I Used To Believe

Do you believe in karma?

I used to believe in karma. Now I’m not so sure if it truly exists.

Many of the abusers and founders of the cult I grew up in lived well into their nineties. Nothing came for them. No one demanded penance. They continued on, rolled whatever they had to their descendants, who carry their toxic torches forward. The sins of the fathers haven’t fallen on their heads yet.

So, when I saw this writing prompt, it sent me on a bit of a rabbit hole into exactly what karma is.

Karma originates in ancient Indian religious thought, first appearing in the Vedas (composed roughly 1500–500 BCE) as a term simply meaning “action” or “deed,” before developing into a full ethical and metaphysical concept in the Upanishads, where it came to describe a moral law of cause and effect: every intentional action generates consequences that shape a person’s future, including across multiple lifetimes through the cycle of rebirth known as samsara.

The concept was then taken up and reshaped by Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, each adapting it somewhat differently; in Buddhism, for instance, karma is tied closely to intention rather than the action itself, meaning the mental state behind a deed matters as much as the deed.

At its core, across these traditions, karma reflects a belief in a just, self-regulating moral universe, where ethical or unethical actions naturally ripple outward to shape one’s circumstances, character, and future rebirths, rather than being handed down by a separate divine judge.

But there are too many variables that exist within the concept. There is no proof of rebirths, or even an afterlife. In a world rife with violence, justice does not seem to have a swift sword.

And maybe karma is just something we choose to adopt because frankly, it kind of feels good, to hope that there will be consequences for someone’s adverse actions; that magically, it will all come back around to haunt them or the lineage of those who commit harms.

Maybe karma keeps us in check. If we fear some kind of karmic action, whether it be the Christian hell or the claws of the ever elusive karma, the threat of a negative reaction to our actions tends to keep the general population from defiling each other on a daily basis.

And maybe that’s an issue with humans; that they need some threat to keep their morals in check. It makes me think of the saying that if you need a belief in order to be a good person, you’re probably not a good person.

And in the end, perhaps it’s all a mental game rooted in a plethora of hypotheses; a whole lot of what ifs. When something shitty happens to us, we start to make an internal list of all the past wrongs we did that must have caused the thing to happen.

“Probably my karma.”

“Karma will get us all eventually.”

I do believe in cause and effect. What I do and say; how I regard others, creates an effect on them, and me. I think in the end, this makes more comprehensible sense than the many faces of karma.

But the reality of this remains to be seen, or unseen, depending on how you believe.

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