Talk from a retreat with Adyashanti.
Adyashanti, author of Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.
Over thirty five years of exploring past lives, the afterlife, the interlife and the spaces in between have convinced Judy Hall that we are not victims of circumstance, nor are we solely a product of karmic consequences.
We are all following a soul-plan which may be strewn with obstacles but which will ultimately lead to soul growth. So if you’ve been asking yourself why certain things have happened to you, the key may lie in other lives or in the space between lives – the interlife.
More than half the world’s population believe in karma and reincarnation; that they have lived before, died, and taken on a new body, and that the body and the life they lead has been created by their previous actions or by the contracts they have made with another soul. However, from interlife exploration, it is clear that there are souls who are still fulfilling a soul contract that is way past its sell-by date.
There are also souls who have chosen to undergo a specific life experience not because of their karma but because they want to cultivate their soul or to offer service to humanity.
In this wide-ranging book, Judy Hall encompasses the vast kaleidoscope of karma and interlife choices.
The Book of Why explores:
· how the soul reincarnates
· death and the afterlife
· the concept of karma
· moving beyond karma
· soul contracts
· interlife choices
Judy Hall is a successful Mind Body Spirit author with over 40 books to her credit including the million selling Crystal Bible (volumes 1 and 2).
She has been a past life therapist and karmic astrologer for over 40 years. An internationally known author, psychic, healer, broadcaster and workshop leader, her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She recently appeared in the Watkins Review of the one hundred most spiritually influential authors.
A trained healer and counsellor, Judy has been psychic all her life and has a wide experience of many systems of divination and natural healing methods.
Judy has a B.Ed in Religious Studies with an extensive knowledge of world religions and mythology and an M.A. in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at Bath Spa University. Her mentor was Christine Hartley (Dion Fortune’s metaphysical colleague and literary agent). Her specialities are past life readings and regression; soul healing, reincarnation, astrology and psychology, divination and crystal lore
Extract
Serendipitous Synchronicities and the Soul’s Plan
I love serendipitous synchronicities, ‘happy coincidences’ that come together and move our lives forward in a way that is exactly right. A good example is a PR consultant friend who had written a brilliant children’s book but was having trouble finding a publisher who would take a chance on an unknown author. She was contacted by a woman she ‘happened’ to meet at a lunch who was seeking marketing assistance for her small publishing house. The publisher was successful with a locally-based children’s book and looking for more. The manuscript went off post haste. Several serendipitous synchronicities had helped my friend research the book and it will fulfill her lifelong dream of being an author.
A blueprint for life
I believe we build such seemingly incidental contacts with ‘soul friends’ into our lifeplan: the blueprint set out at the planning meeting that precedes our birth. The blueprint reflects karmic consequences and our soul’s intentions – which may transcend our karma. This blueprint isn’t set in stone, it’s flexible and allows for personal responsibility and freewill to come into play but it nudges us along our soul’s path.
People frequently ask me why certain things have happened. Things that are seemingly traumatic and life-destroying, or arise out of lack of what someone desperately wants in their life. Occasionally, the question is about something amazing that has ‘blown in from nowhere’. Apart from birthchart and ‘far memory’ psychic readings, I’ve regressed hundreds of people to other lives and the space between lives where we plan the next move in our soul’s evolution. So I’ve explored a wide spectrum of soul reasons for taking on specific life situations and all is rarely as it seems. I’ve examined this at length in The Book of Why. But it boils down to balancing out our karma, growing our soul by developing qualities we lacked in the past, gaining insight and giving service to humanity.
Crystal star beings
We travel in loose ‘soul groups’ that interact with other groups as appropriate. This includes the relationships that I explore in ‘Why’ and in The Soulmate Myth [200402]. But I’d like to tell you a more unusual story of serendipitous synchronicity, one about human and non-human soul interaction: star beings incarnated within crystals. The two aren’t mutually exclusive it depends which material form soul is taking on.
Surely crystals don’t have a soul’, I hear you say. But if you’d lived (as you probably did!) three, four or more thousand years ago you’d recognise crystals as animate, divine beings. The divine permeated everything in those days. ‘As above, so below’ so was the consensus reality, unlike today. The idea persisted for aeons. American Indians believed that the stone people only took a breath every hundred years or so. During the time this idea was prevalent, humankind honoured the earth as divine. There wasn’t the huge divide we have nowadays nor the wholesale rape of the earth’s resources – and yes I know there are people who think crystal mining is an abuse in itself but crystals have told us that it is their soul’s plan to be working with us so they can contribute to earth healing.
The lovely John from Exquisite Crystals in the States sent me a Trigonic Quartz earlier this year and asked me to explore its qualities. We’d been introduced by one of my ‘soul sisters.’ John understands that crystals speak. You just have to acquire the knack of listening (see The Crystal Experience [200617], the companion to the Crystal Bibles [190817 and 190818]). As soon as I held a Trigonic it became clear that these crystals had a powerful connection to soul. But, I kept asking, were they entirely natural? Somehow they had a different feel to most crystals. That question was answered when artist and energy worker Walter Bruneel channelled their oversoul. The communication (see my website http://www.judyhall.co.uk) showed us just how far back soul contracts can extend. The Trigonics informed us that they were star beings trapped here millions of years ago. They took refuge in plasma which became crystalline. Now they are emerging to help with healing the earth and shifting the consciousness of humankind. They want to dissolve the war gene, but that’s another story.
Working together in healing
The Trigonics had told us that they had a particular affinity with water. The first workshop on Trigonics ‘coincided’ with the oil spill in the Gulf. We were using another new high vibration crystal to take the light of the sun to fertilise the heart of mother earth and facilitate her regeneration, and several attendees were asked by the Earth Mother to assist at the oil spill. We laid out a grid of Trigonics, Herkimer Diamonds (formed from ancient oil millennia ago) and other stones. The second workshop had to be vacated due to an overwhelming smell of oil from a leaking boiler. We took the hint and laid out a huge grid in the new venue and spent the day helping the earth heal this gaping wound and loss of her lifeblood. I had a ten feet long grid on my dining table that evolved over several weeks. I asked John to appeal to Trigonic caretakers to assist by holding the intention that a solution would be found – focusing a group of hearts and minds together can work miracles. Each workshop ‘coincided’ with a step in the sealing process – although when I added Shift Crystals to the grid a hurricane blew up! This might have seemed disastrous but I believe it too had its part to play just as seemingly dire incidents in people’s lives are, with the benefit of hindsight, actually very positive.
I smiled when I heard on the radio the other day that ‘the damage from the oil spill is much less than feared, the oil is dispersing and Mother Nature has obviously been healing herself’. Serendipitous synchronicity ensured that John sent me the crystal at just the right time, which meshed with furthering our knowledge of how to work with crystal beings to serve the earth – part of my soul’s plan.
With all good wishes,
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The End of Karma is written for anyone ready to take a quantum leap in their spiritual growth. Practical, uncomplicated, and masterful, this precious little gem of a book transports you effortlessly into the realm of spirit and soul. By reading only one chapter a day of its lovely poetic verse and then reflecting on it, you’ll move from traveling on the all-too-often bumpy highway of fate to the smooth royal road of your ultimate destiny: always living in tune with your Higher power, the God within you.
Spirituality has become too complicated. It’s been made far too philosophical and intellectual. In reality, God is within you; and you have the right to experience that peace, happiness, and joy while living on earth in the here-and-now, regardless of your circumstances in life. The End of Karma will awaken that truth within you.
Remove the mystery from your life. Discover and live your dharma, and start ending your karma today.
Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D
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A challenging question that many religious leaders and religious people often struggle to answer concerns the existence of suffering in the world. Whether this suffering is human or non-human, religions strive to provide answers for why such suffering occurs in the first place. If authoritative and authorized texts or spokespeople are not able to offer satisfying answers then epistemic, if not existential, confusion for practitioners is likely to follow. Religious practitioners may consequently abandon their religion in search of one that offers more convincing answers.
The horrific rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a 23-year-old woman, in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012 has foregrounded these and related issues for many religious people, and especially for many Hindus. In a Hindu context the explanatory strategy that is typically employed to account for her ghastly and colossal suffering is dependent on the mechanism of karma. The degree to which human (and non-human) actors have agency or the degree to which their actions are determined or pre-determined, however, is not patently obvious and has resulted in volumes of esoteric commentary and philosophical/ theological literature, most of which is not available to the vast majority of practicing Hindus. Self-proclaimed authorities such as Asaram Bapu have placed responsibility, and, therefore, agency, on the victim and have, to some degree ignored the mechanism of karma. In so doing he has simultaneously offended religious and secular people. If, on the other hand, one were to take the opposite position, to embrace a kind of hard determinism, namely that all is determined by karma, then one would deny agency and even the perpetrators of this heinous crime would be absolved of immediate responsibility. This also is not desirable and surely is offensive. Karma may not offer a convincing explanation.
Justifications for the suffering of the righteous becomes even more muddled when theism is added to the mix. That is, if there is a God and that god is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent then one may wonder why such a god would permit suffering in general. The answer that is frequently given by religious spokespeople and practitioners is that “God works in mysterious ways.” This MWC, “mysterious ways clause,” however, is merely an acceptance of a profound ignorance combined with an optimistic belief that all suffering will be beneficial in the future (in the Hindu context, in the current life, or in future ones). Many, of course, are reassured when they employ the MWC to make sense of their suffering or the suffering of others.
There are, of course, other variants of these models and they are being articulated in India and throughout the world. Honoring, remembering, and memorializing Jyoti Singh Pandey is our collective karma.
My intention here is to invite readers to become aware of, and, perhaps, even question, their own presuppositions. My intention is not to create any more suffering or to ridicule readers or the victim of this (or any other) sickening tragedy. My intention is to foster insight through critical self-reflection.
Deepak Sarma
More and more people are “waking up” spiritually. And for most of them, the question becomes: now what? “Information about life after awakening is usually not made public,” explains Adyashanti. “It’s most often shared only between teachers and their students.” The End of Your World is his response to a growing need for direction on the spiritual path. Consider the book you hold in your hands Adyashanti’s personal welcome to “a new world, a state of oneness.”….ADYASHANTI (whose name means “primordial peace”) dares all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation in this life seriously. He began teaching in 1996, at the request of his Zen teacher with whom he had been studying for fourteen years. Since then, many spiritual seekers have awakened to their true nature while spending time with Adyashanti.
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Adyashanti – The Disorientation That Occurs When Ego Drives Begin To Disappear
More and more people are “waking up” spiritually. And for most of them, the question becomes: now what? “Information about life after awakening is usually not made public,” explains Adyashanti. “It’s most often shared only between teachers and their students.” The End of Your World is his response to a growing need for direction on the spiritual path.
Association with Truth / Adyashanti
Adyashanti’s nondual teachings have been compared to those of the early Zen masters and Advaita Vedanta sages. Expressing both the infinite possibilities and the ordinary simplicity of a spiritually realized life, Adyashanti’s teachings are directed to those who are sincerely called to awaken to their true nature and embody this life-changing realization.
Adyashanti – Different Qualities of Awakening
Talk from a retreat at Omega center with Adyashanti.
Adyashanti, author of Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.
Asked to teach in 1996 by his Zen teacher of 14 years, Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology. “The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but is open to all and found within all.” Based in California, Adyashanti lives with his wife, Mukti, Associate Teacher of Open Gate Sangha. He teaches throughout North America and Europe, offering satsangs, weekend intensives, silent retreats, and a live internet radio broadcast.
Note: I received an e-mail from the founder of Spiritual Research Institute, Mr Vazhakunnathu Abraham Thomas who would like to share his knowledge on topics relating to the causes and effect of Karma and other spiritual topics.
Enjoy, Namaste.
Book Summary of From Death To Birth: Understanding Karma And Reincarnation
Authentic answers to often-asked questions on death, birth and mastering our destiny. Through a series of lively stories drawn from the ancient scriptures and his own experience, Pandit Tigunait takes us on the soul’s journey from death to birth.
About the Author
Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, the Spiritual Head of the Himalayan Institute, is the successor of Swami Rama of the Himalayas. Lecturing and teaching worldwide for more than a quarter of a century, he is a regular contriutor to Yoga International magazine and the author of twelve books, including the best-seller The Biography of Swami Rama of the Himalayas.
Pandit Tigunait holds two doctorates: one in Sanskrit from the University of Allahabad in India and another in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennysylvania. Family tradition gave Pandit Tigunait access to a vast range of spiritual wisdom preserved in both the written and oral traditions. Before meeting his master, Pandit Tigunait studies Sanskrit, the language of the ancient scriptures of India, as well as the languages of the Buddhist, Jain and Zoroastrian traditions. In 1976, Swami Rama ordained Pandit Tiguanit into the 5,000 year old lineage of the Himalayan Masters.
Karma and Reincarnation
Karma and Reincarnation with Pandit Rajmani Tigunait. Full program is available for Premium Members at: HimalayanInstitute.org
Eckhart continues his exploration of India’s revered text and how these ancient teachings remain powerful and relevant today.
Experience a work considered one of the greatest spiritual treasures of humanity, as Eckhart guides us through the transcendent Bhagavad Gita. Eckhart explains the gift of karma yoga, namely the way in which we perform action in this world, as the Gita’s most important teaching on this month’s issue on Eckhart Tolle TV.
View Part 1 of his exposition on Bhagavad Gita Here
President Barack Obama is one of the calmest, coolest and most compelling political figures in modern times. Dealt a grueling first term of wars, recession, and bitter partisan attacks, he has remained even-tempered, level-headed, and downright Zen.
Obama’s appeal runs even deeper than the revolution his ethnicity represents. His rare combination of inner peace and outer passion, his mix of realism and idealism, are qualities that have made him an iconic figure around the globe. Extraordinary emotional intelligence is perhaps the prime quality that has drawn Barack Obama’s supporters to him through thick and thin.
In Obama Karma, Russell Razzaque analyzes key moments in the life of our forty-fourth president that reveal his depth and self-awareness, especially when confronted with challenges. While temperament is largely inherited, emotional intelligence can be learned. Through simple exercises included in the book readers can learn to improve their own life skills and interpersonal relationships.
Finally, Obama Karma helps make the case for the re-election of Barack Obama on the basis of his extraordinary leadership in a singular time in history.
Russell Razzaque, PhD, has been a practicing psychiatrist for over fifteen years. His most recent book Human Being to Human Bomb was a psychological examination of suicide bombers. He is an attending psychiatrist across several mental health and addiction treatment centers in London. Razzaque has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent.
Karma isn’t a mystery. Karma isn’t an esoteric philosophy. Karma is a natural law–the Law of Cause and Effect–and, just like gravity, it is constantly at work in the world and in your life, whether you know it or believe in it or not. The book you are holding will give you the knowledge and tools necessary to discover and understand the playing-out of karma in your physical, mental, psychological, social, and spiritual life. It will help you to make sense of your life-circumstances and provide a road map for traveling to a more fulfilling, joyous, and purposeful future.
Karma: How To View It, Use It, and Lose It will also introduce you to a group of people who have successfully applied the tenets of this law, along with a clear understanding of the principles of reincarnation, to create productive, successful, meaningful lives for themselves: from inventors, composers, healers, and military leaders to teachers, business people, artists, and bureaucrats. Once you’ve read it, your life and the way you view your world will never be the same.
Excerpt:
Excerpt: pp. 37-38: “If everything in the observable universe has a cause, and every cause has a determinate effect; if “nature” includes not only the universe with all its phenomena, but the laws and principles that guide that universe as well; and, if we are a part of the natural world, how could it be that everything under the sun is governed by the same laws and principles–except human beings?
The concept of Karma is simply the extension of the law of universal causation to include man’s moral and spiritual life. It asserts that every decision we make must result in determinate consequences. Karma is an impersonal law and should not be confused with the concepts of predestination or “luck.” Consequences do, indeed, result from every single decision we make; however, we make the free-will decisions that set this law in motion. Our thoughts, words, and deeds determine every effect we experience in our lives–positive and negative–not the “lucky star” we were born under, the “dark cloud” that follows us around, or the “Hand of Wrath” that reaches down from the heavens to punish us.”
Karen Reed Hadalski was born in California and lived many years in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas of Pennsylvania. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Temple University and a Master of Arts degree in English and American Language and Letters from Boston College. She also did post-Master studies in the Ph.D. program at Boston University where she was awarded both a scholastic scholarship and teaching fellowship.
In addition to teaching literature, research and critical thinking, and expository writing at the college, adult, and preparatory school levels, Karen served as a VISTA volunteer in an Athabascan Indian village in pre-pipeline Alaska; did research and program development for both environmental health and educational software projects; social work with abused and neglected inner-city children; and was appointed to Philadelphia’s Mayor’s Commission on Literacy where she coordinated their city-wide Family Literacy program.
Karen has traveled extensively; her most memorable adventures being: The exploration of favorite writers’ homes and haunts in England and New England; as well as the many museums housing paintings and sculpture of favorite artists in Florence, New York City, and Paris; whale watch excursions conducted by famed naturalists and marine biologists; traveling by dogsled to a frozen, desolate region of Alaska in order to fully experience the magnificence of the Northern Lights; meandering through the Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, and Muir Woods; riding-out turbulent Caribbean waves during a tropical storm; making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where every Sunday School story and picture came to life; moving above, behind, and around Niagara Falls; and investigating the pyramids, temples, sphinx, necropolises and other ancient sites of Egypt. She still dreams of taking a “safari” trip to Africa. In addition to travel, Karen enjoys classical music and singing; nature and animals; the study of world religions, metaphysics and philosophy; and reading, especially biographies.
Her favorite literary genre is the essay and her favorite writers are Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Shakespeare. In addition to her books, Karen has also published articles in various journals, newspapers, and magazines and authors the animal advocacy and education column, “Perspectives,” for Pet Tails Magazine. She currently lives in Virginia Beach with her husband, John, whom she met when he was a student at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, along with their two dogs, Odin & Serena, and two cats, Lily & Chance.
