How about this:

Before incarnating, you work with the Planners and if you don't devise a lifeplan for the next incarnation, you are given one that they see you need. You do not have to accept it --

I like the idea of life-planning being a give-and-take, a having to choose at least partly from what's available or suggested to you, like buying a used car.  Maybe there are Future Lives Salesmen.

Who's to say that man-made things haven't been exported to the non-physical realms, though?  Perhaps the concept of "contract" didn't exist before Earth, but after the concept was invented, out-of-body beings could've began using it thinking it a novel idea. 

Jazz music might've never existed before twentieth century Earth, but how do we know it isn't now wildly popular in a far astral backwater?
Astral beings or ETs could be copying Earth culture--and conceptualizations--all over the place.  I mean, what if humanity's extreme fixation upon Christ has conjured a convincing thoughtform of Christ in the astral realms that other beings worship--never guessing that their god is a lifeless hologram?

Simply because a being doesn't have a body doesn't mean that they have perfect knowledge or exude purity or are above concepts like contracts.
And not every non-physical being is more enlightened than a human being.

How about this:

Before incarnating, you work with the Planners and if you don't devise a lifeplan for the next incarnation, you are given one that they see you need. You do not have to accept it --that would violate free will (where have I heard that before?) Normally, each soul works out a script with certain elements in it, 'lessons' tests to be met -- not necessarily what is called 'karma'.

For example, if you killed some one in a 'past lifetime' with a knife, you do not have to be knifed in any subsequent lifetime... what IS required is that you meet the situation again (the one that caused you to go beserk and knife someone) and handle it better. So called 'karma' is merely meeting yourself.

The script is NOT a contract, but the script may contain contracts. For example, in the case of Braided Souls, twin flames, one of the souls will enter the body first say because they like childhood experiences; the other soul will enter during adulthood since babyhood and childhood are not liked. The two Braided Souls make a 'contract' to do this, and usually a date is set, or a certian circumstance/event is identified, at which point the AGREED UPON ('contract') action is carried out. (It does not have to be done, but there will be questions raised at the next Planner session as to the what/why etc of the abrogation... you may have 'hurt' the other soul who was counting on you fulfilling your part of the agreement.)

In another example, a normal earth human, single-soul, may construct a script wherein he races a car too fast around a corner and hits a tree, with the intended result of causing his death. At the point of death, one of the Planners (Light Beings) may approach the soul and remind him of unfinished business, or maybe his leaving would seriously throw someone else's life out of kilter -- scripts are not cast in concrete! -- and the Planner can offer that soul an opportunity to 'redo' that part of the script, and not die yet. If the soul is fed up, they can choose to leave; if the soul is moved by what the Planner says, the accident didn't happen (timeline reversed) and they may have agreed on another 10 years to wrap things up, and then the same (or another accident) will take him out.

Choices, choices, choices.

Contracts with other souls can be broken, and may incur 'karmic' penalty -- unless the other soul forgives. If he doesn't forgive, the two HAVE to carry out the contract (at some time) and the two are 'energetically linked' to each other to do this. This is where forgiving is important... let 'em go, unless you just have to 'prove' something and then both of you 2 souls will learn from it.

I have been having some trouble getting my head around the subject in this thread...so brought up a few ideas that would help me.

...But if the bee at a certain level has entered into an exchange of energy with another being, then I guess that puts a different focus on it for me.

I don't put total stock in Seth (the being Jane Roberts channelled), but he did mention in The Nature of Personal Reality that cattle had entered a contract with human beings.  That they were learning from being enslaved to humans.  I don't know.  Maybe he/she was trying to pacify guilt.

It could be that the type of agreements we're generally talking about here are specific to beings with a certain high level of complexity: self-awareness, freewill and intelligence.  The agreements made between or among second-density consciousnesses might seem obvious or boring to us: like the agreement of insects to assist in the reproduction of plants in return for food (if that is indeed an agreement of any kind).  ...Two alternative explanations are that such arrangements are a reflection of intelligent design or random, mechanistic evolutionary processes.

Mainly I think I have trouble with the word contract being used.  But if the bee at a certain level has entered into an exchange of energy with another being, then I guess that puts a different focus on it for me.

Maybe that's why some people have a stronger affinity with certain animals?

I appreciate there may or may not be anything metaphysical between the bee, the flower and the gardener.  But I want to keep it simple for the analogies sake.  Is this the basics of what is being said here?

Marcus,

I'm not clear if you are putting this out in general or to anybody in particular.  I hadn't really thought about it in terms of having a contract between a human, an animal, and a plant, but I suppose those could exist as well.  I think the key is that a contract is entered unto wilfully and volitionally; this is not to say that there isn't some higher dimensional aspect of the bee or the flower which has the capability of making those decisions.

Did you know that the Mormons have a special ceremony that allows two people to be married when one of them is dead?  THAT ONE is messed up.  Talk about your spirit attachment!  Ownership from beyond the grave - yikes!

The Mormons also have a ceremony for Celestial marriage, or an everlasting marriage and they do "sealings" of whole families.

They also baptisms for the dead into the Mormon faith.  Before I left the LDS chuch, when I was 12, I participated in that ceremony.

I'll jump in on one thought for now for your consideration.  Marriage contracts!

Marriage contracts are usually VOWS YOU MAKE BEFORE GOD (or with communicating this intention to a higher deity).

And what do they usually involve - promises to love, honor, obey, until death do you part.

Well, the interesting thing is, those contracts (or any pledge you have made that invokes God) remain in the energy field of the person.....even AFTER death....even into the next life.

So, one thing I've discovered in my work as a healer is this.

If you're one of those people who has had endless troubles getting a long-term, happy, high vibrational romance off the ground, and you're wondering what is up, you might want to scan your field and clear out ALL OLD MARRIAGE VOWS.

Instead of thinking of this as a contract, perhaps think of it in its energy terms:  these are old promises that you once made before God, or before a higher deity, and these were very significant moments in a spiritual sense.  They leave a HUGE energy trace in your field.  Whether you want to call this ball of intention a contract, vow, or agreement, it's still something that is restricting your energy field in this life and preventing it from flowing freely.

So - work to cancel out those old vows that no longer serve you. 

Sometimes, when two people meet and have a strong attraction to each other, yet deep down they KNOW they're not truly compatible and shouldn't be together, it's actually the energy of those old vows and that marriage contract from another reality giving off energy and magnetizing them.  So they'll have a fling or an affair just to reinvestigate those energies because they still feel so weird and strong.....yet this relationship may be out of alignment with their energies in this lifetime.  So such unions don't often last long.

On the positive side, sometimes people DO harmoniously reunite in different lifetimes. But I've found that usually our spiritual growth can be hampered if we are always romantically partnered with the same person in multiple realities.

One way to clear out any vows or contracts that no longer serve you is to use electric violet, a dynamic shade of violet with gold pulsating through it, and beam it through your energy field with the intention to dissolve all of the energies of any vows or contracts you have made that no longer serve you. (Dr. Shakuntala Modi goes into contracts in detail in her excellent book about spirit release therapy, Remarkable Healings. If there's one book every person on this forum needs to have on their shelves, it is this one. I mean it! Applying just some of her ideas can provide and immediate clearing of gunk from your energy field and change your life forever. I know it did mine.)

While you're doing this, you might also want to remove all VOWS OF SPIRITUAL SERVICE that you have made in various realities.  We've done that one SO many times.  Endless pledges to enslave ourselves to this "god" or that "god" (usually the regional ET in charge of herding the sheep.)  Those vows can be a factor in abductions or harrassment that you might experience in your current life.

I think the key with contracts is to remember that they were often made from a place of less enlightenment, in lifetimes where you had no clue about spiritual energy, and you were usually operating with less metaphysical wisdom than you have now. So be proactive, clear your energy field of these old vows, contracts, and agreements, and see if your energy feels lighter.

These balls of energy created by vows and contracts are something that some energy sensitives can feel in a person's aura. I can. I usually have to be working quite closely one on one to perceive the subtleties of these energies, but boy, when you bump into one, you can immediately see how they contrict the person's energy and can cause all manner of problems.

Did you know that the Mormons have a special ceremony that allows two people to be married when one of them is dead?  THAT ONE is messed up.  Talk about your spirit attachment!  Ownership from beyond the grave - yikes!

All right, that's all for now, must work!

LipstickMystic aka Jennifer

Does one create karma by breaking an agreement with the self?

Karma is what you make of it.

First by agreeing to put yourself under the authority of something more powerful than you. It could be the legal system, physical reality and its laws, some metaphysical law of balance or freewill you cannot ignore, some group you agreed to join or derive services from which can make you suffer if you fail to pay up.

I'm assuming this also goes for  religion? Putting oneself under the dominion of a certian religion, as in joining a church or professing a certian belief, binds one to the restrictions and punishments of that religion? For example, if I claim to be Moslem and drink alchahol, am I creating Karma by breaking the rules? Does one create karma by breaking an agreement with the self?

A bee pollinates a flower, and goes and makes honey.  This serves both the flower and the bee.  On a physical level this is a part of what the bee and the flower are here to do, and is a natural process.  To take it a step further, a gardener comes along and cuts down all his flowers.  This causes the bee to have to learn and seek out new flowers; to basically adapt and change its life due to the gardeners appearance and his actions.  From a certain perspective then; this could be termed as a (metaphysical?) "agreement" or "contract" between the three parties – which may have arisen either before incarnation or else at some higher awareness / dimensional level?

I appreciate there may or may not be anything metaphysical between the bee, the flower and the gardener.  But I want to keep it simple for the analogies sake.  Is this the basics of what is being said here?

Scroll to #20 (last one) here:

http://forum.noblerealms.org/viewtopic.php?id=2425

One of the ideas that has been brought up here is that a "contract" is a human conceptualization, or ego device.  I would agree with that.

I don't agree that it necessarily follows that pre-incarnation, or "soul" (as they may be called) contracts therefore do not exist.  While it is true that we don't really remember what it was like before we incarnated here, what we do know is that, wherever that was, we were there. 

What I am meaning to say is that it isn't our bodies that make us human, or endow us with these egos.  We had all of those qualities beforehand.  We brought them along with us on this journey.

So I don't think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that before we came here, we were still behaving like humans with egos. 

The ego itself is a result of the denial of our wholeness.  The fact that we utilize ego devices (and we all do) is evidence that we do not perceive ourselves as whole.

It would seem obvious to most of the people here that , for all the amount of intellectual affirmations of Oneness, they do nothing to create an actual experience of Oneness.  The moment the mind attempts to perceive itself as one with everything, it immediately creates the polarity of others who do not perceive themselves as one with everything.

That's why we must go beyond the mind.

From an individual soul's vantage point in 5th density, it is seeking to utilize the ego as a mechanism for creating the experience of unity needed to progress to the 6th density, or group soul level.

In order to incarnate into a 3rd density body, a soul must deny what it already knows to be true (that All is One).  The "goal", if you will, is to transmute a self-imposed limitation into a self-realized liberation.

On the involutionary path, the Soul chooses experiences which foster the growth of the ego.  Think of native tribes where each person chooses a totem spirit to embody, or pagan religions that worship the various gods and goddesses. 

Bravery.  Honesty.  Wisdom.  Beauty.   

Yet, in a dual world, every quality has an opposite, and you truly cannot know one without knowing the other.

Enter Soul Contracts.

So here you are sitting in a room with a bunch of your Soul Friends planning out your lives during the late 19th century.  You and your good pal both decide that you are going to create your egos around the concept of Honesty, which is of great interest of you both.

You would like to work together on this project, but you know that once you are born into 3rd density, you will forget who you are.  So you make an agreement.  You and your buddy agree to incarnate together.  You are going to be born as an honest politician in the United States, and your buddy as a corrupt European banker.

Through a series of pre-arranged, or "fated" events, your paths cross and you enter into each other's lives.  Your friend, disguised as the banker, tricks you into a deal in which you are later forced to betray your values and your countrymen.  Overcome with shame, you hang yourself just outside of town.

Wow bum life.

From the soul's viewpoint, perhaps it was a good life. You gained the invaluable experience of knowing what it is like to betray the truth in yourself through blindly trusting another.  Lesson learned.  Job well done!

So now you and your buddy switch places.  You are born as a teenage girl in the  early 21st century who lies to her mother about who she is her entire life.  An unbelievable string of "bad luck" hits, and you are forced to reveal who you really are to your mother.  She is so distraught that she later develops a case of liver cancer and dies.

Another astounding performance!

The contract is necessary because, left to their own nature, those two egos would never cross paths.  At the level of the ego, like attracts like.  The nature of ego is to surround itself with other egos that support its own belief system and repel egos with opposing viewpoints.

An ego that believes that honesty is important will naturally surround itself with other egos that share in that same belief, while those that believe that it doesn't matter if you tell the truth will have many friends that support that belief system.

At the unconscious, involutionary stages, the contract is enacted at a specific time and place, and the parties make their performances in accordance.

The path of evolution begins at the moment that the ego consciously realizes that acting to the benefit of another results in benefit to oneself.  This is the point where there is a split of the STS / STO paths.

Prior to this, the ego was just acting out a role, but now the ego has a will of its own, and can choose to benefit oneself through directly acting to the benefit of another, or through acting on behalf of another to their benefit.

But let's get back to you.  Since you are reading this, I think it's safe to assume that you are a individual who has chosen the path of service to others, and are reasonably (or highly) aware of your existence as a soul as well as an ego.

So here you are going about your life, being an honest person, and suddenly you've noticed that you've attracted a particularly dishonest person into your life. 

DING! DING! DING! Soul contract!

So now what do you do?

Choice One:  You ACCEPT the contract.  Your Higher Self brought this person into your life for a reason, in order to learn something that you have forgotten about yourself.  You play your role; they play their role.  You both go on your merry ways, wiser for knowing each other.

Choice Two:  You REJECT the contract.  You know this person came into your life for a reason, but you just don't have the energy or desire to deal with them right now.  Possibly you are not ready to face your fear of darkness at this time.  Maybe you just need to spend some time taking care of yourself.

If you choose to go into default on a contract, you incur a charge (karma) which binds you to the other party who performed on the contract, but did not receive equal consideration. (I'm using legal terms for a reason)

The charge is created by an uneven exchange of energy, whereby you are holding onto the energy of another without offering anything in return.  Because you are in "unlawful" possession of energy, the damaged party is now presented with a few options.

Option One:  They can seek REDEMPTION of the contract.  They keep coming back into your life, offering you opportunities to make good on your promise to perform the contract.

Option Two: They can offer FORGIVENESS of the contract.  They release you of the charge and free you from your obligations under the contract. 

(Obviously this works both ways)

Then there is also Choice 3, which I think is a relatively new option that has been made available through growth of human consciousness into 6th density.

Choice 3:  You PARDON the contract.  If, in the moment that you are aware that a contract exists, you are ALSO aware of your existence at a group soul level, you can cancel the contract entirely, because you can see that there is no basis of self and other upon which any contract can be performed.

A couple comments were made about the difference between spiritual law and man-made law.  I would suggest that man-made law is simply the externalization of spiritual law.

The Torah and the rest of the Old Testament are not just stories, they are legal documents which, to a large degree, determine how various forms of contract defaults are handled.  The old law was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  Crime and punishment.  Restitution.

What has become known as the New Testament is a teaching which offers the paths of acceptance and forgiveness.   Those paths have worked well.  Yet, in recent years, it has developed into "New Age" thinking, where all is love and light, and we just keep on living up to our word and forgiving others that don't.

Yet, as I and many of you are so acutely aware, this New Agey thinking has a bit of a fishy odor that leads down into a smelly sewer of endless waste and garbage where we sometimes get caught into believing that acceptance and forgiveness mean spending our time cleaning up everybody else's shit.

We know there is something more.  We are awakening to an aspect of ourselves that exists beyond the annals of space and time.  Some of us perhaps for the first time.  Others as a remembrance as our future selves come back in time.
It really doesn't matter how.  What matters is the awakening.

Sure, forgiveness and acceptance will get us very far in the world.  All that love n' light will make for a more pleasant experience, and may even lead to a lollipop land where we can fly at will and manifest our every intention here in the Matrix.

But it will not get us out of the Matrix.

Contracts, however noble, will never get us out of the Matrix, because the Matrix is fueled on the energy of contracts.

To get out of the Matrix we must transcend the concept of contracts entirely.  We must move past the idea that we are the chosen "One", come here to redeem the world. 

We don't have to bail Cousin Joey out of jail again.  We don't have to pretend that we like that ugly outfit that Aunt Martha got us for our birthday.  We don't even have to smile at the stranger on the street. 

These are all contracts, and we realize that they are no longer necessary.

To the love n' light camp, we may appear to be sometimes rude, or inconsiderate, or uncaring.  We may appear to be hypocritical, or judgmental.  And so we are.

But we are learning to operate from the awareness that the only thing that we truly have to offer is whatever we happen to be at that moment in time. 

Thus what was once a  obligation by which we offer a false image to another in exchange for knowledge of our own true nature is transformed into donation by which we offer a true image to another in order to remind them directly of who they really are.

The result is a reduction in the amount of time necessary for souls in 3D to evolve to the next level.  Eventually, when critical mass is achieved, the amount of time reduces to zero.  Hence the "End of Time", harvesting of souls, etc.

At that point, a greater part of the group soul has been integrated than remains separate, and the "need" for contracts dissolves away as simply as it was created.

So what did you want to talk about then?

Well, my perception of what a contract was was never of a binding, set-in-stone destiny, but that's where the thread seemed to run to right off.  Though I agreed with you that there might be loose plans made by beings, it still went that way.  C'est la vie.

I find I learn more by fielding possibilities and trying on different points of view.  That probably does come across as wishy-washy.  I hadn't thought about being perceived that way before.  (Though, in retrospect, my friends have told me that they find it hard to discover what I really think).

The concept of the binding, set-in-stone, pre-determining contract is not the concept I wanted to talk about.  I was more interested in talking about loose plans between beings--both pre-life and in-life.  And I was particularly interetsed in talking about agreements made from a lower stage of evolution that might not be serving us anymore--ways to end agreements, update them, ways of identifying them in the first place.

We can't.  And I'm open to the idea that there are no pre-life agreements.  I can't prove their existence.  It feels right, to me, that beings might make some plans before incarnating--but maybe it is off-base.  It seems clear that all kinds of agreements exist between beings during life, but you're right, how would an off-planet being prepare for life on earth?