There is absolutely nothing mystical about the concept behind the word “Karma”. If there’s one notion I wish I could disabuse people of, it’s that you benefit or suffer from the effects of some unknowable Karma, like it’s a capricious magical force that likes you or has it out for you. Karma is cause and effect. At the most basic level, your actions have effects. You reap those effects, even though you cannot know with perfect certainty how your actions will effect other people and how they will respond, in kind. That is unknowable, only in the sense that it’s too many variables for our little brains to compute. That number of variables is also a pointer to the way that we inter-are. Are you kind, considerate, and thoughtful to others? When you act that way, people will generally respond positively toward you. If you’re not, they may not. Do either of those things stop you from being robbed at gunpoint on a random street? Nope. But the person who robs you will likely experience negative consequences for making the string of choices that briefly stops on that moment. Will the people who know you know that you are kind, considerate, and thoughtful over time? Yes. And will you see benefits from that, beyond whatever happens directly in response to those specific acts of kindness. Yes.
That’s it. Now, we can debate to death the philosophical things surrounding this. Do we have past and future lives? If so, does that Karma carry over? Do we have free will at all that actually allows us to make the choice to behave a certain way or is it all an inevitable string of actions that happen because of every thing that has happened before it since the beginning of time? I can’t answer those questions. What I can tell you is that for all of post hunter-gatherer human history, if you know to plant the right crops, fertilize them, water them, and tend to them skillfully, that’s a more effective plan than putting some seeds into the ground and just praying for a good harvest.