At last I return to you, oh faithful diary. I kid. The past week has been rather stressful which explains the lack of my presence. Soon I will start packing my things for the trip, but not just yet. Tomorrow (or later today, rather) is the pride parade, and since I am on the board of directors of a nationally-known, grass-root and queer activist organization, my presence is pretty much obligatory. I will be taking pictures, as it is my duty, which I may share on this blog.
Quick observation: I noticed at last, or perhaps I already knew but I thought I would share this now, that for every 'mean' person you meet in life, another 'nice' person makes up for the heartache caused by the previous. I use quotations because mean and nice are labels which are easily attached to people based on an individual's point of view. They are subjective. It is also simply an appearance to that person, whether someone is mean or nice. This has nothing to do with karma, rather with the balance of life, I would say.
Since I mentioned karma, let me write a few things about that. I have noticed that people use the term loosely, and not really knowing what it means. The other day I watched The View, and Joy asked a question about Hitler, and where he is now in relation to the afterlife. She was talking about his evil deeds and how he would experience karma because of his actions. In other words, how did Hitler get 'punished' for his actions? From what I gathered, she was searching for something that happened, or perhaps didn't happen, to him after being responsible for so many deaths. The answer, simply put, may be that there were no 'consequences' for his actions. From the dharma teachings I have received in the past, and this may or may not vary in different teachings, I know that karma does not affect a person in the same life time. We create causes and experience their effects. However, the effects of these causes are not experienced in the same life time. Karma accumulates as life progresses, good karma or bad karma, and we experience their effects in our next life, or the following. Therefore, from my teachings and my understanding, Hitler would not have experienced the effects of his bad karma while he was Hitler. He may have died and not been 'punished' by the law of karma, but in his next life, which he may be living right now if fortunate enough, he could quite easily experience the effects. and I say 'if fortunate enough' simply because his accumulated karma may have been so bad that he was not fortunate enough to be reborn as a human for a second time, which would be extremely unfortunate for him and could even be the effects of his actions or his 'punishment'.
This is by no means a place for me to preach to people, rather a place for me to write. Remember, this is an exercise, an experiment and practice for myself. People have different views and opinions which means this post, or my talk about karma, may have nothing to do with you. Choose to ignore it in that case. The first post was "leave your cultural straight jackets outside". He was preparing us to discuss things which we may not be familiar or agree with. He encouraged us to be open and receive the information and then process it all.
I googled 'karma', hoping to find a nice picture, but for some reason inappropriate things came up on the first page. So I will not use any pictures today. The story bit will continue at some point as well; there is no rush!
No comments:
Post a Comment