Part 5 (1/2)
I shook hands with him and introduced myself. At first, I felt a slight downturn in my energy, but the more he talked enthusiastically about how beautiful everything was in the canyon, the more I began to think he was okay.
At one point, I even asked him if he knew anything about the Doc.u.ment, but he said he wasn't aware of it. After we talked a bit more about Sedona, he said, ”I see you have a knife. I wonder if I could borrow it for a few minutes.” He was pointing toward my belt at my prized eight-inch hunting knife that I always carried in the woods.
”We're setting up camp over there,” he continued, ”and I just need it for a few minutes to cut some rope.”
I looked through some mesquite and saw two men and a woman in that direction putting up a tent. Figuring he would be close where I could observe him, I took off the knife and gave it to him in the scabbard-then watched as he walked back and began working with the two people.
A fresh breeze was blowing up, and I took a breath. The morning rain had cleared and the sun was beaming down. Slowly, I felt myself recovering my lost energy and noticed how beautiful this particular area was. Small pine trees and junipers dotted the entire canyon floor.
Just then Wil came back and sat down beside me.
”No one seems to know what the chopper is doing,” he said. ”I kept my distance from it, but I could see it was empty. And it's definitely military.”
He was sitting on his pack. ”Let's just wait here for a while.”
I smiled. ”You could tell me about the next spiritual law.”
As Wil formulated a sentence, I again looked over toward the campsite where the man had been working, only to find that he was nowhere to be seen. I jumped up and ran to the campsite and asked the couple where he was. They told me they didn't know, that he wasn't really part of their party.
”He just came up to talk,” the woman said. ”He offered to go borrow a knife for us, to help us cut some rope. He seemed to be a little down on his luck.”
I was about to go look for him when Wil came up, and I quickly filled him in.
”He stole your knife?” Wil remarked, a look of wonder and amazement on his face, as if something important had happened. I brushed it off and proceeded to look all around the area. There was no sign of him anywhere. After about twenty minutes, I returned to where the packs were, finding Wil sitting patiently, waiting for me.
”I've had that knife a long time,” I said, sitting down next to him.
”Well,” Wil offered, trying not to grin, ”you wanted to see how all this would play out.”
I was in no mood for a.n.a.lysis. I just wanted my knife back, but Wil was persistent. ”Right before you saw the guy was gone, didn't you ask me what the next law was?”
I remained silent, still sulking.
”Well,” he continued, ”it's the Law of Karma.”
It was past noon, and Wil had left again, telling me he was going to look for food. For a long time I just sat around, wondering what kind of purification was going on here in this canyon. Then, about the time I was ready to go look for him, I saw Wil coming back. He sat down and looked over at me.
”Find some food?” I asked.
”Yeah, a little bit. I had lunch with some people I met. I wanted to bring you some but there wasn't enough.”
I just looked at him.
”Why shouldn't I find food?” he responded. ”I have good Karma!” He was using an overly dramatic tone to his voice, then burst into laughter, barely able to control himself.
As usual with Wil, his humor was so contagious I couldn't help but laugh, too.
”Okay,” I said. ”What did the Hopi tell you about Karma?”
Instantly, he was serious. ”The Doc.u.ment says that it's real, and in our time, it responds to our actions more quickly than ever before.”
”So I'm the poster child for it.”
”Well, take a look at what has happened. You tried to steal food from someone, and that created a karmic response from the Universe that resulted in some guy stealing your knife.”
I began resisting again. ”What about him? Maybe he's just a serial thief.”
”Maybe, or maybe he's a nice guy and he decided to move up the trail somewhere or go back to town, and he just forgot to give back your knife. Either way, you have to ask why this happened to you right now, just when we're talking about all this and right after you tried to steal from someone.”
”Wait a minute. Stop saying that. I wasn't trying to steal from anyone.”
”No? Didn't you tell a lie in order to try to manipulate someone out of his food? Trying to do it and doing it is the same thing karmically.”
”The Doc.u.ment says that?”
He nodded and then stared at me for a long time.
”Look,” he finally added. ”These laws seem hard to believe because we've all been trained to think the Universe only has physical laws. And the reason people are slow to put this together is that we all shade the truth at times, especially in business, or to save face, and we all have things happen to us that are bad. So there seems to be no relations.h.i.+p between the two. We think it doesn't matter if we lie a little bit, because bad things happen to everyone anyway.”
He looked at me hard. ”But according to the Doc.u.ment, that isn't true, and anyone can prove it to himself by just being observant. Because Karma is speeding up, the consequences from an untruthful manipulation come back very quickly.”
”But why is it speeding up?”
He stopped. ”I don't know. I asked the Hopis the same question, but they said the Doc.u.ment didn't say. They only hinted it may be part of the energy that the Calendar is pointing to.”
”You mean the Mayan Calendar? What do the Hopi know of that?”
”The cla.s.sical Maya were Native Americans, too, you know.”
”Anyway,” Wil continued, ”prove it to yourself. The Doc.u.ment says that when enough of us realize this is the way Karma works, it's going to lead to a new era of Integrity to replace the corruption we have now.
”And there's more. It's important to see that the Law of Karma is designed not for punishment, but to affect a positive correction. It apparently works this way: the Universe is set up spiritually to support and encourage our spiritual growth. If you center yourself in truth, then your Synchronicity will soar. If you partic.i.p.ate in untruth, then you draw into your life a person who does the same thing to you, again not as punishment but to show you how it feels, so you can move back toward truth.
”What happens,” I asked, ”if we don't get the message?”
”The Doc.u.ment says the response of Karma gets more extreme in an effort to get our attention, something, again, that we can also prove to ourselves at this moment in history. All we have to do is pay attention to what happens in relation to our own behavior.”
”Okay, what if one is randomly selected and murdered by a serial killer? Is that payback for something we did earlier?”
”No. Remember, Karma has nothing to do with payback. It reflects back to you what you're doing. If you are an armed robber, for instance, you are standing for the untruth that says that behavior is okay. It's the same as a lie or deception to get the money, only worse. And you will have money taken from you to show you how it feels, so you can change. The problem is that some people just use the Karma as an excuse to keep the same behavior going, thinking everyone is doing it to me, why shouldn't I do it to them as well? They're missing the fact that they are being shown something so they can change.
”When someone becomes the victim of a serial killer, unless the person is a serial killer himself, it's a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's the result of chance, not Karma, and happens because of the current state of the world's imperfection. We know psychologically and genetically what's going on with serial killers, from studies of childhood trauma and genetics. In the ideal, someone would have noticed these factors and intervened with the person early, so he wouldn't have been able to hurt anyone. Unfortunately, we just aren't enlightened enough to inst.i.tute those kinds of interventions yet. Hopefully, one day we will be.”
”I guess, until then, we have to hope we're lucky.”
”Yeah, at least until we can move through the Integrations enough to realize we can be 'protected.'”