Years ago I was a 100% fucking scumbag, I ran with an ugly crowd and I did some things that are just plain mean and evil; now I wasn’t a rapist or a pedo, but I smoked a lot of drugs and took whatever I wanted, and I didn’t give a shit who got hurt! Maybe is was my younger self, trying to be a hardass or maybe it was just the drugs talking, I don’t know. What I do know that almost twenty-five years later I find myself asking the question; is my karma is so fucked up that I will never get my inner life, my soul, back into balance, or will my life continue to be a spiritual train wreck until I have finished paying some sort of karmic price?
Long before I stopped running the streets like a fucking loser, I knew deep inside that I didn’t like who I was.I didn’t like the people I ran with, I didn’t like robbing and stealing, I didn’t like living on drugs to wake up or go to sleep, and most of all I didn’t like the person who I had become.
I don’t know how an intelligent college graduate goes from being a regular kind of person into a stereotypical street thug almost overnight, maybe it was the drugs that jacked my body and soul and left me without a shred of decency. I do know it took years to finally hit rock bottom and ask for help, and even after I sought help and learned what the solution to begin correcting my life was, it would be roughly 10 more years of doing drugs while I walked a razor’s edge between total insanity and death before I surrendered to win!
Now close to twenty-five years later, I don’t use drugs anymore, I don’t steal or commit crimes, but somehow my life isn’t as I thought it would be. There is a part of me that wonders if someone like me could actually have been so damn ugly in life to totally kill their karma, or damage it so bad that there can never be any spiritual recovery, or could it be that the price to my karmic redemption is so high that it can never be paid back in one lifetime?
Even after all of these years I find that almost everything I do or attempted to do ends in some sort of failure of some kind. I found myself asking these questions when I was homeless for close to two years. While I was in Denver I really began to question my past and if it had some bearing on why I ended up homeless and how every attempt to get back on my feet failed. I was in this homeless shelter and overheard a conversion between this Hindu Monk and another homeless man who was staying in the shelter with me, and the Monk had said something to the effect that even though God will never give up on a person, it may require many lifetimes to fully repay all of his spiritual debts before any sort of relief could be realized. I remember sighing softly to myself as I had heard that.
I knew deep inside that I had a long hard road ahead of me. While I was involved with the 12 step group, part of the solution or program for recovery requires a kind of restitution, and doing the footwork to truly attempt to “clean” my side of the street. I had followed this step closely with a sponsor, or of you will, a spiritual advisor of sorts. It took me a long time to work this particular step, but when I was done, and even while I was actually “working” this step I had felt a release. Maybe it was a release of guilt or a kind of freedom, still this feeling was deep and lasting, and it wasn’t until I had overheard that Hindu Monk that I began to question my spiritual fitness.
I am not a religious man, but I do believe in a power greater than myself, and while I may be totally off track, or even mistaken, still I truly believe there is a spiritual balance of all things, and there is a spiritual price that must be paid for all of our transgressions. This price could be the karmic balance that exacts spiritual revenge for our wrong doings. I do not know, but thinking about this and how it may apply to my life has me watching how I conduct myself because I don’t want to find myself on the wrong side of the karmic balance that rules the world, as I am sure you have heard that old expression: What comes around, goes around?
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