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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (25921)	11/13/1998 10:19:00 PM
From: George S. Montgomery	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Christine, I am not trying to be a wise-ass here... I simply am numbed by this statement of yours: "Is it possible that karma in the poor and unfortunate who have NEVER had much of a causative role in their own experience, is different than in relatively privileged western people who adopt it as part of their belief system?" The "adopt it as part etc..." is where I fall down. Adopt what? Karma? Their roles in their experiences? Is the karma different? Again, I ask most respectively what it is you have said. geo

To: Grainne who wrote (25921)	11/14/1998 12:34:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Definitions are everything, I guess. If Karma just means that when people misbehave or use poor judgment the stats are likely (tautologically) to catch up with them at some point, if they do it often enough and excessively enough, well sure I believe in it. (Sam, I think you're using it that way-- meaning "you're likely to reap what you sow" -- and of course I won't argue with that. I'd add, though that haven't you noticed how often people reap what others sow? If everyone only reaped what they sow, the word "injustice", and the phrase "damn bad luck" could be retired. As some karmic thinkers appear to me to have retired them, philosophically.) And there are those little human magical-thinking-tricks that I come up with and I know others do too-- recently I was deciding whether to renew a couple of life insurance policies for 15 years, and I really think my decision was made as much because of magical thinking as because it made practical sense: I "figured" hey, it'll guarantee us at least 15 years more of life! I understand it is built into the human brain to see patterns. Sometimes they aren't there, in a particular instance, but we can feel as though they are. Paranoids do that more than the rest of us. My insurance decision I recognize as a humorous instance of a benign sort of paranoid ideation. I think Karma could be seen as a paranoid idea, insofar as it doesn't mean what I said at the beginning of this-- that sometimes you gets what you ask for. Of course, the question of whether a conviction is paranoid is complicated by culture. If everybody in your culture believes certain things, and a particular conviction, however literally untrue, is your culture's normative "take" on life, and you were taught that it was true... well, you can see it's complex. In America only a paranoid would assert to the world that his well had gone bad because he drilled through a snake. But in Bangladesh... I had some local office assistants when I lived in Africa. Staff meetings sometimes involved accusations of witchcraft by fellow workers. On one occasion one woman accused another of trying to cast a spell on her, the evidence being a carton of milk she found left on her desk. I was able to find the actual person who had inadvertently left the milk there, and I naively thought that issue would disappear. It didn't. Belief is stronger than evidence. The idea of "adopting" something as part of one's belief system is interesting. We all do it, for very sound reasons, but some recognize more than others the semi-willed, adaptive, "adopting" aspect of that accommodation to our evolutionarily implanted imperatives. For example, some adopt a a counter-cultural life, or an "artistic" one. Some a fundamentalist Christian life. Some a cloistered life. Some an ambitiously materialistic life. Etc. Etc. There are thousands of categories and subcategories in the menu of possible "beliefs" to choose from, of course. Monogamy. Freudianism. Vegetarianism. Some adopt the idea of Karma as helpful to them. Some the idea of an all powerful, omniscient, yet benign God-entity. Whatever gets us through the night. (But some nightlights seem more humane than others in their implications, don't they?) Part of making a belief system work for you when you adopt it seems to be to really buy into it to the degree that you forget it is your accommodation to your material and genetic and cultural circumstances. We all do that. I'm meandering, sorry. I see there are a lot of new posts to catch up on today.