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Un-Kinking Karma |
Karma for the Unconvinced Today, let's take a brief look at Karma. It is our karma, we're told, to suffer and pay our debts for errors we committed in past lives. But I have my doubts about the way karma is usually portrayed - at least in Western circles. According to the popular teachings of mystics, we live many lives, gradually learning lessons, as we make our way through time, until someday we finally master all the lessons and don't have to be reborn any more. This sounds semi-bogus to me. First of all, those same mystics teach us that there is no such thing as time. They say it's just an illusion and that all things are actually happening concurrently. (Modern physics, by the way, seems to verify this.) Apparently, we can't perceive all moments of time at once simply because our own senses aren't built to accommodate it. All things happening simultaneously - doesn't that sound tantalizingly like my suggestion of parallel time threads? So how do you make progress through time if there isn't any time? Second, to whom to you owe these debts for your errors? Certainly to nobody but yourself. Do you really think the gods are keeping accounts, holding you in debtor's prison for century after century just because you were born not already knowing everything? What! They create humans that don't know anything, and then punish them for making errors that arise out of their ignorance? What kind of insane person conceived a cruel God like that? So instead of talking about debts and errors, let's turn it around a bit. Let's assume that our objective - for each individual lifeline - is to gain skill in identifying increasingly subtle causes and effects, so that we become better and better at getting predictable results from our actions, thoughts and emotions. And let's suppose that the only reason we seem to be working through time is because of our limited ability to perceive reality. In other words, let's assume that we're here, not to learn lessons and overcome our faulty nature, but to simply experience the joy of living. What if the phenomenon of time is simply one of the conditions or parameters of the experience. While we're at it, let's sort of redefine karma. How about something really simple like: KARMA - the results we get from the things we do and think and feel. No judgment by anybody. No guilt for sometimes getting things wrong. In that way, we immediately accept both the positive results and the negative ones. Nothing's a punishment, it's just a result. Doesn't that take some of the pressure off? Now we don't have to experience and learn. Instead we get to experience and learn. I hope you like that difference as much as I do. Now consider: Our thoughts and emotions send their effects out into the world. And the way we think about ourselves and about our world determines what kind of things will happen to us. We all have unconscious mental patterns that repeat. And those patterns bring us the same kinds of experiences over and over. If we like what we're getting, that's fine. A lot of the time, however, we don't like what we're getting, but we're not sure how to make changes. That's karma: You're living in the world you've created for yourself. Don't blame your wife or husband. Don't put it off on your boss or co-workers. And it's not the neighbors, either. They're doing nothing to you. You're doing it all yourself. The good news is, it takes incredible power to keep doing unpleasant things to ourselves, day after day, year after year. We have that enormous power, and we use it every day. Now all we have to do is free up and redirect that power to work for us, to bring a pleasant life. A joyous life. A life filled with love. Now is a good time to start. Just think something consistently... and it begins to happen
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