Karma (part 3)

See Part 1 & 2… (continued)

So back to how I believe the Universe works and how “karma/darma” operates. The Universe is intelligence beyond our comprehension.  Ours is one of an infinite number of Universes and ours is one of an infinite number of dimensions. The best way to describe it is a circle within a circle within a circle forever smaller and larger than the circle we occupy. The Great Intelligence is infinite in every direction without beginning or end. It does not directly create, have judgment or take sides.

Actually, it is my belief that the Great Intelligence (I don’t want to call it God or Goddess because these terms are to anthropomorphic and loaded) is an energetic field in and part of all of creation – meaning each of us carries a piece of this animating force known in occult literature as the Higher Self or in religious vernacular, the soul.

So we literally have direct access to the Great Intelligence. All of us are equally connected, equally a part of this Great Intelligence as the Great Intelligence experiences/learns and grows through our processes of individuation which is also and equally a part of the Great Intelligences’ individuation and growth process – in other words we are one and the same, all of creation is directly linked to the Great Intelligence.

This being said, conversely the Great Intelligence is eternal, all-knowing, pure unconditional love. And I don’t mean love as an emotion, but love as a beingness or energetic glue of oneness which in our language is best expressed as love. The Great Intelligence is in a constant state of creative evolution and experiences all of Itself (of which I’m including you, I, and everything in the Everythingness) as an extension of itself. The Great Intelligence does not possess human emotions, motives or anything we can remotely wrap our heads around. This is where karma/darma comes in. Each Universe is set up with a set of rules and conditions that those who occupy that Universe must abide by. Our Universe is dualistic; we have light and dark, good and evil, black and white, man and woman and all that lay in-between these opposites.

In our Universe we can not know one side without experiencing the other. It is through contrast that we learn and evolve, for whatever reason this is the path our soul took in this lifetime to learn whatever it needed to in order to further our own individuation and add to the collective growth/knowledge and self-understanding of the Great Intelligence. Or, hey, maybe we just like it and find it fun and entertaining.

We know through science that time is an illusion and actually as quantum physics evolves (through string theory) the notion of parallel dimensions has become a primary component, without this string theory is rendered useless. Just by extrapolation of this theory (which dovetails well with ancient occult teachings) there are endless versions of our world where: you are born, you are not born, you decide to marry, not marry, have children, not have children, etc. And of course you are but one component of the endless possibilities and how all these things coalesce to make for the current universe we inhabit. In a sense karma helps to keep the balance among all these possibilities, without this law our souls could not make the connection between the light and dark or between action and reaction.

Karma in other words is the connective tissue between the call and the answer. I don’t believe it is punishment or favor. It is nothing more than a universal law set up so we may understand how our actions create and effect our world, loved ones, future trajectories, and really everything.

In eastern religions it is thought that we are on a wheel of Samsara or suffering. That our world is a kind of purgatory from which the ultimate goal is to ascend. I don’t believe that either. In this version of karma the idea is to reach a state of karma-lessness through meditation, and never causing injury (or help for that matter) to anything whether it be ant or human. The problem with this idea is (of which there are many in my opinion) is in order to live someone else has to die, be that plant, animal or even microbes that one breathes. There is no escaping the impact one will have by the very act of being alive. And hiding away on a mountain to meditate all night and day, eating only things without faces is a form of escapism (in my opinion, not that one doesn’t learn a lot about the soul and ones connection to the Great Intelligence this way, one does, and there is great wisdom to garner from a lifetime spent in meditation, but it won’t get anyone off the wheel).

I have this opinion because I would like nothing more than to spend all day in a tower meditating, having someone else put some bread and a bowl of soup at my door for me to “evolve” off the wheel of Samsara. But from my own memories I’ve spent many lifetimes doing just that, and I’m still here. And we have the example of the Dali Lama who keeps coming back despite leading countless ascetic hermetic lives. I’ve had to make a conscious effort not to hide away in this lifetime because I realized life was and is meant to be lived, mistakes are meant to be, and one moves off the wheel, or off this planet whenever one feels he or she is ready. It’s really that simple. What isn’t simple is our souls are far wiser than we are and hold us to a standard not easy to pass until we are truly ready and have exhausted all growth needed to move on

….In other words I believe we participate out of choice, a choice to grow and become greater than we started and whatever it is in the human experience that moves us forward, it is one of many experiences our soul will have in its eternal life. And we can choice to incarnate here or there or wherever. We have to play by the rules of the game we get into and that is that. Let’s face it hanging on the astral plane and reading the Akashic records all day would get pretty boring after awhile and one would hunger for a new way to experience the self just as the Great Intelligence hungers to grow more intelligent and to experience the self through all of Its many facets and pieces.

In part 4 I’ll talk about heaven and hell…

Best to all,

Denise

Karma (part 2) new

So in my opinion karma/darma is one in a set of governing laws provided as boundaries/laws which evolved to move us and the Great Intelligence (of which we are one with) forward. Christ said, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within,” a quote often overlooked and in many ways misunderstood. What he meant isn’t you can find internal peace or happiness inside, but that the way to Heaven (or the Great Intelligence) is through the divine part of the self, the part that is at one with the Great Intelligence, the part that returns to the eternal oneness, the part that is itself eternal just as the Great Intelligence is, sometimes referred to as the soul, spirit, higher-self.

We are like innumerable sparks taken from the Great Intelligence, cast out by It on myriad of adventures to expand, grow and bring back greater knowledge of the Great Self.

I had a knowing in my early 20s that we were all Individual and all One at the same time. That the nature of our dualistic universe does not allow us to see beyond Ain Soph to Kether. These restrictions are placed on us so we will stay grounded in our agreed upon time and space, so we may interact in order to learn the lessons we feel we need to learn in order to grow.

As odd as it seems, it’s been my experience and belief that to a lesser or greater degree we are co-creators of our lives. I do not believe in The Secret‘s idea of this. It is far more complicated, delicate and random than the New Age has sold this idea. I do not believe people born into poverty or to terrible parents did awful things in their past lives. Chances are better that these are highly evolved souls who choose a more difficult path, one they knew would be fraught with sacrifice and hardship in order to learn far more than those who live an easy life.

I do not believe being wealthy, famous or born into those privileges are a blessing. Instead I believe they create distortion, a bubble of isolation, misunderstanding of the world around, often a lack of empathy, a feeling of aimlessness and self-absorption. Faust sold his soul to the devil for fame and fortune and indeed this metaphor is apt. In our narcissistic culture it seems everyone is all too ready to sell even their children soul (such as Balloon Man) for a taste of fame – a tiny rush of power and a chance at prosperity.

Yet all that we seek here in the west, fame, fortune, power over others – those things that have become hallmarks of being “special,” actually take us away from the true experience of life and those things that are actually precious. It is no accident that Christ said, “It’s easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man into the kingdom of heaven.” And what he meant was: the more one looks outward for reward (through riches, power, fame) the further one gets from their connection to God/Great Intelligence as they fall into a bubble of narcissistic power tripping that others are all to happy to indulge due to their own ego driven narcissistic tendencies.

Take for example the recent example of Andrew Young’s book The Politician which exemplifies this idea. From Young’s interview (I haven’t read the book yet) he seemed to lack insight and of course this was and is to his benefit. He sold his soul to be close to power. John Edwards may have been his devil, but Young was surely Faust, and his attempt to purge his conscious and clear his name lacked the same insight. He didn’t seem to understand the position Elizabeth Edwards was put in, or have much compassion for her – a woman who was diagnosed with cancer and had her husband lie and cheat on her. I suppose this was because his ego was bruised from his participation in her injury and the fact that she took out her anger on him in her desire to believe her husband. I’m not saying she was perfect or that she didn’t have issues. But it’s clear that she was a typical woman, she’d been in love and married to the same man (faithfully) for 30 years. Gone through the loss of a child with this man, supported his dreams and sublimated her own desires for his. Young mentioned that they had an “odd” relationship, that Elizabeth was more like a mother than anything else to John.

Well, this is often the case when both partners are in love with the same person – in other words she was in love with a narcissist, but I’d hate to give narcissists such a bad name, I think we can go several steps farther and say this man was more likely a non-violent sociopath (they do exist – an excellent book on the topic is called The Sociopath Next Door). John Edwards not only lacked empathy, he was pathological in his lack of care for those he “loved.” His crazed narcissistic high was so great he was willing to throw everyone,  under the bus, including his dying wife, his best friends, his mistress and the whole of the Democratic Party for his own selfish ambition. Let’s face it if the dude had gotten the nomination and his affair and love child came out then, well, hey we’d have 8 years with Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the red button. That to me proves he is at the darkest levels of selfishness besides his pathological lying, cheating and general douchbaggery.

Part 3 of karma tomorrow…

Answering Readers!

From Hope and a Plan:

I have been thinking about string theory a lot in the past week and about physics and how electrons take every single path to get from a to b.  I wonder if that isnt a physics metaphor for how we are either taking every single path as humans or our incarnations are all happening at the same time.  And if so, are all of our multiple selves impacting karmically each other?  What if we personally create a butterfly effect across dimensions (life times) impacting not only all of life which is energy in the here and now but elsewhere?  I’d love to know your thoughts…  Thanks again for a terrific subject!

Hi Hope and a Plan,

I’m glad you brought up the idea of multiple selves across time and the idea that they are impacting one another. This is something I’ve thought about due to a series of dreams I had that I was a colonist on Mars. Strangely, I met another woman around the same period who was also having similar dreams. We were (and are) both Aquarians and when comparing our dreams found they were bizarely similar. The structures in the dream were nearly identical and the small number of colonists, all the details. It sort of freaked me out at the time and I didn’t know what it meant. In retrospect I think she was actually someone who I have a future karmic tie to and we met in this life for a brief period perhaps to set something up for that lifetime which was why we were both having these dreams around the time we met each other.

Since time is pliable and really an illusion I’ve wondered if our other selves could not only be living in different times but different time trajectories. Meaning histories that could have been and futures that will be if only certain things happen. Perhaps our decision to incarnate at a collective time/space is an attempt to rectify the past and the future, shaping for the better our personal and collective evolution.

I remember as a child being confused that certain things hadn’t been invented as I had assumed things worked in a certain way such as computerization. When I found out that people actually drew the pictures for animated films I was shocked. There were a lot of things invented in my lifetime that I assumed were already here when I was young which led me to believe I had lived in the future at a certain point and came back in time to this point. I think we incarnate in this way skipping backward and forward across time for various reasons. It isn’t linear as we are led to believe by traditional ideas of reincarnation.

I think you are right about the idea of a butterfly effect which is why we skip across time and incarnate in ancient Egypt and then as a colonist on Mars, as each life effects the whole more like a globe of energy being added to by our decisions and incarnations, then a point in space/time that moves in linear fashion.

Which leads to this next question from Wei:

Denise, Could Zoma be your higher self?  Someone you were at one point?  Interesting that you found a historical reference, must have been quite a person.  I worry about channeling because of the intentions of the spirit coming through, but as long as you know what you’re doing.  It’s an interesting subject and I have no doubt channeling is real.

Hi Wei,

I have wondered that myself and actually thought it was my higher self until I found the ancient Jewish mystic and philosopher who bore that name. And then I wondered the same thing, perhaps he’s me from another life? I don’t know. When Zoma first came to me the feeling was very extraterrestrial and Zoma actually called itself “we.” It appeared as a collective group of souls or so I felt at the time. And it had a similar vibe to my experiences with Enochian energy.

But I was also more afraid of my psychic ability then and it had a dark side (probably due to my turbulent childhood). As I’ve matured my ability has become earthed more in my personality and my body which has been an interesting experience and hard to really explain. Instead of going out of my body to get information I now go inward and trace things through lines and trails usually through my heart chakra. And actually at the end of a reading I feel this overwhelming unconditional love for the person I read for due to this method.

My ability feels completely integrated unlike when I was younger. My new experiences with Zoma feel more like he is a part of myself. Even his tone and energy seem like a spiritually evolved human and not like some freaky extraterrestrial Enochian angelic force. This makes me believe that Zoma is a part of me which is why I was really the only person who could channel it/him when I was younger.

I do believe we all have a Zoma though, some part of ourselves (aka the higher self) that knows pretty much everything, is omniscient and one with God/Goddess/Universe. I have no idea why some people can access this and others can not, but I think it probably has something to do with our path in life and how we set this life up. Some of us really don’t need to be in touch with that part of our-self because our life lessons are grounded very much in the material plane. Just like I’m athletically (severly) challenged (and I mean that literally) some people are cut off from their intuition. I have one friend from high school who told me she never had so much as a Deja Vu’ or any  kind of intuition or any experience with feeling the presence of God/Goddess or really any kind of remotely psychic experience. And I know this to be true because I took a trip with her in the 1980s to New York and she didn’t even get a bad feeling when we walked through Times Square. She was totally clueless to the creepy, leering energy there, it was odd as if she had not even any primitive animal instinct for danger. For some reason she chose to be blind in this way for this lifetime perhaps to concentrate on other things. She’s a brilliant person and artist, but has not one iota of intuition. Just like I have not one iota of athletic talent.

I can only suppose we design our life time to fit our lessons and take the tools we need to fulfill our purpose leaving behind things that would distract us. The problem for most people though is they undervalue or devalue their gifts and spend far too much time lamenting what they feel they are lacking. I think this is one of the hardest lessons of all. We each admire others for the things we feel are missing from ourselves and dismiss what we are meant to give. It’s not an easy lesson. I’m only beginning to come to terms with these issues myself.

Many blessings to all,

Denise

An Interesting Question about the Universe from a Reader…

Here’s the question from a fellow reader who e-mailed this to me:

Here goes, if I can express my question lucidly:

Most of physical matter appears to be contained within something else. For example, protons and electrons are contained within atoms, and atoms are a part of all matter. All organisms found on this planet are contained on this planet which itself is contained within the solar system which in turn is contained within a galaxy which is considered a part of the universe which is thought to be INFINITE. So, going with this theme, in what is the UNIVERSE contained? If it is contained in something bigger than itself, then the universe is FINITE. If our UNIVERSE is contained in something else, then is that SOMETHING ELSE contained within something else, and so on and so on?

Is this a different paradigm for analyzing our ‘UNIVERSE’ around us or Am I Just Being Silly?!! 🙂

Here’s my answer:

There are some interesting new theories about this very question and some answers have come from String Theory. I’ll try to do a descent job of explaining what I’ve read on the subject and of course it will be in layman’s language and hopefully I won’t butcher any of the ideas too badly, so here goes. The first thing about string theory is the ideas in it are complicated and require something like at least 11 parallel dimensions in order for the theory to even work. The string part of string theory is derived from the notion that beyond the smallest known particles like quarks (which behave very unusually and in many ways prove some esoteric ideas, but that’s another story) are the tiniest of the tiniest bits that make up all known things. And once clumped together into something they take on certain characteristics. These strings are ubber tiny strings that vibrate and it is through their vibration that they attract other like strings and make stuff. I love this idea as the universe would literally be made up of inaudible music created from the tiny strings. So these strings vibrate at a certain pitch and collect to make different sorts of bigger compounds.

But the most interesting part of String Theory is the question that it set out to answer which was the notion of how did the Big Bang happen? Or what came before the Big Bang? And something to note here is that the Big Bang is a more complicated idea than most of us are taught, here’s a brief synopsis. All of a sudden space-time blasted into being, it started out very hot and very close together and has been pushing out since then. The part that we often misunderstand is the notion of space-time which is a complicated idea. Literally everything that exits in the Universe, all of time and space was created in that one moment which came from nothing. That’s a pretty heavy and strange idea.

Now the beautiful thing about String Theory, and in my opinion where it dovetails with the metaphors of all religions and the notion of “as above so below,” is the idea that what created the Big Bang was a bunch of universes all sort of floating around in what is now called a multiverse and two of these universes happened to collide into one another thus creating our universe (sort of like sex or the idea of the Goddess and the God or in esoteric Judaic and Christian traditions, the notion of God and his female soul Sophia or the feminine side of God co-creating the Universe).  Of course one then asks where did this multiverse come from and so on which is the appeal of the easy answer/creationism/intelligent design.

Here’s the thing from my own personal experience that leads me to believe String Theory is about as close as we’ve in come, in science, to the truth. When I was 12 my back was fractured and I had a herniated disc. I was put on bed rest for about 7 months. My father was dead by this time and my mother worked, so I spent 95% of my days alone. Besides watching Oprah on my little black and white TV there wasn’t much to do so I spent a lot of time, reading, thinking and meditating. A lot of my meditation was spent on God and how the Universe came to be as I was always psychic and very fascinated by this question. I had started my search for answers at about 9 when I began reading astronomy textbooks to learn about what made up the universe and peer into any clue I could find about how it worked. I found a lot of information about dwarf stars, black holes (which were still theoretical at the time) and approximations of how many stars were in our galaxy (about 300,000) but not much about how the universe came to be which I found very frustrating. I then searched through my  occult books, the bible, mythology, etc.

Again nothing satisfied so I thought about it and spent many days and nights meditating on the question until I came to the knowing that the Universe was like a circle within a circle within a circle. There was no end and no beginning, these circles went on for infinity in every direction. There was no end to how many parallel dimensions as that was infinite as well. Perhaps the greatest epiphany was that God was always and forever, meaning God had no beginning and no end. God was also not a “designer” but an energy source present in everything and everyone and there was no true beginning of time or matter, it just transformed as we did when we die. Hence we as human beings are both finite and infinite as our souls are eternal and part of God’s energy and our bodies are part of the earth which has a finite beginning, middle and end as do all physical things. The energy that makes them is infinite and forever but they have a finite period of time to “live” and develop until the next set of lessons and/or individuation process unfolds.

Of course this brings up the notion of why God would want or need to expand Him/Herself. The answer I came up with was to experience Him/Herself and allow each piece of Him/Herself to individuate and ascend infinitely, reuniting with the Self/God after a period of expansion and learning. This theory would of course mean we reincarnate for as long as we want and perhaps in some cases for as long as we need to.

I hope this makes some sense and is not to confusing.

This is why ancient religions stated “All Gods are One,” and the spiritual seeker is to always see the God/Goddess in everyone he or she meets (-Namaste). This is sometimes hard when dealing with people who are asleep spiritually or run their lives as if they are worker drones or zombies. Those who have yet to awaken to the power and truth of our collective Oneness. Or what some call “conservatives.” I’m not going to go on about the health care zombies right now who basically argue that they have theirs so f everyone else. This is a sad state we are in and one I’ve thought a lot about lately. Is it that there are too many of us on the planet and there are the same percentages of selfish people? Or is it that we are so many we are starting to act like too many rats stuck in the same cage? Even simple courtesy seems to have dissolved into the whole “me first” way of our current world. Not only is this sad on a spiritual level and hurtful to our emotional and psychic development, but it also freaks me out because it makes me think we are calling down the worst possible fate by our behavior and sadly we are all going to have to suffer under it whether or not we partake of this intensely rude and mean spirited selfishness. We are all linked and we will all have to answer to the loud mouths who would rather let a stranger starve on the street than help them. I have to admit that my natural inclination toward feeling most human beings were ultimately good has been replaced by the feeling that there is a range of goodness and most people are heavy into the middle section of gray. I know there are many good, great loving people in the world, it’s just that their voices are often softer then those who are rude and mean spirited, this has always been the case. I wish there was some way to change it.

Many blessings,

Denise