Karma Is Not Necessarily Bad
Karma is often considered negatively, as in “if you do evil, you will be punished later.” Sometimes we even say “karmic debt” and a debt just doesn’t sound good.
However, karma simply means action or deed in Sanskrit. From there, karma took on the meaning of cause and effect, one action being the cause of a certain effect.
In the system of reincarnation, karma is just one way to ensure meaningful learning.
Karma as a way of learning
We are all here to experience love and abundance in a tangible manner. However, such learning is a big project, so it’s a good idea to break it down to smaller, more digestible lesson pieces. These lesson pieces need to be organized in some way. Further, let’s remember that learning cannot be free from making mistakes. In a sense, we learn by making mistakes — just think of how you learned anything. So we need a way to review our mistakes and learn from them.
Let’s say, for example, a soul mistakenly thinks love is about getting people do things for them. So this soul (for the sake of discussion, let’s say it is incarnated as a girl) practices how to effectively manipulate men. She polishes her appearance and learns various manipulation techniques. She successfully marries an influential man and her life is great — she has all the things she want to buy and so many people try to please her.
Then she realizes something is wrong. She doesn’t feel loved. But why? Everything went according to her plan of getting love.
Now, if she is wise, she may notice that her idea of love, which was the foundation of all her life endeavors, was wrong. If she is courageous, she can start realizing true love as soon as she notices, regardless of her age in this lifetime. But what if she doesn’t notice? Is she just left behind in the misery?
Reincarnation and karma
No way. At the very least, she can review her life with a guiding spirit when she gets to the other side. The spirit, being respectful, will not just tell her how she is wrong. But it will indicate where the wrong premise may be, so that she can try it differently next time.
Sometimes, however, it takes more than the spirit’s guidance to really understand our mistakes. It may take actual experience. So, in this example, she might come back as someone who eventually get involved with a manipulative partner. When you are in the other person’s shoes, quite literally, you get to see the whole picture.
When a soul takes the role of receiving difficulties that it previously imposed on others, we call it karma.
It’s really nothing mysterious — we often experience it in the same lifetime. For example, someone who stole a lover from another may lose that lover in a similar way later. Again, it’s not a punishment, it’s a way of learning.
Paying karma, or being born on the receiving end of the difficulty that you previously imposed on others, is not the only way reincarnation works. There are various approaches to learning.
Another common approach is to keep one of the major characteristic or the birth setting the same throughout the multiple reincarnations.
Do you have any questions about karma and reincarnation? Please let me know in the comment. Thank you.
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