Karmageddon or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Calm

Most people have at one time in their lives been blindsided, perhaps in the middle of a mundane Thursday afternoon, by a life’s culmination of poor and unskillful decisions most of which were made unconsciously. It seems in that moment that the dark part of the universe, which had been minding its own business torturing other poor souls, saw you out of the corner of its eye and fixed its terrible gaze on you. It is then that everything you thought you were, the life you had created, the relationships you had cultivated, the career you worked so hard for, all fall away and what’s left is a smoking pile of rubble that resembles more a Jackson Pollack painting than your life. This dark synchronicity of monstrous proportions is of course your very own karmageddon. The one that had been waiting for you for years. And everybody gets one (if you’re lucky). Every bad thing you ever did, every poor choice you ever made all seem to turn around at once and return to where they came from: You.

Karma is a concept that is readily used in American culture today even by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In some ways it has become a religiously neutral concept despite its Hindu and Buddhist roots. We all employ the concept of “karma” (usually threatening someone by reminding them that “what goes around comes around!”) but despite its popular use it is also one of the least understood concepts in popular culture. Just because you (and here is an extreme example) murdered someone in your past life doesn’t mean you will get murdered in this life or that if you were a thief in a past life you will be robbed blind every other week in this one. Thankfully it doesn’t work that way. Whatever “unfortunate” thing happens to you now is actually a good thing (I know, bear with me a second—this is good news I promise). When you have something “bad” happen to you this means you are finally healthy enough in this life to be able to metabolize the bad karma from your previous lives. You’re finally strong enough to endure the kind of karmic trials that will burn off your bad karma. Basically think of “unfortunate” incidents as rebirth control: an opportunity for you to burn off that bad karma and cease being reborn altogether.

But karma is also not also not punishment, and suffering isn’t necessarily a result of bad karma. As Buddha’s first noble truth reminds us, “All life is sorrowful.” We may suffer, but it doesn’t have to be because of anything we did. Sometimes bad things just happen and as my friend Renea Frey reminds us, “karma is the certainty that you will be presented with opportunities to learn from past mistakes. It is a teaching, it is not punishment… We can't ever *know* all of the strands of karma that converge in any moment (unless we are fully enlightened) so it is impossible to say if what we are experiencing is the result of "good karma" or "bad karma" since we can't see all of the possible ways that things might have turned out otherwise.” All we can do is be mindful of our conditioned minds and attempt to condition them towards more enlightened responses to difficult situations. Pain is inevitable, but our suffering is entirely a choice. We may lose our jobs or our car break down, but it is always our choice to respond with equanimity, letting go of our expectations that things go a certain way. When we are present with things as they are, not as we wish them to be, there is great freedom and clarity. Karma presents that opportunity for us. In every moment it teaches us to choose peace or suffering. No matter which we choose, it is a choice that transforms.

Of course you don’t have to buy into the concept of karma and the whole idea of past lives and futures lives and all the rebirth stuff. In fact, I’m not sure I do either (although there is some tantalizing evidence out there). But one way to think of it that may be helpful is that every moment of your life is a life. Every state of consciousness you inhabit is a single life that you have the opportunity to make more virtuous and more complete. In each of those moments is the chance for you to choose to become more whole, more loving, and more compassionate. For every time you choose fullness over brokenness you train your mind to become that much fuller next time when a similar moment arises that challenges you. The mind is largely a reflexive organ anyway and we all have unskillful tendencies that have been deeply ingrained in us from our childhood we realize must be corrected. The sooner we see our conditioned negative tendencies the sooner we can get about the business of correcting them and showing up in our lives as the wonderfully virtuous and fully awake humans that we naturally are.

So the next time your car breaks down in the middle of the interstate in rush hour traffic, or your boss fires you after ten years of service, or your significant other dumps you, don’t worry and calm down (or try to anyway); you’re looking at an opportunity to meet these challenges with grace, wisdom, and awareness. In doing so you not only create good karma for yourself but you’re no longer adding bad karma that you’ll have to burn off in your next life. So make it easy on yourself in your next life. Don’t be there.

Oh, and the last one out cut off the lights.