A dissertation upon Spiritual Work in general and Karma in particular, by Crash

[old_cutter_john]

It's been a long time since I wrote anything about spiritual work, except insofar as it's all spiritual work. I've quit encouraging people because I've discovered that if you pursue the path of knowledge, impeccably and with perfect diligence, regardless of where it leads, sooner or later you're going to get the horrors. You'd be better off on a

Comments

[gmdreia]

My own perception of karma - my own personal insight into it - is that we often filter the whole idea through our western Christian-based moral system (and even if one isn't raised specifically Christian - I'm secular Jewish for example - it's still a Christian-dominant culture and it's just hard to escape those memes). And another thing that doesn't translate very well with nonwestern-based systems is how much of our worldview is based upon taking the word of appointed "experts" relatively unquestioned. You see this a lot with many of the skeptic/atheist contingent (who are not themselves scientists) who basically take their favorite experts' word as gospel while not actually understanding how much uncertainty and mystery is actually involved in real science (and that that's the POINT of it). A discomfort with "not knowing" and or with anything remotely subjective. With these sort of skeptics, the words have changed but the worldview is still basically Christian.

My experience with Buddhism, meditation, and mind altering substances at this point has been that at least with Buddhism, there was the expectation that one should meditate *because* what it tries to describe can only actually be internalized and understood subjectively and empirically... "no one can tell you what the Matrix is, you have to see for yourself".

My understanding of karma: there's no deserving because "deserving" is a product of dualistic thinking, as if some god in the sky were doling out either brownie points or blue-chip stamps for bad or good behavior. All of your action and thought in the past brings you to where you are now. That was my understanding of it. I also felt that the more simplistic explanations of it in terms of mysticism, etc, tended to be metaphor (one Tibetan geshe told me, "if you think that's all bullshit [the stuff about the bardo, hell realms, etc], that's ok too, because all of that isn't the point".)

It's interesting to think and talk about this stuff.