The Law Of Causality
Karma is not a balance sheet, it’s a cycle.
James Clear said, “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”. You know what it means but you don’t know how it ties to five thousand-old wisdom written in The Bhagavad Gita.
We deserve what we get even though we aren’t responsible for it. I wrote it here. In that I mentioned that good doesn’t guarantee good and bad doesn’t guarantee bad, it’s a fantasy of religion, not practical life. But why do bad people end up worse? I know not all of them get what they deserve according to us but you often see people reaping fruits for their actions.
The law of karma is not a balance sheet as all of us tend to believe. It’s a cycle.
There is a person A who doesn’t go to college and chooses to miss the formal education route. He is left with no contemporary social circle, no qualification for a job, and no tools to live a comfortable life. But maybe he did it because he doesn’t think highly of formal education so he chose to go his own way and acquire knowledge from the domain experts.
There is a person B who skipped college because he was lazy and lacked ambition in his life. He is fine with his daddy’s money, unemployment cheques, or both.
With your actions, you have triggered a chain of reaction which with the matrix of probability and possibilities sends you to a path of either extreme failure or extreme success.
Person A showcased a tendency to acquire practical knowledge. Through his actions he will meet several leaders along the way, he will learn, and he will use that knowledge to his advantage because leaders tend to motivate. He might start his own venture and inspire others like him.
He will keep acquiring knowledge because that’s how his habits are. His habits helped him create a process through which he acquired insight and knowledge. This system helps him trigger a chain of events that almost always have a positive outcome in the end.
Person A will often find himself in situations that can only be described as luck. But in truth, his systems and the cycle of events that get triggered due to his system push him into favorable situations. He often finds himself in close contact with great minds and things eventually work out for him.
Person B here does nothing. He decided to build a safe and comfortable system for himself which has its own chain of events. Such systems end up making Person B alone, defensive, unhappy, and most importantly someone who always complains.
Nothing in Person B’s system has a probability of a positive outcome. With this probability, it will require an extremely rare event to make him happy. But then the mindset required to be happy was never cultivated because he didn’t have the system to seek feedback and improve.
This is also the law of causality.
This brings us to the most important aspect of the law of Karma — Karma will get you because, with your habits and system, you are initiating a cycle that will keep repeating until you get what you deserve.
Smokers often end up with lung cancer because, with every choice of smoking a cigarette, they are setting up a chain of events that could lead them to the worst outcome. It’s not a permanently open loop, the cycle will end and you will get what you deserve.
So, what about people not getting what they deserve?
Two reasons —
- their cycle of events leads them to a different outcome than you think
- they have realized the loop and changed their Karma.
Events in life do not operate on the religious principle of “Good things happen to Good people”. It operates on a basic principle that you, through your actions, set a chain of events that will lead to a certain outcome.
You do not know what the outcome will be, you can guess but you don’t know. You also do not have the right to choose the outcome. Because it depends on probability and thousands of possibilities based upon what action you end up repeating several times.
And that is why Lord Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita said to focus on your actions, the outcomes aren’t up to you. It’s not even in your hands. Keep doing the right things and you will trigger a chain of events that will lead you to me, the ultimate salvation of human beings, Lord Krishna says.
You can choose to mull over this thought or you can read James Clear’s book about how habits and systems shape your life.