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Cause and effect, known as karma is not the same as fate. It is the basis of personal freedom and universal responsibility for all living beings. Logically, positive causes cannot bring about negative results and vice versa.

According to the Buddha, four conditions come together for a karmic impression to come to full effect (positive or negative):

1. A being has to understand clearly its own position and the corresponding conditions, meaning one must know exactly what one is doing and the consequences of such an action.
2. It has to have the wish, to influence them actively, meaning one wants to and has a need to do this.
3. The being must do something accordingly or have others do it meaning one does the deed or allows others to do it.
4. The being has to be satisfied with the results.

When these four conditions come together, a fully developed karmic impression develops, which is stored in our consciousness. So the karma is the strongest when all four conditions come together and the weakest when only one condition is present. This counts for all our actions.

The stream of consciousness flows from birth to birth. In every situation we digest and dissolve old impressions and at the same time, we store new impressions into our minds. For this reason, Buddha never taught karma in a dogmatic way or as a moralist like “You must not …” or “You always have to …”.

A conscious understanding of the way cause and effect work can support you as an individual to create beautiful, positive impressions and to benefit beings in the ‘cycle of existence’ with wisdom and spontaneous activity.

This article was inspired by my Buddhist teacher, Lama Ole Nydahl   

Buddha Shakyamuni (Photo credit: Wikipedia

There is no such thing as “guardian angels” or “protecting angels.” It is our own HIGHER SELF which guards and protects us, to the extent, and in the way, that our own individual Karma (which is the product of our own making) permits.

There exists “an almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings” (Dhyan Chohans or Angels) but “individuality is the characteristic of their respective hierarchies, not of their units.” (Madame Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine) No individual angelic being has any personal qualities of its own whatsoever as it has outgrown and abandoned all elements of personality in ages past, when working its way up from humanhood to angelhood. No angel can or does think to itself, “That person is in trouble…I’ll intervene!” or “That person is praying for an angel to help him…I’ll respond to his prayer and give him what he wants!” These Beings operate solely as Hierarchies, never as individual units. And their work in the universe – which is an absolutely impersonal work, involving and contributing to the WHOLE and not the part – is governed by the immutable Law of Karma, as is everything else.

Madame Blavatsky went on to say, “They are neither ‘ministering’ nor ‘protecting’ angels; nor are they ‘Harbingers of the Most High’ still less the ‘Messengers of wrath’ of any God such as man’s fancy has created. To appeal to their protection is as foolish as to believe that their sympathy may be secured by any kind of propitiation; for they are, as much as man himself is, the slaves and creatures of immutable Karmic and Kosmic Law.”

That is to say, the Law of self-created destiny which is known as Karma (the law of cause and effect, action and reaction, sequence and consequence) is the means whereby the universe maintains its constant balance, harmony, and equilibrium. Nothing can ever happen outside of Karma. Everything that happens to us in life is either karmically destined or karmically permitted. It cannot be otherwise. Thus all petitionary prayer (whether for ourselves or for others) is ultimately vain and futile as Buddha taught. Everything proceeds according to Karma, whether we like it or not, whether we believe and accept it or not, and no amount of praying, crying, pleading, begging, interceding, affirming etc. – regardless of how sincere and filled with faith it may be, or how desperate the situation may seem – can interrupt or interfere with the Law of the Universe. One of many proofs of this is the fact that at least 95% of all prayers go forever unanswered, as any honest and sane religious minister will readily admit.

The Law knows what it is doing and everything proceeds perfectly and in divine order, as it should, although many times it may not appear that way to our currently limited perception.

As Buddha says in “The Light of Asia”:

Pray not! the Darkness will not brighten! Ask
Nought from the Silence, for it cannot speak!
Vex not your mournful minds with pious pains!
Ah! Brothers, Sisters! seek

Nought from the helpless gods by gift and hymn,
Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruits and cakes;
Within yourselves deliverance must be sought;
Each man his prison makes.

Each hath such lordship as the loftiest ones;
Nay, for with Powers above, around, below,
As with all flesh and whatsoever lives,
Act [i.e. Karma] maketh joy and woe.

Guardian angels, protecting angels, and so forth, belong to the illusory realm of Christian-based fantasy. As said, our “Guardian” is not any type of angel but is our own Higher Self, pure eternal Spirit…the Atman…our own Inner Divinity, which is completely and utterly ONE with the Divine Allness Itself. As HPB (H.P. Blavatsky) and the Masters state, he or she who wishes to make progress on the path of esoteric spirituality, the path of the Ancient and Ageless Wisdom, must abandon and discard such fantastical notions as we have discussed and, in the words of the Master Koot Hoomi in The Mahatma Letters, “cross over from your land of dream and fiction to our Truth land of stern reality and fact.”

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IS IT NECESSARY TO PRAY? – From “The Key to Theosophy” by H.P. Blavatsky

Q. Do you believe in prayer, and do you ever pray?
A. We do not. We act, instead of talking.
Q. You do not offer prayers even to the Absolute Principle?
A. Why should we? Being well-occupied people, we can hardly afford to lose time in addressing verbal prayers to a pure abstraction. The Unknowable is capable of relations only in its parts to each other, but is non-existent as regards any finite relations. The visible universe depends for its existence and phenomena on its mutually acting forms and their laws, not on prayer or prayers… prayer, as now understood, is doubly pernicious: (a) It kills in man self-reliance; (b) It develops in him a still more ferocious selfishness and egotism than he is already endowed with by nature. I repeat, that we believe in “communion” and simultaneous action in unison with our “Father in secret” [meaning the Atman, our Higher Self]; and in rare moments of ecstatic bliss, in the mingling of our higher soul with the universal essence, attracted as it is towards its origin and centre, a state, called during life Samadhi, and after death, Nirvana. We refuse to pray to created finite beings – i.e. gods, saints, angels, etc., because we regard it as idolatry. We cannot pray to the ABSOLUTE for reasons explained before; therefore, we try to replace fruitless and useless prayer by meritorious and good-producing actions.
Q. Christians would call it pride and blasphemy. Are they wrong?
A. Entirely so. It is they, on the contrary, who show Satanic pride in their belief that the Absolute or the Infinite, even if there was such a thing as the possibility of any relation between the unconditioned and the conditioned – will stoop to listen to every foolish or egotistical prayer. And it is they again, who virtually blaspheme, in teaching that an Omniscient and Omnipotent God needs uttered prayers to know what he has to do!

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PRAYER AND PETITIONING – From “Studies in Occult Philosophy” by G. de Purucker

- Why do Theosophists not believe in prayer, and that prayer will be answered by our Father in Heaven?

Just exactly what do you mean by prayer? Does it mean petitioning “the Father of men and the Creator of the universe” to send us rain or to give us success in our material enterprises, or to send us a baby boy instead of a baby girl, or to make the crops grow green or to give us comfort and solace when perhaps death has taken a loved one from us? What kind of prayer is this? It is wholly selfish. It is a confession that we are seeking to get something for ourselves; it is a confession also that our view of and opinions about and convictions concerning that unnameable Mystery, whose very heart is compassion and wisdom, are purely human. It also signifies that we believe that the Divine does not know as well as we do what is good for the world and for us. Petitionary prayer, to us Theosophists, is not only wrong, but if we may use ordinary human terms, is a spiritual impertinence. … All petitionary prayer is, in the last analysis, selfish. … he is asking for something which in his imperfect judgment he thinks to be the best thing for him. But you can yourselves change the course of your own lives, because you are a part of Nature, you are an integral part of the Universe, and therefore a part of that very heart of compassion, although as yet very imperfect and feeble expressions of It… The one true and only genuine prayer is loving; give love boundless to everything both great and small; feel your essential unity with the stars in their courses; feel at home in the Universe; have a kindly thought and a compassionate feeling for everything that suffers or is in pain or that grieves or that yearns for light and truth. This is the path of discipleship; this is the ideal of the chela-life. Theosophy makes an appeal to the spirit within man himself, and if this idea is understood and developed within one, then in a little while light comes, peace comes, happiness comes, and great quiet. No longer do pain and sorrow exist in such a man or woman. … It is in Nature’s law for him to learn his own lessons, to evolve himself, to strive himself for strength, for light, for growth. Interference in the affairs of another is unwarrantable, and the very gods in their majestic courses cannot and will not interfere with the evolutionary growth of men by listening to their feeble petitionary prayer.

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How is it then that there is a very small percentage of petitionary prayers – especially very intense and powerful ones – which do occasionally receive answers? HPB says: “Intense prayer for the accomplishment of some object is only intense will and desire, resulting in unconscious Magic. In our own day George Muller of Bristol has proved it.”

The definite use and application of spiritual force for selfish or material ends, however, is the very definition of what Black Magic actually is, as seen in the so-called “Law of Attraction” and “desire manifestation” teachings which flood the market today and also seen in some of the practices of the New Thought movement. White Magic, on the other hand, is simply the definite use and application of spiritual force solely for the blessing and benefit of OTHERS. The line between the right-hand path and the left-hand path is very thin indeed and as we can see the whole thing hinges on the importance of the individual having reached a state of complete and absolute selflessness and desirelessness, for anything other than helping and serving humanity. This is what it’s all about!

By MW, September 2012

So, today I was having a discussion with some people when the topic of Karma came up, and some people didn’t quite get what Karma was or even what it meant. That’s fine, I didn’t expect it to be a universal thing, I was just surprised at how many people were oblivious to the idea of Karma.

So this is how it works.

Karma is essentially the positive waves and negative waves you put out there, coming back to you. I’m going to use a boat as an example, but first lets explore just how many levels deeper waves are than most people think.

Let’s say you are holding a stone over the water, when you drop it into the water and it breaks the surface, you see some of the waves it makes. The ripples out to the sides.

But what about the waves going downward?

There are waves below the surface as well that you can’t see. Also, you make waves when you open your hand to drop the stone. Even the physical thoughts you have to drop the stone make waves. It’s energy (but that’s another discussion entirely).

The point about the waves beneath the surface, is the fact that you can’t see all of the waves you put out there.

Now for how Karma and these waves work.

Think of a boat going across the water. As it goes across it makes waves along the path it takes. Big ones and little ones, positive waves and negative waves, ones you can see and ones you can’t see. Once that boat stops moving, every single wave it has ever made, will catch up to it. Doesn’t matter if it’s big, small, positive, negative, can be seen, or can’t be seen, all the waves catch up to it.

That’s Karma.

I hope that makes sense, and feel free to add any of your thoughts to the comments below.

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Please note, there has been a last minute venue change for Lama Marut’s Public Talk in Vancouver.

Venerable Sumati Marut (a.k.a. Brian K. Smith) is the son and grandson of Baptist ministers, a Ph.D. of Comparative Religions, motorcycle enthusiast, a former surfer, and a fully ordained Buddhist monk.

Lama Marut pulls no punches in his hardcore presentation of timeless spiritual truths and their profound relevance to our modern Western world. Ruthlessly compassionate, he insists that the goals of the spiritual life are totally realizable – here and now.

Lama Marut has been teaching religion for 25 years. As a Sanskrit scholar and Professor of Comparative Religions, he taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Riverside, where he is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies. For the past decade, he has been as a popular teacher of Buddhist and yoga philosophy, spirituality, and meditation.

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