Open House Series - No. 7
10 December 1987

​There have been some recent events in Melbourne*, and in relation to these events I gather that you would like to hear about the Law of Karma. The Law of Karma is not understood by many people on this Earth but the Hierarchy would like many spiritual people to come to understand the Law of Karma within their hearts.
 
So, from the First Ray Department, the Will of God, Shamballa, we have the Board of Karma. It’s a Board which consists of a certain number of Masters of Wisdom and hundreds of unascended beings, Masters and so forth. It’s a whole Board. And this Board of Karma is deciding your destinies on this Earth, and there is no way of ever moving without this karma, or avoiding this Board.
 
You have this karma. You are born with it every life. And why you have it we will discuss now. What many people don’t understand is that we have bad karma, but also good karma. And this karma is meted out by this Board of Karma to you in every lifetime. Now what creates karma? I know that you have heard this many times, but I also know it is not understood. Because intellectually you cannot understand karma, you have to understand it from experience.
 
Karma – I have often said, if a person did not have good karma, that person would not even survive birth. So we have both good and bad karma. Now when you incarnate on this Earth as a soul and a body, personality, you have karma. Already from before coming to this planet you have karma. Karma is not something you only get on this planet.
 
Remember where you come from. You come from outside this planet Earth. And when you come you always bring yourself a luggage of karma, and that karma is what you suffer from until you have learned to live pure lives and then the karma will be neutralised. To live pure lives is nearly an impossible thing because in every life you live, you do wrong actions as well as good actions. And if we didn’t have a certain way of repaying karma, it could never be done. Looking at people today and knowing how many lives they incarnate, it looks impossible, nearly impossible, to do away with bad karma. Except for some methods that have been given by the Hierarchy over time, it is nearly impossible to get rid of it, because bad karma comes from wrong actions, wrong feelings and wrong thoughts. And according to my experience, we always have wrong thoughts, and wrong feelings and we always do wrong actions out of ignorance.

That is, until you are Masters of Wisdom, perfected beings, we are acting wrongly, thinking and feeling wrongly. Now how come then, that all the way up to the Master of Wisdom stage you can do wrong, then suddenly you don’t do it anymore? It is due to ignorance being replaced by knowledge and wisdom. What I intend to give you here today is knowledge. Wisdom, you have to acquire yourselves by using knowledge with love.
 
So what do we see here? We have souls coming to this Earth from other planets and stars. They bring with them already the burden of having acted wrongly in some other place in the Universe. They come down to Earth and they come into embodiment, and they continue to act wrongly not always because they want to do it, but because of ignorance, not understanding that we incarnate and we learn, we incarnate and we learn, and the lessons have to be learned to become perfected beings.
 
The Board of Karma is a totally neutral Board and the Law of Karma itself is a totally neutral energy. It is neither positive nor negative. Many people consider karma to be something terrible, terrifying, and negative. When people talk about karma, they think immediately that something negative is going to happen to them now. That is not true because the good karma is the way you sit here today, and you listen to a talk on Divine Wisdom, or you have had a happy day with sunshine and no incidents of a terrible nature have happened to you. That’s good karma.
  
Now the [so-called] ‘bad’ karma is also learning lessons. We have two different kinds of ‘bad’ karma . We have the bad karma that you take with you from life to life. The bulk has never been touched. But then we have something called lessons in life that can appear to be bad karma, but it’s not. Many people say mistakenly when something bad happens to them, 'That’s my bad karma.' 'It’s my karma that this has happened to me.' In fact, if they knew about karma, it was only a lesson to be learned. Not bad karma at all.
 
Bad karma is the amount of negative energy that you have built up over many lifetimes. The energy of the shadow. Your shadow, your negative self is full of bad karma. Stuffed with it. It is only bad karma, to tell you the truth. The good side of your personality has all the good karma because the good side of your personality acts sort of out of goodwill and has many excellent characteristics with it.
 
Bad karma. I’ll take the incident that happened here some months before the killings in Melbourne the other day, where the man was shooting down people driving past in a car or cars. See, why can such a thing happen? Because certain lessons have to be learned. They are different lessons. Now the girl, if you remember the incident, the girl who rushed out of her car to help the injured not thinking of her own life, and who was also killed, was a typical beautiful astral being incarnating on Earth to be a guardian, to help other people. They usually have short incarnations. Such a human being will, through such a death of sacrifice, save up quite a lot of good karma for her next life. Usually such people, these astral beings incarnating on the physical level of Earth, these astral beings know how to act wisely, and they are not afraid of dying. The family may have traumas occurring and grief may appear but usually these people, when they come to the inner levels, are quite content and fully understanding of their destiny in life.
 
Then we have the other group of people who have died, been killed or injured. And there we often have to look for bad karma. Now we die in many, many ways in each life. We die, there is no way out of it. We have physical death and new life on the inner levels, then again we incarnate and have physical death and new life. We have to die in one way or the other.
 
Our death is two things. It is karmic and also is decided by the element that you have to learn to control in life. In every incarnation you have to learn to control the four elements of air, water, earth and fire. Our deaths in each incarnation are decided by one of the elements. When you are shot down, it is both air and fire because a bullet goes via the air into you, and you are burning and it creates a fiery wound that causes death in many instances, if it is near a vein or the heart and so on. We have on this Earth therefore, different deaths, all have something to do with the elements I have written on the board [air, water, earth and fire].
 
On this Earth we never know when we die. That is a gift given by the Board of Karma. It would cause unnecessary pain and suffering to know when our moment of death arises. We never know from one second to another what will happen to us. Except higher initiates. Higher initiates are able to handle death another way than other people and usually know their date of death and the method used. Also, when you live much in nature like the American Indians, then usually, if you were a more highly developed Indian, and you knew that you were dying, you could die by simply knowing that your time had come, and your astral body would slip out and that’s it.
 
But in city life as we live today, death becomes a difficult thing. For we have so many things in life to be happy about as well as unhappy about, and both things are drawing us to Earth, are tying us to the planet’s physical level of existence. The more you have, usually the worse it is to die. The more you have to look forward to or the more materialistic things you have, the worse it is to  die because you have to leave your commitment, your things behind. Spiritual people who own nothing find it very easy to die. Since they have nothing that ties them to Earth, it is easy to say goodbye to your physical garment, leave, go to the inner levels, see your life in retrospect and go back, incarnate again.
 
The worst thing is to die unexpectedly when you are young because you don’t expect it very much at that age. And that is what happened a couple of days ago, with nearly only young people. And nearly all of those people, if not all of them, are Earth-bound because the shock when you die quickly without expecting it can create a void where you cannot leave the Earth level completely. And the shock can create a ring around you that is hindering the beings on the astral levels from being able to fetch you. So they don’t know they have died. They need spiritual people on Earth, healers and mediums, clairvoyant people to tell them they have died in order to help them onto the inner levels of the astral levels.
 
Why are people killed on Earth? There are only two ways, as I said. Either you sacrifice yourself for others or you are killed because of a karmic condition. If you look at this Earth and its conditions, you know that we have had much warfare and we still have much warfare on this Earth. We have one war after the other. And we have two groups of people. We have the killers and the sacrificing, the victims, who in some way are being sacrificed by society, the government, the state. Now we have the people who like to kill; we have soldiers and people who do not like it but do it out of duty or are forced to do it, for their country expects it of them.
 
Who is it that will be killed violently? It is usually people who have killed violently, that is the karma. I am not going to say that these people, all of them have been violent people in their last life. But some of them, that is the pattern, have done exactly the same to others as what happened to them that day. Now again, that doesn’t help the personality much or the family much to know, because they do not understand about the Law of Karma. Most people do not understand about the Law of Karma enough to understand why things happen to them the way they do. And so enormous grief appears within.
 
An interesting thing I read in the paper today was about the family who felt not anger, but sadness. No anger. Sadness for the killer and sadness of course for the murdered child. You see, such a family is much developed, the souls are developed because spiritual people who understand about the Law of Karma and who lose a relative - a true spiritual person, knowledgeable or not knowledgeable - would not be angry but would be sad because these people would know that certain things have to happen the way they do. And you really in reality cannot blame anyone, because that young man was utilised as a vehicle, an instrument for killing those people. Now we can discuss until 500 years hence, why he was chosen as the vehicle, how it could happen. There’s always possession involved. You cannot kill another human being, and not eight of them, or ten or twenty, without being possessed by negative powers.
 
An entrance has been somewhere that has opened for an elemental, a possessive being to enter, and such a human being changes personality - over one split of second becomes perhaps a violent personality. Why such a thing happens is also karmic. I have very often told you that we have suppressed anger and fear within us. If we have suppressed too much we can – an action, a stimulation of some kind, can open that suppressed fear and anger and let in a being from the lower levels who will possess us. It can happen to nearly everyone. You have to be very strong for it not to happen.
 
And that is why we must strive in every incarnation to do away with this suppressed energy of fear and anger, because that is the open door to the negative forces. Had the young man not had this door, he could not have been utilised. But he is connected karmically to the people he has killed. Have you ever stopped to think why a whole building of people - you have a whole building of perhaps 2000 people and eight of them are killed and some injured, the others not? There are no accidents on this Earth, no coincidences. From the inner levels these people were singled out. Their date of death was that moment.
 
When we reason with our personalities, it is terrible that we are living on a planet of misery and suffering. Where constantly people are killing each other. Where constantly more suffering is loaded upon more suffering. Where we can’t stop the killings. We are living on a planet where the spiritual people are too few and far between and because they are too few in numbers, they cannot stop these killings. It is still a planet of misery, and we live on it.
 
And a planet of misery has been created for man to learn through suffering to become a perfect human being with a heart. Because we have other planets where the beings have no heart. Where they have only a mental body. Where they are very cold in comparison to heart people. And they also have a lot to learn by incarnating here. On this Earth, we learn to have heart. We learn the Christ Principle, that it stands for heart and love. And we suffer to learn it.

Who suffers the most, the victims or the families? Very often the families. Because we can help - spiritual people can help the victims by creating a kind of healing situation. We can send light to them, they can be fetched by other relatives and friends and beings on the inner levels and come to understand the situation. It is much worse for the family because the families have no understanding of the inner levels. Not very much. Very few have. And so it’s more difficult to get them to calm down and be happy than the person who is on the inner levels, because there is a greater understanding of life and death.
 
It has been prophesied that at the end of time when the Christ becomes more present on Earth, we would have such catastrophes. Madness would spread like fire on the Earth in minds of man. Now, we have seen madness before on this Earth. We have seen madness for millions of years, but that madness is more of the astral body, the lower chakras; the madness of ignorant people without learning. The madness we are now about to encounter is much more dangerous because it’s the madness of people with minds, with intellect, with knowledge. And these people will be possessed by even greater beings without love, only coldness and arrogance. And they can do much more – with such a state of mind, much more damage than the other ones.
 
See the typical thing, if you look at the Japanese suicidal soldiers in the 2nd World War, they attacked, they knew they would die but they did it. To do that you have to be a fanatic, you have to be overshadowed by the evil power from the mental level. You no longer reason - you have reason, you know exactly what you do, but you do it out of fanaticism and intolerance.
 
What we have seen in Melbourne with the last two killings is the same as the Japanese suicidal soldiers, because these two murderers, they knew that they would never come out of this alive. They know within when they go about their task that they can’t get out of it alive, and they haven’t. And still they do it because something takes over that kills all reason, all feelings. They do not know what they do. And that is why you cannot be angry with such people. You cannot hate them and curse them for they are in the grip of a power that you cannot come to understand unless you really understand that power I am talking about. It is the power of the Lord of Darkness on the lower mental level. It is much stronger than anything that you have encountered before. And it is coming to Earth with the appearance of the Christ.
 
There is only one way to counteract this madness, this energy, and that is the Earth Healing Services that we do all over the Earth in some way or the other, and the positive thoughts and the meditations. We cannot counteract this madness over a fortnight, five years, ten years. It is a slow process of development. But because of this energy work that has been performed on this Earth, you will not see a world war in 1987. It was scheduled for this year. Many of the great initiates and great gurus on this Earth knew that it was scheduled for this year. But I knew already several years ago it would not happen, because we had counteracted this madness that can start world wars, by the work that we have done over the last ten years.
 
The Christ is appearing on the Earth. He has always been around the Earth. He has lived on the Earth on another level, but He is appearing on Earth. Because He is very much present in the world today, chaos, turmoil and catastrophes are arising. Not so much as natural catastrophes, but catastrophes within the minds of man, within the astral bodies, the feelings of man. And it is exactly what I am more afraid of than any natural catastrophe. Because the moment the door opens and a human being will be overshadowed by this madness, this energy, this lower mental force, I know that very few can fight it and keep the reason, keep balanced, keep spiritual.
 
And I have seen this force work on this Earth for the last 100 years, where it was more of an astral nature. You do understand, don’t you, that these killings in Melbourne are not the last ones, and that there is something terrible in the second killing. You see, when you do something of the nature of the first killing, many people who would like to murder their neighbour, would think twice knowing that it would cost their life doing so. But when the second killing comes, it means that others will continue to do the same. They lose fear. They don’t care what happens to them. They become instruments of, I don’t like to use the word 'hell', but for lack of other terms, we have to use that.
 
How can you avoid being used as an instrument? Because you can be used, every one of you, and you are used daily in your anger temperamental fits, irritations and so forth – however, not to the degree of murdering your neighbour or your fellow human being. But I know from experience – I have lived on this Earth for many millions of years – nearly anyone in this room could be used. However spiritual you may consider yourself, I know there is a force you cannot control - and that you who appear to be such nice and friendly, gentle people, could be used. It’s just a matter of a certain amount of it.
 
There good karma comes in, because you cannot be used as anything as scandalous and terrible as what we have seen happening twice, if you have worked out some of your anger and neutralised some of your fear and guilt. This you do by therapy, and healing and meditation. It is the impurified human beings that we have to be afraid of because we never know how they will act in certain situations. And the terrible thing is, the Hierarchy doesn’t know it either; because there is free will on this Earth, They are not deciding, They cannot stop, They are not allowed to stop. When people open the door, that’s it. The only people They are allowed to stop or help are Their disciples, if the karma allows for it, and it usually does.
 
Now disciples of the Hierarchy, as you well know, are higher developed souls who may not be more gentle or well-spoken or happy people than anyone else. But they have one thing acting for them that the others haven’t got. They have more light within them. The light within them is strong. The darkness is also strong, but the light is so strong that the Lord of Darkness will have difficulties to get them to murder another human being. The Lord of Darkness and his companions can get the disciples to gossip, slander each other, make foolish actions, be nasty to each other, but they do not go to the degree of killing another human being and that is always good to know. Of course there are other ways than doing it physically. We know that by sending a concentrated amount of negative thought, you can actually kill that person in the long run. But still, the Hierarchy protects.
 
But it is the other ones we are talking about. It is the more ordinary people who haven’t got enough light in them to counteract the negative forces. What do we do about this? Because they are not ready to meditate, they’re not ready for healing, they’re not ready for spiritual therapy. There is only one way and that is light that you send onto this Earth. It’s a long process but we are actually further than we have ever been before.
 
Every human being, therefore, has bad karma. But the more one neutralises one’s bad karma, the more you change your destiny in the same life you lead. And your death will usually be pleasant. That is the good karma that you can get on this Earth, pleasant deaths. It is very important that we have pleasant deaths because death traumas cause much grief and total disruption of one’s future incarnations. And you know this as well as I do, that much of your fear comes from death traumas in past lives. So the better we die, and the more beautiful our death, the easier we shall actually have our lives commencing and ending in each incarnation ahead of us.
 
Why are we so terrified when we incarnate? Why do we scream so much? We don’t always scream because we come out into the air and to the light. We scream from fear. We scream from fear because we remember.
 
We are very much tied to soul the first six, twelve hours after birth. We know exactly what will happen to us. And we don’t like it. But I who am a spiritual human being, who knows of methods that are good and powerful, I know that by utilising these methods, we can have good deaths, meaning that you will not run into bullets; you will not run into certain accidents that overcome other people. And just that alone is worth working with these methods.
 
What will happen then to such a boy who kills all these people? It is something that people do not understand. Will he have a terrible life on the inner levels? Will he incarnate on the lower levels until he is ready to be born again? In this young man who killed these people, nothing much will happen because the overshadowing was so enormous that he didn’t know what he was doing. It is completely like in the courts today. If you are insane when you commit the crime, you are acquitted or put into an asylum. You are not put into ordinary prison.
 
That goes also for this young man. I looked into him during the meditation. He was totally overshadowed, he was a chosen tool, and he will not suffer much on the inner levels but he will suffer when he incarnates because for many hundreds of lives he will be unable to forgive himself for the crimes committed. This is how we punish ourselves. This is why guilt arises. Some people are going through major difficulties on the inner levels afterwards, but not this young man.
 
It is very interesting when you have the ability to look into the destiny of a human being. The only thing we can hope for is that we will have some understanding of how to take it if something like this happens to our own family members, or member. I have also been thinking about that for myself, you never know. But the more knowledge and understanding that you have of life on Earth, of life on the inner levels, the easier it is to manage, to understand the act of transition. And much fear will disappear.
 
I can tell you why the disciples of Christ had no fear and they suffered one martyred death after the other. It was because of the Holy Spirit descending into them and taking over minds and hearts. Before then, they had a lot of fear - terrified of opening their mouths, of being killed for the work they did. A spiritual human being loses all fear when truly spiritual, when time comes, for the Holy Spirit, the Grace of God takes over and fear disappears.
 
Why we have fears is bad karma. We learn from it, too, there are lessons in it.
Fear can stop us making actions we would have done normally. If you have thought about what fear does in your life, fear can stop you from making one stupid mistake after the other, and it can also stop you from feeling and thinking wrong feelings and thoughts, because you remember deep, deep within you what has happened before when you did so. When you have learned to be a good human being, you will then lose fear, and life will be wonderful on Earth. There will be no fear, living or dying. And one day, one is receiving this gift from God, the gift of not fearing death as well as life. But you have to deserve it each lifetime. Very few are born with this gift.
 
Many people are striving to run away from their bad karma, and many organisations on this Earth that call themselves spiritual organisations tell their students and followers that there is another way of walking past the Lord of Karma, the Board of Karma. If they believe in this teacher, this master, then the teacher/master will see to it that after death they will not come before the Board of Karma and that’s it. And to promise such a thing is more evil than anything else. Because there is not a human being on this Earth who can avoid the Board of Karma after so-called physical death.
 
After death, you will meet the Board of Karma. You who are not initiates will meet a representative of the Board of Karma who will show you energy-wise – you may not be able to see that representative as a figure, as an energy only. That figure will tell you exactly what you have done wrong, by letting you see your life in glimpses. But an initiate will be taken immediately to the Board itself and stand there, in front of the Masters because it is much worse when an initiate does something wrong than a non-initiate.
 
But we can never ever walk past this being or energy, and that is good to know, because that perhaps could force you to treat your fellow human beings a little bit better, and force your mind to clear your hearts to become purified. The more I tell you about the Law of Karma, the less innocent you become and the more you will pay for crimes committed. You see, if I did not tell you these things, and you were an ignorant human being - all right, you have worked against the law, you will be punished (meaning you will punish yourself in every lifetime) - but the more I tell you about the Law of Karma, the more you pay. What is it you pay? You are having actions happen to you that you have done to others. So, if you have choked someone to death in a past life, you could perhaps suffer a life, a death, an ending where there is no oxygen. That can be anything from being buried alive somewhere to having cancer of the lungs. Everything is meted out totally, and you will not escape. That is what I have been trying to tell people for ten years. You will not escape.
 
It is not enough to understand the Law of Karma mentally. You have got to understand that it works for every person on Earth. You cannot say like many human beings do, it will happen to you, but not to me. That is a certain way of life on Earth that I have known so much. Everything will happen to everyone else, but not to the person yourself. It is better to understand that it will happen to you as well. And that you cannot bypass the Board of Karma and its representatives. And if you want to avoid becoming victims, unfortunate victims, you had better act wisely from now onwards. And you can become sacrifices instead, which is what the Christ wants of His people on Earth.
 
I have explained a little bit about these unfortunate killings. We must try to help the victims by sending love. We must try to help the deceased by sending love and to the murderer himself because on this Earth, we must not really condemn anyone, or we condemn ourselves.
I have known in spiritual circles a terrible thing that these people have obviously forgotten their own past. Because you today think yourselves above killing a human being, you must remember that there was a time on this Earth when you rather liked doing it. And you must understand that other people are now today what you were like five hundred or one thousand years ago. And therefore we have to understand about the Law of Karma. It teaches us to be good human beings. It teaches us to live according to the Divine Laws. It teaches us to become Christs, souls from within. It teaches us everything and we can’t do without these lessons.
 
It is no good to fear karma. The more you fear your karma, the more it will descend on you. The best thing is that you learn to understand your karma in each life - for that we have the therapy wheel - and come to terms with it and you will notice that you can get rid of it by working sensibly with meditation, healing and therapy.
 
The last thing I will say… is that it is no use to fear so much because what will happen to you will happen anyway. When I read about this - I have children myself. I’m nervous when they are in the city at night, my daughter and my son 19 years old. You know what world we live in. But it is very interesting that even if one is an initiate, one can come to think too much like a human being, become too emotional. And with this killing in the paper, I suddenly understood. I had understood, but not completely understood, that what will happen to my son or my other children will happen, and I can do nothing about it. It can also happen to yourself.
 
I have known this for years and lives, but it is very interesting that for as long as it doesn’t sink totally into you, it is not completely understood and you fear. That doesn’t mean you do not have to protect your children or that you let them run and play in the streets when they can’t understand about cars racing past and so on. Many people do this. Many people go to the other extreme of not caring enough about their children, letting them play and run out in the streets at dark, and so and so, and many children come to harm this way.
We of course are not going to that extreme, but to go to the other extreme and fear every time your son leaves the house is also hopeless. You have to find the middle path. You have to find out that the Law of Karma is working, and you have to protect your children. If you have protected them, then what happens is not your responsibility. It is the responsibility of God, and that is good for you to know, the ones of you who have children.
 
If you have no guilt, you know you have protected them as well as you can, if anything happens, it is God’s Will.

* By 'recent events', Ananda is referring to several shootings that occurred in Melbourne in 1987: The Hoddle Street massacre occurred on the evening of Sunday, August 9, 1987 in Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. The shootings resulted in the deaths of 7 people, and serious injury to 19 others. On the afternoon of December 8, 1987, the Queen Street massacre occurred, a tragedy that resulted in the deaths of 8 people, and serious injury to 5 more, as well as severely traumatising many more individuals. In addition, in 1987 there was a killing of several police officers in a 'drive-by shooting'.