Tag: Karma

Cause & Effect, Karma, Musings, Postulates, Questions, Rāja yoga, Yoga

Salacious Gossip

One of the perhaps most difficult things to quit, to give up, when one seeks to adopt a “spiritual” way of life is the modern addiction to salacious gossip in all its forms. One could say that gossip is a bedrock of social media and that it sells newspapers and magazines. Humanity lives vicariously through the lives of others presented for our consumption. Gossip is pushed like a wrap of fentanyl laced heroin.

Many would say, “oh no not me, I am not a gossip”. Well they may not be a pusher but they will score a wrap from time to time. This pays the pushers.

Quite a while back I was thoroughly shocked by an old acquaintance from school. We met up and he wanted to know the ins and outs of both my private life and those of anyone we knew in common. I was genuinely surprised because it was so obvious that he was almost salivating. “Really?”, I thought.

I have joked that the collective noun for a group of academics is a gossip of academics.

In principle an academic is detached and has a cool considered oversight. But that is not the case, they seemed obsessed about who got which grant, who has the higher measure of esteem and where people are in the “blessed” league tables.

Lofty pursuance of academic thought, nah. One upmanship and gossip about who is on the up and who is on the down are readily to be found. If there is any sex scandal, all the better. In the past academia had its own version of the casting couch too. Academia gets a metaphorical hard on for scandal. It likes the salacious just like anyone else.

Trungpa suggests that the Ego is forever trying to use spiritual teachings for its own benefit. Thus, gossip about whichever guru may masquerade as intelligent inquiry, when in fact it is just gossip clothed differently.

If you look at various publications you can classify a very large amount of their content as being gossip related and much of it hearsay carefully couched so as to avoid libel court action. It seems we all want to know what people are speculating as to the minds of Harry and William. There are “clairvoyant” royal “experts” who can read their minds for our “benefit”.

I know that at various stages of my life I have been a subject of gossip. The use of “a” is deliberate because I was only one topic amongst a host. It rarely occurs to people that gossip can damage even ruin careers. But people, it seems, cannot resist and love the attention from listeners which a juicy titbit might offer them

—–

“Have you heard about…”

“Really? Well, I never…”

I will make a postulate.

You cannot achieve liberation whilst you are a purveyor and consumer of gossip. If you are in anyway attached to gossip you are not free. You are addicted and suffer from the fear of missing out on the latest juicy and salacious titbit. You damage the web of life by your obsession.

You may be able to do the most complex asana but if gossip has you, then you are simply a bendy gossip.

In order to be free one has to reorient oneself apropos of gossip, maybe go cold turkey.

Here are some questions to help. Honesty instead of justification may help.

Do I like to hear gossip?

Do I find it a tad salacious?

Have I ever damaged anyone by gossiping about them?

Have I ever been damaged by gossip?

Am I perhaps more addicted to gossip than I would like to admit?

Is gossip in any way life enhancing?

Cause & Effect, Climate Change, Karma, Musings, Satire

Escapism and the Saviour Fallacy

Rather than confront inconvenient truths there is a human tendency to engage is escapism. This may be entertainment, politics or a simple refusal to look at and/or accept truths.

“If we carry on just like we are, a fairy godmother will appear. At the swish of her wand the climate crisis will disappear and we can carry on raping the planet and shitting plastic into its oceans.”

—-

The kind of escapism, where only the bearers of good, upbeat news, get voted into power. Is dangerous and myopic.

“There is no problem with climate change, the coronavirus is just like a cold and the Swissies have bailed us all out in CHF, there will be no more repercussions.”

But people will over promise to get into power and then blame someone else when they don’t deliver.

“It is all down to that fairy godmother, she promised she would save us all. She has gone back on her promises, she even wrote a spell on the side of a big red bus! What a cow!”

This onus on some external “saviour” to put everything right, to conquer evil and save our souls aside from being ultra-passive negates our responsibility. There is a chance that Greta Thunberg is seen as a diminutive saviour and an IKEA prepacked answer to climate change. Because she is in the news we can relax and do sweet fanny Adams.

Really?

It is always some bugger else’s job to fix stuff. We can sit here and point the finger wisely and do jack shit.

The idea that Christ came to save our souls, to redeem us from sin, is both convenient and a cop out. It is a fallacy. He came to show the way and not to let us off the hook and do the job for us. The notion of a carte blanche slate wipe is the stuff of lysergic acid induced unicorn dreams. There is no get out of jail free card. It is a justification and an escapism.

Sooner or later the scales of karma await. Place your bets if you do not believe me.

“I know there is a financial crisis. Let us borrow money we don’t have so as to keep the level of services we have become accustomed to. We can always ask Acme Monopoly Inc. to print us some more currency, it is even more environmentally friendly these days. We have computers, there is no need for killing trees to make banknotes. Printing money is eco-friendly. Are we not wonderful green warriors? Don’t worry about the interest payments we can always borrow some more money to cover them.”

Putting stuff off until Monday next week when we can then re-schedule it for the next quarter is unwise and not timely. Of course, we can then reschedule until the next financial year, if it seems convenient so to do and we can thereby avoid any nasty decisions.

“In the context of inflation let us put off HS2 until next year to save money, when due to inflation the prices will be higher…Genius at work!”

The thing is the fairy godmother does not exist. I am sorry to piss on your fire / burst your bubble…

We cannot pin our hopes on a saviour to get us out of this mess, we as a humanity have to change…and swiftly so.

Cause & Effect, Dreams, Karma

Unexploded Karmic Bombs Dream 28-02-23.

Here is the most vivid segment of last night’s dream.

——

I know that the dream is set in England, it is in London, the home counties and Cambridgeshire. In the dream the lighting of the gardens is pink-yellow and of the in between. I cannot be sure if it is dawn or dusk, nor if the light has been altered by Saharan sand in the air.

In the dream I am indoors looking out onto successive back gardens which vary in size and composition. I am moving between gardens and viewpoints.  In London, I see in a number of different gardens, small bombs fall from the sky, one or two per garden. They land tail fin up and I know that these bombs are karmic bombs, which will detonate one day {soon}. The karma will then be irrevocably released.

The same pattern is repeated for several gardens which I know to be in the home counties close to London. The bombs are of varying sizes, some big and others quite small. The scene moves on to a bigger garden which I know to be in Cambridgeshire. Here again bombs fall from the sky and implant in the earth. They are of varying size and one of them, which is ticking, is quite large.

I know in the dream that people do not believe in karmic bombs and as a consequence they will not take any action to address karma which they think may not manifest. People think that they have gotten away with it. I know in the dream that this attitude is a very grave mistake. There are more karmic bombs to fall from the sky.

Dream ends…

ॐ, Cause & Effect, Climate Change, Esoteric, Esoteric Psychology, Karma, Magic, Musings, New Age, Quotations, Rāja yoga, Vision, Yoga

Training for the Incoming Ray: Ceremonial Order or Magic – Synthesis

—————

“The Seventh Ray of Ceremonial Order or Magic

Special Virtues:

Strength, perseverance, courage, courtesy, extreme care in details, self-reliance.

Vices of Ray:

Formalism, bigotry, pride, narrowness, superficial judgments, self-opinion over-indulged.

Virtues to be acquired:

Realization of unity, wide-mindedness, tolerance, humility, gentleness and love.

This is the ceremonial ray, the ray which makes a man delight in “all things done decently and in order,” and according to rule and precedent. It is the ray of the high priest and the court chamberlain, of the soldier who is a born genius in organization, of the ideal commissary general who will dress and feed the troops in the best possible way. It is the ray of the perfect nurse for the sick, careful in the smallest detail, though sometimes too much inclined to disregard the patients idiosyncrasies and to try and grind them in the iron mill of routine.

It is the ray of form, of the perfect sculptor, who sees and produces ideal beauty, of the designer of beautiful forms and patterns of any sort; but such a man would not be successful as a painter unless his influencing ray were the fourth. The combination of four with seven would make the very highest type of artist, form and color being both in excelsis. The literary work of the seventh ray man would be remarkable for its ultra-polished style, and such a writer would think far more of the manner than of the matter in his work but would always be fluent both in writing and speech. The seventh ray man will often be sectarian. He will delight in fixed ceremonials and observances, in great processions and shows, in reviews of troops and warships, in genealogical trees, and in rules of precedence.”

———————–

As I may have mentioned before my personality ray is ray seven. If you look closely you will be able to see the influence in the blog content.

The incoming ray is this ray ceremonial order or magic. Inherent in this is a major challenge for humanity, which so often is disorganised and in disarray. Winging it, is not seventh ray. The seventh ray may be précised as “the ray of having your shit together”. This is a long way from higgledy-piggledy and in some ways anti-hippie but in other ways it is the ray, par excellence, of natural rhythm. Everything should be in synch and on time with natural law and rhythm.

Yes, ritual traditional magic, craft, and mantra are a part, but only a small one.

Organisation, vivification, and energising are what proper order brings. An organism needs to organise and carry out its given physical plane learning. Karma can be thought of as residual “shit” that you have to deal with. Hence in working off your shit you get your shit together, less new karma, debt paid off.

Many people resist being organised and have never experienced the slick and the smooth of all cogs working in unison. People who are self-obsessed are separative and do not view themselves as part of the holistic whole. ME is a luddite spanner in the works. It causes discordance and discord, dis-chord, the sound jars.

The challenge of the incoming ray is to eradicate this notion of self and alchemize it into the holistic-whole, or ONE. The one humanity.

To say to a sloppy ill disciplined person, who is fond of the weird and the whacky, that they need to have their shit together is to ask for resistance.

“Hey man, that is not New Age!”

“Yes, it is! Get a haircut and pull up your trousers. You need to focus and stop being so dissipated!”

If one meanders and only cherry picks the easy fruit off the tree of teaching, then one will not taste the golden apples higher up the tree, which need more and continued effort to attain. Many choose only those teachings that are strap-on to normal life. Few want radical change. One could say people want to keep their cherry pie and eat it.

The seventh ray is also the ray of constant evolution and application. This is because Synthesis takes new learning and incorporates it with the knowledge heretofore garnered. Knowledge is never complete, because of constant synthesis one could say that knowing is a present participle synonym of evolving, knowledge relates to evolution. True knowledge cannot ever be concrete and finished.

Synthesis is an antithesis of Idealism and Devotion, the departing sixth ray. Sixth ray separates, cleaves and divides, seventh ray heals, stitches the rent wounds of division and stirs its synthetic pot of alchemy in search of the new.   

The seventh ray is unlike the division with which our current world is so very badly scarred!!

It is time to synthesise and not cleave, the synthetic cauldron of inspiration must overcome the axe of cleavage.

Cause & Effect, Karma, Questions

The Karma of Secrets

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The first thing to say abouts secrets is that they all in some way itch, they itch at being. The second thing to say is that secrets bind. Secrets also have a tendency to infect and cause fear in their purveyors. They nearly always generate new Karma to be worked with and sometimes, though not always, have a habit of surfacing at the most inconvenient of times. Some secrets are carried to the grave. Organisations, governments and people use secrets when they think it expedient. Avoiding a problem today often stores it up for tomorrow.

People are fascinated by secrets. Fascination binds.

This fascination is by way of a glamour and an attachment. Because most know that secrets are “naughty” they come with a certain salaciousness and a sense of privilege. Some how the possessors and purveyors of secrets are better than others, they are in the know, others are in the dark.

Exactly who is in the dark and who is in the light, is a moot point, often unconsidered.

From a point of liberation what is most germane is their binding conspiratorial nature. If you share a secret, you share the breath of that secret, you conspire and breathe it together. Whispers in the dark, keep you in the dark, for fear of light.

The two major cause of secrets are lack of impeccability and lack of courage. If you are impeccable there is never any need for secrets.

Anything, any act, which binds you, is not good for liberation.

I suspect that there is not a being alive who has never lied nor never held a secret, at some stage or another. It is the Karma, the Dharma, of holding a secret that needs learned from. There is nothing quite like real life experience to teach.

The cure for secrets is impeccability.

It is as simple as this. If you are utterly impeccable you will never feel the need to lie or hold secrets. You may not feel the urge to spill the beans on everything you know, yet if the time to speak on it comes, there is no secret, no attachment.

People are attached to secrets. Beings often cannot move past a secret. They are log jams in evolution.

Often the secret, held deep and hidden, is no way near as bad as people have built it up to be. Its revelation seldom causes a tsunami nor the explosion of the sun. Some secrets are bad and these eat and itch at the being all of their lives.

Secrets cause suffering!

It is a matter for each individual as to which secrets they keep. One could try airing a few of these to see if God strikes you down. Theory has it He knows in any case. Much of the suffering associated with secrets is SELF generated for the SELF is what keeps or shares secrets, so as to bolster its SELF IMAGE.

As I have mentioned before, Karma is for learning by and from.

Have I ever kept a secret? Have I shared secrets about others? What have I learned through this? What am I still learning from this?

Cause & Effect, Karma, Questions

Karma and Punishment

It is a peculiar fascination of humanity, punishment. Where exactly this fascination has come from is difficult to say, yet it stretches back a very long way. People want to see misdemeanour punished and often severely so. This fascination is crowd pleasing and public punishment, a popular spectator sport. The concept of punishment ranges from the gruesome and capital down to the petty and malicious. The more public someone’s punishment, the better. Humans seem to like to humiliate each other.

Punishment can be corporeal, financial, sexual and psychological. Rarely is it motivated solely to educate. More often than not the motivation is wrathful and vengeful. Humans want to “teach someone a lesson!”. They want to get even and go one better for any imagined slight. People hold grudges for very long times and often wait to strike. Festering thus, they do not live.

So precious are some that even a hint of disagreement or differing opinion, calls forth punitive reactions. People are punished as a deterrent to relating, the hot oil is poured from the ramparts. They are punished for not doing exactly what someone wants. They are punished for doing exactly what someone wants. Some people simply punish life because they are pissed off about ever being born. Punishment takes on a myriad of forms, its basis is to hurt or wound another being. How this makes the world a better place, I do not understand.

The world has a big hang up about punishment.

Perhaps this harkens back to the Old Testament and wrathful Jehovah, but I suspect it predates that. Some people like to get punished because it then allows them to justify wrong doing. Some people enjoy being punished! People are odd…

Because people enjoy punishing others they project their fascination upon others. They think that others want to punish too. They cannot believe that other people do not act from the same orientation as them. Perhaps they project their punishment hang up onto God and even Karma.

Karma does not punish it simply shows cause and effect.

—

The emotional colouration that Karma is punishing people for past deeds, is a human invention. There is simply cause and effect. The universe is not an emotional punitive thing. It does not hold grudges, nor does it sulk.

Strangely being punished can cause a sense of camaraderie amongst the “victims” of punishment. It can bind people together against the “punisher”. People can bemoan that the universe, luck or fortune, has it in for them. They could also try to understand how they caused their present circumstance.

Many who are “punished” seek to pass this on. Punishment can cause more punitive behaviour. This is a part of the Karma of punishing, it is cyclic.

If one does not engage in tit-for-tat cycles of punishment this can cause bewilderment and an escalation of “punishment” until retribution is triggered. Bonkers!!

Justice, I hear you cry. Killing a murderer is a tad hypocritical.

I am not going to get drawn into social methods of government and law. What I wish to point at are the motives for punishment. People justify punishing yet this hides some pretty murky, often base and cruel, motivations. Behind the facade there is nasty stuff motivated by ire and bitterness. In order to be free people need to address and transcend this suffering which they have inside. That way they will cease to want to propagate it.

In many cases the punishment rebounds upon the punisher in some way or other. This is due to the intent behind punishment.

This is because the universe works via intent. If you intend harm with malignant motive, it reflects back. This way the universe balances itself. The universe is more often than not, simply a mirror. It does not colour what impinges upon it, it simply reflects it. The universe and Karma do not punish. The being, in effect, punishes itself.

In all journeys towards liberation, understanding motive, whether pleasant or otherwise, is a key to progress. If you can unpick and transform malignant motive, the world will be a better place and you will suffer less.

Do I like to punish others? What are my motives for that? In reality what have I ever learned through punishing?

Cause & Effect, Karma

When the Fruit of Karma Ripens

King Cnut allegedly tried to deter the tide and the waves. He was by legend unsuccessful in his endeavour.

When the fruit of karma ripens it can do so over a protracted period or very quickly. The fruit of karma can turn sour and maggot filled rather quickly. Its taste can be perceived as being bitter.

Karma is often symmetric. In that the time taken to build the karma may be reflected in the time of its ripening. Karma built up over years can unwind slowly, inexorably, and painfully.

Sometimes karma unravels the clever and cunning plans of mankind over a very short time leading to an apparent crisis in the lives around which the karma is wrapped and wound. The ripening karma can move like a rip tide through the lives of those who seek to ward off the ripening. Those who try to get away with it can find karma unsympathetic to their desires.

The only sure thing is that when the fruit of karma starts to ripen, it is an irreversible process…time’s arrow only goes one way…

Cause & Effect, Karma, Musings, Personal Development, Questions

Trying to Get Away with It and Karma

In the past the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope in particular had a nice little side hustle. This was to sell indulgences to rich people who were filling their pants at the prospect of purgatory and hell because they had not adhered to creed and had been naughty boys and girls. The logic was pay some money and get away with your sins, have a better time in the afterlife for quite a few quid. Nowhere in scripture is a papal get out of jail free card mentioned. It certainly showed some business acumen. The geezer who bought the indulgence could not exactly come back and complain asking for his money back.

—

This “trying to get away with it” mentality is pervasive in our times. Whilst we may not be held to account by other humans and thereby appear to have gotten away with it {phew}. Have we fooled the universe, have we outsmarted karma? Trying to outsmart karma is like raising one’s middle finger to karma and saying, “look at me I am way cleverer than you are, you imaginary thing. You, karma, do not exist. Only brown people, Asians and hippies believe in you! I can have life on my own terms. I am in control of this life!”

We each of us place our bets as to which world model applies. When the croupier calls time and death taps us on the shoulder pointing at his diary to the slot with our name on it, we get to find out if we backed the right horse.

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In our times passing the buck and pointing the finger of blame are ways of trying to refuse responsibility for our own actions. Trouble is if that works once, it becomes habitual, and  we sink deeper into the mire of excuse. Our spine shrivels and we can no longer walk tall. Excuse never changes deed, even if we pull the wool over the eyes of our fellow humans. Shabby remains shabby in the all seeing eyes of karma and the universe. There can be desperation as the onion layers of excuse start to unravel. Moral compasses these days are not as reliable as they once were.

————————

Do you own and take responsibility for your own words and deeds?

Or do you have a trying to get away with it mentality?

Cause & Effect, Karma, Personal Development, Towards Freedom, Yoga

Towards Freedom – Fate

In this pamphlet I have discussed in general terms freedom, equanimity and balance, now there is this controversial idea of fate. Fate implies karma a concept that underpins eastern thinking, but which is less popular in the west. Nevertheless, cause and effect are a major part of scientific method. Newtonian mechanics are taught widely. There is a disconnect because we accept this concept in the world of things but are less comfortable in the world of people. The consequence of cause and effect is karma and the summation of karma is fate. It does not take too much to see how some acts, some words even, cause things in the world of people. There are consequences to our actions, so although not expressed as karma, karma it is. As a rule, people fail to acknowledge just how much interconnectivity there is, this is because responsibility tends to be avoided. There is some immature childish behaviour which suggests that so long as one does not get caught there are no consequences for the person acting. There may be consequences for the person acted upon, but they do not matter provided deniability holds.

It is convenient to imagine that God and sin do not exist and that there is no reckoning for indulgence, for enacting every whim as and when. If you look around this mentality can be found easily. Provided that there is some perceived advantage many do not care less what they do nor how it affects others. They inflict themselves, their wants, desires and ambitions in a willy-nilly fashion. Yet there it is unspoken, unacknowledged and ignored, cause and effect. If you don’t like the word karma, these will suffice.

What has fate got to do with freedom?

If you are reading this tract, then at some level the idea of freedom is of interest. The circumstances of this life and perhaps the others that went before, have lead you here, today, to this.  All the actions you have done, each cause has effected your life, so that as a consequence you are here, right now, reading this. It is your fate to read it. What you do subsequently is up to you. Fate has lead you here. You could argue that this is mere coincidence. But what has caused things to co-incide? Is it pure chance or has your education, place of birth and career made it possible? Has your life always been heading directly at this moment, however fleeting it may be?

Advocates of free will may put it down to choices made. But the summation of those choices has had the effect. At any point different choices could have been made, but they weren’t.

Without being specific if you are considering freedom then perhaps you were fated so to do, by your life experience. Otherwise you would be like many, unquestioning. What matters most is the next football match, the next soap opera episode or the “news” and gossip on Facebook. Somehow, you the reader have found yourself in an eddy in the stream, away from the current of modern living, with sufficient curiosity to be reading this. The odds against this are quite high. There are seven billion people on the planet yet here you are. For how long, who can say?

There may be a counter-intuitive problem with the very notions of fate and freedom. If something is fated, then it implies a lack of freedom. This is a kind of logic. Yet if freedom is your fate and you are fated to be free, then you have to follow that fate. There is freedom in evolving that fate in the general direction of freedom, one can’t avoid the fate, but one can be free in following it. This is as opposed to trying to shoe horn your existence into one of the available life templates extant in the epoch of your birth. Cutting a swathe through life which differs from the societally pre-ordained is much more liberating. Being able to think for and by yourself is less constrained and blinkered. Stepping outside of the hive to inhale the fresh air, if so fated, is fresh.

In order to get to a position where the tried and tested holds less pull, there has to be work on self, this is a cause and the effect is an increasing sensation of freedom. This is karma in action and the evolution of a fate, it is not succumbing. In various philosophies all that you do in this life is an effect of all that has gone on before in others. In this sense each life has a fate and the summation of all fates is your destiny. If it is your destiny to acquire more freedom, then surely that is the only acquisition worth anything in the long term; especially given the impermanence of the material and the social. One could say that of all the fates available, freedom is not a bad hand to be dealt.

Thus, we each of us contribute to our evolving fate by every single action, each thought and how we respond to life. If it is your fate to not yet contemplate freedom in a meaningful way, then you are not yet ready for freedom. Any act may do it, may turn you towards freedom and the quest of it. Freedom cannot be hurried, it can only come when one is prepared for it. If you are fated to start out on such a quest, then there is nothing that you can do to stop it. You can however stymie and hinder it by being stubborn. Pause for a moment and consider; is there any freedom in being stubborn? The only freedom is to express pig-headed mind, not an altogether free state of being.

If you discount the concept of fate, then within the logic of fate, you are fated so to do. We each have to learn. And such a discounting is an effect of your state of mind, your education and your peer group influences. These have caused your current mental make-up and operative world version through which you interpret the physical and social world. You alone have not made up your mind, others have influenced you, so free will isn’t as free as. Whilst we might like the ideal of free will, in practice no being lives and evolves in isolation. The only thing that one can hope to control in any sense of entirety is one’s own mind. It is not as easy as it sounds.

This urge to freedom comes as a response to life, largely when the dissatisfaction grows, and its illusory quality is sensed. Beyond this threshold there is a whole bunch of work and only if that work causes a deeper understanding can one effect, that is make real, a growing sense of genuine mental autonomy and freedom.

If it is your fate to seek freedom, then in time it must be also your destiny. To this end application to task must be unceasing, and unhurried. One needs to be mindful of distraction and avoidance, because some of the things needed to achieve freedom are both scary and at first difficult. Your fate will ask them of you and if you are to evolve your fate then best get on with it. You had better take responsibility for your words, acts and deeds so as to become an authentic being and as authenticity increases so does freedom. It is not a bad fate, nor an unworthy quest, this freedom thing.