KARMA IS THE law of cause and effect. Whenever we take an action, there is a corresponding though incalculable effect. In Indian philosophy, karma is considered a causal natural law in the same way we could say that gravity is a natural law of physics. Karma is not operated by some higher power or god that chooses what kind of effects will happen based on your actions in this or previous lifetimes; karma is not like some kind of Santa Claus that adds up your rights and wrongs and determines the feedback loop most appropriate for you.
Simply put, karma is the relationship between actions and their effects. Good actions tend to have positive effects, and actions with negative intention, like the desire to cause harm, have negative effects. Sometimes the effects are not immediate, like the relationship between parents and children, and at other times we can see immediately the hurt we cause in poor speech or the joy we create when we act out of genuine kindness.
In popular culture, the term karma is most often translated as “fate.” The Sanskrit word “vipaka” refers more to fate, or the exclusive effect of previous actions, but karma differs from vipaka in that it describes the causal relationship between volitional action and the effect of that action. It’s easiest to consider karma as a seed that is planted and then ripens. Sooner or later our actions, like seeds, will bear fruit.
Karma is not a way of pointing out a divine order or some kind of omnipotent creator god that keeps an eye on all that we do. Karma is also not some evolved superego that controls all aspects of our conscience. On one end of the spectrum we could believe that karma points out our predetermined destiny, a road map already created, whereby we simply “get what we deserve.” On the other end of an exaggerated spectrum we find karma as pure luck, a random distribution of events and synchronicities all relative to one another. A grounded and practical understanding of karma is a middle path between the two extremes of free will and pure fate.
We want desperately, as humans caught up in a fleeting and imperfect world, to make sense and meaning of not only our personal lives but of life in general. It can be seductive to use karma to explain what is often unexplainable by using it as a metaphysical tool. Some people blame the tsunami of December 2004 on the karma of those affected by it. Others blamed Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans flood in August 2005 on the karma of an American culture at war. While sometimes using karma in this way has great explanatory power, this logic is built on sand because the conditions that give rise to any one event are so complex that they are beyond reductionistic comprehension. Although there are some Indian uses of the term karma where it is weighted with metaphysical or existential fate, the yogi’s notion of karma is equally balanced between actions and their effects, like multiple feedback loops, with the present moment being shaped both by past and by present actions; present actions shape not only the future but also the present. Furthermore, present actions need not be determined by past actions. In other words, there is always free will, although its range is somewhat dictated by the past.
We could say that the yamas on nonharming, honesty, nonstealing, wise use of energy, and nonacquisitiveness are based on the law of karma. Karma, in the context of the yamas, is a tool designed to help us see the intimate nature of all relationship. How I talk with you affects the quality of our communication, affecting how I feel, how you feel, and how others who come into contact with us feel about our contact in that moment. Karma is not some kind of spiritual air-mile system with merit and demerit added by some divine teller. Rather, karma points out the importance of purifying our actions of body, speech, and mind, so that the way we live our life benefits all with whom we are in relationship.
Often on retreat or in long courses, one of the group exercises we practice begins by reflecting on some of the ways we’ve acted unkindly over the day. In partnerships or in small groups we can notice where greed or anger, competitiveness or dishonesty took hold of us and influenced how we spoke or acted. Each person meets with the same partner every day for the duration of the course and describes where some action was taken that may have caused unwanted harm to another or even oneself, however slight. People meet their partner daily or weekly and simply note the way that actions of body, speech, or mind were unskillful. While at first this may seem like a very simple exercise, it challenges the group to bring awareness to every aspect of their day, raising attention to a level where we can study our actions, intentions, and the effect of our actions. The other person just listens, and then we switch. As we listen, we pass no judgment; we simply create an atmosphere in which our partner feels safe and encouraged to the degree that honesty feels natural. This is one of the ways we teach about causality. The kind of attention and steadiness we bring to our āsana practice now carries forth through the domain of speech and attentive listening, rolling the practice off the sticky mat and into the tangled world of communication. This is how we see the practice through.
What’s important about exercises like these is that there is no determination of right or wrong action. This helps us open to the yamas as guidelines rather than universal absolutes based on idealized notions of perfection or purity. Karma in the context of the yamas becomes a lens through which we can see how the world hangs together, how things feed and rebound off one another. Seeing actions of body, speech, and mind in terms of causality challenges us to wake up and become more sensitive and clear, flexible, and honest. When we practice honesty (satya) and ground our actions in nonviolence, we plant those very seeds as future potentials. This is how we plant the seeds of culture. What kind of seeds shall we plant?
THE IDIOM OF INTIMACY
Investigating the relationship between our intentions, actions, and the effect of our actions, we literally transform our world. Most of, if not all of, our global strife, comes down to the separation of humans from the earth, from each other, and ultimately, from ourselves. This gives rise to discontent and its corresponding symptoms: greed, anger, ignorance, envy, anxiety, clinging, and distress. If yoga begins with relationship, the cure for the world’s symptoms of stress and dissatisfaction comes down to a matter of perception. When we are acting in our own self-interest, when competitiveness and greed, or anger and ill will, rule our minds from moment to moment, we don’t experience the world relationally; we experience “it” as divided. Spiritual practice in everyday life manifests in any moment that the gap between form and formlessness dissolves. Every time you step into that gap, you step into enlightenment.1
Examine how your intentions deeply affect your mood and mode of seeing. In meditative practice, when we are caught up in delusive thinking or cascading distraction, it’s helpful to notice the attitude we bring to the object we are noticing. Are we trying to get rid of a mental state or emotion, or can we notice it and feel it clearly? Do we think a thorny feeling in the body is permanent, or can we watch it change? Attitude needs to be adjusted accordingly, and over time we begin to see the way intention influences the quality of our awareness in any given moment.
If there is a world “out there,” there must be a “me” in here; when there is an object, there is a self. The more I treat the world of earth, elements, and people as out there and separate from “me,” the more alienated I feel. In that alienation I can’t see the nature of reality clearly because I’m trapped in the world of things, just as I’m enclosed by the television of my mind with its constant stream of ideas and images. When I treat the world as an object, I become a solidified subject. I do this to myself. In relational terms, we become like ice cubes bouncing off one another in a cold pitcher of water. We race to work and step over each other, or we work in competition with one another. The simple truth is that rushing has become a habit for many of us and it has a negative effect on our mental, spiritual, and physical health. Watching the rush-hour race, I’m always amazed at how humans push and fight for their imagined right to be first. Even bicycling our son to his downtown school each morning, I find it hard not becoming aggressive in such polluted and congested traffic lanes. But if every action creates the universe, certainly another attitude is possible. Resentment and anger grow when there is separation, because separation entails alienation. Alienation, in turn, feeds aggression, conceit, and entitlement. The more I feel separated, the more cut off I am from knowing what your experience is. Without openness to the other, I turn the other into an object.
INTEGRAL PARTS OF AN INTEGRATED WHOLE
We are integral parts of this marvel we call life. What it means to be human has roots deeper than we may realize on the surface. All of life’s roots are entangled. Even this evening, stepping out of a rural retreat cabin and looking up into the milky sky of northern stars, it takes time for the eyes, breath, and body to become receptive and quiet, especially after hours of writing and reading. When seduced by too much surface thinking and reactive states of mind, the interconnectivity we call life is obscured.
After teaching about karma, Patañjali offers the yoga practitioner an eight-limbed path of practice called Aṣṭāṅga Yoga, which is described as more like a web or a spoked hub than a linear format for practice, because each limb connects intimately with every other limb. We can think of the eight limbs as linear, with one stage leading to the next like so:
Fig. 1. Linear conception of the eight-limbed path.
The problem with this model of practice is that it creates the notion that practice leads in a linear direction. Furthermore, it ratchets up the practice of samādhi, making it seem especially holy or sacred when in fact it only serves to clarify the other limbs through a constant retuning quality of the attention span. Perhaps it’s more accurate and healthy to think of the eight limbs as circular:
Fig. 2. Circular conception of the eight-limbed path.
What is helpful about the circular form is that we begin to see how one stage may provide the ground for the next but also that samādhi—waking up to the inherent integration of all things—is expressed through our actions of the yamas. The yamas, in this model, become expressions of samādhi.
However, we can reconceptualize the path by creating a concentric image of practice that allows room for development, transformation, and the refinement of unskillful habit energies. The concentric model looks like this:
Fig. 3. Concentric conception of the eight-limbed path.
The concentric model of the eight limbs makes the yamas flow together as a supporting structure through which we move over and again, albeit with more and more stability. In this way the yamas are not simply sequential (as seen below). Instead, the yamas are samādhi put into action. This can be best understood as follows.
Fig. 4. Linear conception of ethics.
Fig. 5. Ethics as an expression of samādhi.
The liberating potential of karma in the context of the diagram above is that we see the way in which our actions are, at bottom, expressions of the integral whole. Secondly, our actions are always rising up in response to particular circumstances so that karma is seen to be creative potential rather than the ancient Brahmanic notion of karma as fate. Here is how one teacher puts it:
Who you are—what you come from—is not anywhere near as important as the mind’s motives for what it is doing right now. Even though the past may account for many of the inequalities we see in life, our measure as human beings is not the hand we’ve been dealt, for that hand can change at any moment. We take our own measure by how well we play the hand we’ve got. If you’re suffering, you try not to continue the unskillful mental habits that would keep that particular karmic feedback going. If you see that other people are suffering, and you’re in a position to help, you focus not on their karmic past but your karmic opportunity in the present: Someday you may find yourself in the same predicament that they’re in now, so here’s your opportunity to act in the way you’d like them to act toward you when that day comes.2
Ecology, psychology, and spirituality are sciences of context. They return our tendency toward self-interest to the wider and deeper ground of relationship. This is how we cultivate wisdom and compassion, the chief concerns of any spiritual path. “When the[se] components are practiced,” Patañjali comments in the second chapter of his Yoga-Sūtra, “impurities dwindle; then, the light of understanding can shine forth, illuminating the way to discriminative awareness.”3 The yamas turn our practice toward relational life and in doing so, clarify the ingredients that contribute to the choices we make, because there is an echo in everything we do. It’s the clarity of the mind, Patañjali suggests, that leads to viveka, creative and discriminating awareness.
Patañjali is a realist, not an idealist. We are not in search of a set of rules to follow, nor is yoga practice a practice of dogma. Realization of and commitment to interconnection and interdependence forms the overarching ethical code for the practicing yogin. The yamas are strategies for learning how to take action, though the yamas do not prescribe what specific action one should take in a specific situation: That is up to each of us.
A CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION OR CONNECTION?
Causality reminds us that every cause has an effect and every effect becomes the cause of future actions. Psychological change, then, is inseparable from spiritual awakening. If there is nowhere to go, what is here becomes valuable and worth tending.
There is an assumption in the way we talk about actions and the effects of our actions that there is some kind of natural law that will take care of everyone. Perhaps that natural law is science, or economics, or government policy, or, at a more psychological level, the belief that our conscience will get the better of us if our activities are exploitative to others or ourselves. Unfortunately, none of these assumptions have proved correct. Human actions and economic policies have, over the last several centuries, been determined by calculations of cost and expense, profit and loss, risk and benefit, which all aim to “optimize” the means that pertain to a specific end: growth and profit. But a real response to the reality of inequality must also come from the heart, not the two-column accounting system; otherwise we just keep bumping into ourselves.
In the two-column accounting system, designed to account for income and expense, there is little room for a column that measures accountability, social responsibility, ecological effect, and so on. Thus, it does not account for real costs. Additional (and invisible) columns are usually the responsibility of study groups or policymakers whose perspective is not built fundamentally, even operationally, into the two-column accounting system. Don’t we need to take far more into account? If body and mind are endless, aren’t the permutations and combinations also endless?
Karma teaches us that the first measure of accounting for our actions is in terms of consequences. Since we are always discovering new ends and means to consume and produce, we need to continually look at the consequences of our actions. Unrestrained materialism and ecological integrity exist in an absolute contradiction. We cannot continue to consume and produce at the velocity we are now. The result is a steady erosion of our well-being and the earth’s delicate and complex balance. The root of the degradation is the endlessly invasive and expansive force of capital, gnawing away at the threads of ecological integrity and exceeding, with its inexorable pressure to expand, the earth’s capacity to deal with ecological destabilization. We are greedy, and to deal with our sense of lack and disconnectedness, we pursue the accumulation of capital to try and ground us. We seek retirement security and other forms of financial safety in order to make us feel grounded. But where does it end?
Tending to relationship as another facet of practice synchronizes the mind and body with the heart of others, guaranteeing a natural rhythm to our lives based on nonseparation and tolerance, thus guaranteeing an internal sense of authenticity, credibility, and purpose. As we breathe in and breathe out, we are in constant and changing relational existence. Let us not squander our resources and creative capacities in distraction and aversion—we can certainly wake up with more heartfelt and creative responses to our global and personal ills and reverse the tide of frenzied self-destruction. Morality is an expression of your true nature and how it functions with the world. Do not drift through your life!
In stillness we can reconfigure our intentions and return to what is life-affirming. The yamas are not some final arbiter of right and wrong—we all are. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau reminds us that even if one person withdraws his or her support from an unjust government or culture, it begins a cycle that will reverberate and grow.4 An ethics governed by karma is an expression of the truth of interconnectedness and a compelling guideline for conduct in the world. Morality is not girded to social structures—it’s an embodied expression of your basic wisdom, your basic nature, your whole body, breath, and mind. There is a kinship built into everything, and our realization of this is encapsulated by the term “yoga.”
