What is the theory of karma, and how does it affect us?

 The theory of karma simply stated is that actions have consequences, both good and bad.

A more elaborate explanation is that karma concerns the consequences of actions, including moral reactions, with the intention, consciousness and circumstances surrounding an action affecting the consequences and resulting in another birth.

But before getting to karma, there is something more fundamental to consider. We all have an intuitive sense of justice and injustice. And this sense goes far beyond courts, laws and legal systems. It pervades ordinary life.

We say, “That's not fair.”

We say someone “deserves better,” that someone “got what they deserved,” or that someone “got away with it.” We make these judgments constantly, without giving much thought to where the standard we judge an outcome by comes from.

But why should anything be fair? That’s not easily answered.

If there were no standard of what should happen, then nothing could really be unfair. Things would simply happen. There would be no “deserve,” no “ought,” and no meaningful distinction between fair and unfair. But we make these distinctions.

The problem comes when what should or ought to happen…doesn't. Bad things happen to good people, and the guilty get away with things. Then we experience dissatisfaction, because something seems wrong. If God exists and is all the things claimed He is, why the discrepancies that we see?

Karma offers the explanation for this apparent discrepancy.

It begins with the understanding that the living being is eternal and transmigrates from one body to another, experiencing the results of actions over many lives. This is reincarnation.

There is a standard, but we seldom see it fully applied within one lifetime. In each birth we experience the results of previous actions, while accumulating further reactions through our present actions, most of which will bear fruit in future births.

What appears to be an absence of justice is our inability to see the whole picture over many lives. Karma never forgets and never loses an address, and unless we get free from reactions we have to keep taking birth to experience the consequences of them.

The yogi whose mind is fixed on Me verily attains the highest perfection of transcendental happiness. He is beyond the mode of passion, he realizes his qualitative identity with the Supreme, and thus he is freed from all reactions to past deeds. Bhagavad Gita 6.27