karma and the manifestation of personality

        We solidify our habitual ways of dealing with the world outside ourselves.  What do I mean when I say ‘we solidify’ given that I am already speaking of habit which can be described as a solidified behavior?  In order to answer that I need first to make it clear that my experience tells me that everything is one to the point where our inner being manifests in our outer being – even to the point where our inner personality will often manifest through our physical body.  This is the reason that the apostles, when they saw a man blind from birth, asked Jesus if his blindness was from his sin or a sin of his parents.  Behind that statement is the assumption that the sin, certainly not a corporeal event only, could and would manifest in the physical.  There is also the assumption that things from our past lives can cause physical limitations in the present.

        My purpose here is not to get into a debate as to the veracity of reincarnation but rather to use that example in order to clarify an idea – it being that non-physical attitudes, events, etc. can cause changes and conditions in the physical.

        This is true even in the way that we perceive ourselves.  In the act of self-perception, that which we perceive, even though it is us, is, by the very act of perceiving, outside of the one doing the perceiving.  How we view ourselves, (which is never perfectly accurate), causes changes within us, often giving rise to new and marginally independent internal constructs, patterns of behavior or, more importantly, thought which is a nice way of saying that they take on a life of their own. These will often be ways of dealing with the world that are less than optimum behaviors.  These behaviors that we take on can, and often do, become habitual because they satisfy a particular ongoing need of the ego.

        When you fill a particular need in this manner with anything but a perfect God solution, when the solution comes from within your own ego, it is, by its very nature flawed to one degree or another, often very flawed.  You make compromises within yourself to build a given defense and, as a result, somewhere else within you there is a crack that forms in your internal egoic structure.  That crack can manifest in your behavior, in changes to your physical body, into changes that you may carry over from a past life where the manifestation may be congenital.  But most importantly that crack can manifest in the very structure of the personality that you view as the core of who you are.

        This is one example of how karma can play out.  It is karma in the sense that karma is not necessarily a static thing but a dynamic response on the part of the universe to a constantly changing and adapting creation of ours.  We tend to use the word karma to cover different kinds of punishment for many types of ‘negative’ behavior and that is certainly one form that it takes, especially when our thoughts, words and actions give birth to the law of unintended consequences, (many of these consequences we label as negative karma with cause).  In another sense we might think of our personalities, those strengths and weaknesses that we see as integral parts of ‘who we think we are’, as the stuff of the universe that fills those vacuums that we create.  In that case our outer personalities are in a constant loop as we continually adjust who we are which, in turn, causes us to continually adjust how we see ourselves, (albeit never very clearly), which causes us to adjust who we are, etc..

        We need to interrupt this negative, self-sustaining loop within ourselves.  We need to create new thought forms for ourselves that reflect a different interior paradigm.  This is a kind of ‘fake it until you make it’ approach.  It takes changing our momentums.  Much of what we think of as the contours of our personalities are actually momentums that we carry that have solidified into personality traits that have come to determine our behavior.

        We have more control or authority over all of this than we think.  But if we are unaware of the fact that we have that control we will not, of course, exercise that control.  Even when we are aware and take an active role in changing our paradigm, we will find that we are working against established patterns that have a great deal of momentum. That can be very challenging and very difficult.