John Lennon’s come-on-everybody-wake-up anthem, Instant Karma, is one of my favorite songs of all time.
I love the lyrics, the melody, the chord progression, everything about it. And it’s a real belter – a song that makes me want to sing along at the top of my lungs.
The reminder to snap out of it and realize where we are, what we’re doing, and what we’re creating with our every breath, is so precious.
Wake Up, Wake Up, Wherever You Are!
He sings:
Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead
Startling. But… yeah, right? Good point. Are we using our time well? Every precious moment of our precious birth?
What in the world you thinking of
Laughing in the face of love?
What on earth you trying to do?
It’s up to you. Yeah you!
It’s up to us. To me, to you. As the poet June Jordon says, we’re the one’s we’ve been waiting for.
What Will It Take?
What will it take for us to take charge of our own lives more fully? To understand that no one else but us creates our lives for us?
Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors generate the world we live in. If we do not choose to remember our authorship in all of these, we yield our time.
If we do not claim our role in creating reality, the ruthless help themselves to our world-creating powers. The world we live in today reflects what humanity at large has either consciously created or unconsciously allowed to be created using our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Can we tolerate that? Can we live with what we have authored into being?
One Human Race
Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna look you right in the face
Better get yourself together darling
Join the human race.
An injunction to join together. Look past our differences, the petty and the paltry, and instead unite.
What unites us is our membership in the tribe of humanity. As just-like-me contemplation reminds us, we are structurally the same on the inside, though our contents be different.
Just like me, all humans have bodies.
Just like me, all humans have feelings and thoughts.
Just like me, all humans experience physical and emotional pain.
Just like me, all humans die.
The Star You Are
Lennon sings on:
How in the world are you gonna see?
Laughing at fools like me
Who do you think you are?
A superstar?
Well, right you are!
We’ve been shamed if we thought ourselves too shiny, too powerful. Here Lennon shames us in reverse. We are superstars, truly. Each one of us is a sun, if not a universe in our own right, a child of the divine. Why do we behave as less?
Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Well we all shine on
Everyone come on!
Yes, we do. Whether we realize it or not, whether we consciously choose what lights, sounds, and vibrations we radiate out to others, or whether we are lost in reflections of another’s light, spending our lives reacting to the moves of others.
The Law of Karma: What We Give, We Receive
Lennon’s song is often interpreted as being about karma in the negative sense, as in, if we don’t watch out and take care, our miscreations fire back upon us.
The reverse is also true: we can choose to send out good, and each wavelet of goodness we ripple out also returns to us manifold.
How might we use our last remaining time in a precious, world-creating human embodiment for sending good out to all, knowing the good we do others is good to ourselves as well?
I Am You, You Are Me
The golden rule states: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The golden rule is nothing more than understanding that self is one with others, and when we do unto others, we are also doing unto ourselves.
For those of us with low self-esteem, sometimes we need the reminder that we have to be kind and loving also to ourselves or else risk harming another.
It works either way – what we do to the self, we do to others. What we do to others, we do to the self. Any equation which balances one over the other will create imbalances that ripple back to us.
Create Some Instant Karma – In a Good Way
Here’s an exercise for creating some Instant good Karma, recalling that creating good for others IS the same thing as creating good for you. May it be a fun exercise, connecting you with your inherent human oneness.
Part One of the Golden Rule: How You Like to Be Treated
How do we like to be treated? How would we have people do unto us?
Write down at least 12 statements, identifying smaller or bigger things.
- I love it when people listen to me with love, patience, and compassion
- I love it when people tell me about things from their day that made them laugh, so I can laugh too
- I love it when people bring me a cup of coffee
- I love it when…
Step Two of the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others
Choose one thing from your list, and do it unto someone. For example, if you like it when people bring you coffee, do that for someone today as a surprise.
As you do it, do it knowing that you are giving love to the other and giving love to yourself at the same time.
This is powerful karma, friend. And it’s gonna get you!
