It is rather
hard to believe that you get rewarded according to your deeds when you live in
a world in which the wicked flourish and the righteous perish. You see mass
murderers mount high pedestals and preach dharma to the people. Swindlers are
winners and the honest lose out pathetically in the rat race that life has been
converted into.
There is no
morality or dharma in the universe. The planets may follow their orbits; that
is gravity, not dharma. The stars shine; that’s thermodynamics, not moral
benevolence. That world of stars and planets can also buffet you with storms
and other cataclysms. We can take such cataclysms as punishments for our
misdeeds: punishment from gods or the universe itself. That is a matter of
belief.
In the world
of belief, just anything is possible. Angels can become demons and vice-versa.
That is the power of belief. Do you know about people like Joan of Arc who were
burnt at the stake as the foulest heretics and then later were declared saints?
Both the burning and the apotheosis were done by the same believers.
That is karma.
You get burnt and then you get deified. Or you get burnt and you get demonised.
It depends on who is in power. Look at Mahatma Gandhi. He has become a villain
now. His karma has not left him even decades after death. Think of Nehru: he is
still carrying the burden of all the evils that plague his nation years after
his death. His karma. Karma is as vindictive
as its bigoted advocates.
So, am I
saying that you needn’t do good things? No, not at all. That’s just mediocre
thinking. The mediocre people assume that they must get just rewards for
whatever they do. Such people kill other people in order to prove that they are
more powerful. Most of our ancient kings were such mediocre people.
Intelligent people
understand that doing good is their obligation. Obligation to whom? To themselves.
Not to any gods or ideologies. Their hearts are restless until they follow
their real, deeper instincts and those instincts tell them to do good. Their
intelligence tells them that when each one of us starts doing good, the world
becomes a beautiful place, a heaven on earth. It is not for any god’s sake that
we must do good; it is for our own sakes. That is our real obligation. Karma
will be good to everyone if we all understand that.
(Oops! Where's the comment I posted this morning?.....)
ReplyDeleteThe fate of some of the people mentioned here has deeper implications. It is realised through wisdom and inner growth rather than understood through arguements at the factual level on an explicit plane.
The tragedy is those people will never learn. They will end up with z plus security cordon paid by us.
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