POST 24...Karma and The Jeweled Net of Indra

By way of introduction, in all my writing and teaching I operate as an educator. The Latin root educere means "to draw out". My role is to present ideas in a somewhat objective but more so, an inspirationally biased way, not because I believe something as "factual", but rather to catch your attention. Sometimes I may activate you into a counter-position, which is great too, because you might be inclined to actually post a comment so we can start some cultural dialog.  In this piece, I will be speaking demonstrably about karma, to get you to really think and feel about it. I will do the same whether I am writing about Buddhism, Jesus, Real Estate, or Southern Soul music. This is what educators should do. That said...

In the West we recognize Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion on the physical plane: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton put forth this principle in 17th century England. The classical Hindu philosophers of India saw this law operating on the physical plane, but also on emotional, mental, metaphysical, and other energetic levels, as early as 800 BCE. The Sanskrit term for this idea is karma, literally “action”, in terms of setting up a reaction.

Incidentally, the insight of karma is a key component of what would later be called perennial philosophy, the overarching worldview to come out of the Axial Age, a time when the human quest for deeper knowledge of the world and inner exploration began.  There was an axial shift or "turning" in collective human consciousness that emerged among unrelated cultures across the globe, from Europe to China, centered around 500 BCE.  It was a sort of quantum leap in the evolution of the bicameral mind, that in retrospect launched the whole field of what we now call self-discovery. I am a longtime student and teacher of perennial philosophy and its various derivatives.  If this catches you in some way, please contact me about my Soul Shaker self-discovery program, or for individual philosophical counseling. 

Today, karma is largely misunderstood as personal fate. Sure, it feels personal when karma "happens" to you, but this is a limited view. Karma was originally put forth as a simple, impersonal law, similar to the law of gravity.  It is impartial, inescapable, and has infinite sweep. In fact, the physical phenomenon we call "gravity" would simply be one of countless demonstrations of the much broader reach of karma.

Because karma is seen as having universal application, it follows that everyone and everything must either directly or indirectly be interconnected.  Everything must somehow be part of a single system with countless actions creating interwoven reactions. As you let this idea seep in a bit, and when you really start to get your mind around it, it is easier to see how karma may not be so personal. Yes, the thoughts and feelings and physical actions you individually initiate create reactions that you often immediately feel. But to use an analogy, you are one tiny nerve cell in a massively complex universal brain that literally has more nerve cells than the total number of stars in the known cosmos. 

You are a single local source of thought, feeling, and action in an infinitely vast and pulsating, universal mind. You affect the larger mind in myriad unseen ways, and the larger mind affects you.  (The original depth psychologist Carl Jung developed his "archetypes of the collective unconscious" on this basic idea).

The Hindus have a great metaphor to help visualize the vast complexity of karma, called The Jeweled Net of Indra. (Indra is a god in Hindu mythology that rules a particular world). The world is seen metaphorically as an immense, tautly stretched net, with a polished jewel at each string intersection on the net.

The countless jewels represent everything and everyone that exists. The net is in constant movement simply because all individual things and people in the world are continually expressing some degree of movement.  These expressions are symbolized by each jewel quivering at its place on the net, sending out ripples of energy and reflected light, thereby causing nearby jewels to quiver and sparkle as well. These other jewels are also initiating their own movements. Everything is moving and reacting to everything else. The collective effect of all this action (karma) gives us the image of Indra's shimmering net of gems, sparkling with light and color.

Due to the incredible complexity of all the moving and reflecting, it is not possible to assign specific individual cause to any one thing, person, or event. In short, according to karma, there are no first causes and no isolated events.  Therefore, a beautiful thought that one might call “positive” (love) may be the indirect result of a string of action-reactions that somewhere in the chain included a quite negative thought (hate). Understanding this may help ease the frustration one feels in situations, for example, when something unfair happens to a "victim" in a single event like a car crash.  At best, all we can say is, everything is somehow doing everything to everything else. Therefore, seeing an isolated event as a single cause-and-effect phenomenon is merely a form of ignorance, innocently naive though it may be.  It is the understandable result of not seeing how the entire system of karma works.

Given our collective misunderstanding of karma, we think that reward, blame, and responsibility must be specifically assigned to particular events, things, and people.  We accomplish this through rules of society that are spelled out in our laws and cultural traditions. We pride ourselves on appropriately applying justice to maintain order and civility in society. But according to the law of karma,—and this is a heavy statement—all human-made laws, though still necessary simply due to our lack of evolution as a race, are ultimately redundant and only complicate things. Not trusting the elegant and pure law of karma constitutes an unnecessary fiddling with nature.  We unknowingly screw everything up.

It takes a high degree of awareness and courage to patiently allow karma’s balancing action to play out. We can do it some of the time, but to let karma play out on its own all the time requires one to develop an advanced state of mind called non-attachment (which I will write about in future Posts). Because most people do not comprehend, much less practice the art of non-attachment, an insatiable need (attachment) to prosecute permeates most every society in the world. Hence our highly evolved systems of justice, law enforcement, and risk management, which we call "necessary", not seeing the whole picture.

On a practical level, the shift from the millions of pages of laws and thousands of years of cultural tradtion, to an absolute open trust in the invisible law of karma, is obviously not easy.  It might take thousands of years more, or maybe just a generation or three.  And that's final the point.  We seem to be the lead species on this particular planet (unless it's the dolphins) and therefore, should start conceiving, creating, thinking, and feeling on levels completely outside of the existing boxes into which we have trapped ourselves. We must focus more on horizons of possibility.  Few advances will come and in fact the human race may be in jeopardy if 54,000 of the 60,000 thoughts we have every day are same ones we had yesterday. (A recent scientific study showed that about 90% of our daily thoughts are repetitive).

Indra’s Jeweled Net is immense and affects everyone and everything.  It is everyone and everything. Over 2500 years ago, some insightful East Indian philosophers advised us to transcend our inane attempts to judge and legislate human behavior and control acts of nature. How do we reach such an advanced level? It won't happen by imposing more rules and laws on groups.  In order to be able to dance with the law of karma rather than be slapped around by it, we have to increase self-knowledge.  And what is self-knowledge?  It is a way of viewing and living in the world that is somehow grounded in perennial philosophy. These ideas are cross-cultural and include contributions from great world teachers as diverse as Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Jesus, and The Buddha.  My personal feeling is that perennial philosophy and its branches of ideas should be included in the early parenting of children and within our traditional education systems.

A part of this education should be learning and thinking about karma as a law as dependable as gravity...a comprehensive justice system with only one simple rule and a built-in response mechanism that uses the least amount of energy. Developing an awareness of this law encourages one to initiate more virtuous acts, knowing the law guarantees a reciprocal response. In short, follow The Golden Rule. Karma takes care of the rest.