The word “karma” has become fairly common in English conversations. However, like far too many other words in common and not so common usage, I get the distinct feeling that what others mean when using “karma” is not at all close to what I mean when thinking about or using this word. This gap in meaning can be so problematic that I tend to avoid using this word at all. So, I’d like to explore this meaning-gap issue, this word, and the concept to which it refers in some detail.
Let me begin with some mullings on the nature of meaning. The term “meaning” is another relatively slippery word, especially when combined with the baggage carried by words that often accompany “meaning.” For instance, in contexts in which I worked in education, “meaning-making” was bandied about as if everyone understood exactly what that means. — You can see the circularity coming! — The idea of “making” has all kinds of baggage from mechanistic senses of intentionally constructing something to a general sense of intentionality and personal “agency,” which is another heavily loaded word I try to avoid. With these pitfalls in mind, let me try to provide a sense of “meaning” that has as little baggage as possible.
“KowEkvusnru,” a randomly typed set of letters, has no particular meaning, while “F*@k” may communicate a bit of meaning even though this set of letters and symbols do not explicitly spell an English word. We infer meaning from our personal experiences. The word “president,” on the other hand, can trigger all sorts of meanings, again, depending upon our personal and social experiences. Does everyone hold the same “meaning” for president? Is your meaning for president the same now as it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? I suspect the answers to both questions are “no.” In fact, meaning seems to morph all of the time, depending on the physical, cognitive, and emotional contexts in which we are functioning at any particular moment. At the same time, there may be aspects of meaning that are persistent over time. Our prior experiences, particularly those that have had a large impact on us, and knowledge, whether accurate or not, can provide some degree of consistency.
From my research with children and adults, I found that meaning includes much more than what has been emphasized during our experiences with school. Meaning is more than the “official” knowledge of a particular subject or field of study. Meaning can involve emotions, values, aesthetics or senses of beauty and ugliness, a huge range of biases, a range of belief frames, a huge variety of interpretive frameworks, humor, fantasy, hopes and fears, desires, imagery, memories of personal experiences, and all sorts of tenuous “understandings” of our world that may or may not be accurate, but which we assume are self-evident truths. In other words, meaning is a complex and fluid, ever-shifting set of “information” that provides rich contexts around all sorts of words, ideas, and experiences at any particular moment.
With that little divergence into meaning, let’s move on to karma. There seem to be two common frameworks, lenses, or filters that affect people’s understandings and meanings associated with “karma.” Theistic religious traditions seem to contribute some sense of external authority exerting a moral evaluation and pay-back to the meaning of karma. You are getting what you deserve from your actions. The positivistic and mechanistic paradigms or worldviews provided by the philosophical work of René Descartes infiltrate much of our thinking, including karma as a simple cause and effect mechanism. We punch someone. We get punched back. But, both of these filters over-simplify and distort the notion of karma from Buddhist and Hindu perspectives, although the Hindu perspectives may occasionally be influenced by the theistic lens.
In order to understand karma from the perspective of Buddhism, we need to situate this concept in a bit more context. Some of the fundamental ideas in Buddhism are based on egolessness. “Ego,” from a Buddhist perspective, is not the same as ego in Western psychology. In Buddhism, ego has to do with our patterns of clinging, attachment, and attempts to solidify our senses of self and of our world. Achieving a state of egolessness does not mean you don’t know who you are or how to function in the world. Such a state is probably just the opposite. We see our patterns of thinking and manifesting clearly, but without any attachment or desire to maintain them. And, we can function in the world with greater clarity and compassion. The practice of Buddhist meditation is really about simplifying, seeing clearly, and sharpening our perception and innate intelligence, which can lead to a cessation of clinging to all of our strategies for maintaining a faulty sense of solid self and solid entities in our world.
Within this context, the notion of karma involves more of a sense of patterning, as presented by Gregory Bateson and, his daughter, Nora Bateson. This patterning is situated in the way we think. We may find that we tend to respond in certain ways to other people. We may find that we do not open up to others and are always covering up certain things and are always manifesting in a certain way. Maybe we are always critical of other people and focus in on their perceived weaknesses. Or, maybe we are always trying to please others and to be liked. We may find that we are always angry, whether we manifest that anger or not. We may feel misunderstood, marginalized, or victimized and react to these feelings with anger or avoidance. These patterns of thinking and acting are difficult to change. If you have ever had or been around a male dog that was neutered too late in his life, you may have noticed how this dog continues with the same hormonal-affected behaviors it had before being neutered. The patterns of behavior had become so embedded in such a dog’s thinking that they continue after removing the initial hormonal factors. In people, patterns of thinking, reacting, acting, and so forth also become deeply embedded. This is karma. We keep heaping it on ourselves as we go about our everyday lives.
We also may have heard of “good karma” and “bad karma.” Good karma can be patterns of always trying to help or care for other people. Bad karma can be patterns of aggressive attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors toward others. Although “good karma” is better than bad karma, from a Buddhist practitioner’s perspective, both are problematic. From this view, good karma may continue to build up our sense of ego. We may see our good karma as a way of enhancing our senses of self to which we continue to cling as some sort of confirmation.
Our accumulation of karma may bite us in the butt, which is more closely associated with the popular usage of the word “karma.” However, as you may have gathered, the accumulation of karma, especially bad karma, can have all sorts of effects on oneself. By always trying to take advantage of others, metaphorically or literally stabbing others in the back, criticizing others, demeaning others, and so forth, one’s life has to be pretty miserable. Think of someone who manifests such bad karma — there are certainly a lot of well-known examples — and imagine that you are that person. When I’ve tried that, I seem to immediately get claustrophobic and want to escape! The suffering must be incredibly intense. But, what seems to happen all too often in such personal contexts is for the person to keep returning to the same strategies and patterns of thinking, while assuming such strategies will offer some sense of relief or success.
Karma, from this perspective, is really just another way of looking at the feedback loops, non-linearity, and perpetuation of the system from the perspective of complexity. Complex systems are living and/or social systems that self-maintain, self-generate, and self-perpetuate themselves. In many complex systems, such as ecosystems, they maintain their continuity over time by adjusting to changes. Even, after major catastrophes, such systems, if they are not destroyed, may return to a healthy state after a long period time. However, it seems that in the complex systems of human beings, such systems can diverge into more pathological or unhealthy self-maintaining systems. Our political, economic, educational, and the other social systems, which are all intertwined and interdependent, can veer off from what may have been a well-intended system to one that perpetuates further problems and suffering for those participating in and living in those systems. So, there seems to be a sense of social karma, as well.