“I hope karma slaps you in the face before I do.” I am not sure who said it, but I found this on the internet the other day. And this summarizes perfectly the widely prevalent view about karma.
What is karma?
“The hand of fate” is how a lot of people describe karma. “Your just deserts,” or, “You had it coming,” are other ways of describing it. “The place seemed to have bad karma” is another often-used phrase, signifying “bad vibes.”
All of these meanings have crept into general use. But there is also a wider, more original, and more important meaning.
Lights, camera, action!
No, karma does not mean lights, or camera. It does mean action, though. It is a Sanskrit word, signifying a single act, or the sum total of all your actions.
Why is karma important?
Aristotle addressed that in ancient times. Indians had done that even before him.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit,” Aristotle wrote centuries ago. “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.”
Acting rightly is important
Why?
Well, do you want others to behave appropriately? Do you want your friends and family to “do the right thing” when they are dealing with you?
Then why not you? You are what you do.
Karma as destiny
Why not?
What we call luck, or fate, or destiny, is often the end-result of a series of actions we ourselves have carried out, often in the distant past. We might not even remember those actions, or their link to our current plight.
If you spend your high school and college years partying and having a good time, and you let your grades slip, you might not land a desirable job, and your earnings would reflect that. Your classmates who opted to study might have been called nerds in college, but is it really “luck” if you meet them at school reunions, visibly better placed in life than you are?
You can make your own luck, your own karma.
So control your karma
If you can control your actions, to a fair extent you will be able to control or modulate your fate, your destiny. Because we are what we do repeatedly.
But can you really control your actions?
What can you control?
Have you ever tried controlling your children? Or your spouse? How about controlling other people? What happened?
We cannot control others. We can only control ourselves and our actions. And that is tough enough!
So start controlling your actions
Not so fast!
You first need to understand the mechanisms of action. How do actions arise?
Aristotle again
The philosopher said that all human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion and desire.
Immanuel Kant
This gentleman was a German philosopher from the 18th century. He said that actions have moral motivations or non-moral motivations.
Non-moral motive
This motive is always driven by self-love, in Kant’s opinion. By acting in this manner, you are trying to fulfill a desire: you want to either obtain pleasure, or avoid pain.
Moral motivation
According to Kant, when we act out of a moral desire, we are trying to perform a duty, not obtain pleasure or avoid punishment. In other words, this is selfless action.
Voluntary action?
It is all fine and good to talk about motives, desires, selflessness, and control. But have you ever really tried to control your actions? And which actions are really under your control? Apparently, not too many.
Actions can be involuntary or voluntary. The heart keeps on beating on its own, without any specific effort from us.
We keep breathing, more or less spontaneously. We can, of course, control our breathing, especially if we want to slow it down. But for the most part, breathing requires no special desire or endeavor from us. These are involuntary actions.
Reflex actions
These are also mostly not under our control. Some are classical reflexes in a medical sense: Someone taps you just below the kneecap, and your leg jerks up. You cannot control it, even if you want to.
Pavlov’s dog
Then there are the so-called conditioned reflexes. In the original experiment, Pavlov rang a bell when food was given to a dog. The dog started to salivate. Later, he only rang the bell, but gave no food. The dog still started to salivate. This is called substitution of the stimulus (bell sound for food), but still producing the original response.
Voluntary actions
We like to think that these are the actions which are under our control. Theoretically, that is true. However, in practice, many of our so-called voluntary actions are driven by subconscious desires, motivations, and emotions, and are not easy to change. Deeply ingrained beliefs and habits can often take over our lives, and sometimes cause us great harm.
The subconscious
We cannot lead life by thinking consciously about every decision, or every action. It would be too cumbersome, complicated, and time-consuming. When you first learn to drive a car, you are fixated on the equipment, your arms, legs, and the road. After a while, you “just drive.” Your subconscious lets you swerve to avoid a pothole, without your having to consciously plan it and make a decision, which would take too long.
After we are born, the subconscious mind keeps storing sensations, emotions, experiences, and judgments. We are supposed to learn from that. But sometimes the lessons we learn are harmful. Emotions and judgments from childhood can haunt us as adults, and guide our likes and dislikes, and affect our behavior. Unless we are able to confront them, analyze them, understand them, and modify our actions to move on.
Storm of Thoughts
Mark Twain said years ago: “Life does not consist mainly- or even largely- of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.”
Another Twain gem: “A man’s private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always.”
-Letter to Louis Pendleton, 4 August, 1888.
Thoughts beget actions
We are constantly thinking. Even when we are not aware of it.
From these thoughts proceed our actions, directly or indirectly. Some actions are born out of a fear of loneliness, which we might have first experienced as children. Others may be efforts to feverishly seek love, which might have been denied to us as children.
More direct actions might stem from our thoughts about earning money, accumulating possessions, and earning the respect of our peers. Often, we do not know when to stop, or whether our actions are truly getting us what we really want.
Positive thoughts
Thoughts are the precursors of action. Negative thoughts, or positive thoughts, tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Living with fear and dread rarely leads to positive outcomes. On the other hand optimism and a cheerful outlook have the potential to alter your destiny favorably.
Destiny in your hands
Yes, you can control your karma, your fate, your destiny!
To do that, you need to have a greater sense of awareness. Awareness of what causes actions. Awareness of your thoughts. Awareness of the power of your thoughts.
And by learning to control your thoughts, you can radically change the way you lead your life.
Thought control
You can control your thoughts through yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and a variety of other techniques which are receiving increasing attention.
We will deal with them in a subsequent post.
Stay tuned!