Being a good person, by anyone’s yardstick, is one thing but, though it is essential, it is not what THIS process of karmic amendment is about.
Western philosophy and science trap the universe in the network of words, thoughts, equations and substitutes as well as an ongoing confusion of rules, laws, grammar and mathematics called *reasoning*. Sadly, we take in this network and make it rigid. We then use it as so many weapons against the ordered and logical spontaneity of nature.
As a rule of thumb, I will say that even as we consider ourselves thoughtful and caring, we are, to greater or lesser degrees, a part of our culture’s worship of personal power and profit and therefore equally to greater or lesser degrees removed from our spirit’s energy, from our energy field and the karma that is currently ours to edit.
The ever-spreading juggernaut that has become western-styled culture is one of upgrades and supersizes; of heroes who hit, throw, bounce or chip balls of varying sizes; of great, easy sex; of I want it now-I want it to be easy-I want it to be cheap-I want it to be fun; of self-indulgent behavior, of blame-shifting, of anger flare-ups, and of il[legal] drugs.
Our lifestyle menu is as full of mind-numbing options and escapist behaviors as a jellybean jar is full of beans.
The only assumed power we have is that of trying to ‘make things happen’ in a hit-and-miss manner, usually with a success that is relatively short-lived.
As the amateur juggler knows well, there are only so many balls that can be kept in the air before one is dropped.
The juggler blames gravity. We blame karma.
The reality is that most of us are unaware of how any thought, any decision, any un-decision will boomerang … somewhere, anytime, anyhow … to hit us on the head or, if we are lucky, to simply bite us on the tail.
The sad thing is that by the time that momentoccurs we will, as always, have lost awareness of its connection to that one action, or decision, made back in time. Yet, this synchronistic connection will nonetheless be real.
I have found viewing Babel, a film directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, an excellent way to fast-track understanding of cause and effect/action-reaction and karmic consequences.
I would recommend also having a look at the bonus disk, as it takes us behind the scenes where the turnstile of synchronistic connections and the invisible threads linking each of the characters to each other, are unraveled.
Being in the present, the only way to be if attempting to edit any karma, means not being mentally absent as we eat, talk and think. It means that we should be aware of ourselves, in the present moment.
Editing karma does not mean that we have to stop doing things we find pleasant. It merely means that we need to observe ourselves in the middle of the little moments spent alone or in our tribe, little and everyday moments that are as innocuous as the small breaths that link to a sigh.
Editing our karma begins with the observation of ourselves whilst riding the crest of the waves; the moments of pain we are desperate to avoid – the ones that [almost] break us; and others, usually the rarer ones, the ones we live for, the ones that are said to make life worth living.
The question at hand is where are we in between these peaks and troughs? Where is our head, where are our thoughts in between our highs and our lows?
Though children do not have adequate means of dealing with fateful karma, as soon as they become young adults, they do.
The theory is that our karma, through our soul’s guidance, will never lead us to challenges [commonly known as bad karma] that we cannot overcome through a spiritual approach – an approach radically different from anything usually taught, practiced and observed in all consumer-driven societies.
A genuine spiritual approach is one that rips us away from the impulsive needs and greed of our mechanical ego-persona, i.e., the emotional buffers, the crutches on which we rely and no longer question because ‘everyone is doing it’.
If you, reading these pages, consider yourself a good person and if others tease you about your generosity by calling you a ‘bleeding heart’, even you might have to over-haul your modus operandi just like the rest of us self-centered folks.
Even those of you who *fight* for a cause or would *kill* for it might have to reassess your MO if, once the laudable deeds are done, you pollute your own energy field as well as that of others – as with second-hand smoke – with bad moods and bristling energy.
What we are talking about here is mostly not about being good Samaritans.
Most of us do give to charity or help the Girl Scouts fundraise by buying their cookies. Some of us might even do volunteer work at an animal refuge or nurse the dying.
Whether in flashy ways or in tiny little ways, most of us are basically kind people.
But most of us also come home fuming because the boss is trying to squeeze us dry or because we missed out on that ‘perfect’ opportunity or because our mother-in-law is at it again or because some asshole did this or did that *to us*.
Some people press our buttons and some occurrences do put us in a foul mood.
Once home, we slam the fridge door, bark at the dog, at the kid, at the gf or demolish an ice cream tub, a bottle of booze or retreat behind a Do Not Disturb sign blissfully unaware that whatever we feel inside has permeated our energy field, our aura.
It is in our energy field that our karma gets calibrated.
Paul Brunton states that, “Thoughts tend to be creative and sooner or later it produces karmic fruit in our general environment. It is not necessary for your thoughts to translate themselves into deeds before they can become karmically effective. If they have sufficient intensity and if they are prolonged over a sufficient period they will eventually bring [appropriate] results even in external circumstances. [...]
People should be warned that cause and effect rule in the moral realm no less than in the scientific realm,” he wrote. “They should be trained from childhood to take this principle into their calculation. They should be made to feel responsible for setting causes into action that invite suffering or attract trouble or lead to frustrations.” [4]
Accidents do not happen by accident. In fact, they do not just *happen*.
Accidents are created inside our energy field. On the one hand, they are the karmic by-product of thousands of years of karma while on the other they are the by-product of however many years we have already celebrated in this lifetime.
Death, setbacks, illnesses, melt-downs, all in their many forms, are not mere confirmations that Life Sucks and Shit Happens. These blow-outs are orchestrated by our soul. They are the only ways she has to get out attention when the time has come to force us to rethink our modus operandi.
Isn’t it only once we are stopped ‘dead’ in our tracks that we are finally willing, albeit under duress, to reassess our priorities?
As agreed in regards to the soul – if we have an energy field, as we do, what is its purpose?
Why hasn’t it been evolved out like any other feature that became redundant over the millennia of our evolution?
I have come to take seriously the reality of our aura a.k.a. our energy field as intrinsic to karma and it is where the quality of our presence in the moments gets encoded.
Lip-service, self-righteousness and doing the right thing because pressured to do so do not seem to register as bona fide amendments.
Amending karma is not a matter of mind over matter.
It is more of a matter of energy over matter – the *matter* in question being the gross matter in our energy field.
It is our responsibility, as our soul’s current incarnation, to amend some of the karma that she has accumulated during the millennia and certainly to amend the karma we have contributed to our energy field for X amount of years.
It is generally accepted that toddlers do not have an ego as such, not until they are about seven years old. But, of course, there are always exceptions. How else to explain child-murderers? I imagine that what triggers action so early in life has got to be something encoded in their energy field – a strong karmic debt hanging from another life – no different from those triggered in an adult killer.
Just as it is not generally understood that, just as our entire life is hard-wired into our energy field, which operates like a software and holds the code to our karma, so, too, it is our earthly karma to override…our karma.
Karma is not about us suffering, literally, any god’s will. Karma is about self-actualization and, aptly, its literal meaning is “doing.”
Just like the sea in itself is neutral, neither good nor bad; just like a pizza in itself is neither good nor bad to ingest, all occurrences that come our way, in themselves, are neither good nor bad.
When we respond to them in an energetically balanced way, they remain balanced. Love is only love; duty is only duty; family is only family – but tip either by reacting mechanically – through the usual range of negative energy spikes and Me-first behaviors – and out come their evil siblings; jealousy, possessiveness, dependence, authoritarianism, extremism – as ways to control the other – the one we love.
Love is love but when we mishandle this love by turning it into a possession/obsession, we alter its very nature and like the mad alchemist, we turn it into bitterness, even bitter hatred.
Similarly, the mishandled love of a god can turn to a fanaticism that excludes all reasonable thinking.
We forget about the duality of the physical world, and when we try to separate one attribute from the rest, its evil twin perks up.
Every action triggers a counter action – a reaction. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Put simply for now: if we pull back a branch to get through a forest trail, we should be mindful of how that branch will snap back into its original shape.
If we prune a branch, it will grow back producing many new branches.
If we do not water a plant, it will die.
If we merely tap the surface of a pond with our hand, we will create ripples.
If we throw a rock into a pond, we will create a splash.
If we let anxiety, anger or bitterness rule our emotions, we invite cancer into our cells.
If we chose to reduce the natural side effects of menopause by taking HRT, we invite in much worse, chemically induced side effects.
And the list goes on and on. This list is as endless as all our combined efforts to manipulate our moods, our lives, each other, our society, and the world beyond.
There is no such thing as an action that does not trigger a reaction.
The duality we experience within the physical world is as inescapable as the duality that reverberates to and fro from the physical to the spiritual.
Psychological fears are unhelpful as they play with our imagination and taint the context – the present moment.
Fear is good when we fear Nature’s eruptions or a wild sea or when trekking solo in the wilderness.
As long as we flow one moment at a time, here now, and keep our energy field neutral, harmony is preserved – Karma is not disturbed.
Let us imagine that karma editing works like editing of topics in Wikipedia.
Let us imagine that our main topic is broken up in two sections:
1. Our karmic destiny – the one inherited at the instant our soul picked us as her vehicle.
2. The karma that we have created for our selves through each of our interactions with whomever our life has already intersected in a myriad of synchronistic ways.
Let us observe how our main topic on Wiki is being edited daily, many times a day.
One erratic entry from me will attract, magnet-like, another unavoidable entry from someone else – action/reaction – as unavoidable as the polarity of two magnets.
Basic magnetism works on the simple principle of attraction and repulsion. The north pole attract south pole, just as the south pole attract the north pole.
Inasmuch as I understand the principle, it seems that only a few elements in the periodic table are attracted to magnets. None of the elements, taken separately, make permanent magnets, though they make more adequate temporary magnets when close to another magnet. Similarly, the fact each one of us is attracted to certain individuals, certain locations, certain pathways, or even certain foods must stem from that inner software that is destined to lead us towards a specific goal because, supposing we were born as blank as a blank sheet, wouldn’t we be attracted to everything and everyone, willy-nilly? Or to nothing at all?
Beyond what parents try to instil in their children, often without much long-term success, it is our soul and therefore the karmic software that has been hardwired within each one of us, pre-birth, that define our ego-persona.
Once we begin to establish a firm connection with our *soul* moderator, we begin to write in new entries and these appear to no longer be editable by others. n other words, our field of energy is upgraded and aspects of the old software are disabled.
It is only by taking charge of our own program that we can release ourselves to varying degrees of past karma, conditioned and nurtured *bad edits* to become freer souls, attracting different people, different situations and different outcomes.
Our destiny, our karma, is to resist being pricked and energized by the shrapnel of past events that we carry barely below our skin and to simply *get over them* or beyond them, but in an energetically wholesome manner.
Should we fail – no harm done, as All Is As It Should be at any given moment. No matter how many bad entries we have missed, we can always have another go at them tomorrow.
Karmically speaking, anytime we kick into the ‘me first’ or ‘mine first’, we blow it – no matter how many old ladies we have helped across the street.
Time to inject a little humor into this topic. any of you may know the story of a Scout leader telling her little group that at least once a week they ought to do a “good deed”.
At their next meeting Chrissie, a ten-year old, was the first to volunteer an answer. “Me and four of my friends, we helped an old lady across the street.”
“Oh that’s lovely, but … did it really take five of you to help a little old lady cross the street?”
“Yes, because she kept pushing us off saying she didn’t want to cross the street in the first place!”
If there is a lesson in this, it is that a string of random good deeds, alone, is not going to make us good people.
I have to admit that my personal conditioning has made me a rather self-centered sort of person, very much into the ‘me first’ pole position. However, I have come to realize it is my ego, my sense of separateness, that is flawed and that it sometimes leads me to flawed ways of thinking, reacting, being and needing.
Since I have begun delving into this business of the energy field that surrounds us all and the more I read what great Thinkers have to say on the topic, the more I am now convinced that IF we can indeed alter the quality of our energy field, over time we can edit our karma. Sure we can, but only IF we can accept that, separately and collectively, we are not truly the *individuals* we think we are; there is nothing *unique* about any one of us.
We cannot be truly unique, as some of our thoughts are inherited from our previous incarnations, while others are passed on by our parents, teachers, the societal values in which we have grown up, and our own experience of life so far. They are even influenced by those of the group from within which we have chosen to rebel.
Indeed, even if we are rebelling, no matter how we are going about it, in how many ways is our rebellion truly unique?
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4. Brunton, What Is Karma?, p.35
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