What karma really is — cutting through the confusion

What karma really means

'Karma', along with various other terms used in religious and mystical traditions, is loaded with connotations of control agenda that, according to the understandings and working model that I present on this site, have been put upon it by the garbage via those traditions, and therefore is a term that's best let go of — despite the fact that 'karma' does have a very basic, straightforward and innocent meaning.

The underlying and actually useful meaning of 'karma' is simply the accumulation of distortions or blocks in any level or aspect of your entire being, resulting from any aspect of your life process. If you put your hand in a flame, your hand gets burnt. If you behave harmfully to others, that has distorting effects on subtle aspects of yourself, which in time will cause you problems at the mental / emotional and physical levels — unless in the meantime you take actions that clear those distortions.

If, through no fault of your own you happen to have placed yourself where you get a particular environmental stress, say, in your home, you get adverse effects, whether or not they show up at that time. All these adverse effects, which accumulate in various aspects of our entire being, are karmas.

Thus we can see that it's really not about good and bad / evil at all but simply about what strengthens and empowers you as a vibrantly aware being of clarity and love, and what weakens and distorts you, so obscuring your true nature. The more distorted you are in relation to your true nature, the more troublesome experiences, pain and suffering and indeed bad health you're liable to experience. As I say, it's simple cause and effect, relating to what is our true nature and what weakens and what strengthens us as whole beings. To put it in a nutshell, our true nature is vibrantly happy, positive, aware and creative, and distortions to various degrees detract from that state. Simple!

To concern yourself with 'clearing of karma' rather than simply resolving your emotional issues and generally taking all reasonable measures for speedy self-healing and self-actualization is seriously problematical, and again is what the garbage seeks to get us doing. It seeks to have us terrified of the possible consequences of problematical things we've done, so that, instead of simply learning from our experiences and becoming more aware and loving, we live in increasing fear and are thus greatly obstructed in any true self-actualization direction.

Instead of the latter, then, we develop further unawareness by, say, overt materialism / hedonism or by turning to religions to salve our consciences. But salving your conscience by religious or supposedly spiritual practice is doing little or nothing for you in terms of the self-actualization that would really clear all your karmas without your ever having to think of them as such.

The Milarepa story — a potent garbage-sourced confusion over karma

The story of Milarepa, so revered by Tibetan Buddhist traditions, is actually a hair-raising garbage tract posing as a spiritual masterpiece. Indeed, the garbage, particularly during my ordeals of 2004–2005, sought repeatedly to drag me through severe experiences with remarkable echoes (still far from a carbon copy!) of what Milarepa was supposedly taken through in order to purge his 'karma', so I nowadays recognise very clearly the signs of garbage involvement in such a story.

Suppose you've done the sort of dark things Milarepa was supposed to have done before he took fright about his supposed karma and sought to purge himself, and, like him, you'd done dark practices and killed people. True, initially you'd have got yourself one big problem, with serious distortions in your non-physical aspects, quite apart from more tangible emotional issues, and without very purposeful positive action on your part you'd undoubtedly have major problems and unhappiness in the future.

The positive 'message' in the Milarepa story is what I understand from life experience and my own self actualization process — that purposeful ongoing use of methods for true and full self-actualization are the antidote, for by taking such measures, as well as clearing blocks and distortions in your non-physical aspects, you're then opening up your deeper awareness and thus resolving the original problem of unawareness and reactive behaviour.

When you've truly cleared the blocks and distortions to your awareness that were involved in your earlier dark deeds, never mind how speedily and painlessly, you've cleared that 'karma'. All the rest about karma — self recrimination, divine retribution (or retribution from the Universe), and 'you must have a hard time of it in order to make you compassionate [or, to atone for your deeds]', and of course the 'Damoclean sword' of hell experiences hanging over you, is garbage-sourced fiction and bullshit.

The problem with the Milarepa story, however, is that the 'self-actualization' message is heavily contaminated with the notion that severe retributional karma and hells are awaiting anyone who's done seriously harmful things — and that one necessarily has to undergo major hardships and suffering to purge oneself before one can achieve 'self-realization' (what I nowadays prefer to call self-actualization). Also, the picture given in that story of the 'fully' self-actualized state is again a lure from the garbage — living in a sort of heaven and having all manner of special powers, including that of flight / self-teleportation.

To my perception, the whole conception of the story — of a person who's clearly very much in the clutches of the garbage, not only through his initial dark deeds but in his fleeing in terror from the supposed retributions of his karma and then after massive hardships becoming a figure with all manner of special powers, who we're all encouraged to revere — is one of the myriad tools of the garbage, and made all the more potent because it also contains a valid and important message concerning the use of self-actualization to clear one's karmas*.

As I well know from my own experience, the garbage will pose as wise 'guidance' and make out to be supporting you in your self-healing / self-actualization process but present you with a seriously distorted and often harsh, hard-going and indeed often terrifying or nightmarish version of what is fundamentally a simple, speedy and more or less painless process. That's what it's done with the Milarepa story.

…But all that's only one kind of karma!

What most people think of as karma is actually — thanks to the distorted beliefs introduced and promoted by the garbage — only one kind of karma.* In fact, as I've already intimated, most karma is nothing to do with whether you've hurt or harmed other people in some way. Let's take an example. You have a whole range of misfortunes and unhappinesses and developing ill health — all because that nice coffee table in your living room wasn't placed in a harmonious position.

When people proficient in Helpfulness Testing look at the situation they can see that all that's needed is to move the table e.g., 30cm nearer the window or over there in that corner, and at once the problems start easing off (or maybe the type of table was the problem as well, in which case the person using Helpfulness Testing / proper energy awareness would notice that and advise removing or changing the table). The karma here is simply the accumulation of weakenings and distortions in your subtle aspects caused by something inharmonious in your surroundings — in other words, environmental stress.

What I'm saying here is that most karma — at least, that which is worth acknowledging at all — can be viewed as simply the results of different types of environmental stress, significant emotional stress / trauma, and also the results of choices of ours that in some way weaken our non-physical aspects. Such choices include of course obviously 'negative' actions, but they also include all sorts of weakening choices that people would generally never think of as good or bad, including choices of food, abode, friends and partners.

Without Helpfulness Testing and the sort of deep perceptual awareness ('energy awareness', for want of a better term) that it supports and cultivates, who would have thought that it was a weakening choice, e.g., to go out for lunch on one particular day (or at one particular time) rather than another, or to put an ornament in one position in your living space rather than another, or indeed to sit or stand facing one direction rather than another at a particular time?

Such weakening choices are made by us all the time unless we have Helpfulness Testing / proper grounded deep perceptual awareness, and use it well. Thus we're continually accumulating karma, which actually has nothing to do with good / bad / evil but everything to do with what is (usually unawarely) harmonious or inharmonious and stressful for us. In our ignorance of the real causes of our increasing physical problems, aided and abetted by the medical profession we put it all down to 'ageing' or simply 'bad luck', whereas actually most of it is nothing of the kind.

Indeed a surprising proportion of such physical problems are more or less reversible or at least can be halted or slowed in their progress through simply removing the causes of the stresses and using special methods to reverse or at least minimize the accumulated distortions in your non-physical aspects.

Why do a fair number of supposedly enlightened and 'highly realized' Buddhist teachers / gurus / 'masters' fall into 'vices', and a greater number have unduly short lives?

There's a quite widely held belief in the higher levels of Buddhism that if you're enlightened or highly 'self-realized' (self-actualized), you're beyond the reach of karma. Because of this, it's quite common (I'm not suggesting it's actually the norm, though for all I know, it might be) even for widely revered teachers to come to a point in their lives when they just follow their fancies, such as alcohol, smoking, unhealthy eating, and even sexual promiscuity, with the fond notion that such behaviours can't harm them significantly, at least beyond this lifetime. So they just 'live for the moment' without thinking properly or indeed at all about the likely consequences of their choices and actions.

Their belief about that is a distortion of the real situation. To the best of my understanding, no-soul incarnations (only) have no karmic baggage carried over from any previous lifetime, and, provided they die properly (revert to fundamental consciousness instead of getting trapped into the soul reincarnation cycle), and thus remain no-soul, they carry no karmic baggage beyond this lifetime.

However, even no-soul people do accumulate karmas during the current lifetime, and if they don't do their best to minimize that accumulation (by means of healthy and strengthening life choices) and clear karmas that have accumulated, they are most likely NOT to die properly, and indeed to commence the cycle of soul reincarnation. Thus they become more degraded, unaware and generally shut-down with each successive reincarnation as karmas continue to accumulate over the successive lifetimes, till they end up as parasitic lost souls.

So, then, are those Buddhist teachers no-soul people to start with? My general understanding is that only no-soul people can become properly enlightened (i.e., perceive directly their innermost — non-dual — nature), so at least most of those teachers should be no-soul people if they really are genuinely enlightened. Yet their meditation-based methods plus the mass of illusory realities they're carrying associated with the beliefs that they're teaching to their students are helping to ensure that, contrary to any belief of theirs, they would NOT die properly and would indeed fall into the cycle of soul reincarnation.

If that is indeed correct, it throws very great doubt over the notion that these teachers really are reincarnations of recently-deceased great teachers as is widely believed.

Conversely, if they really are reincarnations of previous teachers, the implication would be that they are still in a cycle of sequential soul incarnations — and in that case they would have soul programming, and thus at least for the most part couldn't be genuinely enlightened, except perhaps in a few cases tenuously so (plenty of subtle illusory realities can mimic it, thanks to one's garbage interferences).

Anyway, through having their distorted notions of the nature of 'karma', with their belief that once enlightened they're 'beyond the reach of karma', some of those teachers are nicely sealing their fate for definite commencement of soul reincarnation cycle, or at least strongly reinforcing their already extant one. I assume that a fair proportion of those teachers do have the sense not to imagine that because they're supposedly enlightened, it would be okay for them to make unhealthy and karma-producing life choices.

One BIG problem for those traditions is that they're based in belief and putting attention firmly on experience while strongly de-emphasizing rational, conceptual thought — so they lack the ability as well as the will to hold themselves, their lives and their modus operandi up to proper scrutiny and see the dire situation they're cultivating for themselves all the time. Good intentions simply aren't enough, and can't be effective without using one's brain power properly.

Furthermore, those teachers are generally creating further karmas (in the correct sense) for themselves by giving themselves away so much to others (generally in the name of 'compassion') and deliberately or otherwise allowing themselves to get weakened and distorted by the issues of their students — again, in the name of being 'compassionate'. It's thus hardly surprising that the teachers' lives tend to be much shorter than they would be if only they were making healthy and properly thought-out choices all the time. And of course if they were making healthy choices like that, the students would then have a better role model and be more motivated to make healthy (and thus less karma-producing) choices themselves and thus be generating less karmas.

How to clear karma(s) — the easy and sensible way

So, in short, the simplest and most effective methods for self-healing, self-actualization and clearance of emotional traumas and issues are all that are necessary for clearance of all karmas — except that I'd add to the list the removal of supposed 'entities', and interferences from the garbage, for the garbage seeks to keep karmas in place and indeed to magnify and add to them, in order to gain more control over you.

For more information, please see Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way.

A real no-no is to have purported 'karmic healing' — especially of the type that invokes supposed higher beings such as the so-called Lords of Karma. This is all garbage involvement. Just look at that term 'Lords of Karma' — an immediate and brazen indication of power / control agenda! If you want to follow the way of power, control, fear and inner confusion, that's a great way to go! What it will NOT do, however, is truly clear those karmas (indeed, it would be creating a whole lot more), and neither would it help you one little bit in the direction of true self-actualization, love, free choice and happiness. Indeed, isn't that latter direction just what you were wanting to clear your karmas for?

As I understand it, there's actually a karmic residue that can remain in place after the karmas have apparently been completely cleared through use of the self-actualization methods (such as the range of methods that I present in Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way). That residue is often called karmic debt, and, as far as I can see, it applies really only to karmas generated by one's interactions with other people (both direct and indirect). It's a certain residual imbalance or distortion in your subtle aspects that's finally cleared when you carry out positive actions that in some way counter the negative aspects of whatever situation caused the karma in the first place.

However, as with the main clearance process, it's by far the most effective for one not to focus on the notion of karmic debts at all and indeed not to act out of any sense of obligation or duty (which the garbage would seek to rub your nose in). Rather, any 'karmic debts' are most effectively cleared simply by your spontaneously making more healthy and 'strengthening' choices as your self-actualization process opens you up.

As long as you carry out supposedly restorative acts on the basis of a sense of obligation or I wronged him and now I must make some restoration to him, you're still letting the garbage interfere with you and actually obstruct the true clearance of any karmic residue; indeed, that would be creating further problems for you and indeed very likely, perhaps in subtle ways, for those very people to whom you're seeking to make 'restoration'.

An example of this in my own experience is during my frequent hitch-hikes, when motorists who pick me up sometimes tell me that they used to hitch-hike themselves and now feel that they should pick people up themselves, effectively as a sort of karmic repayment. That always leaves me with a certain nagging discomfort about being picked up by them, because, in a sense, I'm being used by such individuals, in a way that feels a little 'icky' or 'off', and indeed is unlikely to clear any supposed karmic debt anyway.

I certainly don't mean at all that they'd do better not to go picking up hitch-hikers; the problem here is simply the sense of obligation that obscures their real, more joyful, generosity and can make their attempts to clear a supposed karmic debt into a slightly karma-generating type of action. The healthy way of looking at it would be something like I used to go hitch-hiking myself, so I have a particular empathy with hitch-hiking, and I still love having the encounters even though I'm on 'the other side of the fence' now.

In any case, in the case of hitch-hiking, it's by no means a 'given', that a person is incurring any sort of karmic debt through hitch-hiking. A really 'with-it' hitch-hiker would travel with a very positive outlook, aiming to make each hitch-hiking encounter a positive one, so that it's a mutually beneficial experience. And if any particular driver isn't able to benefit obviously, say, because of their having a very closed outlook and regarding the hitch-hiker as rather a sponger off other people, that's the particular motorist's issue and his alone.

The sensible hitch-hiker simply draws a line under each such encounter and doesn't buy the notion that he's just being a sponger, a parasite. Indeed, many motorists are aware of the stress of driving alone — especially truck drivers, and really do feel that picking up a friendly hitch-hiker has helped make the journey a good or above-normal experience.