Karma

Today we went to the Buddhist temple where a wise man came from Jakarta, ID to speak to the temple members regarding Karma. I didn't understand any of the presentation due to it being in Indonesian and I don't know that language. Following the presentation my family and I met with the man in a room of the temple. Apparently he is know for being able to connect his auroa with others and take a peek into their lives as well as their previous life before they were reincarnated into their current life.

I suppose he connected with my auroa and was able to tell me a few things regarding my life and its connection to my previous life. My father had to translate for me most of what he had said. He stated that in my past I was unstable in career and in love and I easily got bored and changed my mind without thinking. I guess this has been a trend in my past, not recent past but still something I dealt with before. He said this was due to my previous life ending with a lot of instability and it carried on into my current life and remained until it finished its course. Luckily for me, this trend of instability ended a couple of years ago. He also said that I had been through many great ordeals and that I was extremely lucky. Many times in my life I was in strange and even dangerous situations where my good karma stepped in and saved my ass. The good karma was collected from my previous life and that is was has given me so much luck in this one. In my previous life I had done many good things and have no bad karma to date. It was only the instability in the previous life that I died with that made things unstable in my current life, it was not bad karma, so he says. He also said that I was impatient and stubborn but had a big heart and extremely good fortune. Well, I am still impatient and I am still a bit stubborn but overall I think I made a lot of progress onto finding out exactly who I am.

Now I pretty much been agnostic my entire life. I was exposed to Christianity in the United States but never got too involved in the religion. Now that I am here in Asia for a while I am being exposed to Eastern thinking and beliefs. Karma is a big way of life here and I always thought of Karma as being a large possibility. As far as Buddhism I am still a bit unsure. They say that it is the "logical" religion or philosophy but I beg to defer in some areas. For instance Karma carries on from one lifetime to the next. If your good karma is high you will be born into a good position in the following life. I suppose when you look at the world as a whole my position was pretty good. When you have a lot of bad Karma you may be born into a very difficult position. For instance, my cousin inquired about another cousin with this man tonight. A young distant female cousin of mine was born disabled both mentally and physically. The wise man stated he was able to see that in her previous life she was born a male who was very large, dominating, and physically abusive so her disability is an action of bad karma.

The reason I am a bit skeptical regarding Buddhism is that depending on the position in which you are born into may determine who you are and how you behave thus defeating the purpose of the whole rewards and punishments of Karma. Say you are born extremely wealthy, doesn't this sometimes bring out the worst in people? Greed, selfishness, lack of compassion to name a few. Another thing that bugs me a bit about Buddhism is that I am unable to see how the situations you go through in your current life are going to be related to your previous life by you. I mean are you suppose to accept the fact that you were born into a slum village or that your husband beats you day and night as a reaction to something you had done in a previous life? How is this going to teach you a lesson if you can't relate it?

I like to think of Karma as a more immediate reaction to an action. For instance, you get drunk and slap someone. The next day you're hung over in a jail cell with assault and battery charges. Or you do many good things, always treat people with respect, then it gets noticed by others and in return you are respected. Maybe you work very hard every day at your job and you earn a promotion or a bonus. I guess I don't ever think of it as deeply as the Buddhist monks or the Buddhist in general do.

The only thing I strongly believe is that if you are a good person consistently that you deserve good things. If you are a bad person and do bad things you deserve undesirable results from your actions. I also believe everyone is in charge of their own life. I screwed up pretty badly in my past and I could sit there and point my finger at someone else or I could admit that I had a part in it. I was fully capable of preventing things from going wrong and I didn't, so I don't blame anyone other than myself for the things I been through in life. I just accept them, as difficult as that was, and move on.

Another thing regarding Karma that I may have been wrong about. In the past I did many things that wasn't very nice at all. I suffered for it too. I sat on my ass the last couple years and felt horrible, not allowing myself much slack. Guilt and the inability to fix broken things is an absolutely horrid feeling. A good handful of people in the last couple years had advised me to forget it and forgive myself. Easier said than done of course. I felt I had to suffer through it because it was Karma and I was paying for the wrong I did by feeling very bad. I got to thinking about it a while back and I realized something very important. One of the key reasons why I didn't forgive myself was because I felt for so long I needed the forgiveness and approval of someone else in order to make things better on my end. A while after that I realized that the "someone else" wasn't the real victim of my actions, I was, and I had all the scars to prove it.

So what's the conclusion? Well I been told three times this year I don't carry any bad Karma. I have absolutely no clue how they know and I don't but whatever. I figure that the only way this could truly be is if I suffered from my own actions and no one else really did. Makes sense to me plus makes me feel a lot better. After all this, I feel pretty damn optimistic about my future right now.