Misconceptions about karma - Part 1
There are many wrong and childish ideas about karma.
One of them is that karma equals justice.
This is not true.
I would rather claim that the opposite is true. Which also would be a wrong conception.
But it would be closer to the truth than saying karma is justice.
Karma is an energy pattern that has not been changed or transformed over many lifetimes.
It is like a common thread that traverses through all our lifetimes until it is being resolved.
If the physical body dies, it doesn't die.
We have many of those threads. They connect us to the same people over an over again, sometimes even places and we often keep our likes and dislikes throughout lifetimes.
Of course there can always be exceptions.
Karma is not only our external action, it is more about our internal action. About how we internally deal with situations.
Or out of which internal motives we perform external actions.
Let's say someone donates money to poor people because they want to have a good image and be perceived as a good person, but they secretly despise poor people.
Then your external action might look good on a superficial level, but the internal intentions are bad.
Or let's say we see how a man slaps his wife. And we immediately think he is a bad person.
But what we didn't know is that his wife emotionally and psychologically abused and blackmailed him for twenty years and exploited him financially and he never defended himself one single time, only this one time when we saw him doing it.
Not to justify such things, don't get me wrong. I am just using that as an example.
We get even deeper into the meaning of karma when we now look at how, for example the man I described previously, deals with this situation and how he judges himself on what he did.
If he drowns in guilt and shame for his deeds and then, to make it right, he let's his wife abuse him even more than before and feels guilty for the rest of his life, chances are big that in his next lifetime the same things will happen again.
The right thing would be to reflect upon why he slapped her instead of saying "no" to her and put an end to the situation. To see how many emotions had been boiled up, suppressed, not expressed for decades. To look at himself and figure out why he hadn't set boundaries before and talked to her or got a divorce. There were so many years that had gone by and he never took any internal action in the form of self-development that could have lead to the right external action. So that this whole situation where his hand landed on the wrong place could have been avoided.
Furthermore it is his responsiblity to find out why in the first place he felt attracted to this type of woman and chose to marry her.
There is so much internal work and self- reflection we have to do. And if we are too lazy to do so, our karma never changes.
In the case that the man doesn't feel guilty for his actions and still doesn't do the internal work, but realizes that slapping works and he chooses to continue like this and treats his wife like this for the rest of his life, dying without any self-reflection, then this is what he will most probably face in another lifetime as well.
This is just a very simplified example.
People often think that if you behave bad in a past life you will get punished in the next one.
This is wrong.
There is not this kind of justice.
There is actually a lot of injustice.
Most times the perpetrators remain perpetrators over lifetimes.
And victims remain victims.
Karma is not about balance, karma is stagnancy and repetetiveness.
Another very simplified example could be:
A girl gets raped and abused as child.
She spends her whole life full of shame and sadness for what happened and never recovers from it.
She never heals from it. Shaped by what has happened to her she marries the wrong man, who continues to abuse her. She just takes it. And never reflects upon it, never transforms her inner processes, her energies, her understandings and one day she dies. The chances are big that in her next lifetime she will experience the same story again, probably even with the same people.
Again, this is very simplified.
And as I already mentioned, it can be different in some cases.
Some beings, in the moment of death, gather a deep insight into the life that they just left. Some beings are full of regret and they see the mistakes they made or the things they didn't look at and didn't change.
And in this process of self- reflection during death at least a little bit of karmic transformation can happen.
They will most likely get born into a similar situation like before but with a slightly transformed energy and they will have more insight and handle things differently than in the previous lifetime.
The same with the rapist. If he never regrets his actions and never gathers insight into how much suffering and injustice he caused to another being , not even during his dying process, he will probably do the same thing in his next life.
If the rapist regrets and understands the pain he caused during his death process, he could also choose to either become a vitctim himself in the next life for him to experience himself how it feels (this happens very rarely) or he could become someone who helps sexual abuse victims in his next lifetimes. Which is more likely because it would pay off his debts more efficiently than becoming a victim himself.
But often these moments of self-reflection during death are not the case.
And many beings don't die that consciously.
Another example could be about a powerhungry man who is obsessed with money and has no problem with doing anything to get it.
He steals, murders, cheats and abuses, all for status and wealth. He never sees any problem with it and never feels remorse. So his intentions and energies don't transform.
In his next life he comes as a woman and still carries the same patterns within, powerhungry and greed for money.
So she will still go for these things, only that her techniques have changed now.
As a man she would be more aggressive and overt, using intimidation, oppression and violence.
As a woman she will most likely do it very covertly, using sexuality and manipulation, blackmailing and lying.
Also when over lifetimes societal patterns and structures change, when moral standards get renewed, people still carry their old intentions and patterns within themselves and let them play out differently than in their past lives.
But this I will explain in another time.
I want to mention again that this is all very simplified and just an attempt to portray a tiny aspect about karma.
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