We often hear "what goes around comes around." Some people think this is a good, if brief, explanation of the law of karma. However, it is a distorted and over-simplified understanding of a deeply complicated and highly nuanced spiritual law because it bypasses the important truth that we, like life itself, are very complicated and that the energies we engender take on a life of their own as they circulate through our lives and the lives of others. Our actions do not stand alone like telephone poles, but are connected, just like a row of telephone poles we might see along a stretch of highway, all connected by the very cable they support. Karma is the energetic residue or byproduct of our actions that remains in the sphere of human events for a very long time, like cigarette smoke (unpleasant or negative karma) or food aromas (pleasant or positive karma) which linger in a closed room long after the actions which created them are over. This is easy to see in cases of violence and abuse of children. If no one intercedes and facilitates the healing of the child, later the child may very well re-enact what was done to him, creating another generation of injured souls, who may do the same. This is also true of positive karma. They who have received great kindness and generosity are as likely to pay it forward as they who have suffered at the hands of others.
If simplistic platitudes misrepresent the spiritual truths about the nature of karma, how then shall we think of it? How does it affect our lives and the lives of others? And how can we learn to create less negative karma and more positive? Translated from Sanskrit, karma means "action." In traditional Buddhist teachings, from which we take our modern ideas of karma, skillful action brings about positive karma and unskillful action produces negative karma. The importance of the terms "skillful" and "unskillful" cannot be overstated because they take a lot of the traditional Judeo-Christian sting and judgment out of our notions about karma, replacing, as they do, Western language like "virtue" and "sin," which connote not just judgment of our actions, but retribution for them if they have been "sinful."
Skillful actions are those that are based upon the wholesome understanding that all life is transitory and that, ultimately, no one can harm us if we remain unmovable in our belief that our consciousness exists independent of our body. In Western parlance, we would say that no one can harm our soul which is the only part of us that cannot be destroyed and is of permanent value. And so, our skillful actions benefit our consciousness, or soul, and help us to free ourselves from the negative impact of karma.
We engage in unskillful actions in our day-to-day lives when we react to things that hurt or frighten us. Because we tend to believe that things around us are of permanent importance in our lives we react with aversion or attachment to events and people. If we can maintain the realization that all things are transitory and of much less value than we think, we are able to generate far less negative karma and remain firm in our commitment to preserve our peace and equanimity.
If, on the other hand, we indulge our temperamental reactions which are based either upon our skillful or unskillful means we begin to create karma. This is why attachment (excessive affection or hero-worship) and aversion (hatred) are to be avoided through spiritual practices which free us from these positive and negative attachments; all of these practices are based on meditation. If you create strong feelings around an experience the energy which was created during the experience, and later as you mull it over, tends to remain in the energy field perpetuating itself unless and until the opposite energy dilutes its strength and nullifies its influence.
A simpler way of thinking of karma is to envision subtle air currents. Once we set these currents in motion they continue and are no longer under our control. When you exhale you cannot control where your breath goes. These currents mix as they move about and interact with other air currents which have been set in motion by others. Like the telephone poles, they do not stand alone. Negative karma which we have set in motion is mitigated by our skillful and positive actions and thus can be redirected and neutralized. Remember, all the karma we create mingles with our group and family karma and with the effects of the karma of others.
Can We Control Karma? I once complained to a martial arts teacher that my knee hurt as I did the form. He said, "There is nothing wrong with your knee. You are using it badly. You are not practicing awareness." He went on to instruct me on focusing my awareness in the knee as I did the form. I was astounded at how deeply I could experience the inner workings of my knee as I kept it in proper alignment throughout the form. The pain stopped.
Awareness is the most powerful agent we can bring to bear in creating and experiencing the effects of karma. Even when we are engaged in activities that we know are fundamentally unskillful or motivated by negative desires and emotions, we can demand of ourselves that we maintain an honest awareness of what we are doing. This, at least, enables us to reconcile our outer world with our inner world. By maintaining this coherence, we at least do not deceive ourselves and, thus, our positive energies can influence us in the end.
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