What Is Karma?

Dr. Pillai: Life is karma. What is karma? Its experiences, things that happen to you in your life,
the thoughts that you are thinking, your actions, all of these are karma. Where did they come
from? Not from vacuum. You planted these seeds in another lifetime. You decided what you
are going to go through and that is happening now. Karma is the law of causality. You do
something and then it creates a set of reactions.
To make it simple, you did some good things and these good things create certain reactions,
resulting in being reborn. You come back next lifetime to collect the good reward. But if you did
something bad, then you come back to go through the pain of your bad actions. If anyone
realizes that all of his actions produce reactions, good or bad, then he will refrain from doing
bad actions. Bad actions are going to give you bad results: pain, suffering, diseases, etc., if not
now, in the next lifetime. Understanding karma is very crucial for human evolution.
Unfortunately, people think that karma is a philosophical concept and then ask for proof that
there is afterlife. That is short-sightedness. Soon there will be proof from science. Science is
evolving. Science will be able to prove the continuation of life even after someone dies. What
dies is not the soul but only the body. Its the soul that carries the karmic impressions. And
these karmic impressions create another body so that you will have to pay for those good or
bad karmas and then learn from that. Karma is in this way, a way or a means through which the
soul learns.

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