Karma and horn-blowing

One frustration in having discussions with otherwise smart, feeling people is that many of us misuse the word karma. And not just once in awhile, but often—in its mistaken meaning of “fate” it has become a major excuse among the new age set for putting off action, for a fatalism that ill-becomes their otherwise proactive, forward-looking attitudes. I am always hearing things like “My karma made me do it.” or “ I just have to accept being the way I am, it’s my karma.” or “It was my karma that I had to sleep with the milkman—a past-life thing.” If you really want to be that way, to live in a world of predetermination (perhaps ruled by a big all-controlling bearded God-father on a throne who spends his time watching for fallen sparrows) then you really should drop the pretense of being up-to-date and with-it and simply use the word “fate” or “fortune” instead. If you really believe you are the way you are because of fate, you belong in the middle ages—that’s what kept the serfs toiling away and the lords and ladies partying guiltlessly. O Fortuna, velut luna . . .sors immanis et inanis “Oh Fortune, variable as the moon… you are monstrous and empty” (First lines of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—read the rest here: Carmina Burana)

The classical tradition that generated the word karma is Hindu-Buddhist culture. As you may know, Buddhism in its less mystical forms is not really a religion it is a psychology, a science of the mind. Classical conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs) was first described in the West in the late 1800’s, but the same human processes were known to Buddhist thinkers several thousand years ago and these were called karma. Karma is not Fate, it is the sum total of all the conditioned learning you have experienced since birth, and more, it is the total of all conditioned learning the human race has experienced, even since the human race was a single celled free-floater in a warm ancient sea. All evolution is karma, all pain-avoidance, all pleasure seeking, all learning. It is everything you have taught yourself to do to recover from the anxiety of having been spoken sharply to by your mother, to try to feel better after your dad spanked you, all the chocolates you have eaten because the sweetness makes the anxiety go away because it is sweet like mother’s milk which caused your infant’s hunger-anxiety to diminish. You can build chains of conditioning from the smallest actions, from infancy through old age. Using the concepts of evolutionary biology, you can even build them from amoebas to humans. Early Hindu thinkers knew this and from this comes the connection of karma to “past lives”. No mainstream Buddhist thinker believes in a reincarnation that would be similar to pulling the hard drive out of a dying computer and plugging it into a new, freshly born one. They do not believe that you and your soul-mate ruled together over a central Asian kingdom 5000 years ago and are so much in love now because you have re-discovered each other. It's nothing that storybook-simple. What they mean with “karma of past lives” is the total of all the learning that has taken place, the fact that we know how to feed ourselves, reproduce, compose symphonies. They are not judgmental like we are in the West, so there is no bad or good in karma—it is just a fact.

Karma is neither good nor bad, but what the teachings from Eastern religions (psychologies, therapeutic methods) are trying to say is that to live fully, one must not be governed by all the negative things humans have learned and that the easiest way to do this and let go is to break the chains of conditioning. In the West we attempt to sort out bad conditioning from good and keep the good. In the East, they just teach that one must break the karmic connection, bad and good will sort themselves out. It would be impossible to unravel all the karma we have built up or sort through it, but it is unnecessary. What the Eastern psychologist-meditators are saying is that to heal yourself from the pain, it is unimportant to trace the karmic connections; the only thing that is necessary is that we break the chains—become unconditioned. The method here is usually considered to be meditation, but there are other ways. All they are saying is that you must think outside the box. Do not be what you have been taught to be. Make new decisions based on the feeling of the moment, not on what you “have always felt you were”. Every thought or feeling comes in three parts: first the thought, like “Oh, there’s an apple on the table.” then the connection, the learning that links your thought to your reaction. The third part, the reaction, in this case is, “Hmmm, I could eat that apple because I’m a little hungry.” The second part, the link is that you have learned that apples satisfy hunger. The goal in Zen and other meditations is to eliminate the second part so that you say, “Oh, there’s an apple. . .” and stop there. No reaction. Stay in the thought. Be immediate. Only by breaking these conditioned reactions can we be free of karma. Your past life as a Scythian princess has nothing to do with it.

This is getting wordy and that is never my intent. Too many words spoil the idea. In other business, please forgive me for a little horn-tooting—a poem of mine has been “published” in an on-line poetry journal, here:
Holocene Lament (It's at the bottom of the page)

Winter's coming--have you got your tomatoes in?