2 Karmic patterns
Karmic patterns are an essential part of the soul's process of understanding creation. They play out in the life of our personality, but we are mostly oblivious to the process.
Karma cannot really be understood solely from the perspective of the personality, as it is the soul, in cooperation with others, that has an agenda or path mapped out for each personality. The personality is given free will to make choices about how it lives its life, but the soul nudges it along by setting up the situations that it finds itself in.
Those situations are the karmic patterns, so called because they are repeatedly applied until choices are made that break the pattern through understanding the lesson that the pattern is teaching. The lesson is not a fact or piece of knowledge, but an intimate understanding of the end-to-end process of one aspect of human existence and how to create that. The learning is not for the personality per se, as it is the proving ground of the soul's capacity to create a reflection/projection of its own consciousness deeper into matter.
The goal is to make a personality that, of its own free will, chooses wholeheartedly to channel the will of the soul. That process takes a long time, so the soul sequentially creates a lot of personalities, hopefully learning from its previous attempts as it progresses on its path to being able to create a fully conscious representative of itself at will.
Creating different personalities for each phase in the process enables each personality to able to focus on the one part of the lesson, without being encumbered by the memories/baggage of all its so-called failures, which would otherwise lead to continual despondency and depression, preventing further progress.
Patterns in practice△
Given that karmic patterns are a long-term set of repeated personality experiences as part of the soul's progress towards mastering creation, how do they work out in practice?
As we live our personality lives, we will be responding to our circumstances, some of which are of our own making. At the time we have emotions flowing through us, and thoughts come to mind, and if they occur enough together with the experiences, we will think they are related, and so put ourselves in the same sort of situations if we liked them, or avoid the situations if we don't. In doing so, we build up behaviour patterns that we will tend to reinforce by choosing the same responses to the same situations.
However, no two situations are completely the same, and some will vary so much that we begin to doubt whether we should react in the same way. We are challenged to make a different response until we find what works consistently. If we end up being challenged too often, we might think that what we believed about those situations wasn't completely correct, and so rethink some of our priorities. In this way we change direction as what around us changes.
But change doesn't all occur outside of ourselves, and we may find that we start to think differently about our lives, perhaps because what appeared stable is not any more. We might decide to make changes to our lives to make them better for us or others for whom we are responsible. We are taking more control of our lives, rather than just flowing along with what happens to us. It is at these inflection point that our souls see the results of what they have built into our personalities, and change what some future experiences we are to receive to take advantage of our new choices.
This process has been one of starting out with reinforcing advantageous behaviour patterns in response to recurring karmic circumstances, but transforming into pre-emptive behaviours as we take more conscious control of our lives as we see ways to improve them, leading to changed karmic patterns. We are interacting with our souls without consciously knowing about them per se.
Self-awareness△
Self-awareness comes from focussing our consciousness upon the nature of our own thoughts, feeling and actions, rather than just reacting to life's experiences and challenges.
We can see that as we experience karmic patterns, we start becoming aware of how we might change them, and that involves a certain amount of awareness about ourselves and our responses. That is self-awareness, and while that may seem just a part of the process of living, at some time we begin to appreciate that it is a process in itself that we can become skilled in. From then on, we can accelerate our learning because we become a conscious creator of our lives, and less at the mercy of our circumstances and the follies of others.
We are actively using our consciousness to change ourselves in a feedback loop due to our awareness of how we respond and can change our circumstances. That awareness functions differently, depending upon where we are in the timeline of our experiences.
| # | Time | Mode | Action | Awareness focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Past | Reflective | Reactive | How we responded to our circumstances |
| 2 | Present | Situational | Responsive | How we are feeling right now |
| 3 | Future | Predictive | Pre-emptive | How do we deal with situations in the future |
In invoking our awareness, we have shifted our consciousness from being in the middle of our experiences to being an observer of them. It is that partial objectiveness that allows us to become the creator of our lives as we see possible ways we can change them, and ponder the possible results of doing so. Our souls have been nudging us along by creating the circumstances we find ourselves in, but it is our personalities that are taking responsibility by independently making decisions and acting upon those decisions.
By our free will, we are choosing what we think is important, and thus our souls can see just how much the personalities they built are aligned to them. That knowledge is what they will use to change the futures of our personalities, and build better ones in future. Our souls and personalities are evolving at their own levels, and the communication medium between them is the karmic patterns that our souls set up for our personalities.