What is Karma?

If we are immortal spirits, then the body is only the "costume", the psyche is only the "character", and our soul or spirit is really the same "actor" playing a new character in a new costume.

The "players" and elements of the karmic "plot" are chosen before each reincarnation; but the play itself is subject to "improvisation" in "real-time" as the life-long drama unfolds and the players interact.

We can create a comedy or a tragedy, for we are writing the script as our souls come back to play a new role on this stage we call Space/Time.

All that matters is the choices we make.

Our choices and their consequences keep changing the reality we experience. Karma is just the consequences of old choices - old beliefs and old attitudes - which unconsciously create and re-create similar consequences, until we become conscious of them and choose to change them. In the ancient Sanskrit language "karma" meant "action". Karma is not a punishment but an opportunity to correct old mistakes and make our lives (and ourselves) better.

Free Will creates Karma and can change Karma. Our past life karma was created by exercising our own free will - that God-given right to choose for ourselves what we create in each lifetime. It's no less a right than a child's right to choose the course of his own life after he has been raised and guided by the human parents who created his body.  more

As children we learn from our mistakes. Who ever learned to walk without falling down a lot first? Karma is just uncorrected errors and lessons yet unlearned by the soul that came to animate the child's physical form.

As Werner Erhardt once said: "The Truth shall set you free, but first it might piss you off!" Karma is simply a persistent reminder to challenge us to perceive the Truth, even though we may perceive it as a thorn in our side. Karma is more persistent than our own stubborn refusal to see the ultimate universal Truths; so eventually we will learn the hard way, even if we refuse to learn the easy way. Often we refuse to change until it becomes too painful not to.

Only when we realize and accept that we are responsible for creating our own karma, can we choose to change it by making better choices this time around. This is the essential meaning of the old adage: "What goes around, comes around." What we chose in past lives is coming around again in this lifetime. We can get off the "wheel of karma" by making better choices when similar situations come up again.  Click for Part 2.  ©2001 by  Michael Star

You can order a Personal Karma Horoscope Reading here at www.AstrologyZine.com, in which Michael Star explains the meaning of your karma horoscope chart in plain English.