Eckhart Tolle on Karma

 

Q: You talk about Presence and Being as the keys to enjoying form, and creating positive circumstances, or softening circumstances.  How does karma fit into all of that?

ET: Everybody is born into a certain external environment.  Also, everyone is born with certain predispositions – they may be partly genetic, they may be other things.  A person is born with certain patterns, in other words.  We don’t need to examine where they come from, but the fact is that a human being is born into a certain environment.  It may be violent, or it may be relatively peaceful.  A person is born with inner patterns that you inherit.  Even painbody is partly inherited.

There’s a whole set of conditioning that happens when you come into an environment.  The environment conditions you further, and there’s no choice involved – it’s just influences.  You find yourself in this world with certain unconscious patterns that have become the conditioning of who the person is.  Karma, as I see it, is the unconscious conditioning that runs your life.  Karma is partly collective, and partly personal.  You can only understand karma not as an abstract subject external to yourself, you can only understand it by observing yourself, and then you know many other things.  If you want to understand karma, you need to look at yourself.

 

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