Carma
(Sânscrito karman, nominativo Karma, “ato”, “feito”, “trabalho”) O carma é energia/consciência em ação; a lei de causa, efeito e retribuição. Também chamada de lei do círculo, a que decreta que tudo o que fazemos faz um círculo completo e volta até nós para ser resolvido.
Paulo disse: “Pois aquilo que o homem semear, isso também ceifará” [1] Newton observou: “Para cada ação existe uma reação igual e contrária.”
A lei do carma necessita da reencarnação da alma até que todos os ciclos cármicos estejam equilibrados. Assim, de uma vida para outra, o homem determina seu destino através de seus atos, incluindo pensamentos, sentimentos, palavras e ações.
Origem
Carma é a energia de Deus em ação. Originada na Mente de Deus, a energia - a interação ação-reação - é a Trindade do Logos. O campo de força criativo da Mente de Deus é a fonte do carma.
A palavra carma tem sido usada de maneira ampla ou restrita ao longo dos séculos para definir os conceitos de causalidade do homem, da Lei Cósmica e sua relação com essa Lei, conceitos estes sempre em constante evolução. A origem antiga da palavra é: uma chave de energia que governa o fluxo do Espírito para a Matéria. A palavra carma, segundo os mestres ascensos, é retirada da raiz Lemuriana que significa “a Causa do Raio na Manifestação” - daí “Ca-Ra-Ma”.
Carma é Deus - Deus como Lei; Deus como princípio; Deus como a vontade, a sabedoria e o amor do Espírito se tornando Matéria. A lei do carma é a Lei do ser, estando sempre no estado de se tornar - o movimento do Ser que transcende o Ser.
O carma é a lei dos ciclos, o sair e o entrar nas esferas da própria consciência cósmica de Deus - a expiração e a inspiração do SENHOR.
Em todas as sete esferas do cosmo Espirito-Matéria, o carma é a lei da criação, a antahkarana da criação. É a integração do fluxo de energia entre o Criador e a criação. O carma são as causas que se tornam efeitos, os efeitos que se tornam causas e que por sua vez se tornam efeitos. O carma é a grande cadeia da hierarquia, elo por elo, transferindo as energias de Alfa e Ômega, o início e o fim de ciclos.
O carma de Deus
► Artígo principal: Deus
“No princípio, Deus criou o céu e a terra” - e a cadeia de ação-reação-interação teve início. Deus, a Primeira Causa, criou o primeiro carma. Por sua vontade de ser, Deus quis que existisse ambos, o Criador e a criação, e, assim, pôs em movimento o eterno movimento de sua energia - o carma. Pelo eterno desejo de Deus de ser Deus, o único grande Eu torna permanente a lei do carma nos ciclos do cosmo. A criação de Deus é o seu carma. Filhos e filhas de Deus são o carma do Mais Alto Deus vivo.
O carma de Deus é o carma da perfeição - sendo perfeição o fluxo da harmonia do Espírito para a Matéria e da Matéria para o Espírito. O carma de Deus, cumprindo a lei de sua energia em movimento, pode ser entendido como o movimento de sua vontade em uma sucessão interminável de forças primárias que produzem forças secundárias e forças terciárias e assim por diante até o infinito, do centro de Seu Ser à circunferência e da circunferência ao centro. O carma de Deus é a sincronização de tais forças cósmicas, interagindo através dos campos de força cósmicos, estendendo-se aos limites de sua habitação no Espírito e na Matéria.
Livre arbítrio e carma
Sem livre-arbítrio não pode haver carma, seja em Deus ou no homem. O livre-arbítrio, então, é a ação do Espírito Santo, a causa do raio em manifestação. O livre-arbítrio é o cerne da lei da integração. Somente Deus e o homem criam carma, pois somente Deus e Deus no homem têm livre-arbítrio. Todas as outras criaturas - incluindo a vida elemental, a evolução dos devas e a evolução angélica - são instrumentos da vontade de Deus e da vontade do homem. Portanto, são instrumentos do carma de Deus e do homem.
O livre-arbítrio dos anjos é o livre-arbítrio de Deus. Os anjos são obrigados a cumprir a vontade de Deus, pois, diferentemente do homem, eles não têm liberdade de experimentar com a energia de Deus. Embora os anjos cometam erros que produzem resultados contrários à vontade de Deus, eles podem mais tarde corrigir seus erros e realinhar essa energia com a vontade de Deus.
A rebelião angélica contra a vontade de Deus é diferente do exercício gerador de carma no livre-arbítrio no homem. O livre-arbítrio é crucial para a expansão da identidade de Deus no homem dentro da estrutura da Grande Lei. O homem tem liberdade de experimentar com o seu livre arbítrio, pois ele é um deus em formação.
Por outro lado, os anjos, que compartilham apenas do livre-arbítrio de Deus, retiram-se de seu estado elevado quando se rebelam contra a vontade de Deus, que lhes é exigido expressar. Assim, se um anjo escolhe agir contra a vontade de Deus, ele deve ser banido do reino angélico para o reino do estrado de Seus pés e encarnar no reino humano.
Man, who is made a little lower than the angels, is already confined to the lower spheres of relativity. So when he creates negative karma, he simply remains at his own level while he balances it. But an angel who rebels against God’s will is removed from his high estate of complete identification with God and is relegated to the lower spheres of man’s habitation to balance the energy of God that he has misqualified.
Hindu teaching
In Hinduism the Sanskrit word karma (originally meaning act, action, work or deed) evolved to mean the actions that bind the soul to the world of existence. “Just as a farmer plants a certain kind of seed and gets a certain crop, so it is with good and bad deeds,” says the Mahabharata,[2] a Hindu epic. Because we have sown both good and evil, we must return to reap the crop.
Hinduism acknowledges that some souls are content to continue doing this lifetime after lifetime. They enjoy life on earth with its mixture of pleasure, pain, success and failure. They live and die and live again, tasting the bittersweet of the good and bad karmas they have sown.
But there is another path for those who weary of the endless return: union with God. Each life, as French novelist Honoré de Balzac explained the concept, may be lived to “reach the road where the Light shines. Death marks a stage on this journey.”[3]
Once souls have decided to return to their source, their goal is to purify themselves of ignorance and darkness. The process may take many lifetimes. The Mahabharata compares the process of purification to the work of a goldsmith purifying his metal by repeatedly casting it into the fire. Although a soul may purify herself in one life by “mighty efforts,” most souls require “hundreds of births” to cleanse themselves, it tells us.[4] When purified, the soul is free from the round of rebirth, one with Brahman. The soul “achieves immortality.”[5]
Buddhist teaching
Buddhists, too, see the cycle of rebirth as a wheel—a wheel to which we are bound until we can break the karmic chains. Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–c. 483 B.C.), the founder of Buddhism, began life as a Hindu. He borrowed from and expanded on the Hindu ideas about karma and reincarnation.
The Dhammapada, one of the best-known Buddhist texts, explains karma as follows: “What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheel of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart.... If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind, joy follows him as his own shadow.”[6]
Karma and fate
Today, the word karma is used as a fashionable substitute for fate. But belief in karma isn’t fatalism. Karma, according to the Hindus, can cause people to be born with certain tendencies or characteristics, but it doesn’t force them to act according to those characteristics. Karma does not negate free will.
Each person “can choose to follow the tendency he has formed or to struggle against it,”[7] as the Vedanta Society, an organization promoting Hinduism in the West, explains. “Karma does not constitute determinism,” we read in The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion. “The deeds do indeed determine the manner of rebirth but not the actions of the reborn individual—karma provides the situation, not the response to the situation.”[8]
Buddhism concurs. Buddha taught that understanding karma gives us the opportunity to change the future. He challenged a contemporary teacher named Makkhali Gosala, who taught that human effort has no effect on fate and that liberation is a spontaneous event. For the Buddha, belief in fate, or destiny, was the most dangerous of all doctrines.
Rather than consigning us to an irreversible fate, he taught, reincarnation allows us to take action today to change the future. Our good works of today can bring us a happier tomorrow. As the Dhammapada puts it, “Just as a man who has long been far away is welcomed with joy on his safe return by his relatives, well-wishers and friends; in the same way the good works of a man in his life welcome him in another life, with the joy of a friend meeting a friend on his return.”[9]
According to the Hindus and Buddhists, our karma requires us to continue reincarnating until we achieve divine union. The union with Atman may occur in stages while we are alive and be made permanent after death.
Karma and Christianity
► Main article: Karma in the Bible
The law of karma is set forth throughout the Bible. The apostle Paul makes clear what Jesus taught him and what he learned from life:
Every man shall bear his own burden....
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.[10]
Karma can bring boon and blessing to those who have sown well according to the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
The law of cause and effect and of free will is affirmed by Jesus over and over again in his parables to his own and in his warnings to the seed of the wicked. Our Lord speaks often of the day of judgment, which is the day of reckoning of every man’s karmic accounts as recorded in his own book of life. In Matthew 12:35–37 he lectures to the scribes and Pharisees on the law of cause and effect:
A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things [i.e., positive karma]: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things [i.e., negative karma].
But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.
In Matthew 25 Jesus illustrates that the final judgment is based on the karma of an active (positive) or an inactive (negative) Christianity. Here works of love (i.e., charity) are the key to salvation. The Lord promises to those who minister unto him even in the person of “one of the least of these my brethren”[11] that they shall inherit the kingdom; whereas to those who do not minister unto him for the very love of Christ in all people, he says, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire,[12] prepared for the devil and his angels.”[13]
The apostle Paul, in his exhortations to the stubborn Romans, confirms Jesus’ teaching on the wages of karma:
[God] will repay each one as his works deserve. For those who sought renown and honor and immortality by always doing good there will be eternal life; for the unsubmissive who refused to take truth for their guide and took depravity instead, there will be anger and fury. Pain and suffering will come to every human being who employs himself in evil...; renown, honor and peace will come to everyone who does good.... God has no favorites.[14]
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus states the mathematical precision of the law of karma: “With what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”[15] In fact, the entire sermon (Matthew 5–7) is Jesus’ doctrine on the rewards of righteous and unrighteous conduct. It is his teaching on the consequences of thoughts, feelings, words and deeds. It is the greatest lesson on karma, as the law of personal accountability for one’s acts, you will find anywhere.
Lords of Karma
► Main article: Karmic Board
The Karmic Board is a body of eight ascended masters who are assigned the responsibility to dispense justice to this system of worlds, adjudicating karma, mercy and judgment on behalf of every lifestream. The Lords of Karma are divine intercessors who serve under the twenty-four elders as mediators between a people and their karma.
The Lords of Karma adjudicate the cycles of individual karma, group karma, national karma and world karma, always seeking to apply the Law in the way that will give people the best opportunity to make spiritual progress.
Astrology and karma
► Main article: Astrology
Properly understood, astrology accurately predicts returning karma. By astrology it is possible to chart the time and manner in which persons, institutions, nations and planets receive their karma and their initiations. Every sign of the zodiac and every planet is an initiator and can play the role of guru in our life.
It is not our astrology that creates us but it is we who create our astrology. Our astrology at birth has encoded within it the sum of karma that the Lords of Karma have decreed we will face in this life. And when karma returns we are tested. Each individual will respond to his astrology, hence his karma, according to the psychology of personality developed through many embodiments.
What we think of as “bad” astrology really indicates our own karmic vulnerability. It tells us that we will be vulnerable to a particular transit and the momentums it will deposit on our doorstep on a day and hour that can be foreknown.
Karma as opportunity
When people talk about karma, they often think of the wrath of God, of punishment, of the idea that if they have been bad before they’re going to have to suffer now. This is one more ramification of the teachings of hell-fire and damnation, the concepts that have been propounded by Lucifer to thwart the true Christian doctrine.
Karma is not punishment. Karma returning to us is simply the law of cause and effect—for every wrong that we have done we must anticipate a joyous opportunity in the future to undo that wrong. And we have to seize that opportunity with rejoicing because here is a chance to balance our debts to Life.
Returning karma is the glorious opportunity for us to be free, for us to learn the law of non-attachment, non-possessiveness, and to realize the effects of the causes we have sent out. It is altogether natural and proper that we should be able to be on the receiving end of whatever we’ve sent out. If we have sent out love, we have a right to know what it feels like to receive that love in return, and if we have sown hatred or sadness, that’s going to come back also. And when it comes back we shouldn’t have any sense that this is unjust.
Unfortunately, many see the Law of God as a law of disaffection and disavowal. They envision a God who has no use for us but is simply the Lawgiver who stands ready to strike mankind with a rod of punishment. But God does not deal our karma to us as punishment. Karma is a manifestation of an impersonal law as well as a personal one. The purpose of our bearing our karma is that karma is our teacher. We must learn the lessons of how and why we misused the energy of life.
Until that day comes when we recognize the Law of God as a Law of love, we will probably encounter difficulties. But if we will only hasten that day’s coming into our own life, we will recognize that karma is actually grace and beauty and joy. We should understand, then, that the Law that comes to us is the Law of love. When it becomes chastening, it is the chastening of love. When it becomes the fruit in our life of our own advancement, this is the fruit of that love.
Transmutation of karma
Saint Germain teaches the accelerated path of transmutation of karma by the violet flame of the Holy Spirit and the transcending of the rounds of rebirth through the path of individual Christhood leading to the ascension demonstrated by Jesus.
See also
For more information
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Lost Teachings of Jesus: Missing Texts • Karma and Reincarnation, pp. 173–77.
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Lost Teachings on Your Higher Self, pp. 238–47.
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Path of Self-Transformation.
Sources
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Saint Germain On Alchemy: Formulas for Self-Transformation, Glossary, s.v. “Karma.”
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Path of Self-Transformation.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet with Erin L. Prophet, Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity, chapter 4.
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Masters and Their Retreats, s.v. “Karmic Board.”
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Path to Attainment.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, December 31, 1972; June 29, 1988.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, “ Prophecy for the 1990s III,” Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 33, no. 8, February 25, 1990.
- ↑ Gálatas 6:7.
- ↑ Mahabharata 13.6.6, in Christopher Chapple, Karma and Creativity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 96.
- ↑ Honoré de Balzac, Seraphita, 3d ed., rev. (Blauvelt, N.Y.: Garber Communications, Freedeeds Library, 1986), p. 159.
- ↑ Kisari Mohan Ganguli, trans., The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, 12 vols. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1970), 9:296.
- ↑ Svetasvatara Upanishad, in Prabhavananda and Manchester, The Upanishads, p. 118.
- ↑ Juan Mascaró, trans., The Dhammapada: The Path of Perfection (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 35.
- ↑ Brahmacharini Usha, comp., A Ramakrishna-Vedanta Wordbook (Hollywood, Calif.: Vedanta Press, 1962), s.v. “karma.”
- ↑ The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1989), s.v. “karma.”
- ↑ Mascaró, The Dhammapada, p. 67.
- ↑ Gal. 6:5, 7.
- ↑ Matt. 25:40.
- ↑ See Lake of fire.
- ↑ Matt. 25:41.
- ↑ Rom. 2:6–11 (Jerusalem Bible).
- ↑ Matt. 7:2.