Thoughts on Karma – it’s secular.

I was mulling Karma the other day after a number of events I’ve had happen.  I thought to myself “Rich, why don’t you put your thoughts into text and see how things go?”  So I plan to and hope to make 2 (or maybe even 3) posts.

So, I now need to explain what in the world I mean by that post heading.  Here goes.

I’ve seen the definite meme that Karma is some sort of divine judgment force, that there’s some kind of mystical account being kept for us.  I think that’s an unlikely state of affairs.

I tend to apply Occams Razor which means I usually go for the simplest explanation, thus I consider Karma to be a simple matter of cause and effect.  The reason it looks mystical is, in my view, down to the simple fact that we do not (and cannot possibly) possess (or keep track of) all the information in any given situation.  There are just too many variables, many of which are hidden.

For example, a person may well injure themselves in the gym, but again no mystical judgement force is involved.  Unheeded bad habits, poor exercise form over a number of years, simple carelessness, maybe even an undetected medical condition all can be factors.

So let’s build from the gym example, I gave examples of bad secular karma above.  But are there examples of good?  Of course there are, because there are things that can be doen to combat the above, even before they happen.

This is where I invoke parts of the Eightfold path. Right Mindfulness, awareness of your habits while using machines and performing exercises.  Mindfulness of the fact you may have a condition and taking that into account.  Right Action ties in by actually getting you to the doctors to get that condition checked, or seeing a Personal Trainer to get your poor form corrected.

Buddhist readers can no doubt take my example and tie the other elements of the path into it, so as is my habit, I’m going to leave the question open as a thought exercise for the reader.