Do You Believe in Karma?
Karma has a purpose,
even if karma isn't real.
~
Here's what I know about karma's pet peevs. Something karma loves and something karma hates. I believe this has an element of truth even if karma is fantasy. The feelings of guilt and peace evoked by karma are very real and most certainly a result of "what goes around comes around" even if it is just by coincidence.
What Karma Hates
Karma hates it when you take his job. It's karma's job to teach life lessons. It is karma's job to show people why what they did or what happened sucked. When you go and seek justice or vengeance (whatever you wanna call it) that you felt was deserved when you could have walked away instead, you take away karma's job in doing that, and karma hates that. If you could have walked away and found peace karma would have dealt with that for you, having known the full story and circumstances and the true weight of the "crime". Karma doesn't take a day off. Instead of spending the time on that guy, he'll spend it on you instead, and he'll make sure you feel terrible for the justice you enforced especially if it felt great at the time.
What Karma Loves
Karma LOVES it when you laugh at somebody else's expense. This is like giving karma a cause or a purpose in life. Karma loves when you give him a reason to teach you why the suffering isn't funny. Whatever you laughed about, karma will make sure you remember laughing about it and you'll feel terrible for having felt so good.
But how can this be real if karma isn't?
Karma has a way of teaching you to seek peace instead of vengeance. Vengeance isn't something that makes us feel good deep down. It might feel great at the time, when it feels righteous. But the subconscious you hates what you did. Gradually the guilt creeps up on you asking what kind of person would do that. Your conscious mind will snap you out of it and remind you that it was deserved, but then one day something will happen and you will say
"Why me?"
And on that day you'll remember that thing you did that your subconscious has been holding onto. Giving you deep inner guilt that doesn't get expressed except through repressive emotions like anger and frustration.
Finding peace
These guilty feelings lie around your subconsciousness if you can say that you could have walked away and found peace instead. And so when those feelings of "this is karma" and "what goes around comes around" and worst of all "I deserve this" come around it's time to seek forgiveness. Seek forgiveness from yourself or seek forgiveness from God if you believe in Him. Because again, even if God isn't real, I believe there was always a reason the Church taught confession.
Through confession you dig deep into your subconscious and accept the things you hate that you did and you find a way to articulate and understand yourself. You learn to admit what you did wrong and you come to realise how horrible they make you feel when they lie repressed and unexpressed on a subconscious level. Guilt is an ingredient for further self destruction through our need to repress that feeling and express anger and resentment instead, often pushing loved ones away or damaging important relationships.
You might be on to something. In any case, the mainstream idea of karama is too simplistic.
I like to see it like my subconscious relationship with other people and with situations. It's not that I did something bad that causes something bad, it's those negative emotions that still linger and effect me. So if I did something wrong, I will have to face that and do right in order to release those subconscious emotions which will effect my life. If I can truly feel "I want that person to be happy even though things are awkward now...hmm what can I do to express that?" or "I want that person to be happy even if we don't like each other", there is no bad karma on my end and only good things are coming my way.
We may be saying the same thing. ;-)
Hmm. I don't see karma as having anything to do with morality, nor as some cosmic mechanism by which 'right' and 'wrong' are perpetually re-balanced like a checkbook. Rather, karma seems to me to be simply the effect of one or more causes - which is useful to pay attention to because it helps us understand and take responsibility for how our choices influence our experience of the world over time.
I see karma as not something supernatural, or some conscious entity but instead it is the word we apply to a phenomenon. It describes the thing that we all go through when our inner feelings of remorse come out due to our personal suffering. We make the connection that isn't there. In our own suffering we remember any suffering we caused others and this is a phenomenon that I call karma.
One of the problems with kharma is that it encourages belief in the just world fallacy. That is a problem because under that worldview, people who experience misfortune must deserve it in some way. Studies show that people who believe in the kharmic religions are more likely to discriminate against the disabled, to be antisemetic, oppose public healthcare and disaster relief.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/oliver-burkeman-column/2015/feb/03/believing-that-life-is-fair-might-make-you-a-terrible-person
Honestly I don’t believe in karma but I believe that our actions predict our outcomes . If we treat others with respect and don’t do anything wrong then we tend to live in ease . God has planned our whole life and he knows us more than we do . If we choose a path that’s wrong and hurt others , that’s because of how we are as humans not karma
God (if he exist!) has planned our circumstances, it is up to us how we react.
I don't know if it's bad timing in life or karma. I always get punished even if I don't do something wrong. I guess I am product of instant karma :P
Most of the time it is just bad timing, and there is nothing to feel bad about other that the circumstance that you found yourself in through no fault of your own.. Karma only applies when there are buried feelings of guilt and sorrow within your subconscious that disrupt the peace inside you.
Sometimes those buried feelings can put you in worse situations, as we get aggravation from burying them, and feelings of anger never leads to much good.
What could be the solution for those buried feelings?
Well they need to be dug up and embraced. They are part of you that means you have to accept them and learn to not bury them. This is why counseling exists. So many people go for so many years with feelings left in a dark vault that they actually have to pay a professional to be a shoulder to cry on while they go through this process. I don't believe a person has to be a professional to know how to listen (although there are plenty of people who don't). I also don't believe that having somebody to listen to you is always necessary although it can help if there are so many feelings buried so long that it's caused depression or other mental health problems.
The solution is simple. Don't bury them. And if you realise you did subconsciously then dig them up and embrace them until they go their own way. It is easier said than done because it is a painful process but it is the only way to find true inner peace.
Thank you @beanz that was very helpful. I learned how to tackle thoughts now. :)
This post made me really happy on some level... and brought me back to my own thinking of many years: "Whether Karma is real or not, we are best off leaving it alone."
Which means to me that we should just focus on living our lives and taking (our version of) "right action" as we walk our path. If there IS Karma, it will come in and set things right if someone wrong us, and if there is NO Karma, we will be able to sleep peacefully at night with the knowledge that we "did right" in the first place, regardless of what someone else might have done.
Hello @beanz, many consider karma as an invisible force that guarantees a just world, but the reality is that sometimes bad people come out well and sometimes good people do not receive their reward, in conclusion, I do not believe in Karma as a concept...
Then the question is can you be at peace with this?
I think it is a misconception that karma is about balancing out the world's circumstances and making it "fair" in accordance with their actions.
Definition
Notice it doesn't say anything about who "decides" or whether the results are measured the same way.
This is a somewhat supernatural definition that I don't completely believe, however I believe it comes from a phenomenon that is real. I don't know what to call that phenomenon other than karma.
Well said!
Revenge is seldom sweet for very long, any immediate satisfaction soon being replaced by guilt.... for the non-psychopaths among us anyway.
Yes lol, not taking psychopaths into account, as from what I gather they don't have the capacity to feel guilty. And for that reason you rarely even see them angry either (contrary to what most people would expect). A psychopath doesn't use anger if it won't benefit him in getting what he wants.
I think that karma is responsible for making the moments difficult when we recognize the failures, that difficulty and degree of stress, depression or sadness that we have, after we overcome this situation we have a teaching. And that is how you comment my friend, after accepting and forgiving, forgiving others or ourselves. It is really ideal to let the process happen, because then we can have negative consequences if we ignore our realities. Karma is part of the consciousness that God gave us. Thank you for that wonderful reflection.
I don't believe in Karma because not all justice can be achieved in this lifetime and if Karma is real, because it is either doing a bad work in doing it's job or it is just picky in doing its job on people.
I agree cryptopie, karma never really does the job the way we want him to. That is why I wrote this piece. Even if somebody didn't get justice served I think that we suffer less if we leave it with "karma". We like to say "karma will do it for you" because it makes us feel comfortable walking away. But really, karma won't hit this person until something happens to him by coincidence and he will just remember the suffering that he caused and he will feel sorry. -that is as long as his subconscious is aware of the suffering he caused and as long as he's not a psychopath.
I am a religious person and quite believes in God's justice as he has the last laugh over all.