You Have The Power Posted in: The Self Divine

The popular understanding of karma, especially if one wants to think in terms of good karma and bad karma outcome absolutes, to me requires an established/predefined something to measure action and thought against … for example pre-determined moral codes, laws of acceptable behaviour, and logically therefore also ultimately a prescription of the goal of life by God.

Whereas Christianity has the idea of God’s 10 commandments, and designation of soul as sinner for those who transgress, and the notion that the goal of life is to seek redemption, I wonder if these ideas are present within the Dharmic Tradition? I do find concepts more along the lines of recommendations of favourable / unfavourable for those wish to progress in spiritual realisation rather than absolute, non-contextual decrees. But I’m not sure I find the notion of my goal of life being prescribed by someone else, even by God him/herself.

If laws of acceptable behaviour did actually exist, I find the idea of the soul being subservient to such laws sits at tension with any meaningful divinity of the soul. In much the way that the idea of God being subservient to some higher laws would be seriously problematic to the divinity of God. OK, the divine may pretend to be subservient for the sake of lila (role-play adventures), but to actually be slave is another thing. Perhaps that is our situation also? In other words, it serves us in some way at present to believe we are subservient to the law or karma? Or perhaps it simply fits with the illusion of lost or reduced self-divinity?

But I don’t subscribe to the notion of that divinity of the soul is ever lost or reduced, so I favour the idea that the soul creates fruits by their desires and work (karma). For me creator sits much more comfortably than slave with the notion of the soul self-divinity. The bad fruits are no more reactions than good fruits. Only by ignorance do we create what we later judge to be bad fruits. That ignorance is in our disbelieving the extent of our own powers as divine beings. If we apply ourselves to ignoble/selfish acts we create darkness by the power of our own divinity. But that darkness is not a karmic-reaction, it is a divine creation.

We have a choice. If you don’t like what you’ve created, stop creating it vs if you don’t like suffering stop transgressing the law or good and evil. One mindset characterises the power and divinity of the soul whereas the other feeds the notion of a powerless fallen soul.

That said, to see the fruits of karma as reactions might be helpful at the beginning of the journey toward owning one’s divine creative power because at least one is starting to take a degree of responsibility. Moving on from the ‘why me?’ victim perception. Albeit in terms of it’s my fault. Perhaps only much later we can start to think in terms of by my divine power rather than by my fault?

In my opinion, in the journey of self-realisation, karma as a law of action and reaction (to which the soul is subservient) only remains viable to the extent that one is prepared to play down the divinity of the soul. And what sort of self-realisation, what to speak of God realisation (the two being necessarily entwined), can one have while one continues to deny any meaningful divinity of the self?