Karma is a central concept to reincarnation, and these two ideas are inseparable. Reincarnation provides a body for the soul-entity from life to life, while karma shapes and determines the experiences that this soul-entity must live through in her incarnation. In its most common and known definition, it is said that in her given life, an individual reaps the fruits of the acts committed in her previous lives. But karma is more than a mechanical law of antecedents and positive and negative consequences. It is expressed not only through the external events the individual experiences, as for example, the quality of life and the events happening to her, but also through internal sensations, such as emotions, behavioral dispositions, and other aspects of personality transferred from one life to the other. The soul, therefore, contains all this information. “Karma is simply patterns of memory … this subconscious memory has an effect and an influence upon how we think, how we react, what we choose, even how we look! … Although the memory is there, freedom of choice allows an individual to determine the path he or she takes in this present life” (Todeschi, 2013, p. 11).

Hence, karma is both the action and its consequences. However, because life is made up of actions that always have consequences, no matter how minor and insignificant, the entity is subject to the many effects generated from past actions in previous lives and new ones in her present life. As Cayce (2006) explained in many readings, karma should be understood “in being worked-out” and “meeting Self” (p. 21). This means that an individual must accept all her life experiences as a means to encounter and repair the same situations she created in her previous lives to work on herself in her present life. She chose these experiences as a soul-entity before incarnating to increase her soul consciousness and evolve.

References

Cayce, E. (2006). Reincarnation & Karma. VA, Virginia Beach: A.R.E. Press.
Todeschi, K. J. (2013). Edgar Cayce on the Akashic Records. A.R.E. Press.