Submitted by Chatra on
Excerpt by David Frawley (Vamadeva Shastri)
Our present planetary crisis, our crisis in consciousness, is also a ‘collective karmic crisis’. We are setting in motion long-term negative karmic consequences by our civilization out of harmony with life. Such powerful collective karmas can bring about deep disturbances in the world of nature, including alterations at geological and climatic levels that can go far beyond what our species can control. The coming century looks like an era of karmic rectification for the devastation already wrought by our current spiritually immature civilization. We need the wisdom to take us through this coming fire of collective experience and help minimize its potential destruction as nature once more demands that the soul within us comes to the front.
The problem is that our culture does not believe in karma. We don’t teach the law of karma in our schools and or even many of our religions are ignorant of it. Many who speak about the law of karma act in violation of it as well. We think that if we make money or become famous that we have achieved the goal of life, regardless of the karmas we have set in motion for ourselves or for our world.
Our soul is a karmic center of consciousness that we must face sooner or later. When we die, the only thing that goes with our soul is its karma. The bodily self does not continue but the soul – the sensitive core of awareness within us that allows us to feel happiness or sorrow – goes on to wherever its karma may lead, which we must eventually experience. If you have harmed your world in one life, you may have to return in the next in order to rectify the wrong that you have done, which pains the soul, even if the outer mind can ignore it.
If you really want to avoid pain and suffering, not only in this life but in the continued existence of your soul, you should strive at every moment to act with an awareness of the law of karma and its consequences. This is a sobering consideration unlike the promises of easy happiness, quick salvation or instant enlightenment. While these fantasies appeal to our desires, they do not address the actualities of how the universe works, and leave us cheated and deceived in the end when the inevitable effects of our karma must manifest.
Presently our species has not yet seen the worst of what its collective karma has created. We blindly imagine that our consumerist civilization can continue, with affluence and pleasure for everyone, or at least for our own country. Yet if we look deeply at all, we can easily see that our growing social and environmental problems must continue until we remove their cause in our wrong relationship to life. To evolve as a species, we must face and transform this collective karma.
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