Life shows a disconcerting tendency to change directions based on nothing more than chance timing or a stray whim.  If I hadn’t gone for pizza on a particular Thursday night, I wouldn’t have met my daughter’s father. If I hadn’t scanned the classifieds on a particular Tuesday, I wouldn’t have applied for the job where I met my best friend.

When we measure the impact of such fortuitous events, it is difficult to believe they happened by mere chance.  Surely, any life-changing moment must be arranged by fate, or was “meant to be.”  Indeed, most New Agers insist there is no such thing as a coincidence, no such thing as an accident.  But if so, does that mean everything from lost keys to pizza cravings are meant to be?

On one hand, life seems to tumble straight out of this moment, without rhyme or reason; on the other hand, it seems that greater “forces” are always at work in everything we do.

Perhaps we see it both ways because we want it both ways. We want the freedom that puts our lives in our own hands, but we also want to know that the universe has a special purpose in mind for us. We want the power to change our lives according to our choices, but we also want the pattern that tells us where we’ve been and where we’re supposed to go. We want both freedom and destiny, yet how can it be possible to have both?

“See how fate slides into freedom and freedom into fate,” wrote Emerson.  “This knot of nature is so well tied that no one was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.”             In the New Age, we find we cannot leave the knot of alone.  We puzzle over it, turn it, poke it, prod it.  We want to know exactly which end is which so we can find our balance on its sliding surface.  For help, we turn to the East and the elegant law of balance called karma.

The law of balance

In the last four hundred years, science has arrived at a remarkable understanding of how the universe works. A procession of brilliant minds has studied life in its smallest details, and they have unanimously concluded that the universe is held together by a number of irrefutable “laws.” 

One such law in the realm of matter is the law of motion, discovered by Newton, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A similar law, which applies to the realm of energy, is the first law of thermodynamics, or the conservation of energy. This law says that all the energy in the universe remains at a constant level, and a loss in one area is balanced by a gain in another.

We are confident of these laws because some extremely intelligent people have assigned them mathematically exact formulas and verified them with empirical experimentation. But what about those levels of existence such as consciousness in which empirical formulation is not possible?  If, as physics claims, our balancing laws are universal and applicable to all parts of the universe, wouldn’t it follow that balancing laws must operate on the level of unseen consciousness as well? 

Hence, the law of karma, discovered by the Hindus, which says that even in the realm of the unseen, cause is inevitably followed by effect.    

Karma is a universal structure, like the structure of time, built into consciousness itself. Descartes and Liebniz described causality as an “innate” idea within the mind, while Immanuel Kant called it a priori, or prior to, and necessary to, all conscious experience.

Without the innate mental structure of karma to connect cause and effect, we wouldn’t be able to organize the flux of sense impressions that flood the mind. Without karma, we literally wouldn’t be able to understand our experience.

In fact, without karma, there would be no way for life to evolve toward consciousness at all.  Without the ability to connect cause and effect, there would be no basis by which an organism could make different choices in its behaviors, no impetus for adaptation or mutation to a higher level. As the Buddha asked of his cousin, “If, Ananda, there were no karmic ripening in the sphere of the senses, would there appear any sense sphere existence?”  His cousin, of course, replied, “Surely not, O lord.” 

In Buddhism, karma is therefore not only part of the maya, the illusion of material reality produced by consciousness, it also holds the maya together just as the physical laws hold it together.  Karma, say the Buddhists, is the womb from which we spring, the true creator of the world and of ourselves as experiencers of the world.  (See Birth of Freedom)

Blaming karma

Understanding karma as a feature built within consciousness is probably not the definition familiar to most. In the popular imagination, karma is a grubby little law, on par with a hard-hearted accountant who pitilessly puts red marks on our books of what we “owe” life. Such a law is seen not as a blessing, but a curse.

This point of view originated in the Hindu imagination, which sees karma as the intractable force that keeps the miserable masses lashed to the wheel of life. Only when karma is satisfied can we be released from the cycle.

We Westerners are fairly comfortable with this interpretation, probably because it bears such a close resemblance to our concept of “eye-for-an-eye.”  Indeed, most of us who adopt the idea of karma expect it to work like a basic one-to-one equation worked out by a cosmic accountant, wherein every deed is rewarded or punished with an equivalent deed.

Many find this interpretation most comforting.  I know one unflappable woman who attributes everything that happens in her life to her karma. No matter what manner of disaster befalls her, she doesn’t take it personally. She’s convinced that karma brings her only what she deserves and will exact ruthless revenge on any who harm her. 

Sometimes it really does seem to work out that way.  As a teenager itching for trouble I once stole $50 from a stranger; just a few weeks later another stranger stole $80 from me.  It was a vivid lesson, and stealing was never again an attractive option to me. 

Yet most often, karma does not to work in a straightforward way at all, and we cannot help but notice that bad, selfish and horrible people prosper undeservedly while good, nice and wonderful people suffer undeservedly.

This clear lack of balance in the law of balance is often justified by adding in the concept of reincarnation.  We tell ourselves we must have done something in a former life, or at a former time, that is now having this particular consequence.

But according to Watts, “You do not need to believe in reincarnation to understand karma.”  Karma literally translated means action or doing.  So when a Buddhist says, “That is your karma,” he is saying, ”That is your doing.” Karma is simply the knowledge that you are ”both what you do and what happens to you,” Watts concludes.

The energy we put out is inevitably returned to us, which makes us responsible for it.  The fact that we cannot predict what form this energy takes, or how it will manifest in our lives, is besides the point to a Buddhist. 

While it is wise to have a care for the workings of karma in our lives, it is most unwise to try to expect it to work in any particular fashion. That is why the Buddha declared karma to be an “unthinkable,” and warned against treating it as a subject of speculation. We would do better, he said, to look at life as a state of mutual arising. Or as Campbell described it: 

“A great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening how.  Everything, all the time, is causing everything else… nobody and no thing is to blame for anything that ever occurs, because all is mutually arising.  All is one thing.”     

Karma is not justice

Clearly, karma is not a transparent system of debits and credits.  The karma accountant is simply not going to insure justice or redress wrongs. Whatever karma brings to us is in the interests of balance and harmony and not of justice.

Although we may think of justice and balance as the same thing, justice is the social invention of humans, not of God. From the perspective of the infinite, there is no innocent or guilty, no fair or unfair. There is only the endless rhythm of positive and negative energy flowing between chaos and order, separation and union, darkness and light – all of it seeking balance through karma. 

Karma does not decree that a person deserves punishment for his crimes, nor does it spare the innocent from pain.  That is why we cannot conclude that the circumstances we are born into, whether we perceive them as good or bad, are the result of karma we carry from a previous life.

Of course, some interpreters of Eastern religion do consider the soul to be the repository of karma, which allegedly follows us from life to life. But karma is the law of balance that applies to the maya, or material reality, while the soul exists outside of time and space and outside of causality.  The “action” or “doing” of karma unfolds in the present, unfolds in a state of mutual arising.  Karma therefore cannot compel the soul; rather, it is the soul that compels karma into its service.

Yet if we cannot blame karma for all that happens, if all is but a state of mutual arising, does this mean there is no pattern after all? Do we slide off willy nilly along the slope of freedom with no fate to ground us?  Are all our efforts to discover our destiny wasted effort? 

The knot of destiny

The concept of karma was first preached to Americans by the colorful founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.  In her book, The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky writes, “those who believe in karma have to believe in destiny, which, from birth to death, every man is weaving, thread by thread, around himself, as a spider does his web.”  But Blavatsky is also quick to add that karma does not design our destiny, we design it ourselves with our actions.

The New Age amplifies this point of view, and declares each person to be the sole creator of his or her future destiny. Many writers even go so far as to depict our souls waiting backstage for our entrance into the world, freely choosing the circumstances of our birth as well as the details of the life we will lead.

This idea goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic, in which Plato elaborated in fanciful detail the between-life scene of souls choosing their next lives.  “The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice;” he wrote, “the gods have none.”

Like Plato, many New Age writers have elaborated on the between-life process in colorful detail, and have describe rooms made from walls of light and benevolent spirit guides who show us our futures on magic screens. But since most of us do not remember this pre-incarnation experience, we are left to try to ferret out our destiny by other means.  And of course, the New Age is ready to help us with an entire industry devoted to divining our destiny for us.  Psychics, tarot card tarot card readers, numerologists, astrologists stand ready to lend us their all-seeing talents.

From where I stand, trying to “see” into the future is basically meaningless conjecture if all existence is a state of mutual arising.  Destiny is not already laid out but unfolds spontaneously according to our ever-changing karma.  We do not move along as on a thread that stretches out into the future.  Rather, I understand destiny as something that unfolds from this very moment, continually looping back round to where we are in this moment, much like a spinning a circle.  Fate, said Emerson, is “a series of concentric circles,” eternally generating. 

In the end, destiny is not really about one’s future at all, it is about one’s purpose.  Destiny carries what the Greeks called telos, our reason for being.  And as we have learned from the story of our creation, our reason for being to expand God’s self-awareness through our varied experience.

Destiny is therefore not a datebook filled with meetings and things we are fated to do. It is simply our innate knowledge that we have important work to do.  But this work is not predetermined. Now is all there is, and who we are today is not the result of yesterday’s decisions, but of the decisions we make today. We create ourselves, and our destiny, each day, brand new.  The outcome is never fixed; all is at risk each moment, in each choice.

Destiny does not lie in past or future but in purpose, in the need of the gods to find themselves through us.

Like most New Agers, I often ponder my own destiny, and I try very hard to discern its shape.  I tend to believe that we probably do wait backstage before our birth, and perhaps we even choose our parents and a few grand ideas to explore.  But after that, I think we hold our breath and jump into time and the sliding unknown with all its determined certainties and perilous uncertainties.  And I think we struggle mightily to learn that we don’t have to struggle at all. 

Meanwhile, I imagine the gods up above, watching and cheering us on.  Sometimes I can almost hear them, laughing at our mistakes, and raining down the tears of their sympathy.

Go to The Problem of Evil.