Karma
Lately I've been thinking a lot about karma and ethical choices. Perhaps a little too much. At the same time, it's something that bears watching. I find myself wondering fairly often if karma isn't just another way to express the concept of cause and effect, but with less emphasis on physics and more emphasis on the human experience.
An aside on one of my favorite flavors of karma: retribution. I've always loved stories about comeuppances delivered. Revenge stories are some of my favorites, especially if justice is perfectly served. Several revenge tales come to mind:
1. Falling Down, the movie from the early 1990s starring Michael Douglas. Absolutely one of the best movies of all time, not because it is a cinematic masterpiece in any way, but because, aside from the last few minutes of the movie, the story is perfectly cosmically balanced. Everybody gets what's coming to them.
2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I'm currently in the last 300 pages of the 1,200 page unabridged version. nachtrabe kindly lent it to me many moons ago, claiming that the book is 1,200 pages of awesome. He's absolutely right about it. But to quote him entirely out of context, undertaking to read this book is "nontrivial." I digress.
3. Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein. It's not strictly a revenge tale, but it does deal with the Judeo-Christian afterlife in a pretty fun way. Satan is a worldly protagonist; God is kind of an immature douche. And, of course, it's Heinlein, so what's not to love? A must-read.
Humans, it seems, and perhaps myself more than most, are obsessed with enforcing karma. We want to see that everything evens out in the end, that each kid at the birthday party gets a cupcake, that the guy who cut you off in traffic gets cut off a few minutes later, and that justice is generally done. And there's nothing wrong with that in my view. The human obsession with justice is, after all, why any legal apparatus exists.
On the other hand, beyond human conceptions of justice lies something fundamental and much more subtle. I'm not talking about dropping a pencil and it falls to the ground. Gravity tests are great, but what I'm talking about is the metaphysical aspect of karma. We find ourselves drawn to certain activities, institutions, but especially people and sometimes animals. I'm going to wander into the realm of reincarnation a bit here because the karma thing, as it pertains to the emotional-spiritual complex of human relationships, doesn't work without reincarnation thrown into the mix.
I don't know if the metaphysical conception of karma is a load of bunk or if it's for true. But either way, it's a useful mental framework for explaining certain otherwise inexplicable or merely partially explicable phenomena (love at first sight, deja vu, et cetera) we experience when dealing with others. And I like being able to put every thought and feeling into its little box. I like to have explanations for things, tangible or not.
I'll talk about my experience with this since that's all I've got. About a week ago, I was hanging out with a friend, R, when a sudden realization hit me: R used to be my child in a past life. I don't know why that came to mind, but I do tend to feel fiercely protective of R for no particularly good reason. Another example: hanging out on Monday with another friend, D, I was momentarily overcome with a strong sense of deja vu. I have at least one of those episodes every time I see D. Or, to take a really ancient example, when I met my husband, it was a love at first sight kind of thing. We were finishing each others' sentences within the first two days after meeting.
With each of these people I feel I have some kind of karma to work out. There is some reason we were thrown together at this time and in this place. And while I feel that is true of pretty much all the people we meet in our lives, when there's big karma I think I can kind of sense it. Or maybe I'm just fooling myself and making this up. But anyhow, this is what I've experienced to be the case.
After writing this entry, I took a gander at what Wikipedia had to say about karma. The entry is really fascinating.
An aside on one of my favorite flavors of karma: retribution. I've always loved stories about comeuppances delivered. Revenge stories are some of my favorites, especially if justice is perfectly served. Several revenge tales come to mind:
1. Falling Down, the movie from the early 1990s starring Michael Douglas. Absolutely one of the best movies of all time, not because it is a cinematic masterpiece in any way, but because, aside from the last few minutes of the movie, the story is perfectly cosmically balanced. Everybody gets what's coming to them.
2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I'm currently in the last 300 pages of the 1,200 page unabridged version. nachtrabe kindly lent it to me many moons ago, claiming that the book is 1,200 pages of awesome. He's absolutely right about it. But to quote him entirely out of context, undertaking to read this book is "nontrivial." I digress.
3. Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein. It's not strictly a revenge tale, but it does deal with the Judeo-Christian afterlife in a pretty fun way. Satan is a worldly protagonist; God is kind of an immature douche. And, of course, it's Heinlein, so what's not to love? A must-read.
Humans, it seems, and perhaps myself more than most, are obsessed with enforcing karma. We want to see that everything evens out in the end, that each kid at the birthday party gets a cupcake, that the guy who cut you off in traffic gets cut off a few minutes later, and that justice is generally done. And there's nothing wrong with that in my view. The human obsession with justice is, after all, why any legal apparatus exists.
On the other hand, beyond human conceptions of justice lies something fundamental and much more subtle. I'm not talking about dropping a pencil and it falls to the ground. Gravity tests are great, but what I'm talking about is the metaphysical aspect of karma. We find ourselves drawn to certain activities, institutions, but especially people and sometimes animals. I'm going to wander into the realm of reincarnation a bit here because the karma thing, as it pertains to the emotional-spiritual complex of human relationships, doesn't work without reincarnation thrown into the mix.
I don't know if the metaphysical conception of karma is a load of bunk or if it's for true. But either way, it's a useful mental framework for explaining certain otherwise inexplicable or merely partially explicable phenomena (love at first sight, deja vu, et cetera) we experience when dealing with others. And I like being able to put every thought and feeling into its little box. I like to have explanations for things, tangible or not.
I'll talk about my experience with this since that's all I've got. About a week ago, I was hanging out with a friend, R, when a sudden realization hit me: R used to be my child in a past life. I don't know why that came to mind, but I do tend to feel fiercely protective of R for no particularly good reason. Another example: hanging out on Monday with another friend, D, I was momentarily overcome with a strong sense of deja vu. I have at least one of those episodes every time I see D. Or, to take a really ancient example, when I met my husband, it was a love at first sight kind of thing. We were finishing each others' sentences within the first two days after meeting.
With each of these people I feel I have some kind of karma to work out. There is some reason we were thrown together at this time and in this place. And while I feel that is true of pretty much all the people we meet in our lives, when there's big karma I think I can kind of sense it. Or maybe I'm just fooling myself and making this up. But anyhow, this is what I've experienced to be the case.
After writing this entry, I took a gander at what Wikipedia had to say about karma. The entry is really fascinating.