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Will we know if we have paid our karmic debts in this life?

2/5/2015

3 Comments

 
Picture
QUESTION - Will we know in this life, if we have paid all our karmic debts ? Is there a way to know or find out in this life?

ANSWER - The key to answering this question of course is whether or not Karma actually exists. Karma is traditionally an Eastern concept and one which many practitioners of witchcraft, particularly those in the West and particularly those who not subscribe to the New Age ideas of magic do not accept as part of their belief structure.

The principle of Karma - as I am sure you are aware - is that people receive back what they put into the world. The idea is that good begets good and evil begets evil. This view can be adopted as a general belief or in some cases it is accepted as a quantifiable principle with the idea that specific deeds are measurable in terms of their good/bad nature and then the same precise amount of good/bad is returned to them as a consequence of their actions. Wiccans especially tend to be quite keen on Karma - think the threefold law of return.

My own personal path doesn't incorporate the idea of Karma much beyond the idea that if you go around being nice to other people chances are that other people are going to be nice to you. There are too many issues with the undeserving being rewarded or the suffering of good people to substantiate a Karmic world view in my opinion. This imbalance is often addressed by supporters of Karma with the argument that the rewards and consequences of our behaviour can trangress different lifetimes. But I would argue - firstly there is no proof for this and secondly for those who believe in reincarnation the idea is that we get a new chance each lifetime to take a step closer to our full potential as a human soul and it simply makes no sense to carry the baggage from one lifetime into another.

The concept of good and evil in the Karmic view is also too simplistic for my liking. People often do bad things for a good reason and good things for a bad reason. Nor is there a universal agreement on what exactly defines good or evil. For Karma to work there would have to be an absolute source of moral authority. This could possibly be substantiated in a belief system that yields to an omniscient deity but it is shaky ground and smacks more of Pavlov's dog mentality that it does morality. If we only learn morality through punishment for our actions then it could be argued Karmic morality isn't morality at all - it is simply learned behaviour.

There is a certain amount of idealism in people wanting a world where everybody gets what he or she deserves but the truth of the matter is that as long as human beings have free will there will be inequality between those receiving reward and those receiving suffering. It is hard to reconcile the idea of free will with the concept of Karma.

Coincidence is also a big issue when discussing Karma. In an average lifetime any person will go through many good and bad times. They will undertake both good and bad acts and both good and bad things will happen to them. It is easy to find a pattern if you want to look for one but the fact that a good action is undertaken and is followed by a positive consequence is not evidence of cause and effect. 

So I may not have been the right person to ask about Karma - if I'm completely honest it doesn't grab me on either an instinctive or an intellectual level. I don't believe good and evil can be neatly defined and labelled and I don't believe the world operates on the principle of "fair" which is essentially what Karma is I think to say that those who suffer deserve it on some level is both wrong and naively simplistic.

I don't speak for all witches of course but I think you will find a lot of witches who practise Trad Craft will agree that there is no universal balancing of the scales to punish or reward. Sometimes the good go unrewarded and the evil go unpunished and that - as they say - is that.

Image http://www.deviantart.com/art/Sweet-Revenge-180592253

3 Comments
Sandra
2/5/2015 09:23:36 am

You say it makes no sense to carry baggage from one life time to another, but , I do, most of us do I believe, otherwise some things wouldn`t seem right or, normal, or like something you have done before.
As far as reaching our full potential, that, in essence, was my question, how do we know if or when we have reached that point...?

Reply
Deguwitchrose
2/6/2015 02:36:27 am

I can only be subjective about this and as I said Karma isn’t really my thing. That said I do believe in the idea of souls coming back and I do believe that we can learn wisdom that will continue to the next life. What I do not believe is that there is a causality between deed and reward/punishment that follows us from one life to another. That’s an opinion of course and others may well hold different views but my view is relevant to how I answer your question.
I believe we reach full potential when our cycle of reincarnation ends. So where there is life there are still lessons to be learned. It follows from this that you can never know when you have reached your full potential as the very fact that you are alive and contemplating the question means you haven’t. As to what happens when you do become the very best you can be – I’m happy to confess that I’m as much in the dark as everybody else. I do believe in deity and I do like the idea of the fully actualised soul going to a better place beyond this world but I can’t claim any knowledge to support it. I wonder if after many lifetimes and all that learning the soul would not perhaps be ready for the eternal peace of oblivion. Or if possibly the greatest act of the perfect soul is to embrace its own mortality and offer its life to somebody starting the cycle.
You ask a brilliantly thought provoking question but as I am sure you are aware all you will ever get in answer to it is speculation and opinion. Nobody can give you a definitive answer because quite simply the concept of the fully actualised soul and beyond is a step beyond current human understanding.

Reply
Heather
11/19/2015 06:47:17 pm

I believe more or less in Karmic energies, though the good/evil is always a matter of debate. I see it in a way of working for or against people.
A specific working I was asked to do was to basically bind someone from lying and causing disharmony in their workplace.
I knew when I "tied his tongue" that I was working against him, so I would have some of that energy coming back to me.
A month later, in my own workplace, there was a day where everything seemed to go wrong for me, and I had to bite my own tongue, since the things that built up were not anyone's fault and I just happened to work the shift that received the short end of that stick.
I believe that was my Karmic price for that piece of work. I don't think I will continue paying again and again, nor will I pay it in my next life. I don't believe that Karma is this giant build up of intent that we carry on indefinitely.
That being said, I was raised with the belief that all souls are given a set of lessons to be learned, and if we do not learn them in a particular lifetime, we come back in another form until we have achieved true understanding of the lessons we were meant to learn. In that belief, that is why some people seem older and wiser than what they are physically.

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