The word “karma” [from Sanskrit Karman, 'action'] means, in the philosophies of India, the set of man’s actions and its consequences.

Described and codified by the scholar Panini in V B.C., Sanskrit is an Indo-European language derived from Indo-Iranian in which the four Vedas were written, and, between VI B.C. and XI A.D., became the literature and science language in India, being kept, still today, for cultural reasons, as one of the official languages in India.

According to our language karma is connected to the various theories of transmigration, and through it we have notions of destiny, desire as a driving force of life, and the necessary enchainment, because of these two factors, among the various moments of man’s life.

Forming the set of actions of the human creature, a person’s karma can be either positive or negative. Good actions according to the general law generate good consequences. Bad actions contrary to the law of God establish, as we know it, the negative karma.

There is, however, what some scholars call as imaginary karmas that come from a lopsided representation of reality in which the man increases his own suffering for the lack of sense and love of himself. The practice of cilice, among the Hebrews, is an example of that. The naive individual believes that increasing his sufferings he will diminish his karma, thinking that a larger share of pain would make him even with the law, which is naturally wrong.

The Law of cause and effect, taught by Jesus and the Spiritist Doctrine, establishes that the one who kills with the sword will die on the sword, that each one will be rewarded according to their deeds and that in life the planting is free, but the harvest mandatory.

In the question # 1,000 of “The Spirits’ Book” Kardec asked: “Can we, in the present life, redeem our faults?” The immortals answered: “Yes, by making reparation for them. But do not suppose that you can redeem them by a few trifling privations, or by giving, after your death, what you can no longer make use of. God does not value a sterile repentance, a mere smiting of the breast, easily done. The loss of a little finger in doing good to others effaces more wrong doing than any amount of self-torture undergone solely with a view to one's own interest.

The repentance – according to the Spiritist Doctrine – is a blending of compensation and expiation. Together, they are the necessary conditions to erase the traces of a mistake and its consequences.

Repentance softens the traces of expiation and favors resignation – an active force that the Spirit of Lazarus defines as being consent of the heart. But only through repair, which consists in doing well to those you harmed, you can nullify the effect, destroying the cause.

The apostle Peter taught us that love covers the cluster of sins, well-known sentence that Divaldo P. Franco uses to express even clearer: "The good we cancels out the evil we did”.

The wrong thought that we came to Earth to suffer should, then, be replaced by another set of ideas, it means, that life is a struggle and we have not come here neither to suffer nor to enjoy, but to win it.