Michael,
Your take on karma is encouraging but denies a reality – bad things happen to people who do bad things. This has been recognized for thousands of years. The Torah and the Talmud are replete with examples and admonitions about karmic acts as are the sacred Buddhist texts and the writings of wise people from most ages and religions. The Christian bible teaches that you reap what you sow.
Certainly, how we react to bad events is important to how we deal with them in the current monent, but the fact that those events occur in the first place is where karma manifests. Karma is cause and effect – past life (or lives) intentional acts effecting current events. Karma is not the result of how we think about those prior acts but of the intentional acts themselves. Homicide bombers, and those who motivate them, "think" that their acts are meritorious but do you really believe that just thinking so makes them so? I’d bet aginst it. I think there is some very bad karma created by such actions. Conversely, do you believe that the acts of a Mother Teresa generate anything but good karma?
Becoming aware of our prior acts and their impact on others leads us to a greater appreciation of what effect our current acts have on the world, the "others" in our immediate relationships and our God – whoever s/he may be. In the sense that we can affect our current behavior we can affect our future karma. That’s why Buddhists and other mystical traditions rely heavily on meditation practice and developing awareness.
This does not mean that random events which effect us are karmic. Hurricanes and earthquakes may have a karmic component that is related to the acts of many (and even that is doutful) but they are certainly not directed at anyone personally. In that sense, how one reacts to the results of such events is more important to that individual than the event itself. A bad reaction might create future bad karma and, conversely, a compassionate and non-self centered reaction might create future good karma.
I could go on for longer but let me end with this. "No good act goes Unpunished" is a political axiom that is countered by another – "What goes around comes around." There’s something about karma in both of them
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MN:
Agreed, Jeffrey! My take on Karma was more "poetic" than "literal" – meaning, I avoided getting into the philosophical "good creating good" and "bad creating bad" discussion (classical Karma) . . . even though I do believe that. The viewpoint I took was simply that WE have the opportunity to create our own karma by creating Good out of Bad every day.
Great points!
