Law of Success and Merit/Karma

There are many aspects to success; material wealth is only one component. Moreover, success is a journey, not a destination. Material abundance, in all its expressions, happens to be one of those things that makes the journey more enjoyable. But success also includes good health, energy and enthusiasm for life, fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional and psychological stability, a sense of well-being and peace of mind. Even with the experience of all these things, we will remain unfulfilled unless we nurture the seeds of divinity inside us. In reality, we are divinity in disguise, and the gods and goddesses in embryo that are contained within us seek to be fully materialized. Although I call the laws I'm about to discuss The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, they could easily be called The Seven Spiritual Laws of Life. This is because they are the same principles that nature uses to create everything in material existence--everything we can see, hear, smell, taste or touch.

Success in life could be defined as the continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals. Success is the ability to fulfill your desires with effortless ease. And yet success, including the creation of wealth, has always been considered a process that requires hard work, and it is often considered to be at the expense of others. We need a more spiritual approach to success and to affluence, which is the abundant flow of all good things to you. With the knowledge and practice of spiritual law, we put ourselves in harmony with nature and create with carefreeness, joy and love. True success is the experience of the miraculous. It is the unfolding of the divinity within us. It is the perception of divinity wherever we go, in whatever we perceive--in the eyes of a child, in the beauty of a flower, in the flight of a bird. When we begin to experience our life as the miraculous expression of divinity--not occasionally, but all the time--then we will know the true meaning of success.

I appreciate everybody's comments. Karma, to me, is a balance between reaping the results of previous actions and creating the life ahead of you. There are definitely both aspects.

An example is given that once you get on a plane that is going to India, you have no choice but to land in India, but how you carry yourself on that plane, what you do there, and the consciousness that you develop in order to deal with where you land in different ways is still up to you.

In other words, we have a certain destination, whatever it may be, that we are naturally heading towards based on our previous actions and desires, but at the same time we have the freedom to act within that path. We are simultaneously in the process of experiencing results of previous actions and creating our future experiences.

One thing that gets very confusing for Western minds in particular is the whiff of karma as punishment. While the Law of Karma (cause and effect) isn't judgmental in the same way a human mind might be, it does play out over time. If you cause harm even by accident, the energy of your actions are with you until you change them.

As others have mentioned here, the only way to effectively deal with the issue of karma is to be continually working with yourself to attempt putting "good stuff" out there and to refrain from consciously causing harm. The more "good stuff" you generate, the easier it is to change your energy field -- therefore you will begin to attract higher quality energy AND begin to diminish your "karmic stores" of negative energy.

It is said by wise teachers of many religious backgrounds that it is possible to reverse negative karma by positive actions. That, to me, is a little like doing reparations for a particular harm that you have caused.

The trouble about karma from past lives is that we cannot know for sure what we may have done in the past to create negative karmic conditions. All the more reason, then, to be actively working to improve our karmic conditions in the here and now! We may have no control over what's done and gone -- but we sure do have control over what we're putting out into the world in the here and now.

That's about as simply as I can put it today. But I'll think about it some more and see what else there might be to say about this.

Interesting discussion!