Karma, the metric of life

The Katha Upanishad asks a fundamental question that I keep veering back to, so captivating is its power: ‘what is it that everybody knows but nobody believes?’ The answer it gives: ‘that you are going to die’. Well, about 3000 years later the question retains its elemental power but the answer has changed. Now, the answer should be: ‘that you will be judged for your actions, your karma.’

Every religion, every society exalts the belief you that you will be judged for your actions. That has been enshrined as a primary organizing principle for societies since the beginning of civilization.  The point being: if you have figured out how to commit the perfect undetectable crime, you wont really get away with it: god will nail you for it, so cease and desist.  Almost every human being on this planet understands and believes that, has a sense that there is a scalable price to pay for bad actions, perhaps even rewards ranging to glory for good ones. Few in the world actually think that actions will not have consequences. Even atheists subscribe to a sense of morality – often superstition also, but that’s another story, one that makes you wonder how many professed atheists are truly atheist.

Yet hardly any of us behave as though this applies to us, though we are pretty confident others are going to get hauled over the coals for bad karma, especially those who have harmed us. Schadenfreude is universally adored. If we truly took to heart that we will be judged for our own karma, we would give that single belief command over our minds and let it dictate each and every action - to the extent we can assert such control. But we don’t. That’s cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.

If karma is all that survives after this life then karma is all that truly matters, in a spiritual sense. Someone said the ‘the real never dies, the unreal never existed’. Everything other than karma will get left behind in the constraining confines of these three dimensions, only karma will survive death, so in that sense only karma is true and real and enduring.  Which brings us to the answer to the Katha Upanishad question. Karma is the only real thing, and is the one thing we know yet shrug off.

That is maya. Maya is the illusion that our physical selves and the flow of events that constitutes our lives is what is real, eclipsing our souls and our spiritual existence. As normal unenlightened humans we are unable to sense our own souls, our true selves.  We submerge our consciousness in the flows and eddies of events while we seek maximum extraction from whatever streams of life we choose – sensory, material, emotional, intellectual, creative.  Some sense the existence of the spirit, of something beyond the here and now, and seek a spiritual path. Yet the spiritual path is not illumined, and it is easy to lose our way without guidance. Even those who gain consciousness of the spiritual as an additional dimension of life most often fail to link it back to the time bound three dimensions of material life, and can remain driven in their actions and insensitive to their karma.  Maya is powerful and its gravitational pull difficult to escape.

Bad karma takes many forms.

In the conscious or unconscious pursuit of karma there is an almost unavoidable pitfall of behaviour - cruelty.  We all fall in, are cruel to one another, and to other sentient beings.  That is the single biggest negative action staining our karma, draining our karmic balance. We are cruel to others –other people, other animals, to whoever or whatever we define tribally as ‘other’. From another class, another caste, another race, religion, political or belief system, another geography. ‘Other’ can be defined as narrow or as wide as we choose, all the way to every sentient being other than self (I and Not I is the world).

We are also perfectly capable of being cruel to what we accept as our own, yet we just may just feel guilty about that since societies have done their unswerving best to inculcate that sense of guilt. But we generally have few qualms about treating the ‘other’ poorly – societies sanction that, even promote it as a means of defining their own identity and boundaries.  People do that for a variety of reasons sometimes just because it makes them feel good. A sense of power, of being superior, of masking hurt and low self worth. The closer the person we are cruel to, the greater the betrayal of both that person and ourselves, of our own sense of integrity, and the greater the damage to both. We cannot hurt others without wounding ourselves both psychically and spiritually.

Then there is lust: for money, for power, for position, for sensory pleasures.  We will thoughtlessly or coldly or even self righteously do people out of their rights, appropriate what’s theirs, use people, deceive them to help ourselves to what we want rather than what we deserve, driven by our egos and greed, by maya. This is another common form of karmic failure, and in a sense links in with our attitude to ‘others’. Our sense of the ‘other’ moves in concentric orbits, from close in to far out, depending on the nature of the action, and also on how much harm we sense we are causing to the other. We can treat the same person as ‘own’ or ‘other’ depending on our assessment of self-interest in that situation.

Indifference is also poor karma. Those of us who are privileged in some fashion and see the misery around us near and far, should do something to provide the kind of help which we would welcome were we in that situation. Not doing bad isn’t enough – we have to seek to do good. How big a lapse that is depends on how dire the need for help is. Like everything in nature, karma is nuanced and hierarchical, not black and white. There isn’t a single point of transition from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, it is an almost endless scale running from barbaric, psychotic savagery to kindness, compassion, altruism and beyond…to enlightenment, moksha, nirvana.

Jimmy Carter once confessed that he had committed adultery in his heart many times, as he had looked at a lot of women with lust. Do thoughts constitute karma? Thoughts are the seeds of actions, and every thought would lead to an action unless some other thought or impulse prevents it.  So is it okay to have terrible thoughts just as long as we can rein them in? At a simple level one could say yes, I may have had horrific thoughts but I never acted on them, so my actions, my karma are okey dokey.  Yes… but, you cannot have a mind seething with terrible thoughts and not have any osmosis from that flow into your basic stance in life, your basic approach and attitude. Even if such thought doesn’t lead to negative actions it occupies the mind and crowds out good thought. Bad thoughts and great karma don’t go together. If we want to improve our karma, we have to improve our thinking with reflection, contemplation, meditation, mindfulness. What is our intent, and what will be the effect of possible action? We need to think about that, and think more about others today than we did yesterday.

For most of us, there are only two periods in life when our karma are truly our own. As children our actions are guided to a large extent by parents and teachers as we lead supervised lives. Later we take on a partner, and a lot of actions are joint or influenced.  The very first period in our lives when we are truly free to exercise our own judgment is as young adults, when we have left home and before we pair with someone - but a lot of that is thoughtless and immature. The second period which comes to about half the population (of those who enduringly marry/pair) is when you lose your partner. Then you are truly on your own, as mature and informed as you will ever be, mostly in the final phase of life with enough time on your hands to consider your actions.  That is a stark call for reflection, to mull over, re-evaluate your life and make whatever course correction you can. How and on what basis are we selected for this – is outliving your partner the privilege of good karma or the punishment of bad karma? Is it an opportunity to build karma or just the punishing desolation of loneliness?

It isn’t, of course, essential to be single to review your life and karma.  The true challenge is to think and act as an individual soul even when ensnared by the myriad ‘nets of stone’ of our relationships. The rush and tumble of existence is no excuse, just a challenge. There is an imperative in living a life examined for reviewing our past not just as a series of events, triumphs and failures, but also as the flow of karmic events. That is a completely different filter to see things through, its like using a mental scanner that doesn’t see or show the outlines of life that we normally see but looks only at the inner workings of our intent and actions, the karma, the ‘real’ and enduring.  Seen karmically our lives look unrecognizably different, our biggest failures could be our greatest achievements and our greatest achievements karmic fiascos. Overall, our sense of our lives can shift seismically. A sense of satisfaction at a ‘successful’ life can be shattered, and a fragmented sense of an unsuccessful life can be knit together, miraculously repaired. Or a bit of both. The key is: did our karma improve over time, remain the same, or get worse? Or was there no pattern at all as we lived lives unconscious of the one thing we all know but don’t believe?

Every religion has its own do’s and don’t’s.  Islam is the most heavily specified, it has binding rules for everything.  ‘Directed’ karma? Is that real karma, or is free will an essential part of karma? Or is the suspension of free will an act of free will? Orthodox Judaism is also pretty prescriptive. Hinduism and Buddhism work off the lofty unifying metaphysical principle that all sentient creatures are connected – which eliminates the greatest karmic stumbling block, the ‘other’. If you take that message to heart it is powerful and can impact your mind and behavior in a very profound fashion – you cannot hurt anyone without hurting yourself. Both religions in their myriad forms have unfortunately largely abandoned their soaring, transcendent metaphysics for earth bound dogma and superstition and with a mind numbing imposition of cant and credo. Christianity at its heart has Jesus’ Sermon of the Mount, which in its elegant and deceptive simplicity captures the essence of ethics: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Beautiful and minimalist. The countless versions of Christianity though are laden with layers of groaning dystopic rules that would horrify Jesus. Religion sadly most often leads you away from, not towards, the spiritual.

So how are we to redeem our lives, our karma? My own guru reduced it simply to: “Try and always do good for others, and if you cant, at least do no harm”.  Clichéd and trite? Like something your grandmother might tell you? Fasten your seat belt. By ‘do good’ he meant never ever even think ill of others - he was known to get mad at people for finding fault with others: ‘How could you even think that!’ This takes the game way beyond Christ’s sermon on the mount, which was centered on actions and that too relative to oneself. This treats thoughts and actions as one, and moves from the comparative to the absolute plane – is good just what you would accept for yourself in that situation or is good what is essentially the right thing to do? First, this brings reality and immediacy to how we define the ‘others’ to do good to. Those we come into contact with? Everyone in the family – nuclear or extended? Everyone in the community, in the country?  All of humanity?  All sentient beings?  What weightage should we give whom – how much good? Should you treat a neighbour’s child, or a child in Syria the same as you would your own? Can you - does it make sense? Second, this takes you right into the realm of thought: should the good be just in action, or thoughts related to actual or possible action, or should the good extend to thought even when there is no possible action? Are you allowed to think poorly of others’ actions and fate that have nothing to do with you, maybe even quietly enjoy a delicious bit of schadenfreude, while doing good or at least no harm? Nope, sorry. Even a harmlessly malign thought is wrong, offside. The flow of thoughts and actions have to be perfectly aligned and impeccably worthy, for true karmic excellence. Still seem simple? Or more like a camel trying to figure a way through a needle’s eye?

This is a true karma driven call to action, and can set up a lifelong journey of ever improving karma.  The challenge is to take this simple sounding maxim as our primary and over-riding call to action, to understand it profoundly, drive it deep into our hearts, and to surrender to it such that it drives every action, and progressively colonises even our thoughts. When you are dealing with others, even in social situations, seek to be aware of this maxim. Yet, how do we change our behaviour in a comprehensive and sustainable way? Overcome all the seemingly uncontrollable reflexive patterns that we have inherited or developed over a lifetime, and which determine our behaviour, in effect define who we are? That requires a deep, deep dive into issues of identity and ego, it requires coming to terms with and deriving the existential wisdom and the liberation that comes from facing up to and understanding mortality and death, subjects I have reflected on earlier.  The deconstruction of our own identity and ego can help us look back on our lives without the distorting refraction resulting from all the damaging experiences of our lives and the lives of our parents, grandparents, going back generations, and see clearly in our karmic patterns the good, the bad and the oh-my-goodness. Equally, looking karmically at past situations where we were hurt, humiliated, cheated will no longer aggravate us if we see that our own karma was clear, and so any negative feelings are entirely related to the ego; and the opposite, if we look at successes and see our own karma was a little dodgy, the smug positive feelings are pure ego too. This can help deconstruct the ego, the most critical spiritual task.

To think deeply about what we have been doing and why, what we intend to do and why – that is the challenge of karma. To own our karma, and see it not as the result of our actions, but as the driver of our actions.