Wednesday, February 07, 2007
How does the karma of evil people affect YOU?
If you shout at someone, everyone within range will hear you. If you shine a flashlight on someone, nearby people will also be illuminated. Karma is just energy, and behaves analogously to other forms of energy, so karma flowing to someone will touch everyone near them... how could it NOT?
Most folks see karma as a totally individual phenomenon, such that your karma can only affect YOU, but that doesn't make sense; not only is it contrary to how the other natural forces work, it carries the unspoken, and perhaps unrealized, under-thought that there's some sort of sentience directing karma that "makes it" stick tight to just its "owner"... but there's no reason whatsoever to think that. Karma has no more analysis, judgment or intention than gravity or magnetism; it doesn't reward, it doesn't punish, and it's not "fair"... doubly so because you can benefit, or suffer, from karma that you had no hand in creating, just by being close by when it "hits."
Not buying it? One of my friends who's a total believer in karma resisted this idea at 1st, too, because as a Christian (she believes that God created karma as a tool to carry out His plan) she was wedded to the idea of it being "personal" rather than something that can slop onto you like a shaken soda opened in a group. She was puzzled, therefore, when she and her husband took a young man they'd known and loved since he was a kid and his girlfriend into the house because they were homeless and immediately things that neither they nor their guests could have had any effect on started going markedly wrong; they were doing something GOOD, something BIG, and doing it with loving hearts with no thought of being compensated, so what was up? Their guests were allegedly EX drug addicts, which along with the homelessness meant that they were dealing with a great deal of stress; this made them radiate negative thoughts and emotions and thus - karma... but could it have been ENOUGH - karma to cause problems for their benefactors? We'll never know, because, as is usually the case with druggies, there were massive amounts of bad behavior involved as well.
They both got jobs, but somehow didn't have ANY $ to give my friend to cover their expenses; she refused to see that there was no way that transportation costs and such were eating up 2 entire full-time salaries, and this stubborn blindness, this refusal to see the truth, to pass accurate judgment with it or to act on it, which is typical of how we ALL deal with even the worst-behaved loved/liked ones, allowed the lying ingrates to trick her into financing their entire lives. In addition, they pulled some other stunts typical of drug users, including stealing a bunch of stuff from her and her mother; in other words, although they might have been saints before they started using, they'd become sick, evil people, and their presence in my friend's home, and their intense emotional involvement with her and her husband, poisoned her life from the moment they arrived. Financial disasters rained down upon my friend throughout the stay of her "guests," to the point where she and her husband, who had previously been VERY financially secure, nearly had to sell their home; as soon as the turds were tossed out, the disasters stopped, and a series of GOOD financial surprises started showing up... and I mean right away, not 6 months later.
It was so blatant that it was like a dam breaking, and each "reward" was unconnected to the others and beyond their ability to affect it; stunned, my friend realized that the bad karma of her ex-guests HAD been affecting her and her husband, and that only when the sources of - karma were removed could the + karma from the + energy of their selflessness and generosity get to them. Her summation of these events was that God expects us to use our freedom of choice to make the RIGHT choices, in keeping with how He prefers us to behave, and that includes heeding the countless warning signs as to the evil nature of certain people and STAYING AWAY FROM THEM; if we fail to do this, then naturally we should expect the evil to surround us and cause us harm, not only directly from the evil ones' actions but indirectly from their - karma.
The jury is out about the God issue in my mind until proof shows up one way or the other, but the karmic issue seems clear; the karma of those around you mingles with yours, which gives another powerful reason to NOT allow evil people to be in your life. It doesn't matter how much you care about them (WHY you'd care about an evil person is a whole BOOK), it doesn't matter how long you've known them (as if THAT'S a reason for clinging to someone), it doesn't matter how good of sex you have with them, it doesn't matter how well they're treating YOU (so far), it even doesn't matter if they share DNA with you; an evil person will eventually do evil to YOU, the direct results of their evil deeds will likely eventually impact you (ask any woman whose man's in prison how much fun she's having), and the - karma that flows steadily towards them, that surrounds them constantly, will drag YOUR karma down.
It gets even worse; since the karma of evil people tends to not even "reach" them due to their impaired souls (see my post of 1-26-07), those around them will absorb, not just the outer rim of it, but ALL of it... keep THAT in mind the next time you're tempted to vault over 20 nice people to fling yourself at an evil person because they seem "exciting" or "fun" or "sexy."
The cheerful news is that if you have GOOD people close to you you'll soak up some of their + karma; keep in mind, though, that to be GOOD requires ACTION, and pitifully few people are willing to leap to the defense of those who are being attacked or otherwise mistreated, which is a minimum requirement for goodness, and thus are neither bad nor good but neutral, and so is their average karma.
A final note; "negative" emotions like grief, anxiety, anger and depression create - karma as well, which will also affect those exposed to it adversely. I'd never suggest that you abandon an unhappy friend to avoid their - karma, but it might be wise to steer clear of acquaintances who're in a perpetual bad mood; why not give some of the nice people you haven't bothered to get to know better a chance instead?
Most folks see karma as a totally individual phenomenon, such that your karma can only affect YOU, but that doesn't make sense; not only is it contrary to how the other natural forces work, it carries the unspoken, and perhaps unrealized, under-thought that there's some sort of sentience directing karma that "makes it" stick tight to just its "owner"... but there's no reason whatsoever to think that. Karma has no more analysis, judgment or intention than gravity or magnetism; it doesn't reward, it doesn't punish, and it's not "fair"... doubly so because you can benefit, or suffer, from karma that you had no hand in creating, just by being close by when it "hits."
Not buying it? One of my friends who's a total believer in karma resisted this idea at 1st, too, because as a Christian (she believes that God created karma as a tool to carry out His plan) she was wedded to the idea of it being "personal" rather than something that can slop onto you like a shaken soda opened in a group. She was puzzled, therefore, when she and her husband took a young man they'd known and loved since he was a kid and his girlfriend into the house because they were homeless and immediately things that neither they nor their guests could have had any effect on started going markedly wrong; they were doing something GOOD, something BIG, and doing it with loving hearts with no thought of being compensated, so what was up? Their guests were allegedly EX drug addicts, which along with the homelessness meant that they were dealing with a great deal of stress; this made them radiate negative thoughts and emotions and thus - karma... but could it have been ENOUGH - karma to cause problems for their benefactors? We'll never know, because, as is usually the case with druggies, there were massive amounts of bad behavior involved as well.
They both got jobs, but somehow didn't have ANY $ to give my friend to cover their expenses; she refused to see that there was no way that transportation costs and such were eating up 2 entire full-time salaries, and this stubborn blindness, this refusal to see the truth, to pass accurate judgment with it or to act on it, which is typical of how we ALL deal with even the worst-behaved loved/liked ones, allowed the lying ingrates to trick her into financing their entire lives. In addition, they pulled some other stunts typical of drug users, including stealing a bunch of stuff from her and her mother; in other words, although they might have been saints before they started using, they'd become sick, evil people, and their presence in my friend's home, and their intense emotional involvement with her and her husband, poisoned her life from the moment they arrived. Financial disasters rained down upon my friend throughout the stay of her "guests," to the point where she and her husband, who had previously been VERY financially secure, nearly had to sell their home; as soon as the turds were tossed out, the disasters stopped, and a series of GOOD financial surprises started showing up... and I mean right away, not 6 months later.
It was so blatant that it was like a dam breaking, and each "reward" was unconnected to the others and beyond their ability to affect it; stunned, my friend realized that the bad karma of her ex-guests HAD been affecting her and her husband, and that only when the sources of - karma were removed could the + karma from the + energy of their selflessness and generosity get to them. Her summation of these events was that God expects us to use our freedom of choice to make the RIGHT choices, in keeping with how He prefers us to behave, and that includes heeding the countless warning signs as to the evil nature of certain people and STAYING AWAY FROM THEM; if we fail to do this, then naturally we should expect the evil to surround us and cause us harm, not only directly from the evil ones' actions but indirectly from their - karma.
The jury is out about the God issue in my mind until proof shows up one way or the other, but the karmic issue seems clear; the karma of those around you mingles with yours, which gives another powerful reason to NOT allow evil people to be in your life. It doesn't matter how much you care about them (WHY you'd care about an evil person is a whole BOOK), it doesn't matter how long you've known them (as if THAT'S a reason for clinging to someone), it doesn't matter how good of sex you have with them, it doesn't matter how well they're treating YOU (so far), it even doesn't matter if they share DNA with you; an evil person will eventually do evil to YOU, the direct results of their evil deeds will likely eventually impact you (ask any woman whose man's in prison how much fun she's having), and the - karma that flows steadily towards them, that surrounds them constantly, will drag YOUR karma down.
It gets even worse; since the karma of evil people tends to not even "reach" them due to their impaired souls (see my post of 1-26-07), those around them will absorb, not just the outer rim of it, but ALL of it... keep THAT in mind the next time you're tempted to vault over 20 nice people to fling yourself at an evil person because they seem "exciting" or "fun" or "sexy."
The cheerful news is that if you have GOOD people close to you you'll soak up some of their + karma; keep in mind, though, that to be GOOD requires ACTION, and pitifully few people are willing to leap to the defense of those who are being attacked or otherwise mistreated, which is a minimum requirement for goodness, and thus are neither bad nor good but neutral, and so is their average karma.
A final note; "negative" emotions like grief, anxiety, anger and depression create - karma as well, which will also affect those exposed to it adversely. I'd never suggest that you abandon an unhappy friend to avoid their - karma, but it might be wise to steer clear of acquaintances who're in a perpetual bad mood; why not give some of the nice people you haven't bothered to get to know better a chance instead?
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Why do we have favorites?
What's your favorite color?
Why do you HAVE a favorite color?
Why do you have a favorite ANYTHING?
Put another way; why would primitive humans have had a need for favorites... what was the survival advantage? I'm not talking about the rational preference for one non-trivial thing over another, such as "That valley is my favorite because it has more fruit trees than any other" or "That river is my favorite because it has more fish in it than any other"; these boil down to "That valley/river gives me a better chance of surviving than any other" and thus are useful, but things like "This flower is my favorite color" are different... what could have led to the 1st primitive human to choose that sort of favorite having such a thought, which was not only not related to survival but wasn't related to anything they were doing? (It's not like they were choosing a color to paint their cave, right?) What led to them having a favorite bird, not because it tasted best or was easiest to catch, but because it was the prettiest? What led to them picking a species of tree as their favorite, not because it gave better shade or produced more fruit or nuts, but because it smelled the best or had the most interestingly shaped leaves? What benefit did they gain from this sort of analysis and choice-making, and its associated emotional component (because we tend to feel inexplicably strongly about our favorites), that led to the ability and willingness to make the effort to select favorites spreading throughout the human race?
Is the tendency to choose favorites biologically encoded, or is it a learned behavior that got incorporated into human cultures because... why, because picking and having favorites is so much fun that once one person did it everyone else wanted to too? Do ALL cultures have this picking of favorites, in other words do people in remote tribes deep in the rain forests have favorite colors and such, or is it just people in "modern" cultures that've exchanged information between them for ages that have them? How far back do favorites go? 1000 years? To the dawn of civilization? To cave days? I don't suppose we'll ever know; until writing became widespread enough for lots of people to be doing it, and to be doing it to record stuff less important than religious and legal matters, there wouldn't have been records of something like that, so tracking down the 1st written reference wouldn't give an accurate answer.
And; why do we have favorites of things that didn't even exist in our primitive days? Do you know anyone who doesn't have favorite music, for example? Many of us have a deep, visceral reaction the 1st time we encounter the music that'll be a favorite... but WHY? Why any reaction at all to something beyond the experience of early humans? Why are there so many KINDS of music that can be favorites? Very similar-seeming people can have wildly differing musical preferences, and totally disparate folks can love the same music; what is it in our biologies or our brains that causes us to have certain sorts of music that resonate powerfully within us, while others are indifferent to or actively dislike our favorite music? What's the survival value of music appreciation, either in general or in so many different forms?
AND; in a broader sense, why do we have preferences for certain abstract, esoteric or trivial things over others? It's common, for example, for car enthusiasts to prefer the shape of one car's hood to the similar hood shape of another car; do you think primitive people stood around saying, "Yeah, I like the curve of that boulder more than the curve of that other boulder?" You might love plaid but hate polka dots; did primitive people look at a snake's skin and say, "Yeah, this pattern's nicer than the pattern on the gourd we ate yesterday"? When Oog grunted, did his buddy say, "The grunt you made yesterday was far more melodious"?
Why do we have ANY favorites/preferences that don't relate to survival? How was that 1st favorite created, and how did it benefit its "owner" so much that either we developed something physical in our brains that leads to having preferences and favorites, or "preference choosing" became a part of overall human culture? How and why are we even ABLE to form non-survival, non-facts-based preferences? Why can you and I both look at the same painting, and one of us goes "wow" and the other goes "yuck"?
I have no idea; it makes good food for thought, though.
Why do you HAVE a favorite color?
Why do you have a favorite ANYTHING?
Put another way; why would primitive humans have had a need for favorites... what was the survival advantage? I'm not talking about the rational preference for one non-trivial thing over another, such as "That valley is my favorite because it has more fruit trees than any other" or "That river is my favorite because it has more fish in it than any other"; these boil down to "That valley/river gives me a better chance of surviving than any other" and thus are useful, but things like "This flower is my favorite color" are different... what could have led to the 1st primitive human to choose that sort of favorite having such a thought, which was not only not related to survival but wasn't related to anything they were doing? (It's not like they were choosing a color to paint their cave, right?) What led to them having a favorite bird, not because it tasted best or was easiest to catch, but because it was the prettiest? What led to them picking a species of tree as their favorite, not because it gave better shade or produced more fruit or nuts, but because it smelled the best or had the most interestingly shaped leaves? What benefit did they gain from this sort of analysis and choice-making, and its associated emotional component (because we tend to feel inexplicably strongly about our favorites), that led to the ability and willingness to make the effort to select favorites spreading throughout the human race?
Is the tendency to choose favorites biologically encoded, or is it a learned behavior that got incorporated into human cultures because... why, because picking and having favorites is so much fun that once one person did it everyone else wanted to too? Do ALL cultures have this picking of favorites, in other words do people in remote tribes deep in the rain forests have favorite colors and such, or is it just people in "modern" cultures that've exchanged information between them for ages that have them? How far back do favorites go? 1000 years? To the dawn of civilization? To cave days? I don't suppose we'll ever know; until writing became widespread enough for lots of people to be doing it, and to be doing it to record stuff less important than religious and legal matters, there wouldn't have been records of something like that, so tracking down the 1st written reference wouldn't give an accurate answer.
And; why do we have favorites of things that didn't even exist in our primitive days? Do you know anyone who doesn't have favorite music, for example? Many of us have a deep, visceral reaction the 1st time we encounter the music that'll be a favorite... but WHY? Why any reaction at all to something beyond the experience of early humans? Why are there so many KINDS of music that can be favorites? Very similar-seeming people can have wildly differing musical preferences, and totally disparate folks can love the same music; what is it in our biologies or our brains that causes us to have certain sorts of music that resonate powerfully within us, while others are indifferent to or actively dislike our favorite music? What's the survival value of music appreciation, either in general or in so many different forms?
AND; in a broader sense, why do we have preferences for certain abstract, esoteric or trivial things over others? It's common, for example, for car enthusiasts to prefer the shape of one car's hood to the similar hood shape of another car; do you think primitive people stood around saying, "Yeah, I like the curve of that boulder more than the curve of that other boulder?" You might love plaid but hate polka dots; did primitive people look at a snake's skin and say, "Yeah, this pattern's nicer than the pattern on the gourd we ate yesterday"? When Oog grunted, did his buddy say, "The grunt you made yesterday was far more melodious"?
Why do we have ANY favorites/preferences that don't relate to survival? How was that 1st favorite created, and how did it benefit its "owner" so much that either we developed something physical in our brains that leads to having preferences and favorites, or "preference choosing" became a part of overall human culture? How and why are we even ABLE to form non-survival, non-facts-based preferences? Why can you and I both look at the same painting, and one of us goes "wow" and the other goes "yuck"?
I have no idea; it makes good food for thought, though.
