What goes around, comes around.

Karmic Consequences

“Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.  If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect.  In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.”

                                                  Gary Zukav

                                                  From: The Seat of the Soul

“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”

                                                  Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The will is not free—it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect—but there is something behind the will which is free.”

                                                  Swami Vivekananda

          My father was a man indelibly imprinted by war.  He served in the Navy in the Pacific theater during World War II and was one of the Sea Bees’ who constructed runways for the planes that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Like many who are forced to kill or be killed, he found ways to dehumanize those whose lives he took.  My dad was a kind and compassionate man by nature, but he struggled with bigotry his whole life.  He had a low opinion of almost every race and religion that was not his own and of women in general.  At the end of his life, when he was dying from metastatic melanoma, he was hospitalized at Duke.  His attending physician there was a woman and his resident physician was Iranian.  Both were exceedingly intelligent and were kind and gentle to him.  I still have to smile when I think about the karmic dance in all that.  He was given the opportunity to change his intention right up to his last breath.  I thought, “God must really love this man.”

          We all have knowledge of karmic consequences when it comes to deeds.  We know when we say something unkind about someone it may come home to haunt us.  We know that if we embezzle money or steal supplies from our work place, we may be caught and fired.  We understand the law of cause and effect.  I wonder whether we extend that to our intentions, to our very thoughts. 

I remember visiting a medicine man’s compound in Belize many years ago and spending a day with his protégé.  She told us about the ill effects of toxic emotions like jealousy, envy and resentment, and showed us the herbs that the medicine man used to protect people from those who wished them ill.  He firmly believed that angry intentions have consequences both for the people who think them and for the people on the receiving end of them.

Karma is a reality.  Not only is it real, but as we evolve spiritually, the time between cause and effect speeds up.  It is well to be aware of how we think and what intentions are behind our words and deeds.  They will, like the proverbial chickens, come home to roost.

                                        Keeping the faith,

                                        Jane