What is Karma

Have you ever wondered or thought about the word karma? What does karma actually mean? Is karma real or a made up concept spread down through the ages? Is karma individual, collective or both? What are the types of karma? Is it simply what goes around comes around or does it mean something more profound than that?

What Karma Means?

Describing a term long used and misused in different ways, Sadhguru explains the meaning of karma. Explaining how very deep rooted its influences are, he also shows a way to get a "handle" over the complex structure that it is.

Epigenetics, a branch of biology which studies how a human being's behaviors and life experiences impact their DNA, and therefore can be passed on from generation to generation, is being explored by scientists today. However, in the yogic perspective, the influence of the past goes way beyond our ancestors, to the very first life form on the planet. Sadhguru explains the meaning of karma, a term long used and misused in different contexts. Explaining how very deep rooted its influences are, he also shows a way to get a "handle" over the complex structure that it is.

Sadhguru: “Karma means action or the imprint of action which remains within us. The actions that your father performed are working and kicking up within you not just in your situation, but within every cell in your body. It is not so easy to get rid of your parents! You may have noticed that when you were eighteen or twenty, you completely rebelled against your father or your mother, but by the time you are forty or forty-five, you begin to speak like them, act like them, and even look like them. That is a hopeless way to live because if this generation is going to behave, act, live and experience life just the way the previous generation did, this is a wasted generation. This generation should experience life in a way the previous generation never even imagined. I don’t mean you should do something crazy on the street, I mean the way you experience life can be completely altered. It can be taken to the next level of experience.

The problem has come not because of karma, the problem has come because you got entangled in it, you got enmeshed in it. If a little distance comes between you and your body, between you and your mind, then whatever the karma, it has no impact on you. You can still make use of it to be embodied and live, you can still maintain a certain individual character but it does not become a binding, it becomes a stepping stone.”