Recently I read something a person wrote about karma and I’d like to give my perspective on that concept. For many people, karma is about payback. I suppose it often feels that way if we view it in the light of of reward and punishment from a stern god-figure. I don’t see it that way.
For me, karma is neutral, nothing “good” or “bad” about it. It’s simply cause and effect. It’s more like a physics concept to me. You know, that one about “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Or, if you’re of the biblical persuasion, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Then there’s the one about “What goes around comes around.”
They all say the same thing. We’re responsible for the things in our lives even if we don’t always want to believe that and even if we might not see the connection. If you have a taut netting hung in front of you and you throw a baseball at it, you expect the ball to bounce back at you in some fashion. Maybe directly at you, maybe caroming off at an angle, but it will come back.
That’s karma in a nutshell. So if you throw mud at someone, at some point that mud will come back to coat you in some way. And if you throw sweet stuff at a person it will come back to you as well. Somehow we always seem to think we’re responsible for the sweet stuff in our lives, that we deserve it, but we make the muddy stuff something we don’t deserve or as some sort of punishment for not being “good” enough. “They” deserve it, but we don’t.
“Good” or “bad” are just concepts that reflect our desires and likes. We’ve all heard the saying about “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” In other words, “good” and “bad” are pretty relative. If we like it, it’s “good,” if we don’t like it, it’s “bad.” I like broccoli; it’s “good.” President Bush didn’t like broccoli; for him, it’s “bad.” But broccoli is just broccoli. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about it.
So why do so many people think karma is a punishment? It’s as plain as the nose on your face, at least when you look in a mirror your nose is plain to see. You don’t see much of it without the mirror. Karma is your mirror. People don’t want to be responsible for things they’ve created in their lives by the behaviors they’ve performed, the choices they’ve made. They want to believe someone else, that god-figure, is doing it to them. It’s just the mirror, not god-figure.
Karma is one way for us to learn things through having various experiences. I don’t like the term “lessons” because that makes it sound like there’s some sort of big teacher in the sky with a grade book in one hand and a ruler in the other and we want to make sure we get a good grade and that we don’t get swatted with the ruler.
I prefer to see karma as simply learning by experience, by trial and error. Nothing wrong with that. Thomas Edison was once asked about all of his failures before he finally came up with an electric light bulb. His reply was that they weren’t failures because he’d learned a thousand ways NOT to make a light bulb.
That’s a form of karma. Do something in a way that’s not effective and you get an ineffective product – and you also learn what not to do. Stick your hand in the fire and you get immediate karma – pain and blisters. That’s experience. You learned a lot and it was all the result of your choice to stick your hand in the fire.
OK, you say, so what about the bad things that happen to good people? There are a lot of reasons for those things but from the standpoint of karma they may not be about karma at all. Or they might be. My point is that we can’t make judgments about experiences because we don’t have all the information we need to make such a call.
My belief is that as spiritual beings, as souls, we are beings of light and love. But we can’t have the experience of that because we’re immersed in light and love, much like the fish swimming in the ocean can’t understand the experience of being in water. So how does the fish become aware of how important that water is to it? Take him out of the water and he has an experience that teaches him quickly and thoroughly.
Same with souls. We can’t understand being light and love unless we have some way of experiencing NOT being light and love. Now this may or may not have anything to do with karma, or it could. But we simply need to experience what we are NOT in order to have an understanding of and experience what we are.
So we (souls) might devise a lifetime that puts us in a situation where we experience something unpleasant or even horrible. Maybe we put ourselves in positions of abuse or positions where we can help others escape abuse. We might actually be a team so each of us can experience something we haven’t experienced before. We do things to and for each other. Sometimes, therefore, an experience might have nothing to do with karma, either “good” or “bad,” but simply be something we want to try. Like a new food, maybe broccoli. We might like it or not, but we will learn something. Learning what you don’t like is as important as learning what you do like.
Good decisions come from experience; experience comes from making poor decisions. In other words, karma is a learning experience but we don’t have that big teacher in the sky wielding rulers and grade books. We choose our lessons to experience and teach them to ourselves.
Of course, sometimes these experiences take more than one lifetime to give us the lessons we’re looking for since it’s clear that some experiences will remove us from the earthly plane before we can make use of the lesson, like, standing in front of a hurtling train.
Sometimes we have to try the same thing over and over before we finally get it, like training to run a marathon. Nobody expects to simply decide one day to run 26.2 miles and do it the first time. It takes practice. Lots of practice. We don’t learn much if we do something perfectly the first time we try it. Once we understand what to do and how to do it, then we can make different choices. Maya Angelou (?) says, “I did what I knew how to do. When I knew better, I did better.”
One thing I do want to make abundantly clear is that karma is not always necessarily a direct response. If we can understand a consequence without having that baseball come back to bean us, it’s called grace and we have no need to get conked by it. Once we understand the consequence of hurting someone or how certain behaviors might unintentionally hurt others, we can change our behavior and stop the karmic “payback.”
So, karma, lessons, experience. They’re all the same basic thing and if we can understand how they work, we don’t need to keep making the cycle over and over and over. Good thing, too.
Sam, you really brushed the dust off this concept and sparkled it up. Thanks!
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I’m glad you appreciated it, Sharon. There are so many different takes on karma, many from very reliable and credible sources, that it can be difficult to decide what it really means. This piece is how I’ve come to view it. It makes more sense to me than the usual “good/bad” dichotomy, which is very much like the Christian view of “sin,” which I have a different take on, too. But that’s another story! Sam
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What I love about blogs is that they spark an idea in my brain. When that happens, I feel as I need to comment with the hope it might be interesting to some individuals. Simply because you will find plenty of blogs and forums with numerous points of view, they question your comprehension. It is at these moments when you have important insignt other individuals might not have experienced, together using the blogger him/herself. I find myself coming back to to your writings only simply because you have several very good insights and also you have been at this a very long time, that is very inspiring and tells me you understand your stuff. Maintain triggering imagination in others!
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I wanted to say this blog is almost amazing. I always like to hear something new about this because I have the similar blog in my Country on this subject so this help´s me a lot. I did a search on the matter and found a good number of blogs but nothing like this.Thanks for writing so much in your blog.
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I’m glad it was helpful to you. Please keep coming back. Getting comments really helps me figure out what I need to write about. Thanks for coming by. Sam
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I do like the way you have presented this challenge and it really does offer me personally a lot of fodder for consideration. Nonetheless, because of everything that I have observed, I simply hope when other feedback pile on that men and women keep on point and don’t get started on a soap box of some other news du jour. Still, thank you for this fantastic piece and even though I can not concur with the idea in totality, I respect your viewpoint.
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I guess that’s what it’s all about, huh? Respect. Thanks for coming by and taking the time to read my writing. It feels good to know that. Sam
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