Chaos and Karma

“What goes around comes around”,

”As you sow, so shall you reap”

"Then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought is that karma? When you’re not nice, that the bad things happen to you?", Off-the-wall words of Sharon Stone on the earthquake in china in 2008.

This is probably the oldest known principle that billions of people around the world believe in and agree upon: Karma.The belief has dragged in so much momentum, that many people don’t realize that this is yet another word that was absorbed into the English language. Unawares of the root, people still get to enjoy the essence of the word itself.  Although the word is still the same and the basic meaning is still uncorrupted, yet the meaning itself has different spatial orientation that changes with time. The Karma that the hindus talk about, the Karma that Buddha believed in and the Karma that the Shwetambaras and Digambaras follow fall in to this category. While the Western understanding of Karma is still the same yet there is a deliberate difference in their perspective.

What is Karma?

We all must be familiar with this. If not, the first couple of lines must be a sufficient definition.

Why Karma?

Karma and Reincarnation form the basis of the Indic religions. The lure of the western flock towards the Karmic principles strengths the point fact about the human psychological fear. Let’s get to the roots of Karma.

The world itself is a typical representation of confusion and randomness. The world has been reeling under the constant iron rule of Chaos. Chaos is pretty much the inherent nature of the Universe which comprises of the world and its surrounding,  non-linear dynamics!

Man has always been at odds with nature: trying to defend against its fury and out compete its powerful reaches or to mimic its impeccable unique patterns.  The result of one such attempt of countering the chaos kid of nature was the birth of the Karma, an intelligent design that can be attributed to the human mind. Karma is not something supernatural but the result of the complex mixture of the need of the hour and some critical thinking by the brain of the hour. Controlling the entropy is what the everyday life is all about.  The constant red shift that the Universe is tending towards can only mean that randomness is increasing constantly (may be until the bubble bursts, if it is bursts again or sucked in again). The process of reincarnation and Karma go hand in hand.  The deterministic behavior of the Karma is largely what keeps people at bay and makes people refrain from doing things that they think are morally bad and again “Bad” is relative wrt time and person.

 

The Catch 22.

I get stymied every time I try to read between lines. The Hindu belief of Karma seems to be largely deterministic in nature. What when I recollect the life of my superhero (sorry for ruminating on the same character over and over, but that’s what runs deep in my veins and that’s what I based my life, my actions and my beliefs on), Rama from Ayodhya, the Karmic effect does not seem to run in its real form.

Ram was a good son to his father, mothers, a good brother to his brothers, a good student to his teacher, a good husband to his wife, a good master to his servants and a good prince to his citizens. He was embodiment of human goodness. He stood for all values. He never displayed any divine trait except for a couple of instances which come at the far end of the mainline story. He lived his life as a human and if that is true the law of Karma must be applicable to him too. How does the law of Karma come into effect for a person who is a spic and span? What forces him into the forest, hardship, bereavement?

There is no explicit mention of the cause and effect action in many cases.  A vague mention of Valmiki’s curse ( a mistake: this is not Karma though) and a kid making fun of the maid of Kaikeyi can be attributed to the Karma, although both these instances do not feature in the original Ramayan written by Valmiki. This leads me to think otherwise.

1.       Either Ram is just a character in a story with no consideration of the Karmic principles.

2.       Ram did not live his life as a human; rather he had designed his own destiny before he descended on this Earth, (if he is perceived as God).

3.       Karmic principles are just the result of the game of chance rather than a hard rule bound to the spatial mind-body matrix.

Considering my position as a conservative and from a lot more examples and experiences I would always side with the third option.

Though Jesus Christ is deemed as the one born on this Earth to help people, Karma did not apply, it backfired.  There are examples of lots of such ill-fated people who where the principles of the cause and effect failed.

This is yet another effect of Karma: Karma misunderstood/misused.

I perceive Karma as an intelligent design of a highly advanced state of mind which was aimed at bringing harmony, peace and goodness by baiting people with the invisible carrot or perhaps an imaginary carrot, a non-existential carrot.

All these are the essential parts of a game.  A simple game of chess with 64 equal sized squares and equally powered armies on either side is a simple example of a controlled chaos.  There are no stealth moves that are possible, the opponent sees all the moves and the space of movement is limited and still many a times we don’t even perceive a gambit and there is always a winner and a loser.

A chess board is an example of controlled chaos and true to its nature, it originated in India. The Karmic principles are trying to control the vast expanse of the uncontrollable realm of chaos. Though it instills a feel good factor and leads people towards prosperity yet in reality Karma is a non functional, illusory, false concept.

A lot of time Chaos has its say over the happenings. Chaotic flight time control principles can be used to evade the adverse effects of chaos. These will essentially have the same probability that the Karmic principles have to get the good. “Do bad, get bad and do good get good”: The non-existential bait that has driven civilizations after civilizations just like another mystic phenomenon, the invisible god.  It was rather used as a tool to explain the unexplainable, events occurring without a reason could easily be tied to the previous birth, ha ha.