Understanding Karma and Purpose

We find it important to know whatever source of inspiration or revelation we’re drawn to, to know that every source expresses what we might hear as truth or understand as truth through a filter or a lens of their experience. It’s built into the person. In a sense, it’s built in by their karma or by the patterns that they have adopted throughout the course of their life. And this is one of the more subtle aspects of karma, and that is that karma is not always what we experience in the way of something like retribution or a reaction to a prior experience that we have created ourselves or that’s been manifest in our lives, but something that comes over time with a repetition of certain behaviors, but also with the repetition of our life experiences. Those things that we don’t understand, life tends to bring back to us until there is some kind of understanding or some kind of response that moves us forward in our lives.

So, we might say, then, that karma is not just the reaction we have or the experience we have, but something that shapes us. And that in choosing our actions, in choosing our words, even our thoughts, we are actually choosing a way to create ourselves, to create an experience or an aspect of our own soul—a soul that can evolve, become more aware, and even achieve a higher level of consciousness. That consciousness is joined with our human bodies and our human experience, our material experience, if you want to say that—and in this material experience, we do have an ego. We do have a way of interacting with the world that tends to differentiate and create boundaries, create contrast, to create obstacles to our own understanding and our own awareness. So, this shaping of ourselves comes from those decisions and from those choices that we make along the way.

We could see this as a neutral process, meaning that there’s nothing, let’s say, attached to the process until we make a decision, but that’s not quite the way it works. There is in this experience in this world very little that is neutral that comes from within us or that is neutral in the way that we interpret the world, and this is why it’s important to understand what we love because what we love, in a sense, is our destiny. We can love our work. We can love other human beings. We can do and act in loving ways to each other, but deep within each of us is a purpose that’s unfolding within us, something that’s possibly fully conscious, but many times is unconscious to us, meaning that there are forces at work that another part of ourselves is trying to bring to our consciousness. And one of the ways it comes, or those things come to us, is through the things that we love, so that another person can become a perfect mirror for us in our relationship. And we have said before that our relationships tell us much about what we believe about God, and in a sense, this love and this consciousness have their origins in God.

But this love, this purpose that comes through us, that expresses itself in our world might be through our work, where we are drawn to something, a particular resonance, a particular desire, a particular way of seeing something—whether you’re an artist, or an engineer, or even in business or a business person—what happens is the deeper love within us is expressed through that work, so that a person’s selfishness could be expressed as an artist or as an engineer or as a businessperson, or a person’s unselfishness or compassion can be expressed through those same channels of work, or those same channels of expression in this world. 

So, we can understand this in the sense that our purpose is more than just our work that we do in the world. It’s more a part of us. It’s a part of how we see the world. It’s even something connected to our faith—and not faith that we see or compare to an opinion, but a faith that’s an attitude or a perspective about how we approach the world, and what we expect from the world. And even though our expectations sometimes get in the way, it is possible for us to look through a lens of love and anticipate that the response of the universe or the world around us is a loving response. Even a difficult response sometimes might contain that aspect of love that teaches us or opens us in a way to the variety of God’s expression around us so that we know this love that we’re expressing that shapes who we are, and our soul, the building up of our consciousness. And we use words like “building up,” not because there is necessarily anything added to us, sometimes what happens is something is subtracted or let go or something is accepted that already exists. So, this building up of the soul, or the evolution of the soul in consciousness, all the ingredients are present—our consciousness and our awareness, our ability to understand the boundaries that we encounter as human beings, the obstacles, but also the flow that we can sometimes find ourselves in—all of these things interact and become integrated with this part of our being.

We know that we are created out of God’s own substance, that the most essential part of us is connected to that most essential part of life and the universe. We know that that essential part is something that, to us, we might use language about what is primordial, or what is ancient, or what is from the beginning of our own time, even though we understand God to be eternal—that there has always been an existence or a being, a sense of being that surrounds us and is at the same time within us. So, we find ourselves always at the center of this consciousness, in intimate contact with the Divine.

So, we sometimes ask ourselves, if this is so powerful and good, which it is, why is it that our suffering occurs? Why is it that we find obstacles that are difficult to overcome? And, what we find is that when we sit in a place of complacency or a place of, let’s just stay that we are not active and not engaged, where we might be lethargic, there’s a part of life that undermines our security—not in a malicious way, but just in a way that reminds us that there is a type of movement that occurs in us that takes us forward into that purpose and into that love, and in a sense strengthens us in the love that we manifest and in that shaping of our own being. And in that shaping of our own being, we fit into that fabric that we all share, the threads that connects us to each other, that mosaic, whatever way you want to use language to say that we’ve found our place in the universe or the world. It is through this expression of that purpose, this expression of that love.

One of the great potential dangers of the things that we love are those things that are generated by a selfishness, where there’s a love of self that’s disproportionate to our love of truth or our love of God. And part of what helps us keep this in balance is our love of our neighbor. And in our interaction with other human beings, in our relationship, these are things that when we enter into those relationships with compassion and kindness, with a certain acceptance, and without judgment, then the expression of God that is in that human being meets us in a way that facilitates our growth. We become synergistic with each other, we become facilitative to each other, and this expression of love is also a part of that same evolutionary process of our consciousness. In a way, that consciousness exists within us and around us. It’s not just a product of our brain, our physical brain, it’s something that actually produces our physical being. But what we experience as growth in our consciousness—knowing that that consciousness already exists as part of us—it’s really an awakening. That’s why we are so attracted to the language of awakening or being enlightened because it’s as if a light has been turned on when we see something in a new way or we see something with a different background or a different feature in front of us.

There is a value in understanding all of what has been said as an expression of God within us and around us. When we do good work, in a sense of being helpful to others or helping alleviate the suffering of another human being, when we understand this fully, we begin to see how we contribute to the process. But the greater awareness is the understanding that it’s not all from us. We might have a decision that directs our attention or our awareness, but that ultimately all good things come to us and through us from God. So, when we attribute too much to ourselves, we lose perspective. And this is why the acknowledgment of God is so important. We might be very altruistic in all of the things that we want to do, but without that component of God’s integration or engagement within us and around us, it’s too easy for us to attribute too much to ourselves, and we see ourselves in an inflated way, in a way that sees us as a source of life and truth, rather than God being that truth and that life.

Again, as has been said before, we don’t own God. We don’t control God. We can’t do something that requires God to act for us or in us. It is more as we progress along our path, that we are owned by God, and that the truth owns us. We make a mistake if we think that we have the truth and someone else does not. We make a mistake in thinking that we can then use that truth to our advantage or to some advantage, to some type of control or manifestation for our own selfishness, but that is when the balance of the powers that exist within us becomes skewed and become difficult. That’s when we experience separation. That’s when we are choosing something that is not life-affirming or life-giving, and when we make those choices, we actually move away from God. And when we say this, that we move away from God, it’s not that God is not present and surrounding us, it is more that our consciousness shrinks into a smaller capacity. It’s more, since it’s more about us, the more we attempt to control it, and knowing that we can’t control everything, our world becomes smaller because we keep reaching for those things that we can control, and it is only through that repetitive loss of control that we’re supposed to become aware of letting go of that attempt to control. Every attempt to control to force things to be good or to force things to be favorable to us, actually limits the capacity of those things to produce life and to be aligned with truth and love.

So, our alignment with love, our alignment with truth contributes to that karmic, we’ll call it consequence, which is the shaping of our being, the limits of our consciousness, the limits of our capacities to be aware, our limits as a human being. If we’re attentive to that process, when we are not in that alignment, and we’re not in the process of integrating our experience, the universe, if you want to call it that, or God, then functions in subversive ways where our beliefs and our faith, whatever limitations are found in those ways, begin to subvert our effort. Eventually, if we fight so hard for that selfish intention to be manifest, we’ll receive it, but the promptings along the way are meant to keep us open, to keep us engaged, to keep us in a state of anticipation, rather than expectation, to keep us aware in ways that we appreciate the experience that we have. Our gratitude helps nourish us, nourish our openness, and helps us remain open to receiving the guidance that comes through love and through truth.

We must understand that when we talk about our purpose, our earthly expression is a limited expression of who we are and what our potential is. So that any vocation or avocation that we choose that is materially bound to the earth is going to be a lesser expression of our purpose. It can become a tool. It can become a way or a path to a greater purpose, but those greater purposes, those greater expressions of our purpose are linked very closely to the things that we love, the ways we express that love, the balance of that love between our self-esteem and our care for others, the balance that exists between our understanding of truth and how truth is manifest and not used, but expressed and appreciated. All of these things make a difference in the shaping of who we are. We understand ourselves in ways that express greater consciousness when we have an acceptance of who we are, knowing that we hold everything within us that we need; that the wisdom that we need is here ready for our expression and our awareness, and that our true identity is very much connected to the essence of the identify that we find in God. The help is there if we ask for it. The opportunity is always there. We respond and what we choose to respond to is shaped by that love, that expression of our being in its deepest, most essential quality.