Featured Image by Dan4th Nicholas Under Creative Commons License

People think karma is little different than a wrathful man in the sky ensuring that every action has a consequence and that everyone will get theirs in time.

This is an obvious Abrahamic coat of paint on a concept which has nothing to do with Abrahamic religion or western culture.

Karma is very real – but karma in the sense most people believe is bullshit.

Take a look around you – do you see obvious criminals in high positions getting their due?

Of course not. These people are protected from consequences for things that would destroy a normal person if they did a fraction of what they’ve done.

Meanwhile the average person gets ticketed more than half their weekly paycheck because their headlight burned out on the way home and they got pulled over by a cop who needed to meet his quota.

Two things are absolutely true in this sense – justice is not being done but both parties are getting and enacting their karma.

Karma IS inescapable. But it isn’t one dimensional, and not all of it is individual. In fact the majority of karma individuals have to deal with is inherited. Inherited from family; from society – sometimes from the entire global population.

To breathe is a karmic act – to act and be acted upon is karma in its essence.

Some things lead you toward liberation and some things lead you toward enslavement – this is the true differentiator; not “good” and “bad.” You are becoming freer and less attached to meaningless things without dissociating, or you are being mired in concerns that are beneath you as a living embodiment of your own divinity.

What is sown must be reaped – but what is reaped and who reaps it is not a matter of who deserves it, and what comes back to you may not be what you expect.

Discard the One-Dimensional View

People will call themselves empaths and talk about how much they give and how underappreciated they are – how people take them for granted, or betray and discard them without thought.

In a one-dimensional view of karma, it should be as simple as, “you are a giving person so you will receive generosity in return.”

This does not account for the internal state of the person giving – the energy they embody, nor their discernment in who they give or don’t give their energies to.

The immediate cope many will jump to is, “on a long enough timeline, you’ll get what you give and receive what you deserve.”

The problem with that is that on a long enough timeline, that prediction can’t fail. It’s like declarations of society’s imminent collapse. Every civilization fails eventually. The odds of it happening on any given Tuesday are low, but the odds it will happen someday are 100%. History shows this.

For karma to mean anything, it can’t just apply when we’re dead and it’s impossible to verify whether a soul has seen justice done – whether they have gotten back what was taken, or dealt the consequences of their misdeeds.

Again this is an Abrahamic mindset – it is a statement not of faith but of blind faith. Past lives are real and there are all kinds of processes that play out between incarnations to the benefit and detriment of an individual soul.

But a spirituality that is divorced from practical, lived reality is fantasy – not a legitimate practice.

Look at the Scenario Again

If someone is martyring themselves for the sake of people who don’t appreciate them and don’t reciprocate and they keep giving knowing full well that’s what will happen – they are receiving their karma. It is instantaneous. It’s inherent to how they operate within the world.

They abandon themselves and overextend themselves to the point they are drained and lack the ability to meet their own needs and they have no one who will take care of them the way they take care of others.

There is no force of nature nor spirit that will balance the scales for them. The only thing that will alter their karma is choosing themselves and allowing those who have grown dependent on them to figure out how to meet their needs without them.

“Kindness” is not always kind; many times it’s transactional, about giving to get. Or giving to control. Or giving because one lacks all sense of boundaries and self-preservation.

If you give to get – your karma is in not receiving, or being manipulated by the ones who reciprocate. It becomes a game. Genuine community, tribe and bonds can’t be built on that. But – just because you receive transactional giving from someone it doesn’t mean that you are guilty of the same; it’s an implicit contract. It’s an invitation to sink to that level. Your karma is not in receiving this but in deciding how you will respond. That is what determines the energy you embody and what you invite to come to you in turn.

Karma is Action and Choice

The universe does not care if you cast a death curse on a random person. There is no judge who is going to hunt you down and ensure you pay the cost of taking someone’s life through magickal means.

That is not to say there are no repercussions – odds are, if you picked up a book containing such a curse and used it, you probably weren’t taking it very seriously. This would create a total lack of resistance to what you were doing which would likely be necessary to succeed in the first place when you’re new to the craft.

If you are not a psychopath – this is going to be a shock to the system and you will have to find some way to live with what you’ve done. You may dissociate, convince yourself the person must have deserved it, or take the brunt of the emotional weight and actually process it and grow through it. If you grow, you’ll go through the same process someone who went to jail for murder will go through if they’ve enough humanity left to emerge as a functional member of society capable of loving relationships.

Karma is not external punishment – it is the natural consequence of what you do.

And everything you do sets energy in motion. Even a monk sitting placid in a meditative state on a mountainside every waking hour of the day is solidifying or dissolving energetic patterns; he is acting even if his action is sitting still, and this builds his karma.

People take western salvation fantasies and project them onto karma. This is to pervert and misunderstand it in the extreme.

It is not what you put out that will come back to you – what you embody and enmesh with will multiply.

ALL karma is immediate; ALL karma spans lifetimes. It is the stream that wears down stone over thousands of years. The choices you make today may have no obvious impact upon you, your life, or your psyche, but rest assured – you cannot so much as take a breath without being changed.

The Individual Isn’t Responsible for the Collective

Disease can result from choices we make and energies we embody. They can be individually karmic.

But –

When a child dies because a corporation dumped toxic waste into the water supply of a poor country, is that the child’s karma?

If thousands of people plummet to their deaths because a bridge collapsed underneath them, is that their karma? Is it their karma when said bridge was in disrepair solely because of the corruption and mishandling of funds by the local politicians?

As part of humanity, we each bear some small part of humanity’s collective karma – but the only sense in which tragedies and disasters can be said to be individually karmic for everyone is in death and life being linked.

By being born, it is your karma to die. You are part of nature, and nature can be arbitrary and brutal.

But because of how collective karma works, it’s entirely possible to suffer the consequences of things you had no part in. You may not personally abide the corruption of politicians in office, but what are you to do as an individual? Your mightiest efforts aren’t guaranteed to change a thing if the zeitgeist favors turning a blind eye to the actions of obvious psychopaths.

The average person is at once not responsible for the horrible things corporations and governments do and at the same time they’re complicit. Collective karma is complicated – it’s not easy to parse what’s happening to individuals who meet what we’d consider tragic ends.

When you see death as just being part of a cycle rather than an end, it’s not so “karmic” in a punishing sense. It’s not a result of lacking character or failing; it’s just the completion of a cycle, and a completion that was destined to come at birth.

If a society is so corrupt people are dying of horrendous diseases due to contaminants in the air or food, are those people bearing punishment for the collective, or are they being spared what will inevitably befall those who allowed such corruption to run rampant?

The point being – on the outside looking in, seeing only the smallest fragment of a soul’s eternal existence, you have no bloody clue what their karma is or what role the things they’re experiencing plays in their evolution.

I’m not a fan of the bible, but that the subtext of Job’s story goes over the head of every love-n-lighter baffles me. “God” viewed as a personification of nature makes it clear – you can’t judge someone’s character by whether misfortune falls upon them because it falls upon the righteous and the wicked just the same.

Karma is About Your Character, Not What Happens to You

What happens to you is an aspect of karma – but the focus upon that, defining it solely based on consequences makes it just another method of giving your power away.

We are not eternal children waiting to be spanked by our stern father.

We are agents and co-creators within a reality we share with other sovereign divine beings, and the world we live in is the result of what we create together.

Karma is and should be a tool to encourage deep thought about the actions we take and the character we cultivate. It should inform our decisions and encourage us to engage seriously with moral and religious philosophy.

“Good” karma is not simply about doing no harm. This is impossible. Life must consume life in order to live. You’ve gone vegan? Animals and insects are killed in the process of growing your food. The plants themselves have been demonstrated to experience and express pain. They are alive and conscious.

If your philosophy of “good” results in nothing but dead ends and mental gymnastics, you need a new approach. Reflecting upon karma will encourage this.

Treating karma like it’s petty soap opera drama, however, will only chain you. It turns the focus away from yourself – away from your character – to what other people are doing, and worse, what YOU think should befall them.

You need to judge – I think this emphasis on “never judge anyone” has harmed a lot of people by preventing them from acknowledging the obvious and putting up firm boundaries.

But judging for its own sake isn’t a worthy passtime. You don’t have the right to sit in judgement of people and situations that have nothing to do with you, and you’re increasing your karmic weight when you do it.

Sometimes people get their consequences, and sure, that’s an aspect of karma – but it’s a small part of the picture.

What’s more – your karma is tied to your true will. Do you let things slide that you shouldn’t in circumstances where you’re personally involved or have been injured directly? Circumstances where you could assert yourself, speak up, or apply an appropriate consequence to someone who has slighted you?

Standing down and living without boundaries because you gaslight yourself into thinking they will suffer for it in time is not the righteous path – not according to any tradition. There is no spiritual path with any lasting power that teaches spinelessness as a virtue.

In the sense that most people use the word karma – sometimes YOU are that karma, and it ain’t coming if you don’t stand up for yourself.

If you are always waiting for the universe to set things right, that’s your karma – waiting. And you will do a whole lot more of it until you break the pattern. You will be continuously nudged into action until you actually do something.

So it goes with many things. Remember that the universe rewards courage – your thriving is a consequence to those who deserve consequences for what they’ve done to you. Sometimes the scales are righted in your favor.

But it’s never gonna happen if you sit still and don’t set about your great work. Focus on what you need to do and let the chips fall where they may. There is no higher pursuit than the constant refinement of your understanding and character in relation to your true will. If you want balanced karma, that is how you get it.

Linktree