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In my teenage years, I had a somewhat neurotic behavior.
Every time I said or did something I considered as bad, I prayed for forgiveness.
Unconsciously, I had created an image of God who punishes me for bad behavior, and the only way to avoid divine punishment was through repentance.
Although I am a proponent of taking full responsibility for one’s life, I just can’t help but to partly blame my Catholic upbringing.
Anyway, we have all heard of the concept of karma, which most of us associate with a cause and effect mechanism. Do good and good things will come to you. Do bad and bad things will come to you.
Although back in that time I have never spent my time thinking about karma, I had created a whole internal drama representing exactly this cause and effect mechanism.
I said/did something bad (cause) for which I’ll be punished (effect). This is the common understanding of bad karma. My next step in this internal drama was then to plead for forgiveness which in my mind would cancel the punishment (effect). This was the good karma aspect of this drama.
I had created a constant never-ending struggle between bad and good karma inside myself where good karma was the only way to avoid the punishing qualities of bad karma.
But this is not how karma works.
In fact, common definitions of good and bad have nothing to do with karma per se.
So what is karma then and how does it work? In the following article, we’ll explore these questions and how you can free yourself from the clutches of karma.
What is the Meaning of Karma?
The concept of karma has its roots in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. Basically, it’s the active principle of samsara or the round of birth-and-death.
Whether this round of birth-and-death is a literal rebirth cycle with multiple lifetimes or a figurative birth and death of each moment is another matter.
Yet, what all Buddhist traditions agree upon is that your karma plays a crucial role in breaking free from this round.
Now if you think to break free you have to live a modest life and never do anything that could be considered as “bad,” let me reassure you, that’s not what karma is about.
In Buddhism, there is no moral law created by God or nature. The Buddha’s precepts of conduct are voluntarily assumed rules of expediency to remove hindrances to clear awareness.
Contrary to common belief, karma is not some law of moral retribution.
The simplest definition of karma is “conditioned” action.
Conditioned action arises from a motive, and seeking a specific result. Further, the nature of your conditioned action is influenced by environmental influences (i.e., family, friends, media, experiences) and inner influences (i.e., beliefs, thoughts, emotions).
This doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to have a motive or prefer one result over another, but to recognize that solutions create more problems and that the control of one thing creates the need to control other things.
To put it another way, when you are under the influence of karma, your actions are directed to the grasping of life, based upon the conditioning you have received growing up.
You could say that your actions are motivated and purposeful. Most people would say that this is a good thing.
Well, it might be.
Yet when our actions are motivated and purposeful, we are usually anxious about the outcome of our actions, which creates suffering.
This whole grasping at life – trying to control outcomes – leads to self-frustration.
And the basis of all this seeking and grasping is that we are spellbound by illusion or maya, as it is referred to in Hinduism and Buddhism. Maya doesn’t mean that the world is an illusion, as it is often wrongly stated.
The illusion lies in our point of view.
Maya is the illusion of taking all our concepts and abstractions for reality, while they are merely the result of our measuring and categorizing minds.
Basically, it’s confusing the map for the territory. And this confusion results in karmic patterns.
So as long as we are under the spell of maya, we are bound by karma.
This is then how karma works:
You are being conditioned. This conditioning creates beliefs and identities. Your beliefs and identities influence your actions. You hope your actions lead to specific outcomes. This attachment to specific outcomes leads to frustration. And then you try to rid yourself of this frustration through more conditioned action.
Thus you are in the wheel of karma.
Good versus Bad Karma
Now, there is the whole idea of good and bad karma which implies that some karma is desirable and some karma undesirable.
Generally speaking, however, Buddhist practice aims at the disentanglement from bad and good karma. Even good conditioned action is still conditioned action.
The goal is free spontaneous action, uninfluenced by concepts and beliefs, or as the Taoists call it, wu-wei.
You see, if you feel like you have no choice but to give every beggar a coin, you don’t have virtue but a compulsion. It may be good for the beggar but it’s still not free spontaneous action. This may be considered good karma, but it’s still karma.
Still, we can make a slight distinction between good and bad karma.
From your own experience, you might recognize that “bad” actions are usually more grasping than “good” actions. Another way to put this is that some conditioned action is more destructive than others.
Regularly going to the gym and regularly binging on sweets, for instance, can both be conditioned or karmic actions. But most would agree that a workout habit, although it might be a conditioned action, is more life-affirming than overeating.
Now, accumulating good karma is often mentioned in the context of spiritual practice.
Some believe that the spiritual practice you engage in this life will serve you in your next life. Meaning your starting point will be further ahead and you’ll reach liberation or enlightenment faster.
This makes sense if we accept the metaphysical assumption that there is an unchanging part of you, which stores your spiritual progress and that you carry over to each next incarnation.
Yet we can also keep this idea in the context of one lifetime, meaning the fruits of your spiritual practice can be evident in this life.
This leads us to a paradox.
Although Buddhist practice aims at spontaneous action (unconditioned or non-karmic action), the practice itself is, often, conditioned or karmic action.
Nonetheless, in almost all cases the path to liberation or nirvana leads through karma. Even the Buddha, at some point in his life, was engaged in karmic activity.
This way to liberation or mastery is apparent in almost any skill you can learn.
Let’s say you want to be a great artist. To be so, you are practicing daily. You are thinking about techniques and how to apply them. You are self-conscious about the process (positive karma).
Finally, you have attained mastery and are a great artist. Now you no longer have to practice techniques nor think about them. You just paint and apply them in an un-self-conscious manner.
You are learning so that later you can un-learn the learned.
In the words of the Zen poet Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin:
“Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.”
What is Family Karma?
Especially in new age circles, family karma is an increasingly popular topic. Basically, there are two ways to understand family karma.
The first is that your conditioned action (karma) is a reflection of the conditioned action of one or many of your family members.
You can often see this in parents who are abusing their children. Many of them have been victims of abuse themselves. Because they have been unable to break free from this conditioning, they are now acting out their family karma.
Or let’s take the less destructive example from earlier.
You can’t help yourself but give every beggar a coin. Now to turn this karma into family karma you simply add: “My mom was always generous to everyone, I got that from her.”
The second way to understand family karma is that your actions are determined by the image or idea your family has of you.
It doesn’t matter if you are seen as “the black sheep,” or “the golden child,” both can result in karmic patterns inhibiting your joy and freedom.
Family karma may not even stem from just your immediate family (your parents and grandparents) but could have its roots in past generations.
Research in epigenetics suggests that trauma, for instance, is passed through genes. In one study, researchers found that the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors led to genetic changes in the survivors but also in their children.
We have to keep in mind that epigenetics and the idea of transgenerational trauma are still fairly new. So metaphysical claims on the basis of its limited results are to be taken with a grain of salt.
Regardless, it’s fair to say that traumatic experiences influence your behavior, which, again, leads to conditioned or karmic action.
Whether you believe if behavior can be passed down through genes or not, there is no doubt that your closest family members have influenced (and might still influence) your behavior. And their behavior has been influenced by their parents and other family members.
You can take some time to reflect and ask yourself how much of your behavior is a copy of your parents’ or other family members’ behavior.
If you find any behavior you think is destructive to yourself and those around you, ask yourself if this behavior is your free choice or if you have adopted someone else’s behavior.
In the end, breaking free from family karma is about being your own unconditioned self so that you no longer pass down the same destructive tendencies that have been passed down for generations.
Freeing Yourself From Karma
“Reaction and non-action both create karma, but conscious action transcends karma.” – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Now on to the million-dollar question: How do you free yourself from karma?
Well, this liberation from conditioning is exactly the goal of all mystical traditions. Liberation has been called many different names such as enlightenment, nirvana, samadhi, self-realization, and so on.
Historically, full enlightenment has been experienced only by a few individuals and thus seems like an improbable event. If this is really so or not is not important for now.
What is important is knowing that to free yourself from karmic action, you don’t need to make enlightenment your main objective in life.
Striving for enlightenment could be seen as the greatest hindrance to its attainment anyway.
Anyway, seeing through your conditioning is not only helpful for reaching some kind of lofty spiritual goal.
Deconditioning yourself is crucial in remembering who you really are. This includes embodying your authentic personality and recognizing your Self beyond any concepts, ideas, identities, and beliefs.
Essentially there is just one thing you need to liberate yourself from karma. And this is awareness.
I feel like I’m saying this about every topic, but it’s true.
When you increase awareness in your life, you’ll no longer unconsciously re-act to everything around and inside you. Awareness in this sense means observation.
You start to observe everything going on in and around you. With time, understanding will follow. You’ll be able to explain why you have acted the way you have acted.
You will understand yourself.
But don’t try to understand yourself. This doesn’t work. All you do is observe without trying to change or explain anything. Then the understanding follows naturally.
This is what happened to me with my internal drama about the punishing God. Before I reached a certain degree of awareness, I was not aware that I had created this whole wheel of suffering myself.
But one day, without warning, I suddenly saw it all so clearly. I was shocked when I realized what I have been doing. I felt like I had awoken from a deep sleep.
From that day forward my neurotic repentance before a self-created God was gone. No therapy, no reflection, no thinking. Awareness did the trick.
Being Empty Space
The more you are aware, the more you will rest in your unconditioned self, and the more your actions will arise spontaneously, uninfluenced by constant rationalizations.
Then your actions will be beautiful because they’ll no longer be automatic behavior, but full of awareness.
Or as Anthony De Mello says in his book, Awareness:
“The beauty of an action comes not from its having become a habit but from its sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception, and accuracy of response.”
Awareness creates space between everything, or rather awareness allows you to recognize the space between everything.
This space – the space between trigger and response – is the liminal space of infinite possibility. In this space, you have the freedom to choose who you want to be.
You’ll recognize that your personality doesn’t depend on the past. You can create it anew in every moment.
This is what it means to be empty.
You let go of everything and hold on to nothing. When you are empty, new conditioning can’t put its fangs into you.
When you no longer hold on to any concept or idea of yourself, you’ll be free because your actions will no longer be directed at the confirmation of a fixed image of yourself.
Which means you’ll no longer keep your conditioning alive. Your actions will no longer reflect your past but arise from the here and now.
Then you’ll have completely forgotten about karma.
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“When action comes out of nothing it creates no karma.” – Buddha
Luka
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