March 5, 2008

• Warrior Karma

  I don’t recall when it was that I realized how warrior karma manifests itself in my life.  It was years ago, but not very far back in this lifetime.  I think I was already beginning to catch on to the deeper meaning behind the presence of all the broken and beat-up people in my life, when I came home from a long road trip and found myself married to a walk-in — a weird guy by just about anyone’s definition, and very obviously not the husband who been there when I left on that trip.

  Maybe, for some of you, I need to back up here, define my terms, and explain some things.

  Definitions

  Walk-in:
  “Some of us arrived on the planet in the traditional way of your being the first one to enter and inhabit your body (Born-in).
  Others are not the first person to have lived in that body, the first soul having left, upon a soul agreement, and then another arrived here to continue instead.(Walk In)” [walkinevolution.com]

  Karma:
  Strictly, one’s actions or deeds, and by extension, the effect of past actions on one’s present and future lives.  As I use the word, it does not mean the corrupted, “good karma vs. bad karma,” blend of Eastern philosophy with Western Judeo-Christian moralism and atonement.

  In New Age metaphysics, the most popular kind of walk-in is a discarnate entity, often extra-terrestrial, who decides to incarnate on this planet  on a spiritual mission, and finds someone willing to leave a body and allow the entity to use it.  This is not the kind of walk-in I mean.  My kind of walk-in needs a body, for various personal reasons, and agrees to take over the body of someone who wants out of this life, again for various reasons.  Body “donors” sometimes want out of this life to accompany a loved one who has died, but are usually despairing, and often suicidal.

  That approximately describes Greyfox’s state of mind when he found himself off the utility grid in a harsh environment without the material security of a regular paycheck for the first time in his adult life.  He had lived all his life in the same geographical area until he chucked it all and followed me to Alaska.  Despite all my best efforts to inform him, he didn’t know what he was getting into, largely because he just couldn’t believe what I told him.  He thought I was exaggerating.  He says that everyone he had ever known was a liar, so he wasn’t at all prepared for me.

  For him this move was a desperate grab for some kind of lifesaver.  His addictions to alcohol, prescription painkillers, anti-anxiety medications and various illicit drugs, had him scared.  One of the pivotal events for him was the day he looked out his window and saw that his SUV wasn’t in his parking space.  When he called the cops to report it stolen, they told him it could be found in the parking lot of a local restaurant, from which he had called them (the police) the night before, asking for a ride home because he was too drunk to drive.  They’d advised him to call a cab.  He remembered none of that.

  As any savvy addict knows, the geographical cure doesn’t work.  Wherever you go, there you are.  After a couple of years of his addictions and personality disorders, I asked him to leave said he had to go.  He agreed and then reneged, so I took a vacation to get away from him.  While I was on the road, he went on a massive binge that climaxed when he did a sloppy job tightening a propane fitting in the house, ignited the gas leak, blew out some windows (in the middle of an Alaskan winter), burned up some of my furnishings and papers, and singed himself putting out the fire.  He was incommunicado for a while, and when next I talked to him, he was a different guy.

  It wasn’t until after I got home that the magnitude of the change was apparent.  He really was a different guy.  Most people who become walk-ins just go on with their lives, understanding on some level that they have experienced some kind of transformation, but without connection to or memory of the life the walk-in had before the shift.  The walk-in leaves the former life and simply becomes the person into whom he or she has moved.  But most people aren’t shamans, aren’t married to curious, inquisitive psychics, and don’t have the sort of connections we have.

  We now know much of the life history of “Mort,” the guy who took over when the old Greyfox decided that his life wasn’t worth living.  We know when he was born (20 years before Greyfox had been), his profession (warrior), and his reason for wanting a new body (quadriplegia).  The first Greyfox had warrior karma:  he and I had been wandering warrior monks in ancient China, and had been buddies in the Roman Legions.  But Mort’s warrior karma dwarfs the old Greyfox’s.  It was of more recent vintage, and it pops up occasionally when, out of nowhere, Greyfox (who had no military service in this lifetime) growls out an enthusiastic, “Semper Fi!” or talks about battle memories and experiences that aren’t exactly his own.

  I mentioned above, “all the broken and beat-up people in my life.”  Virtually all of those to whom I have the closest bonds in this life, my family, friends and close associates, are physically injured, scarred, and/or maimed.  Some of them were injured in military service in this lifetime, but most of them, like myself, have spent this life as civilians.  My father, and my son Doug’s father, both had hearing loss and other scars from explosive injuries.  The original Greyfox had no battlefield injuries, but he’d gotten some dings during his life before I met him, and even more since then.

  Another thing most of us have in common is weapons.  We’re interested in them, comfortable around them, proficient in their use and often without even trying, a “natural talent”.  More than once, some new girly-girl acquaintance and I have gotten some good laughs when we discovered our mutual interest in guns, or in medieval arms and armor, or in martial arts.  Knowing us, no one would expect it.  I have raised eyebrows on several occasions when I’d throw a knife or axe and stick it, or pick up a rifle and group a nice tight cluster of shots in the middle of the target.  I’ve always thought of target practice as a waste of ammo.  I just point and shoot, and usually it works for me if I can see what I’m shooting at.  I do remember, in a former life, as a boy, shooting at targets.  I did it then, so I don’t need to do it now.

  On the surface, given the facts of this lifetime, this warrior thing doesn’t make much sense.  I’m a peacenik and I don’t tend to hang around with hawkish types.  Even the guys I know who went to war, most of them did it reluctantly, drafted or driven to it by economic need.  Maybe on the surface, a warrior who loves peace doesn’t make sense, so look a little deeper.  One thing I’ve noticed in this lifetime:  some of the staunchest anti-war activists are old soldiers who have experienced the horrors firsthand. 

  I have come to understand that I’m an old soul, and my closest associates in this life are also old souls.  We’ve lived in various cultures all over the planet through many centuries.  We’ve come together in various combinations here and there, now and then.  Most of those times and places there were wars going on.  When was there ever a time on this planet without war?

  When we come together in this lifetime, sometimes we have some interpersonal crap to work out, but usually we just have this strong sense that we have things in common, that we are part of something.  That “something” is called a soul group.  Soul groups often include many generations of one family, or people whose lives and deaths have been connected in some other way.  The bond is a karmic effect.  The cause was shared experience, personal connections or interactions, debts incurred, unfinished business left hanging at the end of a life.  That’s karma, action and deeds, the cause.  When those actions and deeds are violent, the karmic effects can be physically painful and crippling.  So we are a gimpy and beat-up bunch, but we’ve got our camaraderie and our combat skills to help compensate for that.
   

  • 7:30 pm
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