good deeds and karma
Nov. 28th, 2005 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonHaving recently replaced our oil boiler with a wood-fired boiler and central heat storage tank, I just put the old boiler and hot water maker (heat exchanger and storage tank) out on Freecycle.org. Yeah, boilers aren't cheap, and I could probably put a classified ad in the paper and sell it, but I'd much rather have the karma, and I had a feeling about this one.
No surprise, a bunch of people were interested in a free boiler, but as it turns out, a schoolteacher (in the, no-kidding, one-room schoolhouse in the next town over) and her husband are building a house, now running into the winter weather, and while they build, have been living in a trailer heated with a balky propane heater and freezing their butts off, and they really, really need a working boiler right away that they can put into a small section of their new house where they can throw some walls up and get out of the trailer while they finish the house. And when I excavate and crane out the in-ground oil tank out of here in a week or two, they're going to take that, too, and plan to sparge it and convert it into an outside wood-fired boiler. So I get to help out, which makes me feel great -- and it sounds to me like these folks may be good folks to get to know, resourceful and handy neighbors, frugal and good at building and fixing things. Who knows, maybe I'll never see them again, or maybe we'll become friends and trade building tips and skills, or maybe just someday I'll need someone to do a quick welding job or something and they'll do me a favor in turn.
Karma is simple, I think. It's a natural law of the universe, not a cosmic law of deities. There's no omniscient daddy or mommy up there with a heavenly balance book, checking "naughty" and "nice" according to some cosmic Big Book of Dogma and Law, and meting out personal justice in turn. If there were such an all-powerful being or beings, don't you think they'd use their powers to pretty quickly find a way to get themselves *out* of that job, instead of having to constantly watch and monitor the day to day tawdry minutia of humanity, for all eternity? Ick.
No, clearly people often don't get what they "deserve," even if such an objective measure was possible. Karma ain't necessarily personal. Bad stuff happens to good people, and vice versa, all the time. But still, karma happens. It's simple cause and effect, and basic probability. Each act we take, each choice we make, has consequences, and they affect the world in which we live, they skew the probability lines that weave around us constantly, that form the earth, the substrate, the matrix in which we act. If we treat those around us well, we strengthen those around us, and thus we strengthen our environment/community, we strengthen the web of connections in which we live, and, indirectly, we strengthen ourselves. If we treat others badly, beyond incurring the non-inconsiderable personal ill-will, we also weaken our peers, our environment, our community, and, so, ourselves. It seems quite clear that a certain amount of altruism, generally choosing a stance of going out of one's way to treat others well, taking the moral high ground, is, much like using good manners, a very pragmatic virtue, in any world in which natural-law karma operates. And the reverse is true as well. What we choose does comes back to us three times, due to the inescapable force of natural-law karma. It all comes back, and directly or indirectly, affects the probability lines of our lives.
In a more mobile society, it's sometimes possible for people to just dump their crap and move on -- that's how petty thieves, con artists operate and get away with their cons, at least for a while. *Someone* pays for their actions, pays for the trail of mistrust and anger and hurt and damage, while they move on from place to place, seemingly scot-free. Except that it's a much smaller world than it used to be, and getting smaller all the time. And the way the world is going, we're all going to have to depend much more closely on our communities -- the lone wolf, or even the nuclear family, is going to at times be untenable, we all will need others more and more. And that means building up long-term relationships, and that means those around you will know who you are, will have a sense of your history, your nature, what acts you did or did not do over time. And most people have long, long memories, perhaps even longer for slights than for favors, but that may just be human nature, after all.
As has been said, somewhat crudely but accurately, "if you crap in your bed, sooner or later you end up sleeping in crap."
On the other hand, I would rather leave some good chocolates under the pillows, clean the sheets, make the bed, stock the bedside drawer with erotic literature, essential oils and massage oil, sex toys, poetry, and other fun stuff, and hope that others will do the same for me. Makes for much more pleasant and restful nights, I find, and smells infinitely better ;>
Here at the end, I'll attach a snippet of an exchange with a former colleague and brother on the topic of karma -- he says some good stuff :>
>m**** quoth:
>
>Karma, simply put, is the law of cause and effect. Certainly it's greatly oversimplified in both Eastern and Western societies, but in Buddhism it has a
>very specific definition, one that is accepted widely by Buddhists who actually bother to study their religion. The rest do the same as Christians do and regard it
>as a law of punishment and reward. In Buddhism, however, karma is the result of ignorance of the true nature of the universe, that is as a single waveform
>intimately interconnected. This ignorance results in forming a view of the universe that is timebound and subject to the law of cause and effect. The goal of Buddhism
>is to free oneself from delusion and achieve liberation, that is to say an accurate apprehension of the universe.
>
>In day to day terms this is easy enough to see. If you develop a shitty attitude towards life then shitty things are likely to happen to you and constantly reinforce your
>attitude. If you choose to view the universe as malleable and generally friendly shitty things will still happen to you but you'll ride them out in an implicit belief that
>they will bear gifts that you do not yet understand or foresee. A great deal really does come down to attitude. Buddhism states explicitly that it is possible to live
>a life freed from karma, but only if you choose to remain in a state of spiritual awakening or liberation.
>
>Magicians tend to be optimists. Confronted by some apparently random horror of daily life they respond with magick, an action that contains the implicit belief
>that the universe is malleable and friendly to their intentions. This is a much more functional and adaptive attitude to have than one of self-pity, anger, or
>resentment, although these are certainly valid emotions which often must be experienced. How long one chooses to experience them and how much one allows them to
>color one's view of the universe affects the extent to which one binds oneself to the Wheel of Life (samsara), living a life that is fragmented, lonely, and repetitive.
>That is to say, bound by karma.
No surprise, a bunch of people were interested in a free boiler, but as it turns out, a schoolteacher (in the, no-kidding, one-room schoolhouse in the next town over) and her husband are building a house, now running into the winter weather, and while they build, have been living in a trailer heated with a balky propane heater and freezing their butts off, and they really, really need a working boiler right away that they can put into a small section of their new house where they can throw some walls up and get out of the trailer while they finish the house. And when I excavate and crane out the in-ground oil tank out of here in a week or two, they're going to take that, too, and plan to sparge it and convert it into an outside wood-fired boiler. So I get to help out, which makes me feel great -- and it sounds to me like these folks may be good folks to get to know, resourceful and handy neighbors, frugal and good at building and fixing things. Who knows, maybe I'll never see them again, or maybe we'll become friends and trade building tips and skills, or maybe just someday I'll need someone to do a quick welding job or something and they'll do me a favor in turn.
Karma is simple, I think. It's a natural law of the universe, not a cosmic law of deities. There's no omniscient daddy or mommy up there with a heavenly balance book, checking "naughty" and "nice" according to some cosmic Big Book of Dogma and Law, and meting out personal justice in turn. If there were such an all-powerful being or beings, don't you think they'd use their powers to pretty quickly find a way to get themselves *out* of that job, instead of having to constantly watch and monitor the day to day tawdry minutia of humanity, for all eternity? Ick.
No, clearly people often don't get what they "deserve," even if such an objective measure was possible. Karma ain't necessarily personal. Bad stuff happens to good people, and vice versa, all the time. But still, karma happens. It's simple cause and effect, and basic probability. Each act we take, each choice we make, has consequences, and they affect the world in which we live, they skew the probability lines that weave around us constantly, that form the earth, the substrate, the matrix in which we act. If we treat those around us well, we strengthen those around us, and thus we strengthen our environment/community, we strengthen the web of connections in which we live, and, indirectly, we strengthen ourselves. If we treat others badly, beyond incurring the non-inconsiderable personal ill-will, we also weaken our peers, our environment, our community, and, so, ourselves. It seems quite clear that a certain amount of altruism, generally choosing a stance of going out of one's way to treat others well, taking the moral high ground, is, much like using good manners, a very pragmatic virtue, in any world in which natural-law karma operates. And the reverse is true as well. What we choose does comes back to us three times, due to the inescapable force of natural-law karma. It all comes back, and directly or indirectly, affects the probability lines of our lives.
In a more mobile society, it's sometimes possible for people to just dump their crap and move on -- that's how petty thieves, con artists operate and get away with their cons, at least for a while. *Someone* pays for their actions, pays for the trail of mistrust and anger and hurt and damage, while they move on from place to place, seemingly scot-free. Except that it's a much smaller world than it used to be, and getting smaller all the time. And the way the world is going, we're all going to have to depend much more closely on our communities -- the lone wolf, or even the nuclear family, is going to at times be untenable, we all will need others more and more. And that means building up long-term relationships, and that means those around you will know who you are, will have a sense of your history, your nature, what acts you did or did not do over time. And most people have long, long memories, perhaps even longer for slights than for favors, but that may just be human nature, after all.
As has been said, somewhat crudely but accurately, "if you crap in your bed, sooner or later you end up sleeping in crap."
On the other hand, I would rather leave some good chocolates under the pillows, clean the sheets, make the bed, stock the bedside drawer with erotic literature, essential oils and massage oil, sex toys, poetry, and other fun stuff, and hope that others will do the same for me. Makes for much more pleasant and restful nights, I find, and smells infinitely better ;>
Here at the end, I'll attach a snippet of an exchange with a former colleague and brother on the topic of karma -- he says some good stuff :>
>m**** quoth:
>
>Karma, simply put, is the law of cause and effect. Certainly it's greatly oversimplified in both Eastern and Western societies, but in Buddhism it has a
>very specific definition, one that is accepted widely by Buddhists who actually bother to study their religion. The rest do the same as Christians do and regard it
>as a law of punishment and reward. In Buddhism, however, karma is the result of ignorance of the true nature of the universe, that is as a single waveform
>intimately interconnected. This ignorance results in forming a view of the universe that is timebound and subject to the law of cause and effect. The goal of Buddhism
>is to free oneself from delusion and achieve liberation, that is to say an accurate apprehension of the universe.
>
>In day to day terms this is easy enough to see. If you develop a shitty attitude towards life then shitty things are likely to happen to you and constantly reinforce your
>attitude. If you choose to view the universe as malleable and generally friendly shitty things will still happen to you but you'll ride them out in an implicit belief that
>they will bear gifts that you do not yet understand or foresee. A great deal really does come down to attitude. Buddhism states explicitly that it is possible to live
>a life freed from karma, but only if you choose to remain in a state of spiritual awakening or liberation.
>
>Magicians tend to be optimists. Confronted by some apparently random horror of daily life they respond with magick, an action that contains the implicit belief
>that the universe is malleable and friendly to their intentions. This is a much more functional and adaptive attitude to have than one of self-pity, anger, or
>resentment, although these are certainly valid emotions which often must be experienced. How long one chooses to experience them and how much one allows them to
>color one's view of the universe affects the extent to which one binds oneself to the Wheel of Life (samsara), living a life that is fragmented, lonely, and repetitive.
>That is to say, bound by karma.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-28 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-28 08:23 pm (UTC)It's my pattern, after a long period of expansiveness and service, to turn inward -- and sometimes I turn a little too inward.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-28 08:37 pm (UTC)Yep!
A lot of my 'no fish spell' philosophy is rooted in this idea, as well. In magick, I want to phrase things in such a way that I am always working toward desire and the positive, rather than against the negative. The way I was told, the gods hear nouns and verbs really well, but qualifiers not so much. So the ability to concentrate toward the gifts of each thing is essential, even and especially when the gifts are hard to see.
(If you say no fish at the end of your spell, you will probably get your heart's desire - but you will also assuredly get fish!)
This applies also to other things: community, relationships, my job, my home. Sometimes it's important to look clearly at what's not working, sure. But working toward what I want rather than focusing on what I don't is what allows for growth.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-28 08:59 pm (UTC)There are times when one must be in opposition to (and there are of course techniques to use that as an energtic springboard), but I believe that it's often much more effective long-term to instead, posit the positive ;>
no subject
Date: 2005-11-28 09:18 pm (UTC)I actually have a great deal of difficulty even recognizing the 'negative' because of this. Or as I've put it otherwise, I'm pretty good at making even things which aren't working work for me. This is its own limitation - the pollyannaism is not always a good thing. But it's a limitation I'm usually willing to live with.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-29 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-29 01:11 pm (UTC)me- I am amazed by the way you attend to every detail and are so concerned with the comfort and happiness of your guests.
host- People are social, and everyone affects everyone else, so to create an environment where i am most likely to be most happy, i passionately attend to the pleasure of those around me.
And since that conversation (which reframed a fair bit of my life) i've sat back and watched as your harvest comes in, brother.
Thank you ;-)