Is Your Suffering Really Your Karma?

Somewhere right now, a person is sitting in the wreckage of their life. A business that collapsed. A child in the ground. An illness that came without a reason. And someone — an aunt, a neighbour, a calm man on television — looks at them and says, with peace on their face: "It must be your karma."

I want you to feel how cruel that sentence is. Slowly.

It does not just say you are suffering. The person already knows they are suffering. It says: you earned this. You did something — in this life, or a life you cannot even remember — and this pain is your bill. Stop complaining and pay.

Now the person carries two weights instead of one. The pain itself. And the guilt of having deserved it. We took a suffering human being and made them the criminal of their own tragedy.

And here is what makes it unanswerable: you cannot defend yourself against a past life. You cannot check the records. You cannot say I didn't do it — because the whole theory rests on deeds you don't remember and an account you will never see.

So let me say the thing nobody said to you.

Karma-as-blame stands on one hidden assumption: that you are a free, separate person who chose your actions. You chose, so you are responsible; you are responsible, so you must accept the consequences. The whole courtroom runs on that one idea.

Now test it. Did you choose your parents? Your body? The brain you think with — its chemistry, its speed, its wounds? Did you choose the thought that came to you at 3 a.m. last night — the dark one you are ashamed of? Did you build it, piece by piece, and approve it for release? Or did it just… arrive?

Every action you have ever taken grew out of a thought, a desire, or a fear. You manufactured none of them. They arose — from your body, your past, your wounds, what was done to you before you could understand it — and the action followed. At every step, what you did not choose gave birth to what you did not choose.

So where, in that whole chain, is the free chooser who deserves to be punished?

Now hear what I am not saying. I am not saying actions have no consequences. Fire burns whether or not anyone is "guilty." If you hurt someone, they bleed. Consequences are real — they are the most real thing in this world. The illusion is the blame. Fire does not need the wood to have sinned.

Your suffering may be real. But it was never a verdict against you. The relative who said "it's your karma" was reading from a rulebook written for a creature that does not exist: a free, separate, independent doer.

You were never the criminal in your own story. You were the one who got hurt — and then was handed the bill for it.

This is one of the questions I spent years inside. I wrote about all of them — karma, guilt, free will, God — in my book It Was Never You. You can find it at abhijeetrai.com.