PART 1
Know the Truth and the Truth will set you free. (Jesus)
Man is the outcome of his own thought; he will be what he thinks in this life. (Chandogya Upanishad)
All creatures are what they are because of the Karma generated by the actions from their previous lives and the present one. (Buddha)
It is natural for a common man to believe that he is a prisoner of his own destiny. But, paradoxically, in each man there is, potentially, the feeling that he is endowed with free will.
In order to better understand the manifesting ways of these essential aspects, we must take into consideration the terms of cause and effect that always determine our destiny or our own karma, a term of the yoga spiritual system.
WHAT IS KARMA?
The word karma comes from Sanskrit, from the verbal root kri meaning to do or to be active. Thus, the literal meaning of the term is fact or activity.
In their daily life, people encounter three fundamental types of activity: a physical, a mental or a verbal one. Each activity has a reaction or an effect. In the Buddhist philosophy, karma represents all the facts, words and thoughts that have correspondent effects that decisively influence destiny at each stage of your life.
Causality does not have very precise limits and its principle influenced science allowing its progress. For example, Isaac Newton explains the basics of human destiny like this:
When we find that something is going on we assume that there is another event preceding it from which the first one derives under certain rules.
Thus, determination appears as a practice of the causality principle (according to which each cause has an effect) in the phenomenal world.
In the evolution of scientific thinking, there are scientists that approve the principle of absolute determination and others that believe in indetermination as there are some causal series, apparently unexplainable, making the hazard or uncertain possible.
All philosophies mention the principle of determinism. Ever since ancient times the principle of causality has been approved as a law that rules the actions of man and his close or distant consequences.
Thus, for example, Hinduism and Buddhism have developed a theory of karma that explains everything that might come up in our life.
Other religions, like Christianity, have showed their adherence to this principle of causality through clear lessons but without explaining too much.
Unfortunately, as far as Christianity is concerned, many such texts have become apocryphal and the original information about karma and re-incarnation have been changed in time in order to serve some political, social, and economical interests.
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