Karma, Anyone?

When what goes around refuses to come around.

Cover of Bonjour Magazine by Segar via Wikimedia Commons.

Shortly after the election, a friend posted this:

“Yeah, yeah. The karma thing. But, when??? I’m waiting.”

For nearly a decade, half of the country and much of the world has been waiting, with increasing impatience, for the scales of justice to right themselves. Life keeps tricking us into thinking that this time he’s gone too far, this time his words or actions are so egregious, obnoxious or plain illegal that there is no way he can recover from them. And yet.

My friend’s post reminded me of a misunderstanding I had about karma when I started studying Buddhism about twenty-five years ago. I was pissed off about some perceived injustice in my life, and I told my teacher I was having a hard time believing in karma because that’s not at all how life seemed to work. All around me, I saw mean and inconsiderate people doing great, and kind and thoughtful people getting crushed.

My teacher explained that karma is not a cosmic system of justice. It’s not a payment for good deeds or a punishment for bad ones. It’s not magic. It’s a simple law of cause and effect—we make choices, and those choices have an impact on ourselves and others. They create results that lead to more choices, and then more results, and so on, and so on. If you treat people with kindness you can expect that, on balance, the world around you will be a gentler place—but there are no guarantees.

There is a metaphysical aspect to karma, but I don’t think my friend was talking about the system of birth and rebirth found in traditional Hindu and Buddhist religions. If you believe in multiple lifetimes, you might take comfort in the idea that the liars’ and abusers’ misdeeds will carry forward into the vastness of eternity, just as those who believe in hell might console themselves with thoughts of hot pokers. But that doesn’t really help the rest of us.

So I’d like to share the most helpful example of karma I’ve encountered. Jarvis Jay Masters is a Buddhist author who has spent more than 34 years on death row for a crime he says he did not commit. Masters has vowed to practice peace in one of the most violent and aggressive places imaginable, and other inmates have asked him how he manages to be so stoic when the prison guards harass him. He explains that if he lashes out, that guard might then go home and take his frustration out on his kid. Masters doesn’t want to be the catalyst that causes an innocent child to be hurt.

Masters has made a simple decision to refrain from actions that could harm others. That doesn’t mean he’s getting out of prison, or that guards won’t abuse him, or that they will face consequences for doing so. It just means he’s happier and more peaceful than he’d be if he was retaliating. It means that the children of his guards are probably safer. It means that his example of peace might be replicated by his fellow inmates, the prison guards and the many people who have encountered his story through his books and through heavy-hitting amplifiers like Pema Chodron, Rebecca Solnit and Oprah.

I hadn’t thought deeply about karma for a while, so I called my friend John Ankele, a filmmaker and Buddhist teacher. I wanted to make sure I was interpreting the dharma correctly, and I wanted to talk—I’ve been feeling some stress lately!

John explained that Masters’ actions speak to the interconnectivity of our world. By interrupting the usual flow of aggression in his surroundings, Masters is creating new causes and conditions that could impact the way others behave, actions that would then create their own sets of conditions, and so forth.

He’s also changing himself. “To change karma by making a different choice is to relieve yourself of the burden of carrying anger and fear,” said John.

John is not sanguine about what happened on November 5. He’s as devastated as I am. But as we were talking, it occurred to me that when most of us talk about karma we’re usually talking about someone else’s karma. We’re looking at someone we don’t like, someone who has perhaps hurt us, and we’re tapping our fingers on our desks, waiting, waiting, waiting …

I don’t want to live like that anymore.

The next four years, and maybe many more, will require a lot of mental strength and agility. Since the election, I’ve been trying to find ways to keep myself balanced, and one way is to be more thoughtful about where I place my attention.

The first time we went through this, I breathlessly followed the Mueller investigation, the two impeachment trials and the many other scandals that Rachel Maddow painstakingly laid out at 9 p.m. each night. I told myself I was staying informed, and I was. But I was also munching popcorn, awaiting the victorious moment when the foe was vanquished. I was waiting for someone else’s karma to kick in.

I haven’t yet worked out how I’m going to stay informed without going nuts. But focusing on my own karma—that is, paying closer attention to my own words and actions and the impact they have on others—feels like a good place to start.