What goes around comes around

Karma is a natural law that governs us, like the law of gravity. It’s not the same as fate or predestination because we can change our karma by understanding how it works. That wisdom gives us free will.

Carrying straight on from Does luck exist?

 One 1972 academic tome called Inequality apparently got a lot of blowback for suggesting that some sociological differences were attributable to sheer luck or fluke, such as:

chance acquaintances who steer you to one line of work rather than another, the range of jobs that happen to be available in a particular community when you are job hunting.

Our lot in life

But I think it’s quite hard to argue with that. It is clearly not just our circumstances or actions of this life that determine what happens to us, our “lot in life” as it were – there are so many examples of flukes, good and bad, that radically alter people’s lot in life. An ambulance being right there when you need it, for example, or walking under a window just as a dishwasher is being pushed out. So the question is more, where do these myriad little twists that have a big effect on a life really come from? Why the unexplained variance? All else being equal, why does one person get saved by an ambulance while another is squished by a dishwasher?

Variation is not meaningless or unexplainable. If we have created the karmic potential to be saved or injured, when that seed ripens we will be saved or injured. And these seeds are likely to have been sown lifetimes ago.

Put it this way, no one has yet come up with a better explanation, not that I’ve seen anyway. Or, for that matter, disproved karma. And karma fits intuitively with our sense of right and wrong.

Creating our own luck  

The saving grace is that we are not inherently lucky nor unlucky. We can have a long stroke of bad luck, but this can change unexpectedly, on a dime. (And vice versa.) My current foster cat Melody had her leg bitten off and underwent a lot of pain and trauma, but is about to go home with a sweet couple who plan to treat her as their child. We can also learn to create our own luck by understanding and observing the law of karma. (Check out Joyful Path of Good Fortune for a detailed explanation.) As Albert Einstein put it:

Only morality in our actions leads to beauty and dignity in our lives.

And as Venerable Atisha put it:

Always keep pure moral discipline, for it leads to beauty in this life and happiness hereafter.

As Buddhists, we try to take morality very seriously, but we do this not because anyone will punish us if we don’t but because we understand the relationship between our intentional actions and their effects. We begin to understand which actions will be successful in leading us to happiness, and which will result in suffering so best be avoided. We begin to take responsibility for our future fortunes and direction, while also finding it easier to patiently accept when things don’t go our way. This quote from Atisha usually works for me:

If the things you desire do not come, it is due to karma created long ago, therefore keep a happy and relaxed mind.

Of course karma doesn’t mean we don’t take steps to improve our own or others’ circumstances, but it does help us to act from a more peaceful place.

The weird collective karma of Planet Earth 2025

In that article, Is luck real, it says:

All sorts of forces help explain the world — race and class, gender and geography, redlining and Reaganomics — but they were never entirely sufficient. There were always ripples of randomness within those vast tidal currents.

Yes, without understanding karma, things do seem random, inexplicable, and often deeply unfair. However, it is not just the ripples of individual karma that seem random if we don’t get where they’re coming from. Collective karma – actions that we have performed together – also explains the entire arising of the “vast tidal currents” that affect us as a group, such as race and class, gender and geography, politics and economics.

The United States right now, and countries affected by the US, are going through a huge collective shift, as you may have noticed. We all created the causes together at some point in the past and are now experiencing their effects. We are also very busily creating a whole bunch of new causes. I’m not sure how exactly this will end up affecting me personally, perhaps in raised prices or impacts on healthcare; but I have no doubt it will affect me in some form or another, not least because it’s already affecting most of the people around me.

At brunch today, everyone had a story to tell. One man went to a food bank to find no food on the shelves because funding had been pulled from the farmers supplying them. Having grown up in a very conservative rural farming community in eastern Colorado, another explained how farmers themselves are also really worried about losing their subsidies and their workers. She is also affected by worrying cuts to the Traumatic Brain Injury society that has helped her and numerous others get back their lives. Another has to delay retirement 3 more years because her 401K has taken a dive. Another and her team lost their jobs in USAID, which has directly and negatively impacted the lives of people in a distant land. Another’s daughter was laid off, only to be reemployed when it was realized her services were needed, her wages nonetheless cut by $5,000. Another, on a Green Card, is afraid to travel home to Italy in case they’re don’t let her back in, even if she ditches her Smartphone for a burner phone. Another, a federal worker, has been given 4 days to decide whether to take the $70,000 and 6 months administrative leave or to try to hang in there on a 17-year job. A job that is now nothing like it was, not least because half his team members have been laid off, and the other half now have to commute to sit shoulder to shoulder with some of the 23,000 other previously remote federal workers from all over Colorado.

These kinds of conversations are taking place all over the United States. But we had all just meditated on universal love and bodhichitta, and everyone expressed how incredible Dharma is for dealing with their uncertainty and pain. One said, “I wish everybody could be here.”

Like it or not, I am part of this world, not separated out from it, same as you. We are all “Tightly bound in the chains of karma so hard to release”, as Je Tsongkhapa put it – and not just the chains of individual karma, but the chains of collective karma. To loosen these chains we need moral discipline and patience, ideally motivated by renunciation and compassion for our fellow prisoners. To escape these chains entirely, we need the wisdom realizing that none of this is really happening in the way we think it is. Samsara sucks for all of us, but samsara is a dream.

Normally we feel that our experiences are caused by external things, which makes it seem that life can be sorely unfair. But experience is inside of the mind, it IS mind, so its cause must be inside the mind as well. All things arise from causes in the same continuum as themselves. Physical oak trees can only arise from physical acorns in the same continuum. Experience can only arise from intentional actions, good or bad, in the same mental continuum. As Bill Meyer (not sure who that is, but like the quote) says:

Every thought is a seed.  If you plant crab apples, don’t count on harvesting Golden Delicious.

Why would I develop love for people who don’t deserve it?!

Right now, especially if we’re worried about the state of play, it’s a really good time to be a kind, moral, and trustworthy person, not plant crab apples. Not cave into fear and anger because that will simply tighten the karmic chains around us and render us less able to help ourself and others. As Atisha said:

Since all the happiness and suffering of this life arise from previous actions, do not blame others.

We can control our reactions and our behavior and try to fix things out of love. To this end, I have been contemplating that praise of Buddha in The Liberating Prayer:

You who love all beings without exception.

I mentioned Nietzsche in this recent article, We can never go back, in a thought experiment about what moment we could bear to live again and again. I concluded it would have to be a moment with purpose. It can’t just be pleasure because even if everything always went my way and I had whatever I wanted on tap, I’d still get desperately bored.

In the final episode of The Good Place, a thoughtful comedy about the afterlife that I watched with my Dad, (spoiler alert) some of the characters eventually chose obliteration over the endless pleasures of heaven. They realized they “had exhausted everything the universe has to offer.” They just got existentially tired of it. And that, I believe, is because there was no purpose to it as they weren’t helping anyone.

It is the same with the eternal peace of solitary nirvana, really, which is why the Buddhas have to wake up the Hinayana Foe Destroyers to get them to enter the path of compassion. Enlightenment means the ability to help each and every living being every day through our blessings and emanations. That will never get old because it’s always going to be meaningful and worthwhile.

This thought experiment is making me appreciate how important it is to work on not abandoning love for any being, as in one of the 8 precepts of aspiring bodhichitta, however disturbing I find them. Why? To attain the enlightened ability to help all beings, we first need compassion for all beings without exception. (I explain that more here: The gift that keeps on giving.) This requires that I put effort into overcoming my dislike and fear of even seemingly cruel individuals and appreciate them instead. Moreover, even if they don’t seem to deserve it, it doesn’t matter – we can develop compassion and love for them for our own and everyone else’s sake instead.

Last karma article is now published, click here: How karma shapes our lives. Would love your comments!