Are specific forms of suffering such as being victimised by brutal crimes determined by past karma?
Answer Podcast
Karma can come in terrible ways are the karmic reactions that people are supposed to get are the specific forms of those reactions determined say for example people die in brutal ways through rape or terrorism and this did not happen in the past so is this specific results also because of past karma, see not necessarily we could see that if we have a karma tank and there is certain quantity of water in that that water has to be drained out so now how that water may be drained out that will vary according to the circumstances sometimes it may just drain out as a big flow which destroys things or it may come out as a slow trickle which will not take too much trouble, that’s also ok so now what we should focus on is personally there is this whole dystopian attitude that oh things are so bad that they were never so bad at the time of Ramayana it is described that the Rakshasas were actually eating the Brahmanas Lord Ram came to a place called Ramteg where there was a big mound of bones so what that there were bones of the sages who Rakshasas had eaten, so very terrible things have also happened in the past and if you see say Hitler killed Jews so actually there are ghastly things have happened in the world throughout just like now because the world is very interconnected so the news of the ghastly things comes more quickly, of course we can say proportionally it might be more also, it may be less so it’s not that things are so bad have never happened in the past they have happened, in fact if you see in the past when one army would conquer a kingdom they would just ravish the women of the defeated that is standard practice, the women were treated as loot who could be taken, so in that sense it was bad at that time also, but the thing is we should focus on this line so if such kind of terrorism is happening if there are people who are victims we should focus on the fact that the government should improve the law and order and if say women are being abused then the government is responsible to provide better protection to women so we should recognize that even if that particular woman who got brutally raped, was it her past karma that’s not for us to discuss for us to discuss is the breakdown of law when Draupadi was dishonored noble tells us because of your past karma this happened all the Pandavas say that this was horrendous and they are going to avenge this so that’s why we should understand that the karmic reactions have to come but it is our responsibility to make sure that brutal things won’t happen in life and if they happen despite everything we see that as a result of