The Law of Karma

The law, 'Whatsoever a man sows that he shall also reap', is inscribed in flaming letters upon the portal of Eternity, and none can deny it, none can cheat it and none can escape it. - James Allen

Time is the essence of karma.

Karma, an Eastern concept of spiritual checks-and-balances, is an argument that "what comes around goes around." Like the cyclicity of life and experience, the discussion of karma pretty much always ends up being a circle. This discussion is a little different: it's a sphere.

Destiny and change of fortune occur only with the separation of time, with the difference between the present moment and other moments. However, only the present moment actually exists, so memory of the past and desire for the future are the location of destiny, fortune, karma and time itself. For a rock, there is no sense of time, so there is no memory, desire, or karma.

For a rock, there is also no suffering, no joy, and no experience at least from the rock's perspective. Of course, stuff does actually happen over time: there is weathering, the terrifically excited state of "being lava," accretion, all kinds of events take place in the "life" of a rock. Your average rock, existing for many orders of magnitude more time than you or I, has a lot more experiences than you or I will ever have.

Or does it? "Experience" itself is pleasure, pain, suffering, longing, attainment, and so forth, all of which depends on judgment, which depends on discernment and some ability to compare past, present and future. Since, of these, only the present moment actually exists, the past and future, as well as the comparisons between them, the discernment and the judging, must be taking place in the mind... and the mind is an emergent property of the brain and body. I don't know how many kinds of brains are complex enough to have minds that care about things enough to get attached and make judgments and therefore suffer about future and past, but I suspect it affects every brain more sophisticated than that of, say, an insect.

But wait, even a single-celled amoeba is a product of evolution, meaning even an amoeba stores its experiences in its genetic story and passes along ideas about stimulus-response to future generations. Is memory stored in genetic coding really different from memory that occurs in the mind?

All of life evolves, as individual organisms and as a great collective. All of life responds to the same biological laws. Therefore all of life makes "judgments" about the relative comfort of the present moment. These responses set in motion the next series of events, which will interact with present moment reality in the "future" to either create suffering or satisfaction again.

Thus, all of life experiences karma, destiny and change of fortune.

What about that lonely rock? Does it not store "memories" of its past, in its very chemical and structural composition? Doesn't the soil daughter of the rock preserve the ancient memory of its parent lithography? It seems to my geologist's judgment that in fact even rocks experience karma. It seems that all matter in the entire universe experiences karma.

Perhaps karma is a law.

World religions, including (and especially) New Age spirituality, hold the implied promise of bestowing upon you an ability to control your own karma, destiny, or fortune: essentially so that you can arrange to only have enjoyable experiences throughout your life, and preferably not even have to suffer death. I find this promise approximately as ridiculous as the promise that a rock can have bestowed upon it an ability to control its own weathering, sedimentation, molten lava state, or accretion.

But all religions are built around some form of truth, or there would be no centre to them. There is indeed something you can influence. You can influence your awareness of what is happening, and thereby insert new causal factors into the ebb and flow of time, karma, destiny, and fortune.

The influence that you can have is your own witnessing. The larger and more consistent your witnessing of the passage of events and consequences, the larger your "big picture view" of reality, the more you will begin to experience something entirely different from the endless agony of one soap-opera drama after the next. The higher your level of consciousness, the fewer karmic feedback loops you will find yourself caught in, because the actions that lead to your circumstances in later moments will simply stop being repeated once you see the pattern of repetition.

This is always where you meet your obstacle. The mind, a product of any brain of enough functional complexity, contains a protective function called "ego." Ego's purpose is to make judgments about experience, and then hold on to those judgments in order to compare complex incoming sensory information. Ego is personality, any individual organism's unique set of qualities of mind. Ego is the only thing about you that is specifically you, and that makes everyone else, including insects, amoeba, and rocks, not you.

Some religious teachers actually suggest that you should kill your ego. Another way of saying this is that you must "be selfless." You are supposed to put others before yourself. You are supposed to somehow not be. This is impossible, but it's a great way to sell stuff.

You will have and be an ego until the moment there is no longer a "you," a time that probably occurs long after your physical death. So killing your ego in order to end suffering and become enlightened is really very bad advice. There is something else, other than the ego, that needs to be "killed" in order for the bliss of enlightenment to occur.

Enlightenment is having a god's-eye view on everything that's happening in your life and the physical world around your physical body, and finding the whole thing perhaps interesting, but not particularly important. With this level of perspective, you don't often get stuck in stupid repetitive patterns of chronic illness, unhappiness, relationship challenges, striving, aching and longing. With this perspective, you are at perfect peace because you know without question that everything balances out in the present moment, and it always will.

So here's my advice about dealing with your "bad karma," meaning stuff that happens in your life that you don't like, or stuff that doesn't happen in your life that you would like to have happen.

Think of yourself as living in a large, semi-permeable, porous, transparent bubble of infinite thickness. This bubble has a sort of elastic property, so that the harder you push against it, the deeper you sink into it before it resists and springs back against you. It will spring back against you with a measured force in accordance with Newton's action-reaction principle, but the harder you press or the longer you press against it, the more time it will take to finish springing back at you.

Now, inside your "bubble of karma," you say to yourself "I hate this sore knee of mine! I hate this lousy relationship and my chronic illnesses! I hate them!" and you hurl these things away from you as hard as you can. You shove your knee pain away in a round of medications, you tell your partner or mother or child to get the hell out of your life (and you tell them really harshly, to make sure). You distract yourself from your chronic illnesses by whining and crying and screaming and praying for them to be gone. You hurl these unwanted experiences into the bubble, then you wipe your hands and say "Ahhh. I finally got rid of that."

The harder you throw these things, of course, the harder they will smite thee when they bounce back against you. And it will also happen farther away in time, so you'll be caught totally off guard. Yes, karma is a bitch.

The solution to this is in the present moment. Grasp hold of all that you don't like, all that karma you want to change. Take hold of it and examine it closely. Then set it gently down, or set it gently on your shoulder, or carry it in your hand for a while. Just don't hurl it away from you in hopes that some future or past non-existent realm will chew it up and process it for you. There is no such thing as the past or future, and nothing gets fixed except right now.

Time is the essence of karma.