Karmic management. How to manage your life and achieve results?

– If we want to effectively manage a business, we read books about it. In the USA, business literature is popular that gives direct recommendations: “Do this – and you will get these business results.”

I want to discuss the book “Karmic Management” and the very idea that karma can be managed as a system: perform specific actions and obtain results in the area of wealth, well-being, health. In this book, karma is described as a controllable system in which you plant the right karmic seeds and receive karmic sprouts as a natural result.

Is it really possible to manage karma like a business system?

– This is a fashionable topic. The concept of “karmic management” came from a specific author, but today it is used everywhere. I will expand the question a little before moving on to the concept of karma.

This is often formulated as follows: if you perform good actions, you will have a lot of money; if you do good deeds for other people, everything will be fine for you. The law is described quite straightforwardly, and many people interpret it as follows: “I will do good actions for other people and receive benefits for myself in return.” In the book, the logic is exactly this*. This is precisely what is embedded in the concept of karmic management.*

When we talk about karmic management, we mean managing karma. What is management? It is control. To move toward this, it is first important to understand what karma is. It is necessary to at least understand what exactly is supposed to be managed.

Karmic management emphasizes the idea that everything you do has causes and consequences.

I want to separately fix attention on the word “management.” If you look at business clubs, business communities, business education, books, you can see that the idea that a business must have a mission or value is being actively promoted. From the same logic comes the statement: if you have a mission, money will definitely come. At the same time, less is said that money comes when you have a properly built business model, when you know how to work with clients, build sales, manage finances. In contrast, it is claimed that good actions automatically lead to money in business.

What is management in a company?

There are two businesses: managing a coffee shop and managing a factory producing heavy fittings. These businesses have different clients, models, and processes. In the second business – two clients; 400 clients enter the coffee shop daily, it is located in a specific location. To manage a business, you need to understand: where it is located, who its clients are, what the business model is, what the average bill is, what product is sold, what its cost price is, what employees there are, goals, strategy, principles.

The difference between drinking coffee in a coffee shop in Los Altos in Silicon Valley and arriving at a fittings factory in the Urals is colossal. Accordingly, management in these businesses will be fundamentally different.

If we talk about business management and management as such, then in order to manage a company, you need to understand it: understand finance, sales, marketing, production, logistics, service. Without this, management is impossible. When we talk about managing karma, the logic should be the same. To manage karma, you need to understand it.

What does this mean? It means understanding what causes underlie what is happening in your life now: what causes led to current events, what causes that I run a YouTube channel, what causes that at 40 I moved to live in Silicon Valley, what causes that I have four children, what causes that I do business – in IT, in education, in investments, in real estate, in consulting? Why exactly this? What are the causes of this? What are the causes of our relationships, friendship? What are the causes that we have a dog? What are the causes that a specific group of people is filming these videos? What are the causes that I live in this particular house? What are the causes of my current state – good or bad?

It is important to develop a habit of constantly asking yourself:

• what are the causes of the events in my life?
• from what causes do I act?
• what stands behind my actions and reactions?
• what is the cause of my decisions?
• what is the cause of my state?

Just recently I was walking around the apartment and swearing at some employees. Why was I doing this? Because the employees did the work poorly? Or because I was in a bad mood? And if the mood was bad, then why? Because of the weather? Because of a conversation with my wife? Because of thoughts about my parents? Because of a guest? Because the child looked at me wrong in the morning? Or because I ate the wrong food?

To talk about karmic management, you must first learn to understand karma.

The first mistake people make when reasoning about karmic management is misunderstanding their event flow. How to correctly take the next step at each specific moment in time. Which next step is correct if a particular event has occurred? And do we really understand the causes and consequences of what is happening correctly?

It is important to immediately indicate: our task here is not to refute or criticize something. Our task is to understand in order to learn to make more accurate decisions for ourselves and understand how in life it is really possible to manage a certain flow of events.

I have already given a simple example related to mood and what it depends on. The same can be considered using the example of business management. You can often hear the statement that in business, clients will increase because you perform good actions. For example, at a fittings factory. Does this sound convincing? Imagine a fittings factory. It has two large buyers. One is an international company that purchases products in the Urals. The second is another large Chinese company. Perhaps there is also an internal supplier engaged in resale. What exactly “good actions” toward the world can be performed when selling fittings?

At this moment, an attempt begins to artificially construct answers: social packages for employees, abstract conversations about “warmer” or “kinder” fittings, that love should emanate from the product. The question arises: what of this really relates to business management?

When we talk about management, we talk about numbers, goals, models. You cannot come to a fittings factory and say: “To develop the business, you need to hang the sign correctly.” At the factory they will say they have no sign and it does not matter.

A similar situation happens in a person’s life. A person often does not know themselves and does not understand how karma works. This is fundamentally important. If you think about karma in the range of one month, then it can still somehow be operated at the level of thinking. Even with errors, such a model can be fitted in the head.

But if you think about karma from the point of view of other lives – then you need to understand that there is a certain volume of karma formed by previous lives. It can be significant.

Imagine that a person has accumulated negative karma conditionally at minus one hundred. And within one year he is able to create positive karma at plus one. In this case, he does not create a new positive reality, but only gradually works off old karma.

At the same time, people often reason as follows: “If everything is good in a person’s life, it means he has good karma. If everything is bad, it means you need to start doing good deeds, and then it will become good.” But there is no guarantee that it will become good in this life. Negative consequences can manifest for several more lives in a row. Where did the certainty come from that the result will definitely be positive right now?

If a person performs good deeds exclusively for the sake of obtaining a beneficial result, this forms negative karma. The illusion is that you can do something for other people with the goal of obtaining personal benefit and at the same time count on positive karma. Such a pattern does not exist.

At this stage, an objection often arises. It sounds something like this: “It’s normal to think about yourself, it’s normal to see patterns and understand that if you sincerely do good things, good events will happen in life.”

Yes, if a person acts in truth, favorable events really happen in their life. But it is fundamentally important that he acts not for the sake of these events. He acts because it is truth. A person refuses to kill another person not because he is afraid of bad consequences for himself, but because he knows: killing is not allowed. These are different levels of understanding.

There is a well-known example from the Hindu tradition. The student found it strange that the teacher killed a mosquito. He asked: “How so, because you cannot harm living beings?” The teacher replied that the treatises speak not about a prohibition of action as such, but about the absence of the desire to kill; in a situation of protecting one’s own life, action may be permissible.

The same applies to any other actions. You do not want to kill animals because it is truth, or because you count on a favorable outcome for yourself? These are fundamentally different states.

This is the second important block.

Now it makes sense to move on to the third block and look at it from the point of view of patterns. The concept of karmic management claims that good actions lead to money. But where did the very idea come from that there is a direct pattern between positive actions and money?

A choice arises: improving the inner state, reducing anxiety and stress, balancing the perception of the world, the ability to hear reality – or money? In most cases, a person chooses the first, while trying to retain the ability to manage money separately. But here the following question arises: does a person have enough resource, attention, and state to truly see cause-and-effect relationships? To understand which actions exactly and how influence money?

In business I often emphasize: “If you do business for profit, then you do business for profit. Not for a mission, not for values, but for extracting profit.” Only later can strategies, principles, and restrictions related to environmental friendliness and responsibility be built.

Even at the level of basic legal forms this is fixed. A commercial organization is created to extract profit. If the goal is different, there is a separate form – a non-profit organization. These are different models. For example, as in OpenAI there were discussions that they were not aimed at extracting profit, but later they said: “We are a commercial company and aimed at extracting profit, while allowing people to earn from it.”

Therefore, the third important point is as follows: how much a person really sees patterns. Whether he is able to track what his actions lead to. Does a specific good action lead to money, to a certain living environment, to surroundings, to health, to harmonious relationships in the family – or to something else.

One of the most important topics from the point of view of karmic management is the confusion of causes and consequences.

– Then I suggest analyzing the next question.

The author of the concept suggests reading current karma from current life events: if a problem arises, it means that in the past there was an act of similar content, even if a person does not remember it. As an example, a situation is given with an employee who constantly complains, who has difficulties with a manager, who feels dissatisfaction. This is explained by the fact that, probably, he himself once behaved similarly and now must learn a lesson from it.

Is it really possible to draw such direct connections and unambiguously link specific life events with specific past actions?

– These are childish reasonings. The level of such thinking is extremely primitive and abstract.

I will give a simple example. In the current life a person has children, but in a past or previous life there were no children. Is this possible? It is possible. Then how will we link karma? How will we describe it?

Or, for example, in this life a person has a wife, but in a past life she did not exist. How in this case to describe cause-and-effect relationships? Or perhaps in a past life the person was of another gender. How then to connect these circumstances?

Does everything in life really have an exclusively karmic cause-and-effect nature? And how exactly does karma work from the point of view of time and periods of a person’s life?

If we assert that absolutely everything has a karmic cause and consequence, then freedom does not exist at all. Then there is only karma and nothing else. And this means complete automatism.

In this case, when a person says: “I will make an effort to do good,” does he do it freely or automatically, like a robot? If a person claims: “I performed a good action, therefore I got good results,” is he sure that this action was a conscious choice and not an automatic consequence of a karmic program?

If you say that you could have acted differently, then you assume the presence of freedom. But if everything is rigidly predetermined by karma, then there is no other option, and no change is possible. If freedom is present, then it is from freedom that non-karmic zones arise. A person simply acts, creates.

In our time, the influence of heredity is felt much more strongly than thousands of years ago. A person may not reach the realization of their own karma, remaining inside hereditary scenarios. He may live causes and consequences to which he has no direct relation.

Let us consider an example. A karmic event occurs: one person kills another or commits a robbery. You learn about this from the news and feel regret. The event itself is karmic, but your regret is not karmic. This is a new, just-created state, you generated it at this moment. This action has no direct connection with the event itself. Such an understanding changes the idea of one’s own causes and consequences in a person’s life.

Therefore, returning to the example described from the book, the attempt to build rigid and unambiguous patterns is an abstraction. Life conditions among people differ fundamentally. In one life a person can be a socially significant figure with thousands of contacts. In another – live an ascetic life and closely know ten people. Trying to reduce all this to identical karmic formulas is illusion and absurdity.

Before talking about management, it is necessary to understand the basics. If a person does not understand fundamental principles, what kind of management can we talk about?

Another fundamentally important point. When you perform good actions in order to create good for yourself, and when you perform them because it is truth – these are different things.

I, for example, always correlate actions with truth. The concept of truth can be discussed for a long time, but there are things that are obvious: murder, lies, deception, the intention to harm another person. And, on the contrary, a sincere desire for love toward other people. When a person is in a state of desire to love others regardless of their behavior, there is no calculation in this, no expectation of benefit, no category of “so that it will be good for me.” This is a fundamentally different nature.

You chose not money. You chose your own state and mood. And if the concept of karmic management said that good actions lead to improvement of the inner state, to a decrease in anxiety and tension – one could agree with this. In the long term, such influence really exists. But money has nothing to do with it. This is a different nature.

When they say “money is not happiness,” there is meaning in this. A person can be literally flooded with money, but at the same time he will suffer because of health, in relationships, in contact with loved ones. What difference does it make? More money has appeared, and what?

If good actions automatically led to money, then the richest people in the world would be the healthiest and most moral. Then theft would not exist as a phenomenon – anyone who stole would instantly become poor. But reality shows the opposite.

It is enough to look around. There are people who steal and get rich. There are those who were born into wealth. There are those who performed incredibly good deeds and remained poor. We all know very good people who live modestly. And we know very rich people with ruined morality.

When you chose the first state, did you have doubts?

– I had no doubts, but inside there were contradictions.

It is very scary to let go of the topic of money. It is scary to move into a state of inner calm and trust without financial guarantees. The fear of poverty holds very strongly. That is why it seems to me that the basic mistake here is the following: we buy such books, read them and research them because we initially put the illusion at the foundation that everything is measured by money; if there is money, everything else will follow. This is a worn-out illusion. Very often even books that are declared as books about money ultimately turn out not to be about that. Good and wise authors write exactly like this.

And here an important moment arises. If a person has not understood the foundation and does not proceed from truth, then this is no longer karmic management, but an attempt at karmic manipulation. A person sets false goals, incorrectly evaluates the situation and circumstances, performs actions that also turn out to be false. He misunderstands current conditions, distortedly sees causes and consequences, while not having fully understood even the theory of karma itself.

As a result, there is a feeling that with such a distorted approach all this cannot lead to a sustainable result.

– This is similar to situations in companies with marketers. In the modern world, a huge number of specialists offer many actions, acting essentially blindly. This resembles buying advertising in Google Ads or Yandex Direct with a conversion of a few percent. Formally, actions are performed, but they are abstract in nature.

This is the same as in a fittings sales business hiring staff to work with retail orders, and in a coffee business – building wholesale sales through large sales managers.

– This is an example of a cargo cult.

– Simply offering an action that not only makes no sense, but is also capable of worsening the situation and leading to negative consequences.

It is important to see the following here. People engaged in karmic management want to improve their lives without realizing that even the absence of changes can be a blessing. Because with chaotic actions there is a high probability of deterioration.

When a person acts without understanding either theory or practice, without understanding real causes and consequences, he must realize that he can both improve and worsen his situation. Moreover, he must understand how and to what extent this deterioration can occur. This is a game with one’s life.

There is also an objective point. If a person wants good exclusively for himself and at the same time he has not formed an internal system oriented toward the good of other people, this is a guaranteed loss.

The next important aspect in the topic of karmic management is the timing of the implementation of actions. This moment is of fundamental importance for perception.

Imagine we are studying at a university. Everyone has an expectation of a result from education. Or a person studies at school in order to get a profession in the future. The result is delayed in time, sometimes for years or decades. If a child in the fourth grade asks why he studies at school, he is told that it is needed for the future. A connection is formed: there is a cause now and there is a consequence in 10–15 years.

Now imagine that you perform certain actions, but their result manifests not in a month. People want an instant effect. They expect that if during a month they perform “good actions” at work, relations with the boss will immediately improve and income will grow.

If you start analyzing this logic, it becomes obvious that what directly leads to money is not abstract “doing good,” but helping other people earn money. But what does this mean in practice? If you helped another person earn one dollar, will one dollar come to you? And how then to earn a billion? Do you need to help someone earn a billion? Obviously, this logic does not work.

Returning to the issue of time. Even if we assume that certain actions really influence something, are you ready for the result to manifest in 15 years? In 50 years? What if not in this life? If a person is now 50 or 60 years old and does not know how much time he has left, how does he perceive this concept?

– It turns out, if a person declares that he wants to manage karma, he must be ready to live within this concept? And this concept assumes that causes can be in past lives and consequences manifest in the next. If a person is really going to engage in karmic management, then he must be ready for the main results not to appear now?

– Moreover, the most significant results will not appear in the current life. To understand this, it is necessary in general terms to look at the movement of karma during life, at least at the level of theory. There are theoretical aspects that for most people today are perceived precisely as theory. There is an inner state of living in which a person truly matures and begins to see the events of his life in a broader context.

Five thousand years ago a person looked back and saw events that happened to him. Three thousand years ago he said: “I do not remember my past lives, but I know that they were.” Today a person more often says: “There were no past lives at all.” Therefore now for most people this remains exclusively theory.

Imagine that this ceases to be theory. At least at the level of faith that it exists. When a person does not simply allow it intellectually, but lives in this perception, is in it and understands it from within. Then one can consider how karma is lived within one life, even if so far only theoretically.

The first 21 years of a person’s life is the period of karma formation.

What does “formation” mean? It means that events occurring before age 21 create conditions so that after this age events begin to unfold related to the working off of the karma intended for this life. The karma that the soul-spiritual system of a person chose to live through.

A person often struggles with many things in their life, but very often he struggles with himself. His soul-spiritual essence seems to tell him: “Hear me. I was not going to run away from difficult events. I did not plan to become rich in this life, I wanted to live this life poor, because I need to work off karma.”

Or, conversely, a person lives in prosperity not because his current personality is “successful” or because he read a smart book and drew the right conclusions. But because there are causes of another order, not directly related to his current thinking or intellect.

If good events happen in your life, it is important to be grateful to yourself as a spiritual being – the one who already had many other lives behind him. Not because you turned out to be smart enough to record videos, earn money, or create a family, but because there were deeper causes for this.

I often give an example with children. I have four children. It is interesting where exactly my wife and I got an education so that we had four children? I know many people who have read a huge number of books about parenting and family, but they have no children.

Can it be said that in this life I performed good actions so that I would have children? I will keep silent about the first child. Further one can try to build some logical chain, but it will still remain an abstraction. For this you also need to understand which children are karmic and which are the result of freedom of choice. And these are no longer karmic processes. These are processes of freedom.

And here the following is fundamentally important: there are things that arise from freedom, and they are not connected with karma. Moreover, they do not create karma. Some good events come into your life not because you “worked up good karma,” but because you were able to act from freedom and allowed these events to happen.

Is it better to live from freedom or from good karma?

– I believe that in a person’s life you cannot choose “better” in this sense. But if we talk about my choice now – I choose freedom.

– What is “good karma”? This is very well illustrated by the film “The Matrix.” Remember the character who betrays his team and agrees to have his memory erased and be returned to the Matrix? He says: “I will be rich, famous, successful there and will know nothing about reality.” This is an example of “good karma” in the understanding of karmic management.

And someone chooses freedom: “I don’t want good karma. I want true life.” And then he chooses not comfort, not beautiful joy, but sometimes dirt, complexity, incomprehensible food, difficult states. Recall the scene in “The Matrix” where a person eats a steak and says: “How delicious,” perfectly understanding that it is not real. In real life he has no such sensations. This is an escape from reality.

We see the same in “Black Mirror,” in “Ready Player One” – these are all examples of “good karma,” a programmed life without freedom. When we say “everything is good,” very often we are talking precisely about unfreedom.

Let us return to the topic of life periods and karma.

1. As I said, until age 21 karma is formed in a person.

All events of this period create conditions for the further implementation of the karmic path. At the same time, it seems to a person that he performs good or bad actions and thereby forms future karma. But in fact he often creates causes within the current life so that the consequences of past causes are realized. This is called an inverted space of cause and effect. What is it?

I will give a simple example. A person commits murder and goes to prison. From the point of view of social thinking we say: “He went to prison because he killed.” Now try to look differently: by karma a person had to end up in prison. And in order to get there, he commits murder. Then prison is the cause, and murder is the consequence. He does not realize or control this.

1. From 21 to 28 years there is a double period: karma is simultaneously formed and lived.
2. From 28 to 49 years karma is mainly lived. A person goes through the events intended specifically for this life.

And all the ideas that “we will fix everything now, change everything, rewrite everything” are an illusion. This is an attempt to fight the current of the river. You can splash around a little, grab a branch, hit a stone, get to the shore and sit there thinking what a great fellow you are. But you are no longer moving along the river – you are simply postponing the living of karma to the next life. You modified it.

I recall one conversation with a student. He said: “Alexander, I am ripe for spiritual development.” He was just going to Altai, I was traveling in Europe at that time. I told him:

“You are now going to Altai. Various processes are happening there. Let’s immediately assume that you are ready for serious things.” He replied: “Yes, I am ready for serious spiritual development.” I said: “Then let’s immediately discuss one point. Such a trip can strongly ‘rewind’ your path and acceleratedly fulfill karma.”

Many people want to quickly live karma, to “work it off.” It seems to them that there is some accumulated layer that can be closed faster: lived through, completed, and then live as if with a clean suitcase. Often people imagine good karma exactly like this – as a clean suitcase of money. But this is an illusion. And the example from the film “The Matrix,” in my opinion, highlights this very well.

I told him: “Imagine that on this trip you will acceleratedly live several lives of karma at once. You will completely outlive one layer and reach events that were not planned in this life at all. And these events may be associated with serious losses: the death of children, severe damage to health, disability – for example, the loss of arms or legs. You will have to live grief and suffering. Are you ready for this?” He replied that he was not ready. I asked: “Then what development are you in now?” He said: “Definitely not spiritual.”

If a person is truly in the living of the karmic path, he relates to such scenarios calmly. Not because he does not care, but because he understands: this is not superstition and not an accident – not a “black cat crossed the road.”

If a person truly lives in understanding of the spiritual world and karma, he calmly perceives stories about possible events. He understands that no story and no conversation by themselves are capable of changing karma so that someone’s children suddenly die or the body is destroyed.

Moreover, if a person lives in harmony with the laws of cause and effect of the Universe, he accepts that certain events will occur without his personal participation. He agrees that he does not remember and does not realize the hell and horror that he could have brought before. And, moreover, he does not always realize what he may bring in this life. He accepts this and continues to live on. And for him it no longer has decisive significance what events will occur – good or bad. Because for him spiritual development has truth.

It was with this question that he came to me. He called me, and I still remember that moment: I was walking down a street in Spain, on an uphill road, and answering him. This episode is clearly imprinted in me. He came with the question: “Alexander, am I on the spiritual path from the point of view of truth?”

I asked you again because at that moment you immediately chose a path in which the state is more important to you. But at the same time an internal “marker” connected with money flashed in you. And this reflects reality. What is a person truly ready for? And what does he truly want? Not in words, but in truth.

I often give one of the most difficult examples so that a person can test themselves and honestly look at their life. There are your own children and there are other people’s children. If in a critical situation you need to save only one, whom will you choose?

The answer is usually obvious. If you ask my wife, she will answer without hesitation: “Ours.” She will not even think. If you ask her mother – the answer will be the same. If you ask my mother – she will most likely start looking for another option opposite to mine, or choose something special.

If you ask me, I will answer like this: “I try very hard in my life to treat all people equally. It does not matter whether a person is close to me by blood, by current life, by karmic experience, or I see him for the first time. This is a person. If such a situation occurs, I will strive to act based on the laws of the Universe, and not from personal attachment. To treat equally. To try to do this.” I have no other answer in my life.

This is where the work of the mind begins. If you now, as a reader, try to honestly enter this question, you will notice how the brain will begin to create scenarios: “What if this really happens? What if right now? What if like this?” Inside, a whole system of justifications, doubts, images is launched. At some point you will still have to choose. Understand what you rely on, and most importantly – do not deceive yourself.

It is important to understand that life periods – up to 21 years, from 21 to 28, from 28 to 49 – are a huge, powerful flow. In this flow there are simultaneously the illusion of freedom and real limitations. To navigate it even a little, you need to distinguish: where you create karma now, where you live already created karma, and where you act from freedom. At the same time there is not only personal karma, but also the karma of space, country, time.

The karma of a country is a very important aspect. Imagine a disaster: a plane crash, a flood, a large-scale event. Did all the people who got into it have to die exactly according to their personal karma? No.

A country has its own karma. A person is born inside it, and this karma does not always perfectly coincide with his personal one. An event occurs that conditionally brings “plus 10” to everyone. For some, these plus 10 compensate minus 10 – and the person comes out to zero. For someone they cover minus 5 and give plus 5. And someone had plus 400 – and these plus 10 are almost not felt.

If a person came out to zero, does this mean that his karma disappeared? No. What was not lived will be lived later – perhaps not in this life. In the same way a person can die in an event that is not directly connected with his personal karma. In that case the balance will be restored later, by other means.

In life there is always a probability that a flow of events will come to you that does not personally relate to you – neither good nor bad. And true work begins not where you try to manage results, but where you begin to honestly see yourself and your state inside this flow.

The point is not that something good or bad happens to you, but how truly you develop.