Galatians 6.7-10 (CEB)

Make no mistake, God is not mocked. A person will harvest what they plant. Those who plant only for their own benefit will harvest devastation from their selfishness, but those who plant for the benefit of the Spirit will harvest eternal life from the Spirit.

Let’s not get tired of doing good, because in time we’ll have a harvest if we don’t give up. So then, let’s work for the good of all whenever we have an opportunity, and especially for those in the household of faith.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.

Sojourner Truth

God will take care of the poor trampled slave, but where will the slaveholder be when eternity begins?

Karma. “As you sow, so shall you reap.” What goes around, comes around. These are all phrases we use to describe the idea that everyone “gets what they deserve.” If we live good lives, good things come to us, and when we die, we go to heaven or some blissful paradise. If we live wicked lives, well, as Kurt Cobain said, “If you’re really a mean person in this life, you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop in the next.”

That is not how karma works, by the way. There isn’t a direct correlation between an action and its karmic result. Karmic theory involves not only the action, but the spirit in which the action was performed, the nature of the person committing the action, and the circumstances in which the action occurs. Killing someone in self-defense creates a different karmic ripple than killing someone to steal their horse, even though both are murder.

In the West, though, we have virtually lost the nuance. We think of karma as immediately retributive. John Lennon sang, “instant karma’s gonna get you,” an idea that makes practitioners of Indian religions scratch their heads in bewilderment.

Karma is not “if I steal from you, something will be stolen from me as well.” The balance isn’t that literal. Or that immediate. Karma is meant to describe the long, perhaps eternal, process of clearing the mental and spiritual baggage that prevents us from attaining a higher state of being, an awareness of all things existing simultaneously, beyond time and space—Nirvana. Oneness. Classically, karma is a practice, not a law of cause and effect.

How did we come up with the idea that what we do comes back to us? 

To understand how we got to this place of “instant karma,” we need to travel back in time, say, 10,000 years. Imagine yourself on an endless plain, a powder-blue sky dotted with cloudy puffs wispily framing a mountain range just beyond the horizon. You hear the rush of a river nearby, it’s water crisp, cool, sowing the seeds of life along its banks.

In our time of nomadic wandering, we notice seedlings sprouting along the banks of every river. Over time, we see the seedlings explode into a sensation-filling bouquet of bluebells and yellow daffodils, majestic Maple trees, perhaps even wheat and other grains.

Eventually, we figure out that we can stick a seed in the ground and nurture new life into being. Our first primal reaction to this newfound power is simply an awareness of cause and effect. We stick a seed in the ground. If we take care of it (good), it grows. If we neglect it (bad), it dies.

As you sow, so shall you reap. It’s literal, at first, but as we start to ponder our existence, sowing and reaping grow into the first aspect of karma: causality. Once we understand cause and effect, we begin to apply it to everything and develop the second aspect of karma: spiritual ethics. We start believing that doing bad things to ourselves and each other causes even more terrible things to happen to us.

This must also mean that if we do good things, good things happen to us. It’s just like planting a seed and nurturing it or not. If the actions in our lives are noble and good, we will have happy lives and enhance the common good. If we are instead evil, selfish, destructive—then not only will we be punished by human law, well, by golly, the Cosmos will really take care of us! Remember Kurt Cobain’s comment? This is the third aspect of karma: nearly infinite rebirths, each dependent upon the other.

The idea of ethical cause and effect playing out over multiple rebirths is foundational to every religious belief in India. I cannot stress enough the significance the Indian schools of philosophy also played—especially their idea of karma—in forming Christian ideas about resurrection and the afterlife.

Jesus redefines life, death, and rebirth

When Jesus began his ministry, most Jews did not believe in life after death. The dead went to Sheol, a sort of shadowy, afterlife hangout where it seems nothing really happens. Everyone is just there. So, there is a Jewish afterlife concept, but it’s pretty much a dead end.

Thank you. I’ll be here all week.

Jesus, because he is entirely and consciously One with the universe, understands and teaches death differently. He knows life is eternal and teaches not an endless cycle of human birth and death until we magically get it all right, but rather, an eternal spark of divine Spirit that is always reforming us, even in this life. Isn’t that what Christians believe Jesus is doing for us? Planting the seed of God’s love in us, nurturing us, and waiting for us to grow into beings that sow even more seeds of love?

Today, Americans tend to mash-up sowing, reaping, and karma into the pithy phrase, what goes around comes around. We fervently want to believe that bad people get their comeuppance and that if we as a society fail to deliver that in this life, God or the Universe will provide it in the next. We have no patience for the nurturing our spirits need if we are—together—to soar beyond ethical cause and effect on our way to harmonious Oneness with the multiverse of God.

Our lives create ripples in reality. Whether those ripples are “good” or “bad” is anyone’s guess. I do not know if the universe, God, has a sense of justice, of good or evil, and to a certain extent, I don’t care because I know human beings have a sense of justice, ideas about good and evil. So I, like Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and Moses, am more concerned with the well-being of this planet and its inhabitants—animal, plant, human—right now, in this terrifying, pre-extinction moment of history, than with whatever happens to my eternal soul after I die.

I have no idea what comes after I die, but I know what happens tomorrow if I ignore the plight of the world today. So, I’d rather sow all the good I can here and now—not to reap any reward in the afterlife, but simply because this life, this planet, this reality is what God has given us to work with. To continue to destroy it all while thinking our next life, our next planet, our next reality will be better? I don’t know, that seems like the kind of thinking that could cause someone to come back in the next life as a fly.

And you know what flies do all day.

Meditation: God of all-being, help me sow the seeds of love all the days of my life—and beyond.

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