Karma And Secular Ethics (Talk 6)

Karma and Secular Ethics, different sides of the same coin.

Suggested Reading: The Autobiography of a Yogi, The Republic (Plato)

The cost of each talk is one good deed, to be completed within 1 year.* The deed must be sincere to count, such that the doer feels something inside when the deed is complete. Healthcare Workers who served during the pandemic are exempt from the cost of all talks.

Transcript

Karma.

So discussing karma starts to dip into religious belief.

There are many people who do not believe in karma,

Especially with the advent of secular Buddhism.

I would say that modern science does not disprove karma in the same way that modern science does not disprove religion.

There are studies on people who hold religious beliefs or have some sort of worldview,

And the idea is that they were much happier people.

And the idea is that when they came across certain difficulties or certain things they saw or encountered,

They did much better overall compared to people who didn't have some sort of religious belief.

If I had to speculate,

I would say that it is probably due to an ability to accept events which seem unjust or unfair because they believe that this injustice at the present moment will be rectified later on in some other way.

And because they have this belief and this faith,

There is no resistance to the present moment.

In such a way,

Sometimes you may pity someone who is an atheist in the sense that they are sometimes continually outraged by the things they keep seeing,

Things they see happening,

And the things they kind of see as unjust that is going on in this world.

If you have a true religious belief in karma or something similar,

You come to understand that there is no such thing as an eternal injustice.

There is no kind of long-term injustice,

Meaning at some point there is a consequence for every action,

Regardless of whatever religion you hold,

That is,

It comes to grips with you at some point.

Karma,

I would say,

Is something that is found in many religions,

Even Christianity and things like that,

Confucian philosophy,

As well as the other major religions.

In Confucian philosophy,

There is the great central doctrine of,

Do not do unto others what you would not have done to yourself.

The Christian golden rule is basically the same thing but worded similarly,

Do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself.

The basic idea is what comes around,

Goes around.

Karma can essentially be broken down to the concept of cause and effect.

Something has a cause and there is an effect which follows afterwards.

In Hinduism,

They have a very interesting analogy of the three types of karma,

And it's the analogy using a bowman firing arrows.

You see a bowman,

Someone holding a bow,

Who has fired an arrow.

The idea is that the arrows are in three different places.

There is the arrow that has been fired already,

And this represents incoming karma that is on its way to you.

Things you have done in the past,

Things that you said or did,

Things that somehow you did some sort of deed,

And now the fruit is starting to ripen and it's coming to you.

The idea is that this karma cannot be changed,

It is about to come into your life and either do good things or bad things.

The second level of karma is the arrow that is in the bowman's hand.

The idea is this is the karma of the present moment.

In your present moment,

You as the bowman have the ability to aim the arrow how you please.

Meaning how do you react to your everyday life,

Events that occur?

Do you react with anger?

Do you react with kindness and forgiveness?

Do you do good deeds or do you do bad deeds?

Your present karma,

Meaning you have the ability in the present moment to change your present karma by adjusting how you react to things.

And then there is the quiver that the bowman holds behind his back which is full of arrows.

And the idea is that these are karmas of the past,

Far far in the past,

Or if you believe in it from a previous lifetime.

And that these have not yet come to fruition,

And that they may not in the near future be coming to fruition,

But they exist.

And the idea is that down the line at some point these arrows will come out of the quiver and make themselves known.

In this analogy of the bowman,

The arrow that has been fired,

Nothing can be done about that.

That karma is on the way.

It cannot be stopped,

It can only be experienced.

The second arrow which you aim,

That you can control.

You can choose how you react in the present moment.

And the third type,

The arrows in the quiver,

Which represent unmanifested karma from the past,

The idea is with meditation,

With good works,

With doing good karma,

Or with enlightenment,

The quiver can be destroyed.

In the theory of karma,

There is the idea that karma has both external and internal effects on the person who does it,

Who does any sort of deed.

Meaning if I do a deed,

There are both external effects and internal effects of that deed.

External effects are what are commonly thought of as karma,

Meaning when you do good things,

Good things come back to you.

The world around you reacts to what you have done,

And your life is adjusted in such fashion.

If you do a lot of good deeds,

You may find yourself with good luck.

Sometimes things just happen to go your way,

People help you out.

In a moment of need,

You are rescued.

All sorts of things come into your life which help you out as a result of the good things you have done.

If you do bad things,

Bad things come around in your external life.

Accidents,

Misfortunes,

You go to buy something and they've sold out,

Or all sorts of things where suddenly it feels like bad luck.

But the idea is,

Is it bad luck or is it the manifestation of your external karma?

A more interesting nuance which is kind of less known is the idea of karma having an internal effect.

Meaning something within yourself changes as a result of the deeds you do.

If you do good deeds,

Something inside you changes that allows you to better experience happiness.

Meaning if you help people a lot,

If you show a lot of generosity,

If you say a lot of kind words,

Something inside you changes such that you have the ability more than before of experiencing happiness.

In the same way,

If you do bad deeds and you say a lot of bad things to people,

Or you think a lot of bad thoughts,

In that same way,

Your ability to experience happiness decreases.

There's an interesting quote,

I remember it was from the Iron Lady regarding Margaret Thatcher,

But it's been attributed to other people,

And it said something like,

Watch your thoughts,

They become your words,

Watch your words,

They become your actions,

Watch your actions,

They become your habits,

Watch your habits,

They become your character,

Watch your character,

It becomes your destiny.

And this is the central idea of your internal karma.

If you have a lot of negative thoughts,

If you have a lot of negative words,

If you have a lot of negative actions,

They all become part of your habit,

Your character,

And therefore your destiny.

But the idea is your character is shaped by these things.

Your character would be your internal karma,

In the sense that your ability to experience happiness,

Whether you can trust people,

Whether you are open and forgiving,

Or whether you are harsh and cynical and judgmental and angry all the time.

All of these are parts of your karma,

Your internal karma.

There is a nuance in Hinduism,

Which when I first read it,

I didn't quite understand it.

So there's a section in the Bhagavad Gita,

The book I mentioned in a previous talk,

Where Krishna,

The avatar of God,

Speaks with Arjuna,

Who is a prince,

Who has to fight a civil war against his cousins.

And the idea is Arjuna does not want to fight against his family,

But it is his duty,

His dharma,

To do this.

And so at one point Krishna says to him,

In order to allay his hesitation,

He says something like,

No,

Don't be afraid of doing this because it is your duty.

Even if you kill these people,

And you kill them in my name,

It will bring you no bad karma,

And you will not suffer any consequence as a result of doing this duty.

And so it was a very shocking thing to read at the time,

And something I didn't quite understand,

Meaning how can you just murder people and not have any sort of negative karmic consequence.

And it wasn't until several books later,

And reading I think the Autobiography of a Yogi,

But other books kind of started to talk about that there's a nuance in the Hindu thought of karma,

Which kind of would explain how that can kind of happen.

And the idea is that there is the nuance is that karma is really starts with intention.

And so the idea is it's not necessarily deed or word or action.

It really begins with intention.

So if you have intentions or kind of thoughts that are dealing with anger,

Or dealing with desire and greed,

Or dealing with hatred and these kind of things,

Or else with the opposite of dealing with kindness and empathy and generosity.

These intentions are the start of your karma.

And so if you do things,

As I mentioned in a different talk,

About with detached action,

With no intention,

Even though you are doing a bad deed,

In this sense,

It may not generate any negative karma.

Meaning if you are doing your duty,

And you have to do something unpleasant to someone else,

Because you do not have any ill intention,

Or any hatred or any anger towards that person,

Even though you do something even as bad as murder,

In this example,

It is suggesting that you do not accumulate any terrible karma as a result of that.

Obviously,

This is a very controversial kind of nuance since war crimes and things like that.

But I would actually say that even when they look at war crimes,

Such as World War II or things like that,

Generally the soldiers were punished much less compared to the people who ordered mass killings or things like that.

And part of that is probably the understanding that these people were following orders and they didn't necessarily have a choice.

Their choice was taken from them because they were trained to obey.

And so it is the person who used these soldiers as tools in an evil way,

They were the ones most culpable rather than the soldiers.

So even the system of law recognized that there was something less guilty about people who were just following orders compared to people who were doing the ordering from the top.

But in this sense,

The nuance is that your intention matters even if the action occurs is terrible.

In Buddhism,

You have a similar idea where the classic example was if there was a blind man and he was walking,

And while he was walking,

He stepped on ants and he killed them.

And the idea was that he had no intention of killing these ants,

But as a result of his walking,

They died.

And so even though they died because of him,

Because his intention wasn't there and he had no kind of ill will or anything like that,

The kind of badness he accumulates is minimized.

On the other hand,

If you were a young child and you took a magnifying glass and you tried to roast all these ants,

That would generate significant negative karma.

In a similar way,

The other example was if you had a sniper gun and you aimed it at somebody and you pulled the trigger with the intention of killing them,

If you missed,

If your bullet missed,

Your karma still registered as murder.

Because you had the full intention of killing somebody.

So even though the deed didn't complete,

You generated a significant negative karma because of your intention.

There's another interesting nuance of karma in the sense that your karma is amplified by the character of the recipient upon which you perform whatever deed,

Meaning if you do a good deed to a regular person,

You get say plus one.

If you do a good deed to someone who's very virtuous,

You might get plus ten.

And if you did do a good deed to a sage or Buddha,

You got plus one million.

So the idea was,

In several Buddhist kind of stories,

Someone who served the Buddha a meal or served an arahant,

An enlightened person,

A meal,

They generated a massive amount of good karma that caught across several lifetimes.

So that many lifetimes later,

They were still receiving positive effects from having done this good deed.

Likewise,

If you did something terrible to someone who was also a terrible person,

Like an evil person,

Your karma was minimized.

Whatever negative kind of effect of your karma will be minimized by the fact that this person was an evil person.

There are interesting stories where someone,

In the Buddhist text,

Someone attacked an enlightened arahant,

And they threw a stone or did something bad towards him.

And immediately,

They vomited up blood and died,

With the idea that their action generated such an intense,

Humongous amount of negative karma that their life force,

Whatever supported their life,

Was instantly spent by all that negative karma.

And they died right there on the spot.

There's a nuance about karma and reincarnation that I didn't understand until I read about Hinduism.

And that's the idea that what leads to reincarnation?

The question is,

What leads to reincarnation?

And the idea is that desire leads to reincarnation.

And the question is,

Why?

And so they explain it in Hinduism,

The reason why desire leads to reincarnation is because the world is always trying to fulfill your wishes.

So if you make some sort of desire,

Or you make some sort of wish,

The world will do what it can to fulfill it.

And the idea is,

If it can't fulfill it in this lifetime,

Because it's not the proper time,

This wish will continue with you into your next lifetime.

So that if you have something you wish to do,

And it can't be accomplished now,

You will be reincarnated so that in another lifetime,

This wish may manifest.

And so the idea is,

If you wish to kill somebody,

But you don't succeed in killing them in this lifetime,

In the next lifetime,

You might reincarnate with somebody and encounter the same individual in a different form,

And you may wind up murdering this person as a result of your wish to kill them.

And so the idea is your karma carries over from lifetime to lifetime.

There's an interesting story in the Autobiography of a Yogi,

Where he talks about his master was trying to help him get rid of his desires,

And apparently this young pupil had a desire of living in a palace.

So there's a story where the master creates this fantastic magic palace out of thin air,

And they walk around in it,

And he lives in it for a few hours,

And the idea is,

When they come out,

They ask the master why he did that,

And the master said something like,

It's because you had this long-held wish of being in a palace,

And this wish prevented you from achieving something and moving forward in your spiritual journey,

Because you kept holding on to it,

And only by realizing it could you let go of it and move forward.

So how do you accumulate good karma?

Dāna,

The word for donation,

That's basically one of the main ways.

So giving,

The idea is generosity generates good karma.

Often there's a cynical view towards these sorts of things,

Especially with donations and charities and things like that,

Because everyone's kind of seeking money,

But the idea is giving is supposed to generate something within yourself,

Positive thoughts and positive feelings.

In a similar way,

Doing good works,

So helping an old lady across the street or helping someone who you didn't necessarily have to help,

This would include saying kind words to people and giving compliments.

Another thing that generates good karma is basically meditation.

So the idea of mind development is something that generates a lot of good karma.

Meditation,

They said when you reach some of the higher states of meditation,

The jhanas,

States of very high concentration,

This generated an extremely high amount of karma.

Loving kindness meditation,

We talked about this in the anger talk,

The sort of trying to generate a feeling of love towards other people,

This also generated a massive amount of good karma.

And just like mind development,

Basically virtue.

So virtue generates good karma.

So these four things,

Good works,

Generosity,

Meditation,

And being virtuous.

There's an interesting saying,

This was from Islam,

Basically where someone said something along the lines of,

If you have money,

Give money.

If you don't have money,

Then give labor,

Give your body and serve.

If you are unable to give labor or service,

Give kind words,

So say kind things to people.

If you are unable to give kind words,

Then give a smile,

Let your smile be your giving.

And if you cannot even give a smile,

Then just be virtuous and let your virtue be your donation.

So karma.

Karma does have a secular equivalent in philosophy and the idea is that in a similar way,

Without any necessity of religious belief,

That doing good deeds are their own reward.

And so the republic,

Plato's republic,

Is a great source of information for this and kind of a background of kind of Greek ethics.

And so there's an argument in the republic of,

Is it better to be just or better to be unjust?

Or he wanted to make the argument as difficult as possible.

Is it best to be unjust if you can remain undetected while appearing just and then reaping the rewards of appearing just while also doing as much injustice as you can and reaping the rewards of your injustice?

And Socrates basically answers that in a very thorough and convincing way that the just person is happiness and that the unjust person is unhappiest.

And he examines the nature of what does it mean to be just and unjust.

And that justice was not merely something that was good,

That was difficult,

But kind of brought external rewards in the sense of there were three categories of things.

There were things that brought rewards in of themselves,

There were things that were difficult and didn't really bring rewards but that you were obliged to do.

Or let me rephrase that,

So there are things that are good in themselves,

Things good in themselves and also for their consequences,

And things good only for their consequences,

Meaning it was good to appear just even though you didn't really benefit from being just.

It was good of itself but the consequences were good.

And so the argument is that Socrates places justice in things of things that are good both in of themselves and for the consequences.

The argument which Socrates uses,

And he uses this argument to say that the just person is the one that is happiest and the unjust person is the one that is unhappiest.

And the main crux of the argument is by dividing the body,

Dividing the soul into three parts.

There is the rational mind,

There is the spirit which kind of seeks honor and becomes angry,

And there is the bodily appetites.

And the most just person is represented by the philosopher,

One who uses his mind and has his spirit and uses the mind and spirit to dominate over the body,

To rule the body.

The most unjust person is going to be the tyrant who is ruled by his appetites.

And so while the philosopher has a steady character and a tamed body and his appetites are tamed,

The appetites of the person who is a tyrant are untamed.

And the idea is that your bodily appetites,

When they are not managed,

They grow like swarms and the monster they use was the hydra.

You cut one head off and two kind of grow in its place.

And the idea is someone who feeds their appetites more and more and more,

They are driven by desires.

And they are driven by desires that they cannot control.

And they're driven this way and that way and the idea is that they live a most uncomfortable life.

So one who is a tyrant,

Even though he has many possessions,

He never has enough.

He always wants more.

Even though he has lots of power,

He is always afraid of others taking it from him because he sees these things as his own.

And because he uses unethical or terrible means,

He is afraid of other people doing the same to him.

Because he behaves in an unjust way,

He sees the worst of other people and expects them to be unjust towards him.

In such a way,

There was a passage in one of the Stoic writers who said something like,

Be glad you are not a tyrant,

For a tyrant has the same urges and desires that you do,

Only he is able to act upon them.

Meaning you get angry at someone,

Your anger passes,

And whatever thoughts you had about doing something are gone away,

Nothing happened.

But a tyrant gets angry at someone,

And in his flash of anger,

He has that person executed or tortured or something terrible happens.

And that when he wakes up and he's no longer angry,

He has,

However,

Done something terrible.

And there's nothing but remorse after that.

There's a story of Alexander the Great sometime when he was campaigning in Persia.

One of his companions died,

And he was very angry.

And as a result of his anger,

He got drunk,

And he ordered the city burnt to the ground.

And supposedly,

When he woke up and he was sober,

There was a great regret in his mind that he had ordered this thing,

And that not only did he order it,

That it occurred.

And so the tyrant who is not in control of his appetites is kind of pulled this way and that,

And is always unsteady,

And is always insecure.

And because his desires never are tamed,

His life is actually quite miserable.

The philosopher who is governed by reason,

On the other hand,

Possesses a stillness and a calmness,

Because his life is driven by reason.

There's an idea in Stoic philosophy that evil deeds not only have,

That you cannot be harmed by someone else's deeds,

And that you are only harmed by your own deeds.

And sort of the idea is that your property may be harmed by the deeds of other people,

Your body may be harmed by the deeds of other people,

But your self,

Your kind of,

The goodness inside you cannot be harmed by the deeds of other people.

They can only be harmed by your own deeds.

And so there's a passage in Epictetus where he talks about how Paris seduced Helen of Troy,

And it said,

Paris was not harmed when they came to Troy and killed his brothers and razed his city.

This was like the destruction of stork's nests,

Stork's aburrance.

Paris was only harmed when he broke the laws of hospitality and seduced another man's wife.

And so the idea is Paris was truly harmed when he behaved poorly,

Not when others kind of destroyed his possessions.

And so the idea in Stoicism is that there is a loss of something when you commit evil deeds.

It isn't something that you need someone to externally punish for you,

That you yourself lose a sense of goodness if you do something terrible.

You go from a human being who is meant by nature to get along and love other people and to cooperate them to one who has destroyed other people.

And thus Socrates said something like,

If someone who was guilty and committed crimes knew what was best for him,

He would actually see a judge to be punished.

He would willingly go and find a judge to punish him.

And the idea was that once he was punished,

His sin was sort of expiated and his ability to experience happiness again and openness was something he was able to receive again.

There's an interesting story from Game of Thrones where the Hound runs into this kind of commune of people and they're led by this soldier who told the Hound that in his past he was a very violent person.

And he killed people and did all sorts of terrible deeds.

And afterwards he kind of found religion and now led this peaceful kind of commune.

And the idea is that at one point the commune was threatened with violence and the soldier said,

I don't want to go back to use violence even to defend these people who are my family.

He preferred to die rather than to return to that life of violence.

And so the idea is if he went back and became violent again,

The good that he gained from living this peaceful life would be lost and he did not want to lose that again even at the cost of his life.

The idea is that even if you do not see an outward show of remorse,

It does not necessarily mean that someone who did bad deeds does not experience an inner shame.

Meaning just because on the outside they look like they're having a good time does not mean that on the inside they aren't inwardly suffering inside,

Either from bad self-esteem or a judgment of themselves.

Someone told me a story about something that happened with his brother.

So his brother stole from the family after there was some sort of joint inheritance which all the siblings were supposed to share.

And the brother went and stole more than what belonged to him.

He took some things and he sold them.

And basically no one kind of confronted him even though everyone knew about it.

This was actually a kind of a Christian family.

They were kind of very religious.

And so his brother who came to me,

Not the one who stole the brother of the brother,

He came to me and kind of told me the story.

And he said that he forgave him and that he met him one day at someone's funeral,

At a family member's funeral.

And he went up to him and said,

Hey can I have a hug?

And the brother said to him,

He was taken aback,

And he said,

Oh did you want to hug someone like me?

And basically it meant that even though he didn't have any apology or any outward display of remorse,

Deep down he was ashamed of what he did,

Such that it reflected his self-esteem,

That he felt unworthy even of being hugged.

And it was a very touching story because it showed that even people who do bad deeds,

Even if they don't say anything,

Deep down inside they may actually feel something and know that they did something wrong.

There was a moment I saw recently a few weeks ago when I watched the movie Desperado,

Or I should say re-watched,

With Antonio Banderas.

Basically Antonio Banderas plays this man who's seeking revenge against a drug dealer who killed his kind of wife.

And so he runs into his brother who turns out to be that person.

And his brother has a very wealthy life as a drug dealer.

He has women,

He has money,

He has possessions,

He has power,

He does all these things.

And his brother on the other hand is this poor traveling musician.

And at first his ego sticks out and says,

Why?

Look at me,

Look at all the things I have,

And look at all my power,

And look at you.

And then there's something that he said which kind of betrayed it.

And he said something like,

You think you're better than me just because I'm this scumbag person who deals drugs?

Look at all the things that I have.

And that is that kind of comment revealed that even though he had all these external things that most people kind of seek,

Deep down inside there was a sense of,

It came with a cost.

I did this and I may be a terrible person for doing this.

And you feel it even if you don't show it.

There's also the idea that if you commit a crime,

Even if you don't get caught,

You are still punished by your own sense of self.

And sometimes you hear these stories of someone who committed a crime,

Either bank robbery or some other thing,

And then when the police finally catch up to them,

They finally take a sigh of breath and say,

You know,

I've been hiding for so long,

I'm actually kind of relieved to see you.

Some people were kind of relieved when their identity was discovered because they were living all this time with falsehood.

They were always trying to keep up a lie and it was a lot of work to try to sort of manage all the things and stories and things like that,

That finally when they were caught and they could finally tell the truth,

There was some sort of relief in being able to kind of live in a true way again.

There's that saying that veritas o stupa rabbit,

That the truth will set you free.

And there's also the idea that when you kind of do terrible things or are forced to do terrible things,

You lose your humanity.

So if you ever watch movies like The Road or the TV show The Walking Dead,

They do all these terrible things to kind of survive because the world has gone bad in the apocalypse.

And the idea is there's usually a moment in all these kind of stories where they rejoin humanity.

They find a group of people who are good and untouched by evil and they kind of try to rejoin a family or community.

And there's an idea that each time this kind of happens,

They're kind of feeling unsettled,

They're kind of uncomfortable,

They're kind of always a little bit suspicious and they're waiting for something kind of bad to happen.

And the idea is they don't know it was lost until they experience it again,

But some of their humanity was lost through their life that they lived before.

And so this isn't something where a bell rings and you've lost your humanity.

It's lost gradually until the point that you don't notice anymore.

And the moment you see someone's happiness,

A happy family or community or something like that,

Suddenly at that moment you realize you lost something.

You lost something inside of you.

There was a price for the actions that you did that you are only starting to realize just now.

That will conclude my talk.

I suggest the reading,

Plato's The Republic.

Also,

The Autobiography of a Yogi.

If you receive benefit from this talk,

I ask that you perform one good deed.

The deed is not bound by size,

Only by sincerity.

Thank you for listening.

Reviews

Awesome talk. How does a person like Trump fit in to karma.

Very interesting and thought provoking. Thank you. 🙏

This has really opened up something that I never thought possible for me and how I perceive some that I love. I can wish hard as I might that I learned this sooner but I have learned that would be attachment and I have much to let go of not knowing and now believe that all my warning signs say…..LET IT ALL GO NOW!!! AND BE FREE IN THIS LIFE, I thought merely a fairytale. How profound these teachings are. Thank you, I will pay this forward with RAK……(random acts of kindness) more than ever. Peace to all