The truth about karma

The guides explain the meaning (and the process) of karma. It's both more poetic and more prosaic than you might expect.

Not long ago, I was guided to meditate with bumblebee jasper and got a faceful of gold dragon. (I call him Bumblebee, which may or may not be a caution to future dragons to tell me their names sooner rather than later. Ahem.) Ignoring Bumblebee for the moment, I asked the jasper what it wanted to say. "I put people on the path to balance," it whispered. I didn't understand what that was about, so I turned to the dragon. "What do you want to say?" I asked. "The same thing as the jasper, silly," he said. Dragons, man.

Bumblebee then laughed and gave me his lesson."Balance," he said, "is an active pursuit. It never stops. You don’t find balance and stay there, because something will always come along to knock you out of balance." What that means, then, is that finding your balance is a state of being, not an end goal. We are never not working to maintain our balance.

And that, my friends, is about the best description of karma you're likely to find. In this post, the guides explain the meaning (and the process) of karma. It's both more poetic and more prosaic than you might expect.

Hello everyone. Can you explain what karma is?

Karma is balance. Karma is the understanding that for every action there is a reaction. In its physical incarnations, your soul—your higher self—chooses a variety of experiences. Your soul considers all those experiences necessary, because they allow your soul to pursue its mission: to experience every aspect of itself.

What do you mean when you say that the soul’s mission is to experience every aspect of itself?

This is the overall mission of consciousness itself. It's the mission that Source created for itself when it first asked the question, “What can I become?” In its experiences, your soul wishes to understand every aspect of itself—its dark aspects, its light aspects, and every shade in between.

What does this mission of the soul experiencing itself have to do with karma?

After innumerable physical lives, your soul may find that it has aligned more with one aspect of itself than others. Karma is simply your soul deciding to balance itself. It is your soul's choice, as all things are your soul's choice, to balance its experiences so that it can experience itself in all of its glory—dark and light—and then sit at the center of its being, not leaning too far in any one direction.

Can you give me an example?

Let's talk about war. Imagine a soul having an experience on Earth and in that experience, the soul goes to war as a soldier. In its essence, a soldier is a guardian and a protector. And yet our soldier is required to commit acts of violence in their role of guarding and protecting the population. Imagine that, in the course of their actions, our soldier’s soul has strongly aligned with the idea of committing violence for the sake of an ideal.

At the end of our soldier’s physical life, the higher self may say, “Oh dear, we’re leaning too far in the direction of aggression. We need to understand ourselves from the direction of repression.” In that case, the higher self may choose a balancing life—a life in which it experiences being a member of a group that has been subjugated.

In understanding itself from the perspective of both soldier and victim, the higher self can achieve a point of balance: Seeing itself as both things, and neither.

What if we hurt someone? Do we have to pay that back?

In a sense, yes. But it's not a matter of an eye for an eye. When you're planning your life together with those advanced souls whose service encompasses such things, the entire soul group is taken into consideration. The overall goal is always balance. Everyone needs to balance their experiences in some way. And so, situations and potentials are planned that will allow this balancing.

In your hypothetical case, it’s quite possible that your soul will be brought into situations with those you have hurt for the purpose of achieving balance for all. That balance can take several forms, depending on what each soul wants to experience and the choices that each soul, and the group as a whole, make during that particular life. It is quite complex. We are not doing the process justice in this brief explanation, but it will suffice for a basic understanding.

A friend believes we are here to align with light and overcome dark, not balance it. Which is correct?

Child, you already know the answer. Both are correct. However, we would like to make a refinement of your understanding. The soul's purpose in choosing experiences is to balance its understanding of itself. That balance is very important to the higher self and to the universe as a whole.

But in the individual life—in your life as Alison, say—the goal is narrower. In spirit, you are divine light. So coming into the physical is a chance to experience what you are not, and what you could be. So the question is, can you experience dark and not get caught up in the experience? Can you remember, can you awaken, to who you really are?

And so, both views are true. They're simply seeing the mission from different aspects: one from the higher self’s perspective; the other from the individual life’s perspective.

So we're not actually stuck on a "wheel" of karma?

Oh, my dear, there's no wheel. It's just you, trying to find balance.

What else should we know about karma?

Some experiences and choices may require more balancing than others, especially if it's a lesson you're having particular trouble working through. But at no time are you forced to incarnate on some never-ending wheel. You choose what you want to work on, and you have all the time in the world in which to do it.