My feelings/rant on karma
Being the awesome college student I am, I was purchasing a BLT from an on campus eatery when I started to ponder on things. Warning: semi-philosophical rant coming up from a not-so-philosophical guy.
Sitting down to eat my BLT I began to wonder why I do the things I do. Not to sound high and mighty, but I do tend to do the ‘nicer’ thing when it comes to strangers and definitely to my friends and family. I hold the door open for the person behind me when entering or leaving a building or I smile at a stranger I pass in the hall or outside on the way to class, and when I think about it, it all is because of my personal believe in karma, but let me say, for the record, I do not do these things solely because of karma, I just prefer to do them because it makes me feel good to do things for others and if I do anything in life it is to be as good of a person as possible.
Karma, to me, can be summed up in the phrase “what goes around comes around.” Sure the idea has it’s origins within Buddhism and Hinduism amongst other eastern religions, but for me it’s as simple as good implies good and bad implies bad.
But the explanation of karma was not what it means to me, but as to why I believe in this idea as a whole. Many would say, “Mike, you selfish ass hole, you only do good things so good things come to you,” and at first I would think that this is true and that I am a selfish ass hole, which I know I am, but after pondering today I have come to realize, really, why I believe in my own personal version of karma: fear.
I say fear simply because I fear that if I do bad, bad things will come my way and that is definitely what I do not want. Mind you, as selfish as I am, I am ten times more paranoid than selfish. The idea of bad things happening to me (again with the selfishness) crosses my mind too many times a day to count. Perhaps it is an idea of someone trying to hurt me for some unforeseen reason or maybe ordering food somewhere and having someone pee or spit or ejaculate in my food (yes, I think about that, and I think about it almost every time I go out to eat), just some kind of bad thing happening to me. So I try to do good as much as I can to outweigh all of the bad in hopes that bad does not happen to me.
I could list all of the bad things I do and I don’t know how close I could come with all of the good-ish things that I do, but that is defeating the purpose. To me, one does not need to count all of the good and bad to balance things out exactly; one can only hope that all of the good he or she does happens to outweigh the bad they have done. To me, it sounds somewhat like a Buddhist idea, the way I see things, but I’m no Buddhist; I’m just guessing.
As I dwell further and further on this, I begin to think of how others view their daily lives. We all know that people do bad things. Someone will break into your car, steal your stuff and go about their daily lives as if nothing were different. A serial killer is never the one you expected, but he or she lives like just like you (outside of the whole killing thing) and no one knowns until they’re caught. People do bad things and don’t feel remorse. These are things we all know, yet not a day goes by where someone doesn’t do something nice for me, whether it be minor or not, someone always does something. Living on a campus of where 20,000+ people take classes and seeing new people daily, it makes me wonder why drives everyone else to do not-so-bad things.
I read an article on what was called ‘The Monkeysphere’ and it made me feel somewhat sad to be a human being. Though I agree with the article completely about the fact that we cannot definitely care for more than 150 people or really consider them people due to our intellectual abilities as animals, it still has me wondering, as I said, why people do the not-so-bad things they do. Could it be the way they were raised? I know Christians* have use the saying, the Golden Rule if you must, “Do unto others as you would like done unto you,” which I know is a great way to get bullies to stop being bullies and to get wife beaters to be men and lay off of their wife, but given all the bad in the world don’t people think that because everyone else does bad, there isn’t any reason to do good? Is it human nature to do good?
What I’m trying to get at (though it may not be obvious) is that when you think about it, a lot of people believe in some kind of karma. Kids clean their room for a treat, you go to work to get paid. You open the door for someone in hopes that next time you enter a building, someone will hold the door for you. It can be any size gesture or action, but, to me, it’s still karma.
The question still lingers in my head, as to why people do this. I know I do it, as I said, out of not wanting bad things to happen to me, but do all people think like that? I highly doubt it; not everyone.
Before I finish this, I’d like to apologize for not making sense, going in circles, saying things twice, etc. because I’m really writing this in a stream as it comes from my head, but I would still like to hear your thoughts on the matter. I know there was more of what I was thinking, but typing it all out, I’m guessing things just left my mind.
-Mike (aka Gambit)
*I use Christians as the example given that where I live and grew up was 99% die-hard Jesus-loving, anti-gay, etc. Christians