Q. I guess the Western view of karma is that it’s a kind of punishment. Is that congruent with your investigations?
Belsebuub: Yes very much so, and it’s the view of karma which has been pretty standard throughout history. As far back as is known from the Hindus, Buddhists, right the way through until today, it’s a form of punishment. But there’s also a reward for good things. If there were no reward for good, then that wouldn’t be learnt from either.
I have seen karma working in my own life, while out of my body I’ve seen what I was about to pay and then I’ve seen that come true in daily life. You can be informed about your karma while out of your body, and later see it happen in the physical world.
Dreams are certainly a mystery to many people and I guess a lot of people think they don’t dream, or certainly don’t remember them. Do you have any advice on that?
Yes, dreams are a key to understanding karma because if you just look at events which take place in ordinary life, you can’t always see the cause and effect, because karma is about cause and effect. But if you look into dreams, you can get into this hidden side of it—which is what religions are about —and if you have out-of-body experiences then you can look into the nature of dreams themselves in a completely different way. Because when you dream you are having an out-of-body experience, and can actually see what’s going on in the other side, so you can find out what the root of karma (and other different spiritual principles) really is.
Can you give an example of how karma might affect people on a day-to-day basis?
It operates in unseen laws, some people think that they can just do whatever they want and there are no repercussions except the obvious physical ones. But that’s not the case, there are laws in life. For example, if you hit someone, they get offended, this is universal throughout humanity. Every action brings a consequence which sometimes doesn’t stop right there, but continues through a series of events. In everyone’s lives there are events which are taking place which have their consequences, which interlink with other actions and form as series of events and consequences which make up one’s life, these could be recent or far into the past. You can sometimes see this operating through simple actions—somebody goes and steals something and they get caught. This is a simple process operating, but it has widespread implications for the thief’s life and for the lives of others who share in the thief’s life.
Now the confusion really comes with the spiritual non-physical processes, that’s when you get into the hidden side, which requires an esoteric work to understand. The laws which are operating are complex, and there are repercussions which can’t necessarily be seen straight away, but which appear later on. To understand a basic concept of karma, look at simple actions which bring consequences.
It’s been suggested that there is no karma without guilt, so if you do something, you feel guilt for the action that you did or the result of the action that you did, and so that kind of anguish causes karma or is part of karma. Did you have any comment on that theory?
Well everything that a person does has its effect, and what is done has a cause as well. So everyone is always in this, whatever happens. Now you can’t step out of that, either with or without guilt—it’s just a process which exists. Everything moves as a series of events which have their causes and their effects. Now if you’re thinking more of the spiritual side of karma—because it’s all really part of the same thing—then someone could say that spiritual repercussions don’t exist because they don’t see them. Well how do they know whether that’s true or not? If they were to look into dreams and have out-of-body experiences they could actually find out that it exists.
There have been so many accounts of people in their dreams having premonitions of future illnesses or having warnings about events to come, yet even the theoretical possibility of dreams coming true with the consistency that they do is so remote that they shouldn’t happen. So there is more going on there. If you have out-of-body experiences you can go to the dream world consciously and discover what’s happening. By also looking into dreams, you can search further, you can get answers from that dream world and see what’s really going on with the process of karma.
It sounds like dreams are worth investigating in relation to this and in relation to your actions in waking life.
Yes, very important. You can be told in dreams when illnesses are about to appear and can see the causes of them, you can know what illness is going to appear and in what way and more or less how long it would last. Those illnesses can appear in exactly the way that you seen them and last exactly as long as you see. You can track so many different things like this.
You can also see how your actions here bring their repercussions over there, you can see your own accounts of karma—to see how you’re paying them and how you pay things off. Each person has a book of accounts over there, if you pay something off it goes into the accounts. Everything that a person does has its payment within that book, the positive and the negative.
So we’ve all got kind of checks and balances.
Yes.
If a person commits a crime for example, a serious crime against human law and is put into prison for that, is them serving time in jail, is that kind of going to be, the physical punishment, is that going to be part of their karma payment?
Yes, everything comes into the physical world. Breaking a physical law and getting a physical punishment is used as part of the process of paying karma. Karma makes sense when you discover that each person has many lives, sometimes you can’t see what you’ve done wrong for the suffering you feel now, but the answer could be traced back to your actions in a previous life which bring karmic consequences to this. In this way you can put into perspective how a baby is born and within one hour suffers and dies, whereas you couldn’t see divine justice in that if it had just one life.
Right. Of course there is good news as well because there exists dharma as well, which is like a positive kind of an aspect—is that correct?
Yes, if there were only bad repercussions for actions, there would be a completely unbalanced universe. So actions have all kinds of consequences in varying degrees. A person can do good, and from it, good comes.
You can see this operating and working in the world. If there is a society which doesn’t respect rules, then that society tends to break down, and you have all kinds of complexity arising. So you have corrupt officials and crime on the streets, and it becomes really difficult to live, and you find that instead of having freedom you actually have more laws to live under—it becomes much worse—and these laws are more basic, like laws of a pack of animals. And so having just rules helps us to function better in society, an understanding of the basis of karma forms the basis of a healthy and well-acting society.
Through an understanding of karma, a person can do good things, be respectful, and then good things come to them as well. And so it operates in a whole range of different ways from the really negative to the very positive; karma and dharma.
Here’s a quote which I wanted to read out and see if you had a comment: “For every event that occurs there will follow another event whose existence was caused by the first, and this second event will be pleasant or unpleasant according as its cause was skilful or unskilful. A skilful event is one that is not accompanied by a craving, resistance, or delusions. An unskilful event is one that is accompanied by any one of those things.” And that’s a quote from a Buddhist perspective, so a less Western perspective on karma.
Yes. Every action—as the quote is saying—that’s born from delusion and craving brings about the consequences of that delusion and craving. If you understand the causes of your actions it will help you to understand their effects.
A person can become more responsible for their actions when they understand that every single thing they do has an effect, but, that it was caused by something within themselves. Now you may think that you are free, but actions actually have causes, and if you think of the events which preceded your actions, you could find the cause of it by looking at events surrounding it, but you can also try to find the cause from what happens within you—from thoughts, feelings, and emotions, because these are the root causes of actions. Not just the events, because the events were also caused by people with emotions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, delusions, objectivity, whatever. So a person is caught with this sequence of physical events, and inner causes which are the responses to those events.
Now if actions are the result of delusions, fantasies, or cravings, then the consequences, what is done is going to come out of that. Whereas if a person is clear and objective inside, seeing the causes of things and seeing the consequences of their actions, then they can act much more efficiently and clearly in the things that they do in life. And that’s going to bring about a different kind of living; it’s going to bring about a living where a person is responsible for their actions, where they see the causes of them, and so they can live more intelligently. If a society does this, then that society itself lives more intelligently, and as a consequence its citizens live more happily, and in more freedom.
Is karma something restricted to individuals or can karma be attributed to countries or bigger groups of people?
Cause and effect applies to everything, so it applies to individuals, groups, societies, countries, everything is caught in this cycle of cause and effect. In history nations have invaded other nations, gone to war and fought, and this has had terrible repercussions for humanity. And the state, the nation, is, or should be, as responsible as the individual, and carries a great weight for that responsibility because it affects millions, even billions of people. So these laws apply to individuals right the way through to nations and to the world, to humanity.
In the same vein, would natural disasters be part of karma?
There is cause and effect in every aspect of life obviously. But if you’re looking at people suffering from natural disasters, then you could look further to see whether there are causes which are outside of the physical world. And for that then like I said, look into dreams and out-of-body experiences. Because someone could have a belief—if they are brought up a Hindu they could believe what Hinduism says, or Buddhism, or Christianity or whatever—but they will find that their view then is in opposition to other people’s views who are not of their religion or particular ideology. So if you want to find out what the root of all of this is, I’d suggest looking at dreams and having out-of-body experiences to get into the spiritual world to find the causes of events.
Once I’ve done something wrong, how long will it take for karma to equal it? Is it in one hit or lots of small things?
It depends. The repercussions could be immediate or they could take time. The obvious example is someone stealing something and gets caught immediately. Or if you insult someone and then they go and insult you back, or worse, go and attack you. So in a long-term, well, someone takes drugs and gradually the body deteriorates over time. So it depends really upon the cause as to what the effect is, which is why when you look into the causes you can see you can predict the kinds of effects they’re going to bring.
On a wider scale, you need to study in the spiritual world, and see how things manifest. Events foretold in dreams must have a cause which is well beyond their effect in the physical world.
To be able to predict something happening, the causes and effects must be known over there, in the dream world, in the causal spirit world, already. So then the amount of time something takes to appear here is due to those spiritual laws. There is both the spiritual and the physical to take into account.
But if you look into dreams and have OBE’s you’ll find that the spirit and the material are part of the same thing—they are all part of one creation. Just because spiritual things are usually unseen doesn’t mean they are not there. You can open up faculties within you which enable you to see and experience beyond the five senses, and you can get information about different spiritual planes and see the different laws that are upon the world.
Can you receive karma for doing something bad if at the time you thought you were doing something good?
Well it’s actions that count rather than thoughts, you can think that you are a nice person and yet do really bad things. A person can perform an action which they don’t think is wrong or harmful to anyone, and yet someone suffers terribly from it because the person didn’t really look into the effects of what they were doing, nor into the causes of it. So that again brings us to responsibility—to realize that an individual is responsible for their actions and that actions affect other people and the world. A person can become more responsible when they understand the causes and effects of their actions.
Another question is someone saw a book called multiple streams of income where you set in place all these kind of investments and actions to gain lots of streams of income. Can we create multiple streams of dharma?
In the multiple streams of income processes have to be set in motion in order to get those streams of income working. Likewise within you, if you do certain positive actions they will bring positive consequences which are dharma. In life, there are many different opportunities which arise—for doing good, for assessing actions, for seeing what you’re doing, where you’re going, and also obviously opportunities for doing negative things and getting the repercussions of them. While it would be nice to have lots of multiple dharma (good) coming in, you realistically need to see if you have the actions that allow it.
So I guess the old expression, “That was my good deed for the day” is worth adhering to.
Yes it is.
I have a quote which I thought I might use in summation and throw out to you and see if you had any comment on from the Bhagavad Gita, and the quote is, “As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes, so too does the fire of self-knowledge reduce karma to ashes.”
Yes, because with self-knowledge you can see the causes of what’s happening within you and therefore can change. It’s self-knowledge which really allows you to make that change, as you can break the cycle of cause and effect which happens to you in an unconscious way. If you don’t have self-knowledge then the events come to you and you just react with an ego, and reacting is a mechanical process. And so you behave just like machines or puppets of nature in the sea of life, out of control, reacting to different events, and from the reactions come actions, which themselves become causes.
But if you have self-knowledge, then you can see the ripples of life operating, the causal mechanism working, and within yourself you could put a halt to it. So if someone is angry towards you, but having self-knowledge you understand that anger, die to it, and don’t react back, or get negative, then you stop the chain of cause and effect which was based upon anger. And if you’re doing that through the multiple events in your life, then you are altering your actions, you are giving the opportunity for good actions to take place instead of harmful ones.
Having self-knowledge brings the opportunity to observe the causal mechanism at work in daily life and to make changes to the circumstances that arise in it, while having out-of-body experiences is crucial to understanding how karma works at a more esoteric level.
A radio interview By Belsebuub in California USA, 2009
