Karma

When God created us, His intention was that we learn to love Him and each other as much as He loves us.

Karma is a mechanism by which we learn to love.

Karma teaches us. It reflects back to us our thoughts, words and behavior. It is an objective law of cause and effect. It does not distinguish between good and bad. So, if you behave with love, understanding, care and concern, it will be reflected back in how you are treated by others. More importantly, if you behave in an unloving manner towards others, this will also be reflected back to you.

Our personal karma is the result of the choices that we make. We make hundreds of these choices on a daily basis. Each choice adds positive or negative karma, depending on what we choose to think, feel or do.

In biblical terms, Karma is expressed as “You reap what you sow”, or "With what measure you measure, so shall it be measured to you.”

Karma provides feedback that rewards our loving acts and helps us correct our mistakes. A mistake is unloving behavior.

Karma is a mechanism designed by God to help us to use our freewill correctly. If we understand Karma, it provides an incentive to behave well. Good behavior is loving behavior.

Karma is a key element of God’s perfect system of justice. God set up this system so that He does not need to intervene unless we ask for it. God does not punish us, but karma teaches us lessons. If we choose to view this as punishment, we punish ourselves by our misuse of freewill and the choices that we make.

We can ignore all the teachers that God sent, but we cannot escape negative karma.

God will help those who ask for help that is in line with the Golden Rule. Those who do not ask for help are still subject to karma.

Death is not an escape from the law of karma. You cannot avoid the lessons karma teaches, because you are an eternal soul and karma stays with you until it is resolved. If you understand this, you will be motivated to think and behave differently. Sooner or later, we all have to learn the lessons that karma provides.

When we have learnt our lessons, karma is resolved and we can avoid further lessons!

God gave us a way to dissolve karmic debt. If we learn to genuinely forgive the unloving acts of both ourselves and others, we too will be forgiven and absolved from the need to pay off karmic debt. This is not east to do. The process is referred to as the law of Grace (or Mercy, or Forgiveness). It is an extension of the law of karma. God has already unconditionally forgiven us, and if we unconditionally forgive ourselves and others, we cancel our karmic debt. This makes perfect sense. What is the point of karmic debt if you have learned your lessons?

The law of Grace is a much better way to settle karmic debt than to have karma teach us lessons.

It is important to remember that the need to forgive applies just as much to forgiving yourself as it does to forgiving others.

Understand that through God’s perfect system of karma and grace, karmic justice applies to those you feel have wronged you, and you should not concern yourself with judging or trying to punish them. If you do try to judge or punish others, all you are doing is to perpetuate your own karmic lessons. This is a very liberating concept, but it is difficult to understand and apply.

Indifference, apathy and inaction are not exempted from the law of karma. Failure to do what we know is right is a choice, and it will incur a karmic debt. If you are indifferent to the plight or suffering of others, you will encounter indifference to your own suffering when you need the help of strangers.

A large percentage of people (souls) can share an opinion or behavior which is unloving and inconsistent with the Golden Rule. When it comes to unloving thoughts and behavior there is no safety in numbers, and those groups who share and try to justify unloving behavior create a karmic lesson for themselves. For example, if you think that war or the death penalty is justified and you support it, then you will be held accountable and have a karmic price to pay for the resulting mayhem and murder, regardless of whether you physically participated in the act. Our thoughts condemn us just as well as our actions.

Freewill

God is not responsible for what happens to us during this physical incarnation we call life. He established the ground rules for life, but our experiences in the physical dimensions are directly tied to the lessons provided by freewill, karma and our individual and collective consciousness or intent.

Having “freewill” means that we have the freedom to choose our thoughts, words and actions. We have the freewill to be the soul we choose to be.

We, as souls, choose to evolve at different rates of progress.

The physical dimensions provide an environment where we can practice using our freewill to learn our lessons.

The use of freewill requires awareness and choices.

Freewill gives us the opportunity to choose between right and wrong, and therefore to choose to be loving souls.

Karma teaches us the consequences of our use of freewill. These consequences depend on whether you choose to be loving or unloving. You will experience the consequences of your use of freewill until you have learned the lessons that karma teaches.

If we did not have freewill, God would not have created anything except programmed servants. He will not interfere with our freewill, but He will help us if we sincerely ask for His help. Asking God for help is called “prayer”. God helps us according to what is in our best interest. He does not necessarily give us exactly what we ask for.

Use your freewill to love and accept people for who they are. When people understand that they are unconditionally loved by you, very often they consciously or unconsciously love or admire you for the way you treat them, and in doing so they may resolve to be more like you. The way to teach people unconditional love is to demonstrate it!

You are always better off if you try to take the loving path. Try to make your choices based on what you think will be the most loving outcome, without trying to control others. Even if what you chose does not turn out as planned, your “intention” was loving, and you should move on with a clear conscience. You cannot control outcomes and you should not try to control others, but you should try to act with loving intent.

Because we have freewill, we make mistakes. Mistakes are an expected and acceptable part of our soul growth. God knows that and so should you! We are not expected to be perfect, we are here to learn from our mistakes.

If we use our freewill to make bad choices, we will suffer the karmic consequences. We learn lessons from suffering. If there was no suffering, there would be no lesson. Failure to consider how our choices affect others is an indication of selfishness and indifference, which will generate karmic lessons.

If we choose to forgive others, we too will be forgiven and our karmic debts will be negated. This is known as the Law of Grace. If you can forgive others, you have developed an ability which will serve you well.

Try to be aware of your own mistakes so that you can forgive yourself, apologize to others, and move on.

You alone are responsible for your thoughts and actions. People can pray for you and they can forgive you, but only you can take responsibility for your soul. Other righteous souls can petition God on your behalf, and He will respond to their prayers and provide opportunities for your soul growth, but it is up to you whether you benefit from the prayers of others.

Respect the freewill of others, and try not to impose your will on them. If you do try to impose your will on others, it frequently ends up being unloving behavior. We all have lessons to learn, and the best we can do for others is to give them unconditional love. Others will never meet our definition of how we think they should behave, and to make things worse, we frequently set impossible or unstated goals for them!

The exercise of freewill frequently involves difficult choices. We instinctively know the difference between loving and unloving behavior, but we are constantly subjected to pressure to condone or participate in behavior that we know to be unloving. God expects us to use our freewill to make the loving choice, rather than bow to the pressures of a world that often demands conformity of thought in order to be accepted. The short term benefit we receive from being loved conditionally is not worth the karmic price we pay for it.

Do not blame God for the sins of mankind, freewill is the culprit. It is the misuse of freewill that creates unhappiness, hate, and the horrors of war.

Suffering and hardships help strengthen us if we choose to learn the lessons they provide. Suffering helps our soul grow faster.

If you fail to use your powers of discernment, and you subvert or delegate your freewill to the decisions of others, you will share karmic responsibility for the choices they make. “I was only following orders” is a poor excuse that inhibits soul growth.

You have the freewill to choose your actions, but freewill does not extend as far as having right to exercise your freewill to give up eternal life and cease to exist. You are and will always be eternal, and God lets you decide how to use your freewill to determine where you fit into His creation.

Many people reject God because He does not keep us from harm, and they find this very difficult to accept. It is important to understand that God is not a puppet master, and we are not programmed servants. However horrific the ills and misfortunes of some people may seem, they have not been caused by God, and He does not punish us in this manner.

The pain and suffering of the innocent is used by some to support the contention that God does not exist, or if he does, he could not be a loving God if He allows such things to happen. These are judgments that we are not able to make accurately from our limited earthly perspective. We are here to learn to react to pain and suffering with unconditional love.

Jesus was innocent, but he was willing to suffer in order to teach us to love. Many advanced souls willingly incarnate and accept suffering, because they know that their suffering is temporary, and that it brings out the love in others.

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Matthew 22, 37 - 40

If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in one hundred years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt...It is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

The process of forgiveness -- indeed the chief reason for forgiveness -- is selfish. The reason to forgive others is not for their sake. They are not likely to know that they need to be forgiven. They're not likely to remember their offense. They are likely to say, "You just made that up." They may even be dead. The reason to forgive is for our own sake. For our own health. Because beyond that point needed for healing, if we hold on to our anger, we stop growing and our souls begin to shrivel.

M. Scott Peck

The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.

Florence Shinn

It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson.

​Emmet Fox

How are we saved? By unselfish love. If we do only good things we will eventually run out of bad karma and only good things will happen to us, and vice versa. The purpose of karma is to force us to learn life's lessons whether we want to or not. The only way to bypass karma is to develop so much unselfish love that paying for bad karma will serve no purpose - much like a college student challenging a course he already knows. We evolve faster through unselfish love.

Arthur Yensen

"As ye sow, so shall ye reap."

Galatians 6:7

"With what measure ye mete, it will be measured to thee again."

Matthew 7:2

We should not seek revenge on those who have committed crimes against us, or reply to their crimes with other crimes. We should reflect that by the law of karma, they are in danger of lowly and miserable lives to come, and that our duty to them, as to every being, is to help them to rise towards Nirvana, rather than let them sink to lower levels of rebirth.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody, everything, every night before you go to bed.

Bernard M. Baruch

Sometimes we have to "step over" our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there. Then we become the "offended one," "the forgotten one," or the "discarded one." Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them. It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on.

Henri Nouwen

The world is a dangerous place to live not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Albert Einstein

God loves us and believes in us and has done and will do anything he can to help us, but he will not impose on our free agency.

Marion D. Hanks Ensign

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

W.E. Henley

Joy is what makes life worth living, but for many, joy seems hard to find. They complain that their lives are sorrowful and depressing. What then brings the joy we so much desire? Are some people just lucky, while others have run out of luck? Strange as it may sound, we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

Henri Nouwen

Cowardice asks the question: "Is it safe"? Expediency asks the question: "Is it politic"? Vanity asks the question: "Is it popular?" But conscience asks the question: "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one what is right.

Martin Luther King

God created the law of free will, and God created the law of cause and effect. And he himself will not violate the law. We need to be thinking less in terms of what God did and more in terms of whether or not we are following those laws.

Marianne Williamson

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

Agatha Christie

Man is a being with free will therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

Ayn Rand

The purpose of problems is to push you toward obedience to God's laws, which are exact and cannot be changed. We have the free will to obey them or disobey them. Obedience will bring harmony, disobedience will bring you more problems.

Peace Pilgrim

God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices-- exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.

Jim Butcher

I'm a true believer in karma. You get what you give, whether it's bad or good.

Sandra Bullock

There was just such a man when I was young—an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.

Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.

C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity

Destiny is variable, not fixed . It is forever changing depending upon your free will to make choices for what you want your life to be.

Steven Redhead, The Solution

The sin both of men and of angels was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.

C.S. Lewis