Does it bother you that some folks appear to get away with appallingly selfish behavior, as if they’ve been issued a free pass? You know the ones, the egocentric and greedy who always seem to get what they want. Is life selectively unfair?
We also see many examples of virtue apparently going unrewarded, sometimes even scorned, while the sins of others look to go unpunished. What’s up with that? Is God asleep at the wheel?
Saints and masters have been telling us for ages that truth and justice will always prevail in the end, but sometimes the end gets carried over to a future incarnation. For millions of people – victims of hatred, racism, physical and emotional abuse, poverty and despair – this life is mostly one long road of trials and tribulations. Why? They don’t seem to have done anything that deserves it.
Easily overlooked is that each lifetime is a very tiny fraction of our existence. We are weaving a karmic tapestry with all that we think and do, and that tapestry is not finished when we die. We carry its threads with us.
Think of a person or situation that annoys you. Why is that? The answer is what’s really annoying. It’s because you needed and attracted the experience you dislike, and further that you will continue to attract it until it no longer annoys you, until you accept it as your karma and resolve it in a spiritually positive way. Nothing in life comes to us by chance.
From schools of ancient wisdom, and finally from science as well, we know that all of life is deeply interconnected. A beautiful image expresses this most poetically. It says that hurricane winds in the North Atlantic may have had their beginning with the beating of a butterfly’s wings thousands of miles away in the Southern Hemisphere. Nothing we do is without some connective tissue to someone or something else.
This interconnectedness is both sublime in its totality and also a bit disconcerting in its inescapability. Maybe that’s why we try at times to deny it, hoping to get away with a misbehavior. “It’s just a little thing,” we say, “so why should it matter?” Yet, somewhere down the line, its ripples ripple back.
People often speak of good luck and bad, of coincidence and chance, as if all depends on a roll of the dice. No way. Any event viewed in isolation may appear to be random, but the orchestration of all that takes place is always in perfect balance throughout the universe, and if something goes unnoticed by us, it has not gone unnoticed. “Be not deceived: God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
There are no anomalies or mistakes. Reincarnation sets the record straight. Karma is a zero-sum game. Our only real choice is how long we want to take to get to zero. But as Sri Yukteswar declared, “Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.” Sowing love and kindness, practicing kriya yoga and the ways of truth, reaps fewer reincarnations.
