Adapted from “Karma in Action” ~ Andrew Olendzki

Karma is one of those words that is often misconstrued and misused as meaning “fate” or “destiny” word one runs across more and more these days. The word karma simply means “action” and is derived from the verbal root “kr” which means “to do” or “to make.” Intention is the leading edge of karma, directing the activities of body, speech, and mind to act in ways that accumulate, at its trailing edge, karmic formations or dispositions. The main idea behind karma is this relationship between what we choose to do and what we thereby make of ourselves. Cumulatively, we are the end result of our own conditioning process.

Our character, our personality, our very self represents an accumulated residue of these earlier interdependent and dynamic processes of disposition, intention, and action- a continues cycle of one conditioning the other. Quite simply, we are an enduring artifact of our mental formations (i.e. dispositions & intentions) and our behavioral actions- and this karma is primarily concerned with how we shape ourselves, and how we are shaped by ourselves. Our self is malleable and can be transformed each moment by our intentions. “The actions that make up the tangible expression of our lives are merely a go-between, as the world we construct is a mere offshoot, of who we are ever re-becoming”.

Let’s take a formative example like anger. Whether acted out, verbalized, or merely seething unexpressed within, one trains oneself to become angrier by seeding an angry disposition. A person so disposed to anger will condition its response more readily at any provocation. But in a moment of kindness a kindly disposition may be conditioned, and one becomes incrementally more disposed to kindness. “The attitude with which we respond to an object of experience, with anger or with kindness, will therefore not only influence the causal field outside ourselves but also progressively reshape our very nature”.

Within this context of understanding karma, the secret of who we are is thus found in what we do; “yet even what we do is only one phase in a larger cycle of becoming”. We inherit our karma from our past, from previous, cumulative, and formative dispositions— and it is these archaic “dispositional” formations that shape how we understand and construct our present intentions. “Yet every moment we also have our future karma in our own hands, as we shape a response to whatever is arising in present experience. This response, which may be more or less wholesome or skillful, is what determines what we will inherit downstream in the flow of consciousness.”

Bringing awareness and mindfulness to our moment-to-moment experiences can have a very influential role in shaping and expanding our repertoire of outward responses. “Even if disposed to anger, we can choose to act with kindness. This is the essence of our freedom in an otherwise heavily conditioned system”. In essence, this karma is not something outside ourselves that happens to us, but is more inherent to the nature of our underlying dispositions and intentions- and it is our actions that ultimately separate our skillfulness from our unskillfulness in the process of what we are to become.

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