Making Our Lives Better By Changing Karma

by Robert Wilkinson

When we change our pattern of response to life events, we have the potential to alter our future karma. We have more power to do this than we usually suspect.

I last gave this to you about 4 years ago. I’ve rewritten this in some places to make it clearer what I was trying to say, and fleshed out some concepts. For your renewed perusal, “Making Our Lives Better by Changing Karma.”

Times are tough all over, for some more than others. At the same time, in many areas of human existence, we are more aware and advanced than we've ever been before. "These are the best of times, the worst of times" as it was once put. As a life wave, we seem to be striving to find a point of physical, emotional, and mental balance on the razor’s edge of radical ongoing change.

That seems to be the theme at every important juncture in human history, when the few have accumulated much, and many have little or nothing, relatively speaking. Everywhere people yearn for better lives, but are frustrated by the inertia of the larger environment, which seems harder than it needs to be.

Using Imagination to Find Inspiration

So what can we do about overcoming inertia and making a better life? That seems to be the bottom line to any given question about human life. Sometimes that means an action, sometimes a non-action. Determining which of these is appropriate requires knowledge and understanding.

In learning what to do and not do, we find wisdom in exploring what an intelligent action or non-action would look like. And while we often are limited by circumstances, we also have more freedom to think and act “outside the box” than we suspect.

Even when it seems we don't have many choices, there are still ten thousand we haven't thought of. That's because our Higher Consciousness always operates outside of perceptual limitations. The task is to help the conscious mind recognize both the inspiration coming from Superconsciousness and the impressions from the subconscious mind that unnecessarily limit us.

The mind likes to go down familiar lines of view, understanding, and attitude. It's easy to go with what we know, even though that often blinds us to the inspiration that naturally arises from opening to our imagination. That’s why if we knew what to do, we wouldn’t be frustrated when our action didn’t bring us the results we wanted.

So What Limits Our Imagination?

Many people unnecessarily limit their options for all kinds of reasons. Some unnecessary limitations are conscious and justified by the lower mind as it clings to the sources of its own suffering. Some unnecessary limitations are unconscious, also operating through attachment, aversion, illusion, or pessimism.

Here the inertia of the larger environment does not help, since it too is infected with these limiting factors. We are sentient Beings in a vast collective field with other sentient Beings. They too are afflicted with “not knowing,” or feeling inadequate, helpless, squashed, or limited by outer conditions.

Since we’re all in this together, because we feel, inevitably we shall feel all there is to feel in the collective soup. That’s why we must learn to separate out what are our feelings, versus whatever other feelings we’re experiencing that are part of the collective field.

Many human limitations arise from personal, social, or familial taboos and expectations. These often reside in the subconscious part of the lower mind. What we learned when younger set patterns of “adequacy” and “inadequacy” into motion. Some of these may have been necessary when younger, but at some point, we recognize which ones are no longer effective in our adult lives, and open to other possible ways of response.

When we feel frustrated at knowing something needs to change but isn’t moving as we would like, we can still change our pattern of response. That means finding a new effective response, even if it feels unfamiliar. Every single situation that puts pressure on our ego prods us to find an intelligent way of acting, feeling, and thinking that frees us from some assumption or limitation with roots in our past.

How Karmic Patterns are Generated

Throughout our childhood and early adult life, we had to respond the best we were able to challenging situations. How we acted or reacted to those early experiences formed our response patterns in other times in our lives. These have conditioned our personality in many ways.

How we respond to life events generates patterns which will result in future situations that will also challenge us to choose our responses carefully and intelligently. That is “little k” karma. How we responded in the past sets up situations in the future.

Occasionally, those little k karmic patterns set larger karmic patterns into motion that occasionally lead us to the threshold of transformation. And our personality often makes some seemingly minor choices that open major doors of a higher Destiny through both pleasurable and painful experiences. That is “Big K” Karma.

“Big K” Karma is also found in so-called “acts of God.” While we may not have directly “caused” those events to happen, we find ourselves confronting life-altering events that will shape us in the future. How we respond to these “forces beyond our control” also generate future karmic patterns, since we must bring meaning and purpose out of these larger events.

Unlearning the Pleasure-Pain Duality

As we encounter outside influences, both harmonious and frictional, our ego forms attitudes toward circumstances, causes, and ways of responding. Apparent defeats demoralize the lordly mind and its assumptions, which then result in many feelings. Negative experiences are often followed by negative feelings due to conditioning. Our successes also condition us, usually programming us to want more.

Thus we are a combination of learned (“programmed”) responses, attached to what we believe will bring us happiness, avoiding what will bring pain. The paradox of life is a peculiar mix involving many things which once brought us happiness eventually bring pain, and much of what once brought us pain led us into unknowns that yielded great happiness. If we choose to, we can grow tremendously through both types of experience, and find love, wisdom, power, and intelligence regardless of the outer conditions.

All significant events in our life offer us great opportunities to grow beyond old limitations and change our response patterns so we can demonstrate our Highest Self. In our willingness to become our Higher Self, we generate even more important events and choices down the road so we can learn to stay focused on what that Higher Self actually is.

Our inner response determines our outer response. Knowing our inner response can help us understand if we’re reacting from the fear and control responses of the lower ego, or if we’re choosing to respond with love, wisdom, and intelligence via our Higher Self.

Dealing With Personality

Every defeat, as well as every victory, represents a potential fulfillment. Since there's really nothing left to pursue in either case (except Self-Realization arising from seeing the experience in its deeper meaning), that puts us at a point of choice in life. We've already finished that set of life lessons and are confronting the emptiness of pure potential. The trick is not to allow unhelpful responses to dominate the possibilities that are there.

Eventually, everybody finds themselves at various life crossroads. Since we are programmed to fear (or at least be suspicious of) the unknown, we naturally want the future to relate to the past in some better but familiar way. This conditions our attitude about unknown possibilities, and often limits the infinite potential from coming forth.

Remember - if we can imagine it, it is possible to whatever degree the spacial time field permits. We just have to find the right point of view, and persist in making real that which we have imagined. We are only limited by our "Truth-of-Being," or Dharma, which as we embrace it, our lives become a greater thing than we ever imagined.

We are told we have the power to pick up and lay down Spirit, Mind, Emotion, and Matter. How we use these things as we move through experience determines everything about what will follow. A tendency forms a pattern, which if repeated becomes a habit. We have many more unconscious habits than conscious habits.

Habits usually continue until we tire of them, or they are disrupted by external events. Then comes the void. Great possibilities exist in that moment of emptiness, but again, we are conditioned creatures physically, emotionally, and mentally. How we've been conditioned often limits our imagination so we hesitate, or fear, or wonder, or fall into confusion when confronting emptiness. These unhelpful conditioned responses are what we as Eternal Truth-seeking Souls must turn into more productive patterns on their own level.

Our Power to Change Pattern

Our Eternal Consciousness exists in its own multi-dimensional field, and is superior to all denser elements of our personalities. That's why regardless of conditioning or habits in material, emotional, or mental ways, we always have the power to choose our response to anything. Our imagination can create greater futures than we usually suspect.

If we willfully avoid looking at our power to choose to change patterns, then our lives stay stuck in past patterns until we are forced by circumstances to change. On the other hand, we can also choose to welcome unknown possibilities, moving into our potential to grow into higher awareness. That yields opportunities to become more skillful in applying our spiritual intelligence in our life, which in turn yields knowledge and understanding.

Though many things in life are difficult and we've all had painful experiences, that does not mean we need to perpetuate our suffering. Though the collective field is often weird, grim, and contradictory, we can operate as Eternal Consciousnesses in realms where we are resolving karmas and becoming part of "the corrective force of Nature Herself."

Even when unfortunate things occur, we can see them in their transitory nature. Then we can use every opportunity to express the love and wisdom of our Higher Self. Living the Higher Self as a conscious Eternal, being Love-Wisdom-Intelligence the best we're able with others in our Soul field, is the only way to move through worldly realms where we master karmas and Karma, freed from the limitations of form, fear, and suffering.

© Copyright 2009, 2013 Robert Wilkinson

Comments

[gale]

perfect follow up to 11/21 post, much thanks!!

[Sabina]

Robert this article is a very insightful piece of work. I salute you for putting it together so simply and sharing. Everything written here is what I want to acheieve, even if step by step. You have touched a deep chord in my heart.I have been thinking on the subject of the subconcious mind a lot, lately and was happily surprised to come across this piece.
Regards
Sabina