Karma, Explained

Welcome to the Mental Models series, where I'll break down metaphysical concepts from Ancient Sanskrit texts...not in Sanskrit.

This is an explainer of what karma actually is: an equitable system of cosmic action and reaction.

At its core, the concept of karma is the metaphysical explanation for why things happen. Everyone turns into a philosopher as soon as shit happens, right?

I don't know a single person who wishes for bad things to happen to them, but nearly everyone I know has some form of suffering in their life, despite having prayed for/worked towards/"manifested" good things in their life. The unspoken part of any success or failure is a great deal of luck or things outside of our control breaking our way. Our hubris as humans is to chalk up our failures to bad luck but our success to our capabilities. As with most extremes, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The solution to hubris is humility. We need to understand that forces beyond our control influence the outcome of whatever we want to do, but we still need to put the effort in to make the outcome happen. But when we do give it our best shot and still fall short, it can be a bit demoralizing. Especially when we're kids, and we realize that things aren't going our way, the typical response from anyone over 30 is one of two things:

• Life isn't fair
• Life is what you make of it

Both of these statements are certainly true in that we've all experienced "unfairness" in our lives and have (hopefully) put in the hard work to achieve something and have actually received it. However, these two ideas seem a little contradictory. If I can have the life I want, how can it be unfair? Ultimately, it boils down to our incomplete understanding of ourselves and what we truly want. The logical next step to the above statements sums this up:

We make our life unfair.

I doubt most Boomers™ recognize the intricacies of karma when they say this, but it's true! The consequences of my actions are usually fairly immediate, like when I ignore the "VERY SPICY" label and proceed to breathe fire after ingesting a quarter of a bottle of Wicked Reaper Carolina Hot Sauce. Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.

Of course, this is the whole idea behind karma. Karma isn't inherently spiritual, but a proper understanding of how it works can be very useful when trying to keep your focus on what is spiritual.

We tend to default to one particular understanding of karma in popular culture. This is probably best exemplified by one of my favorite TV shows, The Good Place. It pretty much nails the pop culture understanding of karma: we perform an action, and the net effect of said action is either harmful or beneficial, which determines our karmic points. A good action makes up for a bad action; if we do more good than bad, we are good people! The accounting of these karmic points would look something like this:

Obviously, these numbers are made up - I'm not making a statement on the relative good or bad of littering versus recycling. But straight away, we can see a problem here. In this conception of karma, we assume that good actions cancel out bad ones. But we can practically see that's not the case: bad things still happen to people who do good things!

The only way we can reconcile what we see happening with the conception of "what goes around, comes around" is if there are two separate karmic balances: one for the good and one for the bad. It's important to understand that the good we do doesn't cancel out the bad. The karmic accounting might look something like this:

This model is better because it understands that the good we do doesn't cancel out the bad. It also acknowledges that something we do can both benefit and harm simultaneously. But this model still has a big, glaring, enormous problem: we have no idea from this what the circumstances of action were! To accurately judge an action, we need more information than just what was done. We need to know who did it, along with why they did what they did.

Here's a hypothetical situation that demonstrates why context is important. If I informed you that someone kicked a puppy, your immediate reaction would most likely be one of abject horror. However, if I mention that it was an animal control officer fending off a rabid puppy from a newborn baby, you'd probably be ok with it.

The first thing we need to understand about karma with regards to how it's defined in the Sanskrit texts of yore is that it's inherently fuzzy. Because we don't have the capacity to remember everything we've ever done, we may not have the vision to see why things are happening to us now. But an introspective person can see how this principle of action and reaction has manifested in their life, at least in the smaller events of existence.

The interesting thing is that it's not just the action we perform but also the identities of those involved and their intention that matter. Doing something we're not qualified to do can have unintended effects, even if our intentions are good. In the same way, if our motivations for action aren't proper, even if we're qualified to do it, we can end up in a very difficult situation. The best way to understand this is through a few different examples.

Here, we find a situation where the action (killing) is done with proper intention (protecting someone's life). The identity of those involved is also of note: the secret service agent is someone authorized to use force, and an assassin is someone with malicious intent, intent on causing harm that would indirectly impact millions of people. In the age of ubiquitous criticism, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone casting blame on the secret service agent if this situation were to play out.

Here is a situation that is all too common in American society. While the action is the same as before, the improper intention makes all the difference here. Police officers are authorized to use force appropriately - keyword appropriately. Despite their identity as someone able to use force, the officer has no justification for their action. The unarmed civilian's identity also matters: their being of a certain race isn't causing any harm to others. In an equitable system of justice, we would be able to look at these factors before administering justice.

This is something that rarely happens outside America, mostly because we're gun-crazy hooligans who can't find any consensus on stopping mass shootings. But a civilian killing a mass shooter, while not being formally authorized to use force, would be lauded as a hero for stopping someone out to cause harm. The civilian, intent on protecting innocents, would be effectively free from blame in the eyes of the law and society, even though the action is still killing another human being.

Understanding karma to be an equitable system of cosmic action and reaction, dependent on not just what we do but also the role we play, the roles of others, and the intention with which everything is done, frees up so much of our mental resources when trying to understanding why things happen.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will talk about applying this understanding in our own lives.