" Basically, I am convinced that karma simply consists of things that one drags behind because one has not used them in the right way ", so said Mirra Alfassa on November 5, 1960.
The concept of karma belongs, in its most advanced form, to Eastern traditions but we can find prototypes of karmic laws already in the most ancient shamanic and mystery cultures around the world.
The law of retaliation, the law of cause and effect, the concept of a sentient and intelligent cosmos that rebalances events, are somehow present at all latitudes.
Karma is a term of Sanskrit-Vedic origin, and its main meaning is that of " action ", karma yoga in fact means the yoga of works, or translating into action the state of supreme consciousness.
It is a concept that takes the form of universal law in a context that implies reincarnation or metempsychosis : the soul, in the simplest traditions, carries with it, from life to life, the effects of the acts performed in previous lives, in a system of retaliation and rebalancing that forces her to reincarnansi until all the effects are extinct.
Karma and rebirth
This is only a conception of the karmic law, only an interpretative level that sees karma as an inevitable law, imposed by a universe that is in some way moral, based on the concepts of good and evil : do good and receive good, hurt and you will receive the effects that follow.
All the aftermaths of actions performed in past lives require us to be reborn to rebalance the universe that we have unbalanced, until harmony is restored, with the possibility of getting out of samsara, or from the cycle of rebirths and from a dualistic reality in which evil, death and pain are inevitable.
Karma and self-knowledge
However, there are other interpretations of the law of karma. If the individual soul is the Divine itself in a representative and immanent form, how can the Supreme himself submit to a law created by him?
Starting from this assumption, namely that the soul is a spark of the Divine, it goes without saying that it is not the soul that underlies the law of karma but other parts that constitute its instruments of expression, or the various subtle bodies that cover it. from life to life.
But if the soul is the Divine, it is beyond duality, beyond good and evil, concepts that cannot adhere to it. What then happens to the law of karma?
Karma at this point would no longer represent a difference of potential between good and evil but between self-consciousness and one's own inner law ( dharma ), and unconsciousness.
When we act in total coherence and conformity to our inner law, unique and unrepeatable for each individual, we are in total harmony with the universe, and therefore we do not produce any unbalance that we will be forced to rebalance .
Whenever we act driven not by the self but by the ego, composed of numerous karmic fibers and subject to the impulses of the lower nature, we are not in sync with the universe, we act cacophonously and the effects of this jarring follow us until we understand the secret and we do not derive the power to transform cacophony into an euphony.
Karma as an instrument of freedom
But since, to say it with Lavoisier, " Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed ", souls and out of tune elements cannot simply be cut away or purged in some nil or eternal hell, they are instead given to them infinite possibilities to discover oneself, in a way that is ever more profound from time to time, and what was originally considered a merciless and imposed law, becomes an instrument of progressive self-knowledge and finally, the antechamber of freedom that belongs to totally souls join the Divine .
