Bad Karma--Surprise--You Won't Gain it Through These 7 Condemned Acts

As you journey through your unique spiritual path, it may be helpful to know which sort of behavior won't come back to haunt you in a future life. Do you want to avoid some of the problems you've experienced in this life? Then you need to always be mindful of your actions.

Through over 25 years of empirical research, our findings regarding negative and positive karma may surprise you. What you may have thought is a negative karma-incurring act actually isn't.

Below we list 7 things that you can do all you want and not gain a shred of harsh karma.

1. Cussing like a sailor. Although it's not recommended around kids, of course, they're just words. Swearing repeatedly, such as while emotionally venting frustration, doesn't make you incur bad karma.

However, directing negative energy at another person as you swear will create negative karma. Intending harm to someone, even if you don't lay a hand on that person, is a spiritual crime. Thoughts really are things, and just as it's possible to feel uplifted by someone sending you love and appreciation, the opposite is true too.

2. Telling a white lie to protect someone. As long as you're not hurting anyone else, including that person you're telling the white life for, zero bad karma is incurred.

3. Unintentionally hurting someone in any way. Although the associated guilt makes it tricky; it's very difficult to avoid negative karma if you can't forgive yourself and let go of the guilt (including subconscious guilt).

4. Drinking alcohol to the point of moderate drunkenness. If you're not bothering anyone around you, neglecting your responsibilities, or putting yourself or others in danger, then you're not incurring negative karma. However, if you drink to excess regularly, you're harming your health and you'll have to balance it in future lives.

Our findings indicate that you carry with you into future lives the health you maintain and nurture in this life.

For example, we both have recurring past life themes of drinking too much. That excess and overall neglect of health, whether it was in a monastery as monks through self-deprivation, sailing the seas with few provisions, or as mercenary soldiers in times of famine, negative health karma has caught up to us.

We're paying the price now with hyper-sensitive digestive tracts and we are forced to take better care of our physical health and maintain a fairly strict diet. If we don't, we feel, sleep, and look terrible. It's no fun at times, but our good health practices in this life are balancing out the previous lifetimes of carelessness.

Treat your body right or pay the price in a future incarnation.

5) Killing a mosquito, fly, wasp, roach, ant, rat, or other living organism, unless you do it in a cruel way to intentionally make it suffer. Likewise, killing the negative bacteria and parasites in your body won't incur negative karma in the least. On the other hand, if you intentionally kill your neighbor's pet, you'll incur negative karma.

6) Exceeding the speed limit, running a red light, or otherwise violating traffic laws. Breaking the law in such a way, by itself won't incur negative karma, but if you put yourself or others at risk, then things could turn disastrous, so it's best to avoid reckless behavior.

7) Killing or hurting someone in self-defense. Look, if someone broke into either of our homes and our lives were at risk, we'd be happy to greet them with a bullet.

This, by itself does not incur negative karma. However, the associated (false) guilt, if you don't let go of it, might bind you to that person for another encounter far in the future.

Trying to always do the right thing can be stressful. Go easy on yourself and accept that you won't indenture yourself to a future lifetime of servitude if you do any of the above things.

Copyright © Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo