Karma in the west is misunderstood, and with good reason.  We lack any cultural or historical reference point for it.  It’s simply not on the menu.  What we adopt is influenced by our own cultural and religious worldview.  We misinterpret karma because we add qualities from the west such as divine judgment, divine justice, divine retribution or atonement. 

It’s understandable we collapse those deeply embedded cultural ideas into karma, but it causes problems and limits our understanding.  So what is karma?  What is it not?  What is its influence in our lives?  And most importantly, what we can do with the information and understanding.

First thing’s first, let’s dispel some of the western dogma we have with karma.

There is no good karma.

There is no bad karma.

Karma is not a bitch.  

Karma is not divine justice.

Karma is not gonna getcha’.

Karma is not a boomerang.

Karma is not going to be on my side.

Karma doesn’t necessitate atonement. 

I know it breaks our righteous hearts to hear this, but karma doesn’t care.  Karma is neutral.  The presence of karma doesn’t mean anything about the here and now.  Karma is not the arbiter of right and wrong.  It’s not a cosmic or heavenly scoreboard.  It doesn’t make sure you get what you deserve or they get what’s coming to them.  Karma has no dog in your fight.  When something bad happens to someone who deserves it or something good happens to someone equally deserving, that’s not karma giving anyone a sign.  Your good fortune or bad fortune doesn’t mean karma is picking and choosing. 

 Karma is like gravity.  It exists.  There are consequences and rules which follow from its existence.  Learning to understand its nature and the clues indicating its presence gives us options and opportunities in life where before we were walking around experiencing life at its effect. 

 Karma and the scope of its influence is both difficult to overstate and impossible to fathom.  It’s all karma.  Karma is pervasive in our experience of life.  Its influence is wholly saturating.  

 That is a big statement.  If you buy into the idea of karma as I’m presenting, it can feel overwhelming, or maybe downright defeatist.  Or from a Western point of view, most especially a self deterministic American sensibility, it can feel confronting and perhaps even offensive.  It’s not.  Let’s share a few contexts before we dive in.

1. There’s nothing you need to do.  Regarding the pervasive nature of karma, you’re like a fish discovering it’s living in a thing called water.  Nothing changes.  Everyone is in the exact same boat.  It’s all humanity.  But it does affect your experience of life.  And awareness of its presence presents some different options for you if you’re interested in taking it on.
2. The nature of karma is neither good nor bad.  Karma just is.  It's not a good thing to have less karma about a certain subject nor is it a bad thing to have more.  Karma does influence perception, and its presence will generally be experienced as degrading and cause you to perceive or feel negatively about the object or person.  The presence of karma will misrepresent reality in this way. 
3. You can learn to discern, identify, release or heal karma in the soul. If that’s a thing you’re interested in doing, there are a multitude of ways you can do this.  The way I prefer is linear and rational.  I’ve dubbed it “practical mysticism”.  There are plenty of other traditions and practices which are more supernatural, with varying degrees of effectivity, and probably what you’d imagine when I say things like “heal karma in the soul”. 

Karma is best described as a phenomenon.  Like any phenomenon, rain for example, there are conditions which create it.  And like any phenomenon, karma has qualities and characteristics which can be observed (experienced) and described.  Qualities of karma are similar to states of matter.  Water, either frozen solid, liquid in your cup, or vapor in the air is no less water than in any of its other states.  Water simply displays different qualities depending on the state of matter.  Similarly, karma displays different qualities of itself depending on how you’re experiencing it.  But no set of displayed qualities makes it less or more karma.

There are four main qualities to karma:   

1. Karma is a generated phenomenon for the purpose of survival.  Meaning its presence is indicative that something created it.  You can think of karma like memory.  It’s what is leftover after a set of conditions existed to create it. 
2. Karma is also like memory in consciousness for biology.  You are a human being and an extension of evolutionary biology.  This sequence, which led to you, is an expression of karma.  It’s like the energetic underpinning of memory, or instructions for life.   
3. Karma is a Probability or Attractor Field.  This is the expression that often is confused with the boomerang or divine justice.
4. Karma is information which imbalances and distorts perception in the environment.  This includes legacy (past life) and non-legacy (current life) information.  This is the expression which is most prevalent in influencing your experience of life.

 We’re going to focus on the three qualities of karma that relate to conscious human experience and leave the biological memory aspect of karma behind. 

 Let’s get back to “rain”.  Rain as a phenomenon, is a result of conditions which create its expression.  The combination of factors which produce rain look like: water evaporation, atmospheric conditions conducive to evaporated water molecules condensing together, and enough condensation to produce sufficient mass forcing an eventual falling of water back onto the surface.  

 We call it “rain” like rain is doing something.  Rain is just a phenomenon, it’s a result.  The result called rain does have effects and consequences.  Maybe you get wet.

 In the same way, Karma is a result of conditions which create it.  And it too has consequences.

3 Conditions Necessary to Create Human Karma:

1. An observer or an experiencer (me)
2. An Event, Occurrence, Situation or Object experienced by an observer
3. A negative Perspective (conscious or unconscious) about that event, occurrence, situation or object.

 Karma is created by perspective/intention/feeling/thought.  Even a violent act on its own, doesn’t create karma.  It’s the relationship to the action. Karma in this way is a human phenomenon. The number one thing that creates karma is thought.

 Think about how many opinions and ideas we carry around with us about how things could/should/oughtta’ be, even about inconsequential matters.  Now multiply that by the thousands of human lifetimes the soul you are has lived.  Oh, and then consider the world is SIGNIFICANTLY more luxurious and safe today than it has been at any point in human history.  You are a walking judgment grenade detonating everywhere and creating karma in the best of circumstances, in a society that is safer and better by almost every conceivable objective metric.  Can you imagine how much karma was created when life really sucked and there was so much more to complain about and suffer through?  We are karma creating machines. Metaphorically speaking.  And once created, karma hangs out like something imprinted and stored in the information stream that is your soul. 

 Consequences of Karma 1

 Karma stored in the soul becomes imbalanced when the conditions which created it or similar situations/conditions/people are present in your life.  It's like the soul has a memory but lacks the ability to disregard what isn’t immediately relevant.  And the soul you are is experiencing all of itself, at all times.  We are living at one point in its various incarnations.  I like to think of it like I’m living at the very tip of a ballpoint pen.  But the pen itself and reservoir of ink behind the tip are all the stored versions of this soul which have existed.  When you and I come together and have a conversation, we’re like the two ends of our respective pens meeting.  There are a thousand versions of you stretching behind you and a thousand versions of me stretching behind me. And we’re experiencing all the karma between us from those versions of us where we did this thing called life together.  For better or worse.  If you’ve lived thousands of human lifetimes, what are the odds you’ve been a real stand up guy or gal to the people in your life the whole time?  And them to you?  They’re not great.  

 The more you investigate and learn the more you discover we’ve all been the sinner, we’ve all been the saint.  We’ve all been the martyr and we’ve all been the persecutor.  All sides of these dynamics are stored as karma in the soul.  In the healing work I do, it’s often amazing to the person who is releasing trauma from this lifetime, how much of it is rooted in karma from prior lifetimes where they were the persecutor or perpetrator.  There is beauty in this understanding.  First, you are so much more than you know, than the experience in your day to day life.  Second, my compassion for myself increases when I realize and embrace all facets of me as does my compassion for others when I accept the same about them. 

 So we’re living in this life, in the here and now, and our experience of life is influenced by the presence of karma.  When karma is imbalanced it misrepresents the current reality.  It implies that all is not well.  It influences your attitude and energy negatively towards people/places/situations.  Remember, the function of karma as memory is for survival.  As an example of how this works, thousands of years ago, karmic bias towards distrusting anyone from outside your tribe was a super effective survival strategy in a world where tribalism was necessary for survival.  Today, tribalism is not necessary for survival.  In fact, cooperation and community are arguably more necessary for continued long term survival and moving forward of the species.  However those inherent karmic tribal biases are rooted deep and they make us prone to vilifying other perspectives and thoughts not aligned with our own tribe.  See the polarization of societies, social media and politics for examples.  

 Another example:  You’re doing life and one day a person shows up in your social circle and you are subtly, or maybe not so subtly triggered by their presence.  We've all had people we didn't jive with right out of the gate.  In the thousands of lifetimes your soul is experiencing simultaneously, it has immediately identified this person as “enemy” based on the metric ton of karma between the two of you.  Of course you don’t know karma is influencing you, but you immediately have 100 justifications why you hate this person’s face off the top of your head.  Your perception and consequent attitude has been influenced by old, irrelevant information.  For all you know this person might be a best friend in this lifetime.  You have no idea.  This story literally happened to a dear friend of mine about 3-4 years ago.  My friend hated this woman.  Irrationally so.  We released the old information (karma) and my friend felt neutral afterward.  Which is arguably a good thing to feel about someone who you have no reason to like or dislike.  Today, they are good friends, genuinely enjoying one another's company.  That’s an example of the influence of karma in your life.  Old versions of you have nothing to do with today.  But that energy and information is there regardless.  It influences your opinions and perception about everything in your world.  My friend could have given you 500 reasons she hated that “b”.  At the end of the day, they were all bullshit.  She was being led around by the nose by her karma.  I promise you have plenty of versions of this story in your life.     

 What you experience as your personality is already shaped by karma.  We come into this life with a set of filters which are a result of karma.  They inform our preferences for all kinds of things and then we go through life finding evidence to reinforce these unconscious inherent karmic biases.  Along the way we form negative opinions about things and people which are against our inherent biases and filters.  These negative opinions, thoughts and feelings create more reinforcing karma.  Most people have no idea who they really are, what they would be or believe without all of these unconsciously adopted inherent biases.  

Consequences of Karma 2 

 Your life and perception is influenced by karma.  These perceptions lead to thoughts, judgments and opinions which then create more karma.  The accumulation of karma influences probability in your life.

 When we talk about karma also acting as a probability or attractor field we want to go back to thinking about gravity.  Karma, like gravity, is neutral.  There are consequences to its existence.  It’s not personal or a karmic boomerang.  It’s more like mathematics.  You can think of karma as bits and pieces of information.  The more karma you have with someone or something the more bits of information gather up.  The more clumps of information you have the greater the karmic “mass”.  Eventually we tend to be drawn into the orbit of people, things and circumstances with which we have the most karma.  It’s kind of like how gravity affects objects in our solar system in space.  More mass equals greater attraction of bodies.

 You likely have more karma with your family than anyone else in your life.  Who your parents, spouse(s), siblings, and who your children are is not an accident.  They are all an expression of karma.  

 The other people in your life you tend to bump into are more of an expression of probability based on mutual karma.  I have a friend who I had the good fortune to work with for some time in this life.  Unlike parents and children there wasn’t an agreement or karmic imperative that we were arranged in this way.  I was doing my thing, she was doing hers, and we collided like two gravitational objects in space due to shared karma.  When we part, we’ll do it in a way which doesn’t create more karma.

 All the recurring themes that play out in your life are generally the result of karma more than luck:  Everything you hate that seems to show up over and over, the bad luck, the circumstances, the unfairness, the breakdowns, disappointments.  You’re almost always drawing the thing to you in some way based on the “gravity” you have with whatever it is. 

 In an interesting way, this is actually empowering.  It means you are always at the cause, never the effect of the circumstances in your life.  You may not even know how you were the cause.  But relating to yourself as the cause keeps you from being the victim.  And if you were somehow the cause of X, you can move beyond it and create a future of Y.  The great news is karma is just doing its thing.  It’s not personal and it doesn’t mean anything about you or anyone else. 

 So what are you without all of your unconscious filters and biases?  What do you feel, think?  How do you relate to yourself, the world and your loved ones?  I would argue that the answer is your version of true authenticity.  If experiencing life as you, here and now, free from the filters and unconscious bias of karma is interesting to you, you can learn to discern and release karma.  That is what I teach.  If understanding where karma is limiting your experience of life and learning how to release, heal it and move beyond it is interesting to you I would consider coming to a class.  

 Sometime in November of 2016 I made the decision to experience life as free from the influence of karma as I reasonably could.  I wanted to truly know myself, to experience myself, here and now, without the influence of old, irrelevant information which degrades my experience of life and skews my perception of people and things.  It was the most epic decision I ever made. 

Remember, there is nothing to do.  I’m exposing you to the water we are all swimming in.  There is nothing wrong.  This is how all of humanity relates and reacts.  But for those of us who are interested in pursuing a different understanding of ourselves and our lives…game on.  Happy to have you aboard. 

Tom