Life is hard. There is not a person on Earth who enjoys a life free of personal challenge. We all meet fear face to face. We all encounter injury (emotional and physical), hardship, sadness, disease, perceived unfairness, death. Sometimes the pain is so great that we wonder if we can bear it. We seek answers. We seek understanding. Those of us who believe in God do sometimes ask, “How can God let this happen to me?” I’ve heard so many people, when faced with what might seem to be inexplicable horror or unbearable suffering, wonder out loud: “How can something so horrible happen if there is a God?”
The answer is karma.
God is The Source. We are all part of the Source and The Source is part of us. We are created from The Source and we spend the first many thousands of years of our soul-life incarnating and reincarnating to learn the lessons that we need to learn to take on full responsibility as beings of divine love. We work and we work and we work until we have truly achieved a balance of love. Remember, love is the karmic balance. Once we have truly learned what it means to experience true hardship and true joy, true suffering and true calm, true hatred and true love; once we have exhausted the possibilities of human emotion and fully understand all of it, then we achieve the balance of love. Our soul’s karma is love and we are free. It takes lifetimes.
We plan our lives before we incarnate. If you would like to learn more about this, I recommend that you read “Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life you Planned Before you were Born” by Robert Schwartz or “Destiny of Souls” by Michael Newton. In our life planning, which is a collaborative effort with all the souls with whom we will work in our lifetime, we set up challenges for ourselves. We plan familial and friendly and romantic relationships. We plan sickness and injury and loss and pain. We also plan great happiness and joy. With the help of our spirit guide, we lay out what we want or need to learn, and we set about pre-arranging for those lessons on the physical plane. It takes agreement from all our soul cohorts to do this. Sometimes to learn our lessons, we ask our loved ones to learn others. Sometimes to learn our lessons, we ask them to endure hardships that they may not have planning to address. Sometimes to learn our lessons, we ask them to set aside their primary work to help us. It’s all done in love, though. We help others just as they help us. And then, once we come to agreement in the spirit realm, we all head into life knowing.
But then, we forget. When we are born, we are subject to a powerful amnesiac veil. We have no memory of the spirit realm. We have no memory of the best-laid plans we set for ourselves. It is up to us to figure it all out as we go. To put it mildly, that is hard.
Mahrishi Jyotish is Vedic Astrology. Essentially, as described at Maharishiyagya.org, it is “a highly mathematical approach which contains the knowledge of the cycles of time which bring about all transformations, and explains how the Laws of Nature are responsible for all changes and developments experienced in life, for example: the manner in which life unfolds sequentially through the steps of evolution from the moment of birth.” Do you read your horoscope? (If so, opt for the Vedic Astrology version for more accuracy.) Have you had your star chart done? That is Vedic Astrology. But what many don’t understand is that the time and place you were born is not the cause of everything that comes after. No. The truth is, we plan our lives beforehand, and then it is arranged by a group of Divine Masters that we be born at the right time, in the right place, to make our life plans most plausible.
Now this does not mean that there is no free will. Free will is a major player in human life. Once here and going about our lives, we make choices all the time. What we may not know is that these choices lead us toward or away from the plausibility of fulfilling our life plans. We all talk about “gut feelings.” Does your “gut” tell you something is right? Yes. And that is our intuition or perhaps a highly veiled memory telling you that to do what your pondering will set you on the right path.
Our life plans may not always be what one might expect from something conceptualized in love in the spirit realm. Sometimes we choose to take on lives that are extremely challenging or even unpalatable to others around us. We may choose to lives as an abuser or as the abused. We may choose to live lives as an alcoholic or drug addict or as someone who loves one. We may choose to be a rapist or to be raped. We may choose to be a murderer or to be murdered. This whole idea may be hard to swallow. Just know that choices such as these are made for the greater learning of the souls involved. To learn does often require the payment of karmic debt. And karma is freeing.
Be careful in attributing karma to everything. It is not the case that someone who is very ill is so because she was a horrible person in a past life. It is possible, yes, but it is also possible that she simply chose a challenging life of illness to understand what it means to live with disease. It is not easy to explain, from the human point of view and the limited human perspective, all that happens around us. What we need to know is that everyone is on his or her own path of learning.
It is not up to us to label. It is up to us to love.