Karma

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.