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You can choose to see it as "God" or whatever, intervening and balancing things out, or you can say the universe is a machine, spiritual worlds included, and that it's just balancing things from a mechanical and not a moral standpoint; i.e. it isn't judging you, it's just maintaining equilibrium between the energies in your sphere of life, impersonally and automatically. Sometimes I can't help favouring the mechanical worldview; it could also help explain the apparrent lack of proper justice in this world, if it's just balancing things; we are very subjective and can't see all weights on the scales.
Very true. From what I have learned of the concept of Karma, it seems to be more of an issue where you go into things based on what you do. Allow me to elaborate:
The samurai chooses to live by his sword, therefore he chooses to die by it. Is it because he did evil things that he is struck down? No. It is because he is Samurai. This is their way of life.
The roofer makes his life by working on houses with his hands, therefore if careless, mishaps will happen by means of getting a branch to fall on his head, or he touches a live wire, or falls off... etc.
If you choose to live by (factor (x)), you assume responsibility that should cause and effect mechanisms in the universe come around for you, then what you are and what you do will be the conduits wherein there will be a ripple effect upon which shit happens.
People are unlikely to suffer some mishap unnassociated with their lives. A practicioner of magic is more likely to evoke the ire of an entity than someone who does not practice at all, where the chances of doing so would be next to nil.
Think of it this way: Someone cuts you off, and you flip them the bird.
Unbeknownst to you, however, this person really needed to get to the other side of the freeway to make the hospital exit, because the wife is in the back seat in labor. What is outlined in blue may be a factor in why you get pulled over soon for driving fast because you were upset, because the driver of the car that cut you off did not deserve the finger. Did you know? No. Was it possible for you to know? No. Should you flip the bird at all? Debatable, but I argue No. No reason to flip the bird, just back off, and let that person crash,
if they truly are driving like an ass for assholishness's sake.
My understanding of Karma sums itself to advice a friend gave me: "Don't be the sucka... just watch from a safe distance, and laugh when the sucka done mess up!!"
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I've found that instead of worrying about bad karma, I'm often best trying to be objective and judge as best I can the true fairness of a situation, before I go plunging in with powerful energies or curses. If I think I'm justified, I'll always go ahead.
This is also another very true sense of my understanding thus far of Karma. It seems to run along the lines of "Risk" and "Informed Decision despite situational risk." Minimizing risk is a hallmark of human behavior. When events play out otherwise because of ignorance to factors in initial conditions of a situation, then risk has not been minimized and then you "deserve what's coming to you" because you didn't "Check yo'self before you wreck yo'self."
When people see the risk coming, it becomes "an acknowledged possibility"
When people didn't see it coming, it's blamed on the stars, karma, god, etc...
Karma is just the mechanism by which all possibilities from all factors at play are laid out on a (please excuse my use of the word if it is improper) quantum level, whereupon you choose one
assumed on informed decision. If not informed... well, you had it coming. That's Karma. (IMG:
style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) *comedy rimshot!*
This post has been edited by Xenomancer: Oct 10 2009, 11:42 AM