Karma is what you’re born with, and this includes environment. How you play it is dharma. Dharma is the integrity with which you face karma, and how this works out is what life is all about.
Dharma is to be true to your karma: the sum total of all past thought, word and deed, as represented by past lives. You cannot help but be defined by the past and its consolidation in the present, but how you relate to it, how you honor it, is everything. Attitude is everything.
Karma renews itself endlessly, like a snake perpetually shedding its skin. Each moment is the expression of past karma and the creation of future karma. And what you pack into the suitcase of this life, is what you live out of the next life. Only the Now is creative. The past is dead and only becomes alive in the Now. Likewise, the future is predicated on the Now. Only the Now exists. Only attitude exists.
The Now is creative because it alone can witness, because it alone can be detached from the corpse of the past and its reanimation in the future. Only the Now is alive.
All this is why Remembrance is the key. What you remember in the Now transmutes the past to become the future, in the Now. Remembrance of the beloved manifests the beloved, and is the path to be with him or her forever, in the Now.
