Do you believe in karma? My answer depends on how you define karma & I've heard of some pretty funny ones. So how do you define karma?

I do believe what goes around comes around, you reap what you sow, Newton's action-reaction law, that energy never really disappears but gets transferred from one form to another as in the 1st law of thermodynamics.

Some call it karma, some call it by other names but they're all just labels to me.


This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 22 2010, 10:30 PM

Hindus also have karma. So do other religions that believe you'll go to hell if you're bad, heaven if you're good. Cause and effect. They call it by different names but the concept is more or less the same. As they say, a rose by any other name...

Btw, strictly speaking, karma in sanskrit means action, act or performance. Every action (karma) has a consequence (vipaka.) Typing on a keyboard is an act (karma). The vipaka is the characters appearing on your screen. No magic involved.

Karma is easy to refute if you think of it as a linear phenomenon, as in if you are kind to people, people will be kind to you. I don't think cause and effect works that way.

Example: your parents may have said if you get a uni degree, you'll get more job opportunities. That's the typical linear relationship, do A, get B. What's forgotten is the thousand things you did that can change the supposed outcome of A. You may have chosen a field of study that is no longer in demand. You may have chosen to party instead of studying and scraped through with a GPA of 2.1, causing your resume to persistently get shoved to the bottom of the pile. Sometimes even just being present at a place can change the outcome of A, as in someone comes to you and says hey, didn't we go to class together? My dad's the VP of the company you're interviewing at!

In all the scenarios, the common denominator is you, and the seemingly random choices you made prior to that point in time. You choose to attend a particular uni, the field of study, to party & skip classes. Every little choice - even the time you hesitated to cross the road and missed getting hit by a truck by 2 seconds, contributes to the final outcome. That's how complex cause and effect is.

So while the common variety "do A get B" definition of karma is a joke, the study of how a set of micro forces lead to an outcome is intriguing. It is as complex as predicting weather patterns, and can probably use the same concepts as the butterfly effect.

As I see it, it is for this reason that my reward for doing a good deed may not be the same as your reward for doing the same.

No, it just means the common man-in-the-street definition of karma is a gross oversimplification of the process.

I doubt there's one definition of karma that everyone can agree to but I find this to be a good brief summary:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-karma.htm

To me, karma is an ancient name for a process and as I've said previously, the closest analogy I can find to it is the weather prediction process. Weather is a result of prior conditions. When inputting complex variables into a weather-scenario computer, scientists found out that small variations like rounding a number from .506127 to 0.506 can alter the course of weather forever, hence the name butterfly effect where the flap of the wings can change the weather's outcome. More on butterfly effect here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

The butterfly effect is based on chaos theory and suggests the non-linear nature of cause and effect. The smallest inconspicuous act can alter your future and what you are today is the result of millions of past variables, just as what you'll be tomorrow must take into account today's hundred variables. Some variable take a long time to take effect, like how years may pass before the cops knock on your door becoz of an old unpaid traffic summons.

Using formulas similar to weather prediction, the past and present actions of an individual can likewise be measured and fed into a computer and a future outcome predicted. That would be your "karma."

How to teach simple village folk a thousand years ago about chaos theory... it was easier to just say if you do something good, then something good will happen to you. The stories are preserved till today. In reality its a lot more complex than that.

There's one aspect about karma - past lives and future lives - I cannot resolve so I won't spend time speculating about something I cannot get empirical data to.

As I understand it, there is cause and effect for actions and there is cause and effect for intentions. The fact that we can die in an accident demonstrates that an effect can happen without intentional cause, hence why they call it an "accident."

I see BE figuring in the parts involving measurable action like the accident example but you're right, I don't see where BE fits in when two people sit blindfolded and think bad intentions at each other. How do you measure intention anyway?

That is why I'm always of the opinion that there is no such thing as good or bad, there's only consequence. Whether the consequence is perceived as "good" or "bad" is subjective, depending on which belief system you're from.

I'm still trying to understand what you mean by this. Care to elaborate?

Ok I see what u mean. It is slightly different than the Buddha's explanation. He likened bad karma as a lump of salt in a river and the water surrounding it as good karma. If your river is tiny, the water is salty and life isn't sweet. But if your water flow is a big raging river, you won't notice the saltiness and life is good. The logic is not one of probability but of one force overcrowding the other and rendering it statistically irrelevant.

Exactly. A rich man won't feel the loss of a few cents and if you did a study on happy people, they'll tell you their happy moments outnumber the bad moments. Same with unhappy people. Neither one escapes the pleasant or the unpleasant. Its just that one outweighs the other.

By saying if you do bad you face bad consequences, isn't that a form of belief in past karma? You did something bad yesterday, you get a payback today or tomorrow and yesterday=past, yes?

How about trying to discuss karma without involving god in the picture. I suggest discussing it as a process which can be done in a lab. Here's a few examples, differentiated by amount of time between cause and effect.

1. You hold a cigarette lighter to a piece of paper (cause), paper burns immediately (effect)

2. You spend using your credit card (cause) and end of the month, the bill comes (effect)

3. You invest in a 5-year guaranteed bond (cause) and 5 years later, you get principal plus profits (effect)

4. You spend like there's no tomorrow (cause) and 50 years later, you become a beggar (effect)

You'll agree that cause and effect is provable provided you put down the religious-coloured term and relied on controlled experiments on the physical process.

On does this process stop at death or does it continue? No one can answer that except with faith, just like the heaven and hell thingy. That's where I draw the line.

I understand the religious argument that you can't otherwise explain why some are born beautiful, some ugly, some to a rich family, some to beggars, some smart, some stupid, etc and hence karma must be behind it. They assert you haven't exhausted your store of potential energy when you died so it is unwinding in the next existence.

But you can't prove in a lab that that guy who just died has now become this baby. All there is is circumstantial evidence... the ability to speak foreign languages without much training, musical prodigies, knowing people you never met, deja vu, weird stuff like that. I don't discount stuff simply because they're weird so I'll just stay agnostic and skeptical until I see the evidence.

Yes I believe you are right. The rich man example is a good one, thanks for bringing it up.