The Function of Karma

Many spiritual beliefs define karma (Sanskrit for ‘deed’ or ‘action’) as being the result of good or evil thoughts, actions, or words towards the self or another person. The basic principle states that thinking or performing positive thoughts or actions will result in a more positive life. The opposite holds true for negativity. However, you don’t need to believe in karma to know that doing good deeds, and having positive thoughts, generally means life is happier and more rewarding.

There is another school of thought regarding karma, and that is our higher, or soul selves, have contracts with other souls to learn certain lessons from one lifetime to another. These lessons are crucial to a soul’s growth, and its ability to fully awaken to its true identity within the one Self (or God). Karma is the terms of the contract; the lesson or lessons that need to be undertaken in order for the soul to complete its human experience. Unfinished karma between souls will re-surface in another lifetime until their contract is completed.

For this reason, the relationships we share with others all involve karma; all have something to teach us about ourselves. In fact, since we create our lives and the people in it, we must do so with karma in mind to begin with, and that is the reason certain people are in our lives at certain times. They exist to promote the growth of the soul, or the Self, with the ultimate goal of bringing enlightenment, or awakening to the true nature of the Self as it exists in awareness of heaven.

Defined this way, karma is not a case of divine retribution, or punishment by the self towards the self. Guilt performs that function quite readily. There’s no reason to learn life’s lessons through ‘bad’ karma, unless the soul has contracted to experience a life full of apparent hardship in its relations with other souls. In that particular scenario, one’s chosen lot is a still a matter of learning the right lessons at the right time. The soul cannot grow at its desired rate otherwise, yet the end goal is the same. Waking up to the true nature of the Self is a process, and one which every soul in this illusory world must undertake at its own pace.

Love and karma are inextricably linked to one another. Through the manifestation of love between two people, the soul ensures that karma will be pursued with greater focus, and will result in learning more important lessons. Love comes in many forms, and even hate is a form of love; while it may seem that a certain relationship doesn’t involve love at all, since love is the creative force of the Self to begin with, every relationship has love as a component. The key to seeing love in all relationships is the belief that love is the only aspect of life that is real; everything not of love is illusion.

This may be difficult to accept given the nature of some relationships. However, if you accept the concept of a loving God, and subsequently the idea that a loving God is incapable of creation without love, then it stands to reason that love exists in everyone, because we all have a soul created with it to begin with. This also means love exists in every relationship, no matter its form.

Sometimes, we experience relationships that are intensely loving, and yet also highly challenging. This is the result of two souls nearing the end of their human journeys, and as they near their completion, it becomes all the more important to unearth the fears and beliefs of the self that do not serve the soul’s growth. Soul mates and other terms used to describe these relationships are symbolic of souls contracted with one another to strive for their final destiny, or awakening.

People can have more than one soul mate, but if the lessons needed from one aren’t learned, they’ll have to be taught in other ways. In some cases, this means repeating a life experience with another soul mate, having the lesson surface in another life, or finding ways to reconcile with a particular soul whose only purpose is to teach us about our deeper truths. When ego gets in the way of learning our lessons from a soul mate, we often find that our connection to them doesn’t go away even after the relationship has ended, and won’t go away because we’re destined through karma to fulfill our contract with that soul. This is especially the case for souls nearing the end of their human lives, and can be determined by the strength of love that is shared between two people, as well as the nature of the challenges they face with one another.

These challenges often take the form of seeing the best and the worst aspects in a partner, in order to learn what beliefs must be changed to further growth. Fear will have to be faced in these instances, because it’s only fear that prevents us from rising to the challenges of a deeply felt, intense love relationship in the first place. Any ego issues will need to be dealt with, or they’ll threaten the relationship’s foundation, and the soul’s ability to learn. If ego comes between two people in a relationship of this kind and it ends before karma is complete, their soul contract means they will manifest serious messages to themselves as the soul pulls out all the stops to get itself back on its chosen learning curve.

This is why the people who challenge us the most are the ones we learn the most from. In love relationships, it’s doubly true; the most challenging relationships have the most to teach us. Avoiding learning our lessons by denying what needs to be changed within ourselves results in feelings of dissatisfaction and incompleteness, and sometimes more dire consequences, like accident or illness. Only until we have faced the fears that another person brings to our attention are we able to move forward at the rate our soul’s desire.

Karma is the way our souls pursue their agendas of growth and enlightenment. Accepting this as true means accepting the challenges we’re presented with through other people, especially those involving deep love of one kind or another. They’re essential to the soul’s progress through life. Learning our life lessons often involves achieving a greater level of self-awareness before we can finish the toughest ones. That means facing our fears and challenges, rather than denying they exist, or running from them. Sooner or later, they’ll surface again, until we’re ready to learn them.

Choice

Life is rarely a ‘walk in the park’, but it can become much simpler to follow its path if one is paying attention to it. This means learning from the experiences of the past, and applying the knowledge towards making choices in the present; that’s what creating the future is all about.

That may be obvious, but it’s often taken for granted in the midst of strong emotional situations, which can also be times of important decision making. Whether we react to events with the melodrama characteristic of emotional outbursts, or respond to them with wisdom gleaned from lessons of the past, determines how easy or difficult life will be.

Why is this so? When we react to life with strong emotion, we carry the energy of it with us, and at some point, that energy needs to be transformed into something positive, or it will eat away at us in the form of guilt, which is self-blame. This can lead to manifesting illness, injury, or one apparently negative consequence after another.

Remember that we create our lives, and thus no one can be blamed for how we feel from one moment to the next. How we feel is strictly a matter of choice; we either recognize how we’ve set ourselves up to feel one way or another, or we blindly barge through our days blaming the world for our troubles. This is a favourite trick of ego, and is used to give the appearance that we’re not responsible for our choices, or how they make us feel. By projecting blame outside of the self, we ‘escape’ accepting our responsibilities. However, it’s an illusory escape; taking responsibility for our choices is the only way to dissolve guilt, or prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Accepting responsibility is not about blaming ourselves, however; that’s only going to create more negativity, and more guilt. It does mean understanding that we’re human, and therefore fallible; we don’t always recognize that the choices we make, no matter how ‘wrong’ they may appear to be, are really moving us forward in life. The key to self-acceptance, and the growth of our self-awareness, is realizing that we’re always learning, no matter how we may feel about a choice we’ve made.

We might not always feel good about our choices, but as we grow in awareness of what they mean for our progress through life, we can at least begin to change our perspective of them, and find comfort in knowing that they’re helping us discover more about ourselves. This eventually leads to a sense of inner calm, and greater presence of mind to bring to the moments of life. We begin to respond to those with increased calm and thoughtfulness, rather than just get lost in our emotional reactions to them. Who doesn’t want to be calmer, more responsive, and less reactive?

Self-awareness is completely individual, and therefore totally subjective. A person can only determine for themselves how deep their self-awareness is, and may be so lost in ego as to not know what it means to be self-aware to begin with. One either knows there’s more to life and the self, or isn’t thinking about it at all. There’s no right or wrong about this, either; we’re all on separate patterns of growth, and acceptance of this fact can make accepting the self, as well as others, much easier. It also helps us make better choices in life, and learn more from them, too.

Healing is in the Mind

People have always used natural remedies to cure what ailed them. Such remedies aren’t limited to what can be found growing naturally, however. The power of mind over matter has also been used to help people heal themselves, and in the modern age it’s accepted as an obvious adjunct to healing of all kinds.

This is especially so in alternative, or holistic healing. The holistic approach considers the ‘whole’ person when applying treatment, and so attempts to address not only the physical symptoms of ailments, but also their underlying spiritual, mental, and emotional causes.

Understanding the nature of reality (as discussed in previous posts) is a key to helping a person with holistic treatments. For example, a hypochondriac isn’t just afflicted with ailments both real and fictitious; they’re suffering from the influence of their beliefs, something every psychiatrist knows. However, the same can be said of anyone suffering from any form of sickness or injury; life as we know it exists only in the mind, therefore a person’s health is strictly determined by their beliefs about it.

The mind exists outside of space and time, therefore all healing takes place not on the level of the body, but on the level of one’s self-awareness. Beliefs about the self are reflected in a person’s body, which is why treatment of afflictions needs to be aimed at understanding one’s beliefs, not just looking at the apparent physical manifestations of them. There’s no shortage of stories relating how people have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to beat some illness, or the limitations of a debilitating injury. Why does this happen? Simply put, the people concerned believed they could heal themselves.

How they did so isn’t as important as the beliefs they brought to aid with their healing regimens. It takes more than a healthy attitude, though that certainly helps. If someone isn’t used to being a positive person, they won’t be able to suddenly tap into some hidden reserve of strength to overcome a serious affliction. They need to have a healthy mind to begin with, and that starts with a positive belief system.

In order to ensure good health, it doesn’t hurt to consider bringing greater balance and awareness to one’s life. This is where such techniques as meditation, yoga, reiki and many others are very effective. They not only help a person change their beliefs about themselves, they help bring all aspects of the self to a higher state of health. Thus, when serious illness or injury does occur, a person who has been practicing or receiving some form of holistic therapy is better prepared to deal with it.

There’s no point in making comparisons between holistic and modern medicine, however. Both are necessary while people believe in the efficacy of either, or both. Any treatment can be effective if a person believes strongly enough in it, but more so if they believe in themselves, and their ability to meet health challenges. This is why a placebo is often just as good a remedy as a real drug; healing is all in the mind. Change your mind, and you can change your life.