[Table of Contents] [Home] [Next Chapter]
KARMA
This is chapter six in the book No Time for Karma, stepping off the wheel of pain and struggle.
Did you happen to catch the movie Groundhog Day? In this movie Phil Conners, played by Bill Murray, is a weather man sent by his TV station to cover groundhog day in Punxsutawney, PA. Though it is obviously beneath his dignity to report on a rodent observing its shadow, he has no choice if he wants to keep his job. Grumbling, griping, and moaning, he plays the victim role quite well. After all it’s only one day and then he’s outa there.
But the next morning he awakens in the same bed, to the same alarm clock, on the same day, to face his victimization all over again. And again, and again, and again. Thousands of days all lived on the same stage with exactly the same limitations and opportunities. In each day Phil’s belief that "this is the pits" manifests itself as a day in the pits.
Many attempts at suicide are all to no avail. The next morning he awakens in the same bed, to the same alarm clock. apparently it is impossible to die no matter how desperate he is to escape. Same day, same people, same play, no matter what, no escape.
This fictional story is a nearly perfect representation of how karma (another fictional story) works. To those who have not begun to open to the bigger picture of a reality in which there are no victims, lives tend to repeat themselves very much like groundhog day did for Phil. As Yogi Bera said, "It’s deja vu all over again."
Eventually Phil begins to explore the possibility of developing his talents. After all, he is apparently going to have an unlimited number of lives in which to learn to play the piano, sculpt, and memorize French poetry and Jeopardy answers. So he becomes a very talented genius, improving his skills one day (life) at a time.
Finally, though, it is his love for his show’s producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), that softens his approach to life. The pleasure of her company gives a different, less materialistic, meaning to life.
After perhaps tens of thousands of one day long lifetimes, each with its minuscule amount of increased ability to love, a new day dawns. When the new day finally dawns Phil isn’t enlightened. He isn’t the possessor of cosmic consciousness. But he certainly has a different outlook on life. And he most assuredly is ready to explore a whole new approach to living.
Those who are victims of circumstance aren’t victims at all. They are experiencing the results of their belief system. When they come to see the futility of resisting their environment (their creation) then they can begin to focus on developing love as a personal experience.
No one is a victim of karma. No one is destined to receive retribution for his or her bad deeds. Those who haven’t realized this tend to live groundhog day like lives however, because our thought creates our futures.
If I defend myself when I am attacked, when my buttons are pushed, I am playing a game called karma that has no end. It goes on forever. Defense demands a repeated attack. That is the law of karma. Attack and defend can literally be played until the end of time. It is not my opponent’s choice as to when peace shall ensue. It is my choice as to when I walk away from the game. I forgive not because they deserve it or because it is the proper thing to do. I forgive because I deserve peace. I deserve to experience self love instead of defensiveness.
As we explore what the meaning of enlightenment and love are we begin to understand the concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness ends karmic repetitions almost immediately.
Karmic Debts
Karma is quite similar to reincarnation in that it has been a very useful concept despite the fact that the popular understanding of karmic law only vaguely resembles truth. Esoteric teachings have spoken of karma for tens of thousands of years. These teachings have given us some insight into the school system and one means by which we can evolve. While the master teachers have spoken of life without beginning or end, they never told anyone that it was necessary to pay a karmic debt. Paying a karmic debt simply means making amends for something we did wrong. The wrong could have occurred in this life or another.
The esoteric teachings give us a concept that we can reflect upon when we see a small child with leukemia. If we are the product of Western upbringing and teaching, there is no way that we could make peace with a "no-win" situation like leukemia. The only conclusion that we could possibly arrive at is that God is vindictive and punishing. Therefore we have been given useful stories like reincarnation and karma that allow us to believe in the continuity of life and the benevolent nature of the universe.
Living karmically is a choice we make before we realize there is a better way. We make this choice (usually before birth). because we believe that we are not yet evolved enough to wisely choose, on a conscious level, all the events and circumstances of our lives. So it appears to worldly eyes that the universe is victimizing us.
Karmic living is the lowest form of evolvement, the basest form of education of the soul. In the biblical analogy of the human path, karma is found in the opening books where we see individuals who lived under the rule of an eye for an eye. These individuals believed their surroundings to be real. They believed in pain and hard times. Their idea of God, if they had one, was a jealous, controlling dictator who could be displeased with their behavior. This God demanded that the sacrificial alters be used regularly. They had no concepts of reality other than ones that supported the images produced by the physical senses. Karmic law is the only option available as a path of growth for such individuals whose inner senses are completely shut down.
When we get to the last books of the bible, evolved beings have traded karmic learning for grace and inner revelations. They are trying to understand that we all volunteered for experiences that will expediently wake us up. The object now is to shift from a path of victimization into understanding.
With every unpleasant lesson that comes our way, we have two options - we may choose to go through the experience (which is called paying a karmic debt) or we can gain the understanding without the necessity of going through the experience. Saint Paul called this grace.
Karma is for people who are asleep, people who have no concept of the big picture. But mostly karma is for people who believe they are not connected to other people. The only way these folks can learn that they harm only themselves when they kill another person, is to return to the scene of the crime on another day, or another lifetime, to be killed. All masters taught the golden rule. If folks can learn to "do unto others...", their karma contains no tragedies.
The purpose of every karmic lesson, be it drug addiction, poverty, illness or abusive relationships, is to ultimately teach us to be impeccably happy. The system is so perfect that it arranges these lessons for us to help us gain understanding.
Soul growth is required to evolve from this school in 3-D to the more beautiful realms of 6-D, 10-D or 100-D. So we don't desire to seek the end of growth just yet, but we definitely don't want any more painful surprises. We want to shift from external motivation (pain, karma) to internal motivation (vision, cosmic awareness).
What do you think happens if we gain the understanding through enlightenment rather than pain? Does the universe say "No, I'm sorry but you have signed up for another four hundred years of drama, so you are not allowed to do it the easy way?" No! The universe says "You are done. You have now graduated." When you are willing to see the purpose of the lesson and what it is teaching you, then you are through with pain and struggle.
Karmic learning is only possible for those who react according to old programming. Karma only works for people whose buttons can be pushed. If we will simply choose peace in the face of every confrontation, we will avoid the pain that used to come with every karmic lesson.
Most people in our society spend a lot of time in denial about the problems in their lives. This comes from our upbringing. Societal belief is that people with big problems, such as alcoholism, bankruptcy, kleptomania, or poor self image, are less than respectable. But spiritual students are aware that everybody has problems. Or as Patricia Sun says, "your garbage is your ticket in."
Spiritual students look forward to challenges. The challenges (lessons) are also our ticket to freedom from pain. They are our only ticket to freedom from pain. We don't want to avoid lessons and we don't want to avoid growth. But we do want to avoid pain. That is the issue. Pain is not required, growth is. None of the master teachers were talking about avoiding lessons or growth. And they can't do it for us. There is no vicarious enlightenment. They were talking about learning to enjoy the trip. Enlightenment is a very personal, very pleasant, adventure through time and space.
Karma Equals Fear Equals Guilt Equals Karma
Most people on the planet are unaware that life is a series of lessons, or that they have a choice not to accept the belief systems of the world. If we come in here totally asleep, it is very appropriate for the leaders of our tribe or village or country to tell us that our body has value and that we should not allow it to be destroyed. "Don't go play with the lions because they will kill you! Don't jump off the cliff because you will die!"
At that point in our evolution, fear was a necessary ingredient or we would not have stayed in school long enough to learn anything. Second, third and fourth graders, cannot exist without fear. We have all spent thousands of lifetimes in which fear was good and its presence kept us alive. Then one day someone came along and said, "You are a twelfth grader now so would you please forget everything that we ever taught you?" "What do you mean? My fear is so programmed in this deep unconscious mind that I have no idea how I could possibly release it!"
The Aquarian Age teaches release of fear. It is the time when we see the true nature of karma as being fear and guilt motivation. Now we learn that karma is a valid teaching tool in eleven ages, but not in the Aquarian Age. Those who would be the pattern makers for the new way of living must release karma before they can teach karmic release. We must walk our talk.
My Cause Is My Karmic Path
What has the main compassion issue in your life been? Why are some people anti-cancer while others are anti-destruction-of-the-rain-forest? Why isn't everybody against the same thing? Is it really any worse to have holes in the ozone layer than it is to have acid rain? Have we ever considered why some individuals are driven by a need to end war or feed the hungry or house the homeless? We rarely stop to consider that what we were doing a thousand or ten thousand years ago could be the cause of our present need to fix things. If we have any burning need in our life to fix some tragedy, that is a clue that we were the perpetrators of the tragedy in a previous incarnation. On a subconscious level, we are placating our own guilt for the atrocities that we committed last time around. Karma is one hundred percent guilt motivation. It always brings the issue back home. We are immersed in the reality that we previously created on the earth and in our own minds.
If we have a need to protect mother earth, it may be because a thousand years ago we were the ones who violated her. Karma really is that simple. If we were once the industrialist who poured tons of soot out of a smokestack, then we are here now as the environmentalist whose major concern is global warming. If someone is an active feminist, she was once the chauvinistic male who abused or restricted women. Our present cause will always be directly related to our past abuse.
This system and its teachings are so perfect that there is never anyone to work on but ourselves. No one else ever needs fixing! Yet if we refuse to look inside, it will appear as if the atrocity exists out there, so we will be compelled to heal it, thereby healing ourselves. That is one of the magical tricks that is built into the earth school. We have never perceived anything, good, bad, right, wrong or indifferent that was other than looking into a mirror at the self.
Everything that we perceive while we are in body falls in the category of a paradox. While it is true that we have an inviolable free will, most folks used that will to write an iron clad contract with earth school. That is why our experiences may appear to be predestined and in fact they often are, but they were set up by us on a soul level and not imposed upon us by a karmic lord. If we have had heavy karmic issues in this life, it is because we set ourselves up for some drama in the hope that we could forgive ourselves for the "wrongs" that we committed in our last incarnation. When we forgive our present enemies, we forgive our past selves.
Most folks aren't ready to accept responsibility for all the tragedy they see on earth because they believe that tragedy is real and harm is possible. 'taint so. God is love. God doesn't allow tragedy. But we need help with our perception to get that idea.
Shifting Our Past From "I'm Guilty" to "I'm a Healer"
In one of my workshops, when I began to speak about the way this earth functions, a woman started crying as I got to the part about the illusion of tragedy. She was unable to accept that idea. When I tuned in to her, I saw that she had been killed in a Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. She had experienced unspeakable horrors and was left with the belief that God allowed mistakes to occur and that some things simply could not be forgiven. Then I received a great story about the people who had incarnated to be blown away by atomic bombs in Japan or mutilated in the death camps of Hitler's Germany.
Being true to the karmic path these were the beings who, last time around, murdered and maimed their fellow man. We know that God is incapable of judging, but these entities in judgment of themselves declared, "If we come back to be victimized, then maybe we will feel sufficiently punished that we can reach a place in consciousness where we can forgive ourselves." Well, these beings incarnated in droves. They were gassed and nuked and wiped off the planet. Did it really kill them? No, of course not.
When that many people die at the same time, there is a great gathering on the other side. They rented a huge hall on the astral plane and gathered to plot their revenge. These victims of World War II, having forgotten that they had volunteered for what happened to them, got together and bitched, complained and belly ached. Hundreds of thousands of them were arguing in that meeting hall when one of them stood up and said, "I know what we'll do. We'll do it like we've always done it for millions of years! Since we were the victims, we must go back and be the victimizers. Let's incarnate in the United States of America because they are going to have the most powerful army that the world has ever seen. We'll get into their militia and take over so we can wipe out everybody that we don't like. Let's get even!"
That made sense to most of them because it's the normal karmic way. The way we have always done things. Finally another person stood up, approached the microphone and said, "Wait just a minute. What if we incarnate as a group, but instead of being militarists we go in as pacifists? We can be flower children and paint smiley faces and rainbows on everything and put flowers in gun barrels! Maybe that will break the pattern that has gone on for millennium after millennium and we could have an opportunity to experience a little peace." The debate between militarists and pacifists raged on for a year. In the end quite a few of them agreed to give peace a try. "Okay, we'll go in and refuse to fight. They'll try to intimidate us and manipulate us because that is the way that the planet functions. They'll put us in jail if we won't fight, so we'll go to jail or we'll go to Canada."
When that many entities incarnated at the same time and held in mind smiley faces, rainbows and flowers, they irreversibly impregnated the telepathic pool of consciousness with peace. They absolutely guaranteed that peace would win out and that there would be no nuclear war here for the next million years. More than any other single group in history, those entities guaranteed that we would cross the cusp from the Piscean to the Aquarian age without the sinking of Lemuria or the destruction of Atlantis that usually occurs at this time. When I recounted this story to the woman at my workshop, her tears flowed. She said that she had been thinking about killing herself for months. Now she had a great sense that everything was okay. By altering her perspective, she went from believing in tragedy to realizing that she incarnated to prevent World War III. She recognized that she was a savior. We are all saviors.
Guilt Is Limited Vision
Let's look at where we got some of this guilt that we are now trying to release. Every personal trait or habit that we now hate ourselves for, saved our lives somewhere in our karmic history. You will see in retrospect that anything you now feel guilty about was one of the greatest growth experiences that you have ever had. It succeeded in altering your awareness. We want to continue to look for ways to realize that no behavior that we have ever had was inappropriate. God would not allow that to occur. A God whose main definition is love would not allow a system where guilt was justified. So in truth you have never made a mistake. Nothing exists outside of love, so how could we have done something that was right or wrong? We either chose love or we chose love, even if it didn't look that way when we viewed the situation with our five senses.
In theory we know this to be true, but we still come back to, "Yes, but I was not the only one involved! My behavior hurt that person and that has got to be inappropriate!" Well, it might have been if that person had not paid good tuition and written into their class schedule that they were to be battered by you in order to remember their lessons for this lifetime. If you had not experienced the conflicts, disagreements and arguments in exactly the manner that they occurred, you would have denied the other person and yourself the most expedient growth that you had available. Both of you would still graduate eventually, but you would have had to find someone else to fight with.
Do you know what happens after we have all maimed and killed each other? When we are all dead we have a cast party! "Hell of a good play, folks (literally.)" "I really killed you good, didn't I?" "Want another beer?"
It would be very easy for us to go to an elementary school and find a child who is crying because the teacher was making him do his spelling lesson. While we would have compassion for that child, we would not take the lesson away because we understand what it is all about. It is the way that individuals choose to learn here. It is the same in the game of life. All of those people with whom you have exchanged angry words or been upset or had a conflict were spelling teachers.
If we had the power - which we do not - to take away another human being's karma, we would not do it. If we could arbitrarily remove (as opposed to heal) their pain and struggle do you know what they would say to us when this lifetime is over? "You son of a bitch! I was about to graduate. I paid all that money and did all those years of college and just when I was ready to take my final exams, you destroyed them!" The earth is about growth and education and learning and the system is perfect just the way it is.
The truth is that all karmic debts are nothing more than a divine opportunity for better understanding. We have such a clear perspective of the school system that when our own child comes home with an assignment and wants to go out and play, we become the big, bad, mean parent who says no! We say "sit down and do the work first", because we can see what that knowledge will do for the child. When we can see that on a soul level a person has said, "I must have that experience to forgive myself for the things that I have done in the past" do we want to say, "No, I'd rather see you suffer in your own guilt for the next ten million years?" We must release our need to remove another person's karma, particularly if it is our spouse or our parents or our children. They knew what they were doing when they enrolled. We can't fix our family or friends by pointing out ways that they could change for the better.
Healing Instead of Fixing
Of course there is a conflict within us when we see someone close to us experiencing the results of their karma. We know that we can’t fix them. Fixing someone means we want them to quit hurting so that we will feel better. To be healers we do that which will let them gain the understanding that goes with the experience without having to actually go through the experience. Only the universe can impart understanding. We can assist the universe however by holding the individual in a sacred space of pure love and light, without judgment as to cause or outcome. We can help people out of their karma.
Bodies, Habits, Likes and Dislikes - All Karmic
When I was the interim minister at a Unity Church in Tulsa, a woman in the congregation introduced me to her daughter and asked me to tell her that she should quit smoking. I tuned in and told the daughter that if she quit smoking at that point in her life that she would likely die. The daughter had just gone through a divorce, lost a child and endured several other traumatic events. I could see that the one and only stress release that she had was inhaling and exhaling on her cigarettes. It was a form of meditation for her. I told her that she had better continue to do that deep breathing if she wanted to survive. All judgments that the ego makes about other people's habits and behavior are in error.
About thirty percent of the bodies that I have tuned into do not have any problem with smoking. It does them no harm whatsoever. It is all a matter of how our belief system has conditioned our bodies. This conditioning is ninety percent karmic. We can never know how our subconscious views our habits until we look with our psychic vision. Smoking used to be a sacred ritual for the native American Indians. If you want smoking to be a holy act for you, take that pack of cigarettes between your hands, take a deep breath and say, "I bless and energize this sacred tobacco for the nourishment and healing of my body." You have the power to do that with anything, be it chocolate, wine or cigarettes. Do not smoke a single cigarette that has not first been blessed and dedicated to the health and well being of your total self. Cigarettes will then invigorate you and help you be alive and dynamic, or they will disappear from your life without any effort on your part.
We must see the magnitude of our own power. We are not victims of habit, addiction or karma. In the blink of an eye we have the power to transform anything when we refuse to resist it and refuse to see evil in it. There has never been a cigarette that was not a miraculous creation. Can you turn a seed into a tobacco leaf? That sounds like a miracle to me. Everything can be seen in that light by changing our perspective.
Coming into our own personal power requires that we take responsibility in this lifetime for ourselves and that which we have created. That is equally true for the negative things and positive things that have occurred in our life. If we believe that the universe created those experiences by chance or circumstance, then we are acting out the role of victimization and entrapment. We must perceive instead that everything that was painful, as well as beautiful, in our life was something that we inadvertently created. We are held guiltless. It is not enough to perceive only that we are responsible for every event in our life. In order to get free we must also release our guilt. We have heard lectures and read self improvement psychology books and been to therapists and they have all said that our guilt was not justified. But most of us will absolutely not believe it! We have forgotten the one thing that is essential to getting free of guilt - time is not linear. Our karma never happened.
Guilt Requires Errors In Perception
Time Isn't Linear
Guilt cannot exist without the concept of linear time. Guilt may seem like the big motivator and teacher of the earth, but in truth it is merely a misuse of time. Guilt says that what is done is done. If that were true, no master teacher would have ever taught forgiveness. It would be misleading to say that we could be forgiven unless all time is simultaneous. What we believe that we did wrong never even occurred.
Most therapists won't take it that far. They can be very helpful in enabling someone to handle their guilt, but what they are doing is not always in alignment with truth. Many of them are teaching patients how to wrap up their guilt, keep it under control, and confine it to a particular area so that they can get back to leading a useful and productive life.
Most therapists believe that we really did the things we did. That will not eliminate the problem. If the past was really past, there is no way that Lazarus could have gotten out of that cave. If time was linear, we could not heal anything from the past. We would be condemned to guilt eternally and forgiveness would be meaningless.
There is only the present moment. If we project love to old situations in the here and the now, that will lead to the elimination of all of the guilt that we have ever had. It will literally recreate the past and the future in that instant.
If we look with our psychic vision at the many incarnations of Jesus, we find that this guy was perfect. He never did anything wrong, he never hurt anybody and he never made a mistake. Yet he told me that while he was doing those lives, he had anger, he molested people and he even murdered people. How could that possibly be true? When he finally came to his senses, after many lifetimes, he recreated all of reality by seeing only love in the present moment. He healed all of his past "errors" and guilt to the extent that they no longer exist in any record book in the universe.
Our awareness supersedes the limitations of time and space and we can therefore alter those past life experiences in any way that we choose. That is why "perfect" beings like Buddha and Jesus can literally exist in our histories. You and I and all of our classmates will eventually end up "perfect" also. As our vision continues to see more and more of the big picture, we will come to see that we have never made a mistake.
Living Non-Karmically Takes Practice
No individual that we have ever known or probably ever will know has the ability to grasp and apply truth in their own lives without first doing a bit of work. If you walk up to someone on the street and say "Look, this is the way that the system works" they will not be likely to respond by saying "Great! Now I am free and I am a master. I can walk on water, raise the dead, levitate and float through space." It doesn't work that way because of the depths of our subconscious programming.
There is no one who understands how to alter consciousness better than Madison Avenue. They go on results. If they don't get the desired reactions from you and me they will soon be out of business. They understand that it is not possible to run the beer commercial one single time, take it off the air, and have the expectation that people will continue to buy that particular beer. Madison Avenue has mastered the process of spaced repetition. It is a concept that succeeds quite nicely in altering the subconscious beliefs, including spiritual beliefs, of human beings.
If the average individual is reminded over and over and over again about truth, it will only take them about ten lifetimes before they finally say "I've got it! I don't need to slip back into that drama again!" When we see the big picture, we become self empowered and there is no way that we can become ensnared in any trap that the earth would put us in. In the meantime, let's be kind to ourselves and when we do slip into a trap, acknowledge it. Admit that our behavior was based on an old pattern and although we don't like the way that it feels, let's acknowledge that we saw our error much faster than we did the last time.
We are making progress toward our own enlightenment. Each time that we stumble, we recognize the old pattern more quickly. Eventually we will see it coming before it occurs and then we will have the choice to not fall in at all. Every time that we remember to live consciously we raise the group consciousness of planet earth one notch. That makes it infinitely easier for everyone to get it right the next time. It is, in effect, the hundredth monkey syndrome. When enough of us can see the choices that we are making clearly, we will all experience spontaneous enlightenment.
Watch Out! Here Comes Instant Karma
Karma is love because it fulfills an individual's request for rapid enlightenment. In ordinary times on planet earth it is difficult to convince anyone that karma exists. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is not something that folks could relate to when the first eye was in this lifetime and the second eye was in a different lifetime. They could murder people and walk around thinking that they had gotten away with it. They could not see that they would return to earth to get murdered themselves the next time around. The energy that surrounded this planet was so dense that it could be several lifetimes before things came back to us. We needed that grace period to survive.
If you let the average barbarian consciousness loose in a system where there was instant karma, mankind would have been wiped out in a very brief period of time. Now that the veil is lifting and we are coming into a more loving space, the time delay is less and the system teaches in a more concrete fashion. Karma is about thoughts, not deeds. Thoughts and feelings thrown out now return within minutes, hours or days instead of years and lifetimes so there is a far greater opportunity to see the relationship between cause and effect.
Karmic
Lessons Are Good Teachers
But There's An Easier Way
There is only one way to get off the wheel of karma and that is to choose to be happy in every moment. That eradicates all karma. If we feel guilty about something that supposedly occurred in the past, then we are holding in mind an error. That will create another encounter with error, another trip around the cycle with one more karmic debt to pay. We tend to look for techniques to get us off the wheel based upon our old ways of doing things. We keep looking back and saying, "I have to pay all of my debts (learn all of my lessons) and then I will be free", but that is a never ending process. As Einstein said, "a problem can't be solved from the same consciousness that created it." Looking for ways to correct the past or to correct error can never correct the past or correct error. Jesus said to not look at the error, rather "let thine eye be single, fixed on God."
We may have had a need to understand what we did in a past life that made us believe that we had to experience all of our current dramas in order to forgive ourselves. That is an interesting and sometimes useful game, but it is a karmic game. The way to break free from the karmic wheel is to declare that we are already free! If we continue to blame others for our predicament or try to fix people or play any other separative, karmic game, things will get very painful very quickly. It will get worse by the minute until we scream, "I quit! I quit!" When we refuse to play the game, the game ends.
Instant karma is approaching, it is normal in the Aquarian Age. Those who have not released their grievances will find it difficult to survive in the new age. Those who choose only loving thoughts will find earth to be heaven. What we put out telepathically comes back as the only reality that exists for us.
[Table of Contents] [Home] [Next Chapter]