The Absolute Law of Karma – Mortality, Immortality, and the Nature of Destiny

Posted On June 22, 2022 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

In most esoteric texts and spiritual doctrine Karma is referred to as the absolute law because its fundamental in nature and transpires naturally through our very nature and way of being. We’re all born into the world with a predisposition that naturally equips us with everything we need to form particular type of experiences and become a certain type of person based on those experiences. We’re designed, so to speak, with fundamental traits that form our basic character, temperament, natural emotional states and sensitivities, behavioral tendencies, interests, and natural talents, all of which are then developed through our family dynamic and the behavioral dynamics being expressed in the environment around us, and of which we play a natural role in. Out of this dynamic combination of factors all working together in a completely natural way, our mental paradigm begins forming in a way that sets a particular type of story in motion as our life theme, which imposes a direction on our life as our destiny. In order to understand how Karma operates in shaping our life, we have to begin by realizing that as humans, we’re born into the physical world with a dual mind and nature, where we exist as both animal and divine. Where we have both a higher mind that’s intelligent, creative and immortal, and a lower mind that’s automated through instinctual impulses, emotionally driven, and mortal in nature.   

What connects us naturally to all life on Earth is our subconscious mind, also called the collective unconscious or mass consciousness of the group mind, and what connects us to our divine and heavenly nature is our conscious mind, which bestows us with the ability to create the reality of our thoughts through choice and will, which is how we shape ourselves to be an individual (archetype) in our own right. Our lower, animal nature causes us to identify in the fundamental sense with whatever group, culture, or society we’re born into, where we don’t perceive ourselves as existing apart from that group and we operate out of what you can think of as the herd mentality. While we’re operating out of our lower mind we move in-sync with whatever is happening around us based on how we’re being influenced by external forces, and we look to others to tell or show us what to do and how to do it. While operating primarily out of our lower nature we create ourselves out of a fundamentally unconscious state, where we lack any real individuality that’s born out of our ability to think for ourselves. This part of us is mortal, which means that when we die, all our thoughts and memories of ourselves that were born out of the group mind (instinct) blend back into the astral field of instinct that girdles the Earth and is related to our species and class as a form of natural intelligence.

This is what the term mortal is referring to. We are both a mortal and immortal being, where we have both an unconscious and conscious mind that work in harmony with each other in creating what we experience as an outer reality. When we live primarily out of an unconscious state, which operates habitually out of the model formed through our initial conditioning, we simply use the memories of past to create more and more of the same type of experiences in the present. While our formative conditioning establishes the basis of our mental paradigm (around puberty) and imposes an initial direction on our life through the universal theme we naturally begin employing as the means of creating how we experience ourselves, once we become adults and our conscious mind begins developing, we can then take over creating ourselves by exercising the ability to think for ourselves in a rational, reasoning manner and make our own decisions about who we’re going to be and what we’re going to do as a result. As we make conscious decisions that transmute the habitual patterns playing out in our life in a systematic manner, and we act on our decisions to turn them into a reality of our own making, we begin experiencing ourselves in a new way. It’s only the part of ourselves that we create in a conscious, self-aware, and deliberate manner to form ourselves as a product of our own making that’s immortal and transcends the earthly plane at physical death. This part of us ultimately becomes the karmic seed formed out of our soul’s memory of itself that establishes the basis for our next cycle of growth (incarnation) as a natural form of evolution.

The principle of karma, like so many spiritual ideas, has been trivialized in our new-age society to the point where few people are able to realize it for what it is, or learn how to work with it in a meaningful way as a means of exercising their will to create in order to assume control of their own destiny. We tend to view life from a separative mentality, where we take what exists naturally as a part of a greater whole and break it down into separate parts, events or actions, that we then imagine are unrelated and independent of each other, and we never bring them back together as a means of identifying the common theme playing out on a larger scale. Some have even been taught to think of karma as punishment or retribution for past deeds of some kind being administered by a higher power or outer force of some kind. But karma, like all things born out of the mind, operates in a completely natural and lawful manner through the workings of universal laws, and in the most basic sense comes as the experience of our own mental creation from both the giving and receiving end.

Our karma comes as the expression of our soul’s essence, which forms our character as our inner nature. Our being is formed out of our character and morality, out of which all our thoughts, feelings, passions, needs, desires, attitudes, and activities issue forth naturally as a form of self-expression. All of our natural behaviors and deeds result from our moral values, beliefs, emotional states, and memories. Our character is something we’re always in charge of creating based on internal processes we engage in naturally as a means of experiencing the world around us and is governed largely by our conscience, which is our moral nature. Everything you do in life comes as the expression of your character formed out of the accumulation of all your life experiences, translated into memory. Our higher soul’s (true self) constitution, which is of pure mind, is formed out of memory produced through our own ability to create how we experience things. Memory, like the soul itself, is never fixed, static or singular, it’s always in the process of transforming and evolving as you go along in life through the ongoing story you’re always telling by how you live, and through the incorporation of new types of experiences that reshape existing patterns. The most basic way we’re always creating ourselves is through the ongoing story we’re always in the process of telling ourselves through our internal dialogue (thoughts) that follows a common theme, and we’re always the author, main character, director, and producer of our own story.

How We Create Ourselves through our Life Story

Our life story is formed out of what you might call universal themes that are common to everyone as a general idea, while also being developed in a novel way that make them unique to us. For example, one of the most prevalent universal themes shared by the majority of people comes as feeling not good enough or not being loved or wanted, and though this idea forms the basis for the story we start telling ourselves as the means of experiencing our life, it’s shaped in a unique way by each of us based on how we internalize and interpret everything (using our model) to make it mean we’re not good enough. Yet every person has their own unique situation and set of circumstances, family group and dynamic, or social group that they use as the means for creating internal processes where they take any situation and reform it so that it adequately tells the story of not being good enough or worthy of being loved somehow. Each person will use different elements and group interactions to create the same type of experience of themselves. We’re always taking what you can call a universal idea and using it as the basis for forming a personalized version of the same idea.

The theme acts as what you might call a fundamental pattern or energetic template that orders, organizes, and produces an internal representation that consistently produces the same type of experience. Because this story is set into motion at a young age before we develop our rational, reasoning mind, and our ability to discriminate, we don’t even know to question whether it’s true or not because it forms the very basis for how we perceive and experience ourselves and the world around us. Our mind works naturally in any situation to only activate (notice) and call forth (focus on) the information that can be used to tell our story, while everything that would ordinarily contradict or disprove it is ignored or goes unnoticed. We interpret any number of behaviors, no matter how well intended, to mean, once again, that we’re not wanted or good enough. We then react to our own internal representation as if it’s true, which determines how we conduct ourselves and interact with others, which is what turns it into an actual reality. So, our life’s story, which is the most basic way that we create how we experience ourselves, evolves naturally out of our own mental and emotional state.

How Our Higher and Lower Nature Blend into One

While some have formed the belief that we choose our parents and the family unit we’re born into, most likely due to the part of us that reincarnates is also the aspect of our self and mind that has the ability to make decisions and willfully act them out as an experience, this is also the part of our mind that functions exclusively out of higher laws of the mind that are universal and all-encompassing in nature. Our genes not only record and make a permanent record of our memories, but they also form our physical characteristics and imbue us with natural behaviors and tendencies derived from our ancestral lineage. When we come into a physical body, we do so based on the memories inherent in our parents and family genes, which gives us correlating physical characteristics and natural tendencies that are then developed through our family dynamics and act to form the basis for re-establishing and setting our life story in motion as a continuation of our past. Everyone in our family shares not only the same basic characteristics but also play a natural role in acting out the same type of dynamic as shared story. We pair up, so to speak, and combine with whatever is like us in terms of our soul memory, which correlates with and acts to enhance what you might think of as our soul’s design, formed as a kind of memory-seed, out of which all our life experiences naturally proliferate in an automatic and spontaneous fashion.

Memory is archetypal and thematic in nature and forms patterns of activity (natural behaviors) developed as the expression of our character and personality. Because we share the same characteristics of our immediate family along with the ancestral memories associated with our bloodline, we naturally develop behavioral dynamics born out of shared character traits and tendencies, which are correlated to our soul’s constitution coming into this realm. This establishes and forms the foundation of the same fundamental patterns of our karma as the ideal character traits and predisposition that form our life-theme, while also setting them in motion as a continuation of our past life experiences, all of which evolve systematically out of an unconscious state.

This dynamic process set in motion through our childhood experiences that form our mental paradigm as our formative conditioning, functions in a completely natural way as a form of automation where we continue to live out of our conditioning without having an awareness that we change it by employing our higher mind. If we don’t wake up and become aware of our higher nature and realize how it is we’re creating our life experiences, we simply live out of the patterns of our conditioning as our karma. By becoming aware of our own internal processes and realizing how it is that we’re creating our own life experiences out of habitual tendencies, we can begin taking control of our own mind and intentionally directing our thoughts to form new ways of perceiving ourselves in relationship with the world around us. Once we begin realizing that we are in essence the one creating how we experience the world around us by how we think, act and interact with it, we begin participating in our own development and begin learning how to tell a new story about ourselves and our life. This is what the saying ‘you reap what you first sow’, is showing us.

Our Soul’s Essence as Our Internal Nature

Everything precedes according to its nature. Our destiny is encoded in our nature as the accumulation and synthesis of all our life experiences that consistently develops our character and the formulation of qualities we actively express in a consistent manner. Each one of us is perfectly designed to fulfill our destiny in a semi-predetermined way. Our karma forms our soul’s memory as a dynamic formula of character traits developed to different degrees, levels, and potencies. Out of this seeded formula of attributes qualities, and traits, our entire way of being systematically emerges as our personality, likes and dislikes, fears and phobias, what we’re interested in and gravitate towards naturally, what kind of ideas we’re attracted to and associate with, the values naturally instilled in us as our conscience, and what it is we can see ourselves being and doing. Our inner nature forms our predisposition and temperament, out of which our feelings, emotions, and thoughts naturally proliferate and formulate into ideas about our self and our life. The nature of our soul’s preexisting memory, formed as the accumulation and translation of all our life experiences up to that point, forms the basis for reestablishing and continuing our ongoing story and narrative we’re always telling ourselves that gives them the meaning they have.

While many people believe meaning is objective and that what something means to us is the same thing it means to everyone, this is not at all true. Meaning is something we all make-up based on how we present things to ourselves and the interpretations we form as a result. Our life story is set in motion when we’re kids and we have an emotionally intense experience of some kind, and while we haven’t developed the ability to reason yet, we try to somehow make sense of it. While we’re kids, we’re still connected to our parents and siblings and haven’t begun forming a separate identity, and so we tend to make everything out to be about us somehow, or our fault. When mommy’s upset and scolding or punishing us, we make it mean we’re bad somehow, and as a result, she doesn’t love or want us anymore. When our parent criticizes us or put us down in some way, we don’t know to question them or realize that’s just how they are and doesn’t have any bearing on us, and instead we form a belief about ourselves based on it. As kids, we tend to believe whatever it is we hear being said about us, which sets what becomes our life theme in motion and that we continue to build out of as we go along.

Meaning and the story we’re always telling ourselves about things is how we take all of what appears as independent and random ideas and mold them all back into a single idea. If you observe your own internal dialogue and the nature of your thoughts, what you’ll soon realize is that you’re always explaining, describing, judging, and validating your beliefs about the way things are, forming an idea of them as an internal representation that represents a particular type of experience, that you then use as the means for anticipating and forming how you actually experience them. We don’t experience things as they truly are apart from us, but by how we remake them by molding them into our ideas about them. The ongoing story we’re always in the process of telling ourselves as our thoughts about things is how we naturally use our conscious mind (the story-teller) to direct our subconscious (the builder) on what to build into our outer environment so we can apprehend it through our ability to perceive it. We then perceive it as a natural part of our outer world where we can form an experience of it, and as we form an experience of it we simultaneously associate and relate to our own experience, and shape ourselves through the experience created as being a natural part of it.

Due to this all occurring in a completely natural and automatic way, we usually fail to realize that we’re not only the one doing it, but also that we have the innate ability to take control of our own internal processes and create new experiences of ourselves. When we remain unaware of how it is we’re creating our own experiences of life, we perceive life as happening ‘to us’ rather than being determined ‘by us’, and we’re shaped by whatever and whomever we live around and associate with. Inner processes are governed and set in motion by how we’re being stimulated by others and world around us that awaken, vibrate, and call forth in us matching qualities and emotions, and we create our internal experience as a reaction that comes in a fluent and automatic way. In the general sense, we’re a product of our environment and we become like whatever it is we associate with, identify with, and live around consistently.

When this all occurs in an unconscious and natural way, our life is predestined as the enactment and continuation of our karma, where we continue to live out of the reality formed by our previous experiences. This principle of accumulated memory forming the basis for all our current experiences, can be understood by recognizing that most of our thoughts that run automatically in a habitual manner come by replaying the experiences of our past over and over, keeping us in the same state of mind we were in when the memory was formed, and that we use as the means of anticipating the future as a continuation or reenactment of the same idea. We anticipate what’s to come and form our expectations out of similar ideas experienced in the past. We are predestined for a certain kind of life based on our karmic seed as our essential design, which transpires thematically and automatically out of a primarily unconscious state, where we lack an awareness of the fact that we’re the one creating and determining all our own thoughts and experiences and the one forming the interpretation of our life events to make them mean what they do.

Redemption and Resolving Karmic Patterns

We’re all born into this life as an archetypal being. What this means is that we are each comprised of multiple attributes and qualities that are developed in different ways and to different extents, that start off in a primarily latent form, only some of which are activated and brought out in us and developed according to our family dynamics and life situation, while others remain inactive and unused inside of us. These latent aspects of our nature represent our potential for new types of growth and provide the key for using in order to transform ourselves by utilizing and thereby developing new parts of ourselves. This process, like all mental processes, comes primarily in two different ways; one as responding to challenging life events and new situations, and one through self-awareness and evaluation where we consciously choose to employ certain qualities as a means of correcting our own weaknesses and character flaws, or to begin stepping into and associating with our higher and more divine nature.

This is the process of transformation and spiritual regeneration undertaken by initiates by going through difficult and challenging situations while remaining fully awake and self-aware throughout the event, and actively choosing how you’re going to be in relation to the event or happening. Where you actively decide whether you’re going to rise to the occasion and use it to grow yourself in new ways or shrink back and allow yourself to be overcome by it. When we learn to look at our life as the ideal means for developing ourselves by how we go through difficult or intense situations, we can use our life experience as the means for becoming more aware of our own internal processes and we can use our will in being able to maneuver them in a more productive and intentional way.

As you’re stimulated by the events of your life, if you turn your attention inward and become more aware of what parts of you come alive in response to it you can begin recognizing how it is you normally function in an unconscious way through a reactive state. As a feeling and emotion come alive inside of you, what you’ll notice is that it’s directly correlated to an aspect of your character. When you remain unaware of what’s happening and why, you resort to habitual tendencies and react in an unconscious and automatic way based on a past memory associated with the same feeling. Once you begin learning how to refrain from reacting while maintaining a calm inner state, and you turn your attention inward and become aware of the internal processes set in motion, you’ll realize that you have a choice as to how you’re going to respond. If you subdue the emotion prompting the immediate reaction you can bring it under your control and remain calm while processing it through your rational mind. When you’re able to look at what’s normally a highly charged emotional situation with a calm, analytical, reasoning mindset, you can see what’s operating at the subtle level and maintain control over your own mind and behavior.

The means for transforming any quality or mental state is by working with its complementary aspect, which acts to counterbalance it. For example, when a pronounced feeling of fear is invoked in you and you remain self-aware, you realize you have a choice as to whether or not you’re going to be a coward, back down, or freak out, or whether you’re going to be courageous, evaluate the situation in terms of what’s making you feel afraid and why, and step boldly into it with a sense of confidence. By doing this anytime you feel afraid or scared by something and consistently choosing to be brave and confident in yourself, you act to gradually transform that quality and tendency in you, while steadily developing the new quality in its place. As you commit to doing this in a consistent manner, you accumulate more and more experiences of yourself as being courageous and confident in your ability to handle whatever it is you’re facing, and after awhile the fear subsides entirely.

As you transmute one aspect of your character by employing the opposite aspect, you transform your nature, which changes how you experience yourself, and it simultaneously changes your life story, which is what forms your destiny and who you become through your life experiences. You literally impose a new direction on your life by becoming a different kind of person. As you change, your life changes in the exact same way. As you form new experiences of yourself you steadily evolve the memory born out of fear and feeling easily overwhelmed by it, and you create new karma as a result. Karma isn’t something that’s imposed on us by an outside force or authority, it’s formed by being in the experience of our own mental creation. Karma comes as the experience our own creation, born out of our actions (both internally and externally), from both the giving and receiving end of the same act or pattern. What we put out in the world as our actions, we experience as happening to us by an outside force when it returns. All energy set in motion by our will moves in a circular, spiraling motion, and always returns to the same place from where it began. Life, which is formed as a life-cycle based on time, is cyclical in nature, and all heavenly bodies return to the same position from which they originally started.

Our Soul is an Archetype

Out of the One come the many, and the many coalesce together to form the One. A single entity divides into diversified aspects of itself as a means of expressing and creating an experience of itself through its own expression, which is then absorbed and synthesized back into the One from which they came at the end of that life-cycle. We come into this life as an archetype (a state formed out of a dynamic formula of attributes, qualities, and characteristics that express naturally in forming our personal myth) which expresses through multiple aspects of itself to produce a wide variety of experiences, most of which seem unrelated to each other and random in nature, and then, as we die, all the memories attained in our life are categorized and synthesized back into a single unit as an archetype. Our archetype forms our soul’s signature frequency as a prototype or etheric template, that’s then cast into another form as it’s essential nature and morality. Our spiritual nature isn’t a single form, it’s what shapes and gives life to all forms. An archetype is a prototype that can take on many different forms while maintaining the same inner nature, and it’s this part of us that’s reincarnated into a new form each time we’re born into a new body and personality.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Metaphysician, and Spiritual Teacher