Karma
I’ve heard it a million times. Karma is a Bitch. Karma will get you in the end. Good things happen to good people. But what exactly is karma?
According to Buddhist tradition, karma is the inevitablility of a sequence of events that have alligned for a specific result. It is the law of moral causation and buddhism takes it a step further into territory that has boggled my mind many times (and I will not muddle this further for you now).
I plan to simplify karma and remove the mystical and esoteric principals that seem to come hand in hand with this buddhist theory.
Cause and Effect. Karma is the law of cause and effect. You get what you put in. You work for your success. You reap what you sow. Instead of thinking of karma as some mystical force outside of our control in our current life, why not use it with goal setting, or figuring out that the things in your life that you are not happy with are karmic only because you are responsible for the series of actions and events that lead to them.
Things don’t go wrong - a very specific series of events have to occur in a particular order for things to go wrong, and likewise for them to go right. That is also karma.
I read a very interesting book, ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is interesting in that it is a study not of success and how to attain it, but of successful people and the circumstances of their life, birth and environment that led them to become great. That is karma at it’s finest and it produces the top athletes, innovators and minds of our time that were present at the right time and did what had to be done at a time where it worked in their favour especially.
Karma is so basic in that sense. The formula for success is not a mathematical equation so much as a recipe that has to be executed specifically for it to come to fruition.
So how can karma work for you?
Acknowledge your role. Karma only works for you if you work for you. Figure out if what you are doing today is getting you to where you want to go.
