Can you change your karma?

Can karma be changed? Can it be cleaned up? Can you get out of it altogether?

The short answers are yes, yes, and only if you become enlightened. The first two are worth a closer look.

A seed

The simplest picture of karma is a seed. Every action plants one. Some come up quickly and some take years, and the fruit can be sweet or bitter. Like any seed, it needs other things to grow: water, sunshine, the right season.

So the seed is not fixed until it ripens. I think of karma as unset Jell-O. Energy soup, if you prefer. Good actions and good intentions poured in can change what sets, and a hard outcome can turn out gentler than it would have been because of what you did in the meantime.

It does not even have to be an action. Sending good wishes, or meditating for the benefit of every living being, plants something good that will ripen later.

The coffee shop

Here is an everyday one. You walk into a coffee shop with the love of your life and order two coffees. You are having such a lovely time that the cashier gets caught up in it and gives you the wrong change. Too much.

The moment you notice, you have a small karmic debt. Plenty of people would smile and put the money in their pocket. That is a seed, and it will come up.

Or you walk back to the counter and explain. Debt paid, in full, on the spot. Who knows, they may let you keep it and give you a gift card for your trouble. Now that is good karma.

Bigger than right and wrong

Karma is not bound by right and wrong, or good and bad, or any one culture. Many of us grew up with a simpler idea: do right and you will be rewarded later, do wrong and you will pay. Karma asks more of us than that. Some actions help us grow and some hold us back, and everything we do comes back to us, sooner or later.

That makes it worth being far more careful than any rulebook would ask. So the next time you could help someone across the street, catch a stranger's eye and smile, or hand the person on the corner a coffee, do it. Nobody requires it of you. It makes them happier, it makes you happier, and it plants something good along the way.

Cleaning it up

In Buddhist philosophy, old karma, even karma gathered over many lifetimes, can be cleansed with meditation, mantras and ceremony, and by dedicating the good you do to the benefit of all beings.

And getting out of it altogether? The Buddhist answer is enlightenment: being fully awake, fully in the present. Someone who lives completely in the now is not planning for the future, so no new seeds are planted. The rest of us will have to settle for planting good ones.

From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.