Understanding Karma (Action)

Divine Life Society Publication: Chapter 4 - Commentary of Bhagavadgita by Sri Swami Krishnananda

(This week’s svadhyaya verses 4.13-4.22)

The karmas which bind the soul are such intricate processes of relativistic association in this world that it is not easy to know what is actually happening when a karma binds. Kiṁ karma kim akarme’ti kavayo’pyatra mohitāḥ: Learned people with great insight, very advanced in knowledge, are also bewildered as to what karma actually is. What is karma? What is akarma? Kiṁ karma kim akarme’ti kavayo’pyatra mohitāḥ, tat te karma pravakṣyāmi yaj jñātvā mokṣyase’śubhāt (4.16): Now I shall tell you what kind of thing karma is. Karmaṇo hy api boddhavyaṁ boddhavyaṁ ca vikarmaṇaḥ, akarmaṇaś ca boddhavyaṁ gahanā karmaṇo gatiḥ (4.17): It is necessary to know not only what karma is, but also to know what non-karma or inaction is, and what wrong action is. Therefore, what is right action, what is wrong action, and what is inaction? It is necessary to know all these things.

Karmaṇo hy api boddhavyaṁ boddhavyaṁ ca vikarmaṇaḥ, akarmaṇaś ca boddhavyaṁ: Very difficult is this peculiar, intricate way in which karma works. There is no such thing as karma sitting outside on a tree. It is not a thing whose existence we can visualise somewhere. Just as we consider diseases to be a peculiar maladjustment of the physical functioning of the body rather than a thing that is sitting outside the body and existing separately, so also the karma is not sitting outside, waiting to harass us.

Karma is the peculiar automatic reaction set up by the cosmic forces in proportion to the action performed by an individual. The reaction will be exactly in proportion to the action that we perform. In a way, it looks like tit for tat—and in a crude way, we may say it is like that.

The world is supposed to be something like a mirror through which we see our own face. We see our contour in our relationships with the world. If we smile at the world, the world smiles at us; if we get angry with the world, it gets angry with us; and if we denounce it, it will denounce us also. It will treat us in the same way as our body treats us. We cannot know how the body acts and reacts in regard to our own individual existence. The body is not outside the soul. It is inseparably acting on our consciousness, which is our individual soul. Automatic action takes place through the body, and that experience of an automatic reaction set up by the body is the pleasure or the pain that we speak of.

In a similar manner, there is a spontaneous action that is taking place in the cosmos when any activity, any action, takes place anywhere. The reaction is not created by somebody, such as God in heaven. God does not sit there and say, “So-and-so is doing something. I shall react in this manner.” It is an automatic action of the cosmos. When something happens to some part of the body, an automatic reaction is set up by the entire organism in relation to the particular event taking place in the limb of the body. There is no third person who pushes the button.

The difficulty in understanding what karma is arises on account of our difficulty in knowing what our relationship is with the world at all, and finally, with God Himself. There is an inveterate habit of the sense organs to compel us to feel that the world is totally outside, and God is very far away. Even the most learned in scriptures cannot escape this difficulty of suddenly feeling that the world is outside and God is away, and is not as near as their skin. This erroneous apprehension of the relation of oneself with the world and God is the cause of the reaction set up by what reality is in the form of the world or God, and this error itself is a karma.

The wrong apprehension of our relation to the world and to God is the karma that we perform. Our consciousness is our action. Actually, the physical movements are not action. How we modulate our consciousness, how we direct our thoughts, and how we feel things around us—this is the action that we are performing day in and day out. Every moment we feel something, and think something, and understand something. This psychological activity perpetually taking place inside is the perpetual action in which we are engaged, and this is also the reason for the perpetual reaction that is being set up. Karma is supposed to get accumulated in our psyche, in the sense of a propensity of the reality outside, to give the individual that has motivated this wrong action his due. And if this impact goes on continuing again and again—if we persist in wrong thinking, wrong feeling, and wrong understanding—the cosmos persists in giving us a blow again and again, in the same way that if we persist in having a wrong diet and living a wrong life, nature will persist in tormenting us with varieties of illnesses.

The piling up of impacts coming repeatedly from the cosmos on account of our repeated wrong actions every day becomes thick—like a cloud, as it were. Inasmuch as it is a force that is acting upon us from the cosmological side, karma cannot be regarded as a substance. The action engendering a reaction from another source is a kind of experience, and the karma residuum which causes rebirth, etc., is also a potentiality for experience in the future. The repeatedly occurring impact of cosmic forces upon individuals becomes thick like a cloud, and it becomes what we call the unconscious, subconscious and conscious levels of the mind. These three layers are: the thick and turbid residuum at the bottom, like the thick layers at the top of clouds; a slightly thinner layer further down; and a thinner layer further on, like the layer which slightly illumines the sunlight even in the rainy season when the clouds are thick.

The thickest part of our karma is in the anandamaya kosha. This is what psychologists called the unconscious level. The slightly thinner part is in the subconscious, which we experience in dream many a time, and the thinnest part is in the waking condition. Because of its transparency, consciousness is reflected so clearly that even through that karmic residuum we begin to perceive things in the world as clearly as if it were in the waking state. But we perceive things dimly in the dreaming condition because it is subconscious and not as clear as the waking condition. And we know nothing in the sleeping condition because the cloud is very thick and consciousness does not penetrate through that cloud—just as during the monsoons we will not see the sun even at midday, and it will be like night due to the thick clouds covering the entire sky.

This is the difficulty in knowing what karma is. Gahanā karmaṇo gatiḥ: “The way of karma is indeed very hard to understand,” says Bhagavan Sri Krishna. But karmas loosen their grip upon the individual who does not act entirely according to the preponderance of the demands of the sense organs, but acts in the spirit of a Yajna.

The Spirit of the Bhagavadgita - A Short History of Religious and Philosophic Thought in India by Sri Swami Krishnananda