It's been just a few years since the world was going to end, for the umpteenth time. Let's look at us and the world for a moment.
The world is always filled with pain and grief and cruelty. This is the land of karma. It isn't where we come for a vacation. It's where we come to work off some of the stuff we have accumulated, so really unpleasant things happen here.
And as long as people are cruel to other people it will continue to be like this. If one group of people bring up their children to hate another group and be cruel to them whenever possible, maybe even to the point of exterminating them as painfully as possible, what is their karmic reward? Are they all going to be born to families of enlightened beings? Do they die and go straight to their idea of heaven? Or do they come back to experience the fruits of their karma?
And we, who tend to think in terms of one life, wonder why such terrible things are happening to people who didn't do anything to anybody! The state of the world isn't new. But always there have been people showing how to live from a different level.
Back in the 1890's for example, Vivekananda came to the USA and talked about yoga, karma, reincarnation the things that interest so many of us. It was a direct message from the East at the instruction of his guru Ramacharaka.
He gave lectures in Chicago in 1893 about reincarnation, and karma and the eight different kinds of yoga. He arrived in Chicago at the old Dearborn train station on Polk Street, where there was for years a Siddha Yoga meditation center. There was an enlightened being right here then for those who were waking up.
In the 1950's, in California there was one of the greatest teachers, Paramahansa Yogananda, with his teachings about reincarnation and Kriya Yoga, and who we really are.
But how do most people remember the 50's? Probably Elvis, maybe Ozzie and Harriet, certainly not a time when the divinity was being expressed for us.
In the 60's and 70's the world seemed a pretty bad place, as always, but Muktananda was going round the world giving Shaktipat, awakening thousands of people out of the millions, to an awareness of their divinity. Most people remember it as the Vietnam War period..
The world of our great grandparents was just as filled with misery and cruelty as this one. Do we even know now what they were unhappy about, or angry about. One day we will be the great, great, great grandparents, equally unknown and forgotten. What we were angry about won't matter any more then than it really does now.
Our warranty may expire at any minute. We don't have time to be angry about the world. Our own world is pretty soon going to be dust. Our life will be contracted into a hyphen between two dates on a tombstone that will eventually crumble into rock dust or verdigris.
There is only one good thing about a human incarnation. It is one in which we have the capacity to wake up out of our private dream into the public dream, the 'real' world, and then out of the public dream into the awareness that there is only one consciousness in the universe, and our awareness that we are conscious is IT.
When the monks asked the Lord Buddha if he was a god he said he wasn’t. Then they asked him if he was a man. He said that he wasn’t. Their only options gone they asked him what he was. He said, "I am awake." That is the meaning of Buddha.
There are millions of karmic roles going on, but only one actor. If we can fully realize that what looks out of another's eyes at us is what looks out of ours at them, then we can get out of this karmic circus.
Do we really have to do all those unimportant things before we learn to meditate on our inner selves? Jesus said, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God" and "The Kingdom of God is within you." Those two dots aren’t hard to connect. Every other mystic has said the same thing in hundreds of languages… meditate.
Our most important work is to understand our own life. The debaters will say that is a selfish attitude. They are wrong. We can only share what we have attained, and identifying with our current ego as though it is reality is not the way to attain anything.
The ego, the body, and the mind are all going to die eventually, like the leaves on the trees in Fall. Only our consciousness is real. Only the real is eternal. Getting in touch with that inner consciousness enables us to watch the karmic movie without being involved. And that's what we are here for. Now is the only time we have. There is no more important task on your schedule than knowing who you really are.
I once met a really beautiful young woman, filled with divine potential. She was proud of the fact that she was good at holding grudges. I very nearly wept on hearing this. To her it was a sign of strength. Actually it was a terrible waste of the time she had left in this incarnation, and only hurt her.
In the video rewind between lives the only things that will count are the random acts of kindness, the love we shared. The hard work that gave us the ulcer won't be in it at all. Only the love we developed and shared will matter.
In the long view it is true that perfect justice rules the world and nobody can hire clever lawyers to get them off the hook. As ye sow so shall ye also reap. Sow love, not anger, love not fear.
Blessings, Douglas
Tid-Bits 2, # 32 A Bit about Karma
