Most of us know that the universe - God's universe - operates on an independent structure called Universal Law. The laws of the universe - God's laws - are an invisible influence that gently force the natural order under which the universe operates to be maintained. We can't fully understand 'karma' without understanding how it works, and why it works that way, and how the way it works affects our lives on a daily basis - without first understanding the laws that support it.
In order to understand how Universal Law, including karma, affects our lives, we have to understand how it fits into 'the big picture' of life as God created it: In the beginning, God created souls. The soul is the essence of who we are; it is the core of every individual, and each essence has existed for infinity and will continue to exist for infinity. There is no beginning, and no end; we are all a part of God, and are as infinite as He is. Time is a concept that has been developed for clearer understanding within our own human consciousness levels, but there is no such thing. We just ARE. As soul essences, we always have been, and we always will be.
When we separated from God - when God created the souls as spiritual beings separate from, but still a part of, Himself - He created us in His own image. We remained on a level of God-consciousness, knowing all that God knows and being capable of creating on a level equal to God's. We 'knew' God's truth, but we didn't understand it, because it, too, just WAS. We had no sense of conviction that God's way was the best way, because we had nothing to compare it to. We had always been a part of God Himself, and all we knew was love. What we didn't know was WHY love is always the answer to any dilemma.
We wanted to know the whys and wherefores of the truth that was an inherent part of us, and God - in His wisdom - created Life, a learning process through which each of us could confirm, through our own experience, that His way is the best way, and His truth is the only truth. To accommodate the life force He had created, He also created learning environments: planets throughout the universe, each of which offered all of the elements necessary for the souls to experience life in it's many forms, in the hope that they would learn through their experience and come to a point of conviction about the inner truth that they carried in their Spirits.
Universal Truth is a very complex subject, and certainly not one that can be covered in any one lifetime, one level of soul evolution existence. It takes thousands of lifetimes - in many different forms, on many different levels, on many different planets, under many different circumstances - for any soul to experience everything they need to experience in order to reach a level of complete conviction in God's truth. But that's all right, because - no matter how many lifetimes we may invest in our soul evolutionary process - there is a part of us that remains with God, and we are never really separate from Him at all.
What we are is incomplete; we (God and all the souls who are a part of Him) cannot be complete again until we have all completed our learning cycles and returned to a state of Oneness. We remain connected to God through Spirit while we experience life on another level; it's a given that 'life is easier' if we open up our connection through Spirit and live our lives according to God's will as reflected in God's laws, but - life being what it is, and conscious choice being what it is - we don't always do that. Instead, we have a tendency to learn the hard way; we allow the driving forces within any given lifetime to actually drive us, instead of allowing God to be the driving force in our lives.
Here on the planet Earth, where we experience life as human beings, the driving forces are obvious ones: our physical, emotional and mental desires often lead us on detours from our spiritual path, and it can take lifetimes to find our way back to our original learning cycle. We lose our way, and we think that life is about instant gratification, and we invest all of our time and energy in getting what we want, when we want it, no matter who we hurt in the process. That's where karma comes in.
The Karmic Law of Repercussion is one of the strongest influences in our lives, even though it's effect is invisible. This is the law that says, "What goes around, comes around." Translated into practical terms, it means that we will learn what we need to learn by being on the receiving end of every decision that we ever make. Every interaction that we have with any other soul currently in a living form incurs karmic debt under the premise of this universal law.
That's something we need to think about in more detail, because most people (that is, most 'souls in the midst of their current learning cycle as human beings on the planet Earth') work on the misunderstanding that karma only applies to the 'big things' in life. You can incur negative karma, for example, for killing another person, but not for hurting another person's feelings.
Wrong.
Jesus Christ - one of the great teachers of Universal Law - said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," because he understood that whatever we do to someone else will - either in this lifetime or the next - be done to us under the Karmic Law of Repercussion. When he told us to 'turn the other cheek,' he wasn't suggesting that we be wimps about things; he was suggesting that we work in the long term and remember that, if we strike out at another for the sake of instant gratification within a present moment situation, we will incur the karmic debt for that choice and someone will strike out at us at some point in our soul evolutionary future.
When we're on the receiving end of our own choices, we learn from our own experiences what feels like God's love and what doesn't, and it makes an indelible impression on our hearts and on our souls. If we could start now to 'walk a mile in the other person's shoes' - if we could truly do unto others as we'd want them to do unto us - we could breeze through the soul evolutionary process in just a few brief lifetimes.
But we don't. Instead, we respond - all day, every day! - to the people, events and circumstances in our lives with 'less than spiritual conduct.' It's this less than spiritual conduct that brings the most chaos into our lives and the most karma into our personal soul evolutionary process. As human beings, we are tempted daily to give priority to our physical desires, our emotional outbursts, and our mental sense of being justified in everything we do, and it is the day-to-day interactions with other people - and other life forms on the planet itself - that brings us karma on a continual basis.
One of the elements of life philosophy that intrigues most people is the question of 'degrees.' Many religious belief systems work on the premise that it's the degree to which something is done that determines whether it's right or wrong, or a biggie or a minor infraction of God's law. But - when I look around the universe for confirmation of truth via consistency - I don't see any evidence whatsoever that God works in degrees.
Things are either alive or they're not. Women are either pregnant or they're not. People are either healthy or they're not. There ARE degrees, of course; every mother knows there's a big difference, physically, between being four months pregnant and being nine months pregnant. But the degrees are irrelevant from the perspective that - as far as I can see - everything in God's universe either IS or it ISN'T.
The key to living our lives on a spiritual level is to realize that it isn't how much of something 'wrong' we do; it's whether we choose right or wrong responses, according to karmic law as we understand it. I don't profess, for a minute, to have all the answers to the questions I'm posing here; I'm simply suggesting that, in order to truly understand the karmic influences at play in our lives, we have to be willing to acknowledge some of the basic principles of karmic law itself: that all life forms are equal in the eyes of the God who created them, and that there are no exceptions to the independent 'rules of life' that God provided through karmic law itself.
We, as human beings, can no longer justify our 'less than spiritual conduct' by working from the assumption that - because we are human beings - we are God's favorite. These questions don't just apply to understanding karma, either; they apply to understanding our lives and our relationships.
Lois Grant-Holland is a Life Path Focus Counselor offering Life Path Focus Sessions, Karmic Astrology Charts, Channeled Guidance, Intuitive Readings and Classes and Workshops to spiritual seekers on all positive paths, and is the site facilitator at The A.N.S.W.E.R. - (The Seeker's Resource Guide to Alternative, New Thought, Spiritual Growth, Wellness and Enlightenment Resources.) You can visit her website at http://www.loisgrantholland.com