“These ideals play into the belief in karma that can be complex to follow but to myself means that what you put out into the world will often come back to affect you as a result.”
We are all born with our own innate sense of fairness that can develop as we get older. From childhood where we learn to share our toys in the playground with our classmates and friends to adulthood where we share our workspace with colleagues or our kitchen with roommates or our homes with loved ones. People have this innate sense of fairness that ties into larger ideals of justice, equality, and righteousness.
These ideals play into the belief in karma that can be complex to follow but to myself means that what you put out into the world will often come back to affect you as a result. Karma is a belief that how you treat others or how you interact with the world will have an effect of the world giving you what you put out in return.
While karma is not an innate reason why we strive to be fair, just, and equal in our actions towards other people, the belief in it can play our notion of fairness because if we don’t treat someone well or treat them fairly, you have a better chance of them not reciprocating or someone else not treating you fairly, as a result. There is a popular English expression that relates to Karma known as, “what goes around, comes around.”
For children, if you hog all the toys and don’t share, then no one is going to want to play with you or want to be your friend. As adults, if you repel people with your attitude or behavior towards them, it may cause you to suffer in your social relations but in your ability to hold a job or to have a productive life. Believing in Karma is not religious, but it takes a lot of lessons from religious and spiritual belief systems.
What we put out into the universe may not affect us right away, but it may come back in some other form when we least expect it. People fear not just the karma that could come because of their decisions, behaviors, and actions, but also how it affects their conscience and their memories. When you don’t have good karma, you’re likely to suffer other consequences such as bad memories, a muddled conscience, and harmful habits that could cause you to retreat from the world because of poor interactions with it.
While some people don’t believe in karma and don’t think their actions can have a ricochet effect on them, they still have a conscience and emotions that will be negatively affected from their bad behavior. Sometimes, karma is not enough to deter bad behavior, but it can be a motivating factor for people to act better because they don’t want it to come back on them if they have built up bad karma that would backfire.
Karma has its origins in Buddhism and while many people are not Buddhists, they can see the principle of ’cause and effect’ at work in their lives. Even from a young age, we become aware that if we don’t share toys or listen to the teacher, it will likely lead to negative consequences as a result. We learn subconsciously to be good to not only feel good but to receive what’s good in return. That does not mean that if we only put out good deeds or actions or words into the world, that we will always receive such reciprocity. That is a naïve viewpoint, but we shouldn’t do good just for karma’s sake. We should do good to be good people and to automatically have a positive effect on the world in whatever small and measurable way that can in our lives.
Karma can make us better people but primarily, it would be best to follow our conscience first as well as our sense of right and wrong, which I do believe we innately have as babies but learn to hone more and more as we get older with education in character and conduct. Karma is an important layer that is part of our overall belief system, which allows us to be better people and to try to do as much good in the world as possible in the hopes that not only will it come back to us, but it will ripple out in its effect of leading to other good actions by others to boost other peoples’ karma. We want to spread the good karma around so that’s the only karma that can come back on all of us.
When you think of karma from a societal or global perspective, it makes sense in that good actions have a collective effect in that the planet will be better off as a result if we all do good by it. The karma that comes back on us from recycling, lowering our carbon output, taking care of nature and animal species, and limiting our negative impacts environmentally, that kind of karma leads to a healthier planet and a better existence for all of us.
Karma is not just for the individual but for a society and even the whole planet’s inhabitants. If we put out good into the world through better actions, behavior, and deeds, the karma we receive in return will often be better as a result. If you believe in karma, you believe in a deeper sense of overall fairness and justice. You believe that good begets good and fair begets fair. As the civil rights leader, activist, and visionary Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
If more of us believe that our good morals and beliefs will lead to greater justice, than the world will likely have more justice as a result. What we put effort into our behaviors, emotions, and deeds will have an impact and an effect on the rest of us. I truly believe in Karma as a guiding principle and although it may not conclude what exactly our impact will be on one another each and every time, how we generally interact with other day by day does lead to karmic consequences, for better or for worse.
