Karmic Bonds, Are They Real?
People Being Emotional Mirrors
Lately, I went through a personal cycle that brought some heart changing internal realizations. First one happened at the day of Christmas, second one happened at the day of Easter. One thing led to another and I found myself thinking about faith in general.
Something in me shifted deeply within the timeframe Jesus born and Jesus resurrected. Whether you believe in Jesus or not, these are times when the collective energy is strong. Something in the air forced me to breakup with a past version of myself. It’s a strange place to be, like I am changing skin. I reinvented myself more than once through changing careers, cities, countries but this one is different. This time I am changing my heart and its beliefs.
Usually these kind of changes are triggered when we are forced to see ourselves by other people acting as emotional mirrors. People who are causing strong emotional reactions need our careful attention. There is a part of ourselves that we refuse to see is revealed through the other person. Can we dare looking at that mirror to learn the lesson or not? Can we confront our shadows to create abundance in our lives or keep running in circles looking the other way? What if the longing for an external connection to someone or something is trying to point out we lost faith in our own heart?
We don’t feel longing from a connected place, if there is longing there is a disconnect.
The Social in Personal
I will move from psychology to sociology to get deeper in this. What makes Emile Durkheim the father of sociology is mostly his work on faith, and survival. He explored religion, in different times, in different places, amongst completely different cultural settings. The universal and timeless pattern was this: majority of the human population on earth, in all times, had the internal urge to believe. In other words what he found out is that having faith is a psychological need, it gives you a sense of safety so that you can have a feeling of being connected. We need to feel connected in order to survive, that’s our wiring. It’s like we need to eat enough protein to keep our metabolisms functioning.
Remembering Durkheim’s work forced me to question what causes us to lose the faith that helps us to survive. Is it something happened to us, or can it be coming from an inherited place? Or is it the need to be “modern”? As I begin to settle more in Lisbon, I’m noticing the tension that comes from being a “modern” Turkish is quite similar to the Portuguese tension of not being “traditional”. How much of our disbeliefs comes from social conditioning or inherited trauma, rather than ourselves? It’s a big question to sit with.
Hearts with Intelligence
Like many of you, I am spending some time with ChatGPT as well. It’s changing my interactions, it’s changing my vocabulary, it’s changing my thinking. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. We all put some fear and faith in the future of artificial intelligence, but to what extent we need that kind of intelligence in our everyday lives? How does it makes us feel, when someone replies with ChatGPT instead of themselves in an intimate conversation because they don’t know how to handle their own emotions? Hyper-intelligent machines, figuring things out with no heart, how far they can get in being an advanced form of existence? Can a heart with “artificial intelligence” create more love, more financial security or more emotional safety?
Hearts, the center of our souls, have their own wisdom. Can we have faith in our heart’s desires, even if they might be misleading us temporarily in the wrong direction possibly to reveal something? If our hearts get deceived or betrayed, should we close them off or open up more to protect ourselves? In Durkheim’s thinking, having faith in higher forces is not irrational. On the contrary, it makes more sense to “believe” as a protective psychological mechanism. It gives you mental flexibility to stay sane, when you attribute some power to the mystical and divine beyond your own perception of life. Can we have faith in our own hearts functioning as a connector between us and what’s higher than us?
Your Heart and Your Karma
After such a long introduction, I will finally come to the main subject of this article: karmic bonds. Spiritual terminology is speaking of soul contracts and fated encounters. Psychology and neuroscience is researching on attachment patterns, and trauma bonding. There are newly emerging fields like epigenetics and intergenerational trauma. And there is transpersonal psychology interested in transcendent human experiences, while its scientific relevancy is being questioned. Safe to say there are a lot of scientists exploring the same thing under different labels, like Durkheim exploring religion and religious practices of several tribes from a rational perspective. Karmic bonds are not scientifically proven and considered metaphysical, but you know they exist when you experience them. It’s an invitation to open up and expand, and an opportunity the release the fears that are holding you back in life.
Something in this resonated?