Karma, meaning action, is a Vedic term for explaining the reincarnating soul’s evolution from life to life. Karma is portrayed as the effect of our individual actions, extending from past lives to present and future lives. It is often regarded as a force of determination, like fate or destiny. We speak of a person’s karma catching up with them, ‘what goes around comes around’ or ‘as you sow so shall you reap’, indicating this inescapable result of what we have done.

Yet if we look deeper, we see that karma reflects the fact that we create our own reality. We fashion ourselves and our environment according to all that we do in life. Karma, therefore, means that we are universal creators, not simply helpless products of external forces. Karma is the underlying process of the ‘self-creating universe’. It indicates that the universe creates itself according to its own inner intentionality. Through the power of karma, we are self-creating beings in a self-creating existence. Even the forces of nature, like time or gravity, which appear beyond our control, are manifestations of an intelligent reality in which we are active participants. However, karma is not under control of the ego or the mind, but is the action of our inner being.

The Evolution of Consciousness

Modern science recognizes an evolution of form, noting how the bodies of different animals adapt over time, becoming more complex and sophisticated through succeeding generations. It has outlined a physical or bodily evolution from plants and animals to human beings. Since the time of Darwin, science has gone into great detail trying to explain this movement of bodily evolution in terms of the outer factors of natural selection, survival of the fittest and adaptation to changing environments, as if it were a process that occurred of itself by natural necessity.

Today’s science emphasizes genetics as the main mechanism behind this evolutionary process. It has discovered an underlying ‘genetic code’ behind the vast diversity of life, linking all creatures together in the evolutionary process. This marvelous genetic code is simpler, more concise and yet more powerful than any code or data base that the human mind can invent. So one must also ask: Can such a physical information code exist without any enduring intelligence behind it?

Yet the scientific account of evolution leaves any life-force or consciousness out of the picture except as a by-product of bodily processes. It is as though we are following the tracks of an animal and proposing an evolution of the tracks without positing any creature making the tracks, as if one track somehow manages to evolve into the next!

We can contrast this with the view of Yoga, the science of consciousness that arose in India, which recognizes an evolution of consciousness as well as one of form. Yoga neither denies evolution in order to justify a religious view of creation, nor reduces evolution to a blind play of material forces. Yoga teaches that form cannot evolve without consciousness. An inner consciousness brings about evolutionary changes of form, not the form itself, which is no more than a shell. The creatures that we observe in life are the result of an inner consciousness evolving its self-expression through the great movement of time.

Karma and rebirth are the means of this evolution of consciousness, its underlying modus operandi. Only an intelligence that is reborn can evolve in awareness. Otherwise intelligence would die with the body.