Just what is Karma.

       What you give is what you get, as you sow so shall you reap, every action has an equal opposite reaction. There are possibly dozens of differing ways of looking at how karma works but all in all, karma is about getting what you deserve.
       We cannot blame anyone for what happens to us. Whether we remember it or not we have generated our lot in life.

But I'm a good person.

       Maybe you wouldn't hurt a fly and still you seem to get so much suffering in your life. Well mostly. Maybe you wouldn't hurt a fly most of the time, but what about when someone does something that you vehemently oppose? Like flying a 757 into the NYWTC.


       I guess many beautuful people wouldn't take that lying down. The fact that the Bush administration has launched two wars in the wake of the WTC attack (Afghanistan and Iraq), without ever coming up with the proof that Old Oswami bin Lala was actually responsible, and with hardly a complaint from most of the American public, speaks loud and clear of the indignation of the nation.


But let's not get bogged down in just one or two conflicts, we all do things we aren't proud of when we get angry, what to speak of lusty, bored, frustrated, tired, overbudget, cheated on, left out, ... we don't always think perfectly clearly enough to be totally squeeky clean.

But they deserve it.

       Could be! It has to be their karma for it to even happen, but if we take it upon ourselves to punish someone without the right to punish them, and here I'm referring to the fact that we don't know that the enemy actually was responsible, then it becomes our karma. If we launch an attack on someone then we are the aggressor.

Other lives.

       For all we know this karma to attack and be attacked may have been going on for many lifetimes (or maybe not), we are so limited in our knowledge of events that we have no way of being able to track down the past beyond a certain point. We take our birth according to our activities in other, previous lifetimes, but even if we remember something of a past incarnation, how do we know any of it is accurate? What is there that we cannot remember? My point here is that we have difficulty remembering our last dozen phone numbers let alone our last dozen lifetimes.

Payback.

       We see how karma works. I hit you and you hit me. I scratch your back and you scratch mine, unless you think that you can get away with cheating me and then next life, what happens? Then we blame each other; but if it happens, we earned it. The fact that it happens means that we generated it ... rocks do not roll uphill, first we need a gradient. If we generate a gradient then the event may occur.

Rebirth.

       We cannot be born into this world without generating the gradient. Just desiring it is enough. At some stage of our eternal existence we have desired to enjoy life within the karmic world, and there is some fleeting pleasure to be had, but the cost of our pleasure far outweighs the enjoyment. We take birth again and again in various species of animals, aquatics, birds, worms, germs, insects, etc, etc. Life in this material realm is based upon exploitation for personal gain, always at the expense of others. We undergo a cyclic existence of winning and losing, victor and victim, killing and being killed, always fraught with suffering, with difficulty and distress. Therefore we need to break this cyle of karma.

Unlimited Possibilities.

       There are millions of species of life on this planet, and without access to accurate records, one can merely speculate about other planets and galaxies, even universes, so far away from our universe that we have no way of telling that they are there. We can see that there are not only millions of different species, but sometimes trillions of different individuals within any species. Zillions of germs can infect one cotton swab. Each gram of soil may contain up to 1,000,000,000 or more microbes. That's as many microbes in a single gram of soil as there are people in all of China! We may not wish to become a germ, but how do we ensure that it cannot eventuate? We see that the number of individuals within the non human species far outweigh the humans, so the probability that we will get a human birth next time around is pretty small. Besides, we get our birth by karma, so we get what we deserve. Are you so sure that you'll get a happy life next birth, and the one after, and the one after, and the one after...