Karma: & Why We Can’t Avoid Suffering

Last year, I went to see Sadhguru live on stage in London, and during one moment, when he was interacting with the crowd, Sadhguru squeezed my hand, giving me an experience of touching a living saint.

Of course, when it comes to living saints, I don’t want to start a discussion on whether Sadhguru really is a saint, as that is beside the point. The point, however, is that Sadhguru wrote a book about Karma, and he is one of the few people I know who talks about this topic in any meaningful way.

One thing that struck me about the whole discussion of karma is how much better it explains certain parts of life, such as why we can’t avoid suffering, at least completely. For example, Sadhguru once knew in advance that he would have a major accident due to his past karma, and even though some people believed he had achieved saint status, he couldn’t avoid this accident and had to experience that trauma and deal with its consequences.

This is similar to one story in my personal life, as I had 3 different injuries on my legs, which all happened in different and unexpected ways, also happening to my other family members, suggesting that it was either personal or generational karma indicating a lesson I needed to learn, which would repeat itself until the lesson was learned.

Secondly, karma explains why there is suffering in the first place and why, try as we may, we can’t really live in a utopia or a paradise, simply because there will always be people with negative karma who will push the whole system down.

In this way, we aren’t living in a paradise already because there is always some negative karma going around, while we aren’t living in a hell because there is also positive karma, explaining why our world always seems to be balanced between concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, good and evil, etc.

In turn, this explains why two different people can experience heaven and hell at the same time and why some people are born into a comfortable position in life while others are doomed to suffer, which all depends on their past life karma.

Karma goes hand in hand with the reincarnation cycle, which some people and religions believe in. However, an interesting thing about belief is that there is no practical way to know the ultimate truth. Two people can believe in two opposing things (such as where karma is true or not) and since we don’t have ultimate empirical truth either way, this point remains pretty irrelevant as it is pure speculation.

Buddhists, Hindus, and some other people however believe in karma because they subjectively know it to be true, in a similar way that some saints (from different religions) know that God is real, while the rest of us have to take their word for it.

Personally, karma and subsequently the reincarnation cycles make sense to me on a purely logical level, since they better explain certain parts of life that other concepts don’t explain equally as well. Still, ultimately, it is purely a brain tease, which I entertain for entertainment reasons, as again, I don’t know for certain if this is true or not, so why claim that it is one way or the other when there are a ton of other people who will argue in favor of the opposite point of view? After all, they also believe themselves to be right. So who’s ultimately right? We don’t know.

One thing is for sure, though. This is karmically the best time to be alive, as we can have the most control over the positive and negative karma we are creating. Our choices and decisions seem to dictate the course of our lives, indicating that the law of action and consequences applies to the world as a whole,offering a semblance of control and order in our lives.

When I realized that this could be a guiding principle governing our lives, I decided to give it a try. I wasn’t losing much by entertaining this karmic theory, as either way I would be taking some action. So, why not try to do something right? In this way, I embraced the power of positivity and tried to lead a virtuous life, measuring my success by how much happiness I could bring to myself. Naturally, as I don’t live in a vacuum, my theory also applied to making the people around me happy. Ultimately, it became a win-win situation.

I must also say that whether because of karma, the law of attraction, or simply by doing what’s right, my life improved for the better. At the same time, I experienced things in my life that could only be attributed to “fortunate chance.” It’s as if I wished for something and it came true, once again proving the possibility of karma and the law of attraction in action.

This whole story made me realize that life is actually very simple, and the only thing we need to do is to optimize towards happiness. That means to consider what makes us the happiest (or the least unhappiest) and doing that. In this way, Optimal Happiness was born. It made me one of the happiest people alive and turned my life into one big joy ride, and today, I teach others how to achieve similar highs.

So, if you want to learn more about karma, happiness, and how to cultivate a truly wonderful life worth living, then you are in the right place. Optimal Happiness offers this free blog, books, courses, and free calls with me and our other happiness specialists designed to make you as happy as possible. So if happiness is also your goal, I invite you today to take advantage of our offerings.

Stay happy!