Karma- What It Is?

“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”- Wayne Dyer

Karma is simply what we do in the present moment. Whenever some outside factors affect our lives that brings tremendous pain to us, we think, "What wrong did I do?""I must have did something bad and this is the result of it." This is only because we see Karma as a cycle of punishment and reward. We think that our deed in last life seals our fate in this life, but this is not the Buddhist understanding. Karma is an action, not a result. Karma has nothing to do with “fate”. But it ensure us to be responsible for good Karma and that's how it gets payback. Karma can be changed by the intervention of a self-realized master who is free from karma. The future is not set in stone. One can change it!

What would you say if a baby falls and gets hurt. The baby's karma has befallen him?! No. It's the energy that we intentionally generate now and that future will affect us. Our mind is filled with qualities such as anger, discontent, joy, harmony etc. Now if we're reacting with anger all the time, we're conditioning the mind for anger. Similarly, by reacting to things with peace and calm, we're conditioning the mind for peace and calm.

It is 'us' that has the power to decide whether we want to water the bad seeds in our garden of mind or the good ones. These seeds, thus, will eventually grow into flowers or either they'll wither and die.

The evolution of our conscious mind gives us the ability to choose which flowers we should water and which we shouldn’t. Karmic mind can be used as a force of our personal and spiritual development, a force for great good, that will let us forget about the future punishment or reward that we may get or may not in this life or in our reincarnated life. We can let go of mental baggage and worries that we think are assigned to us and instead take control our life.

The Bible refers to karma in the book of Galatians when it says, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”This means ifwe sow evil,we'll reap evil in the form of suffering. And if one sows goodness,he/she will reap goodness in the form of inner joy. Every action, every thought, brings about itsown corresponding rewards if and only we remain mindful.

Now the question that arise is that how can we achieve this mindfulness? Buddhist scholars permeates that if we try to deepen our understanding of what true peace looks like, we'll be able to experience life fully no matter what’s going on around us. To increase our emotional resilience, Meditation is to the escape.