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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. Our next topic is naturally what has traditionally been called right action, but what I prefer to call higher action.

You need to take the teachings I have given about speech, about energy and the use of energy because they are also relevant to the topic of action. You may say: “How does a physical action taken with a physical body have anything to do with energy?” Well, as I have said, everything is energy. Everything you do is done with energy. I know it may be easy to imagine that you are sending out an energy impulse through your emotional body, where you might project a very powerful feeling. It might be more difficult to imagine that you are sending out an energy impulse with your physical body.

This is relatively easily resolved by realizing that your physical body is the lowest of your four lower bodies. You cannot take a physical action that is only taking place in your physical body, at the physical level. The physical level is a projection of what happens at the three higher levels. Any action you take starts in your identity body, goes into your mental, goes into your emotional and then is translated into a physical action. Whenever you take a physical action, you are sending out an impulse through all of your four lower bodies. Most people are not aware of this. They think that they can take a physical action that is only at the physical level. Many people think that if they decide to do something, they are deciding this with their conscious minds. They are not aware that they have these patterns in their three higher minds and that these patterns very much set the parameters for what they are able to decide with their conscious minds.

Stopping a runaway karmic spiral

Many people, as I said, often act like a kind of robot, like a kind of computer, where they have these patterns, these programs in the higher mind, the subconscious mind. These programs take over their reactions. Therefore they are not making a physical, conscious decision to take a certain action. It is determined by the patterns in the subconscious mind. This is where we can again say there is what will seem like a paradox. I have talked about how you can take two basic approaches on the spiritual path. You can seek to suppress certain feelings, certain thoughts, a certain sense of identity, and even suppress certain actions, but this will not help you raise your level of awareness. In order to raise your awareness, you need to go in and look at the patterns and consciously resolve them: resolution versus suppression and denial.

When it comes to action, there is a certain stage on the spiritual path where you actually need to cultivate a conscious willpower to stop an impulse from the subconscious mind, from the three levels of the mind, from being taken out as a physical action. At a certain level, you are not fully capable of resolving the patterns. You are not really aware of how to do this. You may not have the determination to do it. You may not have the willingness to look into your own mind, to look at the beam in your own eye, as Jesus expressed it.

Throughout the ages not only Buddhism but many other religions and spiritual teachings have set up this code of conduct, code of action, for what you do and what you do not do when you are a member of this religion. We cannot simply dismiss this and say that it is completely wrong, even if we use the words right and wrong in this context. I am not trying to dismiss it because an action that you take can, of course, create karma. As I explained, this is the energy impulses that go through the four levels and return to you. If you are constantly engaging in actions that create the more severe forms of karma, you can sabotage your ability to raise your awareness. So it is natural, or it is necessary, for a certain phase that you use your outer willpower to discipline your actions because otherwise you will sabotage your spiritual growth. You may be studying a spiritual teaching, you may be doing certain spiritual practices, but if you are repeatedly engaging in these actions that create the more severe forms of karma, how can you grow spiritually? Your return karma will often block or hinder your spiritual growth.

There are certain actions that have been defined throughout the ages by various religions. I certainly defined some 2,500 years ago. There are some defined in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt not….” They can have a certain effect at a certain level in terms of stopping this runaway karmic spiral that many people have been engaged in for lifetimes. At some point you must stop it, and by accepting an ideal that there are certain things that a person of your religion does not do, then you can actually make progress. This progress will only take you to a certain point because it will not actually stop the karmic spiral completely. It will prevent it from becoming physical if you do not take the physical actions, and thereby it lowers the intensity of the karmic spiral. If you still have the patterns in your emotional, mental and identity bodies, you are, of course, still projecting out through them. Only the karma is not as severe, not as intense.

The outer versus the inner path

What do you then do when you are past this stage? Which, quite frankly, most spiritually open people are. You have not, often for many lifetimes, been engaged in killing other people, using drugs or alcohol and many other such activities that I defined, even back then, as not being constructive on the eightfold path. What is the next step up from this? Well, it is first of all to recognize that it is not enough to simply define certain actions. Because the outer mind, the ego, is very clever at using a spiritual teaching to stop your progress, to hide itself, so that you do not see it and do not see the need to let it go, to dismiss it, to dissolve it.

One of the ways it does this is to create, as I have touched upon before, this concept of the outer path, the automatic path. This path will say there are right actions and wrong actions. If you force yourself to abstain from the wrong actions, and if you force yourself to perform only right actions, then you are guaranteed to reach nirvana. At some point in the future…poof! ….you will be enlightened if you just keep following this outer automatic path. You abstain from these non-spiritual actions, and you perform spiritual actions, including the spiritual exercises prescribed by your religion. If you diligently perform these exercises, you will automatically make progress.

Now, as I have said, by abstaining from karma-making actions, and by engaging in spiritual exercises and spiritual practice, you can make progress, but only to a point. There comes that point where you will not go beyond that level until you lock in to the inner path. It is not enough to abstain from certain actions, to take other actions. You need to work on your psychology, to resolve the patterns, the illusions, these selves that you have in your subconscious mind that are like computer programs that take over your reactions. You cannot go beyond a certain point until you see and engage in this inner path. What the ego often does is, it defines the outer path and then it says that because you are so diligent in abstaining from wrong actions and performing the right actions, you do not need to look at yourself. You do not need to look into your subconscious mind. You do not need to do anything that might expose me, your ego.

Many, many people throughout the ages, not only Buddhists, but from any spiritual teaching, have believed this. Many of the people today who are Buddhists, who are spiritual people, they believe in this outer path. There is a phase where you can make progress with this outer path, but there comes that point where now it is going to hinder your progress because it will prevent you from looking into the subconscious mind.

When spiritual efforts hinder progress

There are people who have defined wrong action, right action, and who have been very diligent in living up to this definition, but they have gradually felt a certain tension, a certain unease. This is because they have some intuition that gives them a sense that they are not actually making progress with what they are doing. But their outer minds are very attached. They have a very strong attachment to this outer path. They have an attachment that says that if they were to change their approach to the path, it would prove that they had been wrong before, and the last thing they want is to be wrong about the spiritual path.

Therefore they become attached, they clutch their ideas, they cling to their present approach to the path. Because of the unease, they now reason: “I must be more diligent in my spiritual practice. I must be more diligent in abstaining from these wrong actions and performing only right actions.” First, they might reason there is no way they can live an earthly life. They must withdraw from society and enter a monastery, where they never attempt to engage in these wrong actions. Even when they are in a monastery. they feel unease, so now they feel: “I must be more diligent in my spiritual practice.” This becomes an obsessive-compulsive disorder where they end up at a point where they feel that the only right action they can perform is their spiritual practice, whether it is chanting, whether it is prostrating yourself on the floor, whether it is rotating a prayer wheel, whatever it may be. They become more and more obsessed with doing this to the point where they feel this is all they can do.

Now the outer minds whisper in their ears: “Oh, look how diligent you are in your practice. Hardly anyone is as diligent as you are. This proves that you are an advanced student, and therefore you have no need to look into your subconscious mind, to look at yourself in the mirror. Just ignore those kinds of impulses and keep your mind focused on the right practice.” People can do this for a lifetime or for decades, and they are not stepping up a single step on the real path.

The real Middle Way

This, of course, you want to avoid, and how do you avoid it? The Middle Way, once again, which we really could call the Higher Way or the Transcendent Way. The linear mind says: “Here is one extreme, here is another extreme. There is a scale between the two extremes, various shades from black to various shades of gray, becoming lighter and lighter until you have white. When the Buddha talks about the Middle Way, it must mean that you find the midpoint between the two extremes.”

People have reasoned: “Oh, yes, I need to abstain from the wrong actions, and I need to perform a spiritual practice, but I can’t spend so much time on a spiritual practice that I can’t participate in normal, active life. I have to find the balance.” Not a completely invalid approach, but there is a higher understanding of this. The Middle Way in its original meaning, even its original expression, was not the middle way. It was not the midpoint between two extremes. It was the Higher Way, the Transcendent Way, the Beyond Way. The way that is beyond not only the two extremes but the entire dualistic scale between them, all the gradations. I have so far said that the dualistic mind defines the two opposite polarities. But the dualistic mind is fully capable of defining a gray zone between the two polarities with various shades. The entire scale, not only the two polarities but also the shades and the midpoint, is still defined by the dualistic mind.

Tuning in to your Life plan

What is the Higher Way to approach action? Well, it is to again seek to strengthen your intuition to get some sense of what is in your Life plan. As I have said before, you may have decided when you made your Life plan that there is a certain experience you can have on earth that you have not had enough of. You need to sort of indulge yourself in that experience until you have had enough of it, and you can therefore resolve the entire desire and let it go. You have transcended the activity, the desire, the experience. Now you come into embodiment. You forget this. You find a spiritual teaching that says the activity you are supposed to indulge in so you have had enough of it is not spiritual. Therefore you should abstain from it. You force yourself to abstain from this activity, and the result is what? You do not make the progress you had planned to make in your Divine plan.

What am I saying here? What I am saying is that you cannot set up an outer scale and say: “This is how a spiritual person should take action, and these are the actions that a spiritual person should never take.” For example: “A spiritual person must be celibate and abstain from sex.” Many spiritual people, especially in the Buddhic tradition, have reasoned this way. If your desire to experience sex is the last attachment that prevents you from entering nirvana, then that would hinder your progress. Of course, the ego can easily use this as an excuse and say: “Well, that sounds good, that teaching. That means I can do whatever I want. It is probably part of my Life plan that I have this experience.” This is, of course, just going to the other extreme. It is a matter of using your intuition to discover what exactly is what you put in your Divine plan. It does not matter of what other people say or what they put in their Divine plans. You need to discover what is what you put in your Divine plan, and that you can do through your intuition. Again, by using these tools to raise your awareness, overcome your patterns, transform the lower energies, you can gain clarity.

Where is your Life plan anchored? Well, it is really anchored in your higher self. Your Life plan can be considered as a book or at least a tablet that is up there in a realm of higher energies. The only way you can see it is to look, from your conscious mind, through your emotional, mental and identity bodies. But if those bodies are so full of lower frequency energies and illusions and maya, you will not be able to see the tablet, or at least you will not be able to read it.

As you start clearing out the debris in your higher bodies, clearing out the maya, clearing out the energy, well, naturally you can begin to get glimpses of your Life plan. You can therefore begin to see what is your personal balance, what activities you should engage in that you wanted to engage in, in order to overcome them and be free of them.

Another aspect of your Life plan is, of course, that there is a contribution you wanted to make to the forward progression of life on earth, of the collective consciousness, of humankind’s situation. Again, many spiritual people have set up a standard for what this should be. It might be often that they participate in certain charity work or that they perform their spiritual practice because that is their way to transform the world. Not that this is necessarily wrong, but is it what you defined in your Divine plan? Perhaps even though you are a spiritual person, there was a particular contribution you wanted to make to a specific worldly area. You wanted to bring forth some idea to promote some kind of change in, for example, business or education or health care or many other things. Perhaps you wanted to write a specific book that could help some people reach certain insights. There could be many different things. There is a myriad of things that you could have decided to do, and in most spiritual or religious movements they will not be defined as spiritual, precisely because they have this standard. Again, you might miss the opportunity defined in your Life plan. This will not help you grow spiritually, even if you perform the spiritual practice which is designed to help you grow spiritually. If it blocks a specific aspect of your Life plan, it will not help you grow spiritually. It will help you feel more spiritual, more advanced, but that is not the same as spiritual growth, as I hopefully have made clear by now.

Doing and not doing is not enough

There are many, many facets here that need to be taken into consideration, but not with the outer, linear mind. In fact, it is the outer, linear mind that often prevents you from tuning in intuitively to your Life plan. You need to neutralize that outer, linear mind that always wants to set up this standard where the two polarities are right and wrong and saying all you need to do is this and not do this, then you will reach the goal. Why will you not reach the goal by performing spiritual actions and abstaining from non-spiritual actions?

What have I said is the goal? What is enlightenment? It is a higher level of awareness. How will you reach a higher level of awareness? Only, only by transcending your current level of awareness and continuing to do so until you reach those levels that are at least the beginning stages of enlightenment. Performing outer actions, abstaining from other actions, will not automatically transform your level of consciousness. In fact, for many spiritual people, they have gotten themselves stuck in a blind alley, where the only way they can make progress is to question their standard for what is spiritual and non-spiritual, in terms of actions, in terms of speech, in terms of their intentions, their entire outlook on life.

I have said that you live in an insecure world, that you cannot actually survive in psychologically, so in order to survive you must suppress certain feelings, certain thoughts, certain impulses at the identity level, so you can find some kind of equilibrium and continuity. At a certain level, suppression is necessary for survival, but that suppression is also what becomes the primary trap, the maya, the veil of maya that keeps people trapped in the Sea of Samsara. They do not see, because of the veil of illusion, that it is the contents of their own minds that produce their experience of life. Therefore the only way to change their experience of life is to change the contents of the mind, not anything outside of themselves, not even at the level of action.

You need to re-evaluate actions based on what they do to your level of consciousness. Some actions clearly will lower your level of consciousness. One of the most common ones is drugs and alcohol and other intoxicants. There is a rather long tradition in India of certain people, they even call themselves yogis or swamis, who use various kinds of drugs, and they think this is the way to make spiritual progress. If there was some physical substance that could bring you to enlightenment, why would you have this thousands-of-years-old tradition of spiritual teachers recommending this arduous practice, instead of just simply taking this drug? Well, perhaps it is because these spiritual teachers know that the drug is a blind alley. It makes you feel a certain way. It might make you think that because you have certain experiences, you must be spiritual. But nothing you can do to the physical brain will raise your level of consciousness. It can lower your level of consciousness, or at least block you from rising because it makes you stuck at a certain level.

If you keep doing this, it will actually even lower your level of consciousness because there will come a point where you have used drugs for a time, where you start having an inner, intuitive sense that you cannot do this anymore, you need to move on, you are not growing. As I said, this increases the tension. Now if you ignore this and insist on continuing with this practice or with stealing or cheating people or whatever it may be, then this can only be done in one way. You intensify your denial, and intensifying your denial lowers your state of consciousness. You are therefore going down the staircase of the levels of consciousness by going deeper and deeper into denial. There are other actions that can have a very similar effect but they are by many spiritual people defined as being spiritual, even holy.

There is not much information available today about the actual situation I encountered as the Buddha those many centuries ago. I encountered quite a bit of resistance from the Brahmins of the Hindu religion, who thought they had a monopoly on giving spiritual teachings in that part of India. They were very focused on outer rituals. You have all these festivals today. You have all these rituals where people go into a temple and a priest sprinkles fruit juice on them or whatever he does, and this is supposed to help you progress spiritually. This is, of course, because the Brahmins have set themselves up as intermediaries between the people and the spiritual realm or the gods as they are defined in the Hindu religion. This is much like the religious authorities of Jesus’s time, who had defined a religion that said that the only way to get to God was to go through the church and the priests, the priesthood of the church. Jesus was condemned to death and executed because he challenged this view by saying the kingdom of God is within you.

Saying that the kingdom of God is within you is essentially the same as saying that everything is the Buddha nature and that all people have the potential to rise to Buddhahood. This is what the priests of an established religion cannot stand. They create this idea that by performing the actions prescribed by the outer religion, abstaining from other actions, you are guaranteed to be saved, go into nirvana, whatever it may be. This is a very old momentum on earth, a very strong momentum in the collective consciousness. Many, many people believe this. Why do they believe it? Because it gives them an excuse for not looking into their own mind and psychology.

The fear of what is in the subconscious mind

Why do people not want to do this? Because they are afraid of what they might find there. This you cannot understand without understanding reincarnation. You can go to a child that has grown up in one of these modern affluent democracies. The child has had by all accounts an ideal upbringing with two loving parents, good teachers in school, kind siblings. The child has basically had the best conditions that anybody could wish for, but the child has such severe psychological problems that it cannot function normally in society. What is there in the nurture or nature of that child? Nobody in the family has any predisposition to psychological illness, so it cannot be inherited. There has been no trauma in the person’s childhood, so it cannot be the upbringing. How do you then explain that a person growing up in ideal circumstances still has such severe psychological issues? It can only be explained by the fact that in past lives this person experienced severe trauma.

Look at the many wars that have taken place even within the last century. How many people have been exposed to this? Now they are in their next embodiment, but they carry the trauma with them in their emotional, mental and identity bodies. There are many people in today’s world that have reincarnated many times. They have been exposed to various traumas, but they have also performed some very selfish, self-centered actions based on this illusion that they are separate beings and that what they do to others will not affect themselves. Or at least if it does not have a direct physical consequence for themselves, they have gotten away with murder. If they are not caught, they can get away with things. Now these people are in embodiment in the modern age, and one of the big changes that has happened within the last several decades in the collective consciousness is that many, many more people have started doing psychological work: doing psychological healing work, embracing various spiritual teachings, anything from mindfulness to yoga to various therapies. Therefore they have started working on their psychology.

There is a momentum building in the collective consciousness that it is normal, natural, necessary, constructive, that you work on your psychology. There is a large group of people in the world who carry with them from past lives not only the traumas, but also the subtle realization that they have done certain things they should not have done. They do not want to look at this. They do not want to look into their psychology because they are afraid of what they might find. They are afraid that they will be overwhelmed so they cannot function normally. What do they want? They want the automatic path, where someone promises them: “You declare Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, and you are guaranteed to be saved.” “You join this Buddhic religion and you study these teachings and you perform these practices, and you are guaranteed to be saved.” “You perform this prostration exercise 10,000 times in your lifetime of prostrating yourself on the floor, and you are guaranteed to reach nirvana.” This is what people want.

Again, what is a higher way to look at your actions? It is to say: “What effect does it have on my consciousness? Not only in terms of, does it raise the level of my consciousness, but when I perform a certain action, what is my reaction? What is my psychological reaction to this? What does this bring up in my psychology? What is stirred up?” Then you use that as an opportunity because you realize you are a spiritual person, you want to make spiritual progress, so you have put yourself in situations where you are, so to speak, forced to take certain actions to stir up what is unresolved in your psychology. It is an opportunity to see something unresolved, to deal with it and therefore make progress, step up. Another step on the staircase. If you see yourself as a spiritual person, you need to make that shift so you are willing to do this, so you realize the necessity of doing this, and you dismiss this dream of the automatic path. You need to look at your reaction to these ideas and see the resistance you have towards looking at yourself.

Actions cannot take you to Nirvana

Then you can take another step related to action. There are many of the traditional religious people who will say that if you take certain actions, it condemns you to hell. If you kill somebody or even kill many people, you are condemned to go to hell. This is again dualistic thinking. You are defining a dualistic polarity. There is a heaven, there is a hell, and whether you go to the one place or the other is linked to your actions. Certain actions will condemn you to hell, other actions will guarantee that you go to heaven. Again, there is a strong momentum in the collective consciousness that people want to believe this, at least if they have abstained from these actions that would put you in hell. There is no realistic basis for it.

I am not in any way denying that there is a level of existence beyond the material universe, even the four levels of the material universe. I am not denying that it is possible to rise to that level so you are free of the wheel of rebirth. You do not have to come back into embodiment, but you can permanently ascend from earth. It is there. It is a possibility, but this is not what religious people define as heaven. The difference between where you are now and this higher realm, which I do not want to put words on and describe, but the difference between your present existence on earth and the higher level, is your level of consciousness. It is not actions that determine whether you can escape from earth and rise to a higher level, where you do not have the conflicts and the Sea of Samsara that you have on earth. The only thing that determines this is your level of consciousness.

As an extreme example of this, ask yourself what kind of beings could enter this higher realm? Let us make it concrete. The Catholic Church talks about heaven and that good Catholics are guaranteed to go to heaven. Can you really see the average Catholic existing in some higher realm that is supposedly a heaven world? Take a Catholic priest. From an outer standpoint, well, you cannot do better in terms of actions than being a Catholic priest. But what if that Catholic priest has abused children? He is a hypocrite because he is pretending to be a Catholic priest and a man of God, but he is abusing children. Can you see such a person being guaranteed to enter heaven with the level of consciousness that causes him to abuse children? Would this be possible? Would this be conceivable? Certainly not for anyone who has activated their intuition. You will instantly see that the vast majority of people on earth could not enter heaven or nirvana with their present level of consciousness.

What does that have to do with actions? Well, many people are afraid, when they believe in reincarnation, that they could have performed some action in a past life that prevents them from going to heaven or nirvana, however they define it. Here is the simple truth that I attempted to explain 2,500 years ago, but I will give it to you in an even more direct form. There is no action you can perform on earth that will get you into heaven, and there is no action you could perform on earth that will keep you out of heaven. Why? Because it is not the actions that determine whether you go to heaven, but your level of consciousness. Of course, a certain action springs from a certain level of consciousness. If you have performed a certain action, it shows that at least in that past life where you performed the action, or even in this life, you had that level of consciousness, and this level of consciousness will keep you out of heaven.

If you are a spiritual person, you do not need to be afraid to look into your psychology. Because no matter what actions you might have performed in a past life, you can overcome the effect of those actions by transcending the level of consciousness that caused the action. The universe, God or however you want to conceive of it is not concerned about the actions you perform on earth. The only concern is your level of consciousness. It does not matter that you did something in a past life that is defined as non-spiritual or anti-spiritual. If you have transcended that level of consciousness, or if you are willing to transcend that level of consciousness now, then you can and will be free of the action. Therefore you will make progress on the spiritual path, based on the progress you make in your consciousness. It is not the actions that are the determining factor. It is the level of consciousness, and once you transcend the level of consciousness, you do not need to feel guilty about the actions.

How karma really works

You can benefit from invoking higher energy to transform the energetic impulse created by the action, which is what many people call karma. You can transform that—if you have resolved the consciousness. We can also say you are performing an action, you are sending an impulse into the four levels of the material universe, they reach the identity level, now they are reflected back to you, and they enter into your identity body. This is an energy impulse. What does energy do? It creates interference patterns with energy that is somewhat at the same level of vibration. If you have not transcended the consciousness that caused you to perform the action, if you still have some unresolved illusions and beliefs in your identity body, then the karmic return will interact with that, and it will be reinforced by it. This means the karmic return will now pass into the mental body, reinforced. If you still have patterns and beliefs in the mental body, it will interact with them and be reinforced even more. Then it enters the emotional body, and if you still have unresolved emotional patterns, it will also be reinforced by them, so that when it crosses the boundary to the physical realm, it might manifest as a severe consequence.

There are many people who believe in karma who believe that if you killed somebody in a past life, that karmic return might cause you to be killed in this life. There is nothing you can do to prevent it because you made the karma, and the karma must descend, and it will result in you being killed. This is true only if you have not transcended the consciousness. If you transcend that consciousness at the identity level, the karmic return comes back, but there is nothing for it to react to. There is nothing that reinforces it. In fact, if you have created higher patterns or freed yourself from illusions and invoked energy, it can be diminished.

Now it goes into the mental. If you have transcended the mental patterns, well, nothing reinforces it, it is diminished further. The same thing happens in the emotional, and so by the time it reaches the physical, it could be completely transformed into a higher level of energy, or it could manifest in a much milder form. Instead of being killed, you might just hurt yourself in some superficial way.

Action is, as modern physics says, tied to reaction. There is no action without a reaction, but there is no reaction without action. It is all tied together in these interdependent originations. You may say: “I took a certain physical action. That action created a reaction from other people that affected me.” Or perhaps it did not because you got away with it, but it still created a reaction in the four levels of the material universe. It also created a reaction in your mind. In fact, the action was based on a process in your mind. If you are trapped in maya and illusions, in a separate state of consciousness, the dualistic mind, your action probably sprang from reactionary patterns in the three other minds. For every action there is a reaction, but you can transcend, transform the reaction from the cosmic mirror, by transcending the consciousness that led to the action.

There are many people who believe in karma, who believe it is a punishment, but it is actually not. It is an opportunity. What have I said is the purpose of life? Your growth in awareness. How do you grow in awareness? By coming to see something that keeps you at your present level of awareness so you can transcend it and rise to a higher level. If you did not see it, how would you transcend it? Sometimes you can see it voluntarily by looking, but other times you do not see it voluntarily. Then some external circumstance forces you to see it by creating a reaction in you. Well, this is what karma does. The law of karma says, you are performing an action. You killed another human being. A severe violation of another person’s free will and right to have an opportunity to grow. If the law of karma was instant, you should be killed right away, but that means you would go out of embodiment. When you are not killed right away, you have to live the rest of that lifetime knowing that you killed another human being.

This gives you an opportunity to process it in that lifetime. Then you have succeeding lifetimes where you may not consciously remember, but you still have the psychology, the patterns in your psychology, that cause you to kill another human being. You still have opportunity to see this, to process it and overcome it. Several lifetimes later the karmic impulse comes back. It is not a punishment. It is an opportunity. If you have not transcended the consciousness, then the karmic impulse will stir up that consciousness, even if there is no outer situation that provokes this. You may not be in a situation where you are tempted to kill another human being, but the karmic impulse coming back to your identity, mental and emotional bodies will stir up what was not resolved, so you experience it and have another opportunity to look at it before the karma becomes physical.

If you are not willing to look at it, then the karma will become physical, so that now you have a physical consequence that you cannot deny. But before you have that undeniable consequence, you had an opportunity to transform your state of consciousness. You only get the physical consequence if you did not make use of that opportunity. Where is the punishment? Everything is an opportunity for those who have grasped what the eightfold path is about. Everything is an opportunity. This is what you can lock in to and come to consciously accept. You can ask yourself, you can use your intuition: “What is the opportunity here? What do I need to see in this situation? What is it in my psychology that I need to resolve in order to transcend this situation, to use this situation as a springboard for rising higher on the eightfold path?”

With this I have given you what I wanted to give you on action. I seal you in the joy of the Buddha of knowing that I have taken a higher action in bringing forth this teaching.