Karmic Concepts
Karmic Wheel
On a recent trip, I found myself in the audience of an “informed” astrologer. He was doling stories on the reasons of the events of the Mahabharata. A recurring concept in his themes was past life “karma”. To a question from one of the five strong audience – he replied that the hardship in this life is due to the bad karma of the previous lives. In fact he classified karma into two types – once which accumulates over lifetimes, and the other which expires with every life. Interesting thought…
Karma as a positive behavior reinforcing concept is excellent. Its a sturdy fabric to build our society with. Without this – we are liable to just annihilate ourselves in random fashion from time to time to random acts of greed and excess. Social evolution (with the implication that non-karma oriented societies failed in the long run) has made this such a strong concept (even in other religions apart from Hinduism & Buddhism) that by the time we are adults – we seriously believe that doing “bad” will get you “bad” and vice a versa. In fact it is such a strong idea that indeed after doing a “wrong” thing – one might expect to self destruct – further proving the concept. And also perfectly serving the purpose of keeping a healthy society.
However to be perfectly logical – this concept by itself is not true. There are people in this world with enormous amounts of “bad karma”, who never see the raw end of the deal. Vice a versa their are many “good karma” guys who never see a great life till their ends.
To accept such exceptions we start reasoning with the previous and next birth concept. It gives us satisfaction to know that “bad things will happen” in the next life of a “bad karma” person. It is at this point that although we are actually seeing the fallacy – we yet do not want to reconcile the contradiction, covering it instead with conjecture.
To sum up – we need to understand that the concept of karma is not a passive/reactionary “God-mediated” service. We ourselves have to enforce the concept. To that end some of us may fail and become greedy and obnoxious. Again it is for the rest of us to diligently enforce the concept. Sitting back and harping about the “next birth” will only make sure that this concept will eventually fail ….
In this country (India) there are millions waiting with hunger in their guts and a desire for a better life in their minds. They can, if they wanted to, come together and enforce the “karma” concept on those that suppress them and serve to impoverish them. And yet the imagined next life and its implications are injecting a lethargy into the system. We have made the karma concept and it up to us to make the magic happen. We are indeed our own Gods !
Related posts:
Excellent job right here. I definitely enjoyed what you had to say. Keep heading because you definitely bring a new voice to this topic. Not many people would say what youve said and still make it interesting. Well, at least Im interested. Cant wait to see more of this from you.
Thank you for an additional fantastic article. Where else could anyone get that type of info in these a perfect way of writing? I have a presentation next week, and I’m to the look for such data.