If both are true, how do they go together? Is it that sometimes a crisis arises from past karma and, at other times, it is not due to karma but due to evolutionary pressure?
Karma itself is an evolutionary mechanism and not a system of reward and punishment. Crisis is always essentially an inner event. It may or may not be triggered by outer circumstances. However when our life is aligned to the Divine Purpose within us then we are able to navigate through outer events and circumstances with relative ease and confidence. When we deviate from the truth of our being due to desires and ambitions or the promptings of the ego then we inwardly become surrounded by anxiety and depression even when outer circumstances are quite good. The crisis therefore is an inner crisis and not the different situations and circumstances that come as challenges and opportunities in everybody’s life. Grace reorients us, puts us back on the right track by an inner change. The circumstances change later, sometimes much later. But the Grace shifts our consciousness within and puts us on the road we were meant to be. It places us in relation with things and people that are meant to help us in this direction.
Annuling karma means releasing us from the entangled knots of our nature that tie us hand and feet, sometimes neck deep in the mud and mire of ignorance. It does not mean that the circumstances of life become easy or the situations disappear. They may or may not. But there is a definite inner change so that we are freed from all anxieties and better equipped to understand and deal with it. Karma is an inner law that affects our inner psychological state. It has very little to do with outer situations that follow their own logic and have only a partial bearing upon karma.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
