Spiritualists say that the world, as we know it, is only a manifestation of what is organised in the cosmos. They say that the real world is the cosmic world because it is from there that come, magnetised to us, all the impulses – the minute ones and the massive ones, the good ones and painful ones – that shape the daily lives of every one in our global communities and have done so since the Big Bang.
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“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It.
“And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts …”
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What if, in a previous lifetime, the lawyer shot in the Melbourne incident, had killed someone with a sword, with a gun, with an anvil? Why not accept the possibility that this *someone*, in the current time- warp mirror-reality, turned out to be the gunman towards whom he was inexorably magnetised, through the catalytic energy of the woman in distress on that Melbourne street corner?
A role reversal if you will.
A tragedy played out according to the Cosmic plan, but from a cosmic perspective who is the real hero? Who is the real villain? It is not for us to know. From a spiritual perspective, any judgement passed by anyone in our world is purely arbitrary.
All we need to accept is that through the events interwoven in the huge tapestry that is our soul’s life, karma is the unerring Great Adjustor. What we sow is what we reap. That is the certainty. What is totally uncertain is when and how often and how, in the millennia, our soul’s incarnation will reap *our* harvest.
“Pashoot meod,” says Moriya in Hebrew. Very simple.
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Moriya said to me one day that the world that, according to the Christian calendar, is a couple of thousand years old is in fact nothing more than a perpetual masked ball where everybody’s true identity is hidden by their ego-personae, our ego-personae. And although there have always been councils and tribunals set up to punish wrong-doers and criminals, when these miscreants reincarnate under a different mask, they can no longer be identified as such and they pass as innocent and pure entities. Having said that, we can, here and now, identify evil-doers in two ways. Either they are seen to repeat their evil deeds in a robotic way or they sacrifice their lives for the benefit of others.
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If our world is only a mirror and we are only reflections of the real images, we
need to turn the mirror around to look at events in reverse.
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There are three more points I would like to make most respectfully, as I continue the deconstruction of the karma of The Good Samaritan in the news item.
1. Because it is a karmic impulse that cost the lawyer his life, not the gun, and not his encounter with the killer, the energetic baggage he will bring into his next incarnation will have been amended most positively. This man died while aiding someone, in this case the woman who, incidentally was the karmically appointed catalyst. If it hadn’t been for her presence on that pinpoint-specific space on the street corner, this particular drama, with these specific participants would never have happened.
1. The impulse to be at the appointed time, at the appointed place to participate in one specific event, even if only as an eyewitness, is hardwired in our aura. It cannot be resisted.
When destiny summons us, we go where we need to go.
With the precision of homing pigeons, all four participants in the shoot-out came from wherever they were, moments before, following their own impulse to come together, on a couple of square meters, right at the corner of Flinders Lane and William Street, while everyone else of the 3,850,000 people in Melbourne were off-stage.
2. “The other man who attempted to intervene,” shot three times in the upper body, was revealed later as a Dutch backpacker who just happened to be there, in downtown Melbourne. He survived.
In all likelihood, only a few persons, not necessarily the ones closest to both these men *knew* them as they really were in *this* lifetime at that particular point in time, and probably no one has a clue as to what these men were like in their previous lifetimes – as is usually the case for each one of us.
Thus, the theory is that when in the eye of the storm, the more spiritually evolved the victim – we do not mean, here, do-gooders or religious zealots – the lesser the energy invested in the incident/accident, which explains why some people stare death in the face but walk away against seemingly impossible odds.
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Moriya explained, “C.C., let’s say, it is your karma to one day get lost in the desert, OK? So, it’s not going to be a nice experience. Maybe you suffer from dehydration. Maybe you come across reptiles and maybe you even get bitten. You get sunburnt. Maybe you also come across thieves. Interestingly, they only want your camera and your wallet. Sure, you’re unhappy and sure you’re frightened, but when it’s all over, you agree that the experience could have been much worse at every turn. So, although you got lost in the desert, you got rescued. You didn’t die there and actually whatever has happened to you will become an anecdote to share with friends or to write about in a book. Look, put plainly,” she adds patiently, “a karmic situation that turns out to be less serious than otherwise expected is like slipping in a mud puddle and falling on your buttocks instead of cracking your head open on the pavement.”
and emotional grazes or whether we die on the spot, no one knows what is in store for us … further up the track … in the next moment.
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To revisit some of the main points made earlier in this file, Moriya sent me another humorous piece to deconstruct from a karmic perspective – a part of my homework on that particular day.
“A young man who had to go away on international business wrote his girlfriend love letters every day. He wanted to do it the romantic way, via the post, not
email. After the 200th letter, his girlfriend got engaged to the mailman.”
Deconstruction: The culminating moment is set in motion when the mailman became mediator between the girl and her boyfriend. Then the boyfriend, through his letters, becomes the mediator between his girlfriend and the mailman. The boyfriend and the mailman have swapped roles, but the three participants are the same. Karma changed their position.
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In one of her emails from Jerusalem, Moriya, who translates her thoughts directly from Hebrew, gave me an analogy to illustrate the concept that karmic events are indeed *God sent* opportunities for us to move on.
“C.C., let’s imagine that our life is a very long road with many refilling opportunities along the way,” she wrote. “Tov [O.K./good, in Hebrew], you have a car and your car will work only when you put fuel into her, right? Now, suppose you just fill the tank and drive a long distance until you run out of fuel. You wouldn’t say: Wait, wait, I need to find the same gas station where I last filled the tank, would you? What you would do is be thankful for the fist station along your way, fill up and drive on. Our ability to get energy from any gas station along the way is very liberating and is essential to our survival, yes?
The first station symbolizes our starting point in life. From there the sky is the only limit. However, people forget how to use their spiritual wings — or maybe that they have wings at all – they settle in the state of chrysalis without ever evolving into a butterfly.
You see, people function in the same way as the car and its fuel. We eat and our body changes our food into energy. We also absorb energy from plants, from the air (prana), from other people and also from objects. Of course, we also have some karma to edit and some karma to live out. All this is energy. It’s very freeing and very functional that we can and, in fact, are expected to refuel along the way, again and again.
C.C., there comes a time when people who have worked or lived together run out of fuel. They are meant to separate. They seldom do so voluntarily, preferring to return to what is energetically familiar over and over again regardless of whether or not this energy is healthy for them and regardless of how much travelling they could have done, if free to move.
What I’m saying is that there comes a time when we need to be separated, otherwise we live under the same regime of repetitions as older students being made to do again and again the same lessons that they were doing in early years. When, energetically, we refuse to budge, we are made to separate and move on by a karmic event, an incident our ego-persona interprets as a nuisance, a setback, or even a tragedy.
It is a very good opportunity to evolve and progress without being linked to the familiar gas station forever. But although people know all that and know that all of us will die one day, most live in denial and cling to emotional crutches and physical crutches and are too afraid to even look for a new gas station up ahead. After all, isn’t there always another station up the road?”
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Karmically, whether we survive a mishap unscathed or with only slight bumps and emotional grazes or whether we die on the spot, no one knows what is in store for us … further up the track … in the next moment.
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Michael Reardon was one of the world’s leading free solo climbers, a rare and highly dangerous extreme sport sport that entails climbing sheer cliffs, some 900 feet high, with only the gripping power of finger tips and rubber-tipped soft shoes – without any saftey equipment whatsoever.
“On July 13, 20007, Michael was standing below a climb he had just completed.
The photographer, Damon Corso, was about 30ft away taking pictures of him. He was about 10ft [5 meters] above the sea and he and had his hands out, celebrating, to say
he had completed the climb of his life. But then a rogue wave just came in.
The wave hit him on the knees and he lost his balance and slipped on the algae. He was shouting for help but there was nothing Damon could do.” [3]
Interestingly, Michael’s personal saying was: “Climbing may be hard but it’s easier than growing up.”
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When a karmic incident comes crashing down on us, it is very appropriate to ask Why is this happening to me? or Why is this happening to us, as a community or even as a country.
Spoiler: It is appropriate, provided the tone is firm and inquisitive for, indeed, it is essential to try and get as close as possible to a spiritual answer.
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Every mainstream religion reminds us about the consequences of our actions. Ultimately, though celebrated with different words and through different rites, I do believe that, once pared down and free of fanaticism, each of the mainstream religions share common spiritual beliefs.
In spite of this, I will risk saying that the greatest catalysts of wars of religions, past and present, aside from masking fear and greed, have been waged because of semantics.
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On paper, all this makes a lot of sense. However, internalizing *all this* until it becomes a part of my core understanding of the meaning of life and death does not come without effort. And so, as I learn more, I practice a shift of perceived values, slowly, slowly, one present-moment at a time. Daily I practice the acceptance of everyone, without exception. No matter how hard and against the grain.
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The good news is that I do not have to deal with anyone’s opinions or religious views and, in fact, I do not have to DO much at all, least of all talk.
All I need to do is simply accept them. But like anything related to this topic, acceptance has got to be genuine – from the heart, not merely from the head, not from the lips.
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Giving of self IS what unconditional love and universal love are about. It is not about sending feel-good vibes to whoever we are naturally attracted to or comfortable with at the time of our choosing. It is not about being kind to the ones we like and love and being indifferent to others. That would be way too easy and hardly the stuff of spiritual evolution.
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It is only the skin that seals us up along with a cultural perception of the individual that give us the illusion of our uniqueness which, in turn, creates and maintains separation and isolation.
Basically, I’m getting to think that we are about as unique as any cookie can be unique on its baking tray, once the cookie-cutter has done its thing.
And this introduces another key concept, that of separation or rather, that of Non-Separation.
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[1] Gnarls Barkley, first single, “Crazy”, (2006), CD St.Elsewhere.
[ 2] S. Roof (1960), Journeys on the Razor-Edged Path, Hodder & Stoughton, London, p. 111.
[3] The Adventurist, http://thehendricksreport.wordpress.com, posted on July 16, 2007 by Jason A. Hendricks.