--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "whynotnow7" <whynotnow7@...> wrote: > > Yeah, agreed. Karma is a feeling or an intuitive thing that > seems to work well as a personal teaching mechanism for me, > but I find it impossible to apply to the actions of someone > else, except as a kind of slang - for example, if someone > is really speeding on the freeway, and later I see him get > pulled over by a cop, I might think, "bad karma dude". :-)
Or it could have been *good* karma, in that he got stopped by the cop before he had a terrible accident. That's why applying the karmic equation to myself or anyone else seems absurd to me. You can always dream up a scenario in which what appears to be bad karma is actually good karma and vice-versa. Even with the worst possible suffering, there's the possibility that it was *chosen* between lives as a way of expiating many lifetimes of accumulated bad karma--not necessarily any worse or more than anyone else's--very quickly, rather than taking it a bit at a time from one life to another. And since we have no way of knowing the Big Picture, there's zero basis for making *any* assumptions, much less for allowing any of them to affect how we respond to any given instance of suffering (individual or mass). Karma cannot be any more than abstract theory, like the free will/determinism issue.
