Monday, 5 August 2024

How does "karma" really work?

Rudolf Steiner, and his living disciple Terry Boardman, have expressed many useful insights based on a version of the concept of "karma". For instance that many of the bad-things that have happened (and are currently happening) in relation to The West, are due to "karmic" consequences of our civilizational untruthfulness and materialism. 

But I don't believe that karma is a good way of expressing this, because karma is itself an abstract and systematized representation of an alien cultural concept; when in truth we live in a personal universe; a reality consisting of Beings who are alive, conscious, purposive - and in relationships with each other. 

The reason karma can be useful is insofar as it is a summary description of the purpose and meaning of Beings; but karma is mistaken and misleading insofar as people think of it like something from physics: as an "objective fact" like a force field or pattern. 


At a first level of analysis it may be helpful to envisage the current Sorathic-evil trend of global and within-national politics and society as a manifestation of karma.

By "Sorathic" I mean the sadistic and spitefully-motivated destructive policies of the leadership class who are actively creating war, violence, famine and mass disease, and the deliberate and rationalized implementation of these policies by a servile and value-inverted managerial class of bureaucrats, intellectuals, propagandists, and punishers. 

When we consider what will happen to these Sorathic-dominated Beings themselves; it seems inevitable that (repentance aside) they will destroy themselves. And in the most horrible fashion. And this inevitability could be termed "karmic". 

But karmic is often used as if what was at work was an impersonal pattern of "justice" built-into reality; whereby people (and demons) "get what they deserve" because that is part of the structure of the universe. 


Instead; I believe we ought to think of it as evil feeding upon itself, as the working-through of chosen assumptions onto the perceptions and conceptions of individual Beings. 

(It is therefore a personal matter of purposes and motivations; not of abstract patterns or structures.)    

When a being chooses to gratify his sins; chooses to align with that-in-himself and among other beings which is opposed and hostile to God and divine creation - then such a mind-set has downstream results. 

After a person has chosen to believe that his own fear and resentment-fuelled spiteful sadism is a valid and desirable life-philosophy; then this becomes his bottom line reality. It becomes how life is and should be for him - so that he ceases to want anything else; and repulses any alternative world-views (such as the Christian).


If that is how life is and should be for any Being; then of course all sorts of consequences follow - including his own self-chosen destruction...

Even when this suicidal motivation is concealed by a veneer of false justification that "explains" how it is that setting-up a situation for his own inevitable destruction, is actually rational self-interest...

Surely a Christian can perceive this all around the world, and on our own doorsteps?   


No comments: