Karma is the theory that we are reborn with payback from previous lives. If something bad happens to you, it’s just punishment from something bad you did before that you don’t know about. No need for earthly judgement systems, because all the judgement is sorted out by God (or some equivalent) inbetween lives.
I have never been comfortable with the idea of karma, and now I have worked out why.
Let’s take an example of something bad happening to someone, a child being sexually abused. The abused child is getting their payback because they were a paedophile in a previous life. That’s ok then, we no longer have to worry about paedophilia, or make any effort to resolve it, it’s just the karma playing itself out. The paedophile is doing us all a favour by giving the child its due punishment, a taste of its own medicine. We know that child deserves to be abused because of karma. The rule of karma says that the abused child must have been a paedophile in a previous life. It’s payback. And we know the paedophile will get his payback in a future life. So that’s great, we can just carry on with our own lives, everything will sort itself out. No need to intervene, it will only muck up the karma system if we do. Paedophilia is a necessary part of the universal scheme of things in order to rebalance karma. Accept it and carry on.
Another aspect of karma is that it neatly explains why life is such a struggle, why there is so much suffering in the world. We all have to play out different roles in different lives, that’s just the way it is, the natural order of things. It’s meant to be like that. No need to do anything, because we can’t. Accept it. There is no other choice. We are powerless, helpless. Just follow the script.
Karma is used by some to justify having a more affluent lifestyle. It’s their reward because they must have been a slave in a past life, and now it’s their turn to be wealthy after all that hard work. All signed off and approved by God, so that’s ok then. The current slaves will get their turn too, in the next life. Well they won’t, because the structure is a pyramid and there are limited places at the top. Personally, I don’t see that an affluent lifestyle living off the back of others’ suffering is a “rich” life, a reward or prize. I see it as spiritually poor.
If you are a “saving for the future” type person, you might even want to suffer, believing you will get a good karma credit rating to get a good next life with some good payback. A bit like working really hard to save up for a nice holiday. This also mirrors the Christian approach of getting brownie points for being good so that you get into heaven. Kids are trained from an early age to work for points and rewards if they are “good”.
Karma sounds like a great justification for accepting things as they are. Acceptance seems like a good way to suppress your anger, deny what’s going on, and to justify continuing propping up the current system dictated by a few elite at the top. Noone wants to make changes do they? It’s so much easier not to, to find a justification for doing nothing. We want things to change, but not if we have to make a change in our comfortable lifestyle. We are used to acceptance, we have been trained from birth to acccept our lot. Kids that glimpse the truth, and react against such training are “problem” children, labelled wayward or challenging or ill or delusionary. Angry kids are told to calm (karm) down.
One of the mantras of Buddhism is “acceptance”, and curiously Buddhism and other Eastern religions that spread the Karma theory, are on the rise in the West. Buddhist monks are indoctrinated with teachings from a very early age. The Dalai Lama was removed from his mother at the age of 4. The Buddhist monk system is remarkably similar to the British boarding school system. The mother child bond is broken early, leaving the child ripe for external indoctrination from the ruling elite power in both Britain and Tibetan cultures.
Paedophiles must love the Karma theory. It not only makes their hideous acts acceptable, it actually makes them necessary for karma to be in balance. This is exactly what the paedophiles say they are doing. They are acting out something natural, something ordered by God. They are doing nothing wrong. The child is willing (because they groom the child into “acceptance” of what’s been done to them). Maybe the child even “deserves it” or “asks for it”. You can see where this is going, as Buddhism rises up to replace the spiritual vacuum in the West, we get more belief in Karma, and it plays into the paedophile’s agenda.
Maybe karma theory has been spread by those in power in order to perpetuate our calm docile acceptance of their control. Coincidentally, many of those in power seem to be involved in paedophilia. Or maybe Karma has been lapped up hungrily by many looking for a convenient explanation for evil. I see the role of evil as there to prod us into doing something, to work towards getting rid of the evil, not into “acceptance” of it for perpetuity. The more we accept it, the more it continues, in this life, and any future incarnations.
Where has our human compassion gone, our compassion for our kindred spirits, when paedophilia, slavery, and mass slaughter, get justified as necessary and acceptable?
(See also earlier posts: The Saviour Within, Comfortable Prisons, Goodies and Baddies, Normalising Paedophilia, Centre for Exploiting Missing Children, The Role of Evil)
suli 
“Areopagite specified that the essence itself of Good consists of creating and conserving the existence of beings, whereas Evil aspires to corrupt and annihilate the existence of beings, without ever succeeding. There is, therefore, no absolute evil/’mal’, because such evil would annihilate itself. Evil, taken as such, can never be absolutely bad, but paradoxically participates to the Good; because evil is accountable to Good, for the scarce bit of being that it possesses within it…”
(Jean Scot Érigène. De la Division de la Nature: Periphyseon. Books I & II.
Ed. Puf.1995. pp. 242-243)
We can be grateful to the Forces of darkness (e.g. the Elite, paedophiles & company.) that, implicitly, invite us to discover a certain number of our weaknesses and subsequently provide us with opportunities to rectify them. By bringing them to light and to consciousness we can learn to see beyond the shadows and evil, learn to perceive beyond these transitory clouds that momentarily occult the sunlight and which after all said and done are only there in order to enable us to clarify things, to incite us to see the light. Without a shadow of doubt!
As long as I continued to function in a dual manner, I also continued not only to nourish my pains and accumulate resultant karma thereby ensuring myself an endless life cycle on Earth. Because as soon as we think in terms of otherness we immediately collude with those very forces that characterise and promote the dual illusion. As soon as I realized that, by wishing to impose my own will I was simultaneously enforcing its very opposite, it became possible to adopt an alternative mode of functioning. The goodwill in this world maintains bad will, and vice versa. All of these dualities are but illusions created by the duality of spirit. It is the snare that is inherent to this ego of ours that considers itself separate from the ‘other’ and does everything in its power to affirm its difference, thereby alimenting dualism for its survival. The exact opposite of: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you…” (Jesus).
In fact, ‘Absolute Truth’ contains neither good nor evil – it simply is! ”
(John Scott. AmO… Ed. Deep Root Press. 2013. pp280-1)
ALL religions and belief systems are designed to emprison thoughts, words & deeds, and, of course, and Bouddhism is no exception to this fact. Having re-cognized and innerstood this, there is little point in pursuing lengthy diatribes on the subject, particularily as this, apparently, only serves to “emprison” the argumenation within a restricted, ‘exclusive’ viewpoint that serrves to further re-create the very same abusive exclusion that is being decried – acca : ” As soon as I realized that, by wishing to impose my own will I was simultaneously enforcing its very opposite…”
As long as you continue to view ‘reality’ in terms of “good and bad”, “punishment” and “reward” – while reducing any apparently different ‘point of view’, misrepresnting in the process as some kind of reductionist : “that’s just the way it is, the natural order of things. It’s meant to be like that. No need to do anything, because we can’t. Accept it. There is no other choice. We are powerless, helpless. Just follow the script.” – you continue to assure the unbridled continuation of the mechanism that ensures the continuzation of the very atrocities that you seek to definively resolve.
Paradoxically, the mockingly: “No need to intervene, it will only muck up the karma system if we do.” serves only to reinforce this caduc “karma system”. Karma only applies to duality/fear-based reality. All time and energy invested in protesting AGAINST serves only to reinforce the object of your attention. You don’t need to be a Master ès Qi Kong to innerstand the fact that ‘energy follows thought’. Simplistic (you can count on me for that) logic suggests that if you dislike cabbage, you avoid eating/thinking endlessly about it. And someone who has never encountered cabbage in their lifetime lives cabbage-free; if they do encounter cabbage, the question to be asked is : “Why have I given myself cabbage to experience ?”…and it may take one or several lifetimes to re-solve the question!
If you experience “anger”, by all means express it, but then work upon innerstanding its ORIGIN, as opposed to remaining exclusively centred upon its EFFECT/S, which simply serves to fuel and exacerbate the ‘situation’ or subject in hand. Contenting y/ourself with remonstrating right (or is it) left, or centre, (but never all three !) is equally “spiritually poor”. For it involves considering.positioning oneself as some kind of ‘objective observer’ while, at the same time, expressing ‘subjective feelings’. We are not our feelings. We are not fear. Feelings/emotions/experiences/etc. express themselves through us, ‘means’ whereby we may apprehend ‘meaning’ beyond the realistic illusions of this life.
Amosouldeer, I find that almost everything I write at the moment gets corrected by you as if you are a teacher with a red pen waiting for me, the pupil, to send in my work for marking.
My writing is there for people to take or leave. Comments are normally welcome, but I don’t want any personal advice on how I should be correcting myself or my life or my blog. If you don’t like what I write, and find it so constantly incorrect in your eyes, perhaps you should stop reading my blog.
My comments are addressed to all readers, including myself.
We are constantly confronted with the choice, either to opt for the ‘victim’ role – in which we become/remain defensive prisoners of the ego, reactively personalizing experience – or alternatively choose the pursuit of an open-minded exploration of our implicit co-creator role, wherein full, individual response-ability for everything that is experienced is assumed (thoughts, words, deeds), regardless of their ‘origin’, beit self or another, the latter always playing a ‘mirror role’ for ‘our’ self.
Social conditioning has done a very effective job in training people to avoid looking in the mirror; it’s often referred to as ‘free choice’. Everything is “right” for you…from your point of view. Idem.
Dear Suli
Do you think there is such a thing as a blog “stalker”?
Yes George, my experience tells me there is such a thing as a blog stalker. By strange coincidence, the word “stalker” has been in my mind for several days. I even started to wonder why the clubs and spades (which are both black) have stalks on, but the hearts and diamonds don’t.
You know those twin tunnels you talked about,they sound like female twin towers.I don’t think I’ll be taking my Elswick Hopper down them!
Oh yes, brilliant! I hadn’t spotted that. Thanks Nixon. I have so much material on the Twin Tunnels, I will probably do a whole post at some point. I won’t be going in them either.
For readers who are interested, I have been covering this on my recent Rambles on my other (newish) blog, which is a collection of ad hoc thoughts and observations
http://sulirambles.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/ramble-friday-19th-april-2013/