karmic action June 30, 2009
I have recently been re-reading A New Earth by Eckart Tolle and I stumbled across a passage that hit home. Last week I found myself in the throws of a “roxtar is stressed so can do what her evil side wants.” Oh, ok, so maybe it’s not an evil side, I guess a better term is a more unconscious side of me that I default to when life hands me what at first glance is a bunch of lemons. I spent a year living a life like this in fact, after working really hard from the age of 14 until 25 I was simply exhausted, on every level one can be exhausted on. I saved some money and quit my cushy insurance job and jumped in to the deep end. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, I just knew I needed space. While the space was necessary, over the course of that year, and last week, I noticed how I used the space as a sort of get out of jail free card to have excessive amounts of fun, damage my body, heart, and others hearts in the wake. This passage reminded me what I learned in that year and had to remember last week: that karmic action is always in effect and I have to be careful when allowing myself these get out of jail moments. I have to be careful that the moments don’t add up to be too many, that I’m not harming myself more than helping, that I’m not harming others in some indirect way. This could be too much food or drink, spending time with people who aren’t good for me, spending more energy than I have to spend, neglecting my yoga or meditation practice, or distracting myself with incessant amounts of tv. At least this time it was just a week. Hopefully in time these moments will shrink and shrink and I will be able to sit with my lemons with nothing more than a tiny smirk from the tartness. Below is the passage:
Let’s say that you are a business person and after two years of intense stress and strain you finally manage to come out with a product or service that sells well and makes money. Success? In conventional terms, yes. In reality, you spent two years polluting your body as well as the earth with negative energy, made yourself and those around you miserable, and affected many others you never even met. The unconscious assumption behind all such action is that success is a future event, and that the end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end. The outcome, which is inseparable from the actions that led to it, is already contaminated by those actions and so will create further unhappiness. This is karmic action, which is the unconscious perpetuation of unhappiness.
