Changing Karma
Karma is said to be the law of cause and effect, but really there is no cause. There is only the effect of an effect of an effect. Everything is an effect of yesterday or the last moment.
The law of karma is that everything repeats itself. Karma comes energetically in waves, just like the waves of the sea, coming towards you all the time. The waves of yesterday, all the days since you were born, the waves come to you. I am talking about you, the person sitting on the seat; about you and life, because that’s the most important thing there is. Everything happens to you. If it doesn’t happen to you, it has no meaning in it.
There is a world karma and there is a personal karma. You can’t really handle world karma until you handle your own karma. So let’s start with the personal karma, and all the effects since you were born.
Even your birth had an effect. It affected all the people around you and even your screams, your gurgling, your being in a pram, had effects. All the effects repeated themselves, either next day, next week or next year.
Every moment, I (in your body) am creating an effect, which will have an effect tomorrow or next week or next year. Every moment creates the wave of effects in our lives. We set the waves in motion. It happens just too fast and is too all-encompassing for our superficial frontal consciousness to get around. But you can get the idea can’t you? I say I am a living master. What does that mean?
It means that I am lord of my karma. Now perhaps you’ve heard talk of ‘the Lords of Karma’, as used by the mystics of the East as well as Madam Blavatsky, the Theosophists, and all their followers. You can get one of their books and for a few days read all about the Lords of Karma in some imagined world, sitting up in the Himalayas, arranging all the karma. But it’s not true. You are the lord of karma, the master of your karma, your life – or you are endeavouring to be.
I am the lord of the earth, the lord of the world of karma. That is what it is to be the living master. You have forgotten this.
Don’t put your I out here on the speaker, will you? Keep it where it belongs. Which is where you speak of ‘I’ – in the body sitting on that chair. For I am man or woman. And the reality of existence is for I in that body to become lord of karma; for you to become the lord of your own karma so that you are not pushed around by the winds of change and by the world of effects.
What happened to you today? Whatever happened to you today also happened to you before, and happened to you before that. Yet not in quite the same way; because karma is an energetic thing. It’s like the agitator in the bottom of a washing machine. You see the washing going around and you see it’s in different places and there’s froth on it. The agitator is always down at the bottom unseen, and is energetic. The effect of the agitator is different all the time. So the energy of karma plays in form, changes the forms. We call that circumstance – people and objects. Karma just keeps moving them around so that you don’t see the agitator ... Well, the agitator is in me. (Don’t put your ‘me’ out here. The agitator is in me in that body on that chair.)
My life is the result of yesterday. It was a nice day today, but if today you lost something dear to you, it wasn’t a nice day. The chances are you didn’t even see the blue sky and the sweetness of the day; and who could blame you? You are heavy with the burden of unhappiness or sorrow. That is due to your karma, and we will go into why you are suffering later. But then life gets better. Things change.
So why is that? Why is it that life seems to get better? It doesn’t matter who you are, life does get better, doesn’t it? And by the time you’re my age you’ll look back and say ‘Life’s alright. It hasn’t been too bad’. It’s amazing how people say that isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what’s happened to them. That is because the whole process here is to change your karma.
Everybody is changing their karma to a degree but when you start to enter the spiritual life, or what I call ‘Living the Divine Life’, you become more responsible for yourself and your life, and then you start to start to control your karma.
~From a talk given on the evening of Monday 17 June 1991 during Barry Long’s Teaching Week, ‘Living The Divine Life’, on the Gold Coast, Queensland. (extract from Journal 3)