The Business of Karma
There’s one form of wealth we don’t often talk about, the one that follows you to the other side of the light- karma. The business of karma is viewed differently by people having different levels of understanding of it, showing a change in attitude as you walk through each successive door of realization.
You know you’ve tuned into the concept of karma when the realization dawns on you that you owe a debt to every life form that served you in any way: plants, animals, your parents, your teachers, everyone. Our karmic record is analogous to a balance sheet, where every positive deed accounts for credit and every negative deed we perform adds to our debt. These debts and credits fructify in our present life or future ones determining the quality of our lives, allowing us to repay debts and savour the credits.
When you delve deeper into the concept, really start performing good deeds, you feel good about it. The spirit within finds it easier to connect with the physical-self because it finally sees itself being benefited as all the accrued positive karma overshadows the negative. That would result in the physical-self experiencing many more good times than tough ones in the fructification of that accumulated karma in this life and future ones.
Deeper still into this concept, you stop seeing it as generosity on your part or a profit venture for yourself. You consider it to be more of an opportunity you were given, something to be grateful for. Yes, show gratitude for the chance to be kind and generous.
Finally, when you’ve fully understood this business, you begin to view Karma objectively. Say for example, you feed a hundred homeless one day, you’ll realize it was in their destiny to eat that meal and some way or the other it would have been provided for. If it hadn’t been you, someone else would have fed them, making you just the medium through which their destiny was fulfilled and nothing more. At this point you realize that the credit for this karma is not yours for the taking. It works the same way for negative karma as well, that is, the guilt too is not yours to shoulder, destiny has a plan to play out, and in that, you are only a pawn.
The question arises then, are acts of positive karma really acts of selfishness? Well the answer is yes. Your every good deed benefits another but also benefits your own spirit. And yet, this is one act of selfishness you should encourage and propagate. Because within this selfishness is selflessness and the selflessness is selfishness.
And just when you feel you’ve reached the very core of this concept and understood the business, you realize that it was all a façade under the veil of maya, the physical world. When you lift that veil and look at karma, you now see it not as acts of generosity but as an act of necessity. It stops being an act of selfishness and becomes just a plain habit. And that habitual karma though helps others as designed to, stops affecting the spirit, it becomes an unselfish act so to say, and such an act in Hindi is called Niswarth Seva. You are no longer the doer, you have risen above karma.
