Workings of Karma

We live a life of making and clearing karma. Our actions create reactions which later on return to us. This is not a concept of Eastern thought, it exists all over the world, in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions and philosophies. What goes around comes around. The best thing you can do for yourself is being good to the world around you.

It is said that the people we choose to have close relationships in this life, are people we have some karma to sort out from a distant past life. I don’t know about reincarnation, but I know some relationships I had, either sexual or not, were clearly karmic, they released me from a past burden by teaching me a lesson. Yet some relationships create more karma and leave us with a lesson we still have to learn in the future. The art of relationships is in letting it live its course so we can be released from some past karmic burden while avoiding to create more of it. It’s not easy but is necessary for our eventual ‘liberation’.

At the moment I’m very happy that with Maya, we managed to see our lessons and let the relationship evolve into something else without waiting for a heavy heart to force us do it, after having created a whole lot of new karma. I give thanks that she came into my life again, in this lifetime, and together we untangled ourselves from some past stories. When we were together, I felt blessed that it was Maya I had with me to do this with. And now I feel blessed to have received this lesson through her.

But it’s not always like this, things don’t work out so smoothly and we don’t take life’s lessons so easily. Some years ago I had a hard lesson which took some time to be digested. In short I felt betrayed by a close friend who went a bit too far consoling my partner during our hard times. While I was trying to give this some kind of meaning, I had to deal with the pain of the sudden cut of communication. My first reaction was more like “I’ll go and kill him” but having never even hit someone in this lifetime, I decided to talk to him and when I tried to do this what came from my mouth was more like “if you make her unhappy you’ll regret it but anyway sooner or later you’ll pay for what you have done. I deliver you to God.” But the understanding of this came later.

I had few events in my life where I felt powerless against the events that were controlling my life. In such cases, when I resisted them things got more tangled, but when I flowed along with them things also flowed. Flow is surrender, surrender to God, to karma, acknowledging that the best thing one can do is to start any action knowing that what one will experience at the end of it is what one needs to experience. I have a few incidents of “magical” escapes from “certain” disasters when I surrendered. But it is not always easy to be awake when in hardship and pain.

So when I said “I deliver you to God” I was acting out of a feeling of being powerless against my destiny. But later, when the pain subsided, I remembered that it was just stating a fact. I realized, of course, he would pay for his betrayal and there was nothing I could do about it, no punishment I could deliver without creating even more karma. In my frustrated state I wrote a couple of angry e-mails and I know it’s likely that this will one day bounce back at me. But I learned to trust the Universe, God or whatever we may call it, to deliver all our lessons. And to see what I have already lived as some necessary test I had to pass.

Recently I heard that she has left him with another member of their music band, a close friend of theirs, and that he, the friend who took her from me, is in much pain these days. I cannot be happy about this. There is no feeling of accomplishment here. It’s not like I had put a curse and it worked, I prayed for his suffering and it was heard or something like that. It would happen anyway. In fact, I’m surprised to see it happen so fast, and I’m surprised that I sympathize with his pain. I know he remembers and understands me now, so a circle of karma is complete. We all get our lessons. I hope nobody ever experiences the same pain I had to endure to learn my lesson.

On the other hand I say “what about her? What a bitch! What kind of karmic landslide is waiting for her?” But she will learn. We all learn, sooner or later, in this lifetime or the next.

Workings of karma is profound and we don’t have to understand how it works all the time but every once in a while we are given a sign to remember it always does. Then we shall ask: do we ever learn?

“If I were embarking upon the way anew, my plea would be:
‘Teach me how to learn and what to study.’
And even before that ‘Let me really wish to learn how to learn,
as a true aspiration, not simply in self-pretence.’”

Kwaja Ali Ramitani