People like to divide karma into good karma and bad karma, to which, it is supposed that good karma consists of doing good things and right actions, whereas bad karma consists of doing bad things and wrong actions. While there is truth in this statement, this also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what karma is all about. Karma isn't about rewarding the good and punishing the bad, it really doesn’t represent that at all, instead karma is more akin to a vital aid that is helping and allowing us to stay focused and on- point in our life and our decisions, because without karma to prick our conscience and to thereby help us mend our wayward ways, we would instead have a strong tendency to keep doing whatever wrongs that we were committing with very little real hope that we would ever change because our thought processes would be fundamentally wrong.
While you aren't necessarily what you think, you are what you are, based upon your actions and the thoughts behind those actions. That is to say if your mind isn't right in the first place, so that, for instance, you say one thing, but do another, sowing misdirection and deception, all of the above essentially being done in order to serve yourself above all, you are eventually going to have to face those traits in another person who can play the game at a level far beyond yours. It is often only when you begin to recognize that your behavior is negative and those negative consequences reap what they have sowed, that you will finally recognize the error of your ways, for the pathway back to God can only ultimately be accomplished through the straight and narrow road, no matter what games you play about that with your mind.
You can look upon karma in somewhat the same way that pain acts as a warning mechanism for us, permitting us to understand that searing pain often signifies that something has good awry, and thereby we should correct this thing before the pain becomes truly intolerable and debilitating. When it comes to our conscience, karma acts as an early warning system, to help to correct us, before one little misstep becomes several significant missteps, and an error of judgment once, becomes ingrained instead as a part of our character and habit. The more we veer down the path of error, the heavier the consequences, so that, for many, only when the burden gets too heavy, do we even contemplate for a second, that the fault might indeed lie in ourselves and not in our stars.
We need karma for our own good, because without karma life would actually be total chaos, as lives built around one's own selfishness, aggrandizement, lust, and greed, if it was to meet nothing but the same, would result in such a cutthroat world, that it would simply be intolerable, and completely unbearable. We don't live in that world, because our Creator has gifted us with grace and wisdom, as well as the very tools that we need so as to build our stairway to Heaven, to which, our God, no matter how many times we fail or fall short or do wrong, keeps reminding us through karma, to dust ourselves off, and press on, because His heart never rests till we rest in Him, as it was, from the beginning.