Is it cosmic punishment, moral bookkeeping, spiritual fatalism — or something far more subtle and practical?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Jacob Kyle sits down with author and historian of spirituality Phil Goldberg to explore karma beyond pop clichés and New Age simplifications. Drawing from Goldberg’s latest book Karmic Relief, the discussion reframes karma not as a system of reward and punishment, but as a complex web of causality and interconnectedness — one that operates through intention, perception, habit, and collective life.

Together, they examine why karma became axiomatic in Indian philosophical traditions, how it relates (and doesn’t neatly reduce) to reincarnation, and why modern moralized uses of karma often lead to spiritual bypassing, apathy, or quiet cruelty. The conversation also moves into contemporary territory, asking what kinds of collective karma we may be generating today — politically, culturally, and spiritually — and what responsibility that places on us as conscious participants rather than passive observers.

At its core, this episode treats karma as a practice, not merely as belief: something worked with through attention, ethical discernment, meditation, and embodied discipline — rather than something used to explain away suffering or justify indifference.

Discussed in This Episode:

• Why karma is not cosmic retribution or moral punishment
• How Indian traditions understood karma as cause and effect, not judgment
• Common Western misconceptions: fatalism, determinism, and “karma as excuse”
• The difference between individual karma and collective karma-
• Why suffering cannot be cleanly traced to specific past actions
• Karma as a learning process rather than a sentence to be served
• The relationship between karma and reincarnation—and why it remains debated
• How intention (saṅkalpa), not just action, shapes karmic outcomes
• Why spiritual explanations can become tools for disengagement or bypassing
• Meditation, yoga, and ethical cultivation as ways of transforming karma
• Modern identity, politics, and the karmic consequences of cultural narratives
• Why discernment matters in a spiritually “normalized” but diluted landscape

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THE INDIAN DARSÁNAS: Twelve Schools of Indian Philosophy Explained Simply Download PDF here: https://enroll.embodiedphilosophy.com/twelve-schools