How Karma seems to work: Insights from Past-Life Regressions

by Hans TenDam

 

Karma is an old, even ancient, Hindu concept. It has a somewhat similar function as ‘sin’ in Judeo-Christian beliefs: something to be warned against. If you do wrong, you have to pay for that. Not in the afterlife, but in your next life.

What do we find in regressions? We find both positive and negative conditions and influences from previous lives, that we loosely call dharma and karma. Karma is also used as a name for any connection between the present life and past lives.

The following is my take on things. It is based on an ample experience with regressions. I estimate that today about 90% of my sessions include past-life experiences. But that doesn’t need to be representative of regression work in general. It most probably isn’t.

I have tried to reflect only my experiences with as little preconceptions as possible. My experiences cover forty years this year. The second half of these years, practicing and teaching regression has been my main work.

Still, it is my take on things. It is based on experience and reflection, not on revelation. And, like everything empirical, it is incomplete and provisional. But it is much, much better than assumptions and abstract reasoning.

Linkages. How do our lifetimes link to each other? How does our present life link to our past lives? I found many linkages.

 

• • Lifetimes link through karmic entanglements: unfinished business between individuals. Karmic transactions with others produce energetic links, and force us to meet again – and often again. Karmic decisions and actions often produce shame and guilt and complicate our relationships with others.
  • Through pendulum reactions and over-learning. So-called boomerang karma happens when we switch from one extreme to the other. Never again! We never want to be powerless again; we never want to be powerful again; never to be poor again; never to be lonely again; never being stuck again, never homeless again, etc. This time we want adventure, next time we want security. Pendulum reactions seem strongest after traumatic and confusing death experiences.
  • Through freezing our judgment, our will or our identity in character postulates that continue through many lifetimes. I have to do it on my own. I don’t belong. Such conclusions and decisions can be amazingly persistent.
  • When we died feeling a failure, we may become control freaks or now we desist to even try.
  • We may react to victimhood with passivity, avoidance, resentment, or masquerading and those reactions may continue through lifetimes.
  • We may feel guilty and next time we react with self-punishment. Or the reverse: we harden.
  • After a lifetime of a frustrated do-gooder we may retain deep disappointment and annoyance as basic emotions in a next life.
  • Generally, we may switch between the neurotic roles: victim, prosecutor, helper, culprit or spectator.
  • Through reactions to the first painful or shocking or maddening experience as a human being on earth: primal trauma, primal hangover, primal postulate.
  • Positively, through building on positive and rewarding experiences: being a farmer, a doctor, a trader, a builder or a musician.
  • Through positive life experiences we may be drawn toward revisiting the environment (the climate or the country or the culture) we enjoyed so much.

Karmic and dharmic lifetimes. Karma and dharma are accountancy concepts. Spiritual accountancy. We may speak of karmic and dharmic lifetimes, depending on the balance at the end of our lives. Karma is the total of negative consequences. It is the credit-side of the balance of life. There are still some unpaid, open accounts, so to speak. And we lost things. At the other side of the balance is posted what you have learned, developed, did for others, etcetera. Those are the positive consequences.

A karmic lifetime is not a life that was bad, or severe. That is often the consequence of issues from before that. Both karmic and dharmic lifetimes are often those lives where you have been influential or powerful, because then the consequences may be more severe.

Some lifetimes are more consequential than others. Especially when we had important responsibilities: doctor, judge, magistrate, commander, captain, political leader. A karmic lifetime is a lifetime with strong negative consequences, for ourselves, and especially for others. The karma doesn’t depend wholly on the kind of life, it depends also on our life retrospect. Did we have one or not? Often, we get stuck in a negative mindset after death and don’t come to our senses. Or we refuse to look in the mirror.

When we have digested a life and assumed responsibility for it, we have a large amount of freedom in what we conclude and intend to do about it. A truly karmic lifetime is a life in which we created karma and didn’t deal with it after death.

Dharmic lifetimes are lives in which we collected a lot of credit. Lives of soul growth and mental growth. Lives of contribution to others or to society – or sometimes to nature.

When we did something by accident, did that create karma? That depends on how we look back and evaluate it afterwards. Do we still assume responsibility? Responsibility is the golden mean between blaming ourselves and excusing ourselves, between guilt and irresponsibility.

The two most common excuses are “I couldn’t help it, and yes, but I was well-intended.” Feeling guilty is often overdoing it: assuming that you did control more than you actually did. Feeling guilty is the do-it-yourself kit of creating karma.

Feeling not responsible or even denouncing there is something you should feel responsible about is the push-off-and-forget kit of creating karma. In the end you will be forced to either open your eyes or suffer accidents. When we refuse to balance things, things will balance us. The negative energy has to go somewhere, ultimately in the body and if we are strong enough to avoid that, in outside events that strike us.

It takes a long time to become wise and not to assume too much or too little responsibility.  “The name of the game is stopping the blame.” Don’t blame yourself, don’t blame others or fate. Understand how things happened and how you acted. If you can balance things, do it. And look for the best way do it, for yourself and others.

Understanding is by far the best way to balance our books. It is infinitely better than guilt, shame or blame. It is even much better than forgiveness: because it doesn’t imply moral superiority.

But when others blame us and never forgive us? That is more karma for them than for us. Now, when the blame comes from souls I feel connected with, I can’t easily ignore that. We’ll have a karmic relationship.

In general, we have only karmic relationships with two kinds of people:

1. People we feel deeply connected with, because of common origins (soul family) or shared positive experiences (soul comrades). The positive bonds between us force us to meet again and try to resolve the negative bonds.
2. People we had energetic transactions with. In a sense, we have become each other’s attachment. People fighting each other to the death and exchanging meaningful looks or cursing each other. People sleeping together and exchanging meaningful looks or exchanging vows. People betraying each other. Intense jealousy, intense envy, revenge, spite, hate. Especially people with a spiritual or magical background become energetically entangled with others.

Karma is an energetic reality. To undo karma with other people means to undo energy exchanges with them. Karma is bad energy. It results from humiliation, power abuse, domination, sexual manipulation, violence, discard, treating people as things. Also lack of attention or lack of understanding for another person’s feelings or circumstances, may build karma.

What is one of the most important sources for hatred? Forced gratitude! When you oblige people to be grateful to you, they sooner or later will start hating you. To be forced in the receiving role, the lesser role, easily breeds hate. To be among superior people leads to hate.

• The karmic balance will work educationally when we go to the light after death, when we have a good overview, a good look back on life, and prepare a life plan.
• Karma will work according to natural law, when we remain stuck after death.
• Unfinished past lives, continued programs, is what we find most often in therapy.
• Karma can work as a correction when we do not look in the mirror ourselves, but others force us to look in the mirror, and we do accept that in the end.

A regression to a dharmic lifetime awakens things in your soul that support or help you, like positive feelings and talents. Dharmic lives were satisfactory and you were feeling good at that time. You were influential and people liked you, and you have done good things on top of all this.

When a problem is tough, persisting, you can call on a past life where you did not have that problem or where that problem was solved. It would be frustrating if such a lifetime does not show up, but I have not experienced this yet – though often such a life is surprisingly long time ago.

The best way to resolve karma is to welcome both experience and reflection.

And don’t try to help clients to deal with karmic themes you haven’t solved yourself yet.

 

Karmic polarities and karmic dilemmas

What are common and persistent karmic themes? The first one is power and powerlessness. Both may be curses. The heaviest power karma is large scale suppression, exploitation and violence with instances of cruelty and torture. The heaviest karma of powerlessness is not having been a victim to such practices, but being powerless to protect our loved ones from falling victim to such practices. Or witness our loved ones starving while we were responsible for food. The worst karmic cocktails coming out of such experiences is a blend of fear, shame, guilt and hatred – or self-hatred.

Warrior lifetimes usually produce a lot of karma. But not all war violence seems to produce karma. More specifically, three kinds of violence produce karma:

• Every violence that was worse than was customary in that day and age.
• Every cruelty you enjoyed.
• Everything you did against your own feelings, your own instinct, your own conscience.

When you hung pirates or mutineers, out of duty, without pleasure, as just as you could under the circumstances, you didn’t produce karma, though you may take some disgust or guilt with you toward a new lifetime. That shadow is part of the game. You may learn from it. It’s not karma in the sense of a weight on the soul.

A related, more limited theme is sexual misconduct. Sexual karma is related to compulsion, usually with humiliation, violence and seduction. Male sexual karma is violence and compulsion – and abandoning pregnant women. Female sexual karma is usually seduction and, more general, manipulation. Men also can have this kind of karma when they seduced women with false promises. Abandoning pregnant women, by the way, is not only creating karma to those women, but also to the offspring.

All this pretty straightforward. Things can become more complex when opposite forces come into play. Love and hate, that is complicating. Karmic entanglements often contain such mixtures. People who have had between them tense and conflict-ridden relationships through several lifetimes, often appear to have a similar or even joint soul origin. One may develop faster or better than the other. Then also envy comes into play.

Probably all themes through lifetimes that create problems (and so experience!) contain such polarities: justice and injustice, feeling at home and feeling lost, being lonely and being connect. When we find several lifetimes of powerlessness, we almost always need to find at least one life of power. And we have to establish a proper chronology. If the powerful life came before the powerless life, the second may be the karma of the first one. If the powerful life followed the powerless life, the soul history is different. The first sequence may be guilt-driven and the second revenge-driven. Two different stories!

Healing starts with understanding. Understanding how one lifetime is a reaction to another lifetime. Understanding where and when and how and why we became powerless. Understanding where and when and how and why we became powerful. Understanding where and when and how and why we started to abuse that power.

The deepest understanding is possible during the life retrospect. But when we didn’t get there or when we avoided to look back, we lock ourselves either in confusion or in the mock-clarity of postulates. No clear-mindedness for the misty-minded or the closed-minded.

So, we also have to find out where and when and how and why we skipped the life retrospect, the Place of Overview. Review can lead to many different conclusions and decisions. Lack of review means persisting or triggering correctional karma, either through intervention or through spiritual laws of nature. There is a huge difference between karma as a natural law (the last resort), karma as a spiritual sentence, karma as an educational intervention and karma accepted out of free will.

Find out what the score is, at least sense what the score is, and use your karma for further growth. There is nothing fatalistic about that.

And as to clients, maybe they are your karma. Or you are their karma. Or new karma may be created: if you falsely promised healing, or if one seduced the other. But usually, therapy produces dharma – or pays off karma.