2.9 What is the evolutionary purpose of karma?

Karma embodies the purposive aspect of this. Karma functions as the teacher, providing balancing and correcting experiences to adjust the development of each person. The purpose of karma is to lead each person, at an appropriate pace and in appropriate circumstances, towards, and then along, a path leading to the final stage of enlightenment.

As your experience of the advanced meditative practices taught in this book unfolds, you will learn for yourself the evolutionary nature of karma. You will come to understand for yourself, through direct intuitive experience, the way your mind has been shaped to a single purpose – to break free of the illusion binding you to attachment to this. From examination of its contents, you will learn that your mind has been shaped in its development across lifetimes.

The experiences of each of us, accumulated across lifetimes, form a journey across an infinite sea of illusion. The journey ends not with death, which simply leads to another set of conditions, but with the realisation that this is that. Each incarnation you experience offers the opportunity to break out of the illusion that this is an objective reality, and to realise that in its true, final and absolute nature, this is a subjective reality.

Just as individuals grow and develop across and within lifetimes, so, too, do whole cultures. Cultures are vast aggregations of individual karma, shaped in turn by the wider karmic patterns of human history. Karma functions to offer cultures the chance to evolve, just as the same chance is constantly offered to individuals.