Karma — this word creates a slightly different meaning in English. When we hear karm, it feels like something pure, something that must be done right. But karma today lives in our collective mind more as a concept. Karma returns. Karma has memory. Karma comes back. These lines now float around us like everyday idioms.
Yet, the kind of knowledge needed to truly understand karma — beyond intellect — is slowly disappearing.
Between good karma, bad karma, right karma, wrong karma, so many new behaviors and old thresholds have entered our lives that even after crossing them, we still fail to understand the happiness and sorrow unfolding in our own existence. The connection between knowledge and karma feels broken. The behavior of the wise and the powerful looks the same now, and their comfort seems driven more by influence and shortcuts than by karma itself.
But let’s step above these light, surface-level observations and try to understand karma with some patience.
Karma is the clock of every moment — ticking, moving the hands toward the next phase. Between daylight and the darkness of night, karma is bound to every cry rising from the human heart and every urge forming in the mind.
For those who believe in karma, it is like a double-edged sword. For those who don’t, life is like intoxication.
Just as a drunk wants only to live under the influence — to shout, to fight, to lash out — until sobriety brings regret, we too live intoxicated. When awareness returns, the drunk may look calm and restless at the same time, but freed from the burden of consequence — until one day the liver fails or the heart stops. Yet intoxication never allows him to think of that future result.
We are all intoxicated. We speak, we perform, we pretend — but how many of us are truly awake, we don’t really know.
Karma is not simple.
In Hindu thought, karma also carries the quota of past lives and destiny (prārabdha). Only the detached and the awakened prepare the next compartment of existence; the rest of us are still dressing up for this life, swinging between bridegroom and dowry.
Like a wedding where all emotions, expenses, relationships, dishes, and decorations come together in one place, our urge to break every speed limit of life right now has turned karma’s principles into a speed-post service — fast in name, but whose delivery time is known only when the letter finally arrives.
Between the simplest and the most complex interpretations of karma, the train of human desires, words, advice, and love is running without whistle or destination. Everyone is obsessed with believing in karma — yet doing something entirely different.
In the Rigveda and Yajurveda, karma is primarily linked to yajna (sacrifice), āhuti (offering), duty, and ṛta (cosmic order). The Upanishads say: Yathā karma yathā śrutam — as a person acts, so they become. The Bhagavad Gita divides karma into two layers:
- Sakāma karma — action done with desire for results, which creates bondage.
- Niṣkāma karma — action done as duty, without attachment to results, which opens the path to liberation.
The scriptures say: karma itself is not bondage — attachment is. Vedanta summarizes it beautifully: Karma purifies, knowledge liberates, devotion completes. Read that once more. Slowly.
Understanding karma is both simple and not simple. To act is movement; not acting is higher movement. To bear karma is life; to renounce it is penance. Karma as action is process; karma as sequence is expression. From karma comes work; from karma comes fruit. Refining karma is wisdom; sweeping karma away is intellect. Karma that is, is not. Karma that will be, never truly is.
My karma, your karma, everyone’s karma, the world’s karma — all exist together, moving together.
So walk — carrying karma, doing karma, thinking karma, binding karma, holding karma, gathering karma, sharing karma, releasing karma.
Karma is fun to understand. I haven’t understood it fully. If you do, please leave a comment.
I find clarity in movement, joy in stillness. Happiness in connection, experience in breaking apart. Thought in living, liberation in death.
Life flows like water between two riverbanks — day and night. Some stones, some flowers, some moss make the river beautiful at places. But if you try to understand its habit of flowing — that is karma.
~ Bhavya, Founder, Religion World
