What’s Karma?

What is karma? There is a lot of misunderstanding around this word. Karma simply means action. Every action has consequences. Conscious choicemaking is the most effective way of creating future consequences of karma. Karma creates the future, but it is also an echo from the past.

Karma conditions our soul through memory, desire and imagination. Most people are prisoners of karma, because it becomes a conditioned reflex and produces predictable outcomes in their lives. The goal of enlightenment is to break the shackles of karma. “Does karma imply a deterministic universe?” The answer seems to be that the universe is simultaneously deterministic and creative. Where we fit in this immense landscape depends on our state of consciousness.

The freer our consciousness is, the more freedom of choice we experience. Avery simple way to interpret karma is that it is a conditioned response, the past influencing the circumstances of the present, as well as our tendencies for conditioned patterns of behaviour. We become bundles of conditioned reflexes, constantly triggered by people and circumstances into predicted outcomes.

Hence, karma is considered to be a prison. The goal of the spiritual journey is to escape the prison of karma and inspire true response of our soul, which is creativity. The more creative and unpredictable our response to the world, the more we are aligned with the universe’s creator. That’s why the freedom that arises from transcending karma is referred to as liberation. We become free of the wheel of samsara.