Karma, karma, karma. Damn near everybody uses the word these days. Good karma, bad karma, Credit Karma, Karma Go, Karma Gopro, Karma Car. Those last four are registered brand names. Damn near everybody who says it thinks they know what it means.

They think it means you do good things and good things happen to you. Ditto for doing bad things. And they’re correct, sort of.

Karma is a Sanskrit word that more accurately means for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yup, Newton’s good old third law of motion, as illustrated by those desk toys with two balls suspended on a rod, where you swing one, it hits the other, which then swings up and then back and whacks the one you swung, which then…, well, you’ve all seen what the toy does. Newton’s third law leaves out an important aspect of the basic concept of karma, though.

Newtonian physics has everything happening in empty space. In Hindu metaphysics, there is no empty space, so karma can’t be looked as simply as the third law views things, like things bumping back and forth for all eternity. The Hindu universe is multilayered, much like modern quantum physics. There are dimensions within dimensions, with all those dimensions occurring in a substrate, a conscious substrate, technically called the brahman. You can think of it as sort of a universal mind, sort of, or an ocean of all consciousness. All apparently separate individual things are more like little wavelets, wavelets that are created by the internal self-movement of that ocean. All these wavelets are necessarily conscious, some more so, some less, since they are all part of that ocean of consciousness.

I hope none of you dropped acid, or did some ‘shrooms. This has definitely gone cosmic, as the old hippies would say.

Okay, so back to karma. The word karma comes from the Sanskrit root word kri, which comes from a hypothesized Proto-Indo-European word kwer, spelled k, w, e, r. Kwer means to make or form. Our word create comes from the same root word. Karma means an action, whether word or deed, that you created. We are all of us, from the smallest subatomic particle, to you and me, to this universe we live in, and beyond that to all the possible other universes, we are all in that one ocean of consciousness. So, each and every little wave of karma we create will eventually, in this life or another, come back around and give us a little kiss, or slap us up side the head with that good old third law of Newton.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: