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

To: Craig Richards who wrote (25963)	11/16/1998 5:24:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

<<Perhaps I am not explaining it very well, but I am trying to distinguish between physical suffering and the suffering we add through our mental processes.>> Craig, that's an interesting way to think of karma, to think of it as internally-generated suffering, sort of. It's also an interesting way to think of suffering that is caused by worries and other mental processes-- to think of them as a sort of karma. But the truth is, even if we stipulated that we were going to give the name "karma" to this sort of mental suffering, I'd still have a problem with it, even though it's a different problem than I have with the less psychological and more magical, or mystical, definitions. For one thing, it sounds like blaming people for, say, worrying about where to get food (though, granted, not for their suffering at actual hunger pains.) But...worry is not a bad thing in itself, is it? It helps us survive. Those that had it in our ancestral environment lived long enough to breed-- it tended to make the ones who lived to become our ancestors put away lots of roots and berries and dried boar for the winter even when the sun was shining! Of course there's worry that contributes to self preservative behavior and worry that's just wheel spinning or making your own life miserable. I guess you could call that neurotic worrying, if that was your framework, or karmic worrying, if that were. (But I'm not even sure how much "neurotic" suffering involves free will, when it comes right down to it. Seems harsh to call it "karma" if it doesn't.) P.S. to Emile and Bob: Remember those British moths whose protective coloration darkened as their habitat got sootier? And I emailed your posts to my geneticist friend, (who actually was very impatient with me about it!), but he did call and say this: "*Of course* there are mutations with beneficial effects.** Every time you grow bacteria in a selective medium, they adapt by selecting for positive mutations! It's been done a million times, it's done all the time."