Panthic Karma: Understanding Why We Are Dysfunctional
Why is that despite having abundant resources, our community can’t make the best out of its potential? We lag even on basic structures needed for any community to thrive. Unless we address what affects our Panthic Karma, we will never succeed.
Personal Karma
Karma is a foundational belief in Sikhi. It is a universal law that creates harmony by holding living beings accountable for their actions. What we do to others eventually comes back to us, in this life or a later one.
Karma accounts for both positive and negative actions, including areas in between that may not be clear for us. It looks at all the details without being restricted by our idea of timing or our patience. It can be quick and almost instant or take even years and lifetimes to bring its balance to fruition.
Our life is full of distractions and tempting instant gratifications. That’s why, even though karma always plays out around us, we cannot pick up on it. No matter what anyone's beliefs are, this law of the universe still applies. Recognizing its subtle hints and workings is a source of deep wisdom.
Panthic Karma
Just like we all have our personal karma, our Panth does as well. However, Panthic Karma is not a monolith, but a collection of our personal karmas put together.
That part of our personal karma that determines our individual contributions to the Panth is the core building block. Each one of us brings into this life opportunities to serve our Guru. What we do with those determines the blessings that the Panth gets nourished with.
Our individual decisions and actions are core units that form our personal karma. Therefore, having a clear understanding of how such small units build the core block of our personal karma is essential to shape our karma at the Panthic level.
Symptoms of Karmic Blockage
Life is full of obstacles, and it’s difficult to recognize which ones are part of our life experience because of our negative karma. However, there are a few signs to identify karma at play.
When despite presence of skills, resources, effort and persistence, there is no sign of progress and there is a circular flow bringing back to the same starting point.
Struggling and not making progress is part of living our life, but we should be concerned if such patterns persist over a long time. When we see this sign, we should reflect and figure out if there may be something laying underneath. Out of other karmic blockage related red flags, this one is easier to spot.
Panth’s Karmic Blockage
We have been struggling through a multi-faceted, long-standing crisis in many areas. There is no doubt about this. While there is always an abundance of explanations and an infinitely long list of external factors we point to, there is no clarity on what are our internal ones.
This is a deep-rooted issue that impairs our self-reflection abilities and, therefore, keeps us perpetually disoriented. We can’t let this continue.
We can identify most of karmic blockage related red flags in our current state of the Panth. The clear one here is also that we have all the resources, talent, skills, effort, and passion needed to make our community thrive, but we continue to fail. How is that a community like ours finds itself in this perpetual state of crisis?
Unblocking Our Future
Just like Panthic Karma is a collective of individual blocks of personal karma, our current resistance to self-reflection as a community is also a collection of our individual denial of personal shortcomings. That is why we need to an analysis framework that charts a route from our individual life to that of the Panthic outcomes.
Understanding our Panthic Karma is a crucial step in that direction. However, our first step towards fixing our Panth is to realize that the heaviest karmic weight that crushes our shoulders is our extreme neglect of letting many Saroops of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji get torn apart and burned down to ashes.
