Karma was one of the fundamental laws presented throughout the literature of the Yogi Publication Society. In its fullest meaning, Karma is the law by which causes produce corresponding effects in human life and consciousness. Every thought, desire, motive, decision, and action contributes to causes whose results must eventually be expressed. Some effects appear during the present life, while others extend beyond death and become part of the conditions encountered in future incarnations. Karma was therefore closely connected with reincarnation, character, spiritual evolution, free will, responsibility, and the development of the individual through successive lives. It was not presented simply as punishment for wrongdoing. It was a universal principle of causation through which each person continually receives the results of the past while creating the conditions of the future.
What does Karma mean?
The word Karma comes from Sanskrit and is associated fundamentally with action, work, or deed. Within Hindu philosophy and the Yogi philosophy presented throughout the YPS catalog, however, Karma carries a much larger meaning than a single physical action. Action sets forces into operation. Those forces produce consequences. Karma therefore includes the chain of cause and effect arising from what a person thinks, desires, chooses, and does.
This is why Karma cannot be reduced to the popular expression that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. The law operates across a far greater field. A cause may produce an immediate effect, a delayed effect, a change in character, a new habit, an altered relationship, or circumstances that cannot fully develop until a later period of existence. The effect may also become a new cause, beginning another chain of consequences.
Karma describes this continuing relationship between cause and effect.
The doctrine places human beings inside an ordered moral and spiritual universe. Actions are not isolated events that disappear once they have occurred. Thoughts do not simply vanish because they are no longer consciously remembered. Desire does not cease to matter when its immediate object has disappeared. Each contributes something to the individual and to the conditions through which that individual will continue to develop.
Is Karma punishment?
Karma is not a supernatural system of reward and punishment administered by an external judge. This distinction is essential to understanding how the doctrine was presented in the YPS catalog.
Punishment implies that an authority observes an offense and deliberately imposes a penalty. Karma operates as law. A cause contains the potential for its corresponding effects, just as physical causes produce physical consequences without requiring an outside intelligence to decide upon each result.
A person who repeatedly gives way to anger, for example, does more than produce individual angry acts. Repetition strengthens the tendency toward anger. The tendency becomes part of character. Character influences future decisions, relationships, reactions, and circumstances. What began as an action has become a condition within the person who performed it.
The same process operates in constructive directions. Discipline strengthens the capacity for discipline. Concentration strengthens concentration. Courage develops through courageous action. Intellectual effort increases mental capacity. Compassion grows through compassionate thought and conduct. The individual continually modifies himself through the causes he creates.
Karma is therefore educational as well as causal. Through consequences, the individual learns the nature of the forces he sets into operation.
How do thoughts create Karma?
The karmic doctrine extends causation beyond visible physical acts. Thought itself is an activity capable of producing effects.
Every sustained thought affects the thinker. A thought repeatedly entertained becomes easier to reproduce. Repetition establishes mental tendencies. Tendencies contribute to habits. Habits become part of character. Character then influences the choices and circumstances of the individual.
This is one of the places where the YPS treatment of Karma intersects naturally with its literature on mental development, suggestion, concentration, habit, will, and self-mastery. The immediate language used by the different systems was not always the same, but they repeatedly emphasized that thought has consequences and that repeated mental activity changes the person who performs it.
Thought also precedes much physical action. Desire arises, thought gives it form, intention develops, and action follows. The visible deed may therefore represent the final stage of a causal process that began internally.
Karma begins before the hand moves.
Does motive matter in Karma?
Motive is important because two outwardly similar actions can arise from entirely different inner causes. An act performed from compassion does not have the same psychological or spiritual meaning as the same outward act performed for manipulation, vanity, fear, or personal advantage.
The physical event is only one portion of the karmic cause. Intention, desire, knowledge, and motive help determine what the action means for the individual performing it.
This prevents Karma from becoming a mechanical accounting system in which every deed receives a predetermined number of positive or negative points. Human causation is more complex. What a person intended, understood, desired, and actually accomplished can all become parts of the resulting chain.
How does Karma become character?
One of the most important aspects of Karma is that the individual is continually creating himself.
Every repeated thought or action leaves the person more disposed to think or act similarly again. At first an action may require deliberate effort. Repetition makes it easier. Eventually it can become habitual and occur with little conscious deliberation. In this way, individual actions become tendencies and tendencies become character.
Character is therefore partly accumulated Karma expressed psychologically.
This principle also explains why the control of thought and habit occupied such an important place in the mental teachings surrounding the YPS. Long before the YPS catalog expanded these ideas through Yoga, occultism, Hermetic philosophy, and reincarnation, Herbert A. Parkyn had made the formation and alteration of mental habits central to his system of suggestion at the Chicago School of Psychology and in his Special Mail Course in Hypnotism and Suggestive Therapeutics. The karmic teaching enlarged the scale of this same fundamental problem. What a person repeatedly thinks and does becomes part of what that person is, and the consequences of character may extend beyond the limits of one physical lifetime.
How are Karma and reincarnation connected?
Karma and reincarnation answer two different questions.
Reincarnation explains the continuity of the individual through successive earthly lives. Karma explains the continuity of causes and consequences through those lives.
Without reincarnation, many karmic causes would have only the remaining years of the present life in which to produce their effects. Without Karma, reincarnation could become a series of disconnected lives with no causal relationship between them. Joined together, the doctrines describe a continuing individual entering successive incarnations while carrying forward the results of previous development.
The person born today therefore does not begin as a spiritually blank individual. Character, tendencies, capacities, weaknesses, desires, and unresolved causes have histories extending beyond the current personality. The present incarnation becomes the meeting place of past Karma and newly created Karma.
This is why birth does not erase responsibility. Death does not cancel causes already established. A change of body changes the conditions under which the individual operates, but it does not destroy the deeper continuity connecting one incarnation with another.
Can Karma continue after death?
Yes. If the individual survives physical death, causes belonging to that individual do not have to disappear when the body dies.
Some consequences may operate during the postmortem states. Others may remain latent until conditions appropriate to their expression arise. Still others become incorporated into character and therefore accompany the continuing individual toward another incarnation.
This is one reason the YPS teachings concerning death, the astral planes, reincarnation, and Karma are so closely interconnected. They describe different stages of one continuing existence.
Physical death closes one field of action. It does not erase the record of causes created within that field.
Does Karma determine the circumstances of birth?
Karma provides an explanation for why individuals enter life under radically different conditions.
People are born into different families, cultures, nations, economic circumstances, physical conditions, intellectual capacities, opportunities, and limitations. If the individual begins existence at conception or birth, these differences can appear arbitrary. Reincarnation and Karma place them within a longer causal history.
The doctrine does not require every detail of a person’s life to have been individually predetermined before birth. It holds that previously established causes contribute to the conditions under which the next period of development begins.
The reincarnating individual is drawn toward circumstances corresponding to accumulated tendencies, relationships, needs, and causes. Heredity supplies a physical organism. Family and society provide an environment. Karma helps explain the connection between the individual and the particular field into which that individual is born.
Birth is therefore not the beginning of the causal chain. It is the point at which an older chain enters a new physical setting.
Is everything that happens to a person caused by past-life Karma?
The doctrine becomes distorted when every event is attributed automatically to an unknown deed in a former incarnation.
Human beings live in a world where countless causal chains intersect. Other people exercise free will. Families, societies, natural forces, disease, accidents, political events, economic conditions, and collective actions all affect individual lives. A person’s own previous causes form part of this environment without requiring every event to be interpreted as a precisely assigned repayment for something done centuries earlier.
Karma should therefore not be used as an excuse for indifference toward suffering. The statement that a suffering person “must deserve it” reduces a complex doctrine of causation to moral speculation about another person’s unknown past.
The important principle is that causes have consequences and that the individual carries a continuing causal history. It does not follow that an observer possesses enough knowledge to reconstruct that history from a single event.
Does Karma explain inequality?
Karma was used to address the apparent inequality of human birth and circumstance. People begin their present lives with enormous differences that they could not have consciously produced during that life. One child is born with unusual intellectual capacity, another with extraordinary musical ability, another with severe limitations, another into wealth, and another into poverty.
The karmic explanation is that the present birth is not the beginning of the individual’s existence. Development already achieved can appear as present capacity. Tendencies previously established can appear as character. Unfinished causes can help shape present circumstances.
This also changes the meaning of talent. An ability that appears almost spontaneously in childhood need not be regarded as an arbitrary gift. It may represent the result of effort accumulated over previous incarnations.
The same principle applies to moral and spiritual development. Individuals may occupy very different stages because their histories are longer than their present ages suggest.
Is Karma the same as fate?
Karma is not fate in the sense of an unchangeable future.
Past causes create present conditions, but present actions immediately begin modifying what comes next. The individual is never merely receiving Karma. He is continually creating it.
This produces an important distinction between conditions and response. A person may not have chosen every circumstance currently confronting him, but he can influence the causes created through his response to those circumstances.
A difficult condition can provoke anger, resignation, perseverance, intelligence, compassion, or courage. Each response establishes different causes. The inherited condition may be karmic, but the reaction to it becomes new Karma.
The present is therefore the point at which the consequences of the past and the causes of the future meet.
Does Karma leave room for free will?
Free will is necessary to the moral meaning of Karma. If every action were completely predetermined, the individual could not meaningfully create new causes.
Freedom, however, is not presented as unlimited. Every person acts within conditions already established. Physical abilities, habits, character, family, society, previous choices, and existing obligations all influence the range of immediately available action.
The individual nevertheless possesses some capacity to choose among possible responses. As consciousness and self-mastery develop, that capacity can increase.
A person dominated by habit has less effective freedom than a person capable of observing and controlling that habit. Someone ruled by anger, fear, appetite, or automatic reaction is being carried by previously established tendencies. Self-knowledge and mental discipline allow the individual to interrupt these patterns and create different causes.
Freedom therefore develops with mastery.
Can Karma be changed?
Past actions cannot be made never to have occurred, but the future consequences of an existing causal situation can be affected by new causes.
A person who has developed a destructive habit can begin opposing it with a constructive one. A damaged relationship can sometimes be repaired. Ignorance can be replaced by knowledge. Weakness can be strengthened through repeated effort. An old tendency can be starved while an opposing tendency is deliberately cultivated.
This does not erase causation. It introduces additional causes.
The principle is similar to forces acting upon one another. A force already in motion has an effect, but another force can alter its direction or expression. Human life continually presents opportunities to create such modifying causes.
Karma is therefore not a doctrine of helplessness. Knowledge of Karma is intended to increase responsibility because it teaches that present thought and action matter.
Is there good Karma and bad Karma?
The expressions “good Karma” and “bad Karma” are useful shorthand, but they can oversimplify the doctrine.
Constructive causes tend toward constructive consequences, while destructive causes tend toward destructive consequences. Yet an immediately pleasant result is not necessarily spiritually beneficial, and an unpleasant experience is not necessarily spiritually harmful.
Difficulty may develop strength, patience, independence, sympathy, or wisdom. Success may produce opportunity but can also encourage vanity, selfishness, or complacency. The karmic importance of an experience depends partly upon what the individual does with it. The deeper standard is development.
Karma continually confronts the individual with the consequences of causes and the opportunity to respond to them. Those responses become new causes and continue the process.
Can Karma operate through relationships?
Relationships are among the most important fields of karmic action because human beings continually create causes in relation to one another.
Love, loyalty, assistance, sacrifice, betrayal, hatred, dependence, obligation, cruelty, and forgiveness establish powerful connections. If the individuals involved continue beyond physical death, those relationships need not be confined to a single incarnation.
People may meet again under altered circumstances. The external roles can change while the deeper connection remains. Someone who was a parent in one life need not return as a parent in another. The important element is the unresolved relationship between the individuals.
Karmic relationships provide opportunities for continuation and correction. Debts can be repaid. Injuries can be repaired. Hatred can be overcome. Affection can deepen. Dependence can develop into independence. Relationships that once produced suffering can become fields for understanding. This makes human interaction one of the primary means through which Karma becomes experience.
Is Karma individual or collective?
Most explanations begin with individual Karma because the individual creates causes through personal thought and action. Yet no person exists in complete isolation. Families, communities, institutions, nations, religious movements, and civilizations also create chains of consequences through collective action. Individuals participate in these groups and may become involved in the effects generated by them.
Collective Karma does not eliminate individual responsibility. A person participating in a larger group still makes choices and creates personal causes. At the same time, individual lives unfold within conditions produced by the actions of many people.
This creates overlapping fields of causation. Personal Karma intersects with family conditions, social structures, historical events, and the actions of other individuals.
The resulting world is not a collection of isolated karmic accounts. It is a network of interacting causes.
How does Karma relate to desire?
Desire is a powerful karmic force because it directs thought and action while also creating attachments to particular forms of experience.
A strong desire encourages the individual to seek conditions in which it can be expressed. Repeated desires become tendencies. Tendencies influence character. Character influences choices. In the reincarnation doctrine, persistent desires can also contribute to the forces drawing the individual back toward physical embodiment.
Desire therefore helps explain why reincarnation continues. The individual remains attracted to experiences, relationships, achievements, sensations, and forms of expression available through earthly life.
As spiritual development proceeds, the nature of desire changes. Immediate physical gratification can give way to intellectual ambition, moral aspiration, service, knowledge, and spiritual realization. Development does not occur merely because desire disappears. It occurs as consciousness gains mastery over desire and redirects its energies.
How does Karma relate to spiritual evolution?
Karma is one of the mechanisms through which spiritual evolution occurs.
Experience alone does not guarantee development. Development occurs because actions produce consequences and those consequences teach. The individual encounters the results of ignorance, selfishness, wisdom, discipline, compassion, and self-control. Through repeated experience, consciousness gradually learns how causes operate.
This process can extend through many incarnations. Lessons not mastered in one life remain available in another form. Capacities acquired through effort become part of the individual’s continuing development. Weaknesses repeatedly indulged become stronger until consciously overcome.
Karma thus makes evolution participatory. The individual is not simply carried upward by an external evolutionary force. Each person contributes continually to his own development through thought, desire, decision, and action.
What is the relationship between Karma and the Law of Cause and Effect?
The close relationship between Karma and universal causation allowed the doctrine to connect naturally with other systems represented by the YPS. This is especially clear in Hermeticism and the presentation of the Principle of Cause and Effect in The Kybalion by the Three Initiates.
The Hermetic principle declares a universe governed by causation, where events arise from causes and themselves become causes of further events. Karma applies a comparable principle directly to the continuity and development of the individual. Thoughts, desires, motives, and actions enter causal chains whose consequences extend beyond the moment in which they originated.
This does not make Hindu Karma and Hermetic Cause and Effect historically identical doctrines. They arise from different traditions and carry different philosophical backgrounds. Their appearance within the same YPS catalog allowed readers to encounter a recurring proposition from different directions. The universe operates according to law, causes produce effects, and greater knowledge permits the individual to participate more consciously in that process.
The Hermetic tradition associated with Hermes Trismegistus, along with Qabalah, Rosicrucian teachings, and other forms of Western esotericism, supplied Western frameworks through which similar questions about law, causation, human development, and spiritual mastery could be approached.
How was Karma presented across the YPS catalog?
The importance of Karma becomes clearer when the Yogi Publication Society catalog is viewed as a network of related teachings. Yogi Ramacharaka placed Karma within an extensive presentation of Yogi philosophy, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, death, the planes of existence, mental control, and the development of consciousness. Within this framework, Karma was not an isolated doctrine. It explained how the experiences and actions of successive lives remained connected.
The works associated with William Walker Atkinson occupied the meeting ground between these occult and Yogic teachings and the American New Thought environment. Mental causation, habit, thought, character, personal development, and the direction of consciousness could therefore be discussed on an immediate psychological level while Karma extended causation across the much longer history of the individual.
Other identities within the YPS catalog approached portions of the same problem from different directions. Theron Q. Dumont concentrated heavily on concentration, will, character, personality, mental control, and mastery. Swami Panchadasi and Swami Bhakta Vishita expanded the reader’s field into psychic and occult states of consciousness. Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Qabalistic, and Christian mysticism material supplied still other frameworks for law, spiritual development, moral consequence, and the destiny of the individual.
The vocabulary changed, and these traditions should not be treated as historically identical. What united much of the catalog was the insistence that human consciousness exists within law and that development is inseparable from the consequences of thought and action.
How did Karma connect mental training with spiritual development?
One of the most important features of the YPS presentation is the way immediate mental development and long-term spiritual development could be joined.
The law of habit shows the process on a small scale. Think a thought repeatedly and it becomes easier to think. Perform an action repeatedly and it becomes easier to perform. Continue long enough and the pattern becomes part of character.
Karma extends that causal principle beyond the immediate personality. Character does not lose all meaning when physical life ends. The enduring results of development accompany the continuing individual.
This creates a direct connection between everyday mental discipline and spiritual evolution. Concentration is not merely useful for completing a task. Self-control is not merely useful for achieving success. Mastery of anger is not merely useful for avoiding conflict. Every victory over an uncontrolled tendency changes the individual who will continue forward.
The earlier work of Herbert A. Parkyn, his Chicago School of Psychology, and his Special Mail Course in Hypnotism and Suggestive Therapeutics had already placed enormous importance on repeated thought, suggestion, habit formation, self-control, and deliberate mental development. Within the later YPS environment, Karma and reincarnation enlarged the timescale. The consequences of mental development could now be understood as part of the continuing evolution of the individual across successive lives.
Can a person escape Karma?
A person cannot escape causation by ignoring it. The way beyond karmic bondage is mastery of the causes that continually create new attachments and consequences.
At ordinary stages of development, people react automatically to circumstances. Desire produces action. Anger produces retaliation. Fear produces avoidance. Habit produces repetition. Each reaction creates further causes and binds the individual more tightly to established patterns.
As consciousness develops, a person becomes capable of observing these forces without automatically obeying them. Desire can be controlled. Anger can be mastered. Habit can be changed. Thought can be directed. Motive can be purified. Action can become deliberate.
This changes the individual’s relationship to Karma.
The goal is not to find a loophole in the law. It is to stop unconsciously producing the causes that bind consciousness to repeated cycles of reaction and consequence.
Does good Karma eventually have to be transcended too?
If liberation is the final goal, freedom cannot consist merely in replacing unpleasant karmic chains with pleasant ones.
Constructive action develops character and creates favorable conditions. It is indispensable to development. Yet attachment even to favorable results can continue binding the individual to personal desire and consequence.
At advanced stages, action becomes increasingly free from selfish attachment to its results. The individual acts because the action is right, necessary, or expressive of a higher state of consciousness, not merely because a personal reward is expected.
The movement is therefore from destructive causation to constructive causation and eventually toward conscious action without bondage to personal results.
What is the final purpose of Karma?
Karma gives continuity and meaning to experience. It makes every thought, choice, and action part of the development of the individual.
The law explains why experience teaches. It explains how habit becomes character, how character influences circumstance, why consequences can outlast the actions that produced them, how relationships can continue beyond one incarnation, and why the conditions of a future life can be connected with a past that the present personality does not consciously remember.
Combined with reincarnation, Karma creates an immense field for human development. No failure needs to represent eternal condemnation because further experience remains possible. No achievement is wasted because genuine development becomes part of the individual. Death does not erase unfinished causes, and birth does not sever the continuity of the past.
This was the larger meaning of Karma within the world presented by the Yogi Publication Society. Human beings live in a universe governed by law. Thought matters. Desire matters. Motive matters. Action matters. Character matters. Every person continually receives the consequences of causes already created while possessing the power to establish new ones. Across life, death, and successive incarnations, those causes become part of the education through which consciousness develops toward greater knowledge, mastery, and eventual freedom.
