In our relentless quest to get to the bottom of the Meaning of Life one fact is inescapable. To get order from chaos, you need rules. To frame those rules, you need laws. Two presentations ago I mentioned that seven laws help derive order from chaos and have particular meaning to us humans. I have covered five so far, starting with the Laws of Freedom, Unity, Development, Self and Destiny.
I wish to quickly recap the last two, as they appeared in the last presentation. The Law of Self invites every human to stand up and take responsibility for their own development. You can surrender your sovereignty to a creed, a book or a person, but this is always to no avail. No one but yourself is able to progress your consciousness development along the path to its eventual goal, which is set out in the Law of Development. You are not alone as you walk your path. Guidance is always available. Just remember to seek the best guidance of all, which comes from that Still Quiet Voice that can only be heard when you quieten your mind and open your heart. Gosh, I am beginning to sound like a New Age mediation CD.
The second law covered was the Law of Destiny. To understand what destiny is not, I compared it to Fate. In the case of Fate, you have no choice over events and can be thought of as karma. Destiny is a guiding path that allows you to have experiences and learn from them. Every soul has a path to walk. Each path is unique but all paths are leading in the same direction. They are leading towards the goal do the Law of Development. Although your path is yours and you have the freedom to explore it at your leisure, Freedom being another law, the Law of Unity reminds you that you are one with all. If in the pursuit of your freedoms, you interfere with the freedoms of others, then the Law of Unity has been transgressed. This is a convenient cue into the next Law of life on our list, that of the Law of Karma.
The Law of Karma
Let’s start by defining what the word ‘karma’ actually means. It is a Sanskrit word that means ‘action’. That may be what the word means but it is usually understood as being the ‘consequences’ of your actions. This then leads to the next assumed meaning, that of bad merit from one’s action. It can also mean good merit but the ‘bad’ definition is what seems to stick in peoples minds. We can restate the Law of Karma as the Law of Cause and Effect.
I have mentioned that when we first enter the 4th, the Human Kingdom of Nature, we make an awful mess of our successive lives. We have suddenly acquired self-directed activity, with none of the wisdom to direct this activity wisely. Driven by our impulses, we rack up karmic debts all too easily, breaking all the aforementioned Laws of Life. We may get a grace period in the repayment of some of these debts but they never disappear until they are repaid in full. The painful outcome of all our profligacy with the ‘sowing’ of bad karma is that even in favourable circumstance, our life seems to have a sting in its tail.
The most obvious analogy when thinking about karma is to compare it to a bank portfolio. We can take the ‘profits’ earned by good karma and invest it in leading a luxurious life. The most frugal amongst us may take that credit and use it to pay off our debts. It may come as no surprise to hear that younger souls opt, more often than not, for the first option. Mature souls tend to opt for the latter. The risk you take for opting for the profligate life is that there are more opportunities to ‘stray’ off your path.
Historically, religion accords wealth and abundance with ‘gifts’ from God. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but can you really see ‘God’ being concerned about your financial status? From the analogy we are using, wealth is a drawing down of your savings in our account. Ok, so you have all this wealth. The next question is how are you spending it?
Karma exists to protect us and guide us back onto the path that was chosen by the Law of Destiny. Karma is also the balance to the Law of Freedom. Doing whatever you want runs a very high risk of encroaching on the freedom of others. Karma sorts out this dilemma. Another attribute of karma is that it is slow to respond. This links it into fate and destiny. This leads nicely into an analogy with a credit card. ‘Spend now, pay later’. You can also pay in instalments. It would be great if you could read the small print and understand the costs to you of compound interest.
Let’s give this credit card analogy a face. Delayed karma can help explain why a non-smoker can die of lung cancer. Karma works behind the scene. We can see its effect all too clearly, but do we know its cause? The law of Cause and Effect is subtly woven into the tapestry of our lives.
Does all karma attract the same rate of interest? No. If you wilfully transgress the Laws of Life, you are liable to generate more karma than if you make an unintentional or ignorant transgression. It should be made clear that although karma often results in suffering, it should not be viewed as punishment for punishment’s sake. Neither should it be regarded as divine retribution. Think of karma as the opportunity to make good. If looked at in this light, karma can be seen as a guiding hand that neither punishes nor rewards, it guides the monad along its chosen path. To put it another way, karma is not the cause of suffering, just the agent.
So, how do we pile up all this negative karma? Take a guess who the culprits are. It is a sad fact that 99 per cent of all human suffering originates from not controlling our subtle bodies. Note the word ‘controlling’. It is our will-power that is at fault, not the subtle bodies per se. If we do not control our impulses in our Physical bodies, or our desires from our Emotional bodies, with adequate amounts of Mental determination, we are bound to get ourselves into a mess.
It may not be very reassuring to know this, but karma is 100 per cent fair and absolutely infallible. It is self-balancing divine justice in action. When people stand up, shaking a stick and demand justice, they are not seeking justice at all. They are after revenge. It should be noted that vengeance is not justice and results in bad karma itself. Even the State can not exact vengeance. Executing someone is in direct contravention of the Law of Freedom. The karma that is exacted from this is shared amongst the whole population of that jurisdiction. When whole countries seem to suffer calamities, now you know one of the causes.
Holding onto vindictive thoughts, self-pity or grief not only prolongs our suffering but also generates negative karma into the bargain. This can poison not just individuals, but families and whole communities. This is exacerbated by the creation of egregores that recycle all these negative emotions. This makes ridding yourself of such influences very difficult. Just stop and think of the national and transnational egregore that have been created through time and how big and powerful some of them must be. Peace in the Middle East anyone?
The bottom line is that if something unpleasant happens to us, we have to realise that it is ‘us’ who are the cause of it. Don’t blame it on some malign external influence, even though this may seem to be the manifest cause. Whether it be a person or an event, the unpleasant happening is just an instrument to rebalance your bank account.
I do wish to make a point here. If someone is harming others, even though this may be ‘wheels within wheels’, that person must stand accountable for their actions. What exactly is going on here then? The Lords of Karma are a smart bunch. They see to it that both parties in an incident have related karmic debts to pay……just not necessarily to each other. As long as both parties reap the appropriate effect, it does not matter if their original transgressions were against each other.
As a rule of thumb, karma usually plays out on the same stage as the original transgression. Physical crimes result in physical punishments. So far we have been talking about a one-to-one outcome. What if there is a one-to-many debt to pay off? What may happen here is that some of the karma is worked out on the lowest subplanes of the Emotional World. These are the planes known as Hell and Purgatory (48:5-48:7). On these planes, your evil intent manifests against you and must be very unpleasant, especially when it is magnified 100 times. This is the result of not having the dampening effect of matter to lessen the effect of emotional energy.
It would be a mistake to regard karma as a mechanism that just results from serious offences like theft, violence or murder. We have spent a lot of time talking about the effect of thought-forms on the Emotional and Mental planes. If these thought and emotions are harsh, they pollute those planes with negative energy. Once you absorb the consequences of negative attitudes, not just actions, you realise that collectively, Humanity has a serious problem. The frequency and volume of such transgressions are vast and the karma that it generates has to be released somehow. Can you take a guess how that is? Well here is a list to get started with. This negativity is released in events like hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, floods, plagues and earthquakes. This is just a taster of what we can unleash on ourselves. We are talking about collective karma here, as the scope of action affects towns, regions, countries or the whole planet. What can also happen is that collective karma is allocated individually, so afflictions or accidents are just a portion of the collective karma.
We tend to regard karma that just affects our kingdom. This is not the case. Animals are also subject to the laws of karma but this is not applied individually. Why? Because animals do not have an individual soul. They are part of a Group Soul. Karma, however, can affect the whole Animal Kingdom as well, not just a particular group soul. Animals get a raw deal from us. We eat them, perform hideous experiments on them and can treat them brutally. It may surprise you to know that when it comes to karmic debts, the animals owe us more than we owe them. Why? Because if you look over the entire span of our evolution on this planet, they have eaten more of us than we have eaten of them. That margin is shrinking fast and soon we are going to find ourselves in deficit. So you have limited time to enjoy your steaks and hamburgers, when the only price you pay is in your digestive tract and the general lowering of your vibrations. In the not too distant future, you will be taking on karma as well, when you tuck into your sausage and bacon breakfast. Bon appétit.
One way to experience karma is to be on the other side of the original transgression. If you are a slave owner, you may reincarnate as a slave to experience the other side of the equation. With the best will in the world, we are never going to understand the full intricacies of karma. The controlling agencies of this law are monad far superior to us. Karma is managed by three hierarchies of highly developed cosmic beings. Their capacity is staggering. They are able to record every thought, emotion, word and action that occurs in their sphere of influence. It is mind-boggling to contemplate what this must involve. The three groups are as follows:
- The Devarajas of the Seven Planes administer cosmic karma and control the destinies within our solar system.
- There is an intermediary group associated with our planetary chain. Their job is to manage the collective karma and future destiny of the Human Race.
- The Guardians of the Four Directions, who are in charge of the four worlds that surround our planet, deal with Human karma. This primarily involves the administering of karma related to our past actions.
Your friends and mine, the Lords of Karma, are known by a variety of names:
- Lipika Lords, which is Sanskrit for a scribe.
- Angels of the Presence and the Book of Life is a term used in Christianity.
- Recording Angels is a Kabalistic term.
- Assessors of Amenti are the agents described by the Ancient Egyptians.
- Devarajas and Guardians of the Four Directions is a Hindu term.
One unsettling thought to bear in mind is that karma is often administered by the ‘forces of darkness’. They act on those that transgress the Laws of Life. Guess what these forces are? They are demons and black magicians and they inadvertently help in the administering of bad karma. It is not that these terrible beasties are somehow in collision with the Forces of Light. It is just that the Lords of Karma know an opportunity when they see one and put monad who needs to learn something, in the path of harm. As I have said previously, there is no such thing as an accident, only pre-arranged incidents.
Karma is one of the main reasons that ‘evil’ exists. As long as we, individually or collectively, choose to break the Laws of Life, there will be evil to administer the karmic consequences. Evil can do us no harm if we obey the Laws of Life. Having said that, there may be a smidgen of collective karma that we have to take on board in our lives.
Here is an embarrassing thought. When the Hierarchy incarnates amongst us, they come bearing no karma. If they suffer, they take on some of our collective karma. This was represented in the Christian Bible as Christ ‘dying for our sins’. This is an allegorical term. The last visit to the planet of the World Teacher ended in 70 BCE. The monad that actually got killed was Jeshu, not Jesus and he was stoned to death, not crucified. I have explained in detail what the allegory of the Crucifixion is all about. The karma was born by Jeshu, not Christ, as the Christ had the good sense of handing Jeshu’s body back to him before the mob arrived to perform the stoning. Jeshu himself still had karma to pay, as at this time he was still a Human focused in his 47:1 atom. He reincarnated 100 yeas later, as Apollonius of Tyana. At the end of this incarnation, he took the (i4) and entered the 5th Kingdom and became a fully paid-up member of the Hierarchy. Just one of my asides.
On that cheery note, I will stop here for today and finish of the joys of karma in my next presentation and also look at the last of the Laws of Life, that of the Law of Attraction.