For the Buddha, karma is not something that happens to you. Like when people say, That’s your karma, man. No. For the Buddha, karma is the relationship between your actions and the consequence of your actions. Because everything is deeply entangled and interwoven, there are no actions that happen without an effect—it’s impossible. Some consequences are immediate, and some consequences, like the effects of parenting, are delayed.
So if you want to plant a culture of kindness, then your actions have to be rooted not just in the philosophy of wanting kindness, but in your whole body and your actions. This is karma: your actions making a difference. You can’t control the outcome, but your actions ripple out in surprising, ungovernable ways. Every teenager needs to know this. We all do.
When we were young, we probably learned about how the world is basically a disaster and we’d better start recycling. Then iPhones and more unrecyclable and distracting technology came in. For the generation younger than twenty years old right now, you can’t tell them how screwed up things are because they’ve been hearing that since they were born. They don’t listen to that message; they know. What they’re interested in is how they can make a difference. They’re less interested in climate science statistics. That’s for our generation, but the younger generation is passionate about wanting to make change, and the most important teaching for this is karma. That what you do makes a differences whether it’s on a meta stage, or in how you move your body and eat, speak, listen, trust yourself, or not.
If you start to trust yourself, if you’re able to respond to what troubles you, you send out ripples that form new patterns and realities around you. If you lie in bed all day smoking pot, paint your room black, and listen to Lady Gaga, you send out those kinds of ripples. If you find somewhere to walk with your feet on the ground, on unpaved, soft earth, and let the mass of what is below you be bigger than you, then something new can happen.