| --- In [email protected], "M" <marcelo_smith@s...> wrote: > I guess the reason I'm hammering on the choice thing is that for the longest time, I didn't > realize that I had a choice. Now that I do, I don't want anyone else to make the same mistake. > -m Marcello, Very good! I like someone who hangs in there and keeps the dialogue open. In responding to this I am tempted to go into how for about 20 years I tried to "get over the Mormon Church". But I won't go into it any more than to say that it was always still there, sort of like my "dark side" that I had to finally own. I think that the separation of space and time (moving away from the Rockie Mountains was very healing for me) did a lot to give me a better perspective of things. Now that I have returned to look more closely at those parts of me that are still vestiges of my Mormon upbringing, I feel more relaxed about myself. It was like even though I tried to turn away from them, the demons of my Mormon upbringing still lay inside me, sometimes coming out at unexpected times. To come full circle and to embrace those aspects have been very healing for me. But what I really wanted to talk about was karma, one of my favorite topics. Whether people call it one thing or another, karma is one of those things that happen to people as they live their lives. One of the things I did after leaving the Church was to study Sanskrit at a state university for three years in order to get a grasp on the ancient Hindu scriptures, which I was completely fascinated by (and still am, BTW). In the Sanskrit dictionary there are about 50 different definitions for the word "karma", and I will spare you all from a long discourse on these permutations of this word. What the word karma means literally translated into English would be the word "working". "Kar" is the word for the verb "to work", and putting the "-ma" on the end of it is equivalent of what we do in English to turn a verb into a noun by adding "-ing" to it. So karma is the verb "to work" turned into the noun "working", as in "this is my working". So in its purest sense, the word karma signifies what a person is doing physically in the world. It is your physical actions. But the implications in the spiritual tradition of the East go beyond the mere physical actions. What people refer to when they discuss karma in the spiritual sense is what is best known as �cause and effect�. Whenever anyone does a physical thing the action has ramifications that are sometimes knowable and sometimes unknowable. If you go for a walk, you might end up stepping on a spider, that if it had lived would have spun a web, that would have caught a mosquito, that had been carrying a disease, that now that the spider is dead, will infect someone who will become sick and die. Okay, I know, maybe that wasn�t a good example, but you get my meaning. All actions carry consequences with them. Cause and effect. You do something, and something will happen as a result. It is an unavoidable consequence of living in this physical plane of existence. Some consequences are desirable, some are not. Whether we can truthfully say that a specific consequence is �good� or �evil� is an entirely different direction than where I want to go with this discussion, but it is also interesting� Each of us does things that end up having consequences for us and those around us. It is desirable to do things that will result in desirable consequences, and that is really how most people TRY to live their lives (we always fall short of optimal living, however). So if one is living so that the things he or she is doing are desirable or beneficial, then we could say that that person is gathering good karma. If someone were doing things that are not beneficial, we would say that the person is creating bad karma. There was a period of time in my adult life that I was as poor as a mouse, and I chose to �live off the land� by shoplifting food from grocery stores in order to eat. So in one sense I was creating bad karma because I was stealing. Even though it was for a good cause (I was hungry), it still was a less-than-desirable method of obtaining the food. I never got caught at this, but eventually I began to notice that things were happening to me in my life that I directly attributed as consequences from my action of shoplifting. When I gave up shoplifting I found my self-feeling cleaner and more at peace with the world around me. I think part of me was using shoplifting as a means to try to get revenge against society, and in carrying out the physical act of that subconscious urge I was only aggravating this negative energy within me. There were actually quite a number of things tied in with that shoplifting action that once I stopped doing it improved. I could get very astral and new-agey here, which I really don�t like to do (I am too much of a empiricist for fluffy logic). However, I believe that we humans really don�t understand the workings of this karma thing. I don�t believe in a god that sits in judgment over us. I don�t really believe in god, period. Unless you consider the entire sum of the entire universe, including the parts we don�t know about yet, as well as the underlying patterns that created the physical laws that exist in our universe as �god�. But that�s kind of a hard thing to visualize, and it really doesn�t have much to do with me and my everyday life. So I don�t believe in god, but I do believe in karma, I�ve seen it in action too many times to doubt that it governs our lives. �As a man soweth, so shall he reap.� To get back to Marcello�s posting, I�d like to bring this discussion to where he indicated that �for the longest time, I didn't realize that I had a choice. Now that I do, I don't want anyone else to make the same mistake.� This is why I am yakking on about karma. I�ll tell it straight up and analyze it later, because Marcello appears to be the kind of guy that likes things straight up and hard!! LOL!!!! Dude, you don�t own anyone else�s karma. Nobody has responsibility for the karma that someone else is creating. Each of us is given a set of lessons to work on as we go through life, and when we have one lesson figured out, another one comes along in its place. It�s part of the big mystery of life that we seem never to come to an end of life�s lessons. But that is okay, otherwise it would be pretty boring, sort of like the Mormons� version of the highest degree of glory where everyone is totally perfect and nobody has to work on anything anymore. We can�t know for sure why things happen to people. To try to explain why �good� people have �bad� things happen to them is really a meaningless exercise. All we really can say is that �stuff� happens to �people�. Each of us in working through our lessons is learning bits and pieces here and there, and it is good to share these insights with each other. But please let�s not get in the way of someone else�s lesson. That�s the Mormon Church�s trip! Marcello, you have said how you want to get the Church�s influence behind you and get on with things, but man, by saying you don�t want anyone else to make the same mistake that you did is precisely behaving in a manner in which the members of the Church are pushed into behaving. If we find that someone is doing something that we can see will have negative consequences, we can only give our own experience and support, and then let it go at that. Each person must find his or her own way. Of course I am not talking about stopping a little kid from sticking his hand on a hot stove. Or pushing someone out of the way of a bus. But every action does carry with it a consequence, and trying to influence someone unfairly is going to carry with it undesirable karma. If you wish to exercise an influence over someone, the best way to do it is to love him or her and leave it at that. The person will need the support to overcome his or her challenges, and each person will end up as an equal to the other instead of someone being superior to another. All lessons are equal, and nobody can say, �I have already had this lesson that I see this other person going through, so therefore I am superior.� Because perhaps that other person is also going through a lesson that we cannot even see or know about yet because of our lack of emotional growth. Some lessons come more difficult than others, and that is why the hardest lesson of all is saved for last. I hope that each of you out there have your lessons come easily. And let�s be nice to each other and to those in our lives, even if they happen to be still TBMs. ~~Curt Allred |
| Karma This was posted to an online group on September 3, 2004. |