From the forum:

Bhagavad-gita isn’t really the most accurate text if you want to understand karma, because Hinduism in general and Gita in particular don’t really get it, and at the time of writing the commentary I didn’t feel like getting into it in so much detail. I put much more thought into it in the later books. The Hindu concept, according to which one is born because of some karmic impurity, and no longer needs to return after this impurity is removed, is riddled with inaccuracies to the point where it’s actually the opposite of useful. There are better ways of looking at it: karma is not an extrinsic element, it’s the stuff your spiritual body is made of, and it’s not “removed” with the process of cleaning, it’s restructured. Excess “thermodynamic energy” of stress, desires, fears or misapprehensions is “excreted” like excess heat from a thermodynamic system, and as a result you get a more calm, “compressed” substance, liquid instead of gas, or solid instead of liquid. Yoga Sutra deals with this excess of energy and its removal from the spirit-structure. The other problem are the attachments and desires, basically, investments of energy into all kinds of stuff. In your cases, it would be investment of energy into ideas, and desire to have those ideas work in order for them to justify the investment. 🙂 It’s not necessarily stuff like houses, cars or family, the way it is for most people; for some, almost all projections of energy go into their religious worldview, or authority of scriptures or holy persons. This also poses another problem: it mimics the vertical connection, to the point where it would be difficult to describe to some people why their religious ideas are a horizontal structure and not a vertical connection to God, but nevertheless, that’s what they are, and once you are in the state of darshan, samadhi or something similar, it becomes quite apparent. For instance, in the process of initiation into Vajra those things are quite obvious.