Teaching on the Law of Karma, A Lecture by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Dec 29, 1996
Teaching on the Law of Karma
A Lecture by Elizabeth Clare Prophet
December 29, 1996
LECTURE TRANSCRIPT
We’re wearing a lot of hats today, aren’t we? [laughter] So this is the book, Mark Prophet’s book and it’s title is The Answer You’re Looking for Is Inside of You. It’s like Jesus, “Go not here, go not there, for the kingdom of God is within you.”
So these are some excerpts so you can assess this book and say how would so and so like to hear this or how would so and so like to read this and how would they receive it. You kind of put yourself in the place of various people that you know and decide whether you think that they are ready for it. So this is page 8 of the book, “Can You Sin, Be Forgiven and Not Have to Make Restitution?”
[Now,] now I am going to explain to you the law of karma as you have probably never heard it explained before. From the time of Christ and even before Christ, people have had a sense of guilt. People still do. And in this sense of guilt, they seek forgiveness for their sins.
Where do they seek it? They seek it from God. And they seek it from someone lesser than God, because Jesus Christ gave the power to forgive sins to his apostles and they in turn transferred that authority to the priests down through history.
Now, people [have a funny idea, they] have funny ideas about karma and forgiveness. They think that you can kick a man and go up to him afterwards and say, “Will you forgive me?” And the man, Christian as he is, says, “Of course I will. I realize that you did wrong, but I’ll forgive you.”
Then you turn to God and you say to God, “I kicked a man, will you forgive me?” And God says, “Yes, I’ll forgive you.” So, man has forgiven you, God has forgiven you and you feel very forgiven. [laughter] And you believe that your slate is now wiped clean. But, you see, the record of your injustice is still there.
The whopping mistake that popes, priests, ministers and people have made for thousands of years is this: they don’t understand that although God and man have pardoned you, the Great Law requires that you make restitution for your misdeeds. In other words, you can be forgiven immediately, but God’s justice must be meted out. Your misdeeds are not wiped out simply because someone, even God, forgives your sins. For as you do unto others, so will it be done unto you. That is the irrevocable law of the Great White Brotherhood.
Do you know why down through the centuries many people became Christians? They became Christians because they were told that Jesus Christ would forgive their sins—and this is true. However, they don’t understand that they still have to make restitution for their sins.
In his book Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda relates this story about the Indian master Babaji: One night, Babaji’s disciples were sitting around a bonfire that had been prepared for a sacred ceremony. Suddenly Babaji grabbed a burning brand from the hot fire and lightly struck the bare shoulder of a disciple who was near the fire.
One of the master’s disciples said to the master, “How cruel!” What was the master’s answer? He said, “Would you rather have seen him burned to ashes before your eyes, according to the decree of his past karma?”
Then Babaji put his hand on the disciple’s injured shoulder and healed him. And Babaji said, “I have freed you tonight from painful death. The karmic law has been satisfied through your slight suffering by fire.”
I would like to pause a moment to tell you a story about myself because it comes to mind so clearly at this juncture. We were in Holy Tree House, our, our first house in Virginia. And I was cooking something very hot that had oil in it in a pan. And as I was pouring the oil out and it was extremely hot, it went over a portion of my hand. So it was very, very painful. And I remember asking Mark about that pain.
And this is the amazing story, the, the story that came out of it was that many, many centuries ago I had a wicked uncle who in this life was my father. And he was forcing me to marry someone or to have a liaison with someone or whatever it was and I was very angry at this uncle and did not want anything to do with him. So I took those who worked for me and we got on horseback and one night we went through this uncle’s farm and set the, the places where the peasants lived on fire and then galloped away never to return.
So this was, was happening, this burned hand of mine, just before a conference. And so what I had to do is through that burning of my hand I was able to make restitution of, of burning the, this uncle’s estates or his, his facilities for his workers. So it shows you, now this was centuries and centuries ago. That’s amazing, another amazing thing about karma that we could have done something ten thousand years ago and it takes all that time for it to cycle back and back to us.
But my karma was mitigated for the amount of service I had rendered from that time to the present. I never forgot that lesson. And so here it is again. “The karmic law has been satisfied through your slight suffering by fire.”
The burning the master inflicted upon the man was less suffering than otherwise would have come to him as a result of his karma. He may have burned someone to death in a past life but had since become a good man, was no doubt practicing attunement with God and was performing religious service. He was trying to find God, trying to make contact. Since he was a friend of God, his sins were not imputed unto him with the same degree of intensity as they would have been if he had not been a friend of God.
People have the idea that they can do whatever they want to do with impunity. They say, “My life is my own. I’ll do what I please because I believe in the doctrine of the vicarious atonement–that Jesus died for my sins.”
Well, I believe that Jesus can forgive sins. I believe, for example, that Jesus Christ forgave one of the two thieves who were hanging on crosses to the right and the left of him. One of the thieves said to Jesus, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.” [The thief mocked him.]
But the other thief said, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “Verily I say unto you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
I believe these words to be true, but I also believe that from behind the veil of paradise the thief was required to reach out in consciousness to right every wrong that he had done, just as every one of us must do.
People place great hope in their salvation through Christ’s forgiveness of their sins. They say, “Oh, the Lord forgave me for every sin I ever committed,” and the next day they go out and do the same thing or worse. Isn’t that something! They ask for forgiveness and then they turn around and do or say the same things that they were just forgiven for.
I do not say that God cannot forgive sins, but people must remember that even if God forgives them, they still need to make amends for their sins. As the saying goes, there are no atheists in the foxholes. When men face death, they begin to recognize that there is a power greater than themselves.
It makes no difference to me whether or not you are able to accept the law I have revealed to you, because your own conscience will tell you that you must make restitution for your sins. If you can accept this law and believe that it works impartially for you and for everyone, you will be able to take more responsibility for your life.
Some people never learn to take responsibility for their lives. I was in a restaurant the other day and I overheard a woman say, “You know, everything I do is illegal or fattening or immoral.” [laughter] That’s the way she saw herself and that’s what she did. And that’s the way people think. They think they can do anything and get away with it.
We must begin to realize that all of our acts, all of our thoughts, everything we do is recorded in the computer that God himself put inside of us. That computer registers our every thought and feeling both in our mind and in the mind of God.
Christ Consciousness Is not Developed through Outer Things
The apostle Paul revealed a formula that is truly wonderful. He said that we must put off the old man of the flesh and put on the new man of the Spirit. Some spiritual seekers take this to mean that all of our mundaneness and humanness must be put away. When, in their own opinion, they have “put off the old man,” they begin to criticize their brothers and sisters on the spiritual path.
We must be extremely careful that in our desire to develop the Christ consciousness we do not criticize, condemn [or] judge others. For criticism repels Christ consciousness. And when we criticize, we incur karma that [ne] we must one day tediously undo.
People have a tendency to fool themselves. They think they have received Christ consciousness simply because they have put away some of the things of this world. Maybe they don’t smoke much anymore and they don’t have quite as many highballs (or maybe they don’t smoke or drink at all) and they’ve given up this and they’ve given up that.
They seem to feel that Christ consciousness is developed by giving up certain things the world [does] does and that when one gives up these things Christ consciousness should automatically rush in.
Here is an enigma. I am referring to George Gurdjieff, who wrote Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and other writings and founded an institute in Paris. Gurdjieff didn’t give up his cigarettes or his vodka. And from the standpoint of some seekers of God, these habits made Gurdjieff unacceptable as a spiritual teacher. [Yet he] yet he was quite well-known as a mystic, and he was the teacher and guru of that great Russian writer [ouspen] Ouspensky, who wrote the Tertium Organum.
Somehow we get the idea that everyone who abstains from this and that is just a little bit better than those who indulge. Once again I go to the apostle Paul, who speaks about this when he takes up the subject of eating meat. Eating meat poses a problem for many people because they think it will prevent them from having Christ consciousness. “Meat commendeth us not to God,” Paul said. “For neither if we eat are we the better; neither if we eat not are we the worse.”
Abstinence–not eating meat, for example–and being good little children in every way according to human [standars] standards does not guarantee us Christ consciousness. Conversely, just because you eat meat doesn’t mean that you don’t have Christ consciousness. I know people on both sides of the fence.
I can remember Mark asking El Morya specifically about the meat question and this is what Morya said. “If you’re going to eat meat, you’re going to have to do twice as much violet flame.” [laughter] I thought that was a very funny answer at the time because Mark was definitely not expecting that. [laughter]
Christ consciousness is not guaranteed to you by what you don’t do. It’s more by what you do than by what you don’t do. That’s why George Gurdjieff, in spite of his drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes, was able to develop a certain state of consciousness that was above the ordinary. All the same, I happen to believe that he would have been better off without the vodka and the cigarettes. [laughter]
It doesn’t pay to judge people superficially. It doesn’t pay to judge people at all. For Christ consciousness is not developed through outer things, whether by indulging in them or by abstaining from them. And the absence or presence of certain idiosyncrasies does not determine whether we are capable of rising to the level of Christ consciousness. As Paul asked, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?…Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?”
Your Thoughts May Be Your Brother’s Stumbling Block
As I said, the most important thing of all is to get rid of our human blocks. Don’t judge people, because that’s a diversion that will take you away from the source of Christ consciousness. If I start trying to figure out what everybody is about, I’m going to stop myself right in my tracks because my attention isn’t on the Presence of God. It isn’t on the laws of God. My attention is on a human being, who may be stumbling or who may be transcending.
We have to remember that people are rising in consciousness all the time. If your thoughts about them are not good and you decide they don’t have Christ consciousness because of something they are doing, you are putting a stumbling block in their pathway.
Your thoughts have wings. They fly to the person you are thinking about and they lodge in his desire body. At a certain point, when the human smog level gets dense and your negative thoughts begin to accumulate in that person’s world, your little thought may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of his desire to do right. You may be to blame for his defeat because you put [that] stumbling block in his pathway.
So, it is always best to withhold judgment. That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t exercise your powers of discrimination. Discrimination is a quality of the Christ and a quality of Christ consciousness.
Discrimination is like a rudder. You’d be an awfully poor sailor if you were sailing without a rudder, because you need to have a rudder to steer. Likewise, you have to be able to discriminate good from evil in people if you’re going to steer through the seas of life. You also have to learn how to walk the razor’s edge between discrimination, which is able to divide the real from the unreal, and criticism, condemnation and judgment, which is harmful.
Cutting Down Mental Baggage
In order to develop the Christ consciousness, we have to let go of the world for certain stated periods. Jesus himself went up into a mountain to pray. This signified his coming apart from the world. Jesus got on a boat, probably a stinky old fishing boat. [laughter] (Most of them are, you know.) [laughter] And he and his disciples launched out onto the Sea of Galilee. They got away from the shoreline, away from the people, and there they communed with God.
They didn’t carry much in their suitcases, like some of our women do. [laughter] But the men are even worse! [laughter] The first time we went to California, we took up just about one whole compartment of the train. We had boxes and suitcases piled…heaven knows only what. I even had a radio transmitter along with me so I could broadcast. I was going to talk back and forth to my wife and others from my hotel room or anywhere [else] in the city.
Oh, we had everything. We had so many porters when we went up to the hotel that they probably thought I was [that] Shah of Iran. [laughter] I remember one time when I walked into the Dodge House in Washington, D.C., wearing my purple robe, and the elevator man looked at me and asked, “Are you a king or somethin’?” [laughter] “Are you a king or somethin’?” [laughter] So we’ve really had a time learning what to take and what not to take with us. [laughter] Well, I’m cutting it down now. [laughter]
If you want to develop Christ consciousness, you have to cut down some of your excess baggage–your mental baggage.
Start Meditating on God and Don’t Get Caught Up in the Past
I have tuned in—as Risë Stevens has and as you may also have—to events that took place thousands of years ago. I have seen ancient scenes of past civilizations as if they were [on] live on TV today. These scenes are all part of what we call the akashic records.
When you start to develop Christ consciousness, you must be careful not to get caught up [meandering through the astral pain, plane] meandering through the astral plane or in the akashic records. This may occur during states of reverie that sometimes accompany meditation. You start to meditate on God and the first thing you know, you’re in a dreamy state. You may suddenly see before your mind the face of a girlfriend or some chum of yours.
The picture is there for a minute. It has no meaning. Then something else comes along. It’s kind of a phantasmagoria, because it is nothing more than a haphazard playback from your subconscious memory. Letting reverie and imagination run away with you is a state of mind that is an enemy of your developing Christ consciousness.
All imagery from the past–latent, expressed, or otherwise‑-has to be set aside and consciousness has to be alerted. This is the truth and I have to state it. You have to get away from reverie and from sights and smells and sounds of the past in order to develop Christ consciousness, because you haven’t had Christ consciousness before. What you have had is human consciousness.
If you’re going to put off the old man or woman and put on the new, you have to create a frame of reference that at least resembles what you think the new man or woman should resemble. One of the ways to put off the old man or woman and develop Christ consciousness is to meditate on the Christ.
I visualize Jesus without too much facial definition. That’s the way I started thinking about him several years ago. I mainly visualized the white robe and the radiance coming out of [the] robe. I didn’t try to be too definite with it. I let the image develop on the film, so to speak. And I kept my attention on God, because God is higher than Christ. Christ comes out of the Source.
God is Spirit. Jesus said [those] that those born of the Spirit are like the wind; it blows here and it blows there. Nobody sees it. So when you visualize God, you don’t really see God, but you see God’s light as it emanates from the Christ.
After you have been doing this for a long time, you may experience an unusual happening. You may suddenly feel currents running all through your body, over your hands and down to your feet. You may feel an almost unspeakable joy. When this happens you know you are getting a wave of Christ’s radiation.
As that wave passes through you, it aligns the inward parts of your being with the patterns of the Christ. Christ is putting his patterns into you at all levels–superconscious, conscious, subconscious and unconscious. And billions of cells–the building blocks of your memory body, your mind, your emotions and your physical body–become charged with Christ’s radiance.
That’s one of the ways you develop Christ consciousness. You further develop it through good deeds, through harmonious interchanges and through expressions of holy love.
END
This teaching on the Law of Karma was given by the Messenger of the Great White Brotherhood Elizabeth Clare Prophet on December 29, 1996 in a service after the Casimir Poseidon Dictation at A World Vigil for Youth: The Ascended Masters’ Rescue Mission for the Youth of the World, King Arthur’s Court, Royal Teton Ranch, Montana.
What is Karma and What is Reincarnation?
[Sanskrit karman, nominative karma, “act,” “deed,” “work”] Energy/consciousness in action; the law of cause and effect and retribution. Also called the law of the circle, which decrees that whatever we do comes full circle to our doorstep for resolution.
Paul said, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Newton observed, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
The law of karma necessitates the soul’s reincarnation until all karmic cycles are balanced. Thus, from lifetime to lifetime man determines his fate by his actions, including his thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds.
Origin
Karma is God’s energy in action. Originating in the Mind of God, energy—action-reaction-interaction—is the Trinity of the Logos. The creative forcefield of the Mind of God is the source of karma.
The word karma has been used both broadly and narrowly through the centuries to define man’s ever-evolving concepts of causation, of Cosmic Law and his relationship to that Law. The ancient origins of the word are an energy key governing the flow from Spirit to Matter. Karma, according to the ascended masters, is taken from the Lemurian root meaning “the Cause of the Ray in Manifestation”—hence “Ka-Ra-Ma.”
Karma is God—God as Law; God as principle; God as the will, the wisdom and the love of Spirit becoming Matter. The law of karma is the Law of being, being always in the state of becoming—the movement of the Self transcending the Self.
Karma is the law of cycles, the moving out and the moving in through the spheres of God’s own cosmic consciousness—the breathing out and the breathing in of the LORD.
Throughout the seven spheres of the Spirit-Matter cosmos, karma is the law of creation, the antahkarana of the creation. It is the integration of energy flow between the Creator and the creation. Karma is causes becoming effects, effects becoming causes—which in turn become effects. Karma is the great chain of hierarchy, link by link transferring the energies of Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending of cycles.
Karma as opportunity
When people talk about karma, they often think of the wrath of God, of punishment, of the idea that if they have been bad before they’re going to have to suffer now. This is one more ramification of the teachings of hell-fire and damnation, the concepts that have been propounded by Lucifer to thwart the true Christian doctrine.
Karma is not punishment. Karma returning to us is simply the law of cause and effect—for every wrong that we have done we must anticipate a joyous opportunity in the future to undo that wrong. And we have to seize that opportunity with rejoicing because here is a chance to balance our debts to Life.
Returning karma is the glorious opportunity for us to be free, for us to learn the law of non-attachment, non-possessiveness, and to realize the effects of the causes we have sent out. It is altogether natural and proper that we should be able to be on the receiving end of whatever we’ve sent out. If we have sent out love, we have a right to know what it feels like to receive that love in return, and if we have sown hatred or sadness, that’s going to come back also. And when it comes back we shouldn’t have any sense that this is unjust.
Unfortunately, many see the Law of God as a law of disaffection and disavowal. They envision a God who has no use for us but is simply the Lawgiver who stands ready to strike mankind with a rod of punishment. But God does not deal our karma to us as punishment. Karma is a manifestation of an impersonal law as well as a personal one. The purpose of our bearing our karma is that karma is our teacher. We must learn the lessons of how and why we misused the energy of life.
Until that day comes when we recognize the Law of God as a Law of love, we will probably encounter difficulties. But if we will only hasten that day’s coming into our own life, we will recognize that karma is actually grace and beauty and joy. We should understand, then, that the Law that comes to us is the Law of love. When it becomes chastening, it is the chastening of love. When it becomes the fruit in our life of our own advancement, this is the fruit of that love.
Transmutation of karma
Saint Germain teaches the accelerated path of transmutation of karma by the violet flame of the Holy Spirit and the transcending of the rounds of rebirth through the path of individual Christhood leading to the ascension demonstrated by Jesus.
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LECTURE: Teaching on Balancing 100% of Karma – February 26, 1997
El Morya Dictation: Lanello Completed Balancing 100% of His Karma Feb 26 1997
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