Karma: Ego's Echo

 The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Frederick Beuchner (https://everydaypower.com/karma-quotes/)

I don't know about you but sometimes I feel like I am caught in a big karmic loop and it aint pretty.

What is Karma anyway?  I liked Eckhart Tolle's definition in the video linked below. Karma is just the echo of our own conditioning.  Hmmm!

To understand Karma, we need to first understand the entity that creates it.  No, not God...our puny little minds.

The Ego

We all have these voices, these teachings, these memories and interpretations, these thoughts, beliefs and judgements   from our past stuck in us..They gather  and clump together forming a new growth that threatens to take over our very lives and does.  It  becomes a malignant personification, an ego entity...a thing that seems to have become something in itself, to have a life of its own and like a malignant tumour  it grows and grows.  

For many of us it is a very dense and heavy thing we have a hard time seeing through.  It covers up who we really are and it is the self we show the world.  It is the thing we tend to see when we look in the mirror as "me".  We become convinced of its solidity, its reality.  We truly believe that it is us and we are it.That there is nothing more than it and what it allows us to see.

What Tolle Refers to as the Pain Body

And for many of us it can be a nasty, nasty thing...dark and negative, hostile and seething like a volcano that could erupt at any time. It gets stronger by joining up with other entities like it, creating a collective force.  It is also a thing that suffers and makes others suffer.  It is, in fact the thing that is responsible for all the suffering in the world, all the violence, the hatred, the fear, the desperation, the lonliness, the illness and despair. It appears to be very, very  powerful and getting more so everyday!

Feeding It

We allow it to scream.  We allow it to temper tantrum.  We allow it to create a drama filled mess wherever it goes...by feeding it.  We feed it constantly with our beleif in it.  We feed it constantly with our unconsciousness...our inability or our refusal to look beyond it. We feed it constantly by seeing only its negative malignancy in self, others and by not being able to ( or refusing to) look at the glory and the good that exists beyond it.  We feed it with our judgements, our view points, our ideolgy. We feed it with this conviction that body lines seperate. We feed it with our refusal to accept life as it is (remember...pain is one thing...a necessary part of life...suffering, however,  is another). We feed it when we believe it, listen to it and follow its directions to react, defend, struggle agianst, resist or attack  any idea or holder of an idea that dimishes it, especially the idea that we may be more than it. 

Ego's Echo

When we do react, resist, struggle against the moment we are in...it gets stronger, we get weaker. Our worlds become limited, dark, unfriendly, punitive.  This is Karma: ego's echo.  The more we feed ego, the stronger it gets and the more it demands...it  screams for more, demands more and will lay down on the floors of our lives if we do not give it what it wants, making a scene. This egoic conditioning is echoed off the invisible walls around us and comes back to us in negative or chaotic circumstance.  We add teh element of suffering to the  necessary curves of life. We react; others react; ego clashes against ego. Ego creates a mess as if to say, "See! I told you it was this way!"

And we just keep feeding it and believing in it and doing what it tells us to do. It seems to be  easier to feed ego than it is, for some reason, to see the illusionary nature of it. To see that we, in a sense, are causing our own suffering...our own Karma.

Breaking Up With Ego

Ego is an abusive lover...seeking only to keep itself strong by making us weak and limited, victims to its unpredicatble nature. It wants us weak.  It wants us totally dependent on it.  It does not want us to see who we could be without it...what life could be without it.  So it is constantly screaming for us to follow our thoughts, to depend only on what we can pick up with the five senses as our reality...to see the world the way it wants us to see it. To avoid...at all costs...the deeper awareness that comes with presence. For presence, it knows, will make it seen for what it is.  In that awareness, ego will simply evaporate as the nothing it is. 

It seems so solid, so real. 

Yet it is nothing, nothing more than smoke and mirrors, an illusion, a creation of our minds.  Therefore all that it creates in the world, all that we expereince in terms of circumstance and suffering is nothing more than an echo of its screaming and temper tantruming. We need to stop feeding it and seek instead the awareness , the truth of who we really are.

Karma Guides Us Inward

Sometimes it takes this karmic suffering...be it personal or collective...to make us see how ego isn't real, how we are allowing it to rule our lives.  When we see this...then we may be willing to go deeper and discover who we are without ego and what life can be like from an egoless perspective.

Hmmm! Something to think about. 

All is well!

Eckhart Tolle (May 2020 ) Futility of Egoic Reaction and Navigating Our Awakening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9DCVEwd6Lw