When I was a kid, and my mother started teaching me about Pagan spirituality, one of the main things she drilled into my head was essentially a variation on Newton’s Law – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What you send out returns to you. Or, as my step-father put it, what goes around, comes around.
Now, I am far from perfect. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I’ve done some very questionable things which have caused pain to a lot of people. It’s not like I’ve set out to be a gigantic bitch or anything, but there’s a lot of times I was just flat clueless that my actions would cause problems down the road. Ignorance is certainly no excuse and there are some repercussions that I really wish had never happened. But then again, there have been a few times when I DID know better, but I chose to charge forward, circumstances be damned. Not real smart….
So I was raised to understand in a Universal version of karmic debt, and because I believed in this, I have also believed that bad circumstances in my life are completely of my own doing. I’ve allowed some pretty crappy things to go on in my life because of that. Yes, there have been bad things that came about as a direct response to what I have done, but something new is emerging in this crazy game of reality –
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the concept of creating our own realities, creating our own truths and living our lives as we choose within those definitions. My definition was “do something bad, pay for it, whether you knew it was bad or not.” That kind of leads to this weird circular thinking where you start to question absolutely every action you take, because what if this is ok for me, but it causes problems for someone else? If I drive my car, will the emissions become so noxious for someone, it causes cancer? If I ride my bike instead, what if someone doesn’t see me until the last second and swerves into another car, causing an accident and financial hardship for someone else? If I walk, what if I’m late to work and miss some critical situation that causes the entire company to shut down? I could just stay in bed all day and not do anything…..but I would be a burden someone else then!
We can play “what if” all day, and yes, I know, those are extreme examples, but the mind gets a little squirrelly sometimes. This sort of faulty logic has caused me to become paralyzed by fear. For a long time, I was afraid to do anything that might be fun and entertaining because other people in my life didn’t have the same opportunities I did, and they might become upset over it. How dumb is that? I’m currently still dealing with issues concerning inter-personal relationships because….well, that’s another story altogether. But that does bring up the point I’m trying to make.
We do create our own realities. Whether we choose to create goodness or badness in our lives directly reflects in what goes on around us. The most difficult thing to do is keeping outside influences OUTSIDE. There are people who want you to fail, who want you to make those bad choices, because they’ve created their reality to be dark and ugly and they want everyone else around them to be just as miserable as they are. They are the people that will make a point of telling you everything you are doing is wrong, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. They will encourage you to make questionable choices, even when your intuition speaks to you quite loudly.
Does karmic debt exist? That I can’t say, but I do know now my worst circumstances were created by me because I thought I deserved it. Years later, I can look back and see that. If I had known it then, how different the outcome would have been!
We’ve all got to learn to listen to our inner voices and understand what is best and right for us. We want a good life – make it a good life. If there is fear, question it, but don’t let it rule your life.
Sometimes we just have to take that first step.
