Different Types of Karma – An Introduction

Not all Karmas are the same – there are some types of Karma that you can control and some types that you can’t.  And some types are just more serious than others, whether or not you can influence the outcome.

The Jains of India have studied Karma for centuries, and have probably the most detailed understanding of any other group.  It’s one of the areas of life that they have particularly specialised in.

I’ll be exploring Karma in some detail on these pages, because Karma helps to shape our Destiny, and I’ll be keeping the language fairly simple, because, if you’re like me, your eyes will glaze over if there are just too many foreign or strange words in a text, and it’s just too hard to do the mental gymnastics of trying to remember what these strange words mean.

The five main types of Karma are:

1. Carried Over Karma
2. Life Lesson Karma
3. Daily Life Karma
4. Society Karma
5. Planetary Karma

Carried Over Karma

This is the consequences of actions you performed in previous lifetimes, destined to play out in this life.  Think of this simply as “unfinished business.”  (I’ll talk more about previous lifetimes in another post.)

Life Lesson Karma

The karma created by taking birth in your present body.  It includes all the “hard wiring” of your life, such as your body shape, race, gender, DNA, susceptibility to genetically based physical problems.  It also includes your “soft wiring”, or the values and beliefs that you were programmed with when you were a young child, and the name you were given.

Life Lesson Karma helps to set up the conditions for you to grapple with in your current life, which may have been influenced by some Carried Over Karma

Daily Actions Karma

This is the karma you create as an individual.  This is what most of us think about when we think of Karma.  This is where my favorite pieces of advice for taking charge of your destiny fits in:

Beware your thoughts because they shape your words
Beware your words because they shape your actions
Beware your actions because they shape your habits
Beware your habits because they shape your character
Beware your character because that is what shapes your Destiny

Society Karma

Then there is karma created by groups of people such as your family, community, nation and so on.  So if you were born into a family where all the males join the military, because that’s been the tradition for over 6 generations, then it’s also expected of you.

It’s also when you’re part of a minority group in your society, whether racially, culturally,  financially, or some other category.  Each group has its own prevailing attitudes, beliefs and karma, that you, as a group member, have knowingly or unknowingly bought into.

Planetary Karma

The cyclic destiny of the Earth itself and its natural forces such as volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes.  There is no place on Earth where you are safe from Nature when it’s time for an upheaval.  And our planet is also travelling along it’s life cycle, as is our entire universe.  A lot of the arguments about climate change hinge on not knowing how much is simply part of the planetary karma