There are some common practices I’ve learned to ignore about karma when I could be otherwise annoyed. I have relatives who consider “death” a bad karma. Hello? You must be out of your mind, relative. When a neighbor they disagreed with experienced the death of a beloved, they secretly gloat about this bad karma that the neighbor received. While I find this a bit hauntingly coo-coo, other times too funny, indeed the “secret cause” to many things is mortality, as Joseph Campbell puts it, that death is considered too bad. Although I may not feel good about somebody’s death or suffering, I maintain that karma is neither good or bad, and, technically, we are living the stream and flow of our karma, whether or not eventful, every nanosecond of our lives.
Karma has its many layers. If it takes a process for an individual to decipher his or her own thoughts, emotions and unknowns in the shadowy corners of their so-called “subconscious,” how much more the karma of another? Let’s be very realistic about this. There’s wishful thinking that somebody is going through terrible times because of a karma with some amount of gloating added to that, but that doesn’t mean that this person is actually going through terrible times for the reasons the gloater is assuming.
Therefore, unless I’m in a self-improvement discussion with friends and counsellors, I don’t mind other people’s karmas. I don’t mind other people’s business. I have my own life and that’s enough already.
Featured here are Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer Plato’s Atlantis collection for 2010, an outrageous way of looking forward to next year, considering that the Philippines is going through a series of typhoons, some of which having characteristics that haven’t been experienced in a lifetime by a lot of its inhabitants nor witnessed by our weather experts. Much as I’d love to live the day to experience 2010, the recent disasters called Typhoon Ondoy followed up by Typhoon Pepeng in the country made me contemplate again on how transient my residence here on this planet.
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I get your idea of karma’s neutrality. Hope you can write a short story of how karma works in someone’s life. Write an example of it’s neutrality. I’ve been thinking of a real life example now, but I just can’t come up with one. Hmmm…
Ah. That makes it more interesting. Karma doesn’t mean anything. We put the meanings to it. Thus, it is neutral, and anything neutral, as mentioned in some of my earlier posts, is impermanent, or exists conditionally. For example: If you feel bad about spaghetti, it doesn’t make spaghetti bad. If you feel good about pizza, it doesn’t make pizza good. Most important in the study of karma is how something relates to you, otherwise, what’s the point of the study? What’s the point of living? Hence your request for a exemplary life story. Although I was once referred to a reading of the Bhagavad Gita, the best story is our own.
Karma, it seems, provides both bondage and release from something we want or don’t want, and we in the Orient have studied this for many lifetimes and centuries. This is quite an ancient treasure.
If you ask me, however, it isn’t universal.
Isn’t the notion of Karma like the notion of Time? It can’t be seen or proven–but it’s a sometime’s useful framework to describe what occurs in reality.
But like all contrived frameworks, they always fall short of describing the totality of what the universe is, or potentially is.
And also like all contrived frameworks, it is very possible to proceed with life without considering them or their existence.
Time is a wonderful comparison! I personally know some people who go through time warps. And space warps too (bilocation). So there’s this idea of release from our usual constructs of time. Karma to me is like a revolving door. You end up where you began, or finally out of it. It’s like Groundhog Day. Ha ha.
The West has called this the Law of Cause and Effect. Ancient Eastern cultures have had a sense of this such as India in the case of Karma.
“Karma” is a whole package deal in Hinduism, going hand-in-hand with “dharma” (duty). I love the Gita for its transcedentalism. And I can’t help but feel incomplete about the discussion of karma where “duties” or “dharma” isn’t taken up.
China has more of a magnetic sense of it, more of the sense of a Law of Attraction. China asks, “What likes to occur with what?” and not, “What causes what?”. Its sense of goodluck and badluck is based on this. It’s good because it attracts or begets more good. It’s bad because it repels the good.
How Japan senses this is just as interesting. It doesn’t look at a series of events, or a series of causes and effects. Instead it will look at the whole. Japan’s sense of this Law is “Unity,” as if to say, “Never mind the bud, or the petals, look at the flower.” It’s like a culmination or fulfillment. They also have a sense of being drawn in to their own beautiful or perfected creations.
Filipinos may have a superficial practice or idea of this. Karma isn’t a Filipino word to begin with. Maybe it has something to do with the mass religiousity where “karma” simply acquires the meaning of “punishment” (god punishes, therefore repent!). And karmic bond with your neighbor simply acquires the meaning of “revenge”. I think that’s how the ordinary Filipino wrapped his or her mind around this idea.