The Seven Kinds of Karma

I wanted to share more extensively about karma before continuing with the Telepathic Link Yoga essays. The reaon why is that the Telepathic Link Yoga is meant to be an accelerated method for burning away karma by connecting with the blessing energy of a light being. Strictly speaking, there is good, bad, and neutral karma. Good karma are causes for a happy, peaceful, compassionate, wise, and creative life. Bad karma are causes for an unhappy, painful, angry, fearful, and sad life. Neutral karma are causes that are neither. When the phrase "burning away karma" is used it is about eliminating bad karma.

In the earliest teachings of the Buddha, he taught the 12 nidanas, which are the twelve interdependent causes and effects of karma. The chain of causation is circular, rather than linear, it is like A causes B causes C causes A. This means that karma has a repetitive pattern. This also means that causes become effects and effects become causes. Some of the causes are psychological and within an individual sentient being. Some of the causes are physical/external and connect an individual sentient being with larger patterns of causation. Ultimately, everything causes everything else. Inside this field of interdependent causation, the free choice of sentient beings is a significant factor. The chain of causation is not airtight or fatalistic. There is Quantum Uncertainty within the process. Free choice is not entirely conditioned by our past and is not entirely free from past influences either. This understanding allows us to grow rather than merely change. There are four places where we can change our karma. We can make better choices in our present moment (ethical idealism). We can burn away the imprints from our subconscious mind (meditation). We can not identify with no self phenomena and rest in our true nature (meditation). We can "remain with the sensation" and not react to external stimuli (meditation).

The first kind of karma is "obscuring karma". This is related to the mental poison of delusion. This kind of karma blocks us from seeing the truth of something. The most active form of obscuring karma is "projection" where we see what we have denied and repressed projected on some person or event. If we deny our anger, push it into our body, and not feel it anymore, then the whole world will be seen and felt as a place of anger and warfare.

The second kind of karma is "general karma". This is the result of all the lines of karma converging and becoming our general level of life. Humans generally have a certain kind of life condition, certain amount of happiness, sadness, work, love, and lifespan. This reflects the general karma of humankind at any point in time. General karma has changed for humanity over time. Things have gotten generally better with new collective challenges also appearing.

The third kind is "balancing karma". These are usually individual lines of causation, but can also be related to whole groups of people who share the same karmaic process. This karma is simple. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is a balancing process. If we kill someone, then we will tend to attract a murderer in our life. In practice, this kind of karma is not this linear, since other causes can soften this karma or change it. If we sincerely regret what we have done, when can mostly erase this outcome. If we help others and save someone, we can balance the karma without eventually needing to get killed ourselves. New causes enter the stream and can shift how our karma will manifest.

The fourth kind of karma is "habit force". This is similar to the law of momentum. We tend to stay in our habits and our habits produce a certain kind of life pattern. This is also known as conditioning. This is a far deeper karma that many humans realize. We are often completely run by habits and are basically sleep walking through life on autopilot, like programmed robots, and are almost not living at times.

The fifth kind of karma is "like attracts like". This is similar to the law of gravity. This is different from balancing karma in that balancing karma has a polarity of abuser and victim and requires us to keep switching roles. The like attracts like is where people of a similar vibration will find each other and interact with each other. This can sometimes include balancing karma too. It could be as simple as too angry people who secretly want to fight just finding each other and fighting each other.

The sixth kind of karma is "completion karma". These are events processes that are somehow unfinished and need completion, like grieving over the loss of someone in our lives. We sometimes block completion karma from finishing, hold, for instance, tears inside and let the held energy poison our whole life. This is usually because a subtle clinging and resistance holds the energy inside us. Completion karma is sometimes called "lesson karma" because something needs to be learned so that the pattern can finish and end.

The seventh kind of karma is "imprint karma". These are impressions stored in our subconscious mind that attract events to us and us to them. They are like hypnotic implants that make us do things until we are aware of them and release them.

A particular karmaic process can be and usually is a combination of all these karmas. I am sharing these processes here so that thinking about karma expands from the usual linear view that if you do something good, then you get something good, and if you do something bad, then something bad happens to you. While this linear view gives some feeling for how karma works, it is oversimplified to the point where it is not accurate. Just as Newtonian Physics came to similar laws, like the laws of motion (F=MA, inertia, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and gravitation), when a mapping of what happens in the real world, where multiple lines of causation are converging and diverging, mutually influencing each other, and so on, the events that conform to these laws are complex. The law of karma depends on a kind of synchronicity governing macro-events, rather than the movement of objects and the interaction of objects within standard temperature and pressure conditions that make them behave in more predictable ways.

There is one question about whether or not a Buddha is free from the law of karma. Some Dzogchen Buddhist teachers tend to feel that he or she is not free from the law of karma and some other teachers feel that the law of completely transcended when we fully awaken. I like the Zen Buddhist answer that a Buddha is not free from the law of karma and not bound by the law of karma, but is one with the law of karma. At its highest level, the law of karma merely becomes the process of creation. We can create whatever life we want once we are conscious of how it works. I think this is why it is important to not objectify the law of karma into some kind of rewarding and punishing god who watches us with candies and club.

One friend said that he did not like the law of karma because it encourages a tendency to blame others for how bad their lives are. We can be uncompassionate to others, which is not really healthy karmaically, since what we condemn we usually attract into our lives. But the law of karma should ideally make us humble. It means that we accept that every painful event that happens to us was at least partially caused by us. We can also be happy with the law of karma, because it means that evil is ultimately stupid and backfires on itself, and can therefore never fully take over the world. It also means that eventually we can master the law to such and extent that we can make our lives immune to further sorrow and learn how to teach others to do the same. The main enemy is not "conscious evil" which does not really exist, but unconscious ignorance which can make poor choices and cause sorrow for ourselves and others. When we understand karma, too, we understand an interconnectedness, that what we give we also receive. If we condemn someone for creating a painful life, then we have not yet fully realized how we might be doing the same and how easy it is to fall into unwholesome patterns and live them out. We are all learning how to live happy, creative, loving, purposeful, and wise lives and we can all learn from each other. The purpose of stating the law of karma is not to assign blame and let people wallow in their pain, but to show how we are unconsciously creating our lives all the time with our thoughts and choices and therefore show how we can master our lives by mastering our minds.

When the third eye fully opens, we can see the karmaic patterns behind the lives of everyone we tune into. It is opening up to a field of causation and seeing the lines of cause and effect that are being created by people and converging to form the events of human life. There are karmaic lessons that can be learned to change the outcomes that are destined to happen, if the person chooses differently than before. Karma is a kind of circular causation, where the same wars actually happen until the unconscious hatred is recognized and released. Some people are having the same argument with each other, lifetime after lifetime, attracting "special hate relationships" that are very familiar to them. If you look carefully at some people, you can see the ease and depth of their argument shows that they have practiced their angry words to the point where the whole dance is well timed and choreographed. It can reveal things started in past lives. The whole relationship is not merely "good" or "bad". It is a pattern with both happiness and pain. It becomes a general karma that the participants live out that forms one of the ten worlds.

The main point of the law of karma is that there is order behind what happens to us in life and the order responds moment to moment to our thoughts, emotions, and choices to form the events that unfold for us. We are normally not aware of what we are doing and how our choices are making our lives. This is living unconsciously, acting out our conditioning, and reaping the appropriate results. Because we are interconnected, one person meditating and evolving can help raise the people around him or her, sending ripples of causation that uplifts and awakens those around him or her. There is an interaction between individual and collective karma behind how this works. Some Buddhist Masters, like Padmasambhava, evolve so rapidly that they move beyond collective human history and only appear to others who are moving outside this collective pattern, at the edges where someone is breaking through "mass consciousness gravity" by meditating to "escape velocity".