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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Karma summary
Sadhguru
A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Own Destiny
24 mins
What is Karma about?
Karma (2021) is a crash course in karma. Filled with explanations, stories, and personal anecdotes, it dispels myths and common misperceptions about karma, explains the science and universality behind the concept, and presents practical tips on how to live a free and joyful life.
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Karma
summarized in 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
Karma is something we generate within ourselves.
Imagine you exaggerated a qualification on your résumé when you applied for a job. A few months into the job, you learn that you’re being fired due to budget cuts. “Why do these terrible things happen to me?” you lament. “It must be my bad karma.”
Or maybe things swing the opposite way: You drop coins into a homeless person’s jar, and, later that day, someone you’ve had your eye on asks you to dinner. “Ah,” you might say. “My good karma is kicking in.”
Actually, neither assumption is true. Rather than some mechanism of justice imposed from above, karma exists within you – and it’s 100 percent within your control.
The key message here is: Karma is something we generate within ourselves.
Here’s what karma is not. It’s not paying a price or reaping rewards for past deeds. There’s no one sitting in judgment with a nice-and-naughty book deciding who to send to heaven or hell.
Instead, think of karma as an internal cycle that we generate ourselves. All through life we respond to stimuli. We have a mental reaction, which causes a chemical reaction, which results in a physical sensation, which then reinforces the chemical and mental fluctuations. These responses form patterns, and these patterns form a shape that we refer to as our personality. In turn, this “personality” affects the way we see the world.
Karmic memory isn’t just something that we create with our minds. It’s a cause-and-effect cycle that operates at multiple levels, including the cellular and genetic.
Here’s another way to look at it: Karma is a sort of software you write for yourself, and it runs repetitively. Due to repeated patterns that result from running this software, our karma creates a vasana, which roughly translates as “scent.” Obviously, the vasana you create for yourself can't be detected with the nose – but, like a good or a bad scent, it can either attract or repel other people or situations. For example, one person may attract the same type of abusive partner over and over again. Another might attract financial fortune.
But karma isn’t in control. You are. Once you recognize and understand it, you can rewrite the software and reclaim the driver’s seat of your own life to live in confidence and joy.
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Best quote from Karma
With a little awareness, every human being can begin to transform habit into choice, compulsion into consciousness.
—Sadhguru
Who should read Karma?
- Anyone interested in spirituality, mysticism, and the afterlife
- Students of Hinduism
- Seekers of techniques to find peace and joy
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