More Karma

Hopefully, you have had time to absorb the last two podcasts on karma and all the ramifications involved. I tried to give simple straightforward examples to help make this topic as clear as possible as I understand it. The collective karma we all gather is intertwined and intricate, yet massive in size. I will try to show how these things can play out in your life, to give you further insight on how important our actions really are. It comes down to cause and effect. Your actions cause the effect they create in the future. Again, I will be simplifying this to try to make it as clear as possible to understand.

So as you have no doubt heard me talk about our karma storage lockers, you will know that all the actions you have ever taken in all of your past lives are stored up there until they ripen on you and you clear them away. Now the memories of those actions are not forgotten, but still remain stored in your mental continuum, but the effects of those actions can be cleared up.

Alright, so lets apply all of this to your current life, the one you are living right now and aware of with your gross mind. There you were floating in the Bardo waiting for your karma to ripen and be reborn somewhere, somehow. Your karma started to ripen due to the collective karma you and your parents created from a past life. You found your parents and chose to be with them, although, it wasn't really a choice it was just that karma ripening. Okay, so after your conception and spending months in your mother's womb you were born and here you are.

The life you had as a child again was due not only to your karma, but the karma of everyone involved. If you had a terrible childhood, that was mainly due to your karma you brought with you. The reason the people around you behaved so negatively is due to their own karma ripening, however, if you had purified and cleared up your negative karma, you would not have been treated that way by them. You may have heard of families where one child seems to get treated better or sometimes worse than their siblings, that would be why. Either they purified and were treated better than their brother and sister or the brother and sister purified some of their negative karma and so that one child was abused far worse. Remember, if you have no negative karma in your storage locker you will not experience anything negative.

All of the things that happen to you during your lifetime are due to your own personal karma and the collective karma of the people around you at the time. If you are in a car accident for instance, then it is your karma and all the karma of everyone involved in the accident, and even those delayed in traffic trying to get around the accident. All of you had to be in that place at the exact same time for that particular karma to ripen on all of you together. No one would be there that did not have the karma to be involved directly or indirectly with that accident. So when anything happens to you, it all depends on the circumstances and people present in the moment for it to happen in the first place.

You see it is the collective karma of every single person that has caused all of us to be born on this planet at this time. Currently, that is the collective karma of over 7 billion people. We have all been together before in different lives and the karma for you to be here is why you are living here at this time in the place you are in. The worse your karma is for this exact life, the worse the circumstances will be for you, the worse the place you will live in will be, the worse the people around you will behave. If you are having a beautiful life, then that is your individual karma mixed in with the collective karma of everyone on this planet. However, your karma isn't perfect or you wouldn't be here at this time on this planet.

Whatever country you were born in, was due to your karma. The type of environment you live in again, your karma and so on. That is the cause and effect factors dictating the situation you find yourself in. Do you live in a country that has a high standard of living or one with a low standard? Do you have access to clean water, healthy food, clothing, shelter, good education and all the things you need to live a comfortable life? Then that is the karma that is ripening now for you. Just because someone is born in a poorer place or worse conditions than you, does not mean they have always been bad people in the past so must go through this now in their life. They are no different than you. The only difference is time. Next time, you could be living a life exactly like they have now. Anything that makes you think you are superior to anyone else is false and you will be born as someone you now think is inferior in the future. Those people you look down on will be in the position you are in now. So be very careful of how you treat anyone, no matter what their appearance is or what circumstances they find themselves in.

Now you are an adult, shaped by the childhood you had. You have made choices of how to behave based on how you developed your mind and way of thinking and the influence of those around you. Perhaps you have tried your best to be a good person, but always seem to have bad things happen to you. It is really good that you are doing your best to be good, because you are clearing up those bad things, so they will not happen to you again in the future. If you have chosen to behave badly, then you have a choice now to change for the better, to save yourself. The nature of reality is impermanent, so you can change any time you want to, it is up to you. You are not stuck being how you are.

As a child, you were influenced heavily by the people around you. If you were lucky enough to be born with good parents that helped you to become a good person as an adult you can use this good karma you are now experiencing to make spiritual progress. If you were unfortunate and had bad parents, then you may struggle somewhat to work towards becoming a good person and to make spiritual progress, but you can do it. I had abusive parents and I struggle because of it, but I am getting there little by little. Either way, it is best if we look for other good people to spend our time with so we can work towards making spiritual progress together. We can support each other on our journey upwards. We can do this no matter what karma we encounter in this life.

Now, for us to improve our karma we need to make sure we are not causing any harm in anyway that could cause us suffering in the future. I cannot emphasize that enough. However, we also need to try our best to not allow others to cause harm. If they are causing harm and we do nothing about it, we are creating the karma for us to experience that harm in the future and we will find no one else will do anything about it. As an example, you may see someone being pick-pocketed and say and do nothing. Well, you then create the karma to be pick-pocketed in the future and no one warning you or doing anything to help you, even though you didn't commit the crime.

The reason most people do not do anything to stop these types of behaviour they witness is because of their self cherishing. People are so self concerned they don't want anything bad to happen to themselves, so do nothing to stop bad from happening to others, except, that actually creates the effect of them being harmed in the future and worse than what they are witnessing. If we take that same example of not helping someone who is being pick-pocketed, the collective karma could be that the money or credit cards that have been stolen, might have been used to feed their family or pay the rent. Now you have the collective karma of all the negative impact that lost wallet will cause. You do not know the circumstances in which the person being robbed is in. Maybe they have been out of work for a long time and just cashed their first pay check and desperately needed that money for their young family. You do not know. Your lack of wisdom and ignorance of the situation can cause you lifetimes of negativity to work through, due to all the harm you allowed to happen.

Most people nowadays would never jeopardize their life in order to save someone else. You know this world is going to hell in a hand basket when the police, who's very job it is to protect the people won't do a thing to help children in danger. If they won't risk their own lives to help a child, they won't do anything to help anyone. They create the karma to have to go through that in the future themselves. A time will come when they are in danger and no one will lift a finger to help them. Not only that, but again, they will go through the agony of the parents and extended families, and so on in lifetime after lifetime. The thing is if you die having a mind of compassion, trying to save someone else from danger, you automatically take a higher rebirth in your next life and have good karma ripen for you. But, because of short sighted, self-grasping of this very life, people do nothing and cause themselves greater harm.

Our compassion for others should be our strongest motivator when functioning in this world, in this life and every life. Not only are we trying to prevent others from being harmed, but we need to prevent the perpetrator from engaging in negative actions as much as possible, because they are ignorant of the harm they are causing themselves. Again, if we do nothing to prevent them from ultimately harming themselves, nothing will prevent us from causing similar harm in the future. You most likely will not remember this life in your future lives, so will forget what you are learning here. You do not know if your next life will be filled with negativity and if you could turn out badly, so we need to do all we can to try to make our future as bright as possible.

Now, there is some strange idea that instant karma is a thing. Instant karma is practically non-existent. Sure you may witness someone doing something bad and then have something bad happen to that person directly after, but that is not instant karma. Instant karma would have to be the exact same thing occurring to the person immediately afterwards in reverse with no connection to any other ripening karma, so it doesn't really exist. All that is happening in those situations is different karma causing the negative effect you may see. Like if a person pick-pockets someone, then runs into the road and is hit by a car, that is not instant karma. That is a completely different karmic situation that is happening to that person. They still have the negative action of pick-pocketing put into their storage unit to ripen on them later. That has not been cleared. They are getting hit by the car due to other past causes. There is no instant karma going on there. These false terms get popular due to degenerate times and ignorance of the people.

So, you may be beginning to understand just how complicated karma is and why we need to be so careful of how we behave and how we react to situations we find ourselves in. To improve our karma, we need to have compassion for everyone. We need to love everyone by wishing for them to be happy. No one can truly be happy if they are doing negative things. We need to be careful of the actions we take and the actions of those around us. We need to prevent anyone from harming us or others as much as possible. Sure it isn't easy and none of us are expected to completely change in an instant, but we can all work towards getting better over time. 

You can listen to the full podcast here: https://youtu.be/VphUNlUYAaM