Transcending karma

January 31, 2020

I’ve always enjoyed excellent health. Is such good fortune the result of good genes, or diet and exercise, or random luck, or good karma?

On two separate occasions in the 1980’s I was driving when I was hit by drunk drivers, one of whom totaled my car. I was not injured in either crash. Was I just lucky to survive the accidents, or was it misfortune to be involved in such dangerous incidents to begin with? Were these events examples of good karma or bad karma or neither? Were they really accidents?

In other words, why me? Or, why you? Why do good or bad things happen to us or our loved ones? Do we have any responsibility for the events in our lives, or is it just that good or bad “shit happens” as the bumper sticker says?

These are some of the questions that have occurred to me in the last week after my Thursday night meditation group listened to a recorded talk about karma by the writer and philosopher Eckhart Tolle.

I don’t know how Hindus understand karma, but Buddhists generally view it as an accumulation of causes and effects. That is, you think, say, or do something, and that energy or vibration has consequences that show up in your life sooner or later, in this incarnation or in a future lifetime. Another way of explaining karma is the saying, “What goes around comes around.”

But karma is not about punishment or revenge. It’s an energy imbalance, often between two people, such as myself and each of the drunk drivers who hit me years ago. Maybe those collisions were karmic payback for something I did to them in a previous lifetime, or maybe those guys were simply random agents attracted by my negative karma, or perhaps they will need to repay their karmic debt to me in a future lifetime. I don’t know why those incidents occurred, but I do believe that they happened for a reason. And even if my Dave personality doesn’t understand the lesson involved, I believe that my soul is aware of such a learning opportunity.

So karma can be a valuable teacher in helping us to learn to make wise choices, leading to the further evolution of our souls. For example, those individuals who deny global warming or contribute significantly to it will experience the repercussions of those choices, probably by being reborn in places that have been made unpleasant by climate change. These lessons are not about punishment, but about gaining awareness of the law of causality.

Yet we have to be careful not to rush to judgement about ourselves or others when something bad happens. The reality is that in our physical incarnations we are limited in our understanding of the specifics about why we experience what we do. This was the objection of one of the participants in our Thursday night meditation group after listening to our discussion about karma. She felt that the concept of karma can be used as an excuse to do nothing about what she perceives to be injustice; an excuse to avoid facing social problems. In other words, if we see a homeless person, we could ignore their plight by dismissing it as their karma. And while it may well be their karma to be homeless, that doesn’t mean that we should do nothing to help that person.

In the talk we listened to a week ago, Eckhart Tolle said, “Karma is the unconscious conditioning that runs your life. It’s personal, and collective… Each person is born with certain patterns and predispositions. Then the environment influences you further…You can only understand karma by observing yourself.”

He went on to explain that we are not slaves to our karma, but rather that we can rise above it. “Spiritual awakening is not part of karma. Karma is the complete absence of conscious presence. The only thing that can free you from karma is the arising of presence. Presence frees you from karma; the energy behind it diminishes. In the light of awareness, karma diminishes. Spiritual teachers point out the possibility of awakening out of identification with unconscious patterns. A spiritual teacher teaches you to go beyond karma.”

And intention is a powerful tool in transcending karma. Intending to listen to, and be aligned with, our inner being, our buddha nature, the “true entity of life” as Buddha Nichiren called it.

So while I don’t fully understand my good karma or my bad karma, I appreciate the presence of that part of me that is learning to value the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s so much easier on our karmic consequences. And there’s that much less karma that we have to transcend.