by Tham Poh Peng

Created on: July 20, 2009   Last Updated: July 25, 2009

My friend William once asked me: 'What is karma?'

'You're sitting on a beetle now and killing it, so you would come back in your next life as a beetle and then somebody would sit on you and kill you.' I waited for him to respond. He looked at me without blinking!

People tend to take the word 'karma' too seriously. The first thought that comes to mind is: 'If I do something bad now, I cannot escape the punishment that would surely come.' There is another extreme version I heard from a lady friend: 'If you're so picky in your food now, you'll be born in a land where there is scarcity of food! You cannot escape, you know! It's karma!'

'Karma' is a Sanskrit word, which simply means 'action.' In simple terms it means that when you do something, there is always a reaction. In some way the word seems to instill a kind of fear in many people, even some of those occult students who are considered to be in the 'inner circle' the seniors who are supposed to know more than anyone else.

Let's try to understand it better. Many people consider Karma to be a universal law. It operates according to nature, just like gravity. Whether you believe in it or not, it is there. You cannot feel it, catch it or dissect it. Remember that people used to believe that the earth was flat but later discovered it to be round? That was irony, wasn't it? So, we asked the questions: What if Karma is real? Would I be able to escape from it?

A Buddhist practitioner once told me: 'If you practise meditation diligently, perform good deeds and hold virtue thoughts in your mind, that's a good start to get rid of your karma. And if you really do it with absolute faith, then by the grace of the Buddha, your karma may just vanish one day!'

I was finally able to sleep without any worries on that particular night some years back! And that was some constructive advice!

I came from a family whose beliefs were strongly entrenched in Ancestor Worship, a belief that the deceased have a continued existence and that they still have an influence on the living. I do not shun their beliefs but let them be.

In any religion or spiritual search, there is a question that keeps popping up: 'Are we here because of the karma in our past life?'

I had once asked my younger daughter, Aeres, this question: 'Do you know why you are here for?' She shot back with the answer without thinking: 'I don't know why I am here for! But I want to build a potato farm with my friend when I grow up!' I burst

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