Karmic bonds

• 26 November, 2022
• culture
• karma
• reincarnation

The clue is in the lengthy Genesis song quote. The song 'No Son of Mine' gives you a narrative and reference point for the subject of this post, which is the second hand karma and projections which comes from karmic bonds. A karmic bond is a relationship where you share blood and often a major part of your life with, so parents, children, and life partners and spouses, plus of course grandparents and grandchildren. When such a relationship goes wrong through old karma or second hand karma the resulting trauma can hit you very hard and often change the trajectory of your life.

Such a traumatic relationship not only complicates the socialization and Ego process, it can create enormous amounts of stress, fear and anxiety during holiday periods because of the potential of fresh trauma, more karma and the reopening of old wounds. Difficult karmic bonds can often lead to lifelong trauma and cycles of karma because you have a certain degree of pathology in your relationship with your parent which doesn't necessarily go away when they die. It simply changes in terms of karma and removes any possibilities of working with said parent to resolve the karma and work together through it.

"Why?
Why?
How many times do I have to try to tell you that I'm sorry for the things I've done? Ooh
But when I start to try to tell you that's when you have to tell me "Hey this kind of trouble's only just begin"
I tell myself too many times "Why don't you learn to keep your big mouth shut?"
That's why it hurts so bad to hear the words that keep on falling from your mouth
Falling from your mouth
Falling from your mouth...."

Eurythmics, 'Why?'

The issue of second hand karma

The issue of second hand karma is a complex issue especially when it arises out of trauma coming from a karmic bond simply because we are all affected by karmic bonds in two ways. On the one hand you have the deeper karmic bonds which come out of ancestry because in physical terms we are bonded to both our parents and children through reproduction. So whatever unresolved karma exists within the parent is often passed on to the child in the process of socialization. This type of unresolved karma can reverberate through different generations and it's important to remember that the unresolved karma in your parents can possibly have been passed on from their parents, i.e. your grandparents.

Then on the other hand, on much more refined levels of consciousness, you have the unresolved karma arising from your past incarnations or previous lives which you have no memory of and are usually not conscious of. This is because unlike sleep, you have no experiential awareness of any past life. Death erases everything and whatever conscious awareness there was is 'out in the field' so to speak, or the environment, or possibly the subconscious. Who knows?

It took me a long time, even despite my shamanistic training and hard studying of the occult, to recognize the fact and understand that much of my issues with my parents during childhood was down to second hand karma. I think I was at least 30 years old or older when I figured this out. Therefore it stands to reason that most people, who don't have that mystical insight or awareness, may not realize this until they're well past middle age. You see when you have issues from past trauma and second hand karma this is not a case of being just you and your environment or childhood. It's also the case of being someone else's mystical transaction and relationship with their environment, their culture, and their childhood and background. This also arises when you seek to create a karmic bond with a life partner, because whatever unresolved second hand karma from both of you will also manifest in your relationship.

"There's a pale moon in the sky, the kind you make your wishes on
Like the light in your eyes, the one I built my dreams upon
It's not fair any longer, something happened somewhere and we both know why
But me I'm getting stronger, we must stop pretending I can't live this lie
I don't care who's wrong or right, I don't really want to fight no more
(Too much talking baby)
Let's sleep on it tonight, I don't really want to fight no more
This is time for letting go...."

Tina Turner, 'I don't wanna fight no more'

There is no right or wrong when it comes to karma

All these song quotes I'm throwing out here are an attempt to soften up a hard truth about life. There is no right or wrong when it comes to existence, and living existence. You are born into a life and an incarnation where you need to be and you go through the experiences you go through in life that you need to go through. Penultimately the only thing that matters in life is the journey, the path you take, the truth you create, and the conscious awareness you develop.

Nothing you can say, or do, or think will ever come close to this reality.

I'm writing this in a way to maybe inspire you to learn from my individual predicament. I suffered a great deal in childhood as a result of my parents toxic marriage to each other. I have always been averse to conflict and confrontation. My father was the abusive one as he was never taught the discipline in his childhood so his issue or second hand karma was control, and my mother fought and stayed for the kids, giving back as good as she got. In the conflicts and the bitter divorce that ensued I was always neutral and refused to take sides. I also refused to yield. My father demanded conformity, my mother demanded non-conformity, so I grew up often being put in a position where I was 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'. If not for my identity issues the outcome could have been a lot worse.

I got away as soon as I could and my response was to become as spiritual as possible as quickly as possible. It brought me a vast amount of conscious awareness, and I've lived a lot of life quickly through being Bohemian in nature, a great deal of drifting, wandering, just going with the flow. But what I wasn't doing was honouring my incarnation and learning how to deal with the mundane physical stuff. You see when you run away you can run away too far and create a lot of karma as a result. At some point you have to turn back, face up to the physical aspects of your incarnation, the mundane stuff, otherwise you end up like me having to go back and pick up all the stuff you missed or were escaping from.

But then I came to a point a few years ago when I finally accepted that maybe this was how it was always meant to be. In this acceptance I learned to appreciate the upbringing my parents put me through, because on some level this was the source to everything else. There were no mistakes, no right and wrong. The chips fell where they fell and things happened for no other reason than they happened. Now I guess you could say to me "But you don't understand. I was abused. My trauma was great. I truly suffered." I'm not denying this. I have encountered people who have got through unspeakable trauma.

But the point I'm making here is that we are all living on the basis of memory, trauma is always environmental and it is the trauma we experience coming from our environment and other people which shapes us as individuals and makes us the individual human beings who we are. Creativity and interaction is never a complete process, there is no perfection, no ideals. We are all in our own unique ways a work in progress.

"As the snow flies
On a cold and grey Chicago morn
And a poor little baby child is born
In the ghetto
And his momma cries
Because if there's one thing she don't need
It's another hungry mouth to feed
In the ghetto
People don't you understand the child needs a helping hand?
He'll grow to be an angry young man some day
Take a look at you and me, are we too blind to see?
Or do we simply tun our heads and look the other way?..."

Elvis Presley, 'In The Ghetto'

What gets us stuck in life are the projections of karma

What gets you stuck in life, and catches you in the Ego predicament, are all the projections from karma which arise out of memory. I have no doubt that you have suffered, and some of you reading this will have lived through a great deal more trauma and pain than I ever have, or can even imagine. But it's also important to understand that your mind and your memory can only get you so far in life. This was the point of my last book, 'The Tears of a Clown' - if you're living entirely on the basis of Ego then inevitably you're going to struggle, you're going to get hurt, and you're going to suffer, because what you're doing is projecting old karma from memory back out into your environment and living on that basis.

There's a difference between thinking about life and projecting from old karma on the one hand, and actually living your life on the other. Often if you fill your mind with the past from your Ego and memory you can end up getting caught up in conceptualizing life rather than experiencing life, bouncing between memory and imagination to generate fears and anxieties, so eventually you get caught up and trapped in your own little world, your own comfort zone, and seek to avoid any experience which takes you out of that comfort zone. If you get caught up in such an Ego predicament, it stands to reason that your future and any possibility is going to be restricted by your past karma.

What happens when this happens is that your life becomes dictated by attractions and aversions, you create all kinds of different conditions, preconditions, boundaries, whatifs and whataboutery, so eventually you end up comparing your present circumstances to your past. You make your life about the physical planes and shut down insight, because you're living on the basis of psychology, thinking, reasoning and logic. But see none of us see things in life the same way, nor do we view each other's experiences of life the same way either. Individual conscious perspective is just that, individual conscious perspective. If you're going through life with your perspective restricted by the cookie cutters from your memory, not only will your mind become cluttered, but most other people simply won't measure up to your expectations. Nor will you measure up to their expectations.

The differences between the way you see things, and the way I see things is karma and projections of karma. So if we're in the same environment and circumstances what could be heaven for me could be hell for you. Do you see how this works?

"Well the world turns
And a hungry little boy with the runny nose
Plays in the street as the cold wind blows
In the ghetto
And his hunger burns
So he starts to roam the streets at night
And he learns how to steal and he learns how to fight
In the ghetto
Then one night in desperation the young man breaks away
He buys a gun, he steals a car, he tries to run but he don't get far
And his momma cries
As a crowd gathers round an angry young man
Face down in the street with a gun in his hand
In the ghetto
And as her young man dies
On a cold and grey Chicago morn
And another little baby child is born
In the ghetto.."

Elvis Presley, 'In The Ghetto'

But see while karma and second hand karma can easily trap you, you can also see it in the popular way as your comeuppance as well. Or consequences. See the Elvis Presley song quotes, the story of a young man in the ghetto in Chicago, and see how projections of karma can easily get you trapped in various cycles which you repeat on and on and on in life.

You see projections of karma can exist on different levels - not just between family members and life partners, but also at a community level between neighbours, a social level through culture, and also on a political level. This is how people who are born into poverty get trapped into poverty and the poverty means less opportunities, less support, less possibilities, less understanding and more indifference. If you're affected by poverty one of the first things you learn is to rely on yourself because often when you reach out someone else will either let you down or turn you away. The choices you make in life are all determined by your circumstances and whatever opportunities you can perceive and have access to. A lack of opportunities and poor circumstances can only result in poor choices, repetition of cycles and the beat goes on.

But see karma can also liberate you because this is what it's ultimately designed to do. But you need more than better choices because all the choices you make are made on the basis of memory and memory is karma. In fact karma is physical existence, because if something has happened then it exists. Better is just a matter of opinion, as is worse. This is why self-improvement and 'working on yourself' is a crock of bullshit because all you're doing is going through the motions, repeating past cycles over and over again, and fooling yourself that because you're doing all this that things are getting better.

What you need is a different perspective to get past trauma and past karma, but to change your perspective you need to change your relationship with your environment and to make that change you need to get out of your comfort zone and create something new. This is the story behind the Hanged Man card in the Tarot. The Hanged Man is the Fool who was seeking his spiritual self. He decided to hang upside down from a tree for nine days. Not eating. Not moving. The coins fell from his pocket onto the ground. On the ninth day he woke up in the morning, and speculated how things would be if the coins on the ground were stars in the sky, and the stars in the sky were coins.

Much of what getting past karma and trauma is reimagining things differently from a different perspective, pretty much the same way you did as a small child.

"Power and the money, money and the power
Minute after minute, hour after hour
Everybody's running, but half of them ain't looking
It's going on in the kitchen, but I don't know what's cooking
They say I got to learn, but nobody's here to teach me
If they can't understand it, how can they reach me?
I guess they can't, I guess they won't
I guess they're fronting, that's why I know my life is out of luck, fool

Been spending most of their lives living in the gangsta's paradise
Been spending most of their lives living in the gangsta's paradise
Keep spending most of our lives living in the gangsta's paradise
Keep spending most of our lives living in the gangsta's paradise

Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we hurt are you and me?....."

Coolio, 'Gangsta's Paradise'

There's no escape from karma

This is why so many people get caught up in crime. Most people seem to think that crime is linked to poverty. This is bullshit. More than anything crime is linked to a lack of social mobility and social security. It's influenced heavily by the Profit Incentive. Crime is just another way of getting one up over others in society. It's just another way of trying to escape karma. But see a lot of people get involved in crime because they're looking for a way out and have no other opportunities accessible to them.

Karma, or physical existence, is 100% lawful. There are laws of physics, laws of chemistry, biology, astrology, psychology, politics, economics, theology, medicine, and all these laws, and sciences, eventually come down to either Natural Law or Creative Law. It's all about energy cycles, waves, wavelengths, frequencies and vibrations. All your thoughts, feelings, emotions, even the language you use and the choices you make, and lawfully defined. You do not think or speak out of a vacuum. What you think and feel now is relative to how you felt and what you thought in the past. What you think and feel in the future is relative to the way you're feeling and what you're thinking now.

One of the biggest human illusions is freedom. But freedom from what? It took me some time to understand that when most people talk about freedom they mean separateness, especially when it comes to stuff like freedom of speech. They want to be able to voice their opinions but not face any consequences. Freedom of speech is a ridiculous concept because there is no such thing as free will. Free will is directed or projected thinking, conception, it's Ego, it's clinging to desire, and whenever you're clinging to a desire from a position of Ego you're also subjected to law, authority, and stuck within the invisible prison of your mind. All you're doing is creating more karma from second hand karma. I put good money on the fact that whatever opinion, desire or ideology you're coming out with has come from someone else.

The truth will set you free.

Actual freedom can only come from a position of truth. But to be able to speak the truth you need humanity, an open mind, an understanding of reality, and all this involves acceptance of past karma and all your shit. There's no other way but to embrace your karma, go through the experience and be in a position to tell the story. Understand that truth always comes from a story, and never from an explanation. You can only tell a story from a conscious perspective and you can only tell a story if you're willing to share insight with others. This is something which is different from explanations, because all explanations are rooted in Ego and based on authority.

I'll leave it here for you to mull over as you head home for Christmas or meet up with your family and relatives. Contemplate.