An interesting thing happened to me recently. On Friday night, I was getting ready and holding a mirror up with my left hand. Being the clumsy person I am, I dropped the mirror, which broke into pieces on the ground and gashed my right hand on the way down. As I ran to UHS, worrying that the blood would get on my clothes, I thought to myself, “Wow, this is just my luck. No wait, this is karma… what terrible thing have I done recently?” I remembered a funny new phrase, prominent in pop culture, that my friend and I started using… “I will ‘cut’ that person” or “I will ‘cut’ you”. Though we were, of course, always joking, I came to the conclusion that this incident was an ironic twist of fate — the world was giving me what I deserved for (even jokingly) putting out negative thoughts by literally cutting me. I laughed a bit, and though I didn’t have to get stitches, silently swore never to use the cursed “cutting” phrase again.
Why did my mind immediately latch on to this petty justification of sorts? As much as my rational mind likes to try disprove karma, the truth is, I think about it pretty often — whether it’s by joking around or neatly observing that “what comes around goes back around” in daily situations. Belief in karma goes back to the fundamental idea that our actions make a difference… that there’s some inherent balance in the world and the cosmic energy that our actions regulate. When we put out negative energy, we get negative consequences… when we grant positive energy to the world, we receive positive effects. I don’t know if this is just our way of assigning some kind of false regularity to the arbitrariness of everything that happens in our lives, but it’s a pretty comforting principle, and an effective moral guide.
This isn’t to say that our positive actions — deeds of kindness and benevolence, or even self-discipline — should be led on by a fear of negative consequences. The good things we do should be grounded in our own love and purity of heart — not any other ulterior, selfish motive. Just as Krishna tells Arjuna in the second chapter of the Gita, we shouldn’t solely focus on the results when we execute our actions. We should do them for the sake of doing them. However, when things don’t seem to be going in our way, maybe we should step back and think of the less-than-good things we’ve done lately. Even if there is no force of karma affecting our lives, at the very least, it will help us pinpoint and try to eliminate our negative thoughts and actions.
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