Collective karma

Thank you, Emmy. It's wonderful to be in conversation with you.

One change in my thinking since writing my first book, "Lifecycles," is my deeper appreciation of the synergy between individual karma and collective karma. In the West, we tend to personalize karma, seeing it as the story of the individual soul maturing over lifetimes. I think our species evolves, pulsing every 100 years in...

I began to have experiences at this level of reincarnation as a collective process. I witnessed the entire planet and species reincarnating in a pulse that moved through history. I had written my first book on reincarnation, where I construed reincarnation classically as the soul's journey toward enlightenment, lifetime by lifetime, making progress and...

Simply as cause and effect. Karma, vipaka, cause and effect. The universe pulses with cause and effect at all levels. Here, we're talking about a substrate of cause and effect, the causes set in motion by the exercise of our capacity to choose. We make choices, we inherit the consequences of those choices. In...

Well, you're asking a lot because the universe is vast, and its mind has many complex, interwoven layers. It's all alive and intelligent, and everywhere we look, we encounter this intelligence. When you dig into the universe's mind, you find layers of intelligence. I experienced the biosphere's intelligence, the incarnational rhythms of the planet....

You're asking a lot, because the universe is so vast, and the mind of the universe has so many layers to it, which are all complexly interwoven. It's all alive, and it's all intelligent. Everywhere we dig into the universe, we discover aliveness and intelligence. We can't dig in anywhere and not encounter this...

At a lower subtle level, also at the archetypal level, I entered what you might think of as a union level of consciousness, where I had repeated experiences of the universe, of this mind of our species, operating as a single whole, one mind of the entire species. I was given repeated lessons in...

I began to experience reincarnation as a collective process, experiencing the species as a self-evolving organism through all individual lives. This understanding dissolved the boundary between personal and collective karma, showing their deep interconnection. I wrote "Dark Night, Early Dawn" to answer why my suffering went so deep and long: because at this consciousness...

Yes, I completely agree. This happens in a psychedelic session too. I affirm what you're saying about the weight practitioners experience. It's past lives' karma and collective karma. Great beings have taken on responsibility for humanity, engaging darkness from our collective history. We have to move quickly through this transformation, no getting stuck in...

It's a long time, but it’s speeding up. Our species’ collective karma is accelerating. We've created an ego-built world, deeply imbalanced, leading to radical breakdown. This evolutionary pivot means we cannot continue with the same psychological basis of egoic consciousness. Historical projections underestimate how quickly this could happen. In "The Birth of the Future...

I should mention here that one of the things that opened up at this level is that I began to experience reincarnation as a collective phenomenon previously. For those of you who know my book on reincarnation life cycles, the story of the soul I tell is one of our individual evolution over many...

I began to have experiences of reincarnation as a collective phenomenon. I'd previously written a book on reincarnation, envisioning it as an individual soul story: learning, hopefully making progress, reborn, and our individual choices leading to an improving destiny as our soul matures. But now, I began to experience the entire planet as a...