Karma: Is it worth it?

nice post

 

Your karma won't effect this life, karma will come back in your next life. Karma is tied in with reincarnation. If you're an *sshole, your karma will come back to hit you hard in your next life.

Reincarnation takes awhile to explain, but if I were to explain it here, everyone, or a lot of people anyway, would go "Ooh".

Bbad things happen to good people, because they were not good people in their past life. You may say "I wasn't a bad person in a past life! I couldn't have been!". Well, you were a different person then. Different body, different mind, different goals, possibly different gender.

The fact that yu didn't get yelled at after doing your chores(etc.) is physical cause & effect, not karma.

I only read the first three sentences of the above post(after I posted), and I like it already.

 

Karma is what makes us not all kill each other. It makes people believe in hope. I, myself am buddhist, I thought karma works a different way too. For example: I steal and rob alot of people, next life I will be robbed, however it doesn't work if you say you be robbed and you steal your next life time, karma is a good essence. If people didn't believe in religious stuff, humans would be doomed.

 

you aren't suppose to do good things and deeds because you think that you'll get something in return, you do it because it is the right thing to do. Also, even though you may not see the physical reward of these actions, you are being rewarded. Practicing these kind acts is teaching you discipline, and the way people see you, they see you as a cool, responsible person, who knows who they'll talk to about you with nothing but good things to say. it opens doors

you believe in God right?

with your parents yelling at you, and your other stresses, i believe that those are tests. Tests to size up the truths you've learned and if you adopted them or not.

think on this,

gold may sink, but its dense enough to handle the pressure and not collapse.

crap floats because it would crush under pressure, i believe this is why alot of bad people get away with so much, because with their short tempers/fuses, they couldn't face real problems and come out whole.

were all tested with the same pressures and given the same allowance. it just looks different because the good and bad people are on different ends of the spectrum ya know?

keep on keepin on bruh

 

Can't really buy into the Karmic way of looking at the world. We live in a complex universe, where everything is interwoven. Some to a greater extent than others. Think : Chaos Theory; Butterfly Effect, Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions. The human mind puts reality into a subjective good or bad context and ignores all the details that led to any given situation.

Forget logic and mathematics - Karma's a far tidier little abstract. Unfortunately it doesn't infer much about the true nature of things in my opinion.

Anyway, to answer the question, no I don't think Karma's worth thinking about. I'd rather just try to cover all my bases, learn from my own mistakes, not waste energy thinking ill of other peoples fortune, not intentionally cause harm and try to have some fun now and then. It never ceases to amaze me how clueless some people are to the ways of the reality and how they continually waste energy fighting with it. To sum it up, don't cause your own problems.

Looking at the big picture, Ying and Yang, black and white, all you'll see is a grey area. But break it down into the most atomic parts and everything becomes quite clear

 

pretty much this is how i look at karma and buddhism...


"if you cannot help someone, do as little possible to harm them" h.h. the dalai lama.

to me, its a good statement. help, and if you can't do not cause harm. apply that to every action you do and you will not have to worry about bad karma. at the same time remeber this applies to what you use for products, how your food got to your table ect.

just because someone else does something for you and gives it to you doesn't mean you don't get the bad karma. for instance using nike softballs everyday that were made by handicap sweatshop five year olds... thats not good karma lol.

 

karma has become another 'eastern buzz-word' whose true meaning has been obscured by lazy translation. It is generally interpreted as the eastern equivalent of 'do unto others...'

In reality, it is actually an entire yogic discipline and as such it became incorporated into the buddhist schemata as the philosophy developed.

The Yoga of Karma is the yoga of action. Yoga translates as 'Yoke' and implies a systematic method to achieve 'union' with the divine..the divine in this sense being that which is not self...as opposed to a conscious deity whose functioning can be equated to our own mental process.

Through studying the concept of 'action' as it exists within our world, we develop an intuitive understanding of the interplay which exists between cause and effect. This then leads to a fuller appreciation of how our actions impinge upon the world and how the actions of the world impinge upon us. It is for this reason that karma has been associated with the philosphical idea of doing good to get good back. This is a western interpretation based upon the instilled teachings of western faiths and should not be taken as an accurate translation of the original meaning of karma. Not also, this concept exists in the pagan belief's surrounding the use of magic, where the law of three states that you get back from the world three times what you put in...ie, one bad action draws an action three times stronger back to you and related in kind to the original energy you put out.

If you follow the conceptual development of karma through buddhism to zen you will find that the concept still follows closely the Yoga of Karma. Once the individual appreciates the role and relationships inherent in a given action one is better placed to make decisions about how they choose to operate within their sphere of influence.

In addition, many of the meditative practices of zen are designed to allow the practioner to increase their resilience to the 'stray' karma which floats about in the outside world looking for some channel through which to find resolution.

I hope my post goes some way to convincing you that there is more to karma than doing good just so you get some spiritual rewards...it is part of a set of disciplines which aim to better equip people for their arduous journey through their lives.

 

I think that Karma has been overly romanticized, and that its original meaning is not what your average joe thinks it is-- in my opinion, Karma simply means that everything that happens to you is a direct result of choices you've made, conscious or unconscious. There is no value judgement in this, it is simply a way of taking responsibility for your actions.

It certainly shouldn't imply that the many forms of suffering we encounter are all our fault, or that if we do all good things, nothing bad will ever happen to us. I don't believe that there is some kind of cosmic check book that must balance out in the end-- to me it seems like a more common sense kind of thing. Whatever choices we make directly lead to the events in our lives-- there is no epiphenomenal force that is judging it all (again IMO). Action, reaction.

 

Billy at the top of your post it says paciFIST quote,read the thread again i didn't say that someone else did

 

Billy, I have to say that I respectfully disagree with you. While I do believe that people have certain kinds of energy, and some folks are more sensitive than others, I do not think that this is the underlying force of karma. It does provide a nice kind of Kantian imperative to do good deeds (and think good thoughts) if you believe that anyone may be reading your mind, but I believe that if someone is spiritually developed to a point that they are able to attune directly to you like that, they probably aren't going to be judging you. Further, I believe that karma is necessarily linked to the actions we choose to take. Considering getting a prostitute, and then making the right choice, and donating the money to charity would not lead to negative karma (in my opinion). I think we are all human beings, with temptations and other "red dust" that can sometimes obscure the correct action from our view. We should not fault ourselves for the temptations-- we should merely try to see through them and make the correct choices, which then leads to positive karma.