Avoiding the Collective Karma

by Stuart Wilde

"If you’re very reliant on others, you are linked to their karma. The more you become self-sufficient and self-reliant, the more you are in your own karma, and the easier life is to control."

Your waking intellect (your personality) brings to you an instant karma. For example, if you are diligent and responsible, life tends to treat you the same way.

If you’re uncaring and irresponsible, you pull to you all sorts that will treat you erratically and let you down. If you are out of control emotionally and inattentive, you slip off the sidewalk and sprain your ankle; if you stay in control and focused, you complete your journeys without incident.

If you are generous, people treat you warmly, if you are mean, life treats you more harshly. Your waking intellect bends reality to suit your personality. So quite naturally, you see and comprehend life and events as you want to see them, so you may not realize you are hard on people, and yet you may wonder why life is hard on you. Karma is hidden. It doesn’t usually offer explanations. You have to work things out looking inside yourself.

Beyond the intellect is your subconscious. Very few have much idea what their subconscious mind is or what information it contains. You will see it talking to you in your dreams, but it may offer you such an incoherent hotchpotch of images and feelings, you haven’t much idea what it is saying.

The subconscious mind is more the ‘real’ you, as it doesn’t have the fake concoction of the waking intellect, it just accepts your feeling and ideas and impulses, without the ability to alter them. Simply put you could say, beyond denial is the subconscious. It is the perpetual memory of everything that you are and all your innermost feelings. It’s your raw self.

Your intellect ceases when your brain stops functioning at death. But I believe your subconscious lives on in a mirror-world dimension, a parallel world that is placed opposite to this one, right is left in the world of the subconscious mind. In effect, the subconscious is what we call ‘the soul’.

Jung discovered much about the collective unconscious. He said we are all linked by the same archetypes and symbols: mother, father, life, death, etc. I think Jung was right. We are all one-mind, and while you have your own karma, which is fairly instant, derived from balance and imbalance, you are also linked to a more distant ‘collective karma’ of your society or nation, and that is linked into an even more distant global karma.

Deep in the subconscious are your archetypal feelings and impulses: love, hate, equanimity, arrogance, each is a defined compartment; you could say each is a dimension of its own—birds of a feather flock together in the subconscious realms. You drift into that part of the mirror-world that is comfortable for you. Where you go, your long-term karma goes with you, for your subconscious mind can pull to you a long-term individual karma many years in the becoming, as well as a more distant collective karma that belong to you as well as many others.

Your instant karma can be easily changed by taking charge of your life and being more practical and living a healthier lifestyle, but your long-term collective karma is more trapping. You can’t escape that as easily, unless you make moves very early on. For example, if you were a carpenter in Nagasaki in the 1940s, you had your daily instant karma, keeping your family fed say, but unbeknown to you, a collective karma approached. If you were aware of your subconscious and that of people around you, you would have left Nagasaki, and many thousands probably did. Others traveled there the day before the bomb. They came to join the collective unconscious department that accommodates for 200,000 incinerations in one day.

The trick to understanding the collective karma is to listen to what people are saying about their feelings and to watch their innermost impulses. If you watch the news you’ll see the national ego running rampant. It’s all arrogance, disdain and self-interest. So you can see where the national karma might be headed. The trick is to uncouple from the collective feelings and try to discover who you really are.  Do you agree with ideals being expressed or do you differ? What are your innermost feelings and impulses? You may discover that you like the shared impulses you see on the news, and if you do, you will have to accept the collective fate that that might create. The problem is you don’t know exactly where the collective fate will end up. Is it Nagasaki or Nirvana?

Here is an example on how the long-term karma of America is to go bankrupt. Americans consume more than the planet can provide, eventually the supply and demand lines will creak and fall apart. If you were a citizen hoping to avoid his or her karma, you would consume less and make your ego’s needs less demanding, so you could easily handle a sudden down-turn. If you were sophisticated at karma avoidance, you’d be thinking Nagasaki-style, and you’d plan a move to safety.

America, realizing she would run out of oil, went to war to capture supply lines and resources belonging to others. The long-term karma of that is she will have no oil at all. It will be taken from her. In the subconscious, you can see it quite obviously. So karma avoidance would be to get rid of the gas-guzzler, while you still can and downsize to a small car or even a scooter or moped.

It is part of the British collective mind-set to be right, people are endlessly arguing, sustaining their need to be right. In Britain, it is very much more important to be right, than to be nice. So people are rather nasty to each other, while pretending to be right, and so its long-term karma is to be found to be terribly wrong. In the olden days, honor and a gentleman’s or gentlewoman’s code of conduct was what held up the edifice of British life, but now that code is lacking. So the country will rot and falter.

The trick to being British is to agree to be wrong and make changes now. If you go down the path of righteous indignation, you will fall as the country falls. The British feel they are very superior, so their long-term karma is to become inferior. They will lose their economic status. If you don’t feel you are superior or right, and if status doesn’t bother you, the nation’s karma won’t bother you at all. The French think they are important, so their long-term destiny is to be become irrelevant, funny eh?

Each of us has the option of going with the collective karma of our people, or you can vote “No” and walk in the other direction, but you have to make a move soon, as a ‘collective karma’ is the most trapping and the least easy to escape from. That is because people don’t see it coming, because it is the result of a ‘collective idea’ that everyone agrees to, so that makes it seem right.

If you’re very reliant on others, you are linked to their karma. The more you become self-sufficient and self-reliant, the more you are in your own karma, and the easier life is to control. If you can’t make major changes, make small ones.

Original article here.