SHARING THE MICHAEL TEACHINGS SINCE 1983
MICHAEL EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION
KARMA & AGREEMENTS
The Physical Plane is where the energy is the slowest and where we experience separateness. From the moment you reach the Physical Plane as a first-level Infant Soul in your first life, you are working towards, longing, to reunite with your entity, with your cadre, with the Tao. What are the steps that Essence follows to achieve that goal?
Up to now we have discussed how this Universe is structured with separate Planes of Existence and different levels of Soul Perception. We have examined the fragments, with their particular Roles, Overleaves, Energy Mixes, Frequencies, and Body Types. But how do the players interact to learn lessons, gain experience to bring back to the Tao, and advance in Soul Perception?
When you come to the Physical Plane each lifetime, no matter what your Soul Perception, you have lessons you wish to learn, tasks you want to complete and experiences you want to have that lifetime. You pick your parents, you know their Roles and Overleaves, and often you have a history together from a past life or a past cycle. You have a general idea of who your siblings will be (if you have any), you know who your grandparents are, and probably where your parents are going to raise you. You know all this because, with the help of your Causal Plane guides and teachers, you have examined their life plans, which are filed in the Akashic Record. And you decide to become a part of all that. Although their plans and yours can change somewhat according to circumstances, generally the plans you decide on before you are born will be followed.
You get a general type of regional upbringing and a general type of imprinting from your parents that help prepare you for the life you set up in your life plan. You plan to bring people and circumstances into your life at certain ages to work on lessons that pertain to your particular soul level and your particular set of past lives. The major vehicles by which your plan is carried out and the people that are drawn in to do lessons with you at certain ages are Karma and Agreements.
KARMA
Karma is an emotionally intense experience which causes a sense of imbalance in the participants. The Law of Karma can most easily be described as an emotionally intense experience with someone that is then re-experienced from the perspective of the other participant(s). If you punch someone in the nose, eventually (in this or another lifetime) that person will punch you in the nose, so both of you get to experience both sides of the intensity.
The one unchanging rule is Karma. Part of being on the Physical Plane is having intense experiences so you can learn from them. The whole point of coming to the Physical Plane is to learn. You take on different personality traits (Overleaves), and you take on a certain imprinting and a certain role so you can learn various lessons from different perspectives. The way that you learn those lessons is by having intense experiences that teach you in a dramatic way. You do not get every Karma paid back in one lifetime. So you need many lifetimes to pay back all your Karmas. That way you grow in wisdom, learn balance and the Universe itself stays in balance. You always get both sides of the coin of every karmic experience before you are completely done with the Physical Plane.
When people are in Karma, they are often acting illogically and sometimes even out of character. They feel driven to do the Karma, nevertheless, and are obsessed with continuing until the end. Anyone outside of the karmic situation can tell the person in Karma what she should or could be doing differently, what might work better. Those in the Karma, however, are incapable of taking any advice to change their actions or the Karma until it is complete. Usually people play out a karmic payback right on the line, the way it was done before. It will also take about the same amount of time to replay the karma as it did to play it originally. It might speed up a little, but there is only so much karmic intensity that a human being can process and still function in her life.
There is no positive or negative Karma―it is all just intensity. There are, however, Karmas that the personality enjoys more and some it enjoys less. You may be intensely happy and have an intense feeling of salvation when your real estate agent finds you the perfect house in time for Christmas; the agent may experience an intense feeling of satisfaction beyond her usual joy at receiving a commission and feel strangely like she has somehow saved your life. It is still a Karma― a payback of the life where you discovered the perfect cave for her and her family which sheltered them before the winter solstice ritual and helped her family survive the winter snows. Once you and your real estate agent entered into this karmic payback, you were strangely compelled to work with each other, no matter what friends, relatives, and colleagues advised either of you to do differently.
On the other hand, a karmic experience might include being the victim of a drunken driver, perhaps a soldier on an alcoholic binge. That driver happens to be the same citizen you ran over in a chariot in 40 B.C. after a night carousing with fellow soldiers in your legion of the Roman army. Neither side of that intensity is usually judged "pleasant."
Karmas do not have to be initiated. If you see yourself heading towards a karmic situation, you can stop and decide not to pick up that karmic thread whether it is a creation or a clean-up. Once you begin a Karma, however, you will stay with it to the end. The only choices you have in Karma are putting it off until later (that life or another, if it is a payback), or not getting involved in the first place (if it is a new opportunity for Karma), or going ahead and doing it. Once you begin a Karma, you will do it all the way until the end. When you are in the middle of a Karma, you really can't judge what the end will be if it is a payback, or what exactly your Essence wants to learn from this situation if it is a creation. You will, however, notice when it is over because the intensity will be gone.
You cannot "forgive" Karma or let someone off from paying you back. There is, however, sometimes a certain amount of "karmic transmutation" that occurs if you are paying back an Infant Soul Karma as an Old Soul. Perhaps instead of taking a life to pay back when you were murdered, the person in karmic debt to you might save your life or somehow give you a life by giving birth to you. Both parties will still, somehow, experience the opposite side of the situation they experienced before, in order to come to balance. You can look at a Karma as rationally as possible with as much of a positive viewpoint as you can, or you can make yourself utterly miserable and let it spill over into non‑karmic areas of your life while you go through it.
A way of ameliorating karma is to recognize when you are in Karma and try to act within the Karma's limits instead of acting in some additionally unpleasant way. You do this by not embellishing the Karma, making it worse, struggling, or making it more difficult than it needs to be. You can make your karmic intensity as pleasant and enjoyable as possible by accepting your choice in the matter, knowing that you obviously need to have some intensity in your life in this area right now or you wouldn't be embarking on it but instead avoiding it.
In the beginning cycles, infant through mid‑young, you are busy creating a lot of Karma to be cleaned up in your later cycles, mid‑young through old. However, you do clean up some Karmas within the same lifetime and/or within the same cycles. Some Karmas are just particular to one lifetime or to a cycle. For example, an Infant Soul-type of Karma would focus on survival, perhaps providing or receiving food when it is scarce. You create most of your Karma within the seven levels of each soul age at the fourth level and you clean it up at sixth level. Still, you do some creation and some cleanup in every level of every cycle. On the whole, Old Souls do much more clean-up than creation, while Infant Souls do much more creation than clean‑up.
SEXUAL KARMA
The most intense and obvious type of Karma is Sexual Karma. People do Sexual Karma all the time. For example, one person gets obsessed with another; she cares about this person and has no idea why. They have nothing in common, yet she can't stop being in relationship. And then, suddenly, at some point, it is complete, over. In a non‑karmic sexual relationship, you have choices, but when you are in a Sexual Karma, you do not. You may be hating it, you may be loving it, but you really can't stop.
What many people consider "being in love," heart palpitating, totally obsessed by the object of desire, is Sexual Karma. They are not really loving a person for her special qualities, they are loving the fact that they feel in a drugged, karmic state. It has nothing to do with the person at all. When you really are in love with a person and it isn't a Karma, you are seeing her clearly and admiring her qualities. A Sexual Karma can turn into a non‑karmic relationship after the Karma is over, but that does not always occur. Once the Karma is done and the relationship would have to be based on other factors such as compatibility, 70% of the time both parties are in agreement that they do not want to continue.
Once the Karma is over, oftentimes the thrill is gone. Also, relationships based solely on karmic debt have little foundation in compatibility. Building a life and history together and learning to appreciate the partner outside of the limits of the Karma, are the factors that keep that 30% in relationship. In this modern age, rather than simply growing apart yet staying together, or living separately while legally married, as people in Karma used to do in past centuries; now, people divorce. Ironically, in the days when marriages were arranged by objective but concerned parents, based on what they knew of their children's needs rather than Karma, and with the children having lower expectations in the first place; 80% of marriages built a foundation of love and respect over time and were emotionally successful, compared to 50% of relationships based on "falling in love."
SELF KARMA
Self Karma is an intense challenge you have provided for yourself to work on this lifetime. Self Karmas can involve just yourself or can include your relationships to other people, but not involve them. For example, you always wind up getting attracted to arrogant, shallow men (or women). Your lesson is that you want to learn how to relate to shallow, arrogant people―how to handle them, how to get something out of the relationship, how to avoid them, how to keep your self‑esteem around them―so you keep introducing one shallow, arrogant person after another into your life. Some of them may be in Mutual Karma with you and some may not. The way you can tell the difference is to see if the person is engaged in the intensity or not. If she is also intense about you, there is Mutual Karma going on. If she is someone who may not even know that you exist, or who feels neutral about you, she isn't in Karma with you. You just have a Self Karma around that type of person.
Other Self Karmas can relate to your personal habits. You might have a bad habit or bodily condition about which you have an intense feeling: smoking; an overweight/underweight problem; an uncontrollable drug or drinking habit; gambling or using credit cards too heavily; being too physically beautiful for anyone to notice you have a brain; insomnia; or inability to get the job you want. Any personal challenge that you cannot seem to overcome and about which you feel intensely about is a Self Karma.
AGREEMENTS
Unlike Karmas, Agreements are non‑binding contracts; they can be broken or changed at any time. Although you do have a certain attraction towards fulfilling your Agreements, there is not the intensity that is present in a Karma. With agreements, you decided when you set up your life plan that you would like to work with another person in some capacity. You could agree to form a business, to see if you would be good mates for one another this life, to take a certain journey together, to teach together, to be lifetime friends, or to do just about any other project you can think of. At the time you make this plan, you have not started the life yet and you have not yet grown up in the society you chose; you are extrapolating who you are going to be by the time you meet the person, given your Overleaves and the imprinting you have planned for yourself. You are not certain that this part of the plan is going to work. So when you meet the person the Agreement can be fulfilled or not, depending on whether it serves both of your purposes at that time.
It is not unusual, therefore, to meet a person and take an interest in doing something with her, but then, after you get to know her better, find out she is not the right person after all. So, you pass on the Agreement. For example, you may have a Marriage Agreement with someone. You meet. You date a few times. There is an attraction, but not an overly intense one. Then, you choose one way or another. Sometimes Agreements are vague and you have to search around for exactly what you want to do with a person. But often agreements are fairly specific: "We're going to meet when I'm 37 and you're 33 and see if we can do business together because we're both going to be interested in spiritual work. We will try to work on New Age consciousness together." Then you give it a shot and see if you can do that. If an Agreement does not work out, you normally don't end up feeling intense (karmic) about it. You are willing to set it aside and do something else, try to fit that person in somewhere else, or part ways with only disappointment, not devastation.