Burning Off Inherited Karma

How Many Of Your Problems Were Handed Down To You?

When discussing manifestation, we often say that people’s internal states create their external experiences. This inevitably leads to the question:

What about things that happened to me that I never had any prior reference for? Things that happened to me despite my never once thinking about them? Things that happened before I was even capable of conscious thought?

There are two answers we can work with here. The first is a simple one.

You don’t need to have had a conscious thought about something for it to manifest in your experience; if you’re holding a certain feeling, that feeling can find its manifestation in many different forms. I don’t need to think, “I hope my car doesn’t break down,” or have anxiety about my car breaking down for it to break down. It’s enough for me to be in a state where I feel like bad things keep happening to me, or I feel financially insecure, or I just can’t stand the awful commute to the job I hate every day, or… Well, or whatever.

A million different feelings could lead to the same manifestation — similarly, the exact same feeling could have triggered a million different manifestations. How things manifest in my life isn’t how they’ll manifest in yours. The context of your individual life and experiences will dictate what experiences represent different feelings for you.

Notice, too, how in the three examples of feelings that might lead to someone’s car breaking down, the first two follow a similar logic — I feel like bad things are happening or I’m in a bad place in life, then a bad thing happens — but the third one follows a different path — I can’t stand my drive into the job I hate, so something manifests to stop me from having to deal with that drive (at least temporarily).

That’s the real “practice” part of any good conscious creation practice — you have to get clever in seeing how your internal states and external experiences are connected. Things won’t always be perfectly obvious until you start digging. Once you do start digging, though, everything will line up perfectly.

But, like I said, that’s the simple answer. I want to dedicate the majority of this essay to the other answer, though.

Some of the “karma” you’re forced to deal with doesn’t belong to you individually — it’s inherited.

Note that when I talk about karma, I don’t mean karma in a retributive sense. I’m not talking about some system of divine punishment or reward. Karma, to me, is just the expression of unconscious energies — you can read more about my point of view on karma here).

So what do I mean when I say we can “inherit” karma?

Well, when you’re born, you’re born into a particular place and are surrounded by particular people. The people who raise you and the culture in which you’re raised have a tremendous impact on what beliefs/ideas/experiences you will or won’t be exposed to. As a result, a lot of what you end up carrying around in your subconscious mind doesn’t really belong to you. I mean, it does belong to you in the sense that you’re the one who has to carry it around, but it didn’t start with you — it was just passed down.

Here’s what I mean: Say I’m born to parents who were forced to flee their homes as a result of political persecution, and when they arrived in their new country, they were heavily discriminated against.

These experiences will have impacted my parents — they’ll have triggered certain feelings and led to certain beliefs. Maybe they feel looked down on and believe that there’s a limit on how high they can rise in their lives. Maybe they feel like they can overcome anything because they have already overcome such intense struggles. Again, different experiences will trigger different feelings for different people. The point is that my parents’ life experiences will have led them to feel some way.

And then, because my parents feel a certain way based on their experiences (and because they hold certain beliefs now), as I grow up, I’ll be exposed to their feelings and beliefs. Whether I accept the feelings and beliefs of my parents as my own or I rebel against them, I am undeniably influenced by their feelings and beliefs.

Feelings and beliefs will end up in my subconscious mind because of feelings and beliefs that were in my parents’ subconscious minds. And the same holds true for everyone else close to me — my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, friends of my family, etc.

This brings us to our next point and our next example.

If I grow up in a neighborhood full of poverty, violence, drug abuse, crime, etc., then I’ll be forcibly exposed to the unconscious feelings and beliefs of all the people in my community — their sadness, their fear, their anger, and so on.

Places have subconscious minds in the same way as people do. The subconscious mind of a place is a product of the subconscious minds of all the people occupying that place. And, by living in any place, I’m, by default, subject to the subconscious mind of that place.

You might recognize this concept as being very similar to Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the idea that humanity as a whole has a shared unconscious mind that each individual person participates in and is influenced by. I think Jung was absolutely correct in his thinking — humanity as a whole definitely does have a subconscious mind — and here we’re just narrowing things down a bit to a local or community scale.

But here’s the point in all this: As you move forward in your conscious creation journey and are trying to connect the dots between your internal states and external experiences, try to become aware of the amount of inherited karma you’re carrying around with you. Just because a feeling or belief didn’t start with you doesn’t mean you aren’t suffering under the weight of it.

When you’re trying to release limiting feelings and beliefs, you might discover that some of your subconscious limitations you can’t even remember ever having been conscious of in the first place, either because they were instilled in you at such a young age or because they were so overwhelming and unwavering that you literally never even thought about them — you just assumed that the “energy” of your world must be the energy of the entire world, too.

I know, for me, this was really inspiring. I realized that so much of my own subconscious baggage was just the subconscious baggage of the people around me and the place I’m from that I took on without thinking about it. This made it so much easier to let go of things.

This should also breed an immense sense of compassion in you — when you realize that so many of your emotions and beliefs were totally inherited, you see that the same thing is true for everybody. That guy at work who you hate because he’s a complete jerk? He’s probably being weighed down by thousands of pounds of subconscious baggage that he’s not even aware of because it was passed down to him from generations and generations of his family members and all the people (again, spanning back generations) in the place where he’s from. This doesn’t mean I have to condone or turn a blind eye to his bad behavior, and it doesn’t mean a lot of his feelings and beliefs aren’t his personally; it just means I don’t have to get sucked into his baggage or react to it by accumulating more of my own (which is just another way of saying, I don’t have to take on his subconscious baggage as my own). I can be totally free of it.

When you get to this point of understanding, you are in a position not only to let go of your own limiting feelings and beliefs but also to free the entire world from some of its subconscious baggage. When you stop creating karma (i.e., when you stop creating energies that will perpetuate in your subconscious), you also stop feeding into the overall karmic cycle. You stop adding junk to the collective unconscious. And that’ll have as significant an impact on humanity as any act of kindness or charity you could ever do.

As always, good luck.