Karma, is and isn't?

With certain religions comes the value of Karma.
''What goes around comes around.''
''What you cause this life, will be dealt to you next.''
''Everything has its consequences, sooner or later you'll feel them too.''
''What you have dealt, will come back 3 fold.''

However you say it, karma seems to be the same concept; what you do will eventually effect you as you had effected others. Karma or some THING to the effect of Karma surfaces in countless religions and paths. People for ages have expressed their views of natural justice. Karma is of course a religious concept, although people who believe in Karma may not belong to any specific religion. The idea of ''what goes around comes around'' can not be traced all the way back to its very origins.
- Meaning, Karma is so old, we can't fathom or trace exactly how old.

People sometimes assume Karma has to do with some form of deity. Such as Christianity, their God will have justice. Supposedly.

More often though, is Karma expressed as natural, not necessarily due to the work of gods. Yes, perhaps the gods set Karma in motion according to some, but often times do they recognize it as an independent force created by but not controlled by a deity.
Hinduism is one of or the oldest known religions the recognizes Karma as a powerful, and effective force. This religion dates back about 3,000 B.C.E (before common era). Yeah, it's old. Karma according to Hinduism, deals with reincarnation. Reincarnation is a term most people are familiar with. It is the recycling of souls, when you die, you are later reborn. Well the Hindu believes, that what you do this life, will effect who you are and what you are your next life. So if you're currently a farmer and brutally murder someone, you will die, and you may be reborn a slug which is not a very glamorous life. Why? Because it's Karma, doing its thing getting you back for what you did the previous life. Now if you're currently a farmer, and you save and old lady from a burning building, you will die, and you may possibly be reborn as a wealthy king. Why? It's Karma!

Buddhism is probably the most popular of all religions that recognize Karma. Buddha believed in the typical, ''you get what you give'' Karma. And the same goes for Confucianism, surprisingly people don't realize that the famous ''Golden Rule'' is a form of Karma: ''Do unto others, what you wish done unto you.''

Then you have others likes Wiccans, that generally believe in a more severe punishment for misdeeds. They behold the 3 Fold Law, ''what you do now, shall come back 3 Fold''. What the phrase ''3 Fold'' is referring is like giving this formula:
(what you do)(what you do)(what you do) = what you get
Scary? Perhaps, but it's what they believe.

Christianity, as with many other things, plays into certain beliefs systems when it comes to karma. Just as they believe in certain forms of reincarnation, they believe in ''what goes around, comes around.'' Thus the idea of Hell comes into the mix. Some believe that on a trip to said ''Hell'', bad karma can actually be ''burned'' off. This idea comes from a form of projection to lower plains (Hell), and certain levels can make for differing results in letting off that karma. Christians do not particularly believe in projection, but their concept of Hell is found to be useful for such occasions.
So yes, Karma is not exactly the same in comparison between various religions/beliefs.
Now then, some people don't believe in Karma at all. Some have figured that it is just a bunch of bull.
But the question is, are they just trying to disprove spirituality so badly that they make crap up to make excuses for denying Karma? Or is Karma really just hoax to get kids not to cheat on Math tests?
Is karma something to fear?

Resulting Paradox:
Resulting Paradox of Absolute Reason.

There is a problem with the idea of Karma being the what causes the punishment of all misdeeds, assuming that karma causes all mishaps.
That is a theory: that all misfortunes that ever happen is karma.

This creates a paradox.
Given certain cases, karma causes karma according to this theory.
Karma not necessarily being a good thing, causes itself.

Clarification:
There is a young boy of say 2 years old, his father is a heavy drinker, and on a regular basis beats the small child.
Situations similar to this have happened.
Is the child guilty of something so severe he deserves his father's torment?
Is the man's actions merely Karma at work?
If so, in the case he is sent to jail for child abuse would the man be punished according this particular theory of karma?
Therefore, wouldn't it be considered karma causing karma?
And again, assuming the boy did something to deserve his lashings, would that be karma at work as well?
Because, karma is responsible for all mishaps and misfortunes.

That is the paradox of this specific theory on Karma, or is it actually logical? I think it would be interesting if anyone had their own theory of karma, or any idea as to how this particular theory is actually rational.

Here are my thoughts on Karma, but first I have to explain/clarify a few things.

1) The Principle of Cause and Effect.

This is an observation made by the philosopher Aristotle; it states that for every action there is a reaction, and that everything that is happening in the moment can be associated with the action that caused this happening.
In this way, everything can be traced back to the primordial event(s) which caused all other events; it essentially means that the past causes the present and that the present causes the future.

Here is a visual representation of a cause and effect system;

cause ---> (action) ---> effect


Although this principle seems to explain what happens in the physical world, it is still lacking something...

2) Feedback

Feedback simply means that the action performed by the cause and the effect will also affect the cause.

Here is the visual representation of a feedback system:

cause ---> (action) ---> effect
^______________l____l

This model is closer to how (most of) the physical world works, it indeed is used by the sciences and is the accepted 'common sense' model of how reality behaves that the majority of humans adhere to.


I think that Karma is the feedback loop, and that many different cultures have attempted to explain it through Myths; some cultures believe that it is intelligent or that some intelligence is in charge of it, and other cultures think of it as a mere mechanism.

Regardless of those beliefs, Karma is one of the fundamental behaviours of this universe. Time as we know it would not exist without it and neither would we; organisms like us rely on various chemical and physical reactions, such as interactions with our environment, to exist.

If indeed Karma is feedback, which is my theory, looking at feedback systems can help us understand how karma operates and what its effects are.

Basically there are two kinds of feedback systems, positive feedback and negative feedback, I can explain them if you are interested.

i dont think karma is about getting back for something you've done, in my opinnion the universe works to balance itself and each soul is meant for self development, what you do in your life developes your over-all soul (even the parts youre not aware of) so if you've done "bad" things in this life and you get a beating in the next life its not to punish you, its simply to mold you to a different person, lets say humility or the need to help others so they wont experience what you have.

so what would seem like a punishment to some is a way to develop and lift your current self in effort to change the over-all you.
Now, like Lady Snow said, this could sound very vicious to a person of our level of understanding who does not see and experiences the whole of the process, it would mean that a child being abused is fine, that a man that gets his hand cut of is ok, since it happenes so we can learn and evolve from it.

but i think theres more to it then what we see, it is not a rule set in stone or a rule at all, we do have a certain amount of control over these things through our choices and there is alway another way to get a single result.
so if i stop the father from beating the child will i prevent the development of the child's soul? if i move the hand before it is cut, will i deprive the man's soul from its lessions?
i dont believe so, there are many ways to reach an understanding, we are all intertwined and eventually one by some thinkers. thats the whole point of helping each other.


about karma effecting this life, i think there is a lot of the Law of Attraction about it.

If karma is not mandated by the gods, that would make a force. Forces alter the “natural course” of events…i.e. an object tends to move with a constant velocity. Apply a force, and it accelerates. We can agree that naturally, there would be no karma.
So what is this outside force? When you think about this, this is where karma begins to seem absurd. Forces in physics are logical. We can explain them with math, and most importantly, we can predict the behavior of systems if we know the forces involved. Karma has none of these traits. Karma is random.


It would be one thing if, say, you shoot someone in the head, and then the next instant a bullet magically appears in your head, killing you as well. But that’s not what happen, obviously. When people talk about karma, they talk about something completely unrelated happening to you whenever. You cannot make an equation to describe this as you can with every other force in nature. You might say that there are a lot of behaviors/systems that we can’t describe mathematically…but that’s not true. If you break up a seemingly random and unpredictable process, you will find order…an example would be a fourier transform, which takes a complex wave that would be really messy to represent mathematically and breaks it up into many simple waves that are easy to represent.


Karma persists from a time before we could describe forces with math…when everything was said to be the work of god. No one bothered to study the force of gravity, because it was simply god’s will that made things fall. In that model, karma is valid. It doesn’t have to make sense, because it’s just god’s will. In short: karma is only valid if you presuppose the existence of god (which I don’t, but that’s another debate entirely!)


I’m also against karma philosophically. I don’t like anything that encourages people to be good just so that they don’t get punished. People shouldn’t murder each other because they have empathy, not because they fear punishment. We are sentient beings who can imagine and empathize with another’s suffering.

Electric Touch wrote:

...in my opinnion the universe works to balance itself...

That's a sensible notion. A lot of processes work to achieve a balance. For example: in a tube of gas... if there is a higher density of particles in one end of the tube, that will "balance out", so that the gas is a uniform density and all particles have the same velocity.

Howver, it's a bit more complicated than you are making it seem.
For example: imagine a bunch of particles arranged in a box so that there is a higher density in one corner (similar to the tube of gas). There are no forces acting on any of the particles. Are the particles going to move to balance out the density? of course not, since there are no forces at work. The reason it happens with the tube of gas is because there are forces acting on each particles (electrostatic repulsion).

My point is that the universe doesn't really seek balance. It seeks balanced forces. Since karma cannot be a force, as I explained in my last post, your argument is invalid. There's no magic involved with this; it makes perfect sense when you think about it with these simple analogies.

of course its more complicated than i make it seem ^^
im just trying to explain it in a way people can understand (not that i fully get it yet).

"theres no magic involved with this"
dont be confused with this term magic, its a bit hard to put science in between all of this (although i do encourge it) simply because our science is behind magick, we still havent got there yet.
think about it this way, if Physics describs the rules of how this physical plane works then Magick describs how the whole of creation works, not this current material plane, but all of them.
i guess i shouldnt have said the universe seeks balance, i meant existence seeks balance.

and yes, i never meant to say that people should do good so they wont get punished, i dislike that point of view myself. i simply referred to the law of attraction and how it works in these kind of situations - bad gives bad and good gives good.

That's valid. A lot of people wrongly believe that the laws of physics are absolute...really, they are just approximations that get better over time. If what you are saying is true, though, eventually magic and physics will converge as our approximation of the laws of physics comes closer to the truth.

When i said "there's no magic involved with this", i didn't literally mean magic. I meant just meant that nothing can just happen; there needs to be some cause/physical process associated with it. We know very little about magic, but I'm sure that if we did, it would be a system just as logical as physics.

I still don't believe in karma because, like I said, there's no logic behind it. Even chaotic systems in physics, like virtual particles, follow rules. Unless it is the work of a deity with free will.

And I don't mean to go off on a tangent, but what do you mean by those "other planes"? I'd like to hear more about that (perhaps in another thread so we don't hijack this one) when you get a chance.

thats fair, everyone has their own opinions. always keep an open mind though, if youre serious about your training here youll find that the more you keep at it you will find new things that will change your views and yourself.

as for the planes, i believe someone from the higher ups could explain it better than i can, ill ask one of them to post about it.

in short, we use the planes as an explanation of how reality is built. each plane differs from the other by frequency. there are planes above us and below (although most of us seem to concentrate on those which are above us).

for example, we live here, in what we call the physical plane, the plane of matter. im not speaking solely about our planet the earth, but of everything that is physical, the whole universe, the only thing you think is here that exists.
thats how big a plane is.

then "above" us in frequency is the Etheric plane which is commenly known as where ghosts reside.
"above" that is what most of us know as the Astral plane or the Spirit world.
(i say "above" because its really not in tearms of height but in terms of a faster frequency)

keep in mind that those higher planes are not physical, and that they are really all intertwined with one another, effecting one another in their own way.
there are a lot more planes and sub planes but as i said the others can explain it better ^^