I just finished reading a beautifully crafted novel set in Greece where one of the protagonists is a billionaire who adores his only son. And so does his gorgeous mistress. It’s a bizarre situation, because the man’s wife knows he loves his mistress, who has free rein to enter and leave his home as she pleases, and even to openly entertain important guests in his house. This man is so wealthy that his wife has her own plush apartment attached to the main house, and so the two rivals never have to meet and be embarrassed.

Well, the boy enters the lavish room where his father and mistress are enjoying their martinis and chats with both of them in his charming way. When he leaves, the man says to his mistress: I know you love my son dearly, and I can see why, he is special, but I often wonder…

I am no scholar and tend to reduce the most sophisticated philosophy into easily digestible truths I can use in my daily life. Complication and complexity only keep me from going deep, I have discovered, and when ideas become simple, they also become fuel for the blissful enlightenment I seek.

If this ancient teaching is true, I often used to wonder, how then did such fierce individuality spring up, driven by insidious notions of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ along with the concomitant evils of competition, jealousy, demeaning others so we can shine as the sole jewels in any given scenario, etcetera? How are some humans capable of the worst crimes when they employ their special status or belief in their class, caste, intelligence or privilege as weapons of justification?

The usual answer, of course, is the ego. A friend in Manhattan once defined it as a nasty piece of work…

The root verb of karma means “doing”, which includes thinking, speaking and acting. One classical definition of karma is the movement of the mind and what it produces in terms of speech and action. If, for instance, I were to think of eating an ice-cream, express that desire to a friend, then wolf down a gallon of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, I would have performed a complete karma.

But “doing” is only one half of the karma scenario. The other half constitutes the consequences that spring from our every thought, word or act. Karmic software has no viruses—it is perfect, infallible and inexorable. So why doesn’t every mafia don who traffics in hard drugs, prostitution and illegal arms end up being riddled with bullets in some dark and filthy alley?Why does a kind and ethical man go down the samsaric tubes, while low-life crooks happily sport Gucci gear…

An emerald green SUV shot past us on the long highway leading back from Washington DC to Takoma Park. I read the bumper sticker displayed prominently on its back and grinned: it read, as you might have guessed: Your Karma Ate My Dogma.

What I enjoy most about Americans on the eastern spiritual path—along with their heart-warming generosity and willingness to embrace the universe in all its crazy splendor—is their irreverent sense of humor. And yet, while the “k” word is bandied around in new age circles almost as much as the “f” word in Manhattan, few westerners seem to discern just how wide-ranging are the implications of karmic theory—by which I mean its potential for transforming human life.