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12 . (Fear of) Karma
31 Plays7 months ago
https://podoflions.substack.com/
Just me today. Chattin’ some chats. Yawpin’ some yawps. Talking about Karma. But this is not your mammas Karma.
In this episode, you may very well learn
* The two types of Karma (It’s not “Good“ and “Bad“)
* How do you get more of the kind you want and get rid of the kind you don’t want
* Are you born with it?
You are not required to believe in any particular metaphysical anything (souls, reincarnation, etc) to understand and benefit from this formulation of Karma. If you believe that you are, or appear to be, a “person” living a “life“ in a “world“ then this will be applicable to you.
Ok, much love, I hope you enjoy xxx
--
Chameleon photo by Anastasia Mezenina
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Transcript
Introduction to Ideas & Inspiration
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my friends. I'm doing a solo episode today. I have a fun idea I want to try out on you. Yeah, so that's the context of today's recording. This is an idea that kind of came to me. It's obnoxious when people say that they got a download.
00:00:22
Speaker
i I don't often feel like I got a download. This felt more like getting a download than other of my ideas. I mean, in a way, all ideas come from a mysterious place. This is something yeah know writers talk about a lot.
00:00:42
Speaker
especially fiction writers, people ask them, where do they get their ideas? And they find the question irritating or they dismiss it in various ways.
Neil Gaiman on Writers' Ideas
00:00:50
Speaker
There's a whole kind of conversation about it. And I think it's Neil Gaiman that says the reason that people are kind of ah cranky with the question, where do you get your ideas is because they don't have an answer and that frightens them.
00:01:06
Speaker
That sounds a little dramatic to me personally. I think maybe it's just, maybe it's just, they don't have an answer and it's annoying to keep being asked a question that you don't have an answer for. I think the question is very interesting actually. And the absence of a good answer, I love an absence of a good answer. like I think that's one of my favorite things, actually. I think that the the places where we have an interesting question that does not have a good answer, those are really cool places. right See the previous episode on consciousness and ah many other conversations on this podcast. right This is a motif that we keep returning to.
Translating Ideas into Language
00:02:00
Speaker
Anyway, ideas come from somewhere, some mysterious place, and its that's true for everybody. There's not some special quality about writers. The difference with writers from other people is the kinds of ideas writers are listening for, paying attention to,
00:02:18
Speaker
and what they then do with those ideas which is that they then sit down and write and do the annoying, boring, stressful work of taking the idea and turning it into language in a way that communicates the idea it to other people, right? But everybody's having ideas all the time. And if you're another kind of artist, you you do that process in another medium. And if you are not any kind of artist that you would identify with, you're still having ideas about things you want to do with your friends or your family or, you know, adventures you want to go on or things you want to buy or what you want to do next for work or, you know, vacations. That's just like, you know, anyway.
00:03:00
Speaker
if you don't like it i'll just say this is an incredible tangent and after this tangent i'm going to go on another tangent before we actually get into just a heads up there's another tangent that i need to go on before we get into the meat of this episode and if you don't like listening to me waffle on about Ideas and going on tangents then this episode you probably just want to skip it honestly And I'm not totally sure why you're here, but welcome.
Personal Insight on Karma
00:03:28
Speaker
I'm happy you're here, but you know anyway it will I'm i'm i'm Partially joking it's going to get less tangential soon alright But I think it's interesting where ideas come from and I think that the everyday ideas come from the same place as the downloads and the difference between the downloads and the everyday ideas is just that
00:03:48
Speaker
The downloads are a longer. They're just a bigger idea. I think that's the difference. I don't think there's like some kind of special like, well, now God is talking to in a way that God was not talking to before. God's always talking to you. So anyway, God said a particularly long thing to me a couple of years ago that I wrote down and I'm going to share it with you more or less today.
00:04:14
Speaker
with some surrounding ideas that have come before or since that help contextualize it. So that's what we're doing today. Okay, so before I go on the big tangent that I was warning you about, I just want to give you a headline about what the main conversation is going to be about as a teaser so that you will stick around and stick through the tangent. Okay, so the main content is going to be about karma.
00:04:38
Speaker
That's K-A-R-M-A, karma. i My kind of weird mid-Atlantic accent has a trouble with karma, because I want to say comma, which is the English in me, comma. But Americans will hear that as comma, like C-A-L-M-E-R. So then I want to overpronounce it in an American accent so that the American audience audience will hear karma.
00:05:02
Speaker
but that feels weird and awkward. So I'm gonna say comma. Anyway, it doesn't really matter to anybody but me, but comma. Comma, C-A-R-M-A. So that's what we're gonna be talking about in kind of a new context, a new way of thinking about it.
Fresh Perspective on Karma
00:05:16
Speaker
The working title is probably not gonna be the title, but the the working title of the download was The Operation of Comma in Normal Life, Reclaiming Peace and Power Through Appropriate Action. That was the subtitle.
00:05:32
Speaker
So we're talking about Kama. This is a pretty big departure from ah kind of notions of Kama you may have encountered in the past. There are lots of meanings to that word. It's a Sanskrit word. It comes out of Eastern spirituality.
00:05:49
Speaker
Hinduism and Buddhism, especially, and so it has connotations. It has meanings in those traditions, multiple layers and layers of meanings. It's kind of, you know, it's a lot going on with this word already. And I have decided to overload it with ah yet another meaning very related. I don't know if that's wise. I'm using it here because there isn't a good English word for the idea that I want to convey. And this Sanskrit word Kama does work in this framework, but it's very possible that the metaphysical and cultural context of the word is a distraction for this framework. And I might end up finding a different word, but for now I'm using the word karma. So let's just say for today, if you can try and forget anything that you think karma means and hear this with fresh ears.
Spiritual Weight Concept
00:06:47
Speaker
But before we talk about comma more, I need to talk to you about an idea called weight. And this is going to be the tangent. This is the pre advertised tangent. And you can think of this as like, if this were a book, this would be in the appendices or it would be a footnote. You can't do that in a podcast. So I'm just putting it right here. But I think it's really interesting idea. So hopefully it's useful.
00:07:12
Speaker
So weight is an idea I learned from Carl Buchheit of NLP Marin. I believe he got it from Bert Hellinger, the constellation guy. Bert Hellinger is a German psychotherapist who invented or codified or so you know kind of was ah influential and foundational in the practice of family constellations. And Carl was a student of Burt's. I don't think a formal student that much, maybe a little bit, but more a spiritual student. He definitely kind of digested the work. And Carl told me this idea of weight.
00:07:51
Speaker
So I don't know if this is Bert's word or Carl's word or exactly the you know the the lineage there or something. It comes from constellation work. And so the idea of weight, this is not a physical weight, of course, right? We understand physical weight, physical weight is the force generated by your mass in the gravitational field of the earth.
00:08:16
Speaker
Does that sound right? Something like that. Anyway, we're not talking about that. We're talking about a spiritual weight or a ah kind of a cosmic weight or maybe an emotional, or psychological, if you don't want to get that, you know, that woo woo. But the idea is, you know, I think that Carl framed it as he would look at a, you know, a 50 year old social worker who is being coached by a 25 year old kind of hotshot kid who learned a bunch of coaching stuff, done all this NLP, done all this other trainings and was really, you know, super bright, super smart, super resourceful. And that this kid is working with this 50 year old social worker and there's a mismatch
00:09:12
Speaker
where the kid is trying to move the social worker, but the social worker just has like, you know, it's coaching, they're they're they're aligned, right? they're This is not a fight, this is a kind of, you know, a ah collaborative activity, but the kid cannot move the social worker because the kid is light and the social worker is heavy in this sense of spiritual weight.
00:09:40
Speaker
And so this is this idea. So you just gotta start to feel, get a felt sense of it with people around you. And there is the phenomena of being overweight. So in this story, the coach, if he's trying to move the social worker, but, and you know, the social worker has seen some shit. This is implicit, right? A 50 year old social worker. They've seen some shit. They've lived, right? So, but the coach is,
00:10:09
Speaker
trying to move the social worker, then that means he is in some sense overweight, meaning that he's trying to operate with more weight than he really has. And it's also possible to be underweight, which is where you are disowning the weight that you have, and you're trying to pretend that you have less weight than you really have. So that might help, I kind of feel into that in people in your life,
00:10:38
Speaker
feel into that in your own life? Do you more overweight, more underweight? Do you feel improper weight, which is kind of the goal here? So this is some familiar territory, but it's a kind of slightly different framing and there's no value judgment on weight. There's no, you know, you're supposed to have more. It's not like that. You're just supposed to not even supposed to. It's just useful to be in proper weight, to know your weight and your weight relative to the people you're interacting with and to be in proper weight, because that's where you can be most effective.
00:11:18
Speaker
right If the coach, the young whippersnapper coach could recognize the proper weight and the proper relationship between him and the social worker he's trying to work with, then he can still be helpful, but it might look different. His approach might be different energetically and in terms of content. And that's the idea. So that's the idea of weight. Carl lists three things that I remember as being how you accumulate weight.
00:11:47
Speaker
Remember, it's not good or bad to have more or less weight. It's just a natural fact of reality. So these things are not things that you should particularly strive to do. They're just, this is how you end up with more weight. So the first one is just time on the mat. As the years go by, you accumulate weight.
00:12:14
Speaker
The second one is having children. Having children conveys a lot of weight. And the third one is suffering comma cheerfully.
00:12:27
Speaker
That's a comma, not comma. Suffering cheerfully. Emphasis on cheerfully, because they think there are other ways you can suffer which do not really ah increase your weight.
00:12:41
Speaker
So those are the three main ones. You know, we can extrapolate somewhat from there, but um that's all I'm going to say about wait for now. The reason I bring it up is because it feels very related to what I am going to talk about today. And I mention it in the main body of the conversation today. So I just wanted to give you a definition, give you some sense of it. And I will certainly return to this concept in the future.
00:13:09
Speaker
Okay, almost complete with preambles. There is one final preamble. There is a premium subscription of this podcast that you can sign up for today.
00:13:21
Speaker
It is a bargain bargain price and it is amazing value. And also it just supports the podcast. So please consider subscribing. There is bonus content and there is a real warm feeling in the heart that comes
Engagement & Subscription
00:13:35
Speaker
alongside it. If you're enjoying the free episodes of the podcast, I would deeply appreciate your support. Okay. You can find that at podoflions.substack dot.com and there should be a link wherever you are listening to this episode.
00:13:49
Speaker
Also, I'm gonna make some pretty strong claims in this episode, and so I would love to hear from you. Please, if you disagree with me, I wanna hear about it. If you agree with me, I wanna hear about it. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you have a different way of thinking about it or you wanna expand on any of the ideas here. The comment section on Substack is a great place to do that, because then hopefully there'll be a conversation that goes beyond just me and you and into a a group conversation about this. I'd be very excited for that.
00:14:19
Speaker
Okay, whole preamble is complete. I now bring you the operation of karma in normal life.
Understanding & Managing Karma
00:14:46
Speaker
We are born with no karma. We can only accumulate comma through our actions. As time passes, comma naturally dissipates. Your personal accumulated comma will be a mix of shadow and integrated comma.
00:15:13
Speaker
Shadow comma comes from taking karmic actions unconsciously, not understanding the driving motivation for the action, not considering what the outcome will be, and often as part of a mistaken view of yourself or reality.
00:15:33
Speaker
Integrated comma comes from taking karmic actions consciously with an understanding of the intended outcome and underlying motivations. All comma adds weight.
00:15:50
Speaker
Integrated comma gives you weight which you can use to deliberately influence the world. Shadow comma gives you weight which pulls you around and finally down without your control.
00:16:05
Speaker
Okay, how do we accumulate karma? What are these karmic actions that can either be done consciously to generate integrated karma or unconsciously to generate shadow karma? So here are some things that accumulate karma. It's not an exhaustive list. It's exemplary. Some things that accumulate karma, spending money, receiving money, having sex, having children.
00:16:33
Speaker
lying, stealing, acts of violence, posting on social media, replying on social media. Making an agreement creates karma for the duration of the agreement. Breaking an agreement creates karma for an indefinite amount of time. Making an agreement you don't intend to keep also creates karma.
00:17:03
Speaker
Okay, so is there anything that does not create comma? Yes, there are. There are things which don't create comma and that can often accelerate the process of dissipating comma. Meditation, prayer, other spiritual practices, spending time with people, especially family, while being honest.
00:17:31
Speaker
spending time in nature, journaling, dancing, singing, playing music, making art. But with a caveat here, if you publish or intend to publish any of those things, they're no longer anti-karmic. This is why singing feels different from recording. This is why journaling feels different from writing.
00:17:59
Speaker
The one is karmic and the other is not karmic or anti-karmic. Relational and sexual practice can be very effective ways of dissipating karma, but only to the extent you can truly be honest while engaged in the practice and maintain the boundaries.
00:18:20
Speaker
Relational and sexual practices are essentially leveraged practices. Both the upsides and the downsides are higher. This means they're more effective than other practices at dissipating karma. But if you are not really honest or the boundaries get wobbly, then they actually can create lots more shadow karma. I think this is why the tantric paths in Eastern religions tend to be kind of viewed with like, whoa, that's the intense thing, that's the kind of crazy and whatever, is because they're more effective, but they're more dangerous, for want of a better word. Dissipating karma feels good because you're getting lighter.
00:19:10
Speaker
This is why you feel good after a lot of meditation or journaling or other kinds of practice. You're actually lighter and that feels good. But there is no normative valence on having Kama. I'm not advocating that a goal of getting rid of all of your Kama.
00:19:37
Speaker
You need some karma for most kinds of human life. But there is value in having as much of the karma you are carrying as possible be integrated karma and working to integrate your shadow karma.
00:19:58
Speaker
allowing shadow karma to dissipate creates space for taking actions which create integrated karma. You think we have a natural kind of comfort level of how much karma we can comfortably hold. So each person has like, this is what feels comfortable and we will avoid taking actions which push us beyond that limit.
00:20:22
Speaker
Clearing out shadow comma allows us to take more actions that create integrated comma. Comma is a tool. Again, there's no value on having more or less. There are very beautiful people that have very little comma and others have a great deal. Shadow comma yanks you around. Integrated comma gives you power to effect change.
00:20:51
Speaker
There are respective vicious and virtuous cycles associated with each. So here's the vicious cycle of shadow karma. Shadow karma yanks you around, causing you to take more unconscious karmic actions, which accumulates more shadow karma. This is what's happening in addiction. The virtuous cycle of integrated karma looks like this.
00:21:18
Speaker
using the weight of your integrated comma to take effective action in intentionally creating change in the world increases your integrated comma, giving you more integrated comma to take more effective action. This is what's happening in leadership.
00:21:36
Speaker
There are patent interrupts in both directions. So in the vicious cycle of shadow comma, it's possible to recognize that you are going in a direction you don't want to go in and take action to interrupt the cycle and begin dissipating your shadow comma. This is great news. So these, they're they're not inescapable cycles.
00:22:00
Speaker
In the virtuous cycle of integrated karma, it's possible to lose sight of your intentions and underlying motivations and possibly form a mistaken view of reality in either way this leads you into taking unconscious action and creating shadow karma. Okay, so here are some dimensions of intervention. Here are ways to work with your karma.
00:22:29
Speaker
that I think are beneficial. First, interrupt current shadow karmic actions. Second, dissipate karma, especially shadow karma. Third, avoid creating more shadow karma. Fourth, increase your tolerance for holding karma.
00:22:53
Speaker
So the these are in suggested order of operation. I think for most people it's wise to begin by dissipating existing shadow comma and to only work on increasing your tolerance for holding comma once you have practiced that slash structured around avoiding creating shadow karma.
00:23:14
Speaker
right If your life is such that you're creating a lot of shadow karma, increasing your tolerance for holding karma is just going to allow you to create more shadow karma. So you want to have cleaned out as much of that shadow karma as you can prior to increasing your tolerance so that when you are increasing your tolerance, the thing that is the karma that you are creating more of, if you want to,
00:23:38
Speaker
ah is integrated comma. Now that last one especially, I don't think again, there's no normative claim here. I'm not saying you should increase your tolerance for holding comma. I'm saying that's a kind of intervention that you might want to do if you want to be able to hold more integrated comma. Okay, I'm gonna go into a little more detail about each of these, not much.
00:24:03
Speaker
this is where you know there's a whole book that I have not yet written which I may or may not about the details of this and not only me but there are thousands of books about variations of these things right I think you can probably see how you can apply this framework to a lot of different self-help modalities, healing modalities, things like that. But I'm just going to give you a gesture to what's fleshing out these ideas a little bit further, if the specific interventions. Okay, so how to interrupt current shadow karmic actions. This is essentially the same as asking how to break out of addictive patterns. So this is a huge question. I think at the core of it,
00:24:46
Speaker
is identifying the mistaken view of yourself and or reality and really getting into relationship with the cost. So what are your unconscious karmic actions? What was the mistaken view that led to you taking those actions and what are the costs that those actions have exacted?
00:25:15
Speaker
So that's the question. That's how to interrupt current shadow karmic actions. Obviously it's a huge thing. One useful tool in working with mistaken views, I think is the Byron Katie, the work.
00:25:31
Speaker
Don't agree with every single thing she says, but the foundational tool of the work, the four questions and the turnaround is very useful. So it's just, a you know, that's just something to consider. If you don't know that tool, it's very easy to look up online. Probably the best way to really get ahold of it is to read the book, loving what is, but like I said, I don't agree with everything she says in there, but I do think her tool is very useful. Okay.
00:25:57
Speaker
So then, so that's how to interrupt current shadow karmic actions, how to dissipate shadow kamma. So you've interrupted the actions where you want to dissipate shadow kamma. So all of the kamma dissipating practices I listed before are helpful. Meditation, prayer, journaling, time in nature, time with family and friends.
00:26:18
Speaker
while being honest. Additionally, what I said before about mistake identifying the mistaken fear of reality and the costs, that's super, super useful. That's going to stop you from doing more comic action. I think it really helps in the dissipating of the shadow karma.
00:26:35
Speaker
I think 12-step programs are useful for this, if especially if you have a capital A addiction. Well, there are a number of 12-step programs which are not about capital A addictions. They're still, you know, still useful over work, over eating, co-dependence, things like that. So there's a lot out there. I think think the 12-step program has some floors, but I do think it's also useful for doing this work.
00:26:59
Speaker
how to avoid creating more shadow comma, don't do it. Don't do it. So don't you know do the thing that creates more shadow comma, which is taking karmic actions unconsciously, not understanding the driving motivation for the action, not considering what the outcome will be. And often these actions are part of a mistaken view of yourself or reality. So avoid doing that kind of karmic action.
00:27:26
Speaker
Be diligent about checking your views of yourself and reality. So don't just think that you're, you know, okay, I've cleaned up my views. I'm done. Like be diligent about that. Are your views accurate about yourself and reality? America right now does not have very accurate views about itself and reality. And it's just taken some big karmic actions. So this is a case in point.
00:27:55
Speaker
I wish America were more diligent about checking its views of itself and reality. I do not have control over that. I do not even have control over whether you are more diligent, but you do. So hopefully you will be. How to increase your tolerance for holding comma. I don't know. Okay. I don't know. Here again are Kyle's prescriptions for developing weight.
00:28:22
Speaker
time on the mat, having children, suffering cheerfully. So I don't know if that exactly overlaps with this idea of increasing your tolerance for holding comma. It seems to me like some people have a higher tolerance for comma than others, and that it's something that you can develop. You can also not, right? Think about monks, right? Any kind of monastic, like nuns, monks, people that go on long-term retreat.
00:28:52
Speaker
If you're living in monastic community, that's an expression of low comma, right? And a probably a low tolerance for holding comma, or just a choice to not hold much comma. That's kind of what where those folks are going.
00:29:06
Speaker
So I don't know how you increase it. I suspect, similar to increasing tolerance with other things, it is by taking small steps out of your current zone of tolerance, not so high that you get blown out or overwhelmed, ah but not so low that it's not kind of interesting or stimulating. so you take you You identify karmic actions you would like to take, but that are uncomfortable. And you find the ones that you can take, but that are not going to overwhelm you and not going to blow you out. And then you titrate that with returning to karmic levels, which are comfortable for you. And then that gradually increases your tolerance. That's my guess.
00:29:49
Speaker
That's kind of how a lot of things work with increasing tolerance. I suspect that's how that works too. But yeah, this is clearly the least fleshed out part of this whole set of ideas. The download was starting to peter out at this point. I'll just say that maybe the caffeine was starting to peter out. I don't know.
00:30:06
Speaker
Okay, so that's the kind of big written thing. I don't know if you could tell, but I was reading from a thing there. I'm just going to add one more idea that came later that is connected with this. It's just one more idea for you to chew on, which is the idea of karmic anorexia or fear of karma.
Fear of Karma & Life Choices
00:30:25
Speaker
So this is the the unwillingness to create karma slash an addiction to an anti-comic life, meaning a life where you are not creating karma.
00:30:38
Speaker
I think this is a phenomenon. I think this is real. Not everybody has this. There surely is the inverse kind of karmic overindulgence and addiction to karma and you know, to an unchecked willingness to create karma.
00:30:56
Speaker
Some characters in public life start to pop into mind as I say that. Maybe another time I'll talk about that. But I think that the fear of karma is less well kind of documented or it's less well understood. But it's real and partly it's less well understood because I think it causes less destruction. But it does cause destruction. It causes harm.
00:31:19
Speaker
I think there's like a natural amount of karma that you're supposed to have in life, but the people can become afraid of that. And there's you know there's the life that they want and the life that they feel is theirs to live, but they don't have it out of a fear of karma.
00:31:41
Speaker
Right out of a sense of like, I don't want to, I don't want to commit. Right. I think this is what's happening when people don't want to commit and they don't want to. To cause reality to settle in one way and to eliminate other possibilities. Right. And so that anxiety, that hesitance can come from this fear of comma, fear of creating comma.
00:32:11
Speaker
You know, there's this archetype in popular culture of Peter Pan, or Jung calls it the poor eternus, the eternal youth. And it's this sense of somebody who is stuck in a playful, free mode and not willing to reduce the possibilities of life in exchange for karma.
00:32:39
Speaker
And I just want to say, like, I think, I think for some people, that's fine. Like, you know, this is kind of heavy. So now I'm going to lighten things a little bit. So it has been heavy here. I don't think that everybody's supposed to accumulate as much calmer as they can and be swinging their weight around in the world and trying to affect change.
00:32:59
Speaker
That's not everybody's path. And I think that it's beautiful. There are monastics that have dedicated their lives just to a ah peaceful existence. And that that is a beautiful life, right? Once again. And even there are Peter Pan's that have just decided, I'm just going to play and I'm not going to...
00:33:18
Speaker
take on too much weight and I'm not gonna get so serious with life.
Personal Experience with Karma
00:33:22
Speaker
That's fine too, that's okay, but people can live their lives. And if that's you, you can live your life. I think that the thing, the reason I wanted to point out this fear of karma is because I think that it can be a force for destruction in people's lives where they do actually want to take on more integrated karma, but this fear of karma holds them back. And so rather than posting on social media their new project or rather than asking out that person or rather than buying that house or deciding to get married or to break up or to have kids, right? Or do whatever it is that that next thing, which is actually the next natural step in someone's life, they hesitate and they hold back out of fear of accumulating karma.
00:34:17
Speaker
You may or may not have noticed but I have been putting out podcast episodes much more frequently than in the past and I'm actually currently in a commitment about putting out a certain number at a certain frequency.
00:34:31
Speaker
And I took on that commitment in a way as an antidote to a fear of comma, of producing more and putting more out into the world. So even right now, this podcast episode you're listening to is me working with my fear of comma, doing that process I was talking about earlier of like, okay, let's take a bite-sized reasonable next step.
00:34:57
Speaker
to increase my tolerance and so this is it. So welcome to my personal project of increasing my tolerance for comma. I hope this has been helpful. I think I've said everything that I wanted to say today, a little bit of a shorter one today, but I think dance, hopefully not too dance.
00:35:15
Speaker
And yeah, again, I would love to hear from you either directly or ideally in the comments on Substack. If I could choose where I would hear from you, it would be on the comments on Substack for a number of reasons, but I'd love to hear from you wherever it comes from. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for listening. Hope you're having a lovely day and be well.