As promised at the start of this blog chapter, we will not be closing this part of my story with Alana the Great Understander of Karma. The truth is, the more clearly I understand karma, the more I suspect that a complete understanding of how karma operates is synonymous with enlightenment.

That’s because, my most recent contemplations (March 2023) have helped me realize that not understanding karma is just one more, albeit exceptionally deep, wrong view; it is a failure to see that every effect that arises, arises based on its own unique set of causes –absolutely everything in this world is exactly as it should be. The belief that it should be different, that it could be different, is an incomplete, faulty, understanding of the world and the way cause and effect –karma – actually operates.

And when you really start examining our hope that the world will be as we want, and our fear that it won’t be, it does seem like an incomplete understanding, a wrong view, of what the world actually is (a series of causes and ensuing effects, aka karma) – if fixed – would solve a whole lott’a our ignorance and suffering.

This however is getting very ahead of ourselves in the story line. In this blog, I wanna get just a little ahead of ourselves…

Here I want to share a line conversation I had with Mae Yo, in Jan 2022, about a year after the ‘conclusion’ of my original karma contemplations, because I think it offers a slightly better summary/working understanding of karma. That year really helped my thoughts and understanding on karma ‘gel’, and, I do hate to leave ya’ll Dear Readers hanging too much…so, breaking with my not-so-orderly-ordered-blog, we will skip ahead for a more proper(ish) resolution(ish) on karma:

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Mae Yo sent over the following handful of videos, please be sure you view them all before you continue reding my reply:

A Bullet that Waited 20 Years #shorts #crazy #storytime

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/znnvC_wDCTQ boy claims he remembers his past life, but wasn’t lying (arias)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EYzYw19mtA

this little boy got in trouble at school because superman

the man who never saw a woman

My Reply to Mae Yo (which did get me a happy sticker in reply 😉):

Every effect in this world has a cause, when the time is ripe, there is no escaping the effect of the cause put in place — just like with the man hit by the bullet in the tree 20 years after it was shot at him.

I have come to understand karma in terms of snowflakes: Every single unique snowflake has a specific set of environmental factors (causes)– humidity, windspeed, temperature, etc. — that are responsible for the unique shape (effect). Given those exact set of causes, no other shape would be possible. Even if all the causes are unknown or unseen it doesn’t mean that the effect is somehow ‘magic’ or coincidence. In fact, with knowledge, training, the right tools, we can get a fairly good sense of a cause by observing an effect –just like a meteorologist might be able to gauge the humidity, windspeed, temperature at which a particular snowflake arose by looking at its unique crystalline structure.

Case and point about there always being reasons, that sometimes we just don’t see: It may seem unbelievable that a man could live till his 80s and never see a woman, but there are reasons. When they are made clear, it not only makes sense that he never saw a woman, it actually would have been strange –given his upbringing and continued life in the monastery– if he HAD seen a woman. The boy with the birthmark on his face is the same, we usually don’t know all the info of a past life, so something congenital we are born with seems to have no reason at all. But with the memory of the past life, the reason was clear. It shows that there is nothing broken in the way cause and effect works in the world, what is limited is our knowledge, our view, our understanding.  This is so clear with the Superman story too…

The teacher didn’t know the boy’s uncle played Superman so she assumed he was being a nuaghty kid and a liar. It was her bias, her belief that her limited set of beliefs/understanding/information was all encompassing, that gave her a blindspot that prevented her from understanding and believing the cause of the kid’s playing dress up. Her own bias –the strength of her view that she had all the info/was correct, knew the nature of kids, etc — made her so blind she ignored the truth when it was literally told to her face by the kid. This is the work of ego, we hold so tightly to our views, to our beliefs of what is true, to the world according to our perspective we ignore the TRUTH that is plain in the world for all to see. The truth of our own fallibility, fragility. The truth that we are not exempt from cause and effect even if we ignore it or don’t fully understand their relationship. The truth of the three common conditions.

I am watching this show about a bunch of colonists lost in space. All trying to make a new life on a new world. One woman on the show is a con artist. Over and over –to herself and to others –she insists she is just like everyone else, trying to make a new life, have a second chance, put her past behind her. But unlike everyone else, she will use any means she can to get ahead: She lies, steals, swindles and even murders. Still in a monolog she explains she is just misunderstood, she says  “I am not the villain of this story, I am the hero”. This is her blindspot.

A blindspot I know I share, not so much in the murderiness, but in the careful curation of a story about myself –that cherry picks the flattering parts and ignores the less ideal. That uses my totally lopsided, half-truth, narrow perspective story as the ‘reason’ to believe I am special, I deserve cookies and not whammies. But the truth is that alana’s reasons are not the real Reasons, my fabrications of how I think things should be is not the Law of Cause and Effect (aka karma).  That woman thinks the world owes her something, that she deserves everyone’s love and adoration and understanding. But in the show, the other colonists are already catching-on, turning against her for her destructive ways. How long till she is cast out? Can she really survive in space alone? There will be consequences –for her, for me– whether or not we think we deserve them’, or they align to our narrative.

With wisdom though, we can be like a meteorologist, and start to piece together the relationship between causes and effect, maybe even learning to avoid the effect we aren’t too fond of in the future by eliminating their cause.