Wicca by Timothy Roderick

Author:Timothy Roderick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: wicca: a year and a day, wicca a year and a day, wicca another year and a day, wicca, witchcraft, tim roderick, initiation
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2015-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Practice Days 17–18

Deeply Understanding Karma

Magical Purpose: Changing consciousness through awareness.

What you’ll need:

• Blank paper

• A pen or pencil

Karma is a Sanskrit word that comes to us from ancient Hindu religions, and it means “action, work, or deed.” It is a term that you hear used widely in today’s world. Most people think of karma as “something bad happening to you,” but that is too simplistic for our studies. Karma is a neutral force involving cause and effect, action and response.

The understanding of karma (and its counterpart, reincarnation) was not historically confined to ancient India. It was also central to the beliefs in ancient Celtic culture, and it informed the Druid religion. So karma has a direct spiritual lineage for Witches that connects to Celtic myth, ritual, and magic. That lineage continues today in Wiccan practices involving karma.

There are two primary forms of practice for Witches around karma. One approach is the reactive karmic “clean-up” strategy, which involves certain rituals and activities around karma resolution. Witches do these usually at the beginning of their direct and intentional dealings with karma, especially when a karmic result has a resounding, distressing, or harmful impact. The other form of practice involves proactive strategies, developing more than just a passing familiarity with karma, deeply understanding it, and allowing it to inform your day-to-day living.

Involved in the idea of karma is the principle of “causality,” meaning that both your intention and action ultimately influence your future. I remember long ago someone trying to minimize the long-standing ancient understanding of karma with the flippant remark, “Karma is the ‘New Age’ hell.”

However, no one burns forever in karma. And karma is not a New Age idea. It isn’t an idea at all, nor is it “hell.” It stands where you stand. It is living truth, like air, fire, water, and earth, manifesting as your life, right now.

One of the key teachings in Wicca is that you should never believe any teaching out of hand. In fact, on this path practitioners should verify the validity of every teaching for themselves. So it goes with the principles of karma.

There is little that you even need to believe when it comes to the laws of cause and effect in this world. If you live your life like everyone else does, eventually you will see clear demonstrations of karmic principles, particularly in the lives of people around you. In fact, many of you have probably witnessed the causal relationship between a direct action that someone took and the quality of that individual’s life. You’ve probably seen people around you making choices that directly affect well-being, happiness, dissatisfaction, health, and more.

These patterns are always easier to recognize in other people’s lives than in our own.

Every action you can think of affects the outcome of many future actions in a wide circle of activity. For example, your actions affect those of other people around you. What’s more, actions arise together. Your action comes forth in response to my action. My action arises from another cause, and so on.

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