Life as a Self-Correcting Process

Guided by the Unlimited Self

Shirley Maclaine has written in Dancing In The Light- "Our higher unlimited Self, which has been a child of God from the beginning of time, is with us every instant, silently (and sometimes not so silently) guiding us through events and experiences which we elect to have for ourselves in order to learn more fully who we are and what the God energy is. That energy is totally aware and the more we listen to it, the more aware each of us becomes".

Life therefore is a self-correcting process. Life provides the experi­ences which we need to learn and if we do not learn the experience is repeated until we do.

Cause and Effect - the Everyday Experience

Everything we do or think comes under the great impersonal law of cause and effect called in Eastern philosophies Karma which simply means action.

The quotations and drawings that follow are from the book Karma by Bo Lozoff.

"In the Bible this law is stated as 'As you sow so shall you reap'. In plain English, if you plant beets you can't expect to harvest tomatoes. Every thought, word, and deed in our lives is a seed which we plant in the world. All our lives, we harvest the fruits of these seeds. If the seeds are full of anger, fear, greed, desire and doubt, then so will our lives be. If the seeds contain love, kindness and understanding then our lives will as well. This is not a moral or philosophical teaching, it is simply a law ener­gy like gravity. Karma is the way the Universe works.

Karma is often easy to see; a Beatles song says Instant Karma's gonna get you'. For example you step on a banana skin and you fall. It's not good or bad, it happens that way; it's just the way things are. It's just Karma.

At other times Karma is also immediate but not so obvious. You flip a switch on the wall and a light goes on over your head. Direct cause and effect, but the wires are hidden. Well, most often in our lives the wires are hidden. Does this make sense?

More often karma is harder to follow because times go between action and karmic reaction. The cause may even be carried over from a previous life on earth.

If you set an alarm clock for ten hours from now, you may forget all about it and be startled when it finally goes off. Yet you set it with your own hands.

Throughout our lives we're either slipping on banana skins, flipping switch­es with unseen wires or setting alarms that we forget about or don't even know about as we're setting them - a kindness that we think went unnoticed, or something rotten that we hoped would disappear - no cause is ever without its effects.

Understanding Karma

As we have already seen, all beings in the Universe are interconnect­ed - even if we can't see the glue. Because this oneness of all things is true or real or natural, then any thought, word or deed which tends to cre­ate a feeling of separateness, creates more karma; it creates falseness and perpetuates separateness. Working out karma is simply the process of undoing this falseness to return to the truth. For example, let’s say I make fun of someone who's ugly or crippled. I may be setting my karmic alarm for some time when I become like that, or marry or give birth to someone like that. Not as a moral punishment, but simply because I would need that experience in order to get beyond the feeling of sepa­rateness from those characteristics. I would need this experience to help me see that there's no "them". We're all just "us".

When we realize this deeply we can understand why the great Indian sage Mahatma Gandhi, as he was shot in the head, turned to his assas­sin and said sincerely "I'm sorry my son". Or why Christ on the cross said, "Forgive them Father, they know what they do".

People who understand Karma simply don't hurt other people; that’s all there is to it. And people who don't understand Karma need all our compassion and forgiveness. When they hurt others, they're really just knocking their own heads against the wall; they're setting so many alarm clocks that will painfully awaken them at some later time.

The Golden Rule

Karma is more like the law of gravity - it's the way energy works. The Golden rule "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you -is really more of a scientific truth than a moral preaching. When Christ says "Love thy neighbor as thyself," he's simply telling it like it is; were all connected, and he can see glue.

Don't Blame Karma

We tend to blame other people for what happens to us, forgetting that Karma gives us back the actual consequences of our own actions. Karma is what a person does; not what is done to them.

The circumstances in which we find ourselves are self-created and provide us, at all times, with the best opportunity for learning by experi­ence the lessons allocated to us for this lifetime.

What really matters is our reaction to those circumstances. The test is, can we accept our Karma without shame, regret or bitterness?

Reducing our Karmic Burden

We all carry with us a karmic load but we can reduce this burden by living in harmony with the Karmic Law; by actions which produce no reactions; by acting with love in our hearts and full awareness of the wel­fare of others. Each of us has the full responsibility for lightening the karmic load of the whole planet. The end of our karmic journey - when we've lightened our karmic burden totally - is called enlightenment. Then every thought, word and action is in harmony with the whole and creates no sense of separate-ness in the world.

Beings like Christ, Buddha and Mohammed, and many others, reached that state. They
became so united with God, or if you like with Tao', 'Dharma' or Truth', that they ceased to create personal karma. We will reach that goal some day when all our karma is worked out. Until that time we must come back into the physical world and experience in it the joys and suffering which teach us to harmonize with nature's laws and the purpose of life.