Karma in relationships

• 19 December, 2022
• consciousness
• karma
• mindfulness

I know this is not typical in our modern culture where all too often it's based on Ego and moral reasoning and where a conflict often arises out of I need this, I expected that, you didn't do this, you did that, this is your fault, you're to blame, and so on. You see all too often in relationships you can slip back into individual mode and come out of the shared awareness and out of relationship. So you come back to separateness and Ego where you have needs, desires, expectations and the other person is the object or subject who is expected to meet the expectation or fulfill the need.

This is common because life occurs in cycles and patterns, and often the relationship shifts or something happens in life, and often when you both come back into relationship someone has unresolved trauma or old karma which hasn't been digested or run off, so one or the other partner cannot come back into relationship and unity until such an issue is resolved.

I tend to see people pretty much the same way I see trees. Whenever you go to a park or a walk in the forest you see the different trees - some tall, some not, some bent, some straight, some young, some old, and you just accept the trees for what they are and appreciate them. If you trip over a dead branch or an exposed root, you just pick yourself up and try to be more careful in future. You wouldn't blame the tree for tripping you up or expect the tree to keep you safe, would you? I mean would you go over to the tree and start yelling at it and calling it names? Or would you ever discuss with friends why oak trees are better than elm trees?

I see people pretty much as I see trees. Humans are growing on the surface of this planet. Sure we humans can move around, but we're pretty much rooted to the ground the same as a tree. I haven't met many people who live under water and I've never met anyone who can naturally fly. But see like trees human beings are beautifully imperfect. Some people are tall, others short, some fat, some thin, some bent, some straight, some smooth-skinned, others gnarled and wrinkled. Also just like trees humans are a product of their environment and also past memory, past karma, and backgrounds.

Another thing I like to do is look at faces and read faces. You can tell a lot from a human face. I try to imagine how someone looked as a two or three year old child, and figure out how they have aged throughout their lives. The other thing a face usually suggests to me is what's going through someone's mind. How they're feeling. What they're thinking about. What's going through their mind. This way whenever they speak or communicate I get a basic idea of how they're feeling and what's on their mind. It gives me a chance to listen to them.

This is just from my individual perspective.. when I look into the faces of most people these days I'm generally looking at a significantly traumatized, somewhat haunted individual somewhat beaten down by either decades or even a whole life of social fragmentation and cultural decline. I see faces of fear, of anxiety, a kind of weariness and a kind of distant sparkle of someone ready to jump on the defensive.. Only in the faces of the relatively poor and the old do I see anything approaching genuine liberation - because among both types many people no longer give a shit and have somehow managed to work themselves free of the cultural and political bullshit. But far too many people are taking this shit far too seriously and its created additional layers of trauma and karma.

Now please keep in mind that generally I work on the assumption that I'm dealing with a real human being who is masking or hiding behind a well developed Ego and vulnerable to various perceived threats from a toxic culture of political authoritarianism and predatory capitalism. I see people with their faces locked onto a screen of a smartphone, usually in the rush hour, often on social media, and understand that many of them are on the way back from some bullshit corporate gig and in recovery mode trying to reach out to others and recover and heal through a bit of social interaction. The humanity is always there, it just depends on how far down you have to dig to find it. See Ego is just another defence mechanism from people judging and being judged.

Could you be loved and be love?
Could you be loved, and be love?
Don't let them fool you
Or even try to school you, oh no
We've got a mind of our own
So go to hell if what you're thinking is not right
Love would never leave us alone
Ayin the darkness must come out to light

Bob Marley, 'Could you be loved?'

You see everyone in some way is just like a tree that despite being battered by storms and bad weather and frozen through countless winters still stands magnificent and proud in the sunlight, in people you have a brilliant shining example of beautifully imperfect humanity buried under layers of trauma and karma of social and mental conditioning walking under some dark cloud of fear and anxiety. Sometimes it's 50/50 which of the two sides you find, or which reaction you get, fear and hostility and judging, or the pleasantly warm surprise of humanity and empathy with a bit of a story.

There's also the demons, the ghosts and the angels, those among us who are not manifest and have no physical reality. There is also those voices to consider, the voices of the dis-embodied. In believing that our Egos are real and our sense of self is predominantly physical and that is who we really are we've got ourselves caught up in separateness and duality and this, when combined with morality and moral reasoning, cuts us off from the deeper, more refined layers of our existence and reality. We think in terms of duality when it comes to life and death, physical and meta-physical, physical and mental, good and bad, good and evil, right and wrong, when in reality these are all one and mutually dependent on one another.

Playing about with the numbers here, the Sacred Masculine (Six) combines with the Sacred Feminine (Seven)to give us a Thirteen, which is reincarnation, change and motion, which also gives us a One, unity through consciousness and a Three, which is natural growth and biological evolution. In actual reality there is no separateness and no duality. What you think is the spiritual world, the afterlife, heaven or hell is actually the meta-physical planes of existence, such as love - which is consciousness - in which you still exist, you simply incarnated into another foetus prior to birth and what you think of as your self, your Ego and the real you is simply your illusion.

The only person on this planet who believes in your Ego is you.

Yet many of you refuse to believe in spirits, ghosts, and reincarnation. Tell me, do you also refuse to believe in sleep and breathing? Please. Think about this.

The road of life is rocky and you may stumble too
So while you point your fingers someone else is judging you
(Love your fellow man)
Could you be, could you be, could you be loved?
Could you be, could you be, could you be loved?

Bob Marley, 'Could you be loved?'

You see on the one hand, all this racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and transphobia going on is pathetic. So too is all this 'anti-woke' nonsense. You're judging people for what the environment and this planet have naturally created in human form and to be brutally honest you bigoted and judgmental types all need to shut the fuck up and just deal with it. Life is hard enough as it is without pointing fingers and adding labels and stereotypes into the mix. Maybe, just maybe if you had a better meta-physic and were more in tune with your humanity you wouldn't feel so insecure or feel the need to cling to your illusory socio-economic or political power, which doesn't exist in reality. Seriously, liberate yourself and chuck it.

We are all pretty much in the same boat in life. We are all living on the basis of memory and trying to deal with the unique and specific factors we were all born into in life. This means we're all working through different layers of past trauma and past karma. Given the fact that the subconscious takes up so much of our brain's activity and we have all - through Ego - been educated, brought up, raised and conditioned by so many different people a considerable amount of the trauma and karma we are put through in life is not just first hand, but also second hand, third hand and more. Thirteen also gives us a Twelve, which is the mystical principle of unresolved karma, and a One, again the unity of consciousness. The first thirteen numbers in numerology if you learn them give you a basis for life, through fairly simple divination, which is why I put them together in a book titled 14 which is free and which you can download and read.

I also wish to point that I walk around with the labels of mystic and shaman and spend a lot of time writing, trying to develop community and on developing dreamweaving so that others can also be their own mystics and shamen I too am walking my own path, dealing with my own demons and ghosts from the past, and working through my own past trauma and karma the same as everyone else. So whenever someone offends or upsets me, instead of jumping on my high horse and defending my Ego, and escalating the conflict and the division, I just accept the pain and deal with the pain by reminding myself that someone has given me a chance to work through some more past trauma or karma. If anything I'm grateful, and even if I don't say "Thank you." I appreciate it. Each time someone hurts me or upsets me, it only serves to make me stronger.

I was never one to back out of an argument and say I was wrong
Even when I'd seen the other side I'd hide my foolishness and carry on
But still I'd be embarrassed because they'd see what happened
And they'd play along
Until I backed myself into a corner
I would only realize that they had gone...

Paul Young, 'Everything Must Change'

It wasn't always like this in my life and when I was younger I was a lot different to how I am now. Young me was eccentric, willful, stubborn, rebellious, and unpredictable. As a child I could also be secretive, two-faced, deceptive, and moody. In my primary school the school bully earned the nickname of 'Scotty' after he picked on me and six year old me tried to push his face through the metal gates at the edge of the playground. I rammed his face so hard into the gates that he got a criss-cross of different cuts and lacerations to his face. No stiches just a criss-cross of thin cuts and scabs in a kind tartan pattern on his face. Hence 'Scotty'. Until that morning, when I also chased the bully's friends round the playground wildly swinging a wooden stilt around, the other kids thought I was soft and something of a pushover.

The environment creates, the individual (organism) grows

This is our reality. It doesn't matter who you are as an individual human being, in terms of physical reality you are no different to a tree, a plant, or an animal. In physical terms you are just another manifestation or incarnation of a living being, part of this planet's atmosphere and biosphere, a walking, talking species of primate that's somehow managed to evolve into an ape that wears clothes, uses tools such as money, uses language, uses money, goes to work and gets food from a supermarket. Sure our natural ability to process consciousness through a powerful memory, equally powerful imagination and a powerful mind gives us the ability to create a certain kind of conceptual reality through culture and art and science, but in physical terms we're no different to any other species out there and we are just as subject to Natural Law and Creative Law as a plant or a tree.

In purely physical terms we're all living in the past on the basis of memory, because that is all what we know and understand. We are all the product of our external physical environments. Our physical bodies come from our parents and biological evolution. What we think, what we believe and what we know comes from our culture, our cultural background, our social and cultural background, our childhoods and upbringing, our education, and our felt sense of immediate experience. Our Ego is just a snapshot of our individual conscious perspective - the Hungry Ghost part which is never manifest, our individual reality - through which we create a running narrative or story of our lives, our autobiography, and we use the Ego as a basis for a personality, an identity, through which we manifest ourselves physically and play out various roles to pretend to be Good Model Citizens and earn Widespread Social Respectability.

Both Natural Law and Creative Law is about the relationship between energy and consciousness, the close relationship between the physical and the meta-physical, the relationship between the divine and the mundane, the natural and the social, and also what's really real and what's only imaginary real and what's also conceptually real. Natural Law and Creative Law are conceptually real, not really real, because they're products of human thinking and human perception. Likewise your Ego is only conceptually real, imaginary real, just as there's actual reality, the reality of this universe and Nature, and our natural environment which we barely understand, and our conceptual reality, such as society, sciences, philosophies, things which we can all know and understand.

None of us can be aware of, or know or understand anything which we haven't experienced in our environment, or which hasn't passed through our felt sense of immediate experience, or manifest into physical reality out of what we understand and are aware of through our consciousness awareness. We cannot know what we haven't encountered through our environment or experienced in our individual reality. This is why holding other people up to your standards and judgment doesn't work. While we are all human beings and one and the same in terms of our humanity and collective consciousness, we all go through life experiences which are unique, highly individual, and our life experiences are as unique and individual as our physical manifestations and physical beings.

And like a dream, a life of reason
Everything must change
(Every, everything must change)
And like the world is open season
Everything must change
(Every, everything must change)

Paul Young, 'Everything Must Change'

Very early in my Buddist training Babu my Master taught me a simple principle about Theravada - 'Obey the law of reason'. It's a very simple principle. If something exists, then it must exist for a reason. This comes down to the 'How?' and 'What?' of the Principle and the Process of Qultura. It's never enough to understand the 'What?' of something, belief is insufficient, you need to also understand the process behind the 'What?', get past the labels and the assumptions, and understand the 'How?' as well. Similarly if you've experienced something, be it a sensation, a feeling, a thought, an emotion, then it exists, it's real, and it doesn't matter if it's something that's come to you in a dream while you were fast asleep or come to you while you were awake and going about your business. It exists, it has some form of reality.

It's like if you're taking a journey on public transport, and taking a bus to go somewhere. You have the journey, the route, which here represents the path you're taking through life. You have the actual bus, the vehicle, which here represents your mind. You have the various bus stops along the route, where the bus stops to let people off and let new passengers on. These bus stops represent your beliefs and opinions. I'm not saying don't have them, but what I am saying is always try to have an open mind and be prepared to change them. Don't get too caught up in them or attached to them, because that would be like going up to the bus driver and telling him not to drive forward and stay indefinitely at the bus stop. That would be ridiculous. But see also if you get off the bus at a particular stop the bus will move off without you. Similarly if you get too attached to your beliefs and opinions, you lose contact with reality and lose sight of your path and you get stuck in one place, living in the past.

This is how relationships can quickly turn into abusive relationships. All trauma exists for a reason, and that reason is that everything changes in reality - all existence is change, all existence is relationship. Trauma is essentially change, motion, because everything in actual reality is falling apart and dying. There is no permanence, no continuity, everything is in perpetual decline, everything living is in a progressive state of death from that mid-point in the life cycle when it stops growing. Similarly society is constantly falling apart and fragmenting as individual people experience trauma in their lives, they get sick, get ill, lose work, lose money, grow old, struggle to get energy, some of their 'bits' stop working, or don't work as efficiently, and so on.

Abusive relationships usually happen when one partner wants to cling to a certain reality or a specific dynamic in the relationship and have control over that dynamic and with it the relationship and their partner. This is what I experienced growing up. My father was the abusive one. He was the only child of my Irish gypsy grandmother and alcoholic retired miner grandfather. Grandmother spoiled my father rotten, he got everything he wanted, never learned the word 'no', never learned discipline, or boundaries, when grandmother died when he was 15 leaving him with my grandfather who didn't give a shit, it broke my father and he was forced to go to work in the civil service and he became angry and bitter and resentful, and in our family a controlling bigoted bully. He expected my mother, a Glaswegian from the rougher parts, to become a traditional housewife and domestic slave. This was never going to happen. Mother struggled with untreated bipolar, she was sharp, intelligent, incredibly smart, but had zero self-esteem and self-confidence due to her mental health issues. Mother jumped in feet first to the marriage, tried to make it work, much to her detriment, and that of me and my sister.

Growing up I was closer to my mother than my father but there was a lot of 'pathology' in my background and childhood, some which came out and some which was kept hidden and secret. I was constantly in the 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation with both parents due to their radically different parenting styles and expectations. Father demanded complete obedience and conformity, mother demanded integrity, empathy and non-conformity. In my mother's eyes I was too secretive and introverted, in my father's eyes I was unwilling to follow rules, submit or conform and needed to be disciplined and held in check. I hated the fact that my father lived in the past and always had to have control, and this made me even more determined not to give it. My mother was stigmatized through being obese and being the proud Scottish woman, and was often deemed the irresponsible mother. Truth be told she was a lonely misunderstood woman who paid dearly for her mistakes in life and it never came good for her. By the time I'd figured out what she had done for me I was in my mid-20's and she was dead.

Cup of tea, take time to think, yea
Time to risk a life, a life, a life
Sweet and handsome
Soft and porky
You pig out 'til you've seen the light
Pig out 'til you've seen the light

Half the people read the papers
Read them good and well
Pretty people, nervous people
People have got to sell
News you have to sell

Look my eyes are just holograms
Look your love has drawn red from my hands
From my hands you know you'll never be
More than twist in my sobriety
More than twist in my sobriety

Tanita Tikaram, 'Twist in My Sobriety'

The need for space and a nurturing environment

I've gone into some details of my own background and childhood, and family relationships to give you an example of how karma and trauma are interconnected and mutually dependent on one another and - as you can see how the karmic process is cyclical in nature, and cycles of karma and trauma combine to give us what we understand to be reincarnation which passes from individual human being to individual human being, from generation to generation, from parent to child, and once the child becomes and adult, a partner and a parent, the cycles become manifest and repeat over and over and over again.

All these vibrations - because all physical existence is based on the energy vibration which manifests either as trauma, karma, or memory - are connected to what is known as the interdependent chain of mutual origin, also known as the ground of being. Both trauma and karma need space to facilitate motion and change, into which energy can be expressed to become reality so that it can cycle through consciousness and become new reality and new space for new consciousness and new karma.

What I'm writing about here are very fundamental and basic mystical principles which apply equally to everything in existence. Some might not agree and think this is deep stuff, which I'm sure it is if all you know about the world is what's been taught to you by authority and all you understand about your reality is your Ego, just on Level 1, Level 2, and perhaps Level 3 of reality. What I'm writing about here is pretty basic for Level 4 and Level 5 and the deeper planes of consciousness. I haven't even got into stuff such as Native American shamanism, the symbolism of rattles, spiritual guides and power animals.

This is why in my other (connected) post 'Integrity in relationships' I challenged the concept of 'love languages'. None of your 'love languages' are going to be any use to you in a relationship if your relationship does not have enough space for you to be able to switch between shared identity and the actual relationship and your own identity, nor will they be any use if your relationship as an entity is not a nurturing environment in which you can not only freely be yourself around your partner but also grow, heal and recover from the inevitable trauma and cycles of karma which you're both going to experience both together in the relationship and outside of it in the wider social environment.

But that's it for now. Let's take a break here. If you want more I'm writing a third post and making this a trilogy with the two posts below.