No matter what you choose to call it, karma exists. It's never wrong and it never misses. There is no avoiding it. What goes around never fails to come around and you will always reap what you sow.
I decided to write about this first because, although the things I want to talk about don't necessarily fall into a nice, neat linear order, intention of some sort is underlying every action so that has to be right before anything else can be.
Personally, I don't think karma is a mysterious unknowable; I think it's physics. Invisible physics, unquantifiable in a laboratory setting, but physics nonetheless. Whatever energy you put into the world comes back to you and it comes back in a magnified form. It goes out, it gets big, it comes back. Emotion is a form of energy that you put out into the world all day, every day. All emotion falls under one of two headings: Love or Fear, positive or negative.
Every positive emotion, from gratitude to joy, is a form of love. Every negative emotion, from jealousy to hatred, is a form of fear. Fear isn't all bad; it serves a purpose that aids our survival and our learning. It can get seriously out of control, though, and needs conscious management.
The way that energy manifests itself into physical form, and therefore becomes stronger, is through physical action. Imagine that you're feeling grateful for your family. That love radiates from you and they all feel it as a sense of well-being, regardless of distance or conscious awareness. Because of the way you're feeling, you might be inspired to do some things around the house, to make it nicer for them, and maybe cook a special meal. By taking actions that stem from your loving feelings, you manifest that loving energy into a clean house and a nice dinner... love in tangible form. Regardless of whether you say anything about your feelings, the nice meal and pleasant atmosphere make your family feel loved, filling their emotional reservoirs and soothing anxiety and other negative emotions they might have built up throughout the day. They, in turn, naturally feel more loving toward others and pass that energy along in every way from petting the cat to smiling at strangers, who then feel better about themselves, and so on. In this way, your loving energy travels from person to person, growing exponentially. That's how it gets bigger. The way it gets back to you has to do with like attracting like... but more about that in a moment.
A nice meal isn't, by definition, a manifestation of love... though one would hope it is more often than not. *s* If you decided to have a dinner party and invited someone you felt jealous of or threatened by and you cooked a lavish meal for the purpose of showing up that person and proving you were better... well, that meal is not a manifestation of love. Rather, it's a manifestation of fear. No one will have a sense of well-being from it and there might well be a choking incident or at least some indigestion afterward. ~dry smile~ Harboring such negativity is bad enough but taking action on it and thereby manifesting it in reality ensures that, sooner or later, it's going to come back around to bite you and it'll be a lot bigger when it does.
You're probably wondering what all this has to do with business. If your business is founded in negativity, it cannot become a positive force in your life. All that negativity will come around and bite you, which might well prompt you to learn some things and avoid the same mistake next time, but your business will suffer while you learn that lesson... so better to learn it first and spare yourself starting over. *s* By founded in negativity, what I mean is that neither the vision that you begin your business with, nor the way you conduct your business, can be based on any negative emotion. If you're trying to prove something, to yourself or someone else, fear of failure will cloud everything you do. If your sales practices are in any way deceptive, if you lie, cheat or steal in any way at all, however small and unlikely to be noticed, guilt -- which is just another form of fear -- will dog your every step, no matter how you rationalize it to yourself. That negativity will crush your business in the end. Sometimes a person will have success initially, despite lots of negative intention. Personally, I think it's the universe's way of giving them farther to fall.
If, on the other hand, you operate with the best of intentions in all things large and small, are scrupulously honest and above board in every way, deliver more than you promise, keep the highest standards of quality in everything you do, treat kindly even those who are unkind to you, and help others when you can, the universe will smile on you and aid you in all that you do. *s* Positive energy attracts positive energy. The more you put into the world, the more the world gives back to you.
I believe that there are people so evolved and enlightened that they can turn away negativity before they even have to feel it. I'm certainly not there yet, I definitely feel it. But I've learned not to act on it, thereby depriving it of physical form, and the results of just that much evolution have been amazing. When you consciously choose to turn your attention away from negative energy, you starve it out. When you consciously choose to focus on positive energy with good intentions, you feed it and make it grow bigger. You attract more and more of what you focus on and the result is that you become... lucky. *s*
