Karma is typically explained as the moral law of cause and effect. It's the idea that the "good" and "bad" that you do in this lifetime will return to you, either in this incarnation or in a life farther along the road to spiritual perfection. While the concept is believed to have originated in the Hindu faith, numerous spiritual paths promote the idea, including Wicca which goes a step further with the Threefold Law (not only will the good and bad return to you, but it will do so in an amount three times greater than it originated.)
At face value, the concept is sound. We can apply it to our own lives as a tool to help us grow, as a moral "magnetic North" by which we can set our own inner compass. But just like a mundane compass is drawn to a position slightly off from true North, so karma comes close to describing a process - it just misses by a small amount.
What the concept of karma does for us is provide us with a direction to begin. By adhering to the map karma describes, we begin to take responsibility for our actions. We nurture positive traits within ourselves and begin to slowly prune away the negative ones. To put this in the bigger picture, we begin to nurture love within ourselves while letting go of anger, resentment, entitlements, attachments - all of which have a single source. Fear.
Fear is the mirror image of love, its perfect opposite. Every single thing we struggle with in our lives can be boiled down to fear. A car cuts me off in traffic and I get angry. Why do I get angry? Because we could have crashed. Why would I be angry if we crashed? Because I wouldn't be able to repair my car, I'd be hurt, I'd be maimed, I'd be late for work and they wouldn't understand. I'm afraid of these things and my response to fear in this situation is anger. Someone else may experience another "negative" emotion that stems from the same fear. We forgive because we love someone; we hold a grudge or nurture resentment because, ultimately, we're afraid.
If love is the product of spiritual growth then Spirit, whether we refer to it as God, the Goddess, the Universal Consciousness, or by some other name, has to be the very embodiment of love. After all, the more we grow spiritually, the more love takes the place of fear in our lives. We become what we mirror and we're mirroring Spirit.
Karma, in the sense that it's a mystical process of cause and effect, fails because the concept implies a cosmic judgment. We do something wrong, negativity returns to us. In other words, under the karmic concept, the spirit realm or, depending on your perspective, Spirit itself, keeps a giant cosmic scorecard. You do something wrong, the Universe will make sure that an equal amount of wrong returns to you. After all, we create this reality. We manifest what's in our lives. If reality is a creation, then the creator, whether our beliefs hold that it is us or a Higher Power, has to be responsible for how things flow. If our actions are given a response we "deserve" or that our actions have "earned" then the process behind that is legalism or judgment, not love.
This about it this way. Let's say that you're God, the Big-G, absolutely omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, the whole nine yards. You're personally in charge of the entire cosmos and love your entire creation, especially those bipedal beings on Planet Earth that call themselves Homo sapiens. You're the very embodiment of love, the absolutely perfect expression of love, of compassion and forgiveness. And one of those bipeds who is struggling with fear, acts out because they're afraid, because they can't feel the love that's all around them.
Now, you realize why they did the thing that they did. And you have a choice. You can forgive them and extend additional love their way - or you can make them pay. This is outside of the process of our spiritual evolution, of us incarnating and choosing the things we'll work on that will help us grow. We're talking about karma as a process of cause and effect, monitored at least passively by Spirit so that the energy manifesting in our world mirrors the energy we've created.
There are at least some of you that are reading this that are saying, "Yep. That's exactly what I would do. People need to learn a lesson and the only way to do that is for them to learn the consequences of their actions."
Now imagine that you're a parent and you're woken up in the middle of the night by your child screaming. You run into their bedroom and find that they're having a nightmare. As you reach out to comfort them, they see your dark shape coming toward them, lash out in the midst of their blind terror and strike you across the face.
What do you do?
To follow the concept of karma, you would hit them back. Or, after they calmed down, you would sit them in the corner, give them a timeout, take away a favorite toy, something that would teach them that striking you was wrong. But as parents, especially to young children, we're the embodiment of love to our sons and daughters. We ignore the strike across our face. We hold them close and tell them that it's okay. We love them and nurture them, not in spite of what they've done because in our immense love for our children, the strike doesn't even register as being something they did wrong.
What we have to understand is that everything negative we do is done out of fear. Just like the child who was having a nightmare, we lash out without realizing what we're doing. How many of us, when we realize what we've done, wish we could undo it? It's the same regret we'd feel as that child if we struck our loving parent and realized that we deeply hurt them. Unless our lives are seriously out of balance, we don't need the correction to change our behavior - all we need is love.
Each of us has an imperfect understanding of what love is and what love can be. We're limited by our own fear, by our own mortal perspective. What we often fail to understand is that we don't have to earn love. It's not a right or a prize. We aren't loved because we're good and then not loved because we're bad. If part of our spiritual path was to truly embody love, then it wouldn't be those who loved us in return that we would struggle to learn to love - it would be those who fell below our standards, who did us wrong.
My Christian friends have given up trying to convert me. My argument has always been very simple. "Your God is the ultimate embodiment of love, right? And, from your perspective, we're His children, right? And if I don't do exactly what God says, accept Jesus and all of that, then I go to Hell, right?" To which they readily agree. My response is always very simple. "If I were in charge of Heaven and Hell, then neither of my children would go to Hell, regardless of what they had done. By that standard alone, I love my children more than your God loves us. And by extension, none of my children's friends or family or friends of friends would go to Hell, because I would hurt someone they love. You can go on and on down the line, but let me put it to you simply. The ultimate act of love isn't to bring someone who loves you in return into your Heaven. It's to meet the murderer at the Pearly Gates and say, 'Even though you did nothing to earn this, I love you enough to give you Paradise. I forgive you.' If I can do that, then I wouldn't want to follow any path who worships a God who loves someone less than I do. When your God can show more love than I can, come back and talk to me."
By the same principles, if Spirit is the ultimate expression of love, then karma can't equate to cosmic law enforcement. It's legalistic, not love.
So what is it we're seeing in action?
There's a process that each of us goes through that I call spiritual evolution. To put it simply, we're growing and evolving toward a simple goal - the embodiment of love. Each of us is on that path; some closer, some farther away. To do that, we've chosen to incarnate, to consciously limit our perspective to that of a mortal being. This allows us to feel separate from the love of Spirit, to struggle with things and overcome them on our own, honing our inner strength and developing spiritual tools and skills. Essentially, by incarnating, we come into this lifetime with things we want to work on. And by the very act of becoming mortal, we essentially tell Spirit, "Let me take these steps and see if I can walk on my own." We'll fall. We'll skin our knees. But it is never more than we can handle. This isn't cosmic retribution, but the opportunity to spread our wings. When we've learned the skills and earned the perspective behind a particular lesson, there isn't a backlog of karma that has to be dealt with. There isn't a pool of previously-earned retribution that has to be processed. It all falls away. In essence, our debt is forgiven on the spot. Why? Because it's not a legalistic spiritual system that we incarnate into, it's love.
This doesn't imply that we get a free pass and can be horrible people without consequence. It's just that because Spirit is the ultimate embodiment of love, there won't be additional punishment on top of what we're doing to ourselves. And we aren't only causing ourselves a great deal of stress, but by moving farther away from Spirit, we're also consciously distancing ourselves from the experience of feeling love. The thing that we need to remember is that we're in school. Our goal, by incarnating, is to hone our spirits, to evolve into something a step closer to Spirit than we were when we were born. This is our greater calling in this chapter of our existence. Each action, each intent, changes who we are, not just on a mortal level, but on the level of our spirit or our soul. To act without thought or remorse not only inhibits our growth, but it actually changes the material of our soul, changing who we are. We not only slow our growth, but we find ourselves farther away from mirroring Spirit than when we began. From the perspective of a single lifetime, this could imply the need for drastic correction to halt our fall and put us back on the right path. Such harsh corrections require a catalyst, much as when we draw hard lines with our children and mete out punishment. However, we aren't beings who exist for a moment on the physical plane and then fade away forever. We live multiple lifetimes and we need a loving environment, not necessarily in a single lifetime, but over the greater stretch of our existence, to help us pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and change the direction of our growth.
The other part of this equation that's important to us as witches, shamans, and pagans, is each step we take deeper into love is also a step we take closer to Spirit. In other words, the more we're truly able to love, the more that the mundane restraints that we've agreed to wear in this incarnation begin to fall away. Magick begins to work in amazing ways. Instant manifestation begins to occur in our world. We experience things that are so mystical they're almost mythical in nature.
Why? Did we earn it? No. It's simply because of love. And if we were in charge of the whole process, we'd give those we love the same opportunities that we find given to ourselves - and our love is still very far from perfect. If Spirit, the very embodiment of love, is so much more than we're capable of grasping from the mortal coil, by extension, how magickal can life be if learning to love brings us closer to being beings of spirit living on a physical plane?