In this presentation, I wish to finish off my examination of the seven Laws of Life. I have completed my look at the Laws of Freedom, Unity, Development, Self and Destiny. I have also introduced the Law of Karma. This law is usually thought of as the law of Cause and Effect. This is a useful way to look at it but as I have indicated, sometimes the effect of a cause may not be seen immediately. In fact, it may occur lifetimes later. The coincidence that brings this ‘cause and effect’ to its conclusion may involve a different scenario to the original event. What is invariably the case, is that both parties are dealing with some issue. I also mentioned that forces of the Left-Hand Path are often used by the Lords of Karma, unwittingly, to deliver the corrective lesson. The enacting agent may incur karma for themselves in the process, but this would have been the case for any individual that happened to get in their way. The Lords of Karma and the Agents of Destiny are resourceful in turning every event into a productive one, even if on the surface it seems a destructive one.
I also mentioned the important topic of shared karma. Our negative thoughts create huge storms on the Emotional Plane and this energy has to be dissipated somehow. The way the Lords of Karma often do this by unleashing the Forces of Nature upon us. These can by atmospheric, geological or biological. The mode of delivery is not as important as the balancing of the negative energy we have collectively accumulated.
So, now to continue with my examination of this inescapable law. How do we deal with our ‘bad’ karma? The obvious answer is to accept our fate and let that karma work itself out. That is not to say that you should let a speeding train come towards you without you taking evasive manoeuvres. It is just that some events cannot be avoided, no matter what you try to do. In such circumstances, it is best to accept the hand that life has dealt you and then go wherever the currents of life take you. It is counterproductive to resist the lesson that life is trying to teach you. Wriggling out of your karma, if it is possible, is only going to make matters worse.
As I have already stated, don’t confuse karma with fatalism. Not everything is pre-ordained. Discernment is required on your part. Use your intuition to guide you. Decide when you need to stand up for yourself and when it is better to accept your fate. The way to see the best path forward is to put your ego to one side. Things will become a lot clearer. The challenge here is to show your ego that you are bigger than it is.
In some respects, this all sounds a bit bleak. When you consider what scrapes we could have got ourselves into, over tens of thousands of incarnations, we could be in for a very rough ride. Add to this the fact that we continue to increase our levels of debt in each successive incarnation. We appear to be doomed. This is not the case, as we slowly gain more control over our impulses and desires. We slowly inch our way forward, making fewer mistakes and confronting past misdemeanours. For this reason, it is helpful to know that there is a way, not only to avoid incurring more karma but actually freeing ourselves from some debts already incurred. The answer lies in a life of service. This means putting the needs of others before your own. By living with less concern for yourself and more concern for others, you show the Lords of Karma that you are evolving….honestly. This triggers another minor Law of Life, that of the Law of Grace. Self-sacrifice saves us much suffering in the future.
Humanity has come up with some weird ways of atoning for their sins. A painful example is that of the flagellant. They believe that by mistreating their body, they are somehow atoning for their sins. The sad reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. Why? Because by torturing their body, they are actively harming another living being. Remember, your physical body is a collection of evolving tertiary monads that are clustered together to give you a vehicle to experience objective reality on the Cosmic Physical Plane. They benefit from this service as well, but just because you are the controlling agent of their destiny, it does not give you the right to abuse them to work out your own guilt.
The net result of all this self-mortification is that you end up with more, not less, karma. Flagellants often reincarnate with physical defects that they have caused themselves in previous lives. The bottom line is that Karma is only made good by accepting the trials of life in an honourable and accepting manner.
There are a number of ways that bad karma can affect our physical lives. These include diseases, disability, ugliness, abuse, miscarriages of justice, lack of intelligence, poverty, low social status, to include just a few possibilities. It is unwise to blame your parents for your disease or disability. It is our karma and destiny that determines such matters. Remember, you chose your parents and asked to incarnate.
It should be remembered by the rest of us that while it is generally true that those who suffer, deserve to, we should still show them compassion. We must do everything within our power to help alleviate suffering. In this way, we contribute to a better world for everyone. Remember the Law of Unity. Such a course of action is a win-win situation. Helping others, eases their suffering and brings us good merit into the bargain. If you refrain from helping others in their hour of need, when you can, it is selfish and vindictive. You do not have to give money to every beggar. Help those that are willing to help themselves.
We all make mistakes. This may seem a bit of an obvious statement. But even enlightened people, those that have taken their (i3), make mistakes. A soul may be faced with a sudden out of character aberration. This could be a karmic residue from a previous incarnation surfacing. The Law of Karma stipulates that to graduate from the 4th, the Human Kingdom, into the 5th, the Kingdom of Unity, we have to clear all our karma. For this reason, you may see a highly evolved person living a very difficult life. They may be plagued with ill-health, for example.
To get into the 5th Kingdom, we need a clean slate. It should, however, be noted that we do not escape the Law of Karma on any plane of matter. It applies to all life in the entire Universe. Don’t expect to find karma unfolding in the higher kingdoms as it does in ours. The higher up the scale of consciousness you go, the subtler the effects of karma. There is no suffering on these planes, but there is always a balancing for laws that have been transgressed. You could think of evolution as a process by which you come to knows all the Laws of Life. These laws govern the entire Universe. You have to learn how to function appropriately within them. Understanding the basic mechanism of the Law of Karma and Destiny should motivate us to work on our lives and our evolution as monads, actively. Not just sit back and go with the ‘jog-trot of life’ as Laurency puts its.
The Law of Attraction
We are finally at the last of the seven laws, that of the Law of Attraction. This is a simple law to sum up in the phrase, “like attracts like”. Think of your mind like a magnet. You tend to attract whatever you give your continued attention to. Let’s unpack this statement as I can just hear some of you thinking that you have been dreaming about a yacht all your life and so where is it? Ok, let’s start by saying that everything that comes into our lives is attracted to us. How? By the thoughts and images, we hold in our mind. Remember, everything we materialise in our lives starts with a thought first. We call it an idea. In fact, it is a material construct in our mental body, made up of billions of Elemental Essences. That thought can drift out of our mental body and into the mental body of others. It may hang around in our mental bodies and eventually get stored in our Permanent Molecule, 47:4. Or it may work its way down through our emotional body until it grounds itself in our physical-etheric brain. We then materialise that idea through our senses and actions.
So, it is safe to say our thoughts influence our lives. Everything that we ever think is going to materialise in our lives. Really? Remember that yacht you had on order? We will get to that shortly. The important thing to realise about the Law of Attraction is that it acts blindly. It does not matter if our thoughts are positive, negative or neutral.
As I have mentioned with other Laws of Life, there is an interaction between them. They do not stand in splendid isolation. For this reason, the Law of Attraction can be strengthened, weakened or postponed by the Law of Karma and Destiny. Amusingly, this law is being exploited by misguided people who think they can quite literally materialise their desires into their lives. These ‘get rich’ schemes can be found in books, on-line, on YouTube videos and is preached from the pulpits of unscrupulous religious organisations.
Returning to that backorder for the yacht; you always get what you wish for. The caveat is that it may not arrive as soon as you want and in the way you want. Let’s go back to the Law of Karma and the analogy of the bank account. You have made deposits in the bank of Good Karmic Deeds. If you want your wish to come true, it has to be paid for. This means you have to draw down on your reserves of merit. Another way of financing that yacht is to add to your already large karmic debt. You may have finally got the boat you desired, but was it worth the cost and was it time, effort and merit, well spent?
The unintended consequences of ’manifesting’ your desires are something that is overlooked by the proponents of ‘cosmic ordering’. Making a list of what you desire and waiting for it to manifest into your life is not a productive strategy for life. Look at it this way. Yes, it may work to draw up such a list, but is it wise to spend all your money in one day, when it is supposed to last a month? What I mean here relates back to your bank account and your stored credits. If you spend your reserves on something you think is truly essential in your life right now, what happens when an unexpected debt falls due? How are you going to cushion the blow from that? The Law of Attraction is real and you can use it. You just must be very careful not to abuse it. It is wiser to use of the Law of Attraction to adopt a positive outlook on life and to allow that life path to unfold naturally before you.
I guess what I am saying is that it is better to trust life, rather than trying to resist it. You can make life easier for yourself by not dwelling on past mistakes. With the same reasoning, it is pointless to worry about the future. Worry only serves to attract negativity into your life. It may be hard for someone who holds very tightly onto everything in their lives, to take a relaxed view. What the Law of Life teaches us is that when you are unconcerned about what life may deal you, you will probably find you achieve success effortlessly. This may seem like a gamble but give it a try. What have you got to lose?
Christianity has a concept of abundance that is related to the Law of Attraction. They assume this teaching comes from God, but it does not. Do you really think that God would want us to become even more materialistic than we are? The lowest planes of matter serve a purpose. We do not want to dwell here forever though. The more you are attracted to the lowest material vibrations, the less easy it is for you to connect with your higher subtle bodies. The splendours of those worlds are beyond description. Why hold onto mere dust when the stars await you.
No one needs an abundance in their lives. By abundance, I mean excess. We only need sufficient. More of everything is greedy and wasteful. We live on a planet that is the physical manifestation of a very great being. This being itself is a collective of even more beings. Together they provide for our every need. This need can not be supplied in abundance for all, but it can be supplied to sufficiently meet all our needs. Going back to the Law of Unity, we need to learn to share.
That brings me to the end of the topic of the Laws of Life. Time for a little recap. Starting with the Law of Freedom, we are told that we have the inalienable right to do what we want. No one should impede us. You see this fundamental right being claimed by voices who say that they should be able to say whatever they please. Technically this is correct. If whatever you do, does not directly, or indirectly impinge on anyone else’s freedom, then go ahead. But what if what you do or say results in an outcome where others get hurt? You may turn round and say that was their free choice, they chose to do that to themselves or to others. What has that got to do with me? Well, it actually has a lot to do with you when you consider the second Law of Life, that of the Law of Unity. This law states that we are all effectively one and if we strive to cause division, we are going against this fundamental law. So your right to freedom carries with it responsibilities. We know words start with a thought. Thoughts are physical entities. They circulate on their own plane of matter and can pass into the subtle bodies of others and influence them. The person receiving that influence may regard it as their own, but it isn’t. It came from you, so you are responsible for the outcomes that may derive from the thought and the speech you made. You may have assumed that you were free to do so, regardless of the consequences. Your right to freedom and the breaking of the Law of Unity activates another major law, that of Karma and Destiny. Now suddenly, freedom does not seem to be that free after all. The saying, “with freedom comes responsibility” should be ringing clear in your ears by now. When in a future incarnation you are born as a pair of eyeballs on a pillow and nothing more and those eyeballs are blind, ponder the price of freedom!
The Law of Development and the Law of Self couple together well. We are destined to develop our consciousness. We come from the Anti-Verse, unconscious. The ABSOLUTE that creates the space in which we exist and thrive, injects an imperative into every monad that it must find its way home, back to the Anti-Verse. The return must be accompanied by a complete knowledge of itself. It is now all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere within the confines of our Universe. The path to the inexorable development of consciousness is predicated by the Law of Self, which states that we get there by our own efforts. This is an over-simplification. It seems that everywhere we go and everything we do seems to be facilitated by other streams of evolution and higher levels of consciousness. But remember the Law of Freedom. We decide our speed of development. We can’t be force-fed on our path to enlightenment. This brings us to the final Law we have been discussing today. When people take about ‘attraction’ they are usually referring to material possessions or status. I think of this law as being a guiding principle that leads us towards the Law of Unity. If ‘like attracts like’, then we should be attracted to other monads, ‘birds of a feather’, not yachts. With this realisation in our hearts, we can attract a better life for all.
In my next presentation, I am now in a position to answer the big question, what is the ‘Meaning of Life’?