A Quote by Simon Blackburn
If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.
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When a friend needs consoling, do not give in to the temptation of telling stories similar to theirs of disaster or bereavement. It is something people often do to show empathy but nothing is more tiresome than other people's problems when you want to focus on your own. Listening is by far the best form of consolation.
Karma is not something pessimistic. If you think of karma as something wrong, you are seeing karma only according to what happened in the past. You look at the past and karma becomes a monster. So you should also look at karma in the present and future. Then karma becomes something very wide and really alive. Through karma you can understand what your destiny is. Destiny itself has no solid form; it's something you can create. You can create your life. That is why we study karma.
Since karma is meeting self, we acquire karma as we meet self in our many attitudes and emotions; when we serve in loving kindness and patience or hold resentful malicious thoughts What we do to our fellow man we do to our Maker our karma or problem is within self.
We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.
The worst men often give the best advice. Our deeds are sometimes better than our thoughts.
While testimonies can come as dramatic manifestations, they usually do not. Sometimes people think they need to have an experience like Joseph Smith's vision before they gain testimonies. If we have unrealistic expectations of how, when, or where answers come, we risk missing the answers which come as quiet, reassuring feelings and thoughts that most often come after our prayers, while we are doing something else. These answers can be equally convincing and powerful.
Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.
There are only two lives we might live: our dream or our destiny. Sometimes they are one in the same, and sometimes they're not. Often our dreams are just a path to our destinies.
In America, karma is best expressed in popular phrases like what goes around, comes around and what you sow, you will reap. Karma has also been referred to as having a boomerang effect where the thoughts and actions that you send out into the world turn around and come back at you... Jesus says, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Karma goes a step further and dictates that What you do unto others will come back to you. I think Jesus and the Hindus really had the same idea. Think about that the next time you want to say or do something nasty to someone else!
In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
When we cross the gates of death, our karma is all we take with us. Everything else that we enjoyed in this life we leave behind... Our karma is the only thing that will count in determining our rebirth, for our next life is nothing but the effects of our karmic tendencies that materialize in our perception.
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.
Many people think there's nothing they can do to change their karma - it's preordained so why bother trying to change their situation? This is what scares people. These folks think that to accept the reality of karma one must be passive. It simply isn't true. Karma is active. We can - in the blink of an eye - make decisions that will shape our futures and transform the parts of our lives that are causing us unhappiness.
There is good Karma, there is bad Karma, and as the wheel of life moves on, old Karma is exhausted and again fresh Karma is accumulated... Karma is twofold, hidden and manifest, Karma is the man that is, Karma is his action. True that each action is a cause from which evolves the countless ramifications of effect in time and space... To the worldy man Karma is a stern Nemesis, to the spiritual man Karma unfolds itself in harmony with his highest aspirations.
At every moment in our lives we need compassion, but what more urgent moment could there be than when we are dying? What more wonderful and consoling gift could you give to dying people than the knowledge that they are being prayed for, and that you are taking on their suffering and purifying their negative karma through your practice for them?
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