True Success is Soul Progress not Material Progress

Most people perceive life in a liner, Earth-based fashion as birth, school, degrees, college, money, work, success, marriage, retire and then death. People are judged around this visible matrix.

What people fail to realize is that this visible world is merely the dense, external framework within which a soul chooses its unique syllabus of growth and learning. 

Never judge people based on where they are on the material scale: For e.g., 

• A poor old man cleaning the road could be a famous soul choosing humility over fame as his final lesson on Earth.

• A struggling single mother may be completing lifetimes of dependence by learning self-reliance.

• A lonely person may have lived many lives at the center of groups, and now seeks solitude to balance the soul.

• A person with repeated failures may be dissolving deep karmic pride acquired through past successes.

• Someone who is serving without recognition often belongs to the group of advanced souls.

• A person with a string of failed relationships may be resolving relationship debts.

• A school dropout may have already mastered the lessons that formal education teaches. Their soul came here to learn something entirely different.

What appears ordinary, unsuccessful, or insignificant on the surface may be profound karmic work in progress. 

True progress is fulfilling the higher purpose of why you are here—paying off your karmic debts, and achieving growth and evolution of your soul.

The greatest feeling on earth is when you get up in the morning with a light heart knowing you have cleared all your major karmas. That sense of liberation is the true taste of freedom! :)

It’s an exalted state where you can feel the sunlight dancing on your face, enjoy the bird songs, admire the vast sky…you can see, hear, taste and smell Peace and Joy.

Nobody in this world can tell you what karmas you have resolved except your own soul.

When Karma returns without its original blessing

This incident comes from a very close circle, and is something I often discuss with my brother, who was quite surprised when I initially revealed it to him. 

A Christian guy wished to marry an orphaned girl who was gentle, beautiful and raised in a Christian orphanage where he himself worked. His father rejected the girl because she was an orphan, despite her upbringing and values.

A few months later, without informing his parents, the boy married a girl from a non-Christian background. There was initial resistance from the family, but over time, she was accepted.

Here is the karmic aspect. The woman’s own family disowned her completely. Nearly thirty years have passed, and there has been no contact between the families.

The father rejected the first girl solely because she was an orphan.  Ironically, he gained a daughter-in-law who became an orphan by circumstance—fully severed from her own family.

The irony lies not in punishment, but in missed evolution. The father was given an opening to perform a profound act of goodness. That doorway closed, and life returned the lesson in another form.

What makes this reflection heavier is that the girl he married did not have the same qualities the first girl carried. When growth is refused, karma returns, often stripped of its original blessing.

Even Small Debts Matter on the Karmic Slate

A priest once shared an incident from his life where he had been brutally attacked by goons. Left lying on the ground, he was pretending to be dead while his attackers debated whether to strike him again or leave him where he lay.

In that critical moment between life and death—his mind did not go to fear, God or prayer. All he remembered was that he had not returned ₹500 to someone he owed.

He told me he had no idea why that thought surfaced at such a moment, but it did. Even at the edge of death, the soul was still accounting for what remained unsettled.

Apology balances karma

Names of people with whom I have long lost contact keep appearing before me—on shop signs, boards. For years, one particular name surfaced repeatedly. One day, on an impulse, I messaged this person after many years.

At that very moment, he happened to be in a spiritual place, praying. His prayer was simple: he was asking God to bless all the people whose lives had touched his, and all those whose lives he had touched.

Shortly after that prayer, my message arrived. He was overwhelmed with happiness and confessed that he had been wanting to apologise to me.

Though I had already forgiven and forgotten the past nearly a decade earlier, his soul had not found closure. He had been carrying a karmic weight that needed release.

The repeated appearance of his name was his soul seeking balance trying to reach out to me. Once the apology was expressed and received, our connection ended naturally. The karmic scales were balanced.

We live thousands of lives; imagine the amount of karma we generate across them. Hence, we keep making trips to Earth to pay off our debts and seek resolution and completion.

Whether it is an apology left unsaid or a small sum of ₹500 unpaid, karma always seeks closure.

PS: Even now, some names & initials continue to appear. I sense that their souls wish to communicate, yet ego or fear may be holding them back. When they are ready, karma will find its way to balance. 

Unfinished Relationship Karma

Unfinished relationship karma is not about marriage failure or lack of love. Some souls carry a past life memory of emotional union that felt sacred, truthful, and soul-recognized — and the nervous system still expects that depth to find form.

This is why shallow bonds don’t register, casual affection feels empty. When love appears, it arrives fully formed, not gradually, a sign of past-life continuity, not fantasy.

Unfinished karma is not separation alone — it is interrupted truth where love was felt, but not lived openly. Emotional truth existed, but circumstances, timing, or fear prevented embodiment.

The bond remained internal, not anchored in daily life. Love was known, but not allowed to become ordinary.

Peace arrives when such interrupted truths are finally allowed completion.