Karma
Spiritual Concepts Series, Part One
Read the other articles in this series:
Spiritual Concepts Series, Part Two — Mushin, Wu Wei, and Sahaja
Spiritual Concepts Series, Part Three — Rebirth
Spiritual Concepts Series, Part Four — Maya
Karma
Translation from language to language is never clean. Nuances, and sometimes complete meanings, can’t always be expressed from one language to another. This series of articles takes ‘spiritual’ terminology from various traditions and aids us in translating the concepts so that they help guide us toward Awakening. These translations are not intended to be more ‘correct’ than other translations — but they are designed to help us see how these ideas can guide us toward Awakening.
Do you know what karma is? Most of us have an answer something like this –
That which we do will come back to bite us (or boon us). In other words, your past actions have had an effect on your current situation, and your present actions will affect your future.
Unfortunately, all that’s presented in this view is a ‘dualistic’ translation of what karma is. And when we take a perfectly good concept (like karma) that is supposed to point toward non-dualism, and we try to fit it into our usual way of thinking, well . . . we end up with an idea that only reinforces our current ‘me vs. the world’ viewpoint.
Shopping-Mart Karma
I call the first common interpretation of karma the ‘shopping mart’ model of karma because of those little signs you see in some stores, stating ‘Shoplifting is Bad Karma’.
But this view of karma doesn’t really do much for us. Consider that it merely bolsters up our idea that there is a past, a present, and a future, and that what happens in one ‘time’ will affect what happens in another. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, it’s how we all live our lives all the time – trying to make the best decisions possible, because it’s obvious to us that what we decide now will affect what happens later.
If the past and the future were anything besides imaginary beliefs, this idea would actually make sense! But the truth is that all we can ever find is the Now.
The only thing different about the shopping-mart model of karma is that it implies a supernatural connection between our actions and the their repercussions. In other words, even if I steal a candy bar and get away with it, karma will dish out consequences, and something negative will happen to me as a result of taking that Snickers. This just adds an additional neurosis to our usual ones.
The Law of Karma
If you study deeper, you’ll find another interpretation of karma. This one states that karma can be translated as the ‘law of cause and effect’. At its most sophisticated, karma is broadened to cover all conceivable actions. For instance, if I choose to raise my right arm, it will rise. The cause was my choice to move my arm, and the effect was the rising. This, too, seems common-sense, and few of us would argue with the truth of that statement. But if we look more carefully, we’ll see that this is an idea loaded with all sorts of unseen consequences.
To illustrate, let’s see just how much baggage the idea of cause and effect carries with it.
Time – Cause and effect cannot work without some concept of linear time. And if we spend awhile in awareness of how ‘time’ works, we quickly see that linear time exists only in our imaginations. The idea of cause and effect and the idea of linear time feed each other quite nicely, but neither stands on a firm foundation.
Object/Subject Breakup of the World – Cause and effect cannot function without, at some level, the idea of independent (or inter-related) objects which affect each other. Just like time, these two pedestals lean on each other, but are supported by nothing else. See this article for some examples of how shaky our concept of identity really is.
Self vs. the World – When we consider cause and effect as it applies to ourselves, it brings up the whole question of free will and intention. These are the building-blocks of our sense of Self, which non-dualism will quickly show us is the singular cause of all our delusion, suffering, and ‘problems’.
This is certainly a more sophisticated view of karma, but again, it’s not really telling us anything we don’t already feel we know. This is how we live all the time – in the world of cause and effect. So all we’re really doing by talking about karma is telling ourselves that we’re living the way we’re living.
However, if we allow the concept to help us be more aware of the workings of our minds, and we realize that there is something else besides karma, then we can turn this idea around and it can act as a great pointer. The use of the idea of karma, then, is to serve as a reminder that there is a state of ‘no-karma’.
True Karma
For karma to truly be a useful concept, it should remind us that if we’re living by our usual methods (in the world of cause and effect), we are living a life of actions and consequences. Many of us think that this is the way that life is, and can’t conceive that there could be a world where there was no cause and effect. That’s why it’s apt to call karma a ‘law’.
But it is a law that can be broken. In fact, this is the only really useful aspect of this concept – as a reminder that our usual life isn’t ‘real’, but is a system of beliefs we’re holding onto so strongly that we tend to think of them as ‘laws of the universe’.
True karma, then, is simply a reminder – a reminder that as we look about ourselves, and see the way our culture, our friends, and our ’selves’ function in the world, that we’re not seeing ‘the way the world really is’. What we’re seeing is the world as viewed through the goggles of karma – a world divided into all sorts of objects, ideas, and assumptions — all of which relate to each other in some way. And these divisions keep us from seeing what’s really underneath all that mess.
As difficult as it may be to believe, there is another way of being – besides karma – which is readily available to us all. This state has many names – Sahaja, Mushin, Wu Wei – and it is one of the most little-known and misunderstood of the ‘spiritual’ ideas.
We’ll examine it in part two.
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April 8th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Great post mate, but I’m still confused, what is karma, and how does it apply? I’ve been subscribing to the two “wrong” versions of karma you mentioned, but is there a “right” version?
April 9th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Good day, Albert!
If there’s a ‘right’ way to see Karma, it’s to see, for ourselves, what karma really is.
Some people have accepted karma as a spiritual reality. More importantly, most people have accepted karma as a physical reality (our commonsense notion of cause-and-effect). In essence, karma is one of the root assumptions we use to make sense of our world. I say ‘our world’ instead of ‘the world’ because cause/effect really has nothing to do with the way the world works. One doesn’t have to take my word for that – examine carefully where one ‘cause’ ends and one ‘effect’ begins, and you’ll soon find that you can only support the notion by working all sorts of strange ideas into mix. When we sit right down and just look at reality, we’ll find that we can either see its perfect simplicity (here is This Moment, arising without any beginning or end we can ever find), or we can get ourselves into a huge mess trying to break that moment up into bits (like a cause and an effect, for instance) and then spend all our time trying to reconcile the relationship between our created objects.
Cause/effect is one of those assumptions that is so ingrained in us that we can feel like it’s ridiculous to doubt it (just like Self, time, internal/external world, etc.). It’s also one of those assumptions that if we really take the time to examine, we’ll find that it’s completely unnecessary. It’s just a coping mechanism we use in order to upkeep our usual illusion of the world.
If we examine our commonsense notion of karma (cause/effect), and can find for ourselves what cause/effect really is, the spiritual notion of karma (discussed above) will also dissolve for us – since it’s our commonsense notion which makes us want to extend our model of reality into the spiritual or metaphysical. Another relevant article touching on this is the one on Rebirth. Rebirth (however one cares to define it) is another of those notions which depends on our usual sense of time and cause/effect, and it’s tied directly in with the notion of karma.
So, to sum up. What is karma? A notion, only necessary if we are insisting on breaking the world up into chunks. It’s like money — a human ‘reality’ in that we all agree to its importance, and thus it takes on great import. But it has no reality outside our agreement on a certain way of living. If we all went back to barter, bills would be useful only for starting fires. And if we all went back to seeing the world Just As Is, karma would have absolutely no use, and no ‘reality’, at all.
Most people can’t imagine a world without money, and many of us can’t imagine a world without karma or cause/effect. But it’s right there the whole time, if we can just see through the ideas and assumptions we’ve created for ourselves.