Today I am on a good karma generation mission. I could not wuss out, so I am taking my PALS to the Wheels of Soul Tour. We are big fans of the bands, and I want my Sweetie to have a special evening. We used to see live music regularly, but we have not been out to a show for almost a year.

Heh, I married a statuesque redhead. Nothing scares me, including rolling Big Red, aka Grande Roja, into the concert. If only she were still able to enjoy an adult beverage.

Going out into a large group of people is surreal and frustrating. People look right through you and try to ignore your existence. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone watched me wrestle with a door and wheelchair, talked to my Sweetie like she is stupid or just stood in the way oblivious and too self absorbed to make room for passage. I think karma shall be cruel to those persons.

The Theory Of Karma

Karma is the law of moral causation. The theory of Karma is a fundamental doctrine in Buddhism. This belief was prevalent in India before the advent of the Buddha. Nevertheless, it was the Buddha who explained and formulated this doctrine in the complete form in which we have it today.

• What is the cause of the inequality that exists among mankind?
• Why should one person be brought up in the lap of luxury, endowed with fine mental, moral and physical qualities, and another in absolute poverty, steeped in misery?
• Why should one person be a mental prodigy, and another an idiot?
• Why should one person be born with saintly characteristics and another with criminal tendencies?
• Why should some be linguistic, artistic, mathematically inclined, or musical from the very cradle?
• Why should others be congenitally blind, deaf, or deformed?|
• Why should some be blessed, and others cursed from their births?

Either this inequality of mankind has a cause, or it is purely accidental. No sensible person would think of attributing this unevenness, this inequality, and this diversity to blind chance or pure accident.

In this world nothing happens to a person that he does not for some reason or other deserve. Usually, men of ordinary intellect cannot comprehend the actual reason or reasons. The definite invisible cause or causes of the visible effect is not necessarily confined to the present life, they may be traced to a proximate or remote past birth.

According to Buddhism, this inequality is due not only to heredity, environment, "nature and nurture", but also to Karma. In other words, it is the result of our own past actions and our own present doings. We ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We create our own Heaven. We create our own Hell. We are the architects of our own fate.

I sure would like to witness karmic justice for quite a few conservative politicians.

KARMA
Extracted from Transform Your Life by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.

The law of karma is a special instance of the law of cause and effect, according to which all our actions of body, speech, and mind are causes and all our experiences are their effects.

The law of karma explains why each individual has a unique mental disposition, a unique physical appearance, and unique experiences. These are the various effects of the countless actions that each individual has performed in the past. We cannot find any two people who have created exactly the same history of actions throughout their past lives, and so we cannot find two people with identical states of mind, identical experiences, and identical physical appearances.

Each person has a different individual karma. Some people enjoy good health while others are constantly ill. Some people are very beautiful while others are very ugly. Some people have a happy disposition that is easily pleased while others have a sour disposition and are rarely delighted by anything. Some people easily understand the meaning of spiritual teachings while others find them difficult and obscure.

Karma means ‘action’, and refers to the actions of our body, speech, and mind. Every action we perform leaves an imprint, or potentiality, on our very subtle mind, and each imprint eventually gives rise to its own effect.

Our mind is like a field, and performing actions is like sowing seeds in that field. Virtuous actions sow seeds of future happiness, and non-virtuous actions sow seeds of future suffering. The seeds we have sown in the past remain dormant until the conditions necessary for their germination come together. In some cases this can be many lifetimes after the original action was performed.

It is because of our karma or actions that we are born in this impure, contaminated world and experience so many difficulties and problems. Our actions are impure because our mind is contaminated by the inner poison of self-grasping. This is the fundamental reason why we experience suffering.

Suffering is created by our own actions or karma – it is not given to us as a punishment. We suffer because we have accumulated many non-virtuous actions in our previous lives. The source of these non-virtuous actions are our own delusions such as anger, attachment, and self-grasping ignorance.

Heh, I actually visualized the angry fat man, noun verb 911, the dead eye cheesehead and the angry creamsicle while reading that.

Vietnam, Afghanistan: War, Karma, and Peace

Trying to Google news of my homeland, Vietnam, over the last few weeks has not been easy. The headlines that often showed up were about another country, not Vietnam.

Here are a few headlines from major news organizations:

- Afghanistan haunted by ghost of Vietnam

-Barack Obama must stop dithering - or Afghanistan will be his Vietnam

-The Vietnam War Guide to Afghanistan

-Afghanistan is Obama's Vietnam

-Which is America's longest war, Afghanistan or Vietnam?

-Vietnam and why we lost Afghanistan

Often times, indeed, when we mention the word Vietnam in the United States, we don't mean Vietnam as a country. Vietnam is unfortunately not like Thailand or Malaysia or Singapore to America's collective imagination. Its relationship to us is special: It is a vault filled with tragic metaphors for every pundit to use.

After the Vietnam War, Americans were caught in the past, haunted by unanswerable questions, confronted with an unhappy ending. So much so that my uncle who fought in the Vietnam War as a pilot for the South Vietnamese army, once observed that, "When Americans talk about Vietnam they really are talking about America." "Americans don't take defeat and bad memories very well. They try to escape them," he said in his funny but bitter way. "They make a habit of blaming small countries for things that happen to the United States. AIDS from Haiti, flu from Hong Kong or Mexico, drugs from Columbia, hurricanes from the Caribbean."

I once met a Vietnamese man who made money acting in Hollywood. He had survived the war and the perilous journey on the South China Sea to come to America. Now he plays Vietcong, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers, civilians, peasants. He is a great actor, he bragged. No one recognized his face. Time and again he died, spurting fake blood from his torso and heart. At other times he screamed in pain, re-interpreting his own past. "Hollywood loves me," he said. "I die well."

Hollywood, of course, is free with its various interpretations. From "Apocalypse Now," which describes an American's mythical adventure in a tropic jungle to The "Deer Hunter," which shows a game of Russian roulette being played out for money between an American and some Vietnamese, to "Tour of Duty," in which American GIs raped then blew out the brains of a Vietnamese girl, to Rambo movies in which America single-handedly restored its pride, Vietnam was always the backdrop, the faceless conical hat adorned figure.

Watching such movies, Vietnamese old enough to remember the war giggle uncomfortably. These naïve interpretations of the conflict little resemble their own past. Vietnam was a three-sided war, with North and South at each other's throats, but the Americans have insinuated themselves as central to an otherwise complex narrative in the retelling. Some Vietnamese are enraged, but many are resigned.

For what they know and won't admit to the American audience is that for them history is a series of personal impressions. Fact and details and analysis and fancy interpretations can't capture the truth about Vietnam any more than wildly fabricated war flicks can. Instead, Vietnamese living in America tell their children ghost stories and share their memories of the monsoon rains and harvest festivals. I, too, store in my brain a million of those memories and myths, none of which have anything to do with America's involvement in the war. But that is another story.

The bad karma that brought us forrty years of conservative nuttery. Thanks a bunch LBJ! It is time for karma to catch up with right wing schemers.

Turning Wheel of Karma on Your side

The law of karma is that powerful that it even takes into account things that are spoken, spiteful things, nice things, rude things, etc. If a person says something hateful towards another, then they will get something similar said back to them at a later date.

It is said that every word we utter is a spiritual strength and that it resonates in the dimensional atmosphere. There is no need to worry about karma, it is an ally as well as an enemy, it is not partial or biased. There is a way to get karma on our side and to get it to work for us, the methodology is simple. Do unto others as you would do unto yourself, treat others as you desire to be treated yourself. If you want to be treated with distain, then act with distain, if you want to be treated with kindness, then act with kindness.

Karma is the universal principle of cause and effect. If you allow it to work properly within your soul, it can only do good. If you close yourself to the constant communications and intuitions you are receiving from your soul, then you are likely to bring suffering upon yourself. It is entirely up to you O seeker! If you know your Self, and are at peace with your inner self, you will always do the right thing and need fear nothing (except fear itself).

You never have to demand that karma act for you or for it to acknowledge your good deed of the day. Karma is the very fabric of positive energy and a profound part of conscious creation, it needs no prompting to play its everlasting hand. Karma is like the air we breath, it sustains us and surrounds us and is eternal. Devised and actuated by the divine living force of the universe and it is better to be aware of it than not to be aware of it

Think twice before you act, are your actions going to be detrimental towards another? If so…withdraw and take a different approach.

Difference Between Fate and Karma

Fate vs Karma

Fate and karma are very much related and sound the same. Some people think the two to be the same but they are very much different.

Karma can be described as something that you get based on what you put out. On the other hand Fate, which is also sometimes called as destiny is that will happen inevitably.

Fate can be called as something that is predetermined. It is something that has been written in your life even before you were born. By fate, it has been already decided that you shoul be born to certain parets, born at a ceratin place, have a wife and children and like that. Fate is that one cannot change.

On the other hand, Karma is the result of your actions. If you do something good, you will get good tings in return and if you do bad things, you will only encounter bad things.

Fate means that there are no choices in life; it is predetermined. On the contrary, karma means that there are choices in life. You have the right to choose the good and bad karma. But in fate, there is no choice of learning these lessons of life. Karma is related to the soul whereas fate is not.

When karma is related to one’s actions, fate is related to god’s will. In Karma, it is the human beings who have the control whereas human beings have no control of fate; it is the will of god.

It can also be said Karma comes from within a person and fate comes to you without your knowledge. Unlike karma, fate is something that has been already decided. You have control over Karma but you don’t have control over fate.

Be kind to one another. Have a great weekend!