The Law of Karma

"As you sow, so shall you reap", is a popular English proverb, and is also commonly believed to be the essence of the law of Karma. If you do good Karma, good will happen to you. If you do bad Karma, bad will happen to you. But given how paradoxical life is, there is another Hindi proverb that says, "Neki kar, dariya mein daal", which means that you should not expect anything in return for the good you do to others. Its again a common belief that even if the person you helped does not give you anything in return, your good actions are being documented by some universal record keeper, and you will be adequately compensated for it in the long run. However, the paradox does not end here. There is also a concept of detachment in the Gita, which says that you have right to perform Karma, but have no right over the results generated by your Karma. So then, will I really reap as I sow?

Despite all the complications and paradoxes, one thing that everyone agrees on is that the law of Karma works at a higher more abstract level. It means that if you do good to your friend, the return for you may come through other means and not necessarily through that friend. So there is a higher level of connection that we have with each other. 

This also means that
every action that you perform

has an effect on the whole universe! 

Think about it.

The effect may be smaller for entities that are not directly connected with you, but there is surely some effect for everyone. Every kind word you speak and every harsh action you take makes a difference to everything else in the universe in some way or the other. So now, lets say you did some good Karma. How can you be sure that it will finally lead to a good result that will get back to you?

Since our Karma and its effects are working at a universal level, it then obviously implies that our Karma interacts with the Karma of other people as well. And this in turn implies that the final effect depends on all the Karma being done by all the people, and not just on what is being done or was done by you and me. A simple illustration is that the success of a person depends in some way on the Karma of all his family members and not just on what s/he does as an individual. The kind of parents, teachers and neighbourhood a child gets has a huge influence on his/her life ahead. The kind of boss and colleagues you get in your team has a huge influence on your own productivity. The kind of leader a country gets influences the lives of all the people living in the country, as well as outside it. Essentially, both nature and nurture contribute in determining the quality of your life, along with what you do as an individual. So if you have done a lot of good, but are living in a bad environment, you may end up spending most of your life in suffering. What wrong did the Jews do to have to go through such torture by the Nazis? What wrong did the Hindus do to have to go through such immense suffering inflicted by foreign invaders?

Now lets assume that you got a family, colleagues and neighbours all of whom strongly believe in doing good all the time. Does that ensure that only good things will happen to you? The answer is no, simply because what is "good" and what is "right" are often very subjective! This is a complicated issue, and so needs a lot of deep deliberation. What is considered right often depends on the context, which is subject to interpretations by different people. For example, if a student gets a lower rank in JEE and so misses out on a CS seat at IITs, it may seem like a bad thing, but may lead the student to discover later on that his/her real interest was in physics or music, and not really in programming. Another example is that you may have gotten admission into an IIT which looks like a great thing, but later on you may go into depression because you are not able to handle the academic pressure over there. So what we consider to be good/bad also changes with time. This leads to confusion, but this is also what makes human society so diverse. Without this diversity of thoughts and opinions, we would not be very different from other animals. 

So if its so hard to know whats right and whats wrong, and if we are not even sure if good actions will lead to good outcomes, how do we live in this world and how do we take decisions? 

तत्त्ववित्तु महाबाहो गुणकर्मविभागयोः ।
गुणा गुणेषु वर्तन्त इति मत्वा न सज्जते ॥ Gita III.28 ॥

But he who knows the Truth, O mighty-armed (Arjuna),
about the divisions of the abilities and (their) functions,
knowing that the Gunas as senses
move amidst the Gunas as the sense-objects,
is not attached.

This verse from the Bhagavad Gita essentially says that our actions are just a result of the interplay of the 3 gunas (sattva, rajas and tamas). Thus, we should not get entangled in this process, and only observe this from an inner distance. If you carefully observe your daily activities, you will realise that most of the actions you perform were decided by a sub-conscious process and you were informed about it by your brain/mind later on. We don't really have as much control over our actions and decisions as we may like to think. This is also why its so hard to change a person's behaviour and habits, because a lot of it is hard wired in the brain/mind. It is this detachment that is the true goal of any spiritual process. Just be a silent observer of whats happening around you, and also inside of you. Nothing else really matters!