35 - Karma and Awakening

Let's discuss Karma.  What is Karma?  Can it be mitigated?  Does positive karma cancel out negative karma?  What is karma's role in awakening?  Can Karma be dissolved?  What is meditation's  relation to Karma.  Can meditation dissolve and heal Karma?

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

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Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. Today, let's talk about karma. I know most of you are familiar with it, but this podcast covers lots of subjects in regards to awakening for lots of people, so maybe everybody hasn't heard of it. What is karma? Karma is the result of past actions, its cause and effect. There's psychological karma. If we say negative things to ourselves over time, we might develop depression or bad habits or negative habits. Where we are today is as a result of all the things we've done in the past. There's personal karma. If we've done negative things to others around us, they won't like us. So where we are both psychologically, habitually, socially, economically, if we don't work, we probably don't earn money. Where we are is based on what we have done. Our karma is seen in the circumstances that we find ourselves in today, and there can be unripened karma that ripens later in our lives that is also based on what we've done in the past. As a psychotherapist, often people would come to me and say, I had a very happy childhood. Everything was fine, but later in life, problems just suddenly appeared, phobias and other issues. What's going on? It often seemed as if there was a grace period for us to enjoy life unencumbered by issues when we're younger, and then the issues would come up later. And actually, later I heard a guru mention that same thing, that our karma can ripen later in life, our seeds of karma, the effects of our past actions. We can also be affected by family karma, all the things that our family has done, societal karma, our city karma, all the things that have happened in our city in which we live, they affect us. Does our city have a good vibe, bad vibe? Is it economically viable or not? What is it like politically? These are all effects from the karma of that city. We're also affected by the country we live in, country karma. When we change cities or countries, we're affected by the country or city that we move to. We can also, because we move to a cleaner, higher vibration place, we can start to let go of some of the negative karma if we were coming from a negative place or a lower vibration place. Often that's why people go on vacations, to get away from stress where they live. So karma is really something we all experience. It's very practical. Most religions address it. In Galatians, in the Bible, perhaps you're familiar with the statement, a man reaps what he sows. The Bible goes on to say in the next verse or two that if you do a lot of negative things, you'll have negative effects in your life. And if you do a lot of positive things, you'll have positive effects in your life. That's karma. It's physics, cause and effect. Prior causes create an effect today, causation. It's psychology. Our current thinking and habits and emotions are built on our past. So karma is just an Eastern word that we all experience all the time in our lives. Of course, you don't have to use the word karma. You can use whatever word you want. Words are just labels, but that's often how it's talked about in spiritual circles, karma. I remember once when I was in India, my guru was named Bhagavan or my guru at the time. He's still living. He's the most powerful man that I've ever met. And he's a good friend of mine. I just drank in every word that Bhagavan said. I wanted to be around him as much as possible. And, um, I was with a fairly, he has millions of followers and I was with a group of Westerners. I guess there was at the time, maybe a hundred of us. And there were a lot of, there was a separate group of Indians, a lot of Indians. And they said, okay, Bhagavan's going to be with the Indians. Uh, that's a separate talk than what you're going to get. And, and that was that I happened to see where they all went. And I was curious. So I put my ear on the wall and listened to what Bhagavan told the Indians. And what he was talking to them about was working in the West and specifically in the United States. He said, if you go to the United States, it's a great opportunity for you, but the karma is so thick and negative over there. Uh, you know, there's so much turmoil and emotional trouble and cloudiness and people are kind of cut off from themselves and just how it really is over here. He was talking to them about it. And he said, so if you go there, don't stay for more than two years. Otherwise it will affect you very negatively. So after two years, come back to India, get that negative American karma off of you, and then you can return for another two years, but don't stay over two years or it will be very negative for you. So we are affected by our environment, our circumstances. Sometimes people ask me, why do you go to India so much? And what I've told them before is it's so clear there, where I go anyway, it's clear spiritually. And I feel like layers of junk just come off of me. And that's what so many people that go to India experience. That's why they go. So our surroundings affect us karmically. There's another interesting thing about karma. Negative karma is separate from positive karma. You don't generally net them out. If you're nice to one person on one side of town and bad to another person on the other side of town, the one that you were negative to won't like you probably, even though you were nice to some other person that he doesn't know. So you can't mix the two karmas. Being good and being bad are each separate things. However, you can apologize to the negative person. You can address them and apologize, and they might start to like you better. Let me give you a couple stories that I heard in India that address this a little bit. One man had major foot problems and he was finding it hard to walk. So he talked to his guru about that. And nothing and no doctor could heal him. The guru said, your foot problems are a result of your past action and past lives. So nothing here is going to heal you unless you address that specific past life foot karma. What I'd like you to do is buy lots of people with bad feet that can't afford shoes, buy them good shoes to help their feet. He did that. He spent a lot of money on shoes. After he had done that, after a period of time, his feet miraculously started healing. He addressed the foot issue. In a related story, there was a very wealthy man in Bangalore. He was an eye doctor, yet his son was going blind and there was nothing medical science could do to heal his son's blindness. He went to a guru because nothing else was helpful at the time, and he was at the end of his rope, and he asked for advice on how his son could be healed. Now, this man was very tight with money. So the guru said, I want you to buy anybody in Bangalore. And Bangalore is a big city in India. He said, anybody that has eye issues, I want you to pay for their treatment for one month, everybody in Bangalore, anybody that sees any doctor, you pay for it, and then your son will be healed. The man did that and his son was healed. So it's like going to the person that you've wronged, apologizing, and that can mitigate that karma. That's one way to mitigate karma. And there are other spiritual ways to mitigate karma. And you know them, they're very natural, and we've talked about them in many, many podcasts before. What that would be is, say the result of your karma is tension inside, and you've become so blocked and separated from yourself that you no longer experience oneness, or maybe never have experienced oneness. And instead, you feel anger and hurt and fear and disconnected from yourself, and you don't know what to do in life, you're separate. And that's the state and condition of most of us in the world. Well, what can we do to heal that? Awareness is curative. And when you become in touch with that part of you that's aware, most of us do it most easily through meditation, because we can eliminate many distractions. And we can watch those things that come up the hurt, the fear, the anger. And as we watch them, the silent power of that awareness begins to melt them and they melt back into the infinite and beyond. And when a problem has melted, it no longer exists. There's a release and relaxation in your muscle system. So that karma, that psychological karma is gone, it's melted out of your system. Meditation heals the effects of our past actions in that regard. So meditation heals the effects of karma. Well, there's another way that our past actions, habits, emotions, and thoughts affect us. They affect our vibration. Where we live affects our vibration. Our family affects our vibration. Our vibration is the sum of all of our past events, thoughts, actions, and environment. So if we have a low vibration, as they say in India, the external reflects the internal. Low vibration things in life are attracted to us. Low vibration external. When our internal is low vibration, we keep having problems and issues, and we can't shake them. We try rationally, and they shouldn't be happening to us, but they are. We work hard, but we don't make a lot of money. Other people hardly do anything, and money just flocks to them. Our relationships fall apart because we have enough low vibration in enough areas of our life that that vibration is attracting other low vibration things. As we meditate these blocking thoughts that we've talked about so many times in different podcasts that I'll just let you review that if you're not sure what I'm talking about. But these blocks slow down our vibration. They obscure the natural spiritual light that's flowing through our bodies, the natural spiritual sounds and flow. But as we watch them, awareness just melts them back into the infinite, and our vibration starts to rise. And as it starts to rise, we start to attract better and better things in our lives, better relationships, better ways to interact, better jobs, more money flows into our lives. Higher vibrations beget higher vibrations. In India, I'm often around a lot of awakened people. And I remember talking to one monk, very powerful monk, just radiant. And I asked him about problems. And he said, as his radiance grew, and now it was so strong that if a problem suddenly came up from the past, it would just vaporize, just poof, back into the light, it would be literally vaporized. As we've talked about another podcast, everything in creation is made of the same substance. And this is just not a philosophy, you can see it, you can feel it as you become clear, you feel it vibrating in and out of existence, a million times a second, but it's just made of love and bliss and well being and joy. Every atom, every molecule, and therefore every object is fundamentally made of this. So as your vibration rises, everything starts to melt back into that, especially the flimsy things, because those are the easiest, the thoughts, the emotions, all depressions and anxieties, they all melt back into the infinite. So in that sense, your karma is melting away. Because the external reflects the internal, as you become stronger, some of these gurus can manifest very, very powerfully in the world around them and effect what we would call miracles. Of course, in the West, we're familiar, many of us are familiar with the Bible and all the accounts of Jesus and his miracles. We might not believe them, but my feeling is they're absolutely true. And somebody with very powerful energy can do these things very high energy. The reason one of the reasons that I believe that is I've seen it with my own eyes, with high frequency people in India, gurus, and I'll talk about that in a another podcast. The main point with this podcast is that we can heal our old karmas, and our vibrations can move up, and the world can be quite different than the world that we have experienced, because our old world has been conditioned and has come out of our prior actions. The world that we used to live in is our karmic world, built on low vibrations, perhaps, and our current world, hopefully, is built on higher vibrations. So, our surroundings themselves can change as we heal our karma. The external reflects the internal, truly. And yes, some of this touches on manifestation, creating things in the world. Is that possible? If so, how? We'll talk about that in a podcast very soon. Now, what about karma and past lives? If karma is all of the causes all the way up into today, do they include past lives? Do I have to believe in past lives? What about past lives? Well, no, you don't have to believe in past lives, because in a practical experience, the results of all of the causes turn into an effect today, and the result of that effect is your life. You can look around, it's your world. So, whether you believe in past lives or not, the effect is still there, and you can still work on that effect, your life, regardless of whether they're past lives or not. However, I am going to talk about past lives in a podcast very soon as well. Okay, one more thing about causes and effects. What if I'm angry and I just hold it to myself? What if I just use my willpower, I get through life, I'm just living my life, I'm angry or sad or whatever, but I just put it to the side and I motor on? What about that? Well, there's a thing about karma and manifestation that goes something like this. Your anger pools with all of the other unresolved anger all over the world, and that's what erupts into wars. So, if you want to stop war, you do your part by meditating and dissolving your anger. Being an angry protester doesn't stop wars, it just adds more anger to the pool that will pop up somewhere else and form another war. So, the way to stop wars is to release your anger, heal yourself, and you'll heal the world. You might remember in the last podcast, we talked about a famous guru in India named Ramana. And when somebody came to him and said, Hey Ramana, why don't you do social action? Because there's World War II and all these things going on. He said, if you feel called to social action, do it. Social action is fine. But I'm called into my being to be very clear. And I know that my clarity will do more to heal the world than any social action could. If you want to do social action, of course, do it. But I'm going to meditate. So, ultimately, meditation heals both your personal karma and can heal world karma. Okay, that's a little on karma. Next time, let's talk about past lives. I look forward to talking to you then. Take care. Bye.