“Most Wiccans believe in reincarnation and karma.”
This post is a follow up to this post but I will only be discussing karma here.
Most Wiccans think Karma means “consequences” for our choices and behavior. Many people, Wiccans included, see that karma means “just desserts” for those who are naughty and that it’s the Universe bagging a score for some moment we were an asshole…if you can possibly pardon all the goofy metaphors…
Karma is not a Wiccan concept. Supposedly our Wicca started in the United Kingdom, and England specifically. Karma is from the Indian continent…though given their status as a part of the Empire once upon a time, it is certainly understandable that the concept appealed to Gardner. There’s a number of traditions which arose from India, including Kashimir Shivaism. This last is the source of my current understanding of Karma..as taught by a Sarasvati teacher named Shambhavi Sarasvati. You can find her online at Jaya Kula dot org. If you’ll continue your reading here, you’ll see that the common belief stated about karma is skewed and almost wrong. This is to clear the record about how karma really works.
In recent years, I was taught by Shambhavi (and no…Shambhavi won’t recognize any student named Starspider, so don’t bother asking her) that karma is really the effect of momentum. By this I mean that our habits, our common perceptions and most common emotions, our everyday assumptions, our most cherishd expectations… these all move us forward in our lives in a very certain way…and there’s momentum behind these. Shambhavi compares it to being on a train…and how our foibles and our illusions and obsessions propel us over a certain path and toward certain outcomes. For example, a drunk is going to cause herself diseases and woes that drunks tend to experience. This principle works the same if we have emotional clarity, if we choose the habit of eating salads, taking a daily swim and of getting plenty of sleep each night. Say we have an intellectual practice to be forgiving of self and others. It’s likely that these habits will carry us forward in our lives such that we are healthy almost all the time. We won’t have so many stress-related illnesses and we’ll likely have happier relationships and likely have longer lasting relationships that are higher functioning than someone who holds grudges. Another, more personal example is that I have Celiac’s Disease. This is a genetic disorder, so this is a familial karma for me. I have been sick much of my life without understanding why, and organ damage is the result of both my choices in diet, but also a factor of the karma of my family. Yet it is better than having the cancer that’s prevalent in my family…so I have indeed changed some momentum in my family karma because I have chosen other healthy emotional and intellectual habits which they did not choose. At my present age it’s nearly unheard of to still be cancer-free, unlike almost all other members of my family…and still I can be released from the momentum of the death that might arise from Celiac’s if I choose a healthy diet and allow my digestive tract to heal. I have done this and am seeing my body heal and my mind and emotions become clearer as the years pass too.
So here you see both individual and familial karma…You can see that it is not punishment, it is simply our outcomes from choices we make. It is what will naturally happen given no change in momentum or direction. But if we choose healthy things, that momentum works just as powerfully on our behalf in creating our reality.
When we choose another course, we’ll find that the momentum of what was formerly customary keeps effecting us for a while…it may even be a very long while before we feel the momentum of that former and likely deeply engrained karma stops making it’s presence known in our lives. And while the old karma is still expressing itself, we’ll be uncomfortable…and likely struggle to remain faithful to our new path. The good news is that the new choices are also creating momentum…and if we keep choosing the new momentum, it eventually over takes the old one.
This is why people who are trying to diet struggle, why people who want to stop biting their nails struggle…and why those who persevere succeed.
But this still doesn’t address why bad things happen to good people and how karma works then.
We also have a group or collective karma as I pointed out when discussing family karma…and sometimes we simply get in the way of momentum caused by others choices and sometimes, we likewise avoid trouble from others choices. For example, someone takes a left turn instead of a right and as a result is not involved in a car accident the moment another driver does something stupid…simply because there’s only one car there instead of two. It works the opposite too… We could be the recipient of being in the right place at the right time to pick up a $100 that someone dropped deliberately to benefit a stranger, or we could be interrupted by a child asking for help for a moment and not enter a store at the exact moment there’s a robbery…and it’s really that simple. There’s no element of punishment in this. It is simply all about outcomes to choices being made.
I think this frees us from a message common to western society; that we are essentially bad and “Someone” is score keeping on our behalf. It also makes us fully aware that we have the power to change our lives and therefore our group experiences…Which is a core value of Wiccan tradition…but more about that in another post.
For more on this Karma topic, I refer you to a most excellent study on how reality works and many other important spiritual topics: Pilgrims to Openness by Shambhavi Sarasvati. It is a book on the topic of Tantric viewpoint on awareness. It’s a very important text and one that I would consider required reading for my students.
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