“What goes around, comes around!”

Popular Idiom referring to Fairness and Balance

Symbols and Color

• Background Image: There are few places or events more conducive to creating Karma on a mass scale than war. I took this picture of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. There are thousands of names; each with a story, each with history, each who settled, created, owed or extinguished karma. Destiny does not favor the bold, but it does continuously present itself. It is our choice what we do with it.
• Border Color: Gray – Covenant Group – Life is seldom black or white.
• The Eight Ball: Chance and Fate.
• Alpha and Omega: TAO(-Card 0) Anything that can be imagined can be a source of Karmic fuel
• Triality: The only way to transcend the effects of Karma is to be present in the neutral state of synthesis, where a new equilibrium is reached.
• The Gun: Symbol of Karma itself. Every action committed by/with it perpetuates karma. Whether wounding, protecting, or hunting, the events when it is used always stoke the fires of emotion: fear, anger, revenge, and sometimes a rush of power.

Implications of the Upright Position or Positive Pole

A key unlatches a lock which then allows a door or window to open. But sometimes, keys don’t necessarily appear as we believe they should look and neither the lock itself. Unlocking the mysteries behind each karmic exchange is the way that consciousness expands and knowledge is gained. Karmas
are patterns built upon the universe’s spiral design of continual expansive motion; metaphorically like riding the wheel of fortune but always having the wheel ramp up to a higher/broader level. That is why luck is so closely related to the notion of karma. Whether good or bad, the effect of luck and karma produce unintended consequences which are still ours to account for. It is part of the process of resolving a Karmic imbalance. Yes, we can and do both create (Card 55 – Masculine) and have karma attach to us (Card 54 – Feminine). Each side is a valid experience for exploration and expansion of the TAO (Card 0). To know when and how to let go or when an how to acknowledge a charged situation makes it possible to heal wounds or settle debts. The key to spiritual growth is recognizing the continual cycle of Karma, not as reward and punishment, nor even debts and collections, but a continual seesaw of momentum taking us through ups-and-downs as our learning propels us through the wisdom of the (Soul) ages. Every time a doorway is passed through, one enters into a new room of experience. There may be a toll to be paid on the way out (karma you owe), or a toll you may be required to collect (karma owed you). But in either case, moving through successive spaces takes you further along. While bound in the cycle of incarnations, from 1st life Infant Soul (Card 71) to last life Old Soul (Card 75), no one ever has a 0 balance. Equilibrium
on the physical plane is only reached when one cycles-off (Card 76). Many people equate the idea of Karma with Newton’s 3rd law of Motion famously stated as “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Yet what is not acknowledged, often just as frequently as the aphorism is invoked, is this statement refers to the degree of force, not the form of the action itself. Thus the sheer magnitude of
effect will be the same or quantity of force will be equal, but not specifically the same act or event.

Therefore Karma is more equatible to quantum Entanglement in physics rather than motion. Why is this significant? Karma as a concept speaks to the interconnectedness of two bodies (beings) having an interrelated energy effect upon one another regardless of their relative position in time-space. Hence, our definition requires a more precise requirement of tit-for-tat equivalence in form, not just effect. Yet, for as long as beliefs and interpretations exist, misunderstanding will as well. All you really need to know about karma is that you pay it back and create it anew every moment you exist. But if you want to have a phobia about doing so, i.e. forming a self-karma about karma, is to fear the creation of karma and falsely believe you can control the process. You can avoid the distortions of self-karma by simply pursuing and telling the truth to yourself and others. It is that simple! Those knowledgeable will have seen a subtext I will now explicitly state. Viewing Karma through the context of motion is to view it as macro or cosmological “big picture” event and in some cases legitimate. Yet, it lays the basis for an misconstrued assumption that a force is capable of being altered is thus brought to rest i.e. completed. Karma is an ongoing stream where you simply reach shoals or eddies before getting swept up by a new current.
Yet, by contrast, entanglement is a metaphor about relationship interaction. Those events, emotions, patterns, themes, memories or exchanges which have specific permutations. Conceptually it is better modeled by entanglement principles of particles (individuals), instead of the waves of cyclic patterns. Karma is about people interacting not merely systems in motion. How are you and someone else(s)
uniquely entangled? Consider that common beliefs, family ties, personal histories of cost or benefit are all the filaments (ribbons or cords) activated between any two or more individuals. Once you pluck a few of these strings you’ll see what resonates and what cords bind you together.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Resolution

(Completion, restitution, absolution, forgiveness, reciprocity)

1. The wheel of fortune revolves and life evolves because of Karma. Desired resolution of intense, unresolved emotions lock two persons in a chess game where completion and victory are not the same. Check mate is close at hand. The encounter will end.
   
2. Karmic resolution occurs not with victory but understanding. Is Karma seeking resolution in this affair?
3. Karma, conceptually relates to balance in physics, and justice in society. Find the equilibrium.
4. Karma is not just retroactive. You can use it creatively and pay it forward.
5. Philanthropic Karma gives with no agenda or intent to be compensated. Good fortune is near.
6. There is a reciprocity that is going on in this situation. Move forward with it and know that something is being balanced out.
7. Many things depend on our completion of karma. But the one thing it can give us is an opportunity to innovate how we repay our debts. Doing the best you can to create win-win circumstances is the best means to an end.
8. “Karma is our teacher. It teaches us to refine our behavior–hopefully sooner rather than later. One way to tell a young soul from an old soul is to observe how quickly he learns karma’s lessons in life.” ~ Editors of Hinduism Today, What Is Hinduism?
9. Karmic resolution occurs not with victory but with understanding. Can you detect some thematic qualities present? Is restitution being sought in this affair? If so, does someone owe you, or vice-versa? Sometimes collecting can knock us out of our comfort zone. Take a breath. You are on a spiritual quest. Your Holy Grail awaits. 
10. The Wheel of Fortune revolves around life and life evolves because of Karma. Desired resolution of fixated, unresolved emotional states lock two persons in a chess game where completion and victory are not the same. Checkmate is close at hand. The encounter will end.
11. What happens next? Interestingly enough, this is where your ability to manifest (Card 69 Maya) and your intention (Card 63 Inspiration) intersect. Karma will result or resolve either way. The amount of love, generosity, compassion, and commitment to justice (fairness) you bring to the situation, will weigh the determination whether it earns you grace or disgrace. Your choice. How are you going to play it?
12. It is possible to be creativity in karmic restitution. Look at this situation and see if you can imagine a different outcome that satisfies both players, and a different solution that both players may benefit from.
13. Invest energy and it will be there to eventually draw upon. Pay it forward.
14. Heard the expression “my karma ran over my dogma”? Experience teaches, dogma preaches! Best to make peace with the former and bury the latter.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Karma is our teacher. It teaches us to refine our behavior–hopefully sooner rather than later. One way to tell a young soul from an old soul is to observe how quickly he learns karma’s lessons in life.” ~ Editors of Hinduism Today, What Is Hinduism?
• “There is good Karma, there is bad Karma, and as the wheel of life moves on, old Karma is exhausted and again fresh Karma is accumulated. Although at first it may appear that nothing can be more fatalistic than this doctrine, yet a little consideration will show that in reality this is not the case. Karma is twofold, hidden and manifest, Karma is the man that is, Karma is his action. True that each action is a cause from which evolves the countless ramifications of effect in time and space.”~ WILLIAM Q. JUDGE, The Path, Sep. 1886
• “Think about karma as a bank. The Karma Bank is an impartial, honorable, incorruptible, infallible solid establishment. Every single person in the whole universe has an account in this colossal depository. Each time you perform a positive action, you add good karma to your account. Every negative action that you perform produces bad karma. The ultimate goal is to have your account in perfect balance. When this is achieved, you will have mastered your karma.” ~ MARY T. BROWNE, The Power of Karma 
• “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
• I’m a true believer in karma. You get what you give, whether it’s bad or good. ~Sandra Bullock

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

The anvil is a heavy burden that we can carry until we can set it down. To do that, you’ve got to pay your dues and settle your debts. In 1960’s the popular Road Runner cartoon had as the nemesis Wiley Coyote; a hapless schemer always trying to subdue his light-footed opponent. The two of them were locked in a struggle of karma where neither the furry antagonist nor his feathered protagonist could ever “let it go.” The gravity of their relationship antipathy seemed perfectly represented by poor Wiley’s use of an anvil as a weapon or tool to destroy clever Road Runner. Ironically, for a generation of kids who grew up in cities, this was the only sight of an anvil they’d ever had. So, they really didn’t know what it was really about. Yet, whether as a weight, a weapon, or a tool, it has a pretty dubious reputation and is known to be heavy. Of course, it teams with the hammer to beat our meddle into something worthwhile: sometimes sharp like a sword, a knife or a razor; but in most of us things a bit less glamorous like a hinge, a shield, or a shovel. In any case, karma has its uses; it shapes us and it tempers us. Is it any wonder why most people associate karma with heaviness, pain, and getting beat-up? Yet, in itself, it is a mechanism where exchanges of energy are logged and accounting for their restitution put in the annals of the Akashic Record. Then personally, recorded in the memory of your own emotional biases: your wounds, your loves and your aspirations.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Obligation

(Payment, indebtedness, retribution, revenge, corded, indentured, comeuppance, repulsion, effect, vengeance, reprisal, indentured, saddled, tomented)

1. Feeling weighed down by indebtedness? In shadow, Karma is an obligation that can stagger one or cause denial and avoidance of duty. Is there a situation that causes you to feel dread and fear? Be careful and brief, but face it.
2. Now you’ve done it! Someone has been hit by a big load of juice! The cord has been struck creating a karmic ribbon between the two of you. Forewarned is forearmed!
3. Are you beholden to someone but are avoiding dealing with it? Until you make amends or settle up it will nag at you. What you resist, persists.
4. There is an adage, “Hurt people, hurt (other) people.” Wounded people tend to lash out. Pain causes us respond in a defensive action which resembles the way we ourselves were hurt. Knowing this trope of human nature can increase your compassion. Not caring about it will increase your callousness.
5. If you can figure out a way to channel the energy differently than how it came at you, then you may transcend the cycle of retribution. 
6. Negative karma is the eye-for-an-eye mentality which seeks to pass on a painful experience to a perceived transgressor. It was Gandhi who said, “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” Stop now or you’ll end up with sunglasses and a guide dog. Of course, maybe then you’ll have someone to complain to?
7. Karma conceptually relates to balance of energies and justice in society. Find the equilibrium between the two. Imbalance is not profit or loss, it is inequality and injustice.
8. Do not mistake karma and sin. The first is issued the result of an imbalance that exists within you. The second a stain one feels upon their own soul because of a transgression they deem harmful to a community of others. It is a pronouncement upon you.
9. The Wheel of Fortune revolves around life and life evolves because of Karma. Desired resolution of fixated, unresolved emotional states lock two persons in a chess game where completion and victory are not the same. Checkmate is close at hand. The encounter will end.
10. What Karma theme is seeking resolution in this affair? If you want to find it, look at what is driving each of the participants belief that have been victimized or short-changed. Where they match up, you’ve found the would to be exposed, and hopefully begin healing.
11. “The most effective way to get through something, is to go through it.” Because there is no going around karmic ties or events, just follow them to completion.
12. You are neither bad nor wrong for having karma. Shame, guilt, and pity do not, however, substitute for genuine apology and offer of restitution. Those emotions are self-involved. To reach honest and appropriate reparation, focus on what the other needs or what the emotions are demanding of you to address.
13. If you can figure a way to channel the energy differently than how it came at you, then you may transcend the cycle of retribution.
14. There are emotional charge(s) locking themes and events in place. Will you address them?
15. Some say that “revenge is a dish best served cold.” It means that seeking vengeance one should feel completely indifferent to the other’s, and even their own, feelings. Yet, karma is driven by an unresolved emotional attachment. Cold is a misnomer, because those emotions are flowing hot until the deed is done. Don’t confuse numb detachment with dispassionate Meta-awareness.
16. Even the Bible acknowledges the karmic process. “Whatsoever a man (woman) soweth, that shall he(she) also reap.” If you are sowing the seeds of discontent know that more than a few people are likely to be looking to either confront you, sabotage you, or outright gut you. You may not even have intended to do so! But pay attention to two groups: those who were the persons you were in opposition to or acting upon? And those who are your compatriots in the endeavor, i.e. those who you were acting with? With both friend and foe, karmic ribbons can be formed.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• Those who were pre-ordained to have no good karma at all – gazing into the lamp of emotional attachment, they are burnt, like moths in a flame.  ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib
• “Like gravity, karma is so basic we often don’t even notice it.” ~Sakyong Mipham
• “A man’s indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.” Ruth Benedict
• “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” Mohandas Gandhi

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

Karma is the great motivator and produces a continual interest and necessity for an Essences’ participation on the Physical Plane.  A driving urge to do something or seek out someone, or reversed an intense revulsion; helps reveal to us the roots of a karmic presence.  Categorized by the Theosophists as “the law of cause and effect”, many make analogy to Newton’s principle stated in the Third Law of Thermodynamics as “every action having an equal and opposite reaction.” Yet, that opposite may not be as simply framed by exchanges of behavior or consequence but a passing of the same intense emotional experience one suffered or perhaps gained to another person for their to be the possibility of completion, rectification, and hopefully advancement on the game board of life which is the Wheel of Fortune.

In the Michael Teaching, the emphasis is upon Karma as a “bonding agent” which looks two souls into a pattern or unresolved event. It is characterized in the early Michael Books under the heading of “karmic ribbons to be burned.” The Christian idea of “you reap what you sew” falls in line with this interpretation. Meaning that everything we do has consequences with effect us later: within the life or in another life. What forms a Karma can be any experience where an emotionally charged and highly significant event forms a bond, sometimes feeling more like a chain or unresolved business, and instill in someone a sense of “cognitive dissonance” whereby a nagging feeling of discomfort pervades a circumstance. Thus, it provides a stimulus to seek pacification of that internal stressor by an number of means.

Karmas, according to Michael, are formed when an perceived agreement has been abrogated leaving one party being the receiver of an unplanned and usually devastating consequence; and by extension, holding a grudge. These grudges may have thousands of unique variations, or permutations. But for the most part, there are general or universal themes like: abandonment, deception, betrayal, disloyalty, abuse, which are pervasive to lessons of the Physical Plane. Thus, the nature of an individual scenario is likely to bear one of these general stamps though the specific circumstances may be quite interesting and unique. However, repayment of a Karma can, for souls who bring awareness to the table, be creative endeavors. One of Michael’s favorite examples relates a story of two souls who shared a Karma around the theme of life-death. In the formation event, one soldier abandoned a friend on a battlefield and ran, resulting in a comrades death under fire. Lifetimes later, instead of reenacting exact or similar circumstances, the two souls shared rectified the imbalance of the original abandonment by the soul who ran saving the life of a drowning victim who was his comrade he had previously abandoned. By willingly placing himself in danger to save the life of the other, the soul who was owed a continued also experienced compensation in loyalty and sacrifice and thus the karma was completed and the debt paid.

Lastly, it should be noted that Karma and sin are NOT equivalent. Since sin implies guilt, wrongdoing, or perpetration with the resulting need for retribution. Karma’s may have no malice or intentional harm as part of them as implied by sin. Religions use sin as a means of manipulation of the psyche and a mechanism for exerting some influence upon people’s behavior. Karma, like sins, may be forgiven, but unlike sin especially viewed in the Christian faith presumes a third party: God or a priest, may bestow absolution and exempt one from making amends. Sorry folks! While the disturbance upon an emotional equilibrium may be spiritually troubling, it serves a valuable learning purpose for both souls and thus no one is truly a victim although it may be construed that way. Hence, a karma is only resolved between the two parties and no outside force may intervene nor excuse it without the consent of the parties. Karma’s are contracts and they are only discharged when both parties are satisfied. And when that happens there is advancement, or at least peace, for both Essences.

Cultural Meaning

In the modern era, perhaps more so than any other previous time period the rate of Karmic interactions: creations and completions, is at an all time high. More people doing more interactions producing more results: some harmful and deliberate others beneficial and altruistic.

Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated 2024

For a Motivation Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com