Action and Reaction: Karma

Reflections on Karma

I wanted to come to the idea of karma. Just as knowing the atma is key to developing transcendental vision, another important aspect of proper vision, or Yoga-vision is an understanding of Karma. It’s a very simple idea. The best ideas are often the simplest. That’s why the idea of karma has been around for a long time. The idea evolved out of the Vedic age, thousands of years ago and is encoded in books like the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita of Shri Krishna, the ancient wisdom traditions of India.

While he broke with its formalism, Gautama Buddha borrowed many of his observations from the philosophical teachings of the Vedas. Karma was one of them. The idea of karma is good common sense.

Isaac Newton incorporated the law of karma in his three laws of thermodynamics, the laws that govern physics. Put simply, the idea is that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

It’s easy to see how action and reaction works, especially when we talk about physical objects. The idea of cause and effect is simple and powerful one especially in science. From the electric light bulb to the engine in your car or the internet, all our inventions were born out of a fascination with the law of cause and effect as it relates to physical objects. In fact, this passion for technical solutions to our problems has consumed us to the point of destroying the earth. Now the planet is reacting in the form of mass extinction, global warming, viral epidemics and the pollution of oceans, contamination of the atmosphere, the slaughter of animals and the desolation of the earth.

In this Faustian bargain we have made with technology, we have truly sold our soul for cheap cellphones with free pornography, fast food, and mass exploitation. Our exaltation of mechanical solutions, of the laws of physical cause and effect have become religion. Now that we have concentrated hundreds of years of thought and imagination in understanding the cause and effect relationships between physical objects we have gained immense power over the planet. But like the sorceror’s apprentice, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And we overlook far more important but subtle cause and effect relationships.

Physical sciences teaches us to explore the relationships between physical elements and energy, but there are more subtle forms of energy and more flexible laws of cause and effect.

The transformation of a seed into a plant, the plant into a tree, and the blossoming tree into fruit is an organic cause and effect relationship. It may rely on physical elements, but the organic elements of growth and transformation may not be ignored.

Often we explain karma in Newtonian terms--that there exist certain laws of cause and effect in our lives and in our personal behavior, and these laws may not be ignored lightly. But let’s leave the mechanistic explanation for a more organic one.

The idea of karma and how it affects our lives really has much more in common with the cause and effect relationships of an organic system than those of a physical or mechanical nature.

This is why attempts to completely understand how karma works are bound to fail as Krishna points out in the Bhagavad-Gita when he tells Arjuna that even the wise have difficulty ferreting out the distinction between good karma, bad karma, and neutral karma.

Stealing is bad, for example, but what if we rob an apple to feed a starving man? What if the starving man was Hitler and we saved him from starvation only to help him in his mission of destroying the lives of innocent people.

The basic ideas of good and bad karma are given in many different scriptures from the Laws of Manu to the teachings of Buddha where “right action” is advocated.

Our problem is with our tendency to try to to manipulate the laws of karma for our own benefit.

The development of a proper Yogic vision is key to being able to decipher the vagaries of karma. That is to say, proper ethical action requires proper vision, which was Buddha’s point. The Yogic Vision is distinct from the Buddhistic one in the sense that a yogi sees the spiritual nature of all beings. A true yogi understands that consciousness is everywhere and sees the living spirit within every body, from the high priest to the low-caste man, to even the dogs. This is why yogis avoid violence to other human beings and animals.

Krishna’s teaching differs from that of Buddha, since Krishna supports the Upanishad version of “Atma.” The idea of Atma is another intrinsic aspect of Yoga vision, since Atma means the eternal individual consciousness, also called “jiva.”

So the idea of Karma is not something that you “believe in” or don’t believe in. It’s a simple law governing action and reaction. You can’t say, “I don’t believe in cause and effect,” any more than you can say I don’t believe in the law of gravity or in the laws of thermodynamics. Newton put it simply: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

The subtlety or difficulty lies in understanding which effects have resulted from which causes.

Dostoyevsky explores the laws of karma in “Crime and Punishment.” He wanted to show that actions have consequences. He took on Nietzsche’s idea that the Ubermensch or Super-Man is above ordinary law and can do what he wants. Dostoyevsky was sure that sin and evil don’t exist in a vaccuum. His famous comment was that if God doesn’t exist, then anything is possible and in his novel he tries to show that karma has consequences. Where the Raskolnikov thought he could get away with murder, since his victim was a person of no conequence, the reverse is true and he goes to Siberia for murder. He attains redemption only when he understands what love is.

Normally we think of karma in these terms: sin and redemption, good and evil. Bad karma and good karma. This is because we are conditioned by Christian dogma as well as the scientific dogmas about cause and effect. But karma has another, more subtle meaning.

The word karma is derived from the Sanskrit root “krit” which means “to create. So karma also means work, action, creative energy. It is not simply “reaction” but action itself.

When we speak of karma-yoga then, we’re talking about the path of action--or properly how to use our action as a kind of meditation for self-realization. In this sense, karma-yoga is the applied form of yoga-vision, since we are taking our understanding, our awareness of reality and incorporating it into our actions.

Normally people think of yoga as a way of tuning the body through exercises. But why are we tuning the body? What is our goal once the instrument has been tuned? If our goal is to put the instrument into action only for the purpose of exploitation, then our vision needs correction.

In other words, if we live a stressful materialistic life style and hope to take yoga classes to relieve the stress so we can continue with the same stressful lifestyle we aren’t fooling anyone. Yoga is a path to inner peace and enlightenment and not something you use to take a break from exploitation so you can do it again. That would be something like a sex worker taking a religious retreat in order to have a clean conscience and get ready for more perversion. My guru compared this to the bath of an elephant.

The idea is that if you are immersed in the world of karma you will continue to suffer all kinds of action and reaction. Instead of using yoga as a tool to help you keep your balance as you are buffeted about by the actions and reactions of karma, we are to practice yoga with a view to developing yogic vision. This vision will help us transcend the world of karma.

Samsara, or the Wheel of Birth and Death

The good news about the atma is that it is eternal and indestructible. This means that the soul or spiritual energy cannot be destroyed with the death of the body. The bad news is that we are bound by our karma to the wheel of birth and death called “samsara.” As long as we are addicted to action and reaction, we cannot escape this wheel of fortune, but will be born again and again as a result of our karma. The true yogi seeks freedom from this wheel of repeated birth and death.

If all of this is true, then what does it mean for our daily life? The other branch of philosophy is ethics, and it involves how we put our vision to practice.

Ethics means how to act. How does one who understands the law of karma act? Well, karma itself means action, but dharma means ethical action with a view to healing the soul.

I’m not here to tell you how to live or how you should act. If you study the Mahabharata you will find a number of actors with different viewpoints on ethics and how to act. I’m not here to tell what is sinful and what is pious.

On the other hand we can try to do good karma and avoid bad karma. This is the general position of moralists who, working within the world of birth and death, try to minimize the damage their karma causes. This is like trying to have a smaller carbon footprint to help with the problem of global warming. Good karma and  bad karma are opposite components of the same problem: the world of samsara,  of repeated birth and death. Good karma gets you a nice situation on the wheel of fortune for a time. Bad karma gets you a negative position. But both good and bad karma are relative. What is good and what is bad is subject to a million subtle factors and variables in this complex world.  Fully realized yogis, armed with deep mystic vision transcend good and bad karma with spiritual wisdom. This is the aim of yoga. Still higher is something which makes ordinary liberation look pitiful. This is the path of dedication or bhakti.