Defining Karma

What is Karma?

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Christopher Ott

Karma means 'action.' The Law of Karma is the law of action and reaction, or cause and effect. Meher Baba explains that Karma is not really in addition to natural laws of cause and effect, but rather supervenes upon and subsumes them. (Beams of the Panorama, 33-35)

The way Karma is normally but somewhat erroneously or incompletely understood is as 'fate' that is earned by previous actions. That which you do to others will be done unto you. In India it has even come to mean that bad action can lead to a life as a cow or a pig - something Baba says is impossible as consciousness once gained is never lost. In the West it has been equated with deserved retribution by the law of 'pay-back.' If you do good, then good things will come to you. If you do bad, bad things will come to you. In a sense the result of the law of Karma can have this exact effect, but it is valuable to grasp that this is not what is most fundamentally going on.

To truly understand Karma it is best to look at it a slightly different way. Rather than 'fate' with moral intention, think of Karma as a very natural law of action and reaction, cause and effect, which is subsumed by a higher spiritual purpose of allowing the soul to gain wisdom.

Remember Newton's third law of motion. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Why is this? Well it is just common sense. If I throw a ball at a wall, it bounces back. There is no intention in it. It is simply a law of balance. You could even say that the world simply supervenes on laws like that, and Karma is simply its effect as it manifests in our human lives.

So if I take a hammer and I hit my hand very hard, it will hurt. One could feel that this is a punishment for doing something stupid, but it is more accurate to simply say that this is what happens due to the laws of bodies in motion, the human nervous system, etc. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a literal sense, this hurt in your hand is Karma at work -- action and reaction, cause and effect.Now we take this to a deeper level, relating karma to sanskaras.Assuming you did in fact purposely hit your own hand with a hammer, what would cause you to do such an odd thing? One might be tempted to simply say 'ignorance' of the effect would be the cause. In one sense 'ignorance' of the divine law of karma is one cause of bad things happening.But to make a point clear, let's assume this is a person who knows quite well that hitting his hand with a hammer will cause his hand to hurt. What then would cause him to strike his own hand?

The answer, according to Meher Baba, is sanskaras - impressions left on the mind by past experiences that are generally forgotten. To make this make more sense I think it would be useful for me to switch to an illustration that we might more readily find in our daily lives.

Let us say that a man strikes his children often. Now this causes his children to hate him, and finally they are taken away by his society for their protection. The man eventually dies alone and unhappy. We would say that he deserves what he got.

But it is a known phenomenon that often people who are beaten by their parents continue the tradition. It turns out that this man was beaten when he was a child, and though many of the emotions he felt as a child being beaten he no longer consciously remembers (instead telling stories of what a good solid Christian upbringing he got from his fine parents), he is left with deep seated impressions or scars on his psyche that cause him to later strike his own children. So in a way it is not his fault that he had these impressions, and thus these impulses.

At some point in his life, if he were an old soul, he might seek help and change and go against these impressions. But generally people are so unaware of what they are doing and why and the future implications that they simply act like automatons upon their impressions.

I want to give one more example before going on. Let us say that a person is born to cultured parents and he grows up and raises his children well. Again, this is simply him responding to his impressions. In a sense he is no more laudable for his good parenting than the bad parent is reprehensible for his bad parenting. Each is simply acting as an automaton upon his impressions.Very few great people came from troubled families. Very few tyrants came from good ones. Mostly people are conditioned. And even the exceptions will be explained as we go on.All this is easy to see. If you drink poison you will become sick. If you have the impressions to cause you to drink poison you will do so, and little can be done about it.But what about things that have nothing to do with impressions gathered in your childhood, such as sickness or being born into poverty? Why, for instance, was one parent born to a troubled family and another to a cultured one?

This is where past lives begin to come in. When a person dies, he has acquired over the course of his life a body of impressions (sanskaras) as explained earlier in the section on sanskaras.

Meher Baba explains that these sanskaras then form a matrix or mould for the next form (body) that the person takes birth as. They also determine what parents he is born to.

This is extremely hard to imagine. Let's take each in turn, the body and the environment. As they say, 'the nature and the nurture.'

Sanskaras are really mental impressions caused by past experiences that form the psyche. The mind impressed by sanskaras is the psyche of the person. These sanskaras are entirely mental, but upon birth (as the mind begins to identify again with the gross world to express these sanskaras) they somatize as your DNA. What scientists perceive as genetic code in your DNA is really the manifestation in physical form of what is first-most mental sanskaras, that collapse into energy, then collapse into solid gross form upon fertilization. Thus how you look, what diseases you are prone to, are all an outcome of the impressions left over at the end of your last incarnation.

What about your family? When you died in your last life you also died with strong impressions with certain people that needed to be worked out consciously. By taking birth in the proximity of these people (your family usually, and the acquaintances you will have) you are in a position to undo those impressions by acting upon them. If, upon death in your last life, you had angry impressions with someone, you will be drawn together in the next life subconsciously in order to express that anger and thereby work it off. Of course in the process of working it off by getting angry over something trivial, you will make new impressions and a new birth occurs and so forth.

We still have not talked about events that seem entirely accidental. What if a meteor falls from the sky and kills you? How could that be? Here is where it is weird. You actually subconsciously know everything because you are unconsciously in the Over-soul and connected to everything through sanskaras. The whole world is an outcome of an interconnected gestalt of sanskaras. In a sense your sanskaras are not yours alone, but are the part in a play of sanskaras working as a whole. Thus, you actually take action to put yourself in the right place at the right time to be hit by the meteor. It seems coincidental, but it is actually a subconscious psychic act.

Now, once we grasp karma in this new way, as an automatic and natural response to impressions along with the consequences, then we really grasp karma. We should further get the whole picture: Actions that are taken leave impressions (sanskaras) on the mind, that cause subconscious desires or fears that lead to reactions -- that then start the process over in an almost never-ending loop.

Action - impression - impulse - action - impression -- impulse -- and so forth.

Note that your karma is not a punishment or reward. It is simply what happens in response to your own actions, that occur because of impressions that occur because of actions. In a way, you're a victim of the law of how things work. This is the sense in which your karma is your inescapable fate.

But it should also be noticed that nothing really happens to you that you don't cause. So you make your own destiny.

So there is freedom to do what one chooses and experience the consequences. But there is almost no freedom over your choices. So most fundamentally you have no freedom.

This is why discussion of free-will goes nowhere. You have all the room in the world to choose your own destiny (free-will), but no room at all to choose what you will choose. What you choose is the result of your impressions (no free-will).

So how does this end?

As said, there is always an open door through spiritual practices and through the help of genuinely enlightened masters. But, due to impressions, the choice will almost never be made to start to take advantage of these things until the impressions are light enough that the person has begun the process of the spiritual path. This takes a very long time. There is always the chance, however, of simply lucking out by the grace of a perfect master and gaining his help even when it is not asked for. Usually this happens when some spark is shown by the soul (often by a single act that was outside the scope of the sanskaras) that caught the attention and affection of the master. For instance, while you had very bad impressions you had an inspiration to do something outside your nature that appealed to the master - such as an action that was especially brave or selfless or a creative endeavor done with little thought of oneself that proved helpful to others, or simply a spontaneous act of great panache. Then his grace is bestowed. But even having the impulse to take such an uncharacteristic action is only by the grace of God. So, still the masters say that nothing moves but by the will and whim of God.For this reason disciples of a master who have some understanding always say that it is by the master's grace that he finds the master, or that the master found him, or that he was lucky, or that he is beholden to the master. For, understanding the laws of cause and effect, he sees that really speaking there was no chance to escape except by grace. So Baba says, ask for that grace.

If all this frustrates you, then good. The man or woman who enters the path is the one who has grown frustrated by exactly this, having at last recognized the futility of expecting slavish following of impulses born of sanskaras to lead to lasting happiness.

Good and bad karma

Sometimes people talk of 'good' and 'bad' karma. What is good to one person is sometimes bad to another. What we call 'good' and 'bad' are really descriptions of pain and pleasure that we ascribe to experiences in terms of how we look upon them. What we want we call 'good' and what we don't want we call 'bad.' But there is nothing good or bad in the thing in itself. It is in how you look upon it.

More truly, one ought to say that 'bad' karmic results (results of cause and effect) are those that cause us to be miserable - due to our desires. For instance, most of us would not be very happy to live the life of a blind syphilitic beggar. But really speaking there is nothing intrinsically 'bad' in the life of a blind syphilitic beggar. It is merely undesirable to people who desire the things that most of us enjoy, such as seeing, being pain-free, or expecting a full belly on a regular basis.

If one was of the sort of mind to enjoy the darkness, to enjoy pain, and to enjoy starvation, then a lifetime as a blind syphilitic beggar would be 'good' karma (a good effect) and a life worth living.

But most of us are of the natural sort. We would prefer to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. It is wise to admit this and be good.

The existential justice of karma

This brings us to the final point - the poetic but hard to watch justice of karma allowed to play itself out.

Most Abrahamic religions teach of a God that watches human actions and rewards some and punishes others. But in the dharmic tradition (that includes karma) it is not this way. Rather the law of karma, created in God's perfect reasoning, is perfect in itself. It requires no intrusion. This is why from a God's eye view the world is perfect.

It is of immense value to see exactly why this is.

The law of karma is such that it causes men to write their own divine law by which to be judged. What is projected onto a judgmental God is really man's own sort of thinking. It is man himself, in his actions, that writes his own divine law and thus, being his own god, must necessarily live by his own law until he evolves beyond it.

Imagine a leader of a nation who decides that torture is a good thing. It is good, he declares as a lawgiver, that men be tortured to see if they have any useful information - it is for the greater good. He then sets down this law and people are tortured. Man, acting as a rational actor within the bounds of his impressions, has established that rounding up and torturing people for information against their will, to see if they know anything of interest, is a good and reasonable and moral idea. So by such a law it becomes an imperative. As a god of his own invention, the leader has now willed a law that he must fully live in accordance with.It is a fact that for there to be a torturer there must also be a person who is tortured. Thus for the leader to live up to his law (made foolishly and disingenuously and hypocritically) he must now complete the cycle of his own reasoning, by living the other half of his own law. This is the meaning of "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Mark 4:24). Man, as a rational actor, plays God unwittingly via the law of karma. This is also incidentally the idea behind Kant's categorical imperative; that man ought only do what he would will to be a general principle - that he should act as if each action establishes a law by which he could live.In his next life the leader is born with the impression and thus impulse to fully express the other side of his own law in order to live the other half of his own reasoning. As he has willed that there be a torturer, which implies there necessarily be a man tortured, he finds himself living out the role of the one who is tortured. When this is done, he has completed his foolish experiment as a law-giver, having lived up to his justice. As long as he only experienced one half and not the other of his two-horned equation, he had not lived fully up to his commandment and was merely pretending. So the torture he experiences in his next life is ironically meted to him by a justice of his own invention. Once tortured, having at last experienced and thus exhausted his ignorant law from both its ends, he at last is again free to make wiser choices - his intuitions slightly matured. In short he will have worked off that impression from the previous life.

You find many who like to feed off of the weak, to become rich upon the poor and unwise, who relish in the punishment of others for their failures and weaknesses, who feel that help ought not be given to the helpless, who feel justified in their privileges, who feel themselves chosen and others not, and who feel retribution is every man's right. All these must live out the other horn of their own half-truths.

In the final analysis, man lives, over the course of lives, the fruit of his own life as a lunatic god, until he surrenders to the true God of mercy, who eternally sees fit to allow man to reap all that he insists on sewing until he ceases to insist, and asks to be led.

So when people shake their fist at God for their tidings they shake their fist at their own lower selves.

God's mercy

So where is God's mercy in such a seemingly cold operation of immutable and perfect justice? First it ought be seen that the coldness is one's own, that man's inhumanity to man is his own idea, though born of ignorance that was not his fault, but that God's justice is his mercy. God allows the ignorant to remain so in their obstinacy for they seek it to be so for a long time. They wish Him to leave them alone when they are sinning, and rescue them when they suffer. And if it be said that God's justice is blind, who would say that any but blind justice is true?

The only thing that keeps man locked in a cage of his own making is his obstinacy. For every age has an Avatar and every moment its Wali. There is no moment in any man's life when there is not a chance to resign himself to God's will and plead bewilderment at shaping his own lasting happiness. But for a long time he chooses to go his way. Every Avatar has said, leave all and follow (obey) me, and men have mocked him, castigated him, and made a mockery of his teachings. So who is cruel?

God never turns his back on the world. Again and again he returns to restore the dharma (paths) that leads out of wickedness and suffering to immortal happiness.

Does the concept of karma make men heartless?