Growing up, I was fortunate enough to not be burdened with the concept of sin; things were right and wrong of course, but lying to your brother about the number of chocolates you took out of the fridge didn’t necessarily mean that you will have to spend eternity in vats of boiling oil being deep fried with a pitchfork sticking to the back. After being introduced to Indian mythology at a relatively young age, I began to speculate on how my daily wanderings would convert into what I would become in my ‘next life’. I had read about kings and heavenly creatures being reborn as ordinary guys, lowly animals or other unsavory creatures. So if I kept up my hobby of climbing over the compound wall long enough, maybe I would end up a hairy green monkey. Fantastic! Slowly though, I inevitably came to believe in the tit for tat, instantaneous justice of ‘karma’ as they call it.
The best thing about karma was of course that it made sense. Like any basic law in the universe, it balanced all things we did. Do good things and good things happen to you, do bad things and you lose your phone at the department store or fall on your face while getting out of the bus. Simple, straight forward and easy to follow.
Karma was working out perfectly for me. It didn’t keep me out of evil ways but it did give an incentive to good deeds And all bad things, all the terrible acts I did were done with full knowledge that it was all coming back one of these days. All was fine for a while, then bam! It was payback time. And a new dilemma emerged. Now, I have hurt people, I have made terrible errors of judgment. So when the same things happen to me, I know where it’s coming from. But the problem is, does knowing that take away my right to try and dodge the misfortunes approaching me? Believing in karma, do I fight it? Or do I take karma lying down, allowing it to balance out all my evils? Hmmm.
