Dharma and Karma
April 1995 So the next question has something to do with this: Will fulfilling one’s dharma in life give spiritual advancement, or is more required? I would say that is what is required for spiritual development. See, the dharma is difficult to find, because for many people it is the exact way they don’t want to walk. We have karma and dharma. Karma, we have created from the first step we took onto this planet. Positive and negative dharma and positive and negative karma come from actions in the past. You can have negative karma, but the karma can be redeemed, if you live your dharma. See, if you don’t fight against your dharma, but try to live it, and find out what it is and live it, you will see neutralization of karma. And if you do not live your dharma, you will see a building up of more negative karma. What is dharma? Living by the law. What does the law state for you individually in each life? How to live the best way to become enlightened perfected human beings. The dharma is often difficult, which is why you try to avoid it. But then you are also avoiding your spiritual development, and you can actually be at a standstill for several incarnations. There is nothing worse than being at a standstill, if you have tried to have, you know, a kind of rapid spiritual development for five or six incarnations, and suddenly you are at a standstill due to actions. There is nothing as dreadful, because you are alive and you are dead. The spirit is dead within you. You cannot contact it, you cannot contact the soul, there is nothing there. And that is in itself very dreadful and many people commit suicide. They won’t live the dharma and they can’t take the karma that they incarnate with – they think it will be easier returning to the inner levels, when the fact is that it will be more difficult in the next embodiment. Why are so many people committing suicide on the planet today? Because it’s so difficult to be a human being today, with the unemployment, the stress in the schools, the abuse that you are subjected to from childhood perhaps. You cannot find a good partner in life; you have several bad relationships. You find you have no one to talk to any longer; everything is dark; there is no hope, no expectations of something better the next day. They are people who usually cannot live with their own karma, who have too little strength and courage to walk through it, to walk and do something about it. And the problem is that the next life will be worse. There is no easing up of any situation by committing suicide, there is only making things more difficult. But when a person is dreadfully depressed and cannot live with all of the karma, then what the Board of Karma looks at are the reasons behind the suicide. Some suicides do not create as much karma as others. There is a law that says that you are born with a karma you can manage to repay and a dharma you can fulfill. So it is up to you in every lifetime to do that. |