Everybody who practices spirituality for long enough will reach a point of realising that there is order in chaos. That everything happens for a reason. That the good and the bad is all due to yourself. In that moment, you understand that your destiny is in your own hands. Something inside tells you that there is order and meaning in the world and it is such a comfort to relax into this order! Trusting fully and knowing that all is happening exactly as it should for everyone to learn their lessons.
When that moment comes, all this understanding will suddenly become much more than a mental process. Our whole being will participate in the experience, which encapsulates the direct understanding that there is a power which directs and ensures that each and everyone gets exactly what he/she deserves. In the East, this power is called karma. Karma is that which arranges the future destiny of each of us based on our past deeds.
Karma is not – as many erroneously believe – a system of punishment for our sins, but a complex understanding of causality. The word “karma” defines not only the immediate physical results of an action, but also the delayed results, which only come at a later stage in time. If you throw a stone at someone, the immediate result of this action is that the stone will hit him, but the delayed karmic effect is that the violence you referred to him will come back to you some day. Then you will be hit, just as you hit.
The principle of Karma does not claim that the violence you have created will hurt you because someone on some cloud wants to educate you. Rather, it explains that you will be harmed by the violence that comes back to you, simply because the universe acts like a mirror or like an echo that returns to you exactly the same energy you threw into it. The recurring echo, the delayed result, is the fruit of karma, called in Sanskrit, karma-pala. When we become attached to what we do, we create karmic seeds that one day will bear fruits.
In a simpler way, it can be said that according to the laws of karma, you will always reap what you have sown. The seeds of orange will one day grow oranges, the seeds of watermelon will one day grow you watermelons. It will never happen that you sow watermelons and grow oranges. If your life is full of pain and suffering it means that in the past – which could potentially be past lifetimes – you’ve sown pain and suffering in yourself and/or others. If your life is full of happiness and love, then this is what you’ve sown in the past.
Unlike the Western culture which aims at the accumulation of goods, the Eastern one strives to be freed from both good and bad karma. In the East, any kind of karma is described as something that binds us to the world, that keeps us returning to this level of existence. Once we die we have to come back over and over again to reap the fruits of our actions from our past lives, until what we gave equals what we’ve received.
It is said that bad karma is like an iron chain and good karma like a golden chain. The golden one might be more beautiful and attractive, but it still binds you to the wheel of dharma. It might be easier to first replace our iron chain with a golden one and then to release ourselves from that. Another option is to cancel both, the good and the bad altogether. This option became a real possibility thanks to one of the major “spiritual discoveries” of the Eastern tradition, namely that it is possible to act without activating the mechanism of destiny, in other words to act without creating karmic fruits and without creating a recurring echo.
What enables us this possibility is a practice known as Karma Yoga. In Karma Yoga, the yogi’s ambition is to achieve a “free” action, generating no attachment. Such an action is done without wanting or seeking any personal gains or rewards.
At the origin of any karmic fruits and their long-term effects lies the belief that “I am the doer”, that I am a separate self that does this and that and gains this and that. The desires and the fears of the consequences of our actions, are what binds us to our actions. This is what creates the returning karmic echo, which will one day or another inevitably return. Conversely when an action is done without any sense of separateness, without any fear, desire for gain or request for compensation, then there will be no karmic echo.
Therefore, karma yoga could be translated as the path of acting/doing in union. For people who have a dynamic temperament and who love living fully in the world, engaging with all aspects of life, the practice of karma yoga can lead them to a very quick spiritual development. With the help of karma yoga we can reach – without giving up on life – the same spiritual heights as a monk who strives to reach perfection in solitude and isolation from the world. But there is one “small” and essential condition: all that you do must be done without doing it for yourself!
A good starting point is to act for the benefits of others without expecting any reward, acknowledgement or validation, such when, for instance, helping strangers who may not even know that you are the one helping them. Do not seek any inner reward either! This is in fact where most fail at karma yoga – doing good actions to have a better image of themselves. Therefore, do not seek to boast yourself and say: “I have done something great”; “I am spiritual and sublime”; “I am altruistic”. All of these will bind you again to the wheel of karma.
In our next article we will deepen our understanding of karma, karma yoga and the importance of the act of consecration.