"Symphony of Your Karma"

An unusual polyphonic symphony of mankind shown through the prism of the author’s vision keeps echoing and glittering in all colors throughout the pages of the book. This analogy crossed my mind when I was contemplating Rachel Madorsky’s book “Symphony of Your Karma: Healing Destiny of Soul” as I was sitting in a concert hall, listening to a nervous vibrating melody of flamenco, accompanied with an unusual high-pitched voice of a singer and rhythmic-arrhythmic motions of an agile and tense body of a young dancer. However, the author is not just an observer or a record-keeper of these events – she is actively participating in the process of discovering them. She is also helping participants to understand them and derive moral lessons from them.  We see a procession of destinies of people who faced difficult and sometimes seemingly dead-end dilemmas. After trying all the available material means, these people finally came to seek help from a healer − the last hope for help and support.  Why does that happen? Perhaps, even after reaching very high levels of scientific and medical development, the modern society often fails in providing answers for many situations in life, not even taking into account the fundamental questions of the universe. 

Who can answer the questions such as “Why do our lives come out to be that way or another?”, and “Why do some people live long and happy lives, while others have to go through horrible tragedies, often suffering from incurable diseases, and dying prematurely, as it may seem, before they live their lives in full?”, and “Why does that go on like this forever?”  Is there any meaning in all these things, and who is the conductor, the one managing all these events?  Believers find consolation in a Religion, atheists believe in a coincidental nature of phenomena, but none of them are protected from strikes of destiny, regardless of their beliefs.  Indeed, Bulgakovsky-Voland eloquently described these thoughts: “Yes, human being is mortal, but that would not be too bad. The problem is, sometimes human being dies suddenly, and that’s the tricky part!” Why? There is no intelligent answer to this.  Nevertheless, there are some people, such as psychics, healers, magicians, shamans, who believe they have been given special and wonderful abilities.  They believe that they are able to see the essence of things or envision and feel human destinies in their current and past forms.  However, these abilities could frighten people due to their lack of the gifts of clarity and mysticism. 

I won’t elaborate on the philosophical aspects of the concept of karma and their interpretation by the author – let the experts work on that. I am more intrigued by the literary side of the work.  If we leave aside the question whether what is described in the book reflects the reality, we can clearly see a simply outstanding literary work.  The book fits the modern trend of literature perfectly, focusing not only on real events of the material world, but also on the philosophical and moral reflections about life and death (Pelevin, Saramango, R. Bakh, and others).

What is the truth regarding karmic destinies?  Is it possible that what the author and her patients saw are only one of many possible scenarios of karmic events that either happened or did not happen in the past?

In general, who can reliably judge about the nature of creativity and its sources and motives?  Author Richard Bach describes the emotions he felt while writing his famous books “Seagull named Jonathan Livingston” and “Illusion” as follows: “In fact, I do not like writing books.  But sometimes I hear an explosion and someone or something grabs me by the throat and whispers: ‘I won’t let you go until you describe me on paper.’”  There is a rather popular theory of art, which describes that writers, composers, and artists, just like scientists, do not come up with something out of the thin air, but rather discover and show their work to the rest of the world.  Their artwork has already been existent somewhere in the infinite informational reservoirs of the Universe (there is a famous expression that “manuscripts are fireproof”), and others gain access to the reservoir because of their creative efforts and dreams.  Many authors of esoteric literature use similar terminology to describe the origin of their creations – they say they were ordered or allowed to reveal certain secrets of the universe.  For instance, Kabala, that unites experts in Judaic mysticism, incorporates identical ideas. Along the same lines, Littman explains the surge of interest in Kabala by saying that the Highest forces allowed access to previously classified information, in order to speed up positive processes in the world.

Going back to the book at hand, I would like to note that this book is very cinematic, and I would not be surprised to see someone writing a screenplay based on one of the stories mentioned in the book.  The book is filled with vivid visual images and interesting illustrations, which could possibly be included in a movie.  Moreover, the idea of a constant struggle between the Good and the Evil, which is as old as our world, is present throughout the book.  This type of a tension goes along with what Hollywood depicts in so many of its successful movies (e.g. The Matrix). 

Here is an allegory that applies to this book:

The book is like a giant colorful carpet. Certain threads of this carpet suddenly appear amidst unique patterns, and then spread in various directions.  From time to time, those threads appear at unexpected places, intertwining with other lines, until they break up, in order to disappear for good or to re-appear at an unexpected place, amidst a new ornament...

As for the threads of destiny, a long time ago, I was stunned by a statement in Trifonov’s novel “The Other Life” that human destinies resembled threads:  “a human being is a thread that stretches across time, like a fine nerve of history, which could be chipped off and put aside in order to learn many things from it. Human beings will never give in to death, because they have inborn sense of the infinite thread and realize that they are part of that tread.”  Likewise, in the ”Symphony of Your Karma: Healing Destiny of Soul,” one can clearly visualize threads of human actions, which do not disappear at all, and are reflected in future destinies.  That continues for as long as it had been determined for all of us by the highest forces.  Rachel Madorsky writes about these forces in such a descriptive and interesting manner.
  © B. S.