The Joys of Karma
Everyone knows about Karma, it’s that pesky little force of the universe that most of us want to have on our side — and LOOK OUT when it’s payback time for being naughty!
The other day a close friend revealed a rather interesting karmic situation: Someone had told some vicious lies and gone to great lengths to bash her, no doubt the offending party was insanely jealous — but like a lot of spiritually deficient souls, the jealousy put her in the direct path of karma that was rolling down the tracks like a speeding locomotive! The offending party had karma come so quickly after doing her dirty deeds to my friend I was tempted to ask my friend if she was dabbling in black magic, haha! But, friend knows better than that; there is no black magic that works better than the natural forces of Karma to satisfy an injustice. And when Karma comes for payback time, there is no law of three to get you into karmic debt! “Karma usually takes forever, but not this time!,” says friend. Then she asked me if I thought it was wrong to revel in joy over the demise of her jealous attacker who had just suffered a significant loss.
Wrong? I don’t think “Karma” cares one was or another, however, anything more than a brief period of gloating before we move on to more productive and positive things isn’t going to be very useful to our own spiritual health. It’s natural for the flawed creatures humans are to gloat when they’ve been done wrong and justice is served so quickly. We need to remember how rare this really is, because in many cases Karma is never served until the next life! Also, as we humans may see Karma as some sort of system of retribution, really, Karma is anything but that. Karma is the sum of every deed, reaping what you sow and Karma is like a “blind watchmaker,” it really has no thought process of its own, it is just a natural force, like the wind or the rain. Karma is the glue that holds the universe together in a balanced way, and we will do well to remember that it’s not something any of us can escape.
November 7th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
Ah, but “revenge is such sweet sorrow” at that moment, isn’t it?
Very often, just as you’ve said, we love the sweet moment when we see our attackers/aggressors dealt the swift hand of “cosmic justice”. But, it is also a very “bitter-sweet” moment. For just as we’ve been dealt a blow, someone else must suffer the same fate. And, all too often, while we revel in that moment of a seeming “victory” we soon come to feel the sting of watching another humanbeing “suffer” its consequences to some degree or another, knowing full well, from our own experiences what that feels like.
Karma can be a rather obnoxious “guest” in our lives. For every action, there is a reaction of some type or another. And, in watching others being delivered their “karmic blow” we are also very much reminded that we,too, as fallible humanbeings will likely, at some point in our lives, be dealt our own knocks from our own Karma.
That, in and of itself, should be a reminder of what it is that we’re doing at all times. We just never know when it will come back to haunt is!