Karma is a natural law. Karma is the currency of your life. With the currency of karmic actions, you purchase and create all your life experiences — good, bad, pleasant, and unpleasant. Karma is the law of cause and effect by which each individual creates his own destiny by his thoughts, words, and deeds.
According to the theory of karma, you have a cupboard filled with karmas: personal karmas, cultural karmas, and karmas that involve the entire human race. The life you experience is a mesh of all your karmas interacting with one another like a big, unique, karmic thumbprint.
Basically, if you push something, it moves. Now expand this idea and realize that the entire universe is made up of movements and reactions to movements.
Your body was created by the lovemaking movements of your parents and then movements of the sperm burrowing into the egg, zygotes replicating, organs forming, and nutrients being assimilated. Everything that keeps your body alive right now is made up of movements: visible movements, invisible movements, and millions of teeny-tiny electro-chemical movements.
The entire universe consists of spinnings upon spinnings — from galaxies to communities, to electrons circling the nucleus of an atom. Movement is the nature and quality of all creation. So what’s keeping it all going?
You can think of the universe as running on the fuel of karma. As Newton’s law of action says, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Thus work the ways of karma.
One good way to grasp the intricacies of karmic law is to watch how karmas manifest inside and around you. Life is a living textbook on the laws of karma. You can
Observe how life so often creates exactly what you most desire or fear.
Watch as the most vehement persecutors in any situation seem to inevitably become the persecuted.
Notice how your own good actions can lighten your heart and create an opening for more goodness to enter your life.
Even movie scripts and novels generally reflect an intuitive understanding of these laws, as good wins over evil nearly every time — even if only moments before the final credit roll!
You already know the laws of karma
Human beings have been using the laws of karma from their beginning — when an unknown caveman first discovered that placing his hand into a fire created pain and didn’t do it again.
Basically, karma is a law of the universe like any other, but not yet fully understood by society at large. So it’s sometimes used as a joke, as in “ha, ha, that must have been your karma!” This line would be akin to making a joke after someone falls down, that “ha, ha, that must have been the gravity!” Well?
Karma is like the wind
In visualizing the idea of karma, you can imagine a large, deep lake — the lake of your soul. When the lake is still, you’re able to see into its life-filled depths. But on a windy day, with leaves and twigs hitting the water’s surface, the lake becomes covered with ripples to the degree that your view into its depths is obscured.
In this metaphor, you can find examples of two kinds of karma:
Fresh karmas: The wind is analogous to the current winds of karma that are being freshly whipped up by your own never-ending thoughts, speech, and actions.
Old karmas: The twigs and leaves on the water’s surface would be analogous to old, solidified karmas that aren’t so easily discarded — such as karmas relating to your family or cultural traditions. You’re more or less stuck with these karmas.
Now, here’s the deal. You may not have much control over all those leaves and twiggy old karmas, but you do have a choice of how the winds of the karmas you’re creating right now will blow.
Even if you have a lot of old karmic debris on your soul lake, if the current winds remain calm, the karmic clutter moves to the perimeter of the lake, leaving the depths visible through the lake’s clear surface. However, if you generate a lot of blustering winds by performing all kinds of noisy, ego-based actions, you’re going to have a messy and obstructive surface.
With a lot of current karmic winds, even if you only have a small amount of old debris from past actions, your lake’s surface will still be obscured by whatever is there, and also by the ripples created on the lake directly by the fresh karmic winds.
The winds of new karmas become still when you enter into a state of inner peace. You can find inner peace by allowing your thoughts and actions to flow through you unsullied by selfish desires or ego-based motives. When your surface waters are clear, you have a chance to see more clearly what is really at the core of your being — the great light of your spiritual soul.
