjected to coercion, for example, has karmic implications because you have a duty to safeguard your own soul and if you fail to do so it will be a karmic penalty. To be sure, the perpetrator who carries out a threat of some kind, to gain an advantage, will have more to pay karmically, but both perpetrator and victim are in a karmic dance and both will need to realign something to gain back higher ground.