How Does Karma Fit In With Your Teaching? with Eckhart Tolle

My question is on karma. I grew up in a Hindu family, and often karma is talked about as something that provides a balance in the world, but it can sometimes seem rigid and. And it's a powerful influence over someone's life. And when I listen to you speak, I feel so much peace and so much hope. And you talk about presence and being as the keys to enjoying form and creating positive circumstances in your life or softening circumstances. And I wanted to know how karma fits into all of that, because there seems to be places in the world where there's not a lot of resources where there's a lot of brutality. For example, I met somebody at work, and she was a refugee from Afghanistan, and she was a young girl. And the interpreter had told me that her brother and her father were killed in front of her, and she had another brother taken. And then I later learned that a lot of times the Taliban doesn't take the young boys to fight. They take them and they use them as sex slaves. And when I hear about stories like this, I just wonder how I can stay aligned with love or trusting the universe when I'm not able to see through your eyes yet. How do you hold both?

Thank you. Thank you. Now, of course, everybody is born into a certain external environment and also is born with certain predispositions. They may be partly genetic, they may be other things that a person is born with. Certain patterns. In other words, we don't need to examine where they come from, but to see the fact that the human being is first of all born into a certain environment, which may be violent or it may be relatively peaceful. And the person is born with inner patterns. You inherit certain, even pain. Body is partly inherited. Some babies cry a lot. They have a relatively heavy pain body already in this world. Doesn't mean they are spiritually less advanced. The opposite may be the case. There's no knowing. Other babies are relatively peaceful. And so there's a whole set of conditioning that happens. You come into the environment with certain predispositions, then the environment conditions you further. And in all that, there's no choice involved. There's just influences. And so you find yourself in this world with certain unconscious patterns that have become the conditioning of who the person is, the unconscious conditioning. So karma, as I see it, is the unconscious conditioning that runs your life. And that still applies to many humans. And karma is partly collective. You've been born into it and partly personal. They come together. So really, you can only understand karma not as an abstract subject external to yourself, because then you get into Belief systems and philosophy, we're not going that way. You can only understand karma by observing yourself. And by observing, and then you will know many other things. But you need to really, if you want to understand karma, you need to look at yourself. And so I began to understand what karma is when there was something arose that was not part of karma at all. And really, here we come to the key. The arising of consciousness or presence or spiritual awakening is not part of karma. It is another dimension that breaks into the karmic realm. So you do not become awakened by accumulating, as they sometimes say in the east, good karma, that's fine on this level. You can make the walls or the furniture in your prison a little bit more comfortable. But there is something totally from beyond karma that can come into your life at any point within the wheel of karma and rebirth. Rebirth is, of course, part of karma. The deeper meaning of rebirth is identification with form. We don't need to even believe in transmigration or whatever. You can look at rebirth in your own life. Every time you identify with a thought that arises, which is form, you are born into that thought because your sense of self is in it. That's karma. You are reborn. Karma, then, is unconscious identification with these patterns that you have inherited, the conditioned, complete identification of consciousness with the conditioned patterns. So consciousness is dreaming. One could say. This is why we use the word awakening in many spiritual traditions. Consciousness is awakening. Consciousness is in a dreamlike state when you identify with the unconscious patterns. And then you are condemned to rebirth. In fact, many times every day, you are reborn into a reaction, an emotional mental reaction. No presence at all, just rebirth into some form. Or you reborn into thoughts that arise, and you completely believe in every thought. And then you act from those thoughts and emotions, and the action creates further reactions. And the actions confirm to you that you were right. If you have certain mind patterns about, for example, that other people are basically dishonest. Just one example. People are so dishonest, they're all trying to get something from me that tends to confirm itself in your life experience. You can try it out, or you may have experienced it before you became more conscious. That habitual thought patterns that you identified with, and that is karma, creates in the external confirmation that it is correct. So if you think the world is full of evil people, you will meet many evil people, and in other words, unconscious people, and even people who are on the brain or who are halfway being conscious and unconscious. When you come together with them, your belief will pull them into unconsciousness. And that's Karma. So karma is the complete absence of conscious presence. And so it's automatic. It plays itself out. And time does not free you of karma. That is a misperception that if you only have enough time, eventually you can become free of karma. Karma reduce itself and repeats itself. It's a wheel. And so the only thing that can free you of karma is the arising of presence. And how is it that some person. Presence. I cannot tell you why. I only know that at any point in the wheel of karma, presence can come in. It can happen to a criminal in prison, condemned to death. It can happen to somebody who has never heard of anything spiritual. It can happen to somebody who has been meditating for 30 years, or not happen to the same person who has been meditating for 30 years. So in your own life, I can see from what you're saying that presence has already. I can sense that presence has already come into your life. And presence frees you from karma. Not all at once. Karma has an enormous momentum, meaning the patterns in yourself, the thought patterns, the emotional patterns, the reactive patterns. There's enormous momentum behind that. But as presence arises, gradually karma diminishes, the energy behind it diminishes. And gradually you experience a fading out of those patterns. They become weaker. You are no longer completely in the grip of those patterns. So as presence arises, there's a gradual fading out of karma. Not that it matters that much anymore. Because once you are present, you can, as the previous questioner said when we were talking about certain thoughts still arising, certain negative thoughts, that's still part of the karma, the old patterns, the unconscious habits, patterns inherited, they still arise, but it's no longer problematic, and they no longer cause the suffering that they would have caused before because they are seen in the light of awareness. So the light of awareness arises. And in the light of awareness, the patterns no longer dominate your life. They no longer run your life. And if occasionally it happens that the patterns do take over, then after a little while, your presence returns and say, ah, well, there it was again. Pain. Body is part of karma, which may be strong in some people, not so strong in others. And so as presence arises, you are freed from karma. It has. And then you have another completely different factor coming into your life. And so, for example, for a person to become free of collective karma, you need a considerable amount of presence for that to come in, to remove. And it then will remove you in one way or another. Either internally, you find yourself completely free. You might still live in a violent society, but internally you would be free. There is such a possibility. You can have a holy man or woman living surrounded by violence. It's possible. It's rare, but possible. Or very often it happens that life removes you out of there and you find yourself somewhere else. So let's say vast collective karma, for example, in the case of. Let's say you have the Taliban there, you have all kinds of unconscious movements. You had Soviet communism, you had national socialism in Germany. And for a person being born into that and not being drawn into that unconsciousness requires considerable presence. So not that many people, for example, in Germany when Hitler came to power, not many people were able to remove themselves somewhere. Some artists, some writers, they left. They could see what was happening, and they were strong enough not to be identified with the collective. When there had been a tradition of obedience to authority for hundreds of years, a tradition of following your leader and so on, to take yourself out of that collective karma requires considerable presence. But some people had it. So it is our destiny then, to go beyond karma by being the receptacles for presence. All you can do to be helpful in this world and help others is those people that you come into contact with. Everybody who is awakening will find that sooner or later, they become a kind of teacher to others. And what a spiritual teacher does, the teacher points out the possibility of awakening out of identification with unconscious patterns, which means the spiritual teacher teaches you to go beyond karma.