Posted on Jan 29, 2008

La Petite Chartreuse, directed by Jean-Pierre Denis, a French film about an introverted man, an antiquarian, who accidentally runs over an eight-year-old girl, offers a thoughtful illustration of what amending karma can look like.

Indeed, the only way to karmically right a wrong is to undo the wrong by reversing the deed through personal involvement and from the heart. Not out of a sense of duty. Karma can only be amended when we can repair directly with our victim – should we be so lucky as to still have her/him within reach. There is no other way.

N.B. I have decided to refer to my soul as ‘she’, as I don’t think ‘it’ would be appropriate, not even a bold ‘It’, and I cannot possibly refer to MY soul as ‘he’, not even if spelt with a capital H, even though I know all souls are genderless – such are the limitations of language, but here is not the place to be pedantic about language. Just as a computer has a motherboard – our brain, for its functioning, relies on a software program – so, too, does our energy field in which our karma is encoded. When I am in a ‘mood’, this mood in all of its vibrational characteristics is encoded in my energy field.

Karma is our personal, accumulated, fateful load – our score sheet as inherited from our soul’s previous incarnations, compounded by the karmic balance of what we have managed for ourselves in THIS incarnation, this lifetime. Put simply, since I am past middle age, and since I show no signs of turning into a clone of mother Teresa or of passing as a credible entrant in a Gandhi think-alike contest, it is safe to assume that my soul has already been screwed out of any early plans of Nirvanic retirement.

I, who never ever used to spare a thought for my soul, have come to accept that we do not merely ‘get’ a soul in a random way. Instead, it can be said figuratively that a soul puts its little hand up to accept us as the new vehicle through which she hopes to process some of her karmic baggage.

Souls pick us to be their upgraded vehicle to karmic enlightenment – go figure! – which is why it is tacitly accepted that we ARE able to overcome all and any of the karmic challenges that come our way – if and only if we can tackle them in a spiritual manner which, of course, is not the way our western culture has ever taught anyone to overcome anything.

It can be said that, like a net, our energy field hardens around us, a little bit more with each passing incarnation, making it each time more difficult for us to amend ‘the way we are’. Which is probably why, by now, unless we get a very strong wake-up call – a sometime metaphoric, a sometime literal, blow to the head – it is that much easier to go with the flow and keep on ‘being ourselves’.

I have come to realize that the only spiritually correct answer to “Who am I?” is I am my soul!                                                                                                                                  

So, who is this person looking back in the mirror? The one with spiky grey hair who, every morning, gels up her hair and picks around till she finds the right sea pebbles or the right plugs to push into her earlobes? Ah, yes, that one! Well, her name is C.C. and she is an ego-persona. She is my soul’s flawed vehicle for this lifetime.

We do not usually hear the whisper of our soul over the din of the monkey chatter, the erratic whir of our mechanical actions/reactions as they cruise in and out, like teenagers at party. Some time ago, while trying to clarify a point on a forum I moderate, I came up with a little analogy that has helped me understand better the relationship between the soul – pure, clean energy – and the ego-persona/energy field.

It goes like this: imagine there is a pond and, lying at the bottom, there is a quartz crystal. This crystal has been there for quite some time and, looking at it from above, it appears dingy green, perhaps from pond slime.

In my mind, our ego-persona/our energy field is symbolized by the pond water while the crystal symbolizes the soul that is unable to shine through our emotional clutter, turmoil and the resulting relative negativity of our energy field. While I was working this out, I initially thought that the crystal WAS green because it had become contaminated by pond slime. Thus, I thought what needed to be done was scrub that crystal clean to allow it to shine freely, as crystals do – but I was wrong. The crystal, our soul, NEVER becomes impure or contaminated. It always remains pure energy.

It is just that its energy cannot shine through the stagnant water of the pond.
So what needs to be done is simply purify that water till it is all clear and then the crystal’s energy and brilliance can radiate through the water, all the way to the surface, even as it remains at the bottom of the pond.

Make sense, dear Reader?