A divine law states: what you have done will be done to you.

God grants our desires and punishes our actions.

Our thoughts, words, and actions generate positive or negative effects, which lead to good or bad consequences. It is the actions committed in the past or in a previous life that determine the conditions of one's next birth or reincarnation. The suffering linked to wrongful acts has a double origin: the acts themselves, but also those committed in previous lives.

The origin of wrongful acts is most often ignorance of matters relating to God, existential and absolute truth, and spiritual knowledge. But the fact of being unaware that an act is wrong does not prevent one from suffering its undesirable consequences if one commits it, which in turn give rise to other wrongful acts.

Furthermore, two kinds of faults can be distinguished: those that have, so to speak, “matured,” and those that have not yet. By “matured faults,” we mean those whose consequences we are currently experiencing; the others are those, numerous as they are, that are accumulated within us and have not yet produced their fruits of suffering. A person who commits a crime may not be caught and punished immediately, but they will be sooner or later.

Similarly, for some of our faults we will have to suffer in the future, just as for others, which have already “matured,” we suffer today.

Thus, faults and sufferings follow one another, plunging the incarnated soul, conditioned by material energy and the energy of illusion, into pain, life after life. It suffers in its current life the consequences of acts committed in its previous life, and prepares, through its present actions, new sufferings in the future.

“Matured” or “completed” faults can result in chronic illness, legal troubles, a low birth, insufficient education, or a poor physical appearance. Our past actions weigh heavily upon us today, and our present actions are preparing future suffering for us. But this chain can be broken in an instant for anyone who adopts God consciousness and serves Him with love and devotion. This means that devotional service offered to God is capable of eradicating all impurities.

God says in this regard: “The devotional service offered to My Person acts like a blazing fire, infinitely capable of reducing to ashes everything that is thrown into it.”

Everything good we do, we will reap in blessings, and everything bad we do, we will also reap, but exactly of the same nature, in our next life in the form of suffering similar to that which we inflicted or caused to one or more victims. So let us do no harm to anyone, whether a human being or an animal.

We must also understand that we constantly suffer the consequences of our wrongful acts committed in our previous life. Karma, in this case, acts like infallible justice. It is through karma, the law of action and reaction or the law of cause and effect, that we can correct our behavior and improve ourselves, and it is through the suffering endured, and only in this way, that we can erase the evil committed in a previous life.