Most people are stuck in the first three categories of karma and do not even know the other six exist. That is not ignorance - it is the karma itself keeping you blind to its own structure.
- Paul Wagner
The Framework
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev identifies nine distinct categories of karma that operate in human life. I have worked with this framework for decades - not as an academic exercise but as a diagnostic tool in thousands of intuitive readings. When someone sits across from me and describes their suffering, I am listening for which categories of karma are active. It changes everything about how I work with them.
What follows is Sadhguru's framework with my own commentary drawn from direct experience. Where his teaching is precise and systematic, mine is messy and lived. Both are needed. The map and the territory are not the same thing.
1. Sanchita Karma: The Storehouse
Sanchita is the total accumulated karma from all your lifetimes. Every action, every thought, every intention - all of it stored in what the tradition calls the karana sharira, the causal body. You cannot access most of it consciously. It is vast beyond comprehension.
Think of Sanchita as a warehouse the size of a galaxy. You have been filling it for thousands of lifetimes. Most of what is in there, you have no memory of. But it is all still active, all still generating momentum, all still influencing the trajectory of your soul.
2. Prarabdha Karma: This Life's Portion
Prarabdha is the specific portion of Sanchita karma that has been allocated to this lifetime. It is the hand you were dealt. Your body, your family of origin, your baseline temperament, the broad strokes of your life circumstances - all Prarabdha.
This is the karma that most people experience as fate. And in a sense, it is. You did not choose your parents in this lifetime. You did not choose your genetic predispositions. You did not choose the country you were born in. Prarabdha chose for you - based on what your soul needed to work through next.
3. Agami Karma: What You Are Creating Now
Agami is the karma you are generating right now, in this moment, with every choice you make. It is the only category you have direct, immediate influence over. Every thought you think, every word you speak, every action you take is adding to or subtracting from your karmic momentum.
This is where free will lives. Not in choosing your circumstances - Prarabdha handles that. But in choosing how you respond to them. Two people with identical Prarabdha karma can generate wildly different Agami karma based on their choices. One becomes bitter. The other becomes wise. Same river, different swimming.
4-9: The Deeper Categories
Beyond the three primary timelines, Sadhguru identifies additional categories that most seekers never encounter because they require a certain depth of awareness to even perceive.
These include the karma of the body (physical patterns inherited and accumulated), the karma of the mind (thought patterns that have calcified into identity), the karma of energy (how your prana moves and where it gets stuck), and the karma of emotion (the feeling-patterns that repeat regardless of circumstance).
There is also collective karma - the karma you share with your family, your culture, your species. And there is what I call dimensional karma - the karmic patterns that operate at the level of consciousness itself, determining which floors of awareness you have access to and which remain locked.
I will not pretend to have mastered all nine categories. But I have worked with them long enough to know that most human suffering is concentrated in the first four - and that even beginning to address those four can transform a life beyond recognition.