March 17, 2024
Can Karma / Morality Exist?
(from a non-religious view)- karma meaning cause & effect or action
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two essential qualities of trust = warmth and competence
- identity is built by the brain, and we construct “games” that guide our ways of being in the world (for example, if you think “I am a bodybuilder,” your game would include going to the gym and eating lots of protein)
QUESTIONS WITHOUT CLEAR ANSWERS:
- is there an objective truth / rights and wrongs, hidden behind all layers of reality and beyond our understanding of karma and morality?
- is everything just neutral at its core? is good and bad just a construct of the mind?
- do animals understand karma/morality?
- at what level of desperation do humans abandon their morals and forsake their karma?
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Without the lens of religion defining our views of karma and morality, it is difficult to pin down what exactly they mean to us at their most basic levels. For many, even if we are not religious people, we tend to think of them with a religious undertone that was painted so long ago before our time. However, when we look at the essence of karma and morality, we can see their emptiness as their form.
Western minds usually understand karma as cause and effect, morality as right and wrong values. Karma can also translate as “action,” morality as “character.” Stripped from religious inputs, they remain as headless definitions, hiding like scarecrows in fields of the mind, empty of life or meaning yet standing still as warning signs directing our decisions. The mind infused with consciousness is an open and fertile motherly meadow manifesting all of life. The meadow is beautiful and suitable for sunbathing or gazing at clouds, but we must also have a place to sleep and to eat and to create. So we build houses of ego atop the motherly meadow of mind, designed with different rooms intentionally built to accommodate our different versions of self. We identify with the selves we meet wandering in the meadow and choose carefully who gets to live in our house. Slowly, we build a seemingly fixed identity conceived from all of our roommates.
Once we’ve established a sturdy enough identity, we play games with it. “I want to be a bodybuilder.” So I go to the gym and eat as much protein as I possibly can. Maybe I’ll play this game with this identity for a while, I’ll make up rules to follow, decide what is right and wrong, and watch for the effects of my actions. I create the morality and karma for this specific identity based on its wants and needs. And eventually, the mind gets bored of the bodybuilder game and steps out of it for a while to take a walk in the open meadow. I stumble across a scarecrow, one I’ve never seen before and it scares me. Maybe I’ll run back to my bodybuilder self for a while out of fear of change, fear of the unknown. But curiosity reminds me of that scarecrow too often and urges me to bring the bodybuilder out to inspect it. I also bring the artist, the friend, the daughter, the teacher, the chef. I bring all these versions of myself out to meet the scarecrow and each time we look at it, it becomes more alive, more real. We decorate it with the qualities we see in it and give it an identity, perhaps even a name. Maybe we decide this one is a guitarist. Breathing our breath into its lungs, we give it life and character and assign rules to its way of being. We construct its identity and then let it guide our actions. It’s the rulebook for our newly rearranged culmination of selves. Now, instead of being the bodybuilder in the gym drinking protein shakes, I am the guitarist practicing alongside Youtube videos and researching music theory for hours on end. I’ve assigned myself new rules, new karma, new moralities.
It had been stated at the discussion that there are two essential qualities one must possess in order to gain our trust; competence and warmth. Competence, the ability to feel and understand what is going on with someone and provide solutions to problems, guidance, or whatever necessary assistance is fit. Warmth, a feeling of mutual acceptance, comfort, ease. If one is warm, but not component, they appear fake and shallow with questionable intentions. If one is competent, but not warm, they can be harsh, abrasive, demanding, and of course, cold. Warmth and competence must work in tandem to allow trust to form.
It is helpful to know what qualities are necessary for trust, because often we lose trust in ourselves. Building an identity game with our inner selves requires full trust in our understanding of the world. But when we cannot understand or digest our experiences, we lose faith and don’t know how to construct our personal karmic and moral groundings. We look to people we trust and watch how they play their games. More often than not, we are a hodgepodge of identities built by those surrounding us with warmth and competence. Maybe we always put both socks on before the shoes because that’s how mom told me how to do it. Maybe mom wears Hoka shoes because she saw me wearing them.
Karma and morality are not fixed entities, they will always be headless definitions open for endless minds to assign their own values to. We can dress up their scarecrow bodies with our identities’ wants and needs and breathe life into them, but there seems to be no objective, unchanging statue of karma or morality. They are living sculptures, carved by the selves’ tool of identity and kept alive in the meadow of mind as our guide to ways of being.