Searching The Truth Will Set Us Free: Karma and Free Will are Not Contradictory

Sunday, August 11, 2024

Karma and Free Will are Not Contradictory – 2

Karma and Free Will are Not Contradictory – Part 2 /2

By Steve Beckow

Posted on August 11, 2024

Credit: GIFSec.com

(Concluded from Part 1 /2, yesterday.)

As I was saying, being only One can be a problem if you want to get to know yourself.

If you’re all that is, where is your reflection? How do you capture your image? How do you encounter yourself? Who is there to give you feedback?

Goldenlight’s Father or “Source Creator” expresses the dilemma:

“How would I get to experience Myself if it were not for you?”

“Before you there was just Me, before the Earth and all the planets and star systems and galaxies and universes there was just Me and only Me. I needed to create. I needed to split apart and individuate so I could know Myself and see Myself and see all the wonders of creation. You are all ME!” (1)

Surprise! Surprise! So this was God’s purpose in creating life forms! To experience itself.

Every time one of us realizes who we are, it turns out that God meets God. And for that purpose, for that meeting was all of life created.

Here are the Heavenly Hosts, telling us:

[Life] is all just experience to satisfy the Creator’s desire to experience Itself through Its creations. (2)

We find that what we’re looking for has been here all the time, causing many a buddha to laugh upon realization. Sri Ramakrishna had Shiva (in this context, God) laugh in joy, upon experiencing himself:

“When Siva realizes his own Self, He dances about in joy exclaiming, ‘What am I! What am I!’” (3)

Karma brings to us situations that reflect where we’re at. They’re opportunities to “polish the statue,” as Plotinus called purification. (4) Our purification from the dross and overburden of many lifetimes reveals the God that we always were.

Karma educates us on how to reach God … err … ourselves. And, in our free will, we try again.

***

Realizing who we are is the one mission all of us are asked to complete in life. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. And we do get help. (Well, for instance, the Law of Karma.)

Karma helps by continually feeding back to us how it feels to be treated the way we treated someone else. It shows us what results for us when we behave the way we do.

Karma is the input. Our free will produces the output, the reaction, our response, which in future becomes the new input. What goes around truly does come around – for our education and spiritual maturation and eventual reunion with the One.

So karma and free will are not contradictory. It’s just that the one concerns the input in our lives – the situations and people that we meet – and the other concerns the output – our words and deeds in response.

Footnotes

(1) “Council of Angels, Archangel Michael and Source Creator: Upgrading to a Multidimensional Operating System,” channeled by Goldenlight, October 4, 2013 at http://thegoldenlightchannel.com.

(2) Heavenly Hosts, “Let it Be,” 10 Nov. 2006, at https://www.ashtarcommand.net/profiles/blog/show?id=1985014%3ABlogPost%3A273050&xgs=1.

(3) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 393.

(4) Plotinus’s full passage is so inspiring, Let me post it in whole:

“What is this vision [of the One] like? How is it attained? How will one see this immense beauty that dwells, as it were, in inner sanctuaries and comes not forward to be seen by the profane?

“Let him who can arise, withdraw into himself, forego all that is known by the eyes, turn aside forever from the bodily beauty that was once his joy. He must not hanker after the graceful shapes that appear in bodies, but know them for copies, for traceries, for shadows, and hasten away towards that which they bespeak. …

“Withdraw into yourself and look. … Do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautified: he cuts away here, he smooths it there, he makes this line lighter, this other one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you this, too. Cut away all that is excessive. straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one radiance of beauty. Never cease “working at the statue” until there shines out upon you from it the divine sheen of virtue….

“Have you become like this? Do you see yourself, abiding within yourself, in pure solitude? Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor anything cling to your authentic self?

“Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space, not confined to any circumscribed form, not diffused as something without term, but ever immeasurable as something greater than all measure and something more than all quantity? Do you see yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself. Be of good heart. Remaining here you have ascended aloft. You need a guide no longer. Strain and see.” (Plotinus in Elmer O’Brien, ed., The Essential Plotinus. Representative Treatises from the Enneads. Toronto: New American Library, 1964, 40-3.)

Steve Beckow