Karma is Free Will

One of the major causes of our suffering is not accepting whatever life situation is given to us if the life situation conflicts with our idea of how our life should be.

We say, “How could God do this to me”, or “God is a cruel God” or “I deserve better than this”, or “I have never done anything evil how could all this bad happen to me” or “He is such a good and pious person how could I be given such harsh punishment by God”…..

Or most famously some waive off all as “Oh, it’s just Karma”, “it’s just Destiny”.

Karma is neither passively accepting everything that comes our way, nor something to fight against. It is simply a sum total of Cause and Effect over all the lifetimes combined.

Karma

Spiritual Laws apply equally to everyone. For every choice we make and every action we take there is a consequence. We are co-creators of our destiny. It is not imposed by an arbitrary outside agency such as God!

Picture this:

There is a very busy actor high in demand. He is working in 10 different movies as separate characters in different costumes in one week, one after the other.  He goes to one movie set, puts on the costume and plays his role.

Once done with the first movie set he changes his costume, goes to the second movie set, puts on a different costume and plays that character. When he’s completed his part at second movie set he takes off his costume, goes to third movie set, puts on new costume and plays the part of the character there. So on and so forth…..

When the actor changes his movie sets and costumes and plays the character they are all just movie roles. Underneath it all actor is still a fully intact individual.

Similarly the game of life and death is seamless. Our soul never changes, it is fully intact. It just keeps moving seamlessly from one movie set to another, one incarnation to another.

The word ‘DEATH’ seems to have become such a scary word! It has been used too often with negative connotations and so the word Death has taken on a whole fearful life of its own.

Death is nothing more than a SEAMLESS TRANSITION from playing one role of a character in one movie set to another movie set as a different character!

The thoughts he thinks, the choices he makes, the actions he takes and its consequences all carryover as seamlessly with the actor from one movie set to another.

That is Karma -Sum total impact at given moment of all the past actions of the actor.

This impact (or Karma) is earned by the actor himself. It is not imposed upon him from something outside of himself, not even God.

Of all the earthly creatures the reason humans are considered most superior is because humans have individual consciousness and power of choice. Humans get to choose how to act, when to act, where to act, who to act with.  This is the incredible power of humans! We are co-creators with God!

Our own past actions up to the current moment create our movie set and the setting. How do we play the roles, what choices we make, how we respond to the role all goes towards determining what our present moment and situation is.

God is not to blame, no one is to blame. We invited the situations and the reality that was best suited towards our Spiritual growth.

To the extent we keep shifting the responsibility of our suffering upon external people and circumstances we stand in our own way of moving towards Divine Self Realization.

It hurts our ego terribly to accept that there is any remote possibility that we could have created our suffering by ourselves. We do not want to consider looking inside ourselves. It is easier to resign helplessly to some outside unseen force as the major culprit behind our seemingly negative circumstances.

In and of itself all people and situations in our life have first and foremost reason to be there to help us find our Divine Center. They may come as friends or foes but everyone’s role in our life is the same. It is our own awareness that can either find a higher meaning from a Spiritual perspective or blame, curse and fall into bitterness over life as it is happening.

It is also interesting to note that as much as we blame external forces for our suffering how much do we credit the same external forces for all the ‘good’ in our life. We tend to take credit for that. We play at life with double standard.  If you don’t own responsibility for the negative then don’t accept the credit for positive either.  Then you get out of attachment to either type of situations and rise above ‘doership’. When you are not the ‘doer’ then you detach yourself from your external identity. You become a Witness (Sakshi Bhaav) to your physical self-playing the game of life and rise above the trappings of ‘Karma’.

Picture This:

There is a basketball sports team. It has its framework of rules and regulations. It has players of varying capacities. Each player has his own level of expertise to contribute to the game. Player’s amount of practice, dedication and perseverance has all contributed towards the potential success of the player and the team.

Each player not only represents himself but his entire team. He has to give his very best not only for himself but for his whole team.

Even if the team loses the match, on the whole the player still can be player of the match. He can still stand distinguished from the overall team performance.

Similarly our past actions from all lifetimes combined set up the framework of ‘destined path’ for our current lifetime. But within this framework we have complete power of choice, we have free Will.

We play the game of life not only for ourselves but in co-operation with rest of the creation. Our every action impacts the whole of humanity in physical and nonphysical ways.

Ironically, what appears to be ‘destined path’ is also the result of choices made with ‘free Will” prior to the present moment. So there never was anything but Free Will!

Blessed Be.

Ritu

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