The End of Karma

The End of Karma

One idea you run into periodically is that karma has an end. That the enlightenment process causes you to stop producing new karma, roasts the seeds of your backlog, and then you wind down the sprouted seeds. After that there is nothing to drive you back into a human incarnation when your time is done. The end of karma is the end of reincarnation.

While we do indeed clean up our past experiential residues, this idea misses a few key things.

For one, karma means action or energy. If we are in relative life, we are in the field of action. That includes angels, the afterlife, and so on. Our very breath is action. Our actions continue to have reactions – that is a basic principle of physics.

If we are acting from nature itself, then we will be supported and not create new obligations for ourselves. But the experiences still must be processed and resolved. And others who are still bound to karma will still be responding to our actions and creating more residues.

Also, it presupposes we are separate individuals with personal karma. Yet when we shift to working cosmically, then we’re working with the backlog of all. Nothing is personal. And everything is.

Further, the end of a human lifetime is the end of a physical body but it isn’t the end of our soul, growth, or much else. We might see it as the end of our time in this rough place called earth though.

It has also been suggested that some awake beings have a choice at death – to cross over or to continue on post-karma. Again – they may be post-baggage and remarkable beings indeed. But they would not be excluded from karma if they’re living in the field of it.

We can say that we graduate to a progressively superior relationship with karma. But if karma ended, our universe would vanish in a fraction of a second. That’s not dharma.
Davidya

Last Updated on June 16, 2016 by

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2 Comments

  1. Bob

    So could one say that ‘personal’ karma comes to an end whereas ‘universal’ karma continues? Or perhaps attachment to karma comes to an end? I think the distinction you are making has something to do with identification with the small s self. Am I understanding correctly?

    1. Hi Bob
      Well – it’s more a discovery that there never was “personal”.

      Yet at the same time, there is the detritus of unresolved experiences created by this local experiencer. That is wound down substantially.

      There are those like a jyotishi who would not consider it fully done until you die. The laws of this person don’t end until the person does. Or inversely, when the person ends, so does their allotted karma.

      Attachment to karma is a different thing. That winds down with awakening, though it usually takes a bit of time for that to be thorough. This is largely about attachment to the “fruits” or results of action.

      After that, we live in karma but are not bound to it so stop producing more. Some of the drama around us ends.

      Ego identification ends with awakening. Thats related to the above but there can still be various things to resolve after that.

      Big subject and there are a number of ways of seeing it.

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