“It gaba di nahilaba” is a famous Waray adage, which means karma/comeuppance is not long in coming. It is as if the ether is a huge data bank, where our every thought, word and action is given a cipher and is stored for reference or retrieval. Depending on its ripeness, gaba/karma surfaces, even in the most unlikely scenario. And in our voyage through space with Mother Earth, everything should be in balance so as not to tilt and destroy the planet. Achieving balance is the role of karma—and it encompasses all states of matter.

While there is a school of thought that says when we die, our essence transfers to another place and stays there for good, the eastern philosophy holds that we die, get reborn, die again, ad infinitum—and the plaque (karma) that we accumulate thusly gets carried over and influences our life.

Karma is “utang” (debt). There is the mutable karma; there is the immutable karma. Mutable karma is the utang of 100 dollars. Immutable karma is “pagpatay sa kapwa tao”–in killing a fellow human being, you get immutable karma. Do you know why? A single human life is worth more than all the treasures in the universe; a human is THE Creator, THE God, which is in each of us.

Extrajudicial killings, nay killings per se, are simply BAD KARMA.