I’m kinda wondering why the OP thinks Dorothy was reincarnated into a herring or cockroach, or why Dorothy was pre-destined to be a murderess or child molester … if she was supposed to be charitable with her human-life, then she would have been reincarnated into a god, with a different pre-destiny, perhaps the new goddess of destroying Barbuda with a hurricane …
Perhaps the OP is confusing Christian principles with something strictly of the Hindu religion … there’s a difference in how these two religions treat “evil” …
There’s another way of looking at karma. In Sanskrit ‘karma’ simply means ‘action’, and by extension ‘the results of action’.
So physical actions produce physical effects, and that’s also karma. If you put your finger in a flame and it gets burned, that’s karma - the effect of that action - which returns immediately. If you live an unhealthy lifestyle and the result is that you get sick, that’s the karma of living an unhealthy lifestyle coming back to you after a few years. It’s not at all mystical at this level, it’s nothing other than physical cause and effect.
It gets more abstract when you get into subtler actions on a moral level. But however saintly you may have been for however many years, that’s not going to protect you from the karma of a burned finger, or from days of pain, if you stick your finger in a flame. If the person mentioned by the OP had a stroke, that’s not necessarily or even probably the bad karma of a previous life, but the karma of high cholesterol (or whatever) in this life. Good deeds don’t give you immunity from cause and effect at any level.
On a slightly more subtle level, the fact that people looked after her and cared about her is some little return of the karma of her good actions, in an obvious way. On an even more subtle level, those actions may result in being born in a very good situation in her next life.
If you actively use a position of power to screw over everyone you can, you might someday get screwed over in return. Or you might become President. It seems that you in fact can have terrible karma, as long as you have enough security to prevent people from physically killing you in revenge, and will have a long life. Might even make it to high office…
Right. Imagine if she’d been a hateful bitch her whole life. Then instead of having to spend 8 years in a hospital bed surrounded by her friends and loved ones, she’d get to spend 8 years in a hospital bed alone and staring at the ceiling.
Sure, there’s no such thing as karma, if by karma you mean “people get what they deserve”. No, people don’t get what they deserve. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. And the notion of next lives or previous lives is obvious nonsense that can be dismissed easily.
Yet there is also the reality of cause and effect. Point enough guns at people and demand enough wallets, and you’re much more likely to encounter somebody who shoots back. But you can also be walking down the sidewalk one day and a stray bullet comes out of nowhere and kills you. Yeah, that’s cause and effect, because the bullet didn’t literally come out of nowhere, somebody fired that bullet. But the cause of getting hit wasn’t you walking down the sidewalk and you should have known not to do that so it’s your fault you got shot.
Do horrible people have success in life? Sure they do. But what does that mean for us, as a guide to action? Does that mean that you should start screwing people over because that’s the way to be successful? And you’ll be happier if you do? But you’re not Donald Trump. The odds are much more likely that you’ll end up screwing yourself than landing on the top. And these driven people are often miserable, because their success never brings them happiness, it’s compulsive behavior. But yes, there are also horrible people who are having a lot of fun. There are decent people who suffer. But unless you’re a sociopath being a horrible person is very likely to leave you miserable and alone rather than sitting on top of stacks of money surrounded by beautiful ladies.
It wasn’t Lennier (the alien assistant to Delenn) who said that, it was Marcus, the human ranger who was played by Jason Carter. It was from season 3, episode 13, “A Late Delivery from Avalon.”
If the world was fair we wouldn’t need concepts like karma. It’s there so that when unfair things happen, or we just feel unrewarded, we can imagine that at some future time it might all balance out. Also when we see bad shit happen to a bad guy, it’s kind of nice to imagine that that was because the universe “cared” on some level.
We try to ignore the many counter-examples.
A lot of hope and “bright side” messages don’t make any objective sense, but they can persist because it’s bad karma to criticize positive messages
I believe y’all have it a little backward. The ‘you must have been a bastard in your last life to have this happen to you!’, thinking is by those with a pretty naive concept of what karma is and how it works. They’ve just heard,‘what goes around, comes around’, and that encompasses the entirety of their depth of knowledge.
Persons who actually ascribe to karma, and understand it’s nuances would not see it this way. Instead of seeing the sufferer as being punished by actions of a passed life, they would be seeing someone sure to be richly rewarded in their next life. Very much two sides of the same coin, in some ways. But a major difference in perception and intent.
Those suffering great trials in this life are simply considered to be on the ‘short path’ to enlightenment. Achieving it in one lifetime instead of many, though that one life may be filled with great suffering.
I didn’t say it was accepted as a a cosmic principle. Karma is widely accepted as the doctrine within human society, that if one lives a life of good deeds, he will be repaid in kind during his lifetime. Like a sort of a fraternity of the virtuous, who recognize each other by their deeds in society, and favor each other. Something that works without the necessity of a higher power., merely as a byproduct of evolved human nature.
That’s the way I see it, as do many of my non-believing acquaintances.
I usually respond with “I shouldn’t have set fire to the nunnery.”
My philosophy on this is similar. If you work to make the world better, then you live in a better world.
Karma does have social consequences. If someone is an asshole or selfish, or never helps out others, then when they find themselves needing a helping hand (as most of us do at some point in our life) there will be no one there for them. If someone is kind and generous of both spirit and material things, then when they fall upon a hard time, there may be others there to repay their kindnesses.
When you point at something and start jumping up and down and piling on about how it doesn’t exist it says more about you than the universe. And that’s what Karma is about. But you need to wait to see it.
When I was on the road, following the Grateful Dead on my annual Spring Summer sabbatical, I came across one of my favorite stickers ever…
**My Karma ran over your Dogma **
My “tour-mate” and I were both server/bartenders in a “white linen” high dollar eatery. We lived on tips and “Tip Karma” …After a few weeks on tour, camping nightly, we were, lets say a bit “Road worn”, and hungry. We stopped at a small Truck stop/ diner near Upper Sandusky OH, oddly SOUTH of Sandusky. We had GREAT burgers/sides/beverages, when our bill came we left a 50$ bill on a 22$ tab and left. The waitress came running out to our vehicle waving the change, approx 28$…Nope you lady, we replied, that is your tip! She was beside herself with excitement hugged us both and proclaimed this to be the largest tip she had ever received…We ended the tour knowing if would come back around to us once we returned, and it did!
I’ve rationalized karmic principles as being more societal, rather than individual. Undoubtedly, the great works that the subject woman did through her life spawned benefits, happiness, and betterment to others in the ‘pay it forward sense’. The individualistic tit-for-tat fallacy arises when karmic influence is expected to transcend direct functional cause-effect mechanisms.
Ugh, that’s an awkward description…
…What I mean by that is that there is no mechanism for a good deed done in societal relationships to have a resultant effect in whether or not a blood clot appears in some random place in your body. You’re just looking for the karmic effects good or bad, in the wrong place.
