Darth Vader’s life was filled from beginning to end with great suffering. As a boy, he was born fatherless on a desolate world and raised in slavery indentured to a very conniving and wholly self-centered owner. He was separated from his mother early in life and found every relationship he ever had to be contentious and problematic. Filled with distrust and an inferiority complex of gargantuan proportions, and later in life as a young adult becoming severely maimed, dismembered, burned, and disfigured beyond recognition, one cannot say that the negative karma he had built up was not being revisited on him in a tenfold fashion. Yet in spite of it all, it appears that karma never shut him down completely and there was always a “path forward” to either attempt to gain further power over others or to pursue divine alignment and rehabilitation. Is it true that karma clearly ups the ante, but also never seems to say “game over” with choices and opportunities for change? What is Creator’s perspective?

What you are saying is quite true and we have said this before in reminding you there is always a path back to the light, a path back to divine alignment in every moment, in every life. Circumstances might be so constrained by all that has happened that you will not make the journey within your current life, but the path is there nonetheless, and taking that path and journeying as far as you can, even only for a day, will mark an important milestone and achievement that will begin a process of healing that can continue in the future and change the trajectory of your next life to be one of gains and not losses. So every turning towards the divine is a victory that will bring blessings, and that is the most important thing to understand—you are never done, it is never over. Because you are immortal, there is always a future, so death is not the finality and loss it appears, from the human perspective, because death is only a transition from here back to another state of existence from the physical where your energy of consciousness leaves the body behind, and with divine grace and preparation, enables you to return to the light to live in bliss for a time and perhaps lick your wounds, but integrate the lessons to enable planning your future adventures, whatever direction they may be. If you get stuck on the way back to the light and remain in limbo, that will indeed represent a perhaps prolonged penalty phase, much like living a life of torment but one done in the lower astral plane without a body but a minimal functioning consciousness in a state of diminishment and disconnection. But even there, you may be rescued and returned to the light to rise again and get back on track with new adventures in service to the light and not a further falling behind—that can happen life after life for a time until a path to healing is found or inspired at long last. There are many stories and possibilities with a wide array of individuals and their life journeys. Few are easy because all will be challenged. Those who are seemingly quite successful, accomplished, and highly capable earned their way to that higher level of performance, bringing with it greater security and ease of further attainment. It was hard‑won gaining that wisdom to confer such inner strength and stability, given the world you inhabit, the thousands of years of subjugation by evil, and all the toll it has taken in degrading human beings and punishing them severely, to corrupt and warp their thinking and stifle their belief in goodness and in their personal worth, all of which holds them back and retards human progress. So your immortality is your ticket to a return engagement eventually, but it is not a free ride because life can be quite painful in the experiencing with its ups and downs and many challenges, and given that the greatest learning comes from failure, all will feel the sting of criticism, whether by others or the self, and the struggle to gain self-confidence in a setting where evil is working to thwart your progress and invent new obstacles on a continual basis to challenge you and set you back. So the way to view karma is that it is relentless but it is dispassionate; it is not rooting for you to suffer or seeking an ultimate sanction through your destruction. All it takes to right a wrong is an act of forgiveness or an act of loving kindness to the self or someone else that rebalances a prior transgression. That will always be seen and appreciated for what it represents energetically, and the energies will cancel and free you from prior negativity. If you work at this and avail yourselves of the possibility of divine healing, there is no limit to what you can overcome—that is the beauty of the system because the power has been within you all along but you did not know it.