Karma is the simplest way to change.

How do we change?

“Willpower,” some say. Alright.
What is willpower? “Forcing yourself to do it”, they answer. “Always showing up, no matter what.” So you do, inspired to change. And you burn out, and in the process of struggling with that new problem (and the ensuing depression that often accompanies it), you slink back to a slightly different, yet functionally-identical lifestyle. Back where you started.

No change was achieved. Only suffering.

So you ask again: How do we change?

“Just decide,” some say. Alright.
Seems to have worked for them. Quitting smoking — within a day! — after a decade of it is supposed to be nigh-impossible, yet they did it (looking at you, dad).

But what does it mean, to decide? “Don’t overthink it. Just act,” they explain, confused. So you do. You decide, triumphantly, to change; and since that decision doesn’t yet bear any real meaning, you tentatively try saying “no” to yourself about something. Something you’d always, otherwise, do.

It works. Suddenly, there is what feels like a space in your day. Not exactly free time, not exactly an emotion — something that is different, a certain liberty. You said no. Now you have one unspent “yes” to use on something new. So you do.

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A month has passed. You can still keep going. By now you’ve felt that unpleasant feeling — but no, you won’t look at it. Not yet. You can still keep going.

Two months.

Six months.

Nine.

Until you can ignore it no longer. You are… unsatisfied. You did something new, a measurable change. Everyone saw it, sooner or later; everyone commented. You even feel that things are different.

Different around you. Around. But not inside.

Somewhat disturbed by this weird realisation, you figure it’s just a different nail requiring the same hammer. So you say “no” again, to something.

Six months pass.

You say “no” again.

Eight months, this time.

“No.”

Fourteen. A record, of a sort. And everyone exclaims that you are an inspiration. Where others wallow and suffer, you thrive.
But do you, really? Sooner or later, you find yourself peering through the mirror, its shape irrelevant. Could be a glass half-full with whiskey, or a mirror in truth, or your partner, horribly reflecting back at you what you are — or worse, are not.

Either way, the mirror peers back, expectant. Until you cave, and admit.

Everything changed. Everything you do, everything around you, everything that comes out of it. Everything… except you. You can’t quite explain why, but the feeling doesn’t lie.
The same person, wearing new clothes, and celebrated for it. The same arguments, the same pain. The same almost-friendships, and the same regrets.

No change was achieved. Only suffering — just at a larger time-scale. And the fact that none of it makes sense? That only seasons the wound.

How, then, do we change?
What is change?

Unsure of the answer, you cry for help, and the void only answers back with silence… until you choose to look inside.

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Chapter I: Karma, and Gardens

The path to wisdom begins with understanding karma — and to understand something fully, one must know both what it is, and what it is not. Let’s begin with the latter.

Karma is not “bad things will happen to bad people”. That’s a misconception created when the word has been imported into English. Neither does karma mean “good things will happen to good people”. Each and all of us believe we are ‘good’, especially when we are most wretched. That’s not how things work.

And karma, as a term, is meant to describe exactly that — how things work. So what is it?

The best explanation I ever got was from one of my martial arts instructors. He was Chinese, and simply told me what the Mandarin word for karma is: 因果, or “yingua”. He said it means “seed-fruit” (though a cursory check with the dictionary claims otherwise; the old geezer might have bent the truth a little to make his point). He found it silly to use a whole phrase like “cause and effect” when you could just say “yingua” and call it a day.

And that’s all karma is. Seed-fruit, or in more Christian terms: “You reap what you sow”. The phenomenon of consequences.

But pause. Look deeper.
Notice what it implies.

Through the lens of karma, life is a garden which you plant and feed from. You do not have to tend it. The garden grows, and oftentimes re-plants itself with the seeds from inside all the fruit you reap. Consequences, in other words, are quite persistent, and reoccurring, in fact. It can take quite a bit of effort to remove the seed of one.

You can see what I mean, I’m sure, if you look at the opening story of this post through this lens. Doing so reveals a simpler way to view things, and points to obvious problems.

The part about willpower is akin to forcing a seed into the soil when the latter is already crowded. The seed is unlikely to sprout, and even less likely to last. As the malnourished plant withers to leave behind a disappointment in our garden, so too does the forced habit create turmoil, but ultimately changes nothing.

The second part, about “just doing it” and saying “no” to established parts of our life is akin to uprooting an unwanted seed from our garden. It gestures toward wisdom, and indeed creates a change — but how can you know what kind of change? To remove a seed is not the same as to plant another, though it could lead to it. Often what comes to replace the seed is random, blown in by the wind, or placed by another’s careless hand.

Worse, often we place it ourselves, unknowingly, to our own woe.

What, then, does it mean to plant a seed? How can it be done properly?

Chapter II: Seed

Every action is a seed.
Every inaction, also, is a seed.
Every thought.
Every word.
And every fruit.

Because behind each of those is a decision,
Behind each decision — a perception,

And perceptions are the seed of all seeds.

That is the simple answer.

Anything we do or do not — both are going to have consequences. The man who in pursuit of change began saying “no”, for example, became defined by that act. Trapped by it.

You might think it just a story fancied-up for a quirky intro, but it’s a stylised episode of my own life. Anecdotal, yet no less true. There are less clear-cut examples all around us, of people making decisions made to change the present, only for those choices to echo out into their tomorrow, on and on… until the person can never be free of them. And they don’t even manage to change the present very well either, if at all.

Such outcomes are the hallmark of the unwise, and are what we ought to avoid. But how?

Notice the pattern of this process. In the example, the man perceives three things: a need for change, his own stagnation, and the prior failure to enact said change. He also perceives that decisiveness, in the short term, works. He does not realise that the change itself will also be a seed for further consequences; thus he does not pay attention to the details. What kind of change, exactly, will it be? What characteristics would it — would I — have afterward?

If each of those became a seed of its own, what would it bring about?

All questions unsought. Because of this, the man plants a single seed intended for a single harvest, only to come back nine months later and find it choking his whole garden like a weed, season after season. All future harvests become tainted, and he reaps that taint time and again, long after he imagined it depleted.

That’s the whole point of the metaphor. Everything is a seed. Especially the fruits of choices — all fruits have seeds in them, after all. In nature, that’s the whole point of a fruit.

Rather obvious when viewed that way, isn’t it?

You can see it now, I hope. What karma is, and why it matters — and also where the misconception comes. Everything we do or do not, will have an effect on us. Every consequence we reap will bring consequences of its own, again and again, for as long as it remains in the garden inside us.

Only now can we get back to the one question with which we began: how do we uproot the harmful seed and replace it, effectively, with something good?

How do we change?

We don’t.
Change is an outcome, not a goal. The seed-fruit metaphor reveals that.

What we need instead, is ethos.