Karma (Part 2)
The Amoral Ledger
Every culture in the world has a version of the same saying.
“What goes around, comes around.”
The Romans had it. The Chinese had it. Every village elder in every tradition has said some version of it to some young person who thought they were getting away with something.
This is not philosophy. It is an observation about how systems behave over time.
And it also does real enforcement work.
Not complete enforcement, but enough nodes believe it that some defection gets deterred without a single inspector on payroll. No court. No police. No bureaucracy extracting a coordination tax.
Just a widely held intuition, running quietly in the background, that actions have a way of returning to their source.
Collective fictions like these do real coordination work. The belief itself is the mechanism.
They are, in effect, self-fulfilling prophecies.
The Problem With It
You’ve seen the headline.
“Youngest billionaire.” “Forbes 30 under 30.” “The founder who changed everything.”
The face is everywhere. The valuation is staggering. The magazine covers, the keynote speeches, the board of luminaries.
And you, who worked just as hard — maybe harder. Who tried to build something real. Who played by the rules. Are watching from the outside.
The resentment is honest. You did everything right. This person appears to have done very little of it. And yet...
So you conclude: The system doesn’t keep score.
You conclude, “What goes around comes around” is something people say to make themselves feel better. The universe is indifferent.
Then a couple of years pass.
The same face appears in the news again. This time it’s different.
A discovery of fraud. Evidence of wrongdoing. Cases filed. And beneath the visible surface, more that you can’t see — consequences still unfolding, still compounding, still settling.
And you exhale. You say, “What goes around, comes around.”
You sleep peacefully.
But notice what just happened.
You weren’t wrong about the intuition. You were wrong about the timeline.
The cycle was always complete. You just couldn’t see all of it from the moment you were standing in.
But what if you had missed the latter news? The story, for you, is stuck at the first snapshot.
Once enough nodes conclude the score isn’t being kept at all, because they only ever see snapshots, the collective fiction starts to erode. And this is precisely when enforcement costs start climbing back up.
So either the intuition is wrong.
Or the timescale is longer than any single snapshot can capture.
What Karma Actually Claims
Not that the folk intuition is wrong.
That the timescale is longer than you think.
“What goes around, comes around” is the right intuition pointed at the wrong time horizon. The accounting is precise. The cycle is complete. You just can’t see all of it from where you’re standing.
But here is the more interesting claim.
The ledger doesn’t enforce through a judge. It enforces through a collectively held belief that experience — good and bad — is the settling mechanism. That belief is the collective fiction. And like all collective fictions, it works not because it can be proven but because enough nodes hold it simultaneously.
Money works the same way. Nations work the same way. The specific mechanism — whether settlement happens in this life or across many — is a separate question. The minimum viable claim is simpler than any of that.
Just this: Experience is how the ledger settles. The cycle is longer than you think, and it is running the whole time.
How the Karma Ledger Actually Works
But the original architects of Karma weren’t satisfied with just that claim. They went further — much further.
The ledger runs two columns simultaneously.
Pap — actions that generate negative consequence. Punya — actions that generate positive consequence.
And they are never netted.
This is the part that surprises most people. You cannot buy your way out of Pap with accumulated Punya.
A lifetime of generous acts does not cancel the harm you caused. Both columns are real. Both columns settle. Independently, in sequence, at whatever timescale the system requires.
Think of it as two separate accounts at the same bank. Deposits in one do not offset withdrawals in the other. You carry both balances simultaneously. Both will be settled. The only question is when and in what form.
Discharge happens at any timescale.
Within a lifetime, a reputation catches up with its owner. The community remembers. The settlement lands here, in this life, in recognizable form.
Across lifetimes, the outstanding balance that doesn’t settle here carries forward. Reincarnation handles the remainder, not the whole.
The Rest Stops
And again, the architecture is pretty clear on what happens when you are in the waiting room, waiting for your rebirth.
Between lives, the balance expresses itself.
Svarga — not heaven in the permanent sense. A temporary rest stop where the current Punya balance expresses itself as experience. Proportional to the balance. Bounded by it. When the expression runs its course, you return to the cycle.
You get a highest class of luxury suite, as your waiting room.
Naraka — same logic, Pap column. Not eternal damnation. A temporary experience proportional to the outstanding negative balance.
You get the worst waiting room experience.
Now here is the part that is often misread.
Neither Svarga nor Naraka settles the account.
Remember your teacher handing you a toffee when you got the top score on a test?
The toffee was real. The reward was real. You had earned it and you received it.
But did you get a discount on next term’s fees? Did you get an exemption from next week’s homework?
Svarga and Naraka are the system’s toffee. The incentive layer — a signal delivered between lives about how the balance stands, designed to encourage behaviors that sustain the system. The ledger discharges through life. Through what you encounter, what is done to you, what conditions you are born into. Specific consequences meeting specific entries, in embodied experience.
The between-life state reflects the balance. It does not reduce it.
One more thing: The smaller balance settles first. If your Pap column is smaller than your Punya column, you experience the Pap expression first — then the Punya. If your Punya is smaller, the sequence reverses. The system processes the shorter queue before the longer one.
This sequencing matters. It is not random. It is not punishment followed by reward or reward followed by punishment. It is queued process management.
The Proof
The Mahabharata doesn’t just assert this architecture. It demonstrates it.
The war is over. Eighteen days of slaughter. The Pandavas have won.
Yudhishthira — Dharma’s own son, the one whose commitment to truth was so absolute that the ground shook when he finally told a half-lie — has held the line for years against every temptation to compromise.
He arrives in Svarga.
And finds Duryodhana there.
Seated on a throne. Blazing with prosperity. Resplendent as the sun, honored among heroes, worshipped by gods and sages.
Duryodhana.
The man who tried to have the Pandavas burned alive as children. The man who ordered Draupadi be stripped in open court while her husbands watched. The man whose pride destroyed a generation. The man who, when offered five villages to end the war and save a hundred thousand lives, said he would not give them enough land to fit on the head of a needle.
That man is in Svarga.
Yudhishthira’s reaction is not philosophical. It is visceral. He violently retreats. He cannot bear to look.
He says — out loud, to the assembled gods — that he does not desire to be here if this is who is here. He asks for his brothers instead. He asks where the people who actually lived righteously have gone.
The gods agree to show him.
What follows is one of the most harrowing passages in the epic.
The path is dark. The stench is unbearable — flesh and blood, decay, the smell of the place where wicked deeds accumulate. There are rivers of boiling water. Forests where the leaves are blades. Iron pots of burning oil. Corpses everywhere, severed and mutilated, swarming with insects.
Yudhishthira advances through all of it, nauseated and horrified, looking for his brothers.
And then he hears voices.
Distressed voices, calling out from every direction. Asking him to stay. Telling him that his presence brings a cool breeze to this place. That his fragrance — the fragrance of a man who has lived justly — gives them some relief from the suffering.
He stops.
He asks who is there.
“I am Karna.”
“I am Bhimasena.”
“I am Arjuna.”
“I am Nakula.”
“I am Sahadeva.”
“I am Dhrishtadyumna.”
“I am Droupadi.”
His brothers. His wife. Karna — who fought on the wrong side but whose life was one long act of loyalty and courage. All of them here, in this place.
While Duryodhana sits in Svarga blazing like the sun.
Yudhishthira snaps. He is done with the gods. He is done with heaven. He sends the messenger back with a message: tell them I am staying here. This place, with the people I love, is my heaven.
He means it.
And then the gods arrive. Shakra himself, Dharma in embodied form, the full assembly — and with them, the darkness lifts. The suffering dissolves. The horrific landscape vanishes. What was Naraka becomes something else entirely.
It was a test. A brief settling. A demonstration.
Shakra explains the sequencing directly: A person who enjoys the good deeds earlier, goes to hell later. A person who goes to hell first, enjoys heaven later.
Yudhishthira’s Pap column was small — one entry. The half-truth about Ashwatthama, the one time he allowed himself to say something technically true in a way he knew would be received as a lie, in order to break Drona.
One entry. It was always going to settle. His Punya column vastly outweighed it. So the smaller balance settled first — briefly, proportionally — and then everything else routed to where it belonged.
As for Duryodhana: his Punya column had one specific entry that the ledger was reading at that moment. Vira Svarga — the warrior’s heaven, earned by dying without flinching on the battlefield, completely discharging the Kshatriya Dharma at the moment of death.
The ledger doesn’t weigh the man. It reads the entry. That entry was real. It routed accurately.
His broader Pap column — the gambling match, Draupadi, the five villages, all of it — is still in the ledger.
Still outstanding. It will settle. On its own timeline, in its own form.
The system is not broken.
It is reading the full cycle. Yudhishthira was seeing the uptrend and calling it the whole story.
The Finish Line
Every game needs one.
Moksha it is.
Both columns at zero. Not good deeds. Not accumulated merit. Not divine favor.
Zero balance. Every entry on both columns settled, every specific debt discharged, nothing left outstanding.
The cycle ends when there is nothing left to settle.
Notice what this means for the Punya column. Accumulating Punya is still accumulating. A life of generous, cooperative, dharmic behavior builds a positive balance — and that balance produces better conditions, longer Svarga stays, more favorable rebirths. The loop becomes more comfortable.
But the ledger is still growing. The cycle continues.
Punya does not move you toward Moksha. It moves you toward comfort within the loop. The finish line requires zero — not a large positive number.
But that raises the question the ledger can’t answer on its own.
What exactly is being tracked? The ledger is running. The accounting is precise. But what counts as an entry — and what doesn’t?
What are the actual rules?
Think I missed something? Fill in the gaps below.
Think I’m wrong? Even better — show me where.
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The full argument is being built one post at a time. Start from the beginning here if you haven’t already.
Loved this one, esp the underline on the fact that punya karma is still creating karma and still keeping you entangled in the cycle, within the system. A place of 'void karma' is where we need to move to.