Theos-Talk Archives (November 1998 Message tt00374)

Nov 20th

Dear Jerry:

More thoughts on Karma.

The "personality"  -- our brain-mind -- resists the idea because it looks
for ways to weasel out of the consequences of its choices and acts.

The "individuality" -- the immortal, Real Man -- knows that every impression
made on the material of our being either distorts or improves it.

We as physical, psychological and mental beings carry with us all the time
the effects of our choices.  We have either improved or impaired our
instruments.

As far as I can determine, modern psychology has only investigated the
personal consciousness as it manifests through the brain mind. and being
materialistic in its approach it fails to grasp the cause for psychic
memories and traits, as separate from the physical or the "spiritual" or
Egoic -- which are universal in scope, and not solely focused on this life
and its soon-to-be-ended termination.

As far as I can see if one is focused on the here and now, the causative
side and purpose of life remain a mystery and inexplicable.

To me the value of Theosophy has been to find that there are a long-time
group of researchers who have looked into those events and have observed how
and why they occur.

Dal

======================================



              Dallas TenBroeck
              dalval@nwc,net

    From: Jerry Schueler
    Sent: Friday, November 20, 1998 6:07 AM
 Subject: More on Karma


    Many Theosophists seem to take the easy and simple
    approach to karma, that it is cause and effect or
    a system of rewards and punishments. They seem
    to think that karma has the super-human ability to
    see what "really" happens in every single event in
    every single lifetime of every single person and then
    dispense an effective and appropriate measure of
    compensation, no more and no less. This, IMHO, is
    nothing more than changing the word god to the word
    karma. I don't believe that karma works that way at all.

    Modern psychology has found that our minds cannot
    always tell the difference between an external or "real"
    event and an internal or "fantasy" event.  To the psyche,
    there appears to be no difference between inner and
    outer events (i.e., whether our experiences are
    subjective or objective). Now anyone is free to disagree
    with this psychological finding, but I agree with it.

    It is memory alone that allows us to tell the difference
    between an outer experience and an inner imagined
    experience. Some people with faulty memory, for
    example, will confuse a past event with what happened
    in a dream. It has been found in modern psychological
    experiments that many children can't tell the difference
    between what they saw in a movie or on tv with an actual
    event that happened to them. In other words, some
    children will honestly think that something happened to
    them, which actually they only saw in a movie, on tv, or
    in a dream.

    With all of this in mind, where is karma?  If a child sees
    a movie about a rape, and then later thinks that they were
    raped, the belief that they were raped will effect them
    exactly the same as if it really happened. In other words,
    karma from a false memory in the past effects us in the
    present just as much as a true memory. I believe that
    this is an occult fact. Karma is so tied up in our memories
    that what "really" happened in the past doesn't make
    any difference at all. Also, any two people undergoing
    similar experiences can be karmically effected in entirely
    different ways.

    I just don't think that karma is as simple and straightforward
    as many seem to think it is.

    Jerry S.