| Cougar Press PO Box 894 Meadview AZ 86444 |
| Karma |
"The operation is thus:
II, 12. "The karma-container has its root in the Sources of Trouble, and is experienced in seen
and unseen births."
The preceding quotes are from Practical Yoga, Ancient and Modern, by Ernest Wood, a translation
and explanation of the Aphorisms of Patanjali. To me it makes it sound as though there is some
cosmic accounting for all of our deeds, or misdeeds. That has always been the impression I got
about most or all of the teaching and revelation about karma.
I remember back in the seventies, when everyone was jumping on the karma wagon. It was
interpreted as an all purpose excuse in the realm of ethics. I have my karma. Hence, I am free of
responsibility for the suffering that I experience because it's some debt that I have to pay for
some actions that I made in another lifetime. At the same time, my current behavior is pre-
endorsed by my acceptance of its effects, hopefully in some future lifetime. Either way it can
amount to an "I paid my dues" attitude which frees me to do as I please.
It also makes it easy for us to dismiss the sufferings of others. "He's just collecting his karma."
Not only that, but our own pleasures, deep or transitory, can also be chalked up to what we have
earned, and thus deserve, by our own past actions, karma.
When we hear the idea that God loves us, we can interpret that to mean that in large areas God's
decisions are more emotional than logical. He has the twin abilities to be supremely rational and
supremely irrational. That's why we have two sides to our own brain, so that we can do the
same. Love often transcends reason, or overrules it. But reason is never entirely abandoned.
The harmonious pairing of love and logic may amount to what we recognize as wisdom. How to
have your cake and eat it too.
Karma has been translated as work. Work can assume many meanings. As a noun, it can stand
for what we do, how we do it, and what we leave behind when we have done our work. As a verb,
it describes the function of a mechanism, a system, the laws of nature and math and physics. All
of these behave with ultimate accuracy: it all works.
The fact that the results of whatever behavior or application can be unpredictable does not mean
that the thing is not still working. Everything works. If we look about us, knowing, as we do,
that all that we see are photons bouncing off quarks and electrons, we have to admit that the
universe works. It's not so much predictable as expectable. We expect that a thing like gravity
will continue to behave as it has in the past, and it does. So, even though we cannot predict the
results, they make sense when they happen. To whom, we must ask, do they make sense? To us,
we must answer. They make sense to us, not at the quantum level, but at the level we work at
where we interpret the world to be wind and rain, sunshine and flowers, people, animals, trees,
mountains and stars. Karma.
Some physicists propose that there may be, may need to be and may only be one electron that,
traveling at the speed of light, is not itself bound by time. Instead it creates it. There are any
number of thought patterns that lead us to the same idea, which is the unity of all existence. The
divinity that sees, hears and feels the world through our eyes, ears and finger tips has perceived
the world through the senses of every other being as well. At any particular level or vortex,
anywhere that we obtain that sense of self, we are all tapping into the same thing.
The reality is that we do not need to wait for our karma. Whatever happens to us is the result of
motions that we ourselves made long ago. Whatever we do goes into the endless world of effect
where we will find it again. What evolves is compassion, when we accept the suffering of others as
it is. What evolves from compassion is care. We make the world what we want it to be. Part of
what we want it to be is mysterious. We want to wonder what is going on. We want to learn what
can be learned from pain, loneliness, loss, confusion and ignorance. We want to personally feel
the anger and the boredom.
But we also want it to become better than it is, and most of us want to have something to do with
making that so. This response can be totally selfish. I want the world to be better because I am
in the world.
Sociologists describe concentric circles of care. We care first for ourselves, then for our family,
and then for larger groups like extended families, clans, tribes, companies, units and
congregations. Then there are nations. Beyond that, if there is still any care left it might be
applied to the whole species or the home planet. In these enlightened times, many people salve
their conscience with care and concern for other species, as well as for the ecology.
Another popular attitude leads to casting aspersions at the idea of God: "If there were a God, I
would have something to say to him about how he has been handling this whole thing." The
implication here is that we all know there is no God, and that there is no shortage of evidence that
the wisdom and benevolence of a Supreme being is missing. What God would allow all of the
ignorance and pain, the wars and crime, plagues and famines, birth defects, bigotry, holocausts
and rampant destruction of the planet? Or, even worse, what kind of a God would not only allow
but actually create all of these miseries?
What has puzzled me is the penchant for devoted atheists to define this Deity that they refuse to
believe in. These definitions are commonly drawn from prophecy and theology. They choose not
to believe in the God of Moses, Paul or Constantine. Or they choose not to believe in the God of
John the Baptist, Jesus, the apostles Peter and John, the reformers like Martin Luther or John
Calvin, the heretics like Mohammed or Joseph Smith, or the pagans like Buddha, Lao Tzu or
Sitting Bull. Why should anyone subscribe to the conclusions about reality that were reached by
folks who knew nothing about cosmology or quantum physics, people who didn't know that the
universe is thirteen and a half billion years old, or dreamers who never dreamed of the reality of
the big bang?
An analogy might be the attitude of the naysayers who christened Robert Fulton's steam boat
"Fulton's Folly." After it made its successful 150 mile trip up the Hudson River to Albany, these
people shut up. Imagine if they had continued to claim that steamboats were impossible.
In discussions about subjects like the origin and age of the universe, evolution, life support and
extraterrestrial life, there are those who cling to the concept that if something is not in accord
with the contents of the Old and New Testaments, then it isn't true. Subjects that were not
included in the Bible include internal combustion, nuclear physics, space travel, electronics,
computers, firearms, motor vehicles, and aircraft. To not accept these, just because they're not
mentioned in the Bible, would be an obvious error.
There are good reasons why these matters were not covered in the sacred scriptures of the
Christians and Hebrews. One good reason is that the technologies mentioned did not exist when
these scrolls were inscribed. Nor had the observations and theories of modern physics and
astronomy yet come into existence. Writers like John the Apostle had to do the best they could
with the concepts of reality that were current back in the first century C.E. He was speaking to
shepherds and fishermen, farmers and warriors, weavers and carpenters, not astrophysicists and
mathematicians.
So, when someone tells us that they do not believe in God, we must clarify just what they mean.
If they are only saying that they do not hold with the literal accounts of giants in the sky hurling
lightning bolts, or of some magician creating plants on Earth before he got around to putting
stars in the heavens, we can easily agree. None of the ancient creation myths are of any value in
the search for truth and reality. The modern myths about Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the
Grinch, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny are just as valid as tales about the world being built on
the back of a turtle.
It's pretty easy to be an atheist if all that is required is that one not believe in a bunch of gods and
goddesses squabbling like a passel of drunken in-laws. I bear no ill will toward the ones who
invented these tales. Humanity has four basic needs which are food, clothing, shelter and
entertainment. All of these myths belong to the last category. Nights grew long around the fire in
primitive times. There certainly was no television, but there was music, dancing, poetry and story
telling.
In all honesty, this whole web site also belongs in the realm of entertainment. I'm not providing
you with food, clothing or shelter. That's for sure. But sometimes we don't realize how
important it is that we amuse ourselves beyond having a full tummy and a place to sleep. Art,
literature, theatre, religion, history and politics can all be considered as forms of entertainment,
and without entertainment we would probably all die of boredom or insanity.
I know that when I first encountered the concept of karma, I found it very entertaining. I found
it to be consoling, the idea that we were to have second chances to get it right, rather than the
heaven and hell theory that I was raised on. Reincarnation, suffering for our own transgressions
and the opportunity to evolve in the direction of goodness and wisdom, sort of made the whole
universe, or at least the human part, into an open ended Purgatory. Not so amusing is the
mystery that, if the world is only a place for us to pay for the mistakes that we have made while in
the world, just what is the point of the whole thing?
We are tempted to complain that we didn't ask to be born. Who doesn't feel sorrow for the baby
born into a life of sickness, abuse and unhappiness? Does the little child have this to bear only
because of irresponsible parents, or was it because in some previous life he was a guard in a
concentration camp, a slave owner, or perhaps a Roman soldier in Jerusalem?
There are other ways to look at this problem. Wisdom and experience might lead to the
germination of the idea that we did ask to be born. We can look at childbirth, not as something
the parents do to their kids, but rather as what the kids do to their parents. It has been suggested
how incredibly fortunate each of us had to be in order to be born at all. Of the billions of sperm
that raced toward the ovum, only the one that got there first would have resulted in that
particular baby. Any other first place polliwog would have joined with the egg to become
somebody else. It's no wonder that we all are so lucky. Talk with any adult who has taken the
time to look at his life, and you will hear stories of close calls, near misses at intersections and all
of the other blessings of serendipity.
Of course, if one is to count this fortune as good luck, it is necessary to recognize the benefits of
existence. Whether it is to be measured in terms of beauty, pleasure, awareness, wisdom or joy,
the suggestion here is that the good outweighs the bad. For some, the inescapable conclusion is
the opposite, the despair that the bad outweighs the good.
There is a different approach, one that transcends the idea of keeping score. Within the scope of
reality and life there are games and contests, conflicts and struggles, victories and defeats. But
life itself is not a game. Reality is not some cosmic contest. We lament our pain and loss, but
learning, growing, healing and changing are all painful. Do we really desire existence without
change?
As for loss, isn't that just a part of the illusion of time? We have the dimension called time so
that we don't have to experience everything all in one instant. Where would be the fun in that?
Have you ever watched a movie and become so emotionally involved that you felt a profound
sense of loss when a character died, or when a place is left behind, or when the movie is over?
Yet, you haven't lost anything. You can always watch the movie again.
Old people can be guilty of watching the movie again, sitting in their doddering age and reliving
treasured experiences from youth or childhood. As our brains slow down, the bubble of time that
we call the present expands, and we discover that nothing has been lost.
Creation is perhaps a work of art. When we step back and observe the whole thing, we see the
beauty and the finality. We see that all of the pain of learning, growing, healing and changing has
been balanced by the joy and pleasure of the finished work. Karma.
...and then maybe we look a little closer, and we see that this needs to be changed, or that some
healing needs to happen. We see there is part of our creation that can still grow larger, more
complex and more beautiful. We realize that we still have something to learn, and so we focus
once again on this or that detail of the wonderful universe. Karma.
- (a) we perform an action (karma);
(b) we thus make something (a karma);
(c) that something some day ripens into our environment (called karma);
(d) that environment, through Pleasure and Pain, teaches us. This tuition from the outside I
have called extuition."
II, 12. "The karma-container has its root in the Sources of Trouble, and is experienced in seen
and unseen births."
The preceding quotes are from Practical Yoga, Ancient and Modern, by Ernest Wood, a translation
and explanation of the Aphorisms of Patanjali. To me it makes it sound as though there is some
cosmic accounting for all of our deeds, or misdeeds. That has always been the impression I got
about most or all of the teaching and revelation about karma.
I remember back in the seventies, when everyone was jumping on the karma wagon. It was
interpreted as an all purpose excuse in the realm of ethics. I have my karma. Hence, I am free of
responsibility for the suffering that I experience because it's some debt that I have to pay for
some actions that I made in another lifetime. At the same time, my current behavior is pre-
endorsed by my acceptance of its effects, hopefully in some future lifetime. Either way it can
amount to an "I paid my dues" attitude which frees me to do as I please.
It also makes it easy for us to dismiss the sufferings of others. "He's just collecting his karma."
Not only that, but our own pleasures, deep or transitory, can also be chalked up to what we have
earned, and thus deserve, by our own past actions, karma.
When we hear the idea that God loves us, we can interpret that to mean that in large areas God's
decisions are more emotional than logical. He has the twin abilities to be supremely rational and
supremely irrational. That's why we have two sides to our own brain, so that we can do the
same. Love often transcends reason, or overrules it. But reason is never entirely abandoned.
The harmonious pairing of love and logic may amount to what we recognize as wisdom. How to
have your cake and eat it too.
Karma has been translated as work. Work can assume many meanings. As a noun, it can stand
for what we do, how we do it, and what we leave behind when we have done our work. As a verb,
it describes the function of a mechanism, a system, the laws of nature and math and physics. All
of these behave with ultimate accuracy: it all works.
The fact that the results of whatever behavior or application can be unpredictable does not mean
that the thing is not still working. Everything works. If we look about us, knowing, as we do,
that all that we see are photons bouncing off quarks and electrons, we have to admit that the
universe works. It's not so much predictable as expectable. We expect that a thing like gravity
will continue to behave as it has in the past, and it does. So, even though we cannot predict the
results, they make sense when they happen. To whom, we must ask, do they make sense? To us,
we must answer. They make sense to us, not at the quantum level, but at the level we work at
where we interpret the world to be wind and rain, sunshine and flowers, people, animals, trees,
mountains and stars. Karma.
Some physicists propose that there may be, may need to be and may only be one electron that,
traveling at the speed of light, is not itself bound by time. Instead it creates it. There are any
number of thought patterns that lead us to the same idea, which is the unity of all existence. The
divinity that sees, hears and feels the world through our eyes, ears and finger tips has perceived
the world through the senses of every other being as well. At any particular level or vortex,
anywhere that we obtain that sense of self, we are all tapping into the same thing.
The reality is that we do not need to wait for our karma. Whatever happens to us is the result of
motions that we ourselves made long ago. Whatever we do goes into the endless world of effect
where we will find it again. What evolves is compassion, when we accept the suffering of others as
it is. What evolves from compassion is care. We make the world what we want it to be. Part of
what we want it to be is mysterious. We want to wonder what is going on. We want to learn what
can be learned from pain, loneliness, loss, confusion and ignorance. We want to personally feel
the anger and the boredom.
But we also want it to become better than it is, and most of us want to have something to do with
making that so. This response can be totally selfish. I want the world to be better because I am
in the world.
Sociologists describe concentric circles of care. We care first for ourselves, then for our family,
and then for larger groups like extended families, clans, tribes, companies, units and
congregations. Then there are nations. Beyond that, if there is still any care left it might be
applied to the whole species or the home planet. In these enlightened times, many people salve
their conscience with care and concern for other species, as well as for the ecology.
Another popular attitude leads to casting aspersions at the idea of God: "If there were a God, I
would have something to say to him about how he has been handling this whole thing." The
implication here is that we all know there is no God, and that there is no shortage of evidence that
the wisdom and benevolence of a Supreme being is missing. What God would allow all of the
ignorance and pain, the wars and crime, plagues and famines, birth defects, bigotry, holocausts
and rampant destruction of the planet? Or, even worse, what kind of a God would not only allow
but actually create all of these miseries?
What has puzzled me is the penchant for devoted atheists to define this Deity that they refuse to
believe in. These definitions are commonly drawn from prophecy and theology. They choose not
to believe in the God of Moses, Paul or Constantine. Or they choose not to believe in the God of
John the Baptist, Jesus, the apostles Peter and John, the reformers like Martin Luther or John
Calvin, the heretics like Mohammed or Joseph Smith, or the pagans like Buddha, Lao Tzu or
Sitting Bull. Why should anyone subscribe to the conclusions about reality that were reached by
folks who knew nothing about cosmology or quantum physics, people who didn't know that the
universe is thirteen and a half billion years old, or dreamers who never dreamed of the reality of
the big bang?
An analogy might be the attitude of the naysayers who christened Robert Fulton's steam boat
"Fulton's Folly." After it made its successful 150 mile trip up the Hudson River to Albany, these
people shut up. Imagine if they had continued to claim that steamboats were impossible.
In discussions about subjects like the origin and age of the universe, evolution, life support and
extraterrestrial life, there are those who cling to the concept that if something is not in accord
with the contents of the Old and New Testaments, then it isn't true. Subjects that were not
included in the Bible include internal combustion, nuclear physics, space travel, electronics,
computers, firearms, motor vehicles, and aircraft. To not accept these, just because they're not
mentioned in the Bible, would be an obvious error.
There are good reasons why these matters were not covered in the sacred scriptures of the
Christians and Hebrews. One good reason is that the technologies mentioned did not exist when
these scrolls were inscribed. Nor had the observations and theories of modern physics and
astronomy yet come into existence. Writers like John the Apostle had to do the best they could
with the concepts of reality that were current back in the first century C.E. He was speaking to
shepherds and fishermen, farmers and warriors, weavers and carpenters, not astrophysicists and
mathematicians.
So, when someone tells us that they do not believe in God, we must clarify just what they mean.
If they are only saying that they do not hold with the literal accounts of giants in the sky hurling
lightning bolts, or of some magician creating plants on Earth before he got around to putting
stars in the heavens, we can easily agree. None of the ancient creation myths are of any value in
the search for truth and reality. The modern myths about Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the
Grinch, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny are just as valid as tales about the world being built on
the back of a turtle.
It's pretty easy to be an atheist if all that is required is that one not believe in a bunch of gods and
goddesses squabbling like a passel of drunken in-laws. I bear no ill will toward the ones who
invented these tales. Humanity has four basic needs which are food, clothing, shelter and
entertainment. All of these myths belong to the last category. Nights grew long around the fire in
primitive times. There certainly was no television, but there was music, dancing, poetry and story
telling.
In all honesty, this whole web site also belongs in the realm of entertainment. I'm not providing
you with food, clothing or shelter. That's for sure. But sometimes we don't realize how
important it is that we amuse ourselves beyond having a full tummy and a place to sleep. Art,
literature, theatre, religion, history and politics can all be considered as forms of entertainment,
and without entertainment we would probably all die of boredom or insanity.
I know that when I first encountered the concept of karma, I found it very entertaining. I found
it to be consoling, the idea that we were to have second chances to get it right, rather than the
heaven and hell theory that I was raised on. Reincarnation, suffering for our own transgressions
and the opportunity to evolve in the direction of goodness and wisdom, sort of made the whole
universe, or at least the human part, into an open ended Purgatory. Not so amusing is the
mystery that, if the world is only a place for us to pay for the mistakes that we have made while in
the world, just what is the point of the whole thing?
We are tempted to complain that we didn't ask to be born. Who doesn't feel sorrow for the baby
born into a life of sickness, abuse and unhappiness? Does the little child have this to bear only
because of irresponsible parents, or was it because in some previous life he was a guard in a
concentration camp, a slave owner, or perhaps a Roman soldier in Jerusalem?
There are other ways to look at this problem. Wisdom and experience might lead to the
germination of the idea that we did ask to be born. We can look at childbirth, not as something
the parents do to their kids, but rather as what the kids do to their parents. It has been suggested
how incredibly fortunate each of us had to be in order to be born at all. Of the billions of sperm
that raced toward the ovum, only the one that got there first would have resulted in that
particular baby. Any other first place polliwog would have joined with the egg to become
somebody else. It's no wonder that we all are so lucky. Talk with any adult who has taken the
time to look at his life, and you will hear stories of close calls, near misses at intersections and all
of the other blessings of serendipity.
Of course, if one is to count this fortune as good luck, it is necessary to recognize the benefits of
existence. Whether it is to be measured in terms of beauty, pleasure, awareness, wisdom or joy,
the suggestion here is that the good outweighs the bad. For some, the inescapable conclusion is
the opposite, the despair that the bad outweighs the good.
There is a different approach, one that transcends the idea of keeping score. Within the scope of
reality and life there are games and contests, conflicts and struggles, victories and defeats. But
life itself is not a game. Reality is not some cosmic contest. We lament our pain and loss, but
learning, growing, healing and changing are all painful. Do we really desire existence without
change?
As for loss, isn't that just a part of the illusion of time? We have the dimension called time so
that we don't have to experience everything all in one instant. Where would be the fun in that?
Have you ever watched a movie and become so emotionally involved that you felt a profound
sense of loss when a character died, or when a place is left behind, or when the movie is over?
Yet, you haven't lost anything. You can always watch the movie again.
Old people can be guilty of watching the movie again, sitting in their doddering age and reliving
treasured experiences from youth or childhood. As our brains slow down, the bubble of time that
we call the present expands, and we discover that nothing has been lost.
Creation is perhaps a work of art. When we step back and observe the whole thing, we see the
beauty and the finality. We see that all of the pain of learning, growing, healing and changing has
been balanced by the joy and pleasure of the finished work. Karma.
...and then maybe we look a little closer, and we see that this needs to be changed, or that some
healing needs to happen. We see there is part of our creation that can still grow larger, more
complex and more beautiful. We realize that we still have something to learn, and so we focus
once again on this or that detail of the wonderful universe. Karma.
| Yoga for Carnivores by Jay Dyck |