Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny

A new perspective on the overused and misunderstood concept of "karma" that offers the key to happiness and enlightenment, from the world-renowned spiritual master Sadhguru.

What is karma? Most people understand karma as a balance sheet of good and bad deeds, virtues and sins. The mechanism that decrees that we cannot evade the consequences of our own actions. In reality, karma has nothing to do with reward and punishment. Karma simply means action: your action, your responsibility. It isn’t some external system of crime and punishment, but an internal cycle generated by you. Accumulation of karma is determined only by your intention and the way you respond to what is happening to you. Over time, it's possible to become ensnared by your own unconscious patterns of behavior.

In Karma, Sadhguru seeks to put you back in the driver's seat, turning you from a terror-struck passenger to a confident driver navigating the course of your own destiny. By living consciously and fully inhabiting each moment, you can free yourself from the cycle. Karma is an exploration and a manual, restoring our understanding of karma to its original potential for freedom and empowerment instead of a source of entanglement. Through Sadhguru's teachings, you will learn how to live intelligently and joyfully in a challenging world.

How did this Sanskrit term enter every single language in the world? How do we account for its extraordinary popularity, its capacity to endure across the centuries?

There are many possible ways to explain this. But perhaps the primary explanation is just this: karma is the only concept in the world that addresses human perplexity in the face of suffering. It is the only logic that explains the seeming arbitrariness of the world we live in.

How else do we understand the pervasiveness of human anguish? How do we explain the horrors of war and terminal illness, the mute agony on the faces of starving children and traumatized prisoners? The unending catalog of savagery and conflict that has been the human experience for as long as we can remember?

Moreover, how do we answer these ancient questions: Why do terrible things happen to good people? Why does fortune so often favor those who seem cruel or unkind or the morally compromised? Why do life circumstances seem so random and capricious? Why does it feel sometimes that God—if one exists—must be playing marbles with the world? Why does the universe so often seem such a hostile, lawless, ungoverned place? Perhaps no other word answers that bewildered human Why? as well as karma has.

Jagadish "Jaggi" Vasudev, (born 3 September 1957), venerated as Sadhguru, is an Indian yoga guru and author.

Named one of India's 50 most influential people, Sadhguru's work has touched the lives of millions worldwide through his transformational programs. Sadhguru has a unique ability to make the ancient yogic sciences relevant to contemporary minds. His approach does not ascribe to any belief system but offers methods for self-transformation that are both proven and powerful.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadhguru