6.2 How does one experience karmic testing?

Throughout your life, you feel in turn joy and sorrow, and move up and down, endlessly up and down. In a vain effort to smooth out this process, some try to control others; some try to control themselves; and some try to endure the highs and lows. This constant experiencing of opposites, life’s highs and lows, is a natural process; enlightenment offers the only real escape from this endless play of opposites in your life.

When you are far removed from the psychological stage of enlightenment, the alternation of joys and sorrows occurs as a long-term pattern flowing throughout your life. As you get closer to the first enlightenment, this alternating of joy and sorrow becomes more and more rapid. A person close to this stage of enlightenment experiences a profound lack of stability in both inner and outer emotional conditions.

It is important to distinguish between such emotional transformations leading to the unfolding of awareness, and the constant transformation in conditions experienced by the emotionally immature. The difference lies in developing your capacity to endure and persevere through time. One who is moving towards enlightenment understands the instability of conditions as a learning process; one who is emotionally immature simply desires to experience positive rather than negative emotional conditions.

The degree to which your emotions alternate between the opposites of joy and sorrow is a function of karma. The specific circumstances and conditions of your life are formed and structured, by karma, to test your capacity to become free from attachments to joys and sorrows. Learn to become responsive to the direction of karma in your life; trust in your karma to guide you through the maze of joys and sorrows. The commonest response to the difficulties experienced during intense periods of karmic testing is: why me? The answer is: there is a lesson you have to learn before you can progress in your inner development, before you can progress along the path we each must travel, and your current situation is specifically configured, precisely drawn together, to enable you to understand and learn the lesson. Continue to meditate, Live and Act throughout your life, and the difficulties will be overcome.

Do not think, foolishly, that you can escape your karma. You cannot successfully swim against the flow of reality, because you are an integral component of the one reality. Remember, the implacable process that is reality will devour your personality and its products, at its own pace and in its own way – this is the root cause of your emotional suffering.

In the midst of your life conditions, blown here and there by karma, overwhelmed by difficulties and the illusion that they are permanent, your feelings may revolve around despair. Sustained despair can lead to the utterly false and illusory attempt to escape your problems through ending them by suicide. The only sure way out of the suffering experienced in all limiting emotional conditions is to cultivate detachment, yet to remain fully involved in your day-to-day life.

6.4 How does one become detached from fear and desire?

Fear and desire are deeply intertwined in our lives. What we desire most is often what we fear most. Fear is, in reality, the inverse of desire —”No! I don’t want that.”

Both fear and desire, experienced with intensity, can be very stressful on your whole organism, both mind and body. To become detached, you must free yourself from this stress, which invariably occurs on the path to the first enlightenment. The first and simplest technique is to enter into deep, slow meditative breathing- this will have a calming effect on your whole system.

There is also a second, more advanced, technique available to you. However, to develop in the practice of this second meditative skill you will require considerable faith. Not faith in anything particular, just faith.

Faith, pure and unbounded, grows in you naturally and spontaneously as your awareness unfolds of your role in the process that is reality. Your faith grows with the realisation of the fruits of meditation. Committed daily practice in meditation inevitably produces these fruits.

As the results of your meditation unfold, a simple fact will become clear to you. You will come to understand this fact gradually, with the certain knowledge of experience. This fact is that you and reality are one and indistinguishable.

This fact, which is the ultimate truth of reality, is not at all apparent to common sense. Only gradually will you come to understand what it means. When, finally, after many trials, you know through experience what it means, then and only then will you have attained the final stage of enlightenment.

Through time and meditation on your experiences, you will come to understand that you and karma are indistinguishably one. That is to say, everything that happens to you is a function of who you are and what you think, feel and do. It will slowly dawn on you that everything which happens in your life is part of a meaningful and purposeful pattern.

In time, with this realisation comes freedom from bondage to fear and desire. All along the path to the final stage of enlightenment, you will still have the capacity to experience fear and desire. However, through meditation, you can free yourself from attachment to fear and desire.

This freedom from attachment comes from realising that everything that happens in your life, everything, without exception, has meaning and purpose. All fear is relatively illusory, because what is happening, or will happen, is structured to teach you a lesson about your own nature. All desire is relatively illusory, because the conditions of your life will supply you with all you truly need to understand your own nature, which is the true nature of reality.

As your work in meditation develops, and your practical experience expands, you will experience a growing capacity for fearlessness and desirelessness in the face of reality. Reality is not to be feared, because you and reality are one. Trust what happens, however fearful, with a calm acceptance of the reality of life and death. Reality is not to be desired, because you and reality are one. Accept what you receive from life and have no doubt that it will be sufficient.

Put simply, whatever is happening will happen as it occurs; avoid letting your fear and desire interfere with the course of events. To develop your capacity for fearlessness and desirelessness, Live and Act throughout your life. Think long and deeply on this.

6.6 Why is it crucially important to forgive?

In your life it can happen that you are wronged – unfairly, unjustly and apparently without rhyme or reason. Your sense of injury, in such a situation, is acute and very often considerably justified. If your pain is deep, and your sense of having been wronged is considerable, you may feel it is impossible, indeed stupid, to forgive one who has so clearly and unjustly mistreated you.

Be clear: when such situations occur in your life, you are being tested by the process that is reality. The operator, structuring the situation to create your pain and sorrow, is the implacable law of karma. Whether you are able to forgive, or not, will significantly determine the shape of your life.

Christianity teaches the moral necessity for forgiveness. The supreme example of forgiveness, in our Western cultures, is set by Jesus accepting and forgiving the suffering of his crucifixion, so that the prophecies of his culture might be fulfilled, and primitive peoples raised to an ethically-based civilization. The secular Implicate Technology teaching of the clear setting face to face with reality deals only with the mechanics of the process of forgiveness – the morality of each situation is dealt with by your responding positively to the promptings of your karma.

The mechanics of the process of forgiveness are simple. If you remain attached to your suffering, and are unable to forgive, you will continue to incur negative karma. If you forgive the person or persons who wronged you, you will be relieved from the weight and burden of your accumulated negative karma, according to the degree of your forgiveness.

If you refuse to forgive the wrongs done to you, you will remain bound to the pattern of pain and sorrow which has brought about such a significant opportunity in your life. If you refuse to forgive, you are reinforcing your commitment to unenlightened behaviour. Reality will so structure itself that the opportunities to forgive will continue until you learn the lesson—this means you will continue to suffer through the workings of your karma.

To commit an act of genuine forgiveness is to release yourself from bondage to a specific pattern of pain and sorrow in your life. To forgive is to confirm your commitment to enlightenment, to affirm your determination to act in accordance with the flow of reality. Now reality will so structure itself, because you have learnt an important lesson, that your life moves on to the next lesson. This does not mean the end of your pain and sorrow; it simply means an opportunity to move closer to enlightenment.

The act of forgiveness is simplicity itself. Words alone are not forgiveness. Reality is beyond mere words such as: “I forgive you”.

For the forgiveness to be a genuine release from the burden of accumulated negative karma, it must involve a sincere stepping away from attachment to your pain and sorrow. Mere words may fool other people; they can never fool karma. Within yourself, you must become committed to detachment from your suffering – only then does the genuine act of forgiveness take place.

The first step in the sincere act of forgiveness is to become detached from your negative emotional responses. Calm, slow, meditative breathing will help you to achieve this. Think about this teaching in the context of your own life, long and carefully.

The second step in the sincere act of forgiveness is to convey the fact that you have forgiven to the person or persons who have wronged you. This can be conveyed in simple words, when and if a suitable opportunity arises. What you have to say, according to circumstances, is some variation on this theme: “These things happen. I was hurt, but we can all learn from experience”.

Do not, foolishly, believe that a genuine act of forgiveness will cause your pain to disappear rapidly, nor that your life will suddenly be filled with what you desire as a reward. The consequence of a sincere act of forgiveness is to release you from the burden of your accumulated negative karma. The true benefit you derive, freed from attachment to your pain and sorrow, is to be set clearly face to face with your experience of reality. In this way, you progress along the path to enlightenment.