KARMA, FREEDOM AND DESTINY
Karma: it’s not a sentence, it’s your starting point
Karma means action. In this view, it includes every action—both mechanical and natural—governed by the universal law of cause and effect. Much of our behavior follows this law of action and reaction, often without our awareness. Simply observe your own thoughts and seemingly spontaneous ideas: you’ll see that our freedom of thought—and therefore our freedom to act—is limited.
In this sense, science is correct. As beings living in a material world, we are influenced by countless natural forces. Advertisers, politicians, and all who sell products—or ideas—understand this well. This doesn’t mean free will is absent, or that we cannot think or decide for ourselves. But our freedom is deeply conditioned. True human freedom lies in learning to direct our inherited karma and free ourselves from the influences that shape our thoughts and actions. This process is what makes us fully human, setting us apart from merely conditioned beings.
The karma we are concerned with here, however, goes beyond the natural law of cause and effect studied by science. Human karma—the evaluation of our actions and their consequences—belongs to the realm of ethics and morality, and above all, to intention.
First, we must let go of the idea of karma as punishment or a penalty we suffer in the present. Whatever our current circumstances, they are not a sentence—they are our starting point for shaping what comes next.
Many imagine karma as a kind of “floating curse” hanging overhead, waiting to fall and shatter their lives. Others picture a figure hiding behind a door, ready to strike when least expected. In this view, karma is an external threat looming over existence.
This is a misunderstanding.
The essential insight is this: Karma is you. It is who you are, what you have become, what you have done with yourself, and what you are capable of becoming. Your past—distant or recent—has shaped you. Your way of being, your thoughts, your inner world—judged by the outer world as fortunate or not—are the fundamental tools you have to work with.
When we shift our perspective, karma ceases to be a crushing weight. It becomes a powerful opportunity: a starting point from which to shape our destiny using the means already in our hands. Karma is not a punishment—it is a possibility. It begins with the acceptance of oneself, the necessary first step forward.
In reality, these ideas operate at different levels. Human karma is not the same as Universal Balance—the great cosmic reconciliation. Universal Balance is far greater, relating to exalted beings, deities, or the mechanisms that govern Law and Justice throughout the cosmos.
Ancient civilizations placed their trust in this Great Balance and expressed it through their gods. Hindus and Tibetans spoke of the Lipikas, the great “adjusters of karma,” who harmonized Divine Thought so creation could unfold in an orderly and just way.
The Ancient Egyptians had their counterpart: the god Thoth. Together with his feminine aspect, the goddess Seshat, Thoth regulated the “mathematics” of existence. He safeguarded laws, organized the cycles of time, and maintained cosmic order. In scenes of the Judgment of the Heart, Thoth is shown holding a papyrus, recording inner facts—facts of consciousness.
That is the essential point to remember. On its deepest level, karma is an intimate record of our intentions and conscious acts. It is not an external force judging us, but the natural consequence of what we have chosen to be. To understand this is to begin the journey toward true freedom.
The previous vignette is usually accompanied by the recitation or prayer 30B from the Book of the Dead:
"My heart, my mother's heart, my heart of my mother, and your terrestrial heart of my successive transformations. Do not oppose me in the Judgment; let the Divine Judges not reject me. Be not hostile to me in the presence of Him who maintains the Balance… Do not make my name stink and rot among the Almighty Lords who model the Destiny of Man. Do not utter lies about me before God, but let the ears of the gods rejoice and their hearts be satisfied when my Words are weighed in the Balance of Judgment".
My celestial heart—a gift from my celestial mother, Mut—represents the consciousness I inherit: my origin, all that precedes me. My terrestrial heart is the consciousness I shape within this world, in constant transformation. Both serve as witnesses to my truest intentions, which lie far deeper than the apparent meaning of my actions.
This is why the plea, “do not betray me before the judges,” holds such weight. It is an appeal to one’s own consciousness: Do not reveal my hidden motives. Do not expose that my kindness was performed for appearance, that my generosity sought reward or influence, that my virtue was a transaction. When the moment of truth arrives, it is this inner witness that can unveil us—stripping away the mask to lay bare the intent beneath.
Conscious, intentional action is fundamentally different from unconscious action. The mechanical karma studied by science is not the same as the karma born from human cognition, intention, and will. The human karma we now speak of is that for which I bear responsibility: my behavior, my thoughts, and my emotions.
Consider an accident. I may strike someone inadvertently—an apparent moment of chance. Yet if I have long driven with irreverence, disregarding limits and treating danger as a game, then that moment was prepared long before. The intentional seed was already sown.
Every action I take, at any level, begins from where I stand now. Yet from its very inception, it is a conditioned act: shaped by my conditioned mind, my conditioned body, my conditioned knowledge, my conditioned emotions. My present action is subject to the consequences of my past.
Let us examine these conditions:
My past actions, in this life or another, place me within a specific direction or situation—a trajectory I can only redirect within limited means.
I am born human, not a bird or lion. I am tall or short, woman or man, Norwegian or Central African, rich or poor, educated or not. These circumstances condition my vision of the world, and so when I choose to act, I do so under the weight of innate impressions.
But above all, I am born with a fundamental ignorance: AVIDYA.
Avidya is not mere Agnyana—the simple ignorance of what one has not been taught, remedied by study and experience. Avidya is deeper: it means No-Seeing (A-Vidya). It is the inability to perceive REALITY, to see things as they truly are. One may hold many degrees yet remain blind to the truth of life. Another may be unschooled, even illiterate, and yet in their perspective, their counsel, their sense of being, possess profound wisdom. For wisdom is not the accumulation of knowledge, but a deep vision into the meaning of existence.
Because of our ancestral conditionings, our educational limits, our social circumstances—because of our karma, the result of all we have done—what we perceive is not reality, but something resembling it: MAYA, the worldly illusion that leads to error.
My lack of deep vision (Avidya) gives rise to an illusory perception of the world (Maya). In the darkness, I see a coiled snake—but it is only a rope. I perceive erroneously not just from the external gloom, but from my own inner darkness: my ignorance, my fear.
Thus, my actions are Mayavic—impregnated by worldly illusion. And from this, a cascade of chained errors follows: mistaken concepts that beget further mistakes, the series of “bindings” known in the East as the 12 Nidanas. These are the linked causes that lead to pain, to failure, to dying in ignorance, only to begin again.
They form the concatenation of cause and effect that carries one form of existence into the next, symbolized in the wheel of Samsara—the eternal cycle of becoming, propelled by blind forces and erroneous action. It is the great mechanism of which we are all a part, captured in the Buddhist verse:
“Inconceivable is the beginning of this Samsara; never can a first beginning be found of beings who, obstructed by ignorance and ensnared by craving, hasten and wander through this round of rebirths.”
These twelve causes—the links that give rise to Samsara—can be understood in three fundamental blocks.
The First Block: Ignorance that Conditions Consciousness
This is the root from which all else springs.
Avidya: No-Seeing. The primal cause, the producer of Maya—illusion—and the foundation of all that follows.
Sankhara: Mental formations and predispositions. The latent tendencies shaped by ignorance.
Viññana: The resulting consciousness—deviated, distorted at its source.
Namarupa: The mistaken identity that emerges: the concept of “I” (Nama) and the form it inhabits (Rupa).
The Second Block: The Senses, Perception, and Desire
Once consciousness is conditioned, perception becomes a filter, and desire takes hold.
Sadayatana: The six senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mind—as gateways of information, already biased.
Phassa: Contact or sense-perception. The moment sensory information meets our existing mental prejudices.
Vedana: The feeling that arises—attraction, aversion, or indifference—colored by that contact.
Taṇhā: Craving. The thirst for permanence, for obtaining what is desired, for pushing away what is not.
The Third Block: Attachment, Existence, and Rebirth
From craving grows clinging, from clinging comes becoming, and from becoming, the cycle renews.
Upādāna: Clinging or attachment—to things, to views, to existence itself.
Bhava: Becoming. The course of life set in motion, existence chained to intention.
Jāti: Birth into a new form.
Jarāmaraṇa: Aging and death—the inevitable conclusion that sets the stage for renewal.
In essence, three factors stand above all:
Avidya – The generator. The essential blindness with which we end one life and begin another.
Phassa – Sense-perception. The moment the outer world meets our inner conditioning, sparking the cascade of thoughts, images, and obsessions that entrap us daily.
Upādāna – Attachment. The clinging to pleasure, to identity, and to existence that binds us to the wheel, ensuring its constant turning.
To be continued…
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