Countless rebirths lie ahead, both good and bad. The effects of karma (actions) are inevitable, and in previous lifetimes we have accumulated negative karma which will inevitably have its fruition in this or future lives. (His Holiness The Dalai Lama)
First is ignorance - not knowing the truth and not realizing that we do not know. Second is materialism - the belief that there is nothing but the physical. As spiritual beings, we long for the Divine, but we lose contact with this source of truth if we trust only our senses.
We all have unfinished business from past lives, in the unfinished cycle of action-reaction caused by karmic ignorance. We all are given all opportunity to clean up our act in the current life. Life force is arranged in such a way so that we re-encounter the same set of people, the same scene and forces that created the previous action. Only now we are given a chance to make a better choice.
When we inadvertently harm others out of karmic ignorance, the karmic machine is set in motion. The Life force of our current life is so positioned so that the native receives precisely in the same proportion we once gave to others in a past life. The karmic group being the same from life after life, the harming agent is precisely that person we hurt in our previous life.
People reincarnate in karmic groups over and over, specifically to facilitate this karmic payback. Although being in a dysfunctional family, marriage, or workgroup doesn't feel very pleasant, it's actually how we liberate each other. And Shani (Saturn) is the Karma planet that is the exacter of punishment or retribution. The transformation that shani forces upon us is ego-challenging, brutal but purifying. Shani's job is to force us to chip away at our karmic backlog. We all have a certain amount of debt to repay. Shani is the very definition of your karmic resistance: the acceptance and release work you have set for yourself in the current life. Once the native is able to fully comprehend the import of his past life errors that are the cause of pain in the present life, this spiritual attention and awareness is half the battle won. Once we recognize and own up to these errors we CAN overcome our bad karma through a simple release process. Standing outside of the situation in a neutral non-judgmental stance and accepting moral responsibility for the situation helps to create positive karma and release. Making amends to the persons involved may be helpful, but the essential chemical in the release process is simply gratitude. Once ignorance is transformed into wisdom (read awareness) karma is dissolved.
Shani's job is to bring forward people we have inadvertantly harmed in past lives, give them an opportunity to enter into a negative relationship with us, harm us in return and thereby allow us to consciously realize that we attracted those people into our livesin order to learn about compassion. This is a painful and frustrating process but really it is the only way to balance the karmic ledger.
Trust the pace of progress under Shani to be perfectly timed and entirely appropriate to who you are - and who you are becoming - in the big picture. By developing a knowledge of life outside the ego - by learning to think and perceive "outside the box" of material senses - Shani's suffering can be seen scientifically, as a real but impersonal phenomena of karmic clean-up.
Sai Baba of Shirdi spoke eloquently of Rinanubandh (the karmic association which tie two people together over many lifetimes)…Sai Baba said that even though there are those that enjoy a happy life in the current, even so man must think of the next life while performing virtuous deeds in the current life…in our lives my friends and my enemies have to be equally addressed to, as both have been created by me and are mine. Since both of them have been created due to karmic bandhan (Rinanubandh) it is our duty to neutralize the effects of both in this life so that we don't carry forward the seeds of cause-effect to the next life. Herein the karma theory says that a friend returns the pleasurable experience(s) as we had given same or similar pleasurable experiences to him in past life. Similarly an enemy would pay back the unpleasant or painful experience(s) because we had given him same or similar painful experience(s) in the past. When facing a situation of unhappiness created by the enemy we have two options to deal with him-either by going through painful experience(s) we neutralize its effects or by reacting adversely we carry forward a chain of reaction to future lives. Sai Baba has advised his devotees not to react sharply and adversely towards enemies with equal and opposite negativities but to allow negative effects of past karmas reflected through the enemy to neutralize gradually.
Marriage is the key karmic work of our era. Marriage is the core social and emotional bond of adult life. Marriage is a powerful yoga! For most people, ego-attachment to the marriage partner's body/personality is second only to ego-attachment to one's own body/personality. From a karmic point of view, physical separation and divorce is the result of a marriage contract having become “saturated” when this life's karma in the matter of marriage relations is completed, but like most forms of dis-enchantment, the divorce experience can willingly serve the spirit's hunger for karmic rectification. Two people who are divorcing each other are providing each other an important spiritual service, whether they recognize that or not. Material separation through divorce alienates the partners only on the temporary material plane of the current incarnation. It does not alienate the two souls eternally. Actually, the separation will be caused by past-life karma and will be precisely what each soul needs in order to advance its wisdom in the current lifetime.
In fact, there is no success or failure in marriage. People come together for the highest work that their mutual awareness will allow. When the work is completed, they move on. You will reconnect with your current spouse again in your next life. Our reincarnation groups are remarkably small. The karmic group consists of people who batch together for intensive interactive psychic work, over and over again. You can be certain that you have been married to this person before, and quit likely will be again. You have also been their mother and father before, been their child and boss before, their guru and their student before. Interpersonal psycho-emotional work is not any easier or more amusing than the work of physical or social survival. It is just another level of karmic backlog that is sitting there waiting to get worked out, i.e., ignorance transformed into wisdom. Nevertheless it is an earned privilege to reach the level of material luxury, which allows even the possibility of multiple, voluntarily chosen marriage unions.
Some people have chosen fast-track incarnations where they are healing a huge amount of old karmic backlog, by reconnecting with multiple serial monogamous partners. The key indication of success in a multiple-marriage lifetime, is whether one can remain neutral friends with the former spouse. Many people are able to enjoy good relationships with former spouses these days. The social judgment of “failed marriage” runs off them like water off a duck’s back. Many would bow to accepting the conventional social wisdom that it’s better to build character by staying with one difficult partner rather than indulging in multiple sexual attractions. Society very much criticizes change of any kind, particularly changes in caste, level, or power such as change of marital status. Social control judgment will punish you with criticism of “failed marriage”. But the spirit itself has only one simple goal: transformation of ignorance into wisdom.
