I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of karma—whether doing good brings good back to us, and whether cruelty eventually returns to the person who caused it.
In your honest opinion (or experience), is karma something that truly happens, or is it more of a psychological coping mechanism to help us deal with heartbreak, betrayal, and helplessness?
I’d love to hear from both spiritual and skeptical perspectives. Please be respectful and thoughtful.
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The Buddhist understanding of karma is completely different than the idea of “reward for good deeds” and “punishment for bad deeds”.
Karma refers to cause and effect. The law of karma taught by Buddha is that nothing occurs out of the blue for no reason. Instead, everything is the result of causes and conditions. What happens now will have an impact on what happens next.
If we do unwholesome things, we may enjoy ourselves for a short time, but we will not be able to escape from the consequences of our actions.
Karma is a fact, just like gravity. It is not a comforting illusion to understand that every action has consequences whether we like it or not.
If you don’t believe causality is real, you must think things just happen randomly without a cause, like magic.
It is actually pretty easy to verify that this is not how things work in this universe. People were able to observe cause and effect in action thousands of years before it was verified by science.
Well do you believe in science? If so, do you think we wouldn’t have found statistical relevance to one’s “karma”?
I won’t answer it for you, but encourage you to think about it yourself.
Karma, as cosmic justice, is a comforting illusion. How could it satisfy everyone’s self-interest without contradiction? People seek retributive justice when wronged, and karma serves as a psychological defense, displacing feelings of injustice. Actions do have consequences, but these are often delayed, unpredictable, and mediated by others, sometimes with malicious intent.
The original Hindu understanding of karma is different from the “globalised” version we have today
There are variations, but simplifying we are all here trapped in a cycle of reincarnations until we evolve into superior beings who can achieve samadhi – nirvana – whatever you call it. Karma accumulates across lifetimes, and can be understood as “work yet to be done”. If you haven’t “learned a lesson” (any lesson) your accumulate karma that dictates you are reborn in a certain situation that will force you to learn it. So for karma to be true, reincarnation also needs to be true
Cynics will tell you that it was just a device to foster fatalism and prevent the underclasses from challenging the status quo
Yes, karma, divine justice and the like have always sound like comforting lies to me.
I don’t know how to further develop this answer without getting into very specific details that are probably irrelevant for the discussion. I mean, there isn’t much to talk about from a skeptical point of view.
Karma is real, I just don’t think it generally has to be spiritual or even a coping mechanism. Karma is the smile you get when you compliment someone, or you finally hitting a home run after months of batting practice.
Only the fool thinks life is fair. It’s just life. Full of pitfalls and dick heads. Come to grips with it, don’t trust too easily, as people over time are always changing. cynical view point I suppose. but is it really? I take the view point that people are unpredictable at best. Compensate for possible interactions in the best way you can. Move forward, it’s your life to live. don’t depend on others for what you expect. Just do you. Expectations is the biggest letdown one can have. Expect nothing, then any good thing that comes your way is a bonus. Not something you think you have earned. because once something has left your personal control, the results are up for grabs.
It’s kind of a draw. If you check the fates of 20th/21st century dictators, just less than half died in office, just over half were killed, exiled or arrested. (I think it was 5 died in office/retired peacefully out of 11). A slight most of the time in that case, bullies got their just desserts.
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Karma – to some is basically believing in magic, that there is a power over all things and that good will follow good because that is how that power works…I don’t believe this to be true, and see no evidence of it.
However I do believe that being good to others will more often bring good back to you because of how good within society works, how people engage with good people and feel a wish to repay them.
So I suppose it depends if you mean in a cosmic karmic power or more of a social do on to others type of karma…
There are no guarantees…bad people exist and will take advantage of good people as well, but if you are genuine and put yourself in good places good will.more often come your way in life.
I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. It’s more about being the change you wish to see in the world, as Ghandi said. To expect a one to one relationship between actions and results is immature and unrealistic. The point is that if you are consistently a good person, you will make good friends and follow good opportunities. You may still encounter a disaster or disease, but you will have support around you to handle them. A bad person will not.
I have lived through a lot in my short time on this earth. The shit I’ve been through most people only find in TV dramas and horrific documentaries.
I’ve been very lucky to make it through.
All this to say I’ve seen some of the worst and best of people. More so than the average.
And unfortunately, despite being raised to believe in karma- it’s bullshit.
There is no power that bestows bad upon bad and good upon good.
For example, some thoughts that brought me here. Do children have karma? Sure you can say their abuser is gonna get what’s coming to them, jail, etc, but what did the child do to deserve the abuse?
Belief in karma requires a belief that there is some equal standard of justice in the universe and there isn’t. We make real karma when we hold people accountable for their actions but the universe doesn’t have some magical system for reward and punishment.
I rescue special needs animals. Have done so for 16 ish years. We take the ones no one else wants and foster/rehome the rest after some rehab.
Humans… humans really suck a lot of the time. We are capable of amazing feats of kindness (I wouldn’t be alive if not for several lucky moments with strangers) but also of some really terrible shit.
Did these animals have bad karma? Were those people tools of the universe to deal it out? If they are part of the cycle of karma and were used- do they have bad karma or good?
Karma is just accountability. If you want it you gotta make it. Good and bad.
It’s a lie we tell ourselves to feel better, ask yourself where’s the karma for the Zodiac, Nixon, etc. It doesn’t exist, like karma doesn’t exist. The universe in indifferent to just and injust, wrong and right, moral and immoral and doesn’t care what personal wrong happened to you
First, glad this isn’t about Reddit karma.
There is cause and effect, and we like to think that in the long run, a bad action will somehow be rectified. Mine, and any comment here, is strictly opinion, of course, but feel like Karma is imaginary, except in cases where an action is so blatantly counter to the way the universe is supposed to work.
But rather than payback, I think, it is a matter of things returning to their “normal” state, after an action–for the ripples to extend outward until they run out of energy and the surface of the pond of reality becomes smooth again. Or, If you stand rock steady in the middle of a fast moving river, although the water is pushing you, as long as you have the energy to do so, with your own free will you can resist the flow and stand there. Eventually, though, you will run out of strength, and you will either tire, or die, and the river will continue on and you will float along with it, at last.
Evil might be defined as anything that is counter to the way the universe is supposed to be. But we really only see it as evil if it’s extreme, and arguments can always be made that anything at all that happens “is right.” It’s not satisfying to think that an evil person can live their life doing bad, harmful, or destructive things and never have to experience a punishment for it, or that you can work hard and always try to do good but never get a reward. The only thing that makes it palatable is the general idea that your life will be better if you’re a good person–better is some psychological way, perhaps, or better with making a pleasant life somehow–and if you’re a bad person, perhaps your punishment is that you have to live with yourself.
Other people have addressed the religious aspects in Buddhism and Hinduism really well.
I’ll give you my (very) personal answer.
We are always in the process of becoming the human beings that we will be. At 55, I am the product of my choices, of what I did – and what was done to me, which was not always my choice. The people in my life, and the life I’m living, is to a huge extent a result of those cumulative decisions.
To me it’s another way of thinking about karma. If someone is an asshole and chooses to be an asshole to other people, to be selfish, to be vindictive, to be cruel, every single day they are going to become more and more that person. It sadly does not mean that they ever will suffer or be called out, it means that they may flourish in their assholeness but they will also be surrounded by people who are also assholes, and while you may wish that penalties would fall on them, would you really want to be them? Really? Would you want to act like that, to treat people like that, to be surrounded by friends and family like that? To have anyone kind and compassionate who meets you flinch away in the other direction?
Or would you rather look in the mirror and see someone you actually still like? It accumulates. You can say things like, “I know what I said sounded cruel, but she knows deep down I love her” – but you do that too much, that person is not going to be in your life anymore. It accumulates. How you act, what you choose, what you do, every day, building the person you become in whatever life you live.
Personal karma.
How many war criminals escaped justice and died peacefully of old age?
How many children get cancer or die in drone strikes?
Not only is karma nonsense; I find it to be a disgusting concept. The idea that someone “deserves” whatever station they have in life (while sometimes true, just not for metaphysical reasons) is absurd
I think even without a metaphorical/spiritual component karma still make sense since our spheres of influence are pretty small, so we’re bound to feel the effects of our deeds some way or another.
Also the path we chose changes us more than the world, so we start filtering everything through a positive or a negative lense. I always believed being good or bad is a choice, and it’s like training a muscle; if you want to be good you have to do even if you don’t feel like it until it’s part of you. Fake it until you make it of sorts.
Even thoughi personally belive there’s a spiritual component to it, that’s how I see through a skeptic lense.
Karma is real in the sense that actions always have consequences. Bad things and bad behaviors do catch up with people, in part because those people set off the chain of events that led to their eventual comeuppance. But I can’t imagine there’s heavenly oversight or scorecard in all of this: instead, a fact of life is that good is not necessarily rewarded and bad may not be punished until long after the reprehensible event. There’s no evidence to think someone’s still paying for the sins of a past life or is well off now as compensation for earlier suffering. If “what goes around comes around” were actually true, there’d be no reason for laws, policemen, jurisprudence, charity, regulation and so on. The short answer: yes, to “karma” as consequences, no to karma as cosmic justice.
There has been people throughout the history who have caused so much unwarranted pain and suffering that they can’t possibly suffer enough in their lifetime to make it resemble any kind of justice. It’s 100% a psychological coping mechanism.
I think in a sense, yes, karma is real. But not by any supernatural mechanism, imo.
You’re not punished for your sins, you’re punished by your sins. You can be a terrible person and succeed, sure, but at what cost to your relationships and well being?
We’re all paying for our transgressions in one way or another.
If you think about it, karma is just maths.
If you do something that you wish people would do more, mathematically, the likelihood of this good thing happening in this universe goes up. It’s miniscule, but it’s there, and nobody can deny that.
The great thing is, we are social creatures. If something good happens to us, we tend to repeat it, give it back given the opportunity, so this miniscule percentage has a ripple effect.
Of course you can’t count on it, karma is not some kind of universal tally that always comes back to you. But it is an objective fact that if you pick up litter from the local park, the likelihood of the park being clean goes up. And people are better at keeping a park clean than to clean up a trashed one.
I think karma, or what goes around comes around is real, I have seen it several times. I am 58 and could list several instances of it both bad karma and good karma.
I can’t prove it’s real but it was never meant to be comforting.
It’s implication is that we are all responsible for our lives, including all the bad. If you have leukemia, that is ripening bad karma affecting you now. If you were born with a genetic disease or have bad luck, that is karma. Everything you do, think, and desire has karmic affects. No matter what it is.
That kind of responsibility isn’t comforting to most people. It’s terrifying.
You could probably add enough indirections and excuses like reincarnation or purgatory to make the theory unfalsifiable, but when stated like you did: bad things return to the actual person – that is obviously bullshit and cope.
Just a cursory look at ACLED (https://acleddata.com/) will show you more than enough bad things for the last week alone that there’s just not enough capacity of pain for actual people to receive an adequate payback.
It’s basically the “just world” fallacy, and a just world is for every ethics system roughly compatible with that of an average non-psychopathic westener empiricaly disproven
“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar
I’ve seen this too many times to believe much in Karma, as the OP meant it. I’ve personally seen bad people get ahead, destroy good people’s lives to get their money or land, and the courts didn’t touch them. I’ve seen fraud, poor quality work, theft, etc, but nothing comes of attempting to address it.
But if one tries to enact karma as sometimes happened 100 years ago in towns around here, that is to say crooked lawyers and businessmen getting hot lead justice in the streets, well, you’re the bad guy who gets the full weight of the system on them. So, rebirth, Hell, whatever, if those are real, they don’t impress the ones it should and bog down the ones it probably shouldn’t.
Karma is a bullsh*t philosophy used by oppressive regimes to justify their power. If you are poor, disabled or ugly, it is because you were bad in a past life and thus deserve your place. Meanwhile, if you are rich and powerful, it is because you deserve it. In reality, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. Change can only be made in THIS life. I have nothing but hatred for the concept of karma.
Its a coping mechanism similar to believing in a magical floating being in the sky who is testing us and that is why bad things happen to not bad people and that is why they exist, they need to believe they have a purpose and that their is some meaning to their existence
If you are wronged by an individual you want justice, if you dont get justice now, you cope by believing you will get justice in the afterlife
There are a lot of evil people in the world living lavish lifestyles and you find this to be completely unfair so you cope by believing they will be punished in the after life, cause accepting that they will suffer no consequences is just too much for you, it will make you really mad, sad, ect;
Essentially people choose to believe in a lot of things otherwise it would be very depressing to them
If Karma were real, bad things would exclusively happen to bad people. Instead we luve in a world where the very worst people rise to the top of our society.
It’s fake, as is all spiritual/religious nonsense.
My feeling is that being good is its own reward and being evil is its own punishment. Not because of the downstream paybacks or punishments but because of the state of being.
Your third paragraph contradicts the first two.
The fact that causes and effects exist, does not mean there’s gonna be any sort of cosmic balance or retribution. You could live an unwholesome life right up to the moment of your death and enjoy it.
I believe it is, mainly just because the nature of the definition of karma. When people do good actions for other people, it might open doorways for new possibilities (relationships, jobs, etc). And when others do bad things, there is always a possibility of a bad outcome coming back to them later on.
I believe in karma, not in the religious sense, but just the way the world works in general. As I was getting divorced from my first wife of 27 years, she said that I’d be a lonely old man because no woman would want a man with 5 kids. I did get the kids who were still minors and living at home. I remarried three years later and still going strong 25 years later. The kids never had anything to do with her after the divorce and, in fact, all encouraged me to get away from her. I see them all the time. She died a couple years ago alone in her trailer. She had grandchildren and great grandchildren she had never seen.
If you have to wonder about it, does it matter if there is karma or not? What if there is? What if there isnt? Does that change your life? How do you know what is maybe karma versus pure chance? Why worry about it?
Karma from Hinduism and Buddhism is inherently spiritual and supernatural and has never claimed to be scientific. So don’t expect scientific explanations for it.
I think there’s more paradigms out there than just the scientific paradigm though. Buddhism is it’s own paradigm attempting to explain consciousness and experiences. Within that paradigm I think karma makes a lot of sense.
Karma is the emotional landscape you both cultivate and live within.
It’s not some cosmic debt.
The landscapes shape is formed by the seeds you plant.
Steward the land and its growth will reflect your actions.
Religion is what humans come up with to make sense of the things they can’t find solid, tactile reasoning for. People get mad at this definition but it’s what I’ve been taught in the four religion classes I took in uni, all of which were taught by people who practice the religion they were teaching (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism). I would say there are a lot of clear examples of karma because actions have consequences and this world is just full of insane coincidences aside from more direct consequences, but it would be hard to empirically prove or disprove the concept of karma as a whole.
I think Karma is more a psychological concept than anything concrete. If I were a thief and I didn’t come around to accepting my wrongdoing and refrain from stealing, I would be haunted by my past actions and thereby create my own prison, exacerbating and perpetuating what the Buddhists call “Samsara.”
There are many corrupt and cruel longstanding institutions that seem to cross the expanse of centuries or millennia. Somehow they remain intact and keep cruising along. This is likely because they have no sense of remorse within their psychological framework.
There’s lots of scientific research that suggests happiness begets happiness, patience patience, and etc.
Is it true every single time? No. But do I believe trying to be generous and curious and empathetic makes your life better? Unequivocally.
It used to be very real and kept many souls trapped in a never ending cycle, but I’ve heard it’s no longer a thing. At least, it’s unraveling now. More and more people will be born without karma, going forward.
Besides Americans generally misinterpreting the whole concept…yes it’s “fake”.
When I hear people say “karma will get them” or similar, it’s a lazy cop out. If you’re the one wronged, imo you should do something about it both for yourself and the next possible victim.
It’s a way of saying “good” people don’t need to act and “bad” people will be naturally dealt with. This has not been my experience, sometimes self defense or seeking justice after the fact are quite necessary.
I think it’s more just basic common sense: if you are the kind of person who treats other with respect and is conscientious, then you’ll tend to make more of the opportunities life presents you. And when you face hardship, people will tend to be willing to help you.
If you are the kind of person who treats others poorly or slacks off, you probably will make a lot of enemies, fewer people will aid you when you’re down, and your own irresponsibility means you might let what would otherwise be small bumps in the road grow into giant boulders.
sure, there are plenty of shitty people who prosper from glib charm, manipulative scheming, family $connection$ and even just plain old good looks. And there are many good people who really do just get a really unlucky hand or are simply too shy to take credit for the good they do in life.
but imo yeah, most of what people think of as “karma” is just people reaching their own level in life.
20 years ago, a coworker who tried to screw me over for his own gain. Life moved on, I stopped thinking about him… and ten years later I find out he’d gone to jail for embezzlement.
Was that “karma” for him trying to screw me over years ago? No, it’s just that since he’s the kind of dude who was “always working an angle,” he eventually got caught… working an angle. surprise, surprise, right?
Karma isn’t a physical person so it’s not locked to one lifetime. It’s a universal balancing force. It will see the balancing carried out in this life or other ones. So don’t wait on karma, stay present and focus on what’s relevant.
Think of Karma as a series of Actions.
If someone does something mean, chances are it’s in their nature to continue doing so.
The odds are eventually they will say/do the wrong thing to the wrong person and pay for it.
Same holds true for the good person.
Given that your definition of karma is a modern misappropriation of a South Asian religious concept by largely white Anglophone ‘spiritual’ types, I think it’s fair to say that it’s not a real thing.
If it was real ..karma would actually always come around. It doesn’t. People will pick an instance out of 100k and say there! See! Truth is the bad guys win. There is no justice. That’s unsettling. It’s hard to live with hence the saying no justice no peace which is true. A sense of justice does bring peace. Karma is just something people tell themselves to feel better.
Karma is real if you don’t only accept it as a specific and whole idea and as more of a math thing. Everything is only math, and everything is can only be perception and tone.
There is no karma, but there is a concept known as scarcity value. The scarcer your joys, the greater they feel. The scarcer your sorrows, the greater they feel.
It’s real in the sense that when you do bad things you tend find yourself dealing with shady people in precarious situations, and those tend to have bad outcomes more often than not. Essentially, it’s just cause and affect.
There is no magic power or force. The universe doesn’t give a shit.
That said, obviously, if you are kind and do good things for those around you, they are likely to do the same.
Your version of karma is very Western slanted… “doing good brings good back to us…” but it is how society is supposed to work and continue to stay on track, right?
Karma actually works more like… you give someone five dollars who says they are homeless/starving… then you did a good deed and you tried to help someone and you carry that with you knowing you haven’t wronged anyone… it’s about happiness… and when you learn about deeper karma you realize that it’s not happiness based on circumstances but happiness and peace that transcends circumstances and situations. On the flip side, if you constantly wrong people and deceive them, that will catch up to you in the form of misery and unhappiness. We call that when the caramels sour.
If you watch the show Righteous Gemstones – Uncle Baby Billy has reached this level of enlightenment and serves as a true beacon of hope to others wise enough to learn.
Like most magic karma is not reliable. I do believe that people that do bad things will suffer simply because they surround themselves with bad people and abuse others. Those people are never satisfied and suffer from emotional problems
Karma is not a force of cosmic justice, in fact it isn’t a force at all or even a thing. Karma is simply the accumulation of actions and the results of those actions, described by the law of cause and effect.
Every action, every thought, even your intentions plant a seed so to speak. These seeds take root and sprout when the conditions are right, allowing them to ripen, so to speak, so they can be harvested and consumed. That is, so that the energy one sends out can eventually react back on the one who generated it, neutralizing or “burning” it so to speak.
When the karmic seeds ripen to full maturity and are ready to be harvested and consumed, we call this ripe causation. When we seek out our next incarnation in the 3rd heaven (often called the causal plane), the vasanas (inherent tendencies) left over after shedding the previous life will seek expression, kind of drawing us toward one life or the other.
In other words, each life is chosen according to what we believe is the best opportunity for ripe causation that will burn a lot of karma in an efficient manner.
So karma is completely impersonal, it isn’t an intelligence and cares nothing about justice or punishment or reward. There’s no inherently positive or negative karma, those are values that we assign, as we tend to view whatever causes us to suffer as being a bad thing.
My mum was a lovely person. She tried to do her best and was always helping people are lending an ear. She was also a lifetime smoker. She was dead at 42.
My dad is a narcissist. He made my childhood hell, he made my mums death all about him and he is generally an asshole. He is also a lifetime smoker. He is now 20 years older than when my mum died.
So many good things come to really shitty people and vice versa.
It’s real in the sense that we help shape the world around us through our actions and making the world shittier will probably negative effect you at some point.
But the idea that people always get what they deserve is bullshit designed to make an unfair and uncaring world seem more tolerable.
Ha, not at all. I always think of a video about a small town hero who rescued a kidnapped woman at a gas station and died as a teenager. I’m a Christian myself – I believe what we sow, we reap, but it’s not in a metaphysical, “tit-for-tat,” self-serving way as karma. God is our provider and protector. He rewards wisdom with long life, unless the plans include an early invitation home.
Karma is real, you build karma through multiple lifetimes though. You are only thinking about your single life now. Were you good or bad in your previous life? You may still be paying off negative karma from a previous life and not even aware of it yet.
Of course Karma isn’t real. You know slave owners lived long lives despite raping and murdering their slaves. Plantations were home to hundreds of trafficked and enslaved people, but the owners still maintained health and wealth. It’s actually where much of the current US families with “old money” came from.
If Karma was real, things would balance out and the millions of people throughout history who lived through someone else’s abuse of power, greed, or any number of atrocities would receive justice.
I learned my lesson on karma early on, both bad and good karma.
The GOOD KARMA: when I was about 5-6, I was with my family at a festival but I strayed away and got lost. I was scared, walking around looking for them. Then I saw a few older ladies sitting together asking for money, so I took everything I had out of my purse and gave all to them. Suddenly, I heard my dad’s voice calling me. I remembered that I felt so relieved, I cried as I ran over to him.
The BAD KARMA: I was about 7, my bestie and I threw rocks at a couple of girls (I don’t remember why) and ran away, laughing. We were little shits. I turned around to check if anyone was chasing us, and just as I whipped my head back I ran into a pole. I was so confused when I opened my eyes to see my bestie laughing, looking down over me. I got up and ran straight home. On the way, I saw concerning eyes looking at me, I heard someone said “blood” and pointed at me. So when I finally got to a mirror, I saw a huge glob of blood trickling down my forehead. So of course, I wailed. I was ok, it was just a cut, nothing major.
So, I learned my lessons on how quickly karma can come back to me lol