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My own perception of karma - my own personal insight into it - is that we as Westerners are really unable to wrap our minds around it without making it "bad things happen to bad people", because we often filter the whole idea through our western Christian-based moral system (and even if one isn't raised specifically Christian - I'm secular Jewish for example - it's still a Christian-dominant culture and it's impossible to escape those memes if you were raised in this culture).
And another thing that doesn't translate very well with nonwestern-based systems is how much of our worldview is based upon taking the word of appointed "experts" relatively unquestioned (granted, this is in other worldviews too, but I speak of the one I'm most familiar with). You see this a lot with the most radical fringe of the skeptic/atheist contingent who basically take their favorite experts' word as gospel, completely devaluing subjective experience (a particular thought pattern that tends to indicate a collective issue with theory of mind to me - "but you don't really feel good, you only THINK you feel good, because it's not objectively possible to..."; you get the picture), while not actually understanding how much uncertainty and mystery is actually involved in real science (and that that's the POINT of it) - which is why some scientists don't find conflict with being religious or spiritual. The same worldview can be as much of a shutdown to inquiry and knowledge as religion itself had been.
Subjective experience is not accepted by the skeptical worldview, but - surprise - it's not a part of most traditional, mainline mainstream religious views, either (though it seems to be creeping into the more liberal practices of both Judaism and Christianity). Of course it wouldn't be. Subjective experience is individual, and our culture deals with consensus (of either the men in black frocks and white collars, or the men in white coats and dark ties), and hasn't yet made peace with how to balance individual experience with class analysis, because we just haven't been doing it for that long.
At this point, I've been involved with three different things that tend to be about subjective experience - Buddhism, meditation, mind altering substances (to a small degree) - and my understanding has been with Buddhism, there was the encouragement that one should meditate *because* what it tries to describe can only actually be internalized and understood subjectively and empirically... "no one can tell you what the Matrix is, you have to see for yourself"... and that with reflection, you would come to see the ideas described *on your own* and internalize them.
My understanding of karma: there's no deserving because "deserving" is a product of dualistic thinking, as if some god in the sky were doling out either brownie points or blue-chip stamps for bad or good behavior. All of your action and thought in the past brings you to where you are now. That was my understanding of it. I also felt that the more simplistic explanations of it in terms of mysticism, etc, tended to be metaphor (one Tibetan geshe told me, "if you think that's all bullshit [the stuff about the bardo, hell realms, etc], that's ok too, because all of that isn't the point".)
It's interesting to think and talk about this stuff. I know relatively little about it, but it's still pretty interesting stuff.
And another thing that doesn't translate very well with nonwestern-based systems is how much of our worldview is based upon taking the word of appointed "experts" relatively unquestioned (granted, this is in other worldviews too, but I speak of the one I'm most familiar with). You see this a lot with the most radical fringe of the skeptic/atheist contingent who basically take their favorite experts' word as gospel, completely devaluing subjective experience (a particular thought pattern that tends to indicate a collective issue with theory of mind to me - "but you don't really feel good, you only THINK you feel good, because it's not objectively possible to..."; you get the picture), while not actually understanding how much uncertainty and mystery is actually involved in real science (and that that's the POINT of it) - which is why some scientists don't find conflict with being religious or spiritual. The same worldview can be as much of a shutdown to inquiry and knowledge as religion itself had been.
Subjective experience is not accepted by the skeptical worldview, but - surprise - it's not a part of most traditional, mainline mainstream religious views, either (though it seems to be creeping into the more liberal practices of both Judaism and Christianity). Of course it wouldn't be. Subjective experience is individual, and our culture deals with consensus (of either the men in black frocks and white collars, or the men in white coats and dark ties), and hasn't yet made peace with how to balance individual experience with class analysis, because we just haven't been doing it for that long.
At this point, I've been involved with three different things that tend to be about subjective experience - Buddhism, meditation, mind altering substances (to a small degree) - and my understanding has been with Buddhism, there was the encouragement that one should meditate *because* what it tries to describe can only actually be internalized and understood subjectively and empirically... "no one can tell you what the Matrix is, you have to see for yourself"... and that with reflection, you would come to see the ideas described *on your own* and internalize them.
My understanding of karma: there's no deserving because "deserving" is a product of dualistic thinking, as if some god in the sky were doling out either brownie points or blue-chip stamps for bad or good behavior. All of your action and thought in the past brings you to where you are now. That was my understanding of it. I also felt that the more simplistic explanations of it in terms of mysticism, etc, tended to be metaphor (one Tibetan geshe told me, "if you think that's all bullshit [the stuff about the bardo, hell realms, etc], that's ok too, because all of that isn't the point".)
It's interesting to think and talk about this stuff. I know relatively little about it, but it's still pretty interesting stuff.
