I recently talked a lot about karma, with karmic structures from past lives having been discussed quite extensively in private conversations and on the forum, so I think I have to explain some of it here.

When karma from past lives is discussed, people almost always imagine some kind of a sin that needs to be paid off; basically, you killed someone, you had to be reborn here to learn a lesson by being killed in similar circumstances, and then you can move on. Let me start by stating that I never encountered this, anywhere. I’m not saying it’s not possible, or that it can’t exist; it’s just not common enough for me to have any experience with it. For the most part, karma is not about repaying past debts, it’s about inheriting the momentum of your past choices and actions.

Imagine a forest, with people and animals navigating through it every day. Eventually, as they walk on the ground and break off branches that are in the way, they make a certain path easier to walk. As time goes on, everybody just automatically gravitates towards that path because it’s faster and easier; you don’t have to clear all the brush yourself, because it’s already been done. Not only do you end up walking the same path every time, but so does everybody else, simply because it’s easier. The shortest, easiest path through the forest thus tends to get carved into the landscape by everybody traversing it, and after a while nobody even considers alternatives. Sometimes it’s for good reasons – the beaten paths go around marshes, cliffs and other hard terrain. However, sometimes it’s just because someone went that way first and cleared the brush enough to make it easier for others. I recently did exactly that, by going through a forest path with a chainsaw; the path I cleared became the new default path for others. The paths I didn’t clear because I didn’t need them or didn’t feel like doing the extra work fell into neglect and became so hard to traverse that people stopped walking there. The thing is, the path I cleared isn’t necessarily the optimal path for everyone; it was just the path I found easiest to clear with the chainsaw that day. The others just went along with it.

So, that’s your karmic heritage: it’s the momentum of all the things you did before; if it was playing music, learning music will be incredibly easy for you. If it was speaking Latin, this language will be very easy and intuitive for you to learn. If it was a certain type of religious practice, you will tend to find it the most reasonable and intuitive and just fall into the beaten path. The arguments that reinforce your momentum of beliefs will be heard and understood instantly. The arguments that contradict it will just pass through your ears without even being registered, like the background noise that you automatically ignore because it doesn’t matter, or is intuitively wrong. So, in every following iteration you will instinctively gravitate towards doing the same thing you always did, because it feels good and natural, it’s the “voice of your heart” that tells you you’re in the right place. The alternatives will feel wrong and you will tend to ignore them at best, and usually even have strong negative feelings about them.

As you can see, none of this is inherently good or bad. It’s just what you did before carving a path in the woods, that will become easier for you to just follow intuitively later on. The good and bad parts are up to you, and they don’t necessarily negate each other. You can be an asshole to others, and you can at the same time be very studious and diligent. As a result, you will find it very easy to treat others very poorly, and you will also find it very easy to learn new skills through application of diligence and hard work. Again, whether your karmic heritage is a burden or a boon, is entirely up to you. However, the more you did something, the greater the momentum of inertia behind it; once you carved Grand Canyon into the rock, you will find it incredibly easy to just flow at the bottom, and incredibly hard and unintuitive to climb the cliffs and try to find another way. If you did evil things, you will find it incredibly hard to stop doing evil things and do something kind, good and constructive, which will make your doom likely and your success incredibly improbable. If you did good things, you will find it incredibly hard to be diverted from them, which will make your success likely and your failure improbable. Sometimes it’s about things that are neither good nor bad – if you had multiple male incarnations, you’ll just gravitate towards future male incarnations. If you had multiple female incarnations, being female will feel right. You’ll just fall into a pattern, as you carve yourself from karmic substance in your evolution. Everything that feels more like you is accepted, and what feels as not you is discarded, the way Michelangelo carved Moses from a rock. What felt like Moses stayed, what didn’t feel like Moses got chipped off.

There’s also a mention of karmic lessons. Those are about aspects of your karmic makeup that give you wrong ideas about things because of the inertia of your experience, and you are so stubborn that you refuse to learn that you’re wrong about it, and it’s something that’s important and can’t be just ignored or used for a constructive purpose. It can be many things, and they usually come in clusters. For instance, you have a person who gravitates towards a Pharisee mode of existence – oh, thank God who made me so holy, Jewish, male and pure, unlike those other lesser people. The karmic lesson is of course to be born as all those things you think you’re above – an Arab female, for instance – in order to see that you’re still you, no more or less pure than before; some things are just different, and that doesn’t make them better or worse. Making a whole worldview around stupid prejudice is always a bad idea, and bad ideas need to be crushed through educational experience in order to clear space for better ones. Sadhus in India are a particularly bad case of stupid prejudice that needs to be crushed by particularly unpleasant measures, because those people tend to think in patterns to such a degree that their entire existence becomes entirely formulaic. Shankaracarya literally starts Vivekachudamani by stating that optimal birth is that of a male brahmana learned in vedas, and that such a birth should be used for attaining liberation. The next obvious step for such an enlightened sage is, of course, to be born as a female somewhere in Bosnia, to a family of village idiots, and still have all the necessary requirements for liberation. The karmic lessons of this kind are something that looks more like a blessing from God than a normal way of things. A normal way of things would make you more of the same. However, if you get to be on good terms with God, your path will start looking more rocky in the well established places, and more appealing in places you haven’t explored before. When your life consists of a series of karmic lessons, it means your past became such a problem, that no further progress is possible until you literally dismantle all the momentum of wrong nonsense you convinced yourself to be the only true path that leads to a bright future. That is obviously hard to do, the way it would be hard to teach a river to flow uphill, but sometimes your past experience stands in the way of correct understanding and development to such a degree, that radical changes need to be introduced in order to shake you up – or, rather, pulverise you into cement and then rebuild you from the resulting concrete in a better shape.

So, when I talk about learning karmic lessons, that’s what I mean. It’s a different thing from spending karma – a routine if unpleasant practice that transforms low-energy kalapas into structural elements of your soul, that need to be energetically elevated in order to be integrated, and the process is basically suffering without forming a reaction. A karmic lesson is something else – it’s being broken where you thought you were good and solid; it’s finding out that your glorious and pure past is basically stupidity, nonsense and obstacles to enlightenment, which can mean many things, from silly ones like understanding you don’t need to be a male Hindu from brahmana or ksatriya varna and a good jati to be qualified for spiritual practice, to understanding that monotheism isn’t necessarily a good, healthy and useful way of conceptualising transcendence, or that spiritual advancement and purity can take forms completely different from your expectations. Sometimes, it can mean that being an advanced dark mage who sees “common people” as hardly more than cattle is not an evolved form of spiritual existence and is rather a sinful and fallen state.

Sometimes, it means learning that this world isn’t created by a good and loving God who rewards the good ones with fortune and fame, and punishes the bad ones with poverty, ignominy and hardship. It will definitely mean learning that being in comfort of a beaten path doesn’t mean you’re on the right path, or even The Right Path, as some love to call it. It just means you’re doing what you did so many times before, and what others did alongside you.

As you can guess from all of that, spiritual evolution is a complex thing, where good things can take many shapes, and bad things even more so, and appearances can be deceptive. Things that feel right aren’t necessarily “a sign from God” that you’re doing the right thing; more likely, it just means you’re following gravity downhill, walking the path of least resistance, and whether it’s actually a good one is a completely unrelated matter. Sometimes the feeling of rightness actually does mean you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and you found your true calling. Sometimes, it just means your karmic momentum is making decisions for you. Sometimes, the feeling of freedom and levity means you fell from the 100^th floor and are currently falling towards your death.

In any case, there’s no substitute for actually using your brain for its intended purpose and actively thinking about what’s happening to you and around you, instead of just following instinct and inertia. This means that similar symptoms can mean multiple different things, often with different moral significance, and nobody can rescue you from having to make hard decisions on your own, and facing their consequence, whether in the case you failed, or in the case you made the right call that opened up a whole new horizon that will require thorough re-learning of things you took for granted.