Spiritualizing the Body
Many people today who have some knowledge concerning the identity of the soul and the passage of human beings through multiple lifetimes of experience, also have an understanding that ‘karma’ is what we carry from one lifetime to another as unhealed portions of ourselves.
Sometimes these unhealed portions show up in emotional difficulties or mental preoccupations. Often, they show up in the way our external life flows or does not flow – the limitations, tragedies, crises, and successes that we have that seem to be part of a plan that our conscious self had no say in making, but that another part of us may have.
When ‘karma’ operates in a positive way, we feel glad about it and don’t feel a need to look into the matter further. However, when ‘karma’ brings to us difficulties or misfortune, we wonder what we ‘did to deserve it.’ Though this thought can be pondered with various degrees of seriousness, it often floats across the mind as a possible explanation for what is.
What we can know about the body and about change is that the healing of karma in the present changes the negative conditions that we have inherited from the past. But what, exactly, does this involve?
Often, it involves a change in attitudes, judgments, resentments, and wrong-thinking that we must give up in relation to others or ourselves. Yet, sometimes this choice is not clear, and it is difficult to know what it is that must be changed in order to make life work better. Sometimes, no obvious emotion or attitude seems to relate to what is happening to us.
A not-so-obvious explanation for this is that the healing of karmic influences cannot solely take place on the level of the mind or