Ryan Ange - Karmageddon or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the calm

The new column from Ryan Ange is up - here is a bit to entice your over to his blog.

Karmageddon or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the calm

March 26th, 2011

Ryan Ange

• Nashville Metaphysical Spirituality Examiner

Most people have at one time in their lives been blindsided, perhaps in the middle of a mundane Thursday afternoon, by a life’s culmination of poor and unskillful decisions most of which were made unconsciously. It seems in that moment that the dark part of the universe, which had been minding its own business torturing other poor souls, saw you out of the corner of its eye and fixed its terrible gaze on you. It is then that everything you thought you were, the life you had created, the relationships you had cultivated, the career you worked so hard for, all fall away and what’s left is a smoking pile of rubble that resembles more a Jackson Pollack painting than your life. This dark synchronicity of monstrous proportions is of course your very own karmageddon. The one that had been waiting for you for years. And everybody gets one (if you’re lucky). Every bad thing you ever did, every poor choice you ever made all seem to turn around at once and return to where they came from: You.

Karma is a concept that is readily used in American culture today even by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In some ways it has become a religiously neutral concept despite its Hindu and Buddhist roots. We all employ the concept of “karma” (usually threatening someone by reminding them that “what goes around comes around!”) but despite its popular use it is also one of the least understood concepts in popular culture. Just because you (and here is an extreme example) murdered someone in your past life doesn’t mean you will get murdered in this life or that if you were a thief in a past life you will be robbed blind every other week in this one. Thankfully it doesn’t work that way. Whatever “unfortunate” thing happens to you now is actually a good thing (I know, bear with me a second—this is good news I promise). When you have something “bad” happen to you this means you are finally healthy enough in this life to be able to metabolize the bad karma from your previous lives. You’re finally strong enough to endure the kind of karmic trials that will burn off your bad karma. Basically think of “unfortunate” incidents as rebirth control: an opportunity for you to burn off that bad karma and cease being reborn altogether.

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