Do you believe in Karma?

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and that is because your dogma just cocked it's leg on my karma.

Knowing my family, yes.

As much as I do believe in cause and effect, I don't believe the universe has any intrinsic morality or 'balance', which is what karma means to most people.

People do bad things and they either come to no harm or benefit from doing wrong as individuals all the time. Of course, in Buddhism and other religions, the divide between self and others is artificial, so doing wrong to others hurts the self because self and other are the same thing. That's really an abstraction to most humans, who are very far from thinking like that. Buddhism argues that this is why people suffer in the first place, but I think suffering is relative to one's perception and that someone who doesn't think they are suffering is not suffering. So, a CEO of a company that rapes the environment, but who doesn't feel guilty and enjoys all their money is not suffering, despite what Buddhism says. Yes he/she is living on a planet that is wheezing from their abuse, and he/she is doing the equivalent of peeing in their own bathwater, which causes indirect suffering...but there's no special spiritual levy on that individual for their sins. Other people, who can't afford to move away from the pollution and climate change this person causes, suffer more from this person's bad actions than the wrongdoer does - as is so often the case in the world.

Yes, a person with a rudimentary conscience and a sense that the world doesn't end at their own nose will experience guilt and a long-lasting emotional poverty from doing something wrong (guilt is a horrible thing to experience). That's not karma. Karma is a boomerang effect of bad stuff coming back to whack you. Bad stuff happens to people regardless of some cosmic moral law. Just because some guy beat his wife and then later gets cancer doesn't mean the two are related. Cause and effect is real, but humans often see it in places where it isn't there.

There's the phrase 'no good deed goes unpunished'. There really is a dissonance between whether what you do is morally correct and whether random lucky events happen to you. Reward and punishment are completely socially determined. You might get rewarded for doing things that are socially 'right'. If you happen to do something that is universally 'right', you'll only be rewarded if:
a) that thing was also socially 'right'
b) somebody with a degree of power notices you doing it.
Likewise, you only get punished for doing wrong things, if:
a) your society views those things as wrong
b) people who actually care notice you doing it.

I don't believe that. I think that it's possible to avoid some of the 'karma' due, some of the time, but it's still there as potential 'energy' and the threat of it coming back to you is always present. I don't believe anyone lives a life of shittery unscathed, even if the worst thing that happens is the servants peeing in your soup.

It would be very interesting to be able to objectively measure karma, as in the ratio of good bad behaviour to good/bad results. There are myriad problems with such an experiment though. I doubt it's feasible.

I notice from my personal observations how small things I do create large effects, negative and positive, and I know which I'd rather reap.



Suffering guilt because of one's own negative actions in the world is classic karma.



Oh I see, you are differentiating between cause and effect and karma, whereas I don't.

I'm agnostic on this 'law of attraction' idea of karma. It does sometimes feel like I draw more positive outcomes when I'm doing meritorious acts, but there could be a perfectly natural but unseen mechanism causing it.



Being in line with the universal and the social is ideal, because one is not separate from the other, though there is a persistent illusion that man lives free and independent of nature.

The rewards of society tend toward material rewards that are really just more of a burden when observed with a clear mind, and are not truly satisfying.

I feel that I do good deeds quite often, and so far I have recieved nothing but satisfaction and positivity in return. And long may it continue.

I just think the imbalance between the amount of shittery done and the sometimes meagre comeuppance makes karma look sort of weak. For me, it's enough to discredit it.




If you don't differentiate, then why even have the word karma? Karma has connotations of reincarnation and other spiritual stuff that you may or may not believe in, but that is irrelevant if all you mean by 'karma' is cause and effect. Karma carries associations of other ideas because it comes from an Eastern religious context; that's why I differentiate.




So, this karma business is all a matter of perspective? It's not actual events but perceptions of them? Doesn't that make it the same thing as conscience?

I guess I can't get into the mindset that the world doesn't exist beyond perception. If I buy the Big Issue and then feel a bit smug, I don't see that as karma. I just see that as my feelings, which are totally unimportant on a universal scale.

EDIT: Thinking about it, though. Maybe my feelings are important in that they encourage further action. In my example, the endorphins of smugness experienced will cause me to do more smugness-inducing acts to get the same feeling again. I can see how that applied across the rest of humanity would have a wider effect that could be seen as a kind of karma. Good produces more good and bad produces more bad. The fact that humans mimic each other and readily develop habits lends more weight to this. It's not what most people think of as 'karma' though...which is more commonly thought of as a moral boomerang.

I suggest that that might be a perceptual bias.

From the outside, a bad person might seem to have it all. But we don't always (or usually) know what his or her personal or inner life is like. The grass is always greener might apply in reverse here. It's quite easy to think that our lives are harder or more painful than other people's, because we usually only experience other people's suffering in a weaker way than our own, if it even reaches us at all. Being empathically challenged as we on the spectrum can tend to be, doesn't help.



It's a word, it means something to me. It doesn't mean the same thing to you. That's okay. That's what we have conversation for. AFAIK, this topic is about karma, but we need to define what we think it is to talk about it, since everyone (apparently) has wildly different ideas. I feel the same about use of the term 'God' but I don't bother with those threads; that word is too far gone. I am interested in giving my perspective on Eastern ideas, as they are closer to my heart.



Conscience is there to guide you towards creating or responding to events in certain ways. Karma comes after you act or react in the world.



I don't know what you mean by that. I don't mean to sound smug.



I'm not entirely sure what point you are making now. Your last paragraphs confuse me.

I'm sorry if you think that doing good in the world is simply done to generate smugness. I think that making myself and others happier is only positive, and I don't feel like I'm rubbing other people's faces in that. If anything, I would want other people to feel that too, then they can be smug about it or not as they choose.

Reporting that I feel happier for doing good rather than bad may seem smug to you, but it is simply what I have found.

Yes, Karma is a lot like a moral boomerang. What you throw out into the world returns to you.

My argument was that people do good deeds to feel better about themselves and then they like the feeling, so they do more good things. If you imagine lots of people all around the world doing this, even if it's just for the selfish reason of feeling better about themselves (or smug, if you like), then you have a real force in the world. This is how good multiplies itself. Bad things multiply themselves because the effects of a negative action pass from one person to another. This is how I see a cause and effect arising out of morally motivated actions. This is the only kind of karma I can imagine. I don't believe in a metaphysical force that balances things out, but that is as close as I would get to believing in karma.

My problem with the idea of karma as a boomerang is that it's too simple. Nice things don't just happen to people because they do nice things. Rather, doing nice things encourages a positive frame of mind, that encourages more nice things to happen in the world in general. That was my argument!

I'm not above feeling smug. I think feeling smug is a neutral thing and the good deed done is more important. I was positing the smugness as motivator for more good deeds...so in that way smugness is a good thing. My idea of altruism is very influenced by evolutionary theory. I think most good things are done for ultimately selfish reasons but that doesn't diminish the virtue of them in my view. It wasn't meant as a personal attack. I'm quite cynical about what motivates us bald apes, so don't think I was talking about you in particular.

Ahh, okay, thanks for elaborating. Well, I agree with you! Feeling good about something is a great motivator to do it.

In my view, smug has a negative connotation, so I wouldn't use it in this context myself.



Well I won't argue against that. But I think karma is simple.



I beg your pardon. I partially explained my reaction to the 'smug' thing above ^

I agree in so far as selfless things are done for selfish reasons. But when you get beyond the sense of there being 'I' and 'other', I'd say it's more like this singular 'something' (I need a word, but I'm trying to avoid 'spiritual' terminology) gives of itself and to itself in a natural and harmonic way.

I used the word smug because it does have a negative connotation. All actions have both negative and positive aspects to differing degrees. If someone starts to like the warm fuzzy feeling of doing good deeds too much, it can lead to a certain complacency about asking moral questions. I don't think anything about morality is simple. I have a hard time deciding what is the least harmful thing to do, let alone what the most beneficial thing is.

That's why many mystical/religious systems includes a systematic method for experiencing and understanding cause and affect with deep awareness... meditation. It helps one navigate the grey (and the black, and white) areas, understanding the causes of suffering and how it manifests in oneself, and the ways to live promoting true happiness and non suffering in oneself and others. There's also the doctrine and philosophy which are good, but not really complete without experiential understanding.