When laypeople or beginner spiritual aspirants speak of karma, they usually think of the influence of past lives. But karma is a much broader topic related to every limiting life pattern, regardless of when it originated. Still, the fact remains that the changeable aspect of karma is often associated with the influence of so-called “trans-temporal traumas” or experiences and actions lived and performed in past lives. However, many people either do not “believe” in past lives or consider their influence unimportant. They think that only present events are important and that we shouldn’t bother ourselves too much with the past, as this could overly attach us to it and create a tendency towards avoiding our current responsibilities or justifying our disadvantages with former experiences. Others feel that the idea of reincarnation itself is doubtful, asking, “Who or what is it that reincarnates”? Consequently, even many spiritually oriented people believe that reincarnation does not exist. Doctor Steven Greer, famous ufologist and founder of the Disclosure Project[1], proudly exposes in his book Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge[2] the “uncomfortable truth” – past lives do not exist, and there is no such thing as reincarnation. He further explains that due to the universal unity and subtle interconnection of all life forms, people actually experience the lives of others who lived in the past.
In the initial stages of my spiritual development, I also thought of past lives as almost unimportant. Although I never doubted the idea of reincarnation, I felt that investigating the effects of past lives was absurd. According to Buddhist doctrine, the soul incarnates at least eighty times before it leaves this dimension of existence. So, besides all the problems we have in this life, who feels like being concerned with tens, or even hundreds, of past lives? And just when I had concluded that past lives were completely inessential, I experienced the first powerful impact of a trans-temporal trauma and ended up clearing the effects of my past lives over ten long years. Being dedicated to continual spiritual development, I had the privilege of dissolving most of the limiting impressions from my own past lives and successfully transforming the changeable aspects of my karma. Since I had been “pushed” into this process, which became an integral part of my personal development, I could no longer deny the influence of past lives. Experience has taught me to accept them and develop an efficient method of dissolving their unwanted influence.
Still, the question remains: “Who or what is it that reincarnates?” As we have seen, some people like Dr. Greer think that those who are experiencing a past life are, in fact, re-living other people’s life experiences, the record of which has remained stored in the collective (un)conscious of humanity. This is definitely true in a certain sense, since when working on a past life, we experience ourselves as a completely different person, sometimes of the opposite sex, living in entirely different circumstances and having experiences other than ours. While Dr. Greer is a true humanist and modern-day hero who, in his fight for the truth about the existence of alien civilizations and their presence on Earth, has gone through terrible ordeals and barely survived (unlike some of his close co-workers who haven’t), his knowledge of karmic doctrine and reincarnation seems to be rather superficial. This might be because Dr. Greer is a physician and not a professional spiritual therapist, so he can choose his stance regarding this fringe area of human experience. I, for example, could not afford the luxury of rejecting the doctrine of reincarnation since a good part of my job involves helping others overcome the limiting influences of past lives. Some might say that believing in past lives is important for me because of financial profits since, in a sense, I live off such a belief. However, this is not true – past lives are a reality, and the doctrine of karma and reincarnation represents one of the most important contributions of Eastern cultures and religions to the global storehouse of knowledge.
The point of reincarnation is in the possibility of evolution. Seeing the numerous possibilities that life on our planet offers, limiting the soul to one single opportunity would be, at best, very stingy, if not extremely stupid. God is anything but foolish and is remarkably precise and generous. Also, if we are offered only one opportunity, wouldn’t it be fair for everyone to have the same starting position? But we don’t. Most people born healthy in Western societies obtain good opportunities in life. A two-month-old baby from Iraq who has lost a leg, or an arm and a leg, or even both arms and legs, without any parents or close relatives alive, hasn’t got the same starting position. Still, as long as she is mentally capable, a physically disabled child might have a chance, but the babies that have been psycho-physically deformed by chemical weapons that war criminals unleash upon the Iraqis have no chance. But even this is not entirely true. We could say that such a child has no opportunities – in that lifetime. Therefore, there is always a second chance, a third, and a fourth…
Other opponents of reincarnation assert that the Iraqi children could not possibly be guilty of the predicament they have found themselves in. Of course they aren’t – it is well-known who the actual perpetrators are and who should answer for such massacres before an international war crime tribunal. And they will, sooner or later, as the law of karma is clear, and nobody can escape it. But it is also a fact that the soul of the child born in Iraq (or in war-torn Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Libya, Syria, Palestine…) has chosen such an option. No one lives through experiences that they haven’t chosen themselves. The difficulties such children have do not need to be the results of guilt or karmic payback, but they are indeed created through choice. At the same time, this by no means implies that the actual war criminals are innocent and that nothing needs to be done because everything is “engraved on the tablets of destiny” anyway. Nothing has been “written” until the very end – each life process can develop in different directions, and it is our duty to stop the destructive growth. Although the soul can choose even experiences that seem incomprehensibly difficult to most people, this does not justify the war in Iraq, Libya, or anywhere else.
When talking about karma and dharma, words such as responsibility, choice, rights, and cause and effect have multiple meanings, which can be intertwined simultaneously. Take, for instance, Neil Donald Walsch’s famous statement[3] that even Hitler went to heaven after death. With this assertion, Walsch shocked the New Age community, who couldn’t grasp exactly what he was talking about. Maybe this is what he meant – Hitler, like every other soul, is free to choose the sphere of reality he will go to after death. Each soul has this right. Therefore, Hitler, too, had the opportunity to go to heaven, but he probably wasn’t able to choose such a sphere and went directly to hell, followed by a troop of demonic beings. This was perhaps not even the hell of suffering and karmic payback, but a much deeper hell, one of the lower astral realms, where he could continue to hate, destroy, and serve Satan… So, he surely could have gone to heaven because the opportunity for such a choice exists for each and every soul, although beings like him are not usually able to see this possibility.
What about Hitler’s karma? Even though a person such as him has the right to go to heaven, he can’t evolve if he doesn’t get to feel the effects of his actions on his own skin. Therefore, if he wished to evolve in a positive direction, Hitler would sooner or later have to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions, much like all the other souls who are currently serving the masters of hell. Then heaven will be replaced by hell, the same kind of hell Hitler created for others. The soul can travel down a destructive path for eons, avoiding karmic retribution through the generous help of lower astral entities. Still, the moment it decides to change and move in a positive direction, it will first have to face the consequences of its actions. Only then will there be a possibility for new kinds of experiences.
Karmic balancing happens not only in the astral realms but here on Earth as well. Souls that suffer greatly, such as children whose lives have been destroyed by war, sometimes have committed similar acts in their former lifetimes. We know that modern history has been a history of warfare. For example, the romantic “Knights Templar,” who fought for the “liberation of the Holy Land,” were also extremely bloodthirsty. They massacred the followers of other religions, thinking they were doing the “right thing.” Sure, it is so fitting to physically exterminate anybody who does not believe in your version of God. The romantic crusaders used to travel to Jerusalem for up to two years, often passing through poor and desolate areas. They were so hungry that when arriving at villages, they would typically rob the villagers and frequently even eat their children, whom they would roast on a spit… The karma of people who eat small children cannot be particularly glamorous, and they will have to pay it off sooner or later by living through identical experiences themselves. Of course, there is the possibility of avoiding the “boomerang karma” by performing opposite positive activities, but for such an outcome to happen, people should be aware of their karma. The problem is that the level of consciousness of modern man does not yet allow for these ideas or information.
Also, the most difficult experiences, such as those that children in war zones go through, are not always the result of karmic retribution. They are sometimes chosen by so-called “evolved souls” who, in a certain sense, sacrifice themselves so that humanity might awaken. Using their own lives as an example, they point out the significant problem humanity hasn’t yet fully faced, which is the problem of evil. I have often encountered this scenario, almost as often as the direct karmic retribution scenario. Working with some people who have suffered immensely, I couldn’t find karmic reasons for their problems; I saw only their own decision to go through challenging experiences simply because of the learning process, in this case, an extremely difficult one. So, when we talk about the possibilities provided to us by human experience, we should bear in mind that things are not at all black-and-white, but there are, in fact, many different “shades of gray” as well.
Whether the suffering of an Iraqi child is part of her own personal negative karma or a matter of free choice, it does not mean that war is justified and that it should not be opposed. The same goes for all other forms of negative karma – although there might be a large number of factors that led someone to become disabled, every handicapped person should be given all the help they need. Society needs to care for jeopardized and disabled people, even if their condition is due to their karma. Illness is often karmic in nature, but this does not mean that sick people should not be given treatment. And who of us has no karma to think that we can judge others? All social injustice and imbalance must be corrected. In fact, the karma of a person, family, or community that is going through a difficult period is to overcome it and not to justify it by citing “karmic reasons.” Many people, often those spiritually inclined themselves, tend to look down upon those who are suffering. But when they find themselves “down in the gutter,” there is no end to their wailing.
So, problems are there to be solved constructively. Diagnostics is only the first of several tools because simply diagnosing someone’s problem as “karmic” cannot solve it. A diagnosis must be followed by personal transformation based on adequate methodology and the willingness to accept responsibility for our problems. Reincarnation is one of the tools for such change – the chance offered to a soul to acquire the experience needed for its growth.
Since human beings are proven to be extremely rigid and slow-moving, death and reincarnation enable our transformation from one form to another, from one kind of experience into a completely different one. The soul is overflowing with potential – it is nameless, genderless, and initially empty, with infinite creative potential. Such potential cannot be fully realized within only one incarnation, so the immortal soul receives a whole chain of possibilities for creative expression through the most varied aspects of human experience and activity. For this reason, death is often a pleasant event for many people, especially for their next of kin. When it comes to families, the death of a rigid “old dog” or a “witch” who mistreats everyone around them and doesn’t wish to change is a true liberation for their near ones. Death gets us out of limiting life situations, offering the possibility of change or realizing those potentials that might have been unachievable to us due to our ignorance.
But there’s no reason to wait for death to change us; we can do it ourselves while still living. Many people would like to sleep away their lives and transfer their obligations into some indefinite future and then justify the failure to accomplish them with their own mortality. Things can be avoided for some time, but not endlessly. Therefore, everything we do not carry out now remains for tomorrow, and death is not an end to our duties – we shall have to continue in the next incarnation. And, what we consciously and purposely avoid now will be much harder to accomplish later because all the justifications that are currently purely subjective tend to actualize into objective obstacles in the next attempt. It is much better to face and overcome our karma now or to “die before we die” and be reborn in the same lifetime. The systems of personal development presented on this website enable precisely this – a symbolic death of the old character, built on our weaknesses, and a re-creation of a new, fulfilling, and liberating one. With our new personality, we also attract completely different outer circumstances and can overpower the limitations that seemed invincible and realize goals that until then seemed unattainable.
Let’s finally restate the question, “who or what reincarnates?”. The answer would be – the soul or individual consciousness. Not only do physical beings possess a sense of identity and integrity, but the soul has it, too. After the death of the physical body, the soul will abide in certain spheres of existence, now as an energetic entity capable of experiencing itself as part of a universal whole (or all-encompassing Spirit) and simultaneously as a separate individual. The soul lives and “truly” dies only once when it immerses itself in the pure spirit again. It is created as an individual “being” with particular characteristics, which separate it from other beings, and retains its individuality through all manifestations. The soul, therefore, exists as an energetic entity in the form of its choice, and it can incarnate in the physical realm to acquire specific experiences and manifest its creative potential. The fact is that such an entity has an actual existence, and when looked at through the prism of the human understanding of time and space, it can manifest itself in a successive chain of physical incarnations. These incarnations may differ from one another very much, and yet the soul retains its original individuality through each of them. This underlying identity is sometimes evident through the physical similarities of different incarnations. I cannot prove this scientifically, but seeing as I have “no time for karma,” I also have no time for the “scientific verification” of something I have witnessed many times.
As I have already mentioned, even if the doctrine of reincarnation is an illusion, the fact is that during therapy sessions, people often re-live events that they situated in the past. They see themselves as a person living in another time and place and connect their experiences to other character traits, which are in some “strange way” related to their own. Therapeutic interventions over such events give significant practical results. Here is a “true life story” and an excellent example – my pollen allergy or hay fever, which lasted for many years. Although the most beautiful time of the year, springtime was a period of great suffering for me from age eight to twenty-eight. While other children played soccer, ran across the fields and forests, and enjoyed the scents of flowers in full bloom, for me, those delights were a source of endless sneezing, a runny nose, and itchy eyes, accompanied by a feeling of overall misery. I tried to cure myself in various ways, using methods offered by the official medicine, such as “desensitizing” my body with injections containing small doses of pollen or taking antihistamines, up to the various alternative healing methods. Nothing helped.
But the moment I performed an intervention over one of my past lives, the allergy disappeared immediately. I did this intervention in the springtime when my allergy was most intense. I was still sneezing when I started, but after a half-hour intervention, all hay fever symptoms were gone for good. Today, at the age of forty-something, I am still allergy-free. So what can I say? That past lives are unimportant? I lost twenty springs during some of the most important and beautiful years of my life, only to free myself of the source of my suffering in less than half an hour by intervening in the life of a person I was sure was none other than myself, in a slightly modified version and in a different time and place. This is proof enough for me to believe in past lives and their influence, which I have often faced and dealt with successfully since then.
KARMIC FALL
Discussing karma and past lives, we are slowly approaching the term “karmic fall,” which stands for those past lives in which we did the most damaging things. In these incarnations, we violated all the basic universal principles. Instead of self-realization, we were on the path of self-destruction, destroying other people and everything around us. Because of these mistakes, we now feel strong subconscious guilt, which prevents us from attaining many goals. Since our actions are subject to the law of karma, after the karmic fall, we go through a series of incarnations in which we suffer immensely, but we again try to get rid of the suffering using destructive means. After a series of failures, a soul finally gets out of this vicious circle by agreeing to compensate for the negative outer karma in constructive ways. But this doesn’t mean that the inner karmic aspect is automatically purified, so we have a lot of work to do on dissolving different traumatic experiences and their consequences, originating from the lives in which we purposely did negative things but also from the lives of suffering, where we had to compensate for the outer karmic aspect. The intense suffering produces more victim-like traumas, which also need to be released.
In the essence of the karmic fall, there is regularly a feeling of guilt, which we usually do not recognize, but we acutely acknowledge the problems we have because of it. These problems always concern an inability to break through personal blockades. Some people cannot achieve a harmonious partnership, no matter how hard they try. Some are poor, some cannot have children, and others cannot have a spiritual experience. The unpurified inner aspect of a karmic fall forms a huge block, which prevents us from connecting with our soul and spirit. Since we cannot live from our true selves, we go through many inexplicable and unpleasant experiences of a seemingly “unknown” origin. We may develop strong personalities and firm defense mechanisms to compensate for the lack of a deeper connection with our true selves. We tend to perceive ourselves as the “innocent victims” of someone or something. We may become overly attached either to a rebellious lifestyle or a passive one based on the idea that life is meaningless.
The purification of incarnations that caused the karmic fall can last for some time, from a few months to a few years. If we don’t do it purposefully and intentionally, the period of retribution for the karmic fall will inevitably come during certain transitions of the planet Saturn in our astrological chart. It usually lasts seven years, causing the “seven years of bad luck,” or the “Sade Satti” period, as Indian astrology calls it. But why leave it to our fate when we can do the job ourselves? We don’t have to suffer for seven years just because the planets force us to; we can shorten the period and make it much easier if we consciously face those karmic patterns that caused the karmic fall. Once we finish it, the results will be invaluable, primarily for our souls and us as human beings with specific aspirations and needs. Instead of living like a loser, we slowly and securely turn ourselves into the creators of our destiny. Guilt, at the core of the karmic fall, is now systematically released and transformed into a healthy motivation, inner strength, and the power to shape our lives according to the most profound inner longings. The samskaras that once ruled our lives in the form of “destiny” now turn into inner allies who enable us to have a meaningful and realized life, leading us towards much deeper fulfillment than we could ever have imagined.
Overcoming the karmic fall is not pleasant because we lose the illusion of ourselves as “nice” or “good” and face our inner evil in unknown ways and intensity. It is not easy to watch our misdeeds without judging and accepting that we might have abused and tortured others with unimaginable cruelty. But what else can we do? Blame others? Be a loser? I am always for an active approach, which can turn the unwanted situation into a desired direction. By the way, this is precisely the meaning of all karmic processes – transforming the negative karma and not suffering. The suffering becomes necessary when we don’t have a precise diagnostic tool or efficient methodology for overcoming our problems. Once we have them, it is insane not to use them. And finally, that is why we have reincarnated in the first place – to change the unwanted aspects of existence, purify ourselves from the limiting patterns, counterbalance the outer element of karma with the opposite positive activity, and live happy and fulfilled lives.
DISSOLVING LIMITING IMPRESSIONS FROM PAST LIVES
Now that we have laid down the facts, we can briefly look at what the transformation of past lives’ influences may look like. Not everything that happened in a past life affects our current life negatively; it’s just specific experiences that remain unresolved. These are the so-called “trans-temporal traumas” (as the healer Barbara Ann Brennan calls them[4]), which we didn’t manage to transform at that time, resulting in limiting programs remaining recorded in our subconscious mind and energy body. These records, or “samskaras,” radiate their energy and create inner states and outer circumstances through the program they carry. The influence of the samskaras is, therefore, wide-ranging, and it is not always easy to determine how they will manifest. Still, the common denominator of all limiting impressions from past lives is that they tend to re-create the same or similar circumstances to those from the past. The samskaras repeat themselves like a broken record, attempting to attract our attention so that we start dealing with them. Until we do this, the karma created by the samskara will persistently re-create and repeat itself.
The first and fundamental question someone might pose concerning this kind of work is, “When should we begin intervening over some past life?” Facing our past lives requires a certain maturity or a readiness to do so. These interventions are usually performed when past lives begin to rise to the surface spontaneously. This usually happens during therapeutic interventions meant initially to resolve a current acute or chronic problem. Sometimes, it is possible to work on a past life when we cannot find the cause of our problem within the confines of our current lifetime. In these cases, we use past life regression as a prelude to searching for the cause. When the past life reveals itself, we need to know what to look for. It is not enough to gain a chronological overview of events and do something I call “spiritual tourism.” What is much more important is to transform the traumatic experiences and re-create the past life on new foundations to store a constructive impression in our mind rather than a limiting one.
Advanced practitioners of the Transformation of Karmic Patterns system can sometimes work directly on the causes of a problem in their past lives. In such cases, we need to have the intention of finding the equivalent of our current problem in one or more of our past lives. Then, we go back in time, intending to be taken back to the events and experiences directly affecting our current circumstances. When doing this, the information comes to us little by little, in small pieces, as if solving a puzzle, so we work without expecting to see the whole picture at once. Since the most crucial element of a samskara is trauma, our first aim is to find and dissolve the uncleared traumatic experiences from our past lives. When we discover a traumatic event, we identify ourselves with the most painful moment and then dissolve the physical states, emotions, conclusions, and decisions we acquired back then. After this is done, we re-integrate our lost identity.
We then go on reviewing the other events in that life, if we haven’t already done so at the very beginning, because there are certainly other important events we need to become aware of. Usually, the first situation we face after regressing into a particular past life is the most painful experience we went through, the one that heavily burdens us. But there are some other key points which we have to investigate. These are childhood, death, and the so-called key moment, or the event in which we made the most critical negative decision, causing that lifetime to go in a negative direction. We usually work first on the childhood period and find out if there was any trauma that defined and influenced the rest of that lifetime. If there was such a trauma or traumas, we then dissolve them. Following that, we take a look at what our death in that lifetime was like, and if it was traumatic, we dissolve that trauma, too. If the death was extremely traumatic (torture, murder, or suicide), we can take a look at what happened to us after death, which realm of existence we went to, and how we felt. In other words, there are also traumas acquired after death, which must also be cleared.
We then proceed to uncover the key moment that caused us to take the path that ended up creating the uncomfortable experiences, those which made the foundation for samskaras or limiting impressions. That moment usually consists of a trauma followed by a strong negative decision that occurred in youth or childhood. We then dissolve that trauma and finally perform the most important thing in the entire intervention, which is the re-creation of that lifetime in a new way. First, we envision what that lifetime could have been like if we had been able to react constructively at the key moment. Then, we immediately begin creating the rest of that lifetime as if it had been based on a constructive decision instead of a destructive one. For example, if the trauma on which the key moment was based was a consequence of any form of abuse, and we decided to abuse others from that moment on, we can now look at alternative actions. That is to say, we look for a constructive decision that could have replaced the destructive one. Maybe we could have decided to forgive the abuser and create our life in the best possible way. If we had reacted like this in the first place, what would our life have looked like at the peak of our realization? What kind of person would we have become, and what type of fulfillment would we have achieved?
We then visualize that person standing before us and then integrate them, as we usually do with the lost part. We ask this person to meld with our physical form, and when that happens, we first allow ourselves to feel her completely. We will enable her to look through our eyes, listen through our ears, feel through our skin, and act through our speech, movement, and behavior. We then encourage the part to express itself through us, freely and spontaneously, with no censure. We observe what this part does and what becomes possible for us now. We then work on grounding our new identity and notice what could be the first change we can make in our current lifestyle for the new identity to find a way to manifest itself. Now, we can also become aware of the lessons we could not learn in the past life and go through the initiation we did not pass back then. Finally, we work on creating a new positive reality, which will be the opposite of the problem we started with. We can do this by using the so-called “alphas” or positive creations in the form of verbalized intentions, as explained in the ninth chapter.
Working in this way, we turn a limiting impression from a past life into an advantage or a source of an essential spiritual lesson and significant psychological gain. Instead of continuing to attract the same old experiences stored in its program, a past life impression transforms from an uncomfortable and burdensome problem into a new inner potential, a quality unknown to us so far. Such an attainment is the true goal of any karmic process, and this methodology allows a motivated person to achieve this transformation in a relatively short time. Although this work is often neither simple nor easy, it brings extraordinary benefits once completed. What each of us will do with such benefits is a personal decision, but the undeniable fact is that we now have at our fingertips a valuable asset that we can use however we wish. Man is originally created as a being who can, through expanding his consciousness and creative potential, achieve great personal power. God creates us as free beings, which in turn create their existence according to their desires and through the wise use of the physical and spiritual forces at their disposal. The transformation of karmic patterns is one element that contributes significantly to achieving this level of personal freedom.
Tomislav Budak, 2000
[1] www.disclosure.org
[2] Steven M. Greer, M.D.: Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge – it is time for you to know, USA, 2006.
[3] Neil Donald Walsch: Conversations with God, Volume 1, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996.
[4] Barbara Ann Brennan and Jos. A. Smith: Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field, BANTAM BOOKS, 1988.