I have people ask me if I believe in Karma. I personally think that the concept of Karma comes from the modern man struggling to deal with his morality. It seems like concepts of ethics just don’t package well and so we now talk about ‘Karma.’
To completely decompose the subject I think one as to go into its roots inside Hinduism & Buddhism on the one side and into what it means to the average person today on the other side. (Which I will do later) As many a philosopher has said “don’t call yourself just by changing the meaning of the word.”
American Heritage Dictionary says:
1. Hinduism & Buddhism The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny. 2. Fate; destiny. 3. Informal A distinctive aura, atmosphere, or feeling: There's bad karma around the house today.
I personally believe that Karma only answers half the story. I personally believe in Justice. I do not believe that Karma answers well enough the questions of pain, the questions of why bad things happen to good people, why there is injustice. While the modern man uses terms like “highly evolved” and “karma” we have avoided the much larger and significantly more difficult subjects of Justice & Pain.
So here in my first comment on Karma I only wish to point out the following:
- It is half the story, justice is the significantly higher cause and one I will spend significantly more time writing about.
- Its roots in Hinduism and Buddhism must be researched.
- The phases of a person’s existence must be understood to understand its real basis.
- The concept of destiny, and its very existence must itself be challenged.
I have, therefore, a fundamental belief in justice and believe the modern perception of Karma comes from the reality of Justice. Because the core of justice is how we treat other people. Justice is (a) not meddling in a business that is not our own; (b) understanding the highest cause in any situation and the core of injustice is “when a man thinks he can do wrong and get away with it.”
Following is a short quote on justice from Socrates.
“But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others, he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself. Must not injustice be a strife which arises among the three principles – a meddlesomeness, and interference, and rising up of a part of the soul against the whole, an assertion of unlawful authority, which is made by a rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he is the natural vassal – what is all this confusion and delusion but injustice, and intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form of vice?”- Socrates