Words to the Cosmos

Karma

// December 30th, 2008 // life the universe and everything, magick

Wisdom from Don Webb over at:  http://edred.net/community/members/103/Blog_Magical_Writings.php

“Karma” means action.

You bet you are bound by it.  If you walked up to your boss at coffee-break and hit him in the jaw, the action would produce an effect.  Most actions produce minor effects.  You bought M&Ms with peanuts instead of plain — not much effect, unless you discover that you have a deadly peanut allergy.
A lot of the karma that binds you is not your “fault.”  I’ll give you a good 
and a bad example.

Your great-granddaddy bought a lot of oil leases in the Great Depression. Nothing came of it.  You get a letter one day from a company verifying your descent and then you get checks in the mail.  I think my family got about four thousand over about ten years.  Notexactly enough for us to move to Beverly (Hills that is) but a nice surprise.

Your dad used to slap the crap out of you when he had too much beer.  You knew you were in for a bad day when he stacked his beer bottles by his chair.  One day your spouse lays a few bottles down during an outside painting project.  Out of nowhere you are suddenly very, very mad at your spouse for spilling a little bit of paint.  Your spouse thinks you are a creep, and you start justifying your actions by some shaky line or reasoning about how bad paint is for the environment.

The later Karmic trace may have after effects you don’t want.  It may even be the trigger that leads to many bad fights, even divorce or violence. Since you did not know the Root of your actions, you will justify them to yourself.

As a Black Magician you neither have to follow the La Veyan idea that you should be bound to the material universe, nor the idea of some Shavite LHP groups that you should not be bound.  Extremes are seldom useful to complex creatures.

Instead learn to be like Varuna and choose what you lasso, or learn Tibetan Dream Yoga and choose view everything as a dream.  For the latter choice Maya = Nirvana.

Most people (thankfully) lack the power to create Karmic traces beyond 
themselves.  Some do — Hitler, Martin Luther King, Louis Pasteur, Newton, Attila the Hun.  Most action does little and is cancelled out other actions.  We do not loosen our bounds by attitude.  If I spend my life smoking four packs a day, then I am bound by that action and won’t be running the Boston Marathon.  That’s easy to see.  But it is harder to see the subtle effects of Karma.  Let’s say that you are the sort of person that never helps someone in need on the roadway — you never took someone into town for gas, or helped someone change a flat.  There is no roadway god that has kept tabs on you, but when you are in need your expectations and the way you communicate them to the world will effect you.  If you are cruel to people you will develop in yourself a great receptivity to cruelty  — not because of a moral/Cosmic Law, but because of years of looking for people’s soft spots will have programmed you to see the world expressed in that sort of exchange.

If you read “Karma” as “Causality” rather than as “Sin” it becomes easier to understand.

And a Hell of a lot easier to deal with