271. The Clockwork Of Karma
 

The concept of Karma can be found throughout the recorded thoughtworks of mankind. It takes on many different forms, from deifications to mechanistical, 'scientifical' views of 'cause and effect'.

In its most simplistic representation it condenses to 'what goes around comes around'. In nearly all treatises on this subject, however, the paragraph on "How It Works", is omitted altogether.

Without an understanding of 'how it works', the knowledge of 'Karma' as a phenomenon can be quite frustrating, to say the least, and it can even lead a person astray, ultimately wreaking havoc.

The word 'karma' itself comes from Vedic Sanskrit 'karman' which simply means 'work', 'profession', or, informally, a 'job'. In Pali, the language of Buddhist recordings, this word mutated into the a-declination, misleading many translators to interpret the word as a past tense participe (lit.'what was done').

In any case, over time, the word 'karma' came to be known as a name for the phenomenon that 'one reaps what one sows'.

Now, if one would always reap what one has sowed, any attempt to 'change' future karma would be utterly futile, as pointed out already by Gotamo Siddharto (now known as the 'Buddha') 2,500 years ago.

This circumstance becomes apparent only to the degree that a person becomes able to recall past lives. While the vast number of thoughts and actions just within the current life time is staggering already, the view of life time sequences in the current Universe (Snskrt:'kalpa') is mind-boggling.

Adding on to this the recall of Universe-Rings (maha-kalpas) and the recall of Rings of Universe-Rings (maha-maha-kalpas), any illusions of the predictability  of future 'karma' will
certainly be destroyed thoroughly .

The question of 'karma' seemingly becomes a problem of 'Chaos Theory': the most innocent and minute action can cause re-actions that surpass its original scope and strength by orders of magnitude - the flap of a butterfly becomes the starting point of a storm.

As Gotamo noted, there would be no 'escape' from this for any Being after a sufficiently long time of dwelling in this (or a similar) Universe - every person 'remembers' its past deeds  (mostly super- and/or subconsciously) - and so do ALL other players in the game.

Merely adding on 'good deeds' would not change things in the big picture: if there are 10 trillions 'good' deeds and 10 trillions 'bad' deeds, one 'good' deed by itself couldn't possibly beat the statistics.

Fortunately, though, it can be found that the instantiation of 'karma' is being 'triggered' by the person itself.

This means, that, in order to find the key to 'switch off' at least the negative effects of 'karma', it will be necessary to find the _trigger_ that prompts 'bad karma' to take its course.

Viewing all past actions as a multi-dimensional vector matrix of forces: how does the 'Universe' 'know' what's next in store for a person?

The answer is surprisingly simple, once known: a person triggers a response through its own mind: exactly that what a person feels bad about, will cause the entities in the person's environment to remember what the person did.

In other words, if a person would no longer feel 'bad' about anything it did in the past, the person would not trigger any negative responses within its environment.

This circumstance has been known for a long time (at least intuitively). Many 'religions' established an institutional procedure known as 'confession': the person gets the remembrance
of the 'bad' deed 'off his chest' by confiding it to 'God' via a priest.

While this can work perfectly well, it can also be a double-edged sword: if 'God' has become personalized in the mind of the confessing person, the off-loading of the remembrance of the
'bad' deed will not result in a confession to _all_ players in the Universe.

Instead, it will result in the phenomenon of 'righteousness': the person ceased to hold back its memory of bad things done to a personified 'God' but it now holds back this very memory
from the rest of the Universe. This will usually lead to a _repetition_ of the 'bad' deed, now based on the internal justification of 'being in harmony' with God - the person may act in a devastatingly harmful manner to itself and its environment.

If the act of ceasing to restrain oneself due to a 'bad' action in the past is done in a 'workable' way, the person will give up any thought of hiding anything from the rest of the Universe.

This is the magic of 'surrendering' to the Universe - a phrasing that could be misunderstood to delegate the cause of future events to the environment. What it means in this context, however, is that the person simply does not need to hold back any of its feeling - it doesn't hide anything
from anybody anymore and is thus by-passing the triggers of 'bad karma'.

'Not holding back' doesn't mean to 'spill one's guts' - in the contrary, the person doesn't feel compelled to communicate the sad things about it anymore at all. After all, 'spilling one's guts' is exactly an effort to bring about a confession with the desired result of off-loading bad feelings about past actions. Such a confession, however, becomes obsolete once the person has a 'clean' mind.

As soon as a person does not hold back anymore, any _new_ 'small' deed that is held back will weigh like a ton.

This can be visualized using the picture of a scale: if there are a hundred pounds on each side of the scale, another gram won't tilt the scale.

However, if there is no load (or 'charge') left on either side of the scale, even a seemingly insignificant event can now prompt the scale to veer off to the according side.

Once 'cleaned', the effects of karma will be incredibly magnified - to survive nevertheless, a person thus 'cleaned' must act in a comprehensively ethical manner. The justification
of _new_ 'bad' deeds with the prospective of the possibility of cleaning it up afterwards (as practiced by some institutions nowadays) is a dangerous and truly self-defeating enterprise.

To sum it up nicely: shit happens because people think that shit should happen to them because they caused shit to happen to someone else AND they are afraid to admit it.