Karma and the Karmic Board

Karma is the law of cause and effect as it applies to the soul. Every thought, feeling and act goes out into the world and, in time, returns to the one who sent it. The ascension teachings are firm on one point above all others: karma is instruction, never punishment. It is the way a soul learns what its choices do, and the way it is given, again and again, the chance to choose differently.

What Karma Is

Life flows into each person as pure energy from the I AM Presence. What the person does with that energy is up to them. They can qualify it with love, patience and generosity, or with fear, anger and harm. Either way it goes out, and either way it comes back.

The returning energy is not a reward or a sentence passed by someone else. It is the natural consequence of a world in which everything is connected. A kindness returns as kindness, often from an unexpected direction. A harm returns as an opportunity to understand what harm is, from the inside. The teachings sometimes speak of good karma and difficult karma, but they insist that both are teachers.

How Karma Returns

Karma returns in many forms: as circumstances, as relationships, as recurring situations that seem to follow a person from place to place. It returns when the soul is ready to meet it, which is not always when it is convenient. Some of it is met in the same life in which it was made. Some of it waits for a later one.

An important caution. Not every hardship is karma. The teachings say that souls also take on difficulties out of love, in order to serve or to learn, and that much suffering comes from the choices of others and from the condition of the world. Karma must never be used to blame anyone for their illness, poverty or misfortune, and least of all to blame those who have been harmed. That use of the teaching is itself a cause of difficult karma.

Balancing Karma

The teachings describe several ways in which karma is balanced, or, as they also say, transmuted.

• By the way you meet it. The quickest way to balance a returning karma is to meet it with a different response from the one that created it. Where there was anger, patience. Where there was taking, giving. The situation then has nothing more to teach, and it does not recur.
• By forgiveness. Forgiving others, and asking forgiveness, releases the bonds that hold two souls in a repeating pattern. It does not mean that harm is excused or that boundaries are abandoned.
• By service. Love given freely to others adds to the soul's store of light and balances what was taken in the past.
• By the violet flame. The gift of Saint Germain is described as the most direct means of all. It transmutes the energy of past harm back into light before it has to return as experience. See The Violet Flame.

The Masters are said to have stepped off the wheel of karma this way: not by escaping it, but by meeting every return with love until there was nothing left to return.

Group and Planetary Karma

Families, communities, nations and humanity as a whole are also said to make and meet karma together. This is one reason why the ascension is described as both personal and planetary. Every person who balances their own karma lightens the load of the whole, and the teachings say that a relatively small number of people working steadily with the violet flame can ease the passage of a great many.

The Karmic Board

The teachings describe a council of Ascended Masters who oversee the working of karma for the Earth. It is called the Karmic Board, and its members are sometimes called the Lords of Karma. It is described as a council of eight. Those named most often are Kuan Yin, Lady Nada, Lady Portia and Pallas Athena, together with the Great Divine Director, the Goddess of Liberty, the Elohim Cyclopea and the Buddha Vairochana.

The Board is said to review the record of each soul before it takes embodiment, and to help it choose the circumstances of its coming life: the lessons it will meet and the service it will give. During the life, the Board can grant what the teachings call dispensations: periods of grace in which a returning karma is softened, delayed until the soul is stronger, or spread more gently over time. The Board does not punish. It is described as the place where justice and mercy are held together for the whole human family.

Writing to the Karmic Board

A traditional practice of these teachings is to write a letter to the Karmic Board twice a year, at the winter and summer solstices, when the Board is said to meet. The letter is a petition: for help in balancing a particular karma, for an opportunity to serve, or for mercy on behalf of others or of the world. It is usually signed, offered with a short prayer, and then burned, so that its substance is released to the higher realms.

If you would like to try it, keep the requests sincere and largely unselfish, ask for nothing that would override another person's free will, and burn the letter safely in a fireproof dish, or simply tear it into small pieces. Many people keep a copy and are surprised, months later, by how much has been answered.

Mercy and Grace

The law of karma is exact, but it is not the only law. The teachings say that mercy is also a law, and that grace can enter any life at any moment. A sincere change of heart can shorten a long lesson. Help can arrive that nothing in the record would have predicted. The Karmic Board exists precisely so that the law of cause and effect is administered by those who love the souls in their care.

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Related Entries

• The Violet Flame
• Lady Portia
• Kuan Yin
• The Evening Review