I think that even Oprah is crazy because she believes in karma. If your life is good, I think it is easy to believe in karma. It is certainly an American way of believing, because it allows us to hang onto our materialistic belief systems. It is ironic that Hinduism, the source of the philosophy of karma as a belief system, fits into the American way of life so well. Because we all want to believe that there is some kind of justice, somewhere, somehow and in some way. We want to know that people that are mean, hateful, violent or aggressive will receive vengeance for their hurtful actions towards others. We want people to suffer, when they have brought suffering to us. That is why karma is such a powerful American way of life. It gives us the comfort of knowing that if we can’t get the ‘rat bastard’ in this life, then he may literally be a ‘rat bastard’ in the next life. There is comfort in knowing that hurt will get hurt.
To say that I have done something stupid and therefore must pay the price for my actions, is once again, a human construct. It is no more than opinion and is certainly not fact. If you speed in your car, one consequence is a monetary fine, another consequence is an expensive car crash, another consequence is death and another consequence is nothing. It is possible, even probable that if you drive your car fast, nothing at all will happen to you and you may end up at your destination more quickly than if you did not go over the speed limit.
Are there natural cause and effect relationships? Of course there are. I do not mean to say that there are no causal relationships. What I mean to say is that, we can identify some of these relationships in the physical universe, but I do not believe that anyone can predict these relationships in the psychic, spiritual or psychological worlds. Yes, there are probabilities of behavior, for example, if you treat someone badly for a very long time, eventually they will find a way to leave you. For example, if you exceed the speed limit every time you drive, there is a very high probability that you will receive a speeding ticket and eventually may cause a traffic accident as well.
The reverse is not always true, what I mean by this is that if you never exceed the speed limit, there is no guarantee that you will not be in a traffic accident. You may still end up in an accident even though you follow the law to the letter. This is also why I cannot believe in karma. I have seen very good and very loving people die in very sad and dreadful ways that had nothing to do with who they are or their life. If you are a good person, you have that knowledge as part of your soul, yet you do not have a right to anything else, just because you are a good person.
Please stop telling everyone in the universe that people get what they deserve, they do not get what they deserve. There is no way you can justify giving fatal cancer to a six year old boy. There is no separate set of laws for the young or for the innocent, so you cannot justify a statement that “people get what they deserve.”
