the path
Karma is not punishment
People in the West tend to misunderstand karma due to the influence of Christianity. Karma literally just means cause and effect. It’s not punishment. Christianity is really into punishment and retribution, but the Universe does not actually work like that.
The way the Universe teaches us is through the natural consequences to our actions.
If you treat someone like crap, and they stop wanting to be around you, you learn to stop treating people like crap. That’s it, that’s the whole lesson. You don’t need to be punished on top of that.
Punishment comes from a good/bad, right/wrong paradigm. But it’s not wrong to need to learn things by making mistakes. It’s just not. We all come here to learn.
When you do something, there is a result, and you learn from that result. That’s all karma really means. It means our actions have consequences, and through experiencing those consequences, we learn to choose better actions in the future.
Punishment is the idea that if you make someone suffer more on top of natural consequences, they will somehow learn more. But that’s not how learning works. So it’s just a dumb idea.
You weren’t wrong in the first place for making a mistake, so punishment will not purify you. It will just harm you by creating shame and confusion. Retribution or punishment doesn’t accomplish anything and it’s harmful.
So you don’t need to punish yourself either. It has no purpose–it’s just self-harm.
You are the sky, not the weather
The spiritual path is about dis-identifying as a human and identifying as a spiritual being that is more than human. This doesn’t mean denying your humanity. It means seeing your humanity within the larger picture of who you really are. Of course you are still human and need to tend to the human experience you are having. You came here to be here. But you also came from somewhere, as something, that is far more than this temporary experience of humanness.
“Honor your incarnation” – Ram Dass
God will never ask you to be somebody else
I can’t express enough how much we are meant to be exactly who we already are.
Growth is not becoming “better”, it’s becoming more YOU. It’s undoing the layers of conditioning that keep your inherent Divine nature from simply shining as it naturally does.
There is nothing fundamental to change about yourself. What there is to do is to remove what is not fundamentally you.
Any ideas that we are not enough or not worthy are simply untruths. They are not accurate. That is not how the Universe works. We are not judged by anything but our own mind. And we can stop doing that. We can decide to meet ourselves with unconditionality. To simply appreciate our own being, our own becoming, our own unfolding. We can allow ourselves to experience the grace which is always waiting for us to let it in.
Love and light and bypassing
If your “love and Light” can’t accept or isn’t willing to see that most people on Earth are full of pain and shadow, and you want to escape or avoid that reality, you aren’t embodying the Light, you are bypassing your own pain. Because the actual Light i.e. God is completely unfazed by pain and shadow. The Light has no need to fight the darkness, to try to get others to heal, to rescue people, or avoid them. It shines on everyone and everything, just like the Sun. The Sun shines on everything indiscriminately. That’s how the Light works. So if your spiritual path isn’t making you more and more OK with suffering, complexity, darkness, uncertainty, and pain…then you’re not on a spiritual path, you’re just using spiritual concepts and feelings as a defense.
You can love the Light and accept that you still have pain and it’s not going to magically heal overnight, and it doesn’t have to be avoided to stay “high vibe”. Bypassing is fundamentally a fear response–it does not raise your vibration at all (it feels like it does, but that’s just a feeling). Like all defenses, bypassing keeps you stuck in the SAME vibration, because your vibration is not made up of just your conscious feelings, it’s made up of everything in your conscious and unconscious.
So: face your pain and your fear. Bring it to conscious awareness and love it, embrace it, be with it until it heals. Do this today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life. Stop being afraid of it, it won’t kill you. You embody the Light by acting like the Light. And Light is never afraid of the dark.
Loving the Light and embracing the dark
My life and my sense of self has always been an interplay between the dark and the Light. The experiences I’ve had of the Underworld on Earth have always (eventually, when I crawl my way out of them), strengthened my connection to the Light. It hurts my heart a little when I see people levying claims of “toxic positivity” at the concept of “love and Light” because it is so clear in my mind and heart and body that the Light is where we came from and where we will return, and that “love and Light” is just a literal description of God. I’ve always been drawn to depictions of Angels as messengers of the Light and to me the message is always to remember who we truly are. That is why we come here–to forget and to practice remembering. I can’t not love the Light because I feel how much it loves me. It is hard to be on Earth and it will never stop being hard because that’s largely the point of Earth: to learn how to express our truth and shine our Light even in the dark, and to choose to love even when ego is afraid.
(Of course we may all have different reasons for being here), but this has always resonated the most strongly for me as the point of pain–to strengthen us, as fire strengthens steel–and the strongest steel is forged from the hottest fire. That is why I don’t begrudge the slings and arrows, even though it is exhausting and I am often weary of being here. Because I know it is for a reason, and I know it won’t last forever.
All humans bypass
There is nothing wrong per se with spiritual bypassing. It just means your lessons will take longer because you are avoiding accepting that you do have to grapple with them and there really is no way around that. But humans do this all the time in a million different ways. It’s kind of the human condition.
Avoiding pain is equivalent to avoiding your own growth. But we all do it. It’s OK. You have forever, so you’re fine. The soul doesn’t have deadlines because time only exists for the purposes of being on Earth. It’s not actually real. It’s part of the video game. So as long as you have more karma to clear, you’ll have more time to do it in, because that’s what time is for.
Embracing the dreamworld
I have never only occupied the world that the physical sciences can describe to me. I also occupy a dreamworld that has wild magic as its basis. I am a living bridge between them, as so many others are today on this planet. We each have our own way of translating that magic into something useful to the people living here. And there are thousands of different symbolic systems and ways of making meaning out of the dreamworld. And the question of, “How can they all be true, how can any of them be true?” is irrelevant, because the dreamworld does not operate according to the laws of physics. It has its own logic and its own laws and its own truth. And that truth is often mysterious and paradoxical.
I cannot be nourished by the physical world alone. I deeply need to explore and find meaning in the dreamworld, and translate that meaning into something that is accessible and practical. It’s just part of my nature. Being deeply practical and curious is also part of my nature, so I also love science. They coexist for me, and I understand they don’t coexist for everyone. But I am only here to live my own life, and it’s OK if it doesn’t make sense to everyone.
My survival does not depend on being everyone’s cup of tea. This isn’t the 1500s, and I’m not going to be burned at the stake. It’s safe to be who I am and honor my own truth. And there is no way I can truly be happy and fulfilled in my life if I don’t.
And as I do this work of deep self-acceptance and reclaiming and honoring all the parts of me, I relax. I’m less defensive. I’m less resentful at having to be here on this planet, stuck in this meatsuit. The parts of me that were pushed aside or hidden can finally breathe, and live, and just be who they are. And that feeling of wholeness is worth whatever social consequences may result from just living honestly as myself. I’d rather the discomfort live in the tension of being different than other people sometimes, than for it to live inside me as alienation from myself.
What is spiritual healing?
Spiritual healing occurs when you remember that who you really are is bigger than the thing that you thought had power over you. That is the moment you master the lesson.
All healing is remembering that the fear was never real.
God does not belong to anyone
The spiritual meaning of “open your heart to Jesus” is that our connection to God is through the heart, not the mind, and that connecting to God has to be a free will choice we make to be open and willing for that connection to occur. I’m not a Christian, but I can recognize spiritual teachings exist in all traditions.
And I can separate those teachings from the bullying I received at the hands of Christian kids growing up, and the authoritarian politics of some Christians in my country that is frankly terrifying. These are all different things.
God doesn’t belong to anyone’s tradition–the Light shines for us all, and whatever words and methods help you find it are perfectly fine. I sincerely hope humanity can eventually stop fighting about what are only symbolic interpretations anyway. Our mind cannot comprehend the truth of God, which is why we have to connect with our heart and why “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao”. So use whatever works for you, and let other people use what works for them.
Choosing painful incarnations
I often hear people feel the idea that we choose our incarnations, and therefore choose our traumas, to be victim blaming. I understand why it would feel that way from a human perspective. But the choice isn’t made from within the human experience. This idea presupposes that who we really are is so much more vast and expansive than we can ever hope to imagine while we are in these human vessels, so the choice to experience helplessness and victimization makes sense. It makes sense to a soul the way that lifting very heavy weights to tear our muscles so they regrow stronger makes sense to us as humans–the soul has absolute knowledge that it will survive the experience and learn things from it that it can’t learn any other way.
If you can’t understand why a vast immortal being might choose to have a very challenging but temporary dark emotional experience, then you don’t understand the idea itself, and it’s not meant for you right now. This is a problem with esoteric spiritual ideas being readily available all over the internet, and people encountering them far before they are ready to understand them, at a point when they can actually be harmful or painful to hear.