Lately I find myself not using my mind the way I used to. Formerly, I felt that unless I had intimate knowledge and evidence of a thing, there was no way that I could make decisions about that thing. And that had severe cascading consequences; one question “answered” lead to another, and another, and another. My mind was firmly in control, and I just couldn’t see the limitations that were imposed by that. 
Now that I have a grasp on how to actually use (and trust) my instincts and intuition, my mind is resting a whole lot easier. When I come to a bump in the road, or even a wall, I sit down on a mossy log beside the path, and I wait. If I’m really quiet, it doesn’t take too long before the means to step over the obstacle comes to me. No struggling. In fact the obstacle usually simply dissolves because it was never there in the first place, like a mirage. I’m the one who put it there, so I can make it go away.
But the mind still needs something to do – like coming up with the questions. And, once the answer is given, the mind’s job is find ways to implement it and to project that energy and make things happen. But sometimes even the questions are inspired, if there’s a need to bump the “conversation” a bit to another tack.
All of which is to say that even though we know that we can never understand everything, we still need the mind to be active in its own realm lest it atrophy.
So thoughts come and go as the mind gets its exercise. Some are more useful than others.
Very recently the idea of karma came up – just a general musing that maybe my subconscious needed answers for – or possibly it’s something that I was prompted to explore for my own development (and thus for the people I work with).
A basic premise of what we call the Law of Karma is that it’s a balancing of energies. In some traditions it’s thought that a Supreme Being has a part in doling out the balancing energies. Others (myself included) feel that although it was implemented by the Creator as a part of the system of things on Earth, personal karma leaves it completely up to us to find the way to do the corrections ourselves. We get help with this from our intuitive resources, but we still must be the ones to do the seeking, make the decision, and to implement the actions required. It’s closely tied to life lessons.
Anyhow, we’re pretty sure that when we do a dumb thing, take advantage of people, maybe even do evil things… in order to continue the evolution of our souls, those mistakes need to be balanced with lessons that will enable us to redeem ourselves. As an aside, there are souls who choose not to evolve. They are in fact devolutionary, and what we consider to be “negative” simply because they are a kind of negative in relation to our positive.
But what happens when we have a “positive balance” in our karmic account? The mind and its logic says that if negative karma needs to be balanced with positive, then the converse should be true as well. Do you suppose that every good deed must then be balanced by a hard lesson or a mistake? Or as popular wisdom may have it: “No good deed goes unpunished!” ?
That thought was very interesting to me. Might sound silly, but it makes sense in purely numerical terms. Balance is balance, right?
It leads down a small but definite rabbit’s hole, for me at least. Let’s figure this out.
If we were spun off by the Creator/God, then we are bits of God. We incarnate for a reason, and part of that looks like evolving in order to move back toward our Origin.
Every action or happening in life gets us a little closer to that Origin, or farther away. Say we’re making progress, one step at a time. But at some point we step in a gopher hole, and we stumble back a little. That’s when we incur negative karma.
So of course we need to learn the lesson of not falling into gopher holes, and take a step ahead to get back to where we were, in the direction we’re moving.
But, contrary to my numbers game of balancing positive and negative, there is no “need” to balance good with bad… only bad with good. If we are on a purposeful evolutionary path, every setback is temporary. Your good deeds will go unpunished.
Karma is simply the natural way of moving forward. If you fall back, of course you need to make that up to keep going ahead. Simple.
And did you know that walking is merely a process of surrendering to gravity and continually falling forward?
Those people haven’t worked with me yet. 🙂 But of course you’re right – if it is indeed something that still needs to be worked out on their part, no amount of clearing will resolve it until they stand up on their hind legs and do it.
That phrase… the human condition… always sounded to me as though being human is a condition that needs to be cured, LOL.
Always interesting to me is the idea of “no good deed…” mainly because I see certain people have that experience over and over and over again. I always wonder why they don’t “learn their lesson” and stop beating themselves over the head with a hammer. Maybe it is a blind spot, or a block, or a major lesson that is so deep they need to dig it out with an incepick?? But I then I consider my own areas where I do the same thing, and I’ll bet the other guy thinks the same thing about me. The human condition? It’s something…maybe Karma in action is a possible explanation. It feels to me like this thing wants a name, but I don’t know that I can put my finger on it just yet.